Adventures are not adventures if there isn’t a degree of danger and uncertainty about them. – Ewan McGregor

Adventure

While in Blackwood this weekend, we drove into Trentham for a visit.

There was a group of motorcyclists in town, and I struck up a conversation with one (who was riding a very nice touring BMW). He was preparing to take part in the “2010 Long Ride”, an event to raise funds for prostate cancer research in Australia, in which he and others will be riding from Melbourne to Darwin via New South Wales and Queensland – a distance of over 4,000 km.

I talked about my 1980 trip across the Nullarbor from Melbourne to Karratha, WA. On this trip, I travelled 5,000 km in six days on a GSX 750 Suzuki (and home again at a slightly slower rate).

This put me in mind of “Long Way Round” – Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman’s epic 2004 motorcycle ride across Europe, Russia and North America. I have recently watched this on DVD, and have now just started reading the book. Inspiring stuff!

Thinking about this on the way home, I also thought about some of the other things I had heard about adventuring from Nick Farr at a recent CPX meeting.

Climbing Everest is pretty serious stuff. Here are some of the thoughts that I tweeted from Nick’s presentation:

• The number of deaths on Everest is 8% of the number of summiteers.
• A dream becomes a goal when you start actively planning it.
• Success requires taking risks.
• Failure teaches that taking risks is crucial.
• Failure provides an experience you can’t buy.

Sort of makes my adventuring pale into insignificance. My 2002 ascent of Mt Kosciuszko (2,228 m) isn’t much in comparison. And then most of my ascent was by cable car. Maybe a riskier achievement was hiking to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and back up in the one day in 1983. That was a round trip of over 25 km, with a fall and rise (in that order) of around 1,400 m. This was on the way home from six months backpacking around Europe with a 20 kg pack; that was probably the fittest that I’ve ever been in my life. The signs there now apparently warn:

“Danger! Do not attempt to hike from the canyon rim to the river and back in one day. Each year hikers suffer serious illness or death from exhaustion.”

Nick Farr’s key principle in his (more serious) mountaineering is “entitlement”. If you have done the preparation, then you are entitled to achieve your goal. In the “Long Way Round” book, Charley Boorman quotes the former SAS officer that took them through survival training: “If you can survive the prep, the mission will be fine”.

Business

I have been operating AcKnowledge Consulting for nearly 2 years now, and greatly enjoying the experience of being a freelancer. I also had the luxury of starting out with a fairly comfortable package from my former employer. I have worked with some great clients, and had some interesting projects. Things were a little tight in early 2009, but I have generally done a lot better so far in this financial year than in my first full year of business.

However, this can be a feast or famine game. I am working on some new potential opportunities to pick up after my current major project finishes, but there is nothing locked in yet. There is not as much of the original package left as a backstop now, either.

As much as I have enjoyed the business so far, I am now also realising that I have not had any major projects that have been focussed on my main consultancy offering – knowledge transfer to a non-technical audience.

So it occurs to me know that I am feeling a bit like I did when I arrived at Northam on the Suzuki in 1980.

Getting past the two-thirds barrier

Northam is a town 100 km from Perth in Western Australia. When I reached there at the end of the fourth day’s travel out of Melbourne, I was on schedule to reach Karratha in the planned six days. I had covered two-thirds of the distance. This was the point where I turned north for the trip up the west coast via Geraldton and Carnarvon.

However, it had been a difficult day. The first two days through Victoria and South Australia were fine. The third day started well, but as I was riding over the Nullarbor Plain, I was heading into increasingly strong head-winds. Once I crossed the border into Western Australia, the road edges were wider than the South Australian side, and much clearer of vegetation. The wind was picking up loose sand and throwing it at me.

I tucked in under the windscreen on the sports fairing, and tried travelling a little faster to get through this stage a bit quicker. This actually seemed to make it even more demanding, however. I camped that night in the tent for the third night. The gravel tent site at Balladonia roadhouse was so hard that the alloy tent pegs would not penetrate it at all. I tied one rope to the centre-stand of the bike, and used a screwdriver for another peg.  The bathroom was unpleasantly dirty and shabby, with a door hanging off its hinges. The water was hard, and my soap would not lather. (I learned about soap for hard water later in the trip.)

On day four, I thought I was going crazy. The road and weather conditions were fine, but I was talking to myself, and shifting position on the seat every five minutes; moving my feet to the pillion foot-pegs and back again.

Guessing that I would have had enough of camping by this stage, I had planned to stay at a motel in Northam. It was a relief to arrive there, and sleep in a real bed for the night. At this point, I was just not sure how I was going to cope with the rest of the trip.

