The 3e Factor is an innovative management consultancy specialising in business transformation, leadership development, and recruitment services, with its head office in Melbourne, Australia. Our focus is: Transforming Strategic Thinking into Reality by Developing Corporate Capability.

Have a look at the site, and browse the capabilities of the consultants working with the group.

Please feel free to contact me or The 3e Factor  if you would like to know more.

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.

Some of these systems allow you to take control of your profile, and edit and update it.  The business models used by these sites can