I woke refreshed in the morning, and headed off happily. Regardless of my fears, I just ate up the distance all that day, and covered the 950 km to Carnarvon as if it was a jaunt down the road to the shop. It was probably the most enjoyable day’s ride I have ever had. The last 650 km to Karratha on day 6 was even easier.

So what had happened at the end of day four? It was like I had broken through some sort of barrier of pain and frustration, and come out the other side. I had prepared for the trip, and faced the barriers and the risk of failure – so I was entitled to achieve the goal I had set.

I can take the same approach to my business. I have been working towards this point for some time, preparing my path, building the network, and addressing the risks. Now is the time to face the uncertainty, move forward and achieve the goal.

Time to get back on the bike.

• Simple – It doesn’t have to be sophisticated – you hear it once and you get it.
• Unexpected – It throws you a curve ball that you weren’t expecting.
• Concrete – It has names and actual events.
• Credible – It sound real.
• Emotional – It gets you in the gut – impactful stories evoke at least one strong emotion.
• Transport – It transports you to where the story took place - you can feel the experience.
• Human – It happens with real people.

I have quoted Charles Savage here before: “Innovation is like humour – it occurs at the intersection of the expected and the unexpected.”  The same principle applies to storytelling. 

One fantastic little story I heard a while ago that embodies these principles is a vignette in Bill Bryson’s book In a Sunburned Country:

In the 1950s a friend of Catherine’s moved with her young family into a house next door to a vacant lot. One day a construction crew turned up to build a house on the lot. Catherine’s friend had a four-year-old daughter who naturally took an interest in all the activity going on next door. 

She hung around on the margins and eventually the construction workers adopted her as a kind of mascot. They chatted to her and gave her little jobs to do and at the end of the week presented her with a little pay packet containing a shiny new half crown. 

She took this home to her mother, who made all the appropriate cooings of admiration and suggested that they take it to the bank next morning to deposit it in her account. 

When they went to the bank, the teller was equally impressed and asked the little girl how she had come by her own pay packet. 

‘I’ve been building a house this week,’ she replied proudly. 

‘Goodness!’ said the teller. ‘And will you be building a house next week too?’ 

The little girl answered: ‘I will; if we ever get the f***ing bricks.’

The Government is hosting the “Realising Our BroadBand Future” forum on 10 and 11 Dec, to map the applications and business models that will thrive in Australia’s high speed broadband future.

Thanks to John Wells and co at CivicTEC, I am facilitating a parallel session in Melbourne that will generate some contributions to the discussion.  The session is at 8:30 to 12:00 next Thursday 10 Dec. Deloitte are very kindly hosting us at 550 Bourke St. This is a free session, but you must register. See the details, and click through to register here.

We’re talking about our connected future. This isn’t about technology, it’s about how we can all use it – to connect communities, build businesses, improve our education and health systems, create and innovate, improve our quality of life for all.  For those of you wishing to come along, please register as quickly as you can, as there are limited places available!  Read more in the Press Release.

I have circulated this to various networks in Melbourne – social media people, creative people, trampoline attendees, geeks, telecoms consultants and knowledge managers.  There should be some diverse points of view.  If you can’t make it, follow us on Twitter at #bbfmel.

“Using blogs, Twitter, Facebook and more, the outreach blogger will travel to one of ActionAid’s program countries to help locals harness the power of social media to secure their human rights. You don’t need to be a blogging expert, you just need to have an open mind and be passionate about fighting the root causes of poverty. Social injustice and poverty are easy to ignore when hidden from view. Your mission will be to help bring attention to the scandal of poverty.”

The bloggers will spend one to two weeks in a remote community, blogging their experiences, and – importantly – training locals to use tools such as Twitter and blogs to shine a light on social injustice and human rights abuses.

One blogger has already been there to check out how the program will proceed. Read about Stilgherrian’s experiences on his blog.  Read some further discussion on how challenging this really is on Laurel Papworth’s blog – particularly read some of today’s comments (11 July).

Some very worthy people are now nominating themselves to be outpost bloggers. I have also put my hand up. My nomination text is as follows:

Most nominees here are far more worthy of this than I am – seriously. However, if you still need any more candidates, consider my hat to be in the ring.

I blog (and tweet – @kdelarue), and I have taught people about blogging.  I have been writing my own web sites for 10 years.

I absorb other cultures by eating in Lebanese restaurants in Sydney Rd, Coburg, and go to difficult, remote places by walking around Little India when I go to Singapore to speak at conferences.

The most adventurous thing I have done is to travel 5,000 km by motorcycle from Melbourne to Karratha, WA, in 6 days (29 years ago).

I enjoy writing and talking, researching and teaching. I have been known to get passionate about injustice, and I support Oxfam and others from the comfort of my armchair.

I am not fazed by having to set up my own technology under difficult circumstances, and am quite used to helping others to get things working as needed.

Work-wise, I only need approval from myself to make the time available to go.

Does any of this qualify me to help out with this project? Probably nothing like as much as others here, but drop me a line if you run out of the really suitable people, and I’ll be there.

One thing I didn’t think to include here – I also seriously believe in the power of social media to break down walls, open up communication, and build a new era of transparency and trust!

Oh, and why “TOTO”? It stands for The Overseas Training Operation (although it may be easily confused with a certain rock band formed in 1977, or a small dog in Kansas).

First, back to the Digital Ministry article:

I like to record notes when I attend seminars.  For some time, I have been taking notes on a PDA rather than on paper, as the notes are then synchronised with my PC, and available for blogging or other reuse.  This is great for me.

But with Twitter, I can take notes in just the same way, and everyone “following” me on Twitter can choose to tune in if the topic is of interest.  The notes are necessarily brief, which helps to keep them focused.  Some of the feedback I have received from this has been overwhelmingly positive, with some stating that it is just like being there themselves.

The “tuning in” is done with the use of a “hashtag” – a word relevant to the title of the conference, preceded by a “#”, added to each tweet.  The attendees at the conference can immediately see each other’s tweets by searching for the hashtag, as can all of their followers not at the conference.  (It’s also a great way to connect with people with similar interests.) The Twitter stream provides a great summary after the conference for everyone. You can do this in Twitter search (which can be a bit slow and flaky), or through any of a number of other sites that access Twitter, such as #hashtags.

Since writing that, I have seen this practice grow. As there are more and more people using Twitter at conferences, the richness of the conversation has also grown. It has been great to see people unable to attend conferences actually joining in through Twitter. This is greatly facilitated by mobile Twitter interfaces or clients (dabr is my interface of choice). You can pick a Twitter-aware conference organiser when you see the hashtag put up on the screen at the beginning of the conference!  This saves any hassle in getting an agreed tag going.

Regular meetings may have different hashtags for different dates, or just re-use the same tag. For instance, at the monthly Melbourne KMLF meetings, we tend to stick to the same tag each month – #kmlf.  You can see some of our recent conversations (before, during and after the actual meetings) on #hashtags.

There’s more to be said about Twitter at conferences – but see Olivia Mitchell’s blog posts How to Present While People are Twittering and  8 things I learnt about using twitter as a participation tool for a great insight into fairly serious Twitter use at presentations.  (By the way – if you want to put up a live Twitter display during your presentation, go to Visible Tweets and enter your hashtag.) 

There are three particular points I would like to make on this topic:

The question of etiquette

“So the next time you present at a conference, instead of being confronted by a sea of faces looking at you, you may be phased by a sea of heads looking down at their laptops.” – Olivia Mitchell

The use of Twitter at conferences may be problematic to some people. To the presenter, it may seem that people aren’t concentrating. (Of course, they may be tweeting on a smart phone rather than a laptop, but the issue is the same.) As Olivia points out, the speaker may need to adjust to the fact that this may indicate that the audience is far more engaged than if they were staring out the window!

However, as always it amazes me that people will confuse an action with the tool used to perform the action. (I wrote about this some time ago.) In what way will the audience’s concentration be different when tweeting, compared to taking hand-written notes? Conference venues still supply pens and notepaper for this purpose, and I am not aware of anyone ever having a problem with an audience taking notes.

I have experienced audience members considering tweeting by others during conferences to be rude, and in general my response to this is the same. However, we do need to choose our times even when taking notes – one shouldn’t be tweeting or note-taking during times of group discussion.

Peer-to-peer learning 

“Let go of the illusion that you might know more than the audience.” – Olivia Mitchell

Olivia makes this point exceptionally well. Monitoring Twitter during a presentation is a great addition to just attempting o read body language. Very few of us that deliver presentations will know more on every point than every member of the audience! This can be a great tool for enhancing what we are saying, as well as our audience learning from each other. I understand that recent research in learning emphasises the importance of peer-to-peer learning - we usually learn more this way than we do from non-interactive lectures.

The challenge 

So here is the interesting part. All of the above assumes that there is no reason not to share what we are hearing at a conference or seminar.  It appears that most savvy conference companies have embraced this (it’s good publicity). To the other extreme, there are few people that would inadvertently tweet company meetings that were discussing commercially sensitive issues.

What is of interest to me is the area between these two extremes. Are there conference companies that have totally failed to realise what is going on, and have allowed tweeting without realising the implications? And are there other groups that wish to have some form of secrecy that would want to prohibit tweeting? I would really see this as a retrograde step. Social Media is all about the recognition that we live in an age of abundance, not scarcity. It’s all about the recognition that we all learn and grow by sharing. We are not living in an age of secrecy and prohibition.

(Late addition – see Do Conference Bloggers and Tweeters Need to Follow Media Rules? on Eric Schnell’s blog: “The Medium is the Message” for a very detailed guide to when to tweet and when not to!)

I have never yet been at any form of conference or meeting where I have been told that tweeting is “not allowed”, yet I have heard about some meetings where apparently there has been talk after the meeting that tweeting was frowned upon (although apparently not mentioned at the time).

But as per my point about the confusion between the action and the tool above, if people take their own notes, and then talk to others about the meeting, does that not amount to the same thing? Are we saying that Twitter is in some way subversive? It may be a more immediate way to spread what we learn at conferences, but is doesn’t really differ in substance from any other way of sharing what we learn.

So maybe Twitter is in fact a revolutionary tool. A tool that is shining a new light into places that some thought were in the dark, behind closed doors.

Vive la révolution!

This article is a summary of several previous posts on this site:

You’ve read about Social Media. You may have dipped a toe in the water here or there – or you may be up to your armpits. But have you tweeted yet? What’s all the buzz (or should that be “chorus”) about Twitter? Scared about making the commitment? I was not long ago, too… View full article

Also new to this article:

I have also found [Twitter] to be an amazing way to engage in “open note taking”.  I like to record notes when I attend seminars.  For some time, I have been taking notes on a PDA rather than on paper, as the notes are then synchronised with my PC, and available for blogging or other reuse.  This is great for me.

But with Twitter, I can take notes in just the same way, and everyone “following” me on Twitter can choose to tune in if the topic is of interest.  The notes are necessarily brief, which helps to keep them focused.  Some of the feedback I have received from this has been overwhelmingly positive, with some stating that it is just like being there themselves.  (This is something I will blog about later in more detail.)

… watch this space!

Here’s mine:

Knowledge, communication, storytelling, language, learning, social media; with a dash of Zen. Oh, and consultancy and a big black cat.

If you are here because you read this, then you can read about the big black cat here.

You’ll find the Zen posts here.

I had written him a snail-mail, which I had, for want of email
Address, sent to where I met him in Canberra, years ago.
He was sharing when I knew him, so I sent the letter to him,
Just “on spec”, addressed as follows: Clancy of The Knowledge Flow.

And an answer came directed in a format unexpected,
(And I think the same was emailed from an iPhone in a bar).
‘Twas a sharing mate who wrote it, and verbatim I will quote it:
“Clancy’s gone collaboratin’, and DOPPLR knows where he are.”

In my wild and tacit fancy, visions come to me of Clancy,
Gone a-posting on actKM, where collaborators go;
As the threads are slowly stringing, Clancy moderates them singing,
Collaboration has pleasures that the solo never know. 

And Facebook has friends to meet him; the notifications greet him
And the postings of the bloggers and connections on LinkedIn.
Yes, he sees the feeds so splendid of the RSS extended,
And he makes his calls on Skype, and works in Google Docs and Ning.

I am working with my icky MS Office - not a wiki -
As the IT thugs block all attempts to share knowledge at all.
For the all-embracing firewall, and the silo walls built so tall
Just serve as a reminder – they don’t trust anyone at all.

And in place of sharing people, I can hear excuses feeble,
As the hoarders and the blockers sit in cubicles and cower.
And the gross pontificating of the managers dictating
Echoes faintly up and down the halls of the Ivory Tower.

And I somehow rather fancy that I’d like to change with Clancy,
Like to take a turn at Twitter where the tweets just come and go,
While he faced the round eternal of the email and the journal -
But he won’t like MS Office, Clancy of The Knowledge Flow.
 
No, he wouldn’t like this office, Clancy of The Knowledge Flow!

Read more about the performance of this here.  Breaking news: A video of this is now on YouTube here.

Keith De La Rue & Serena Joyner, 13 October 2008
Performed at “Collaboration Cabaret”, actKM Conference, 14 Oct 2008, Canberra
With apologies to A. B. Paterson, The Bulletin, 21 December 1889.

Should be a fun couple of days!  While I am only booked in to this one as a regular attendee, I am also taking part in the activity on Tuesday night – the “Collaboration Cabaret”.  All will be revealed in due course!

I expect that I will be tweeting at the event – tag will probably be #actkm08.

SilkCharm has 1,670 followers.  That makes a pretty powerful, well connected agency!  (Hey – I have 59 followers myself!)

So there are now at least thirty of us contributing to the joint effort.  I have absolutely no idea where this is going, but it looks like fun!

Breaking News: Read the full story here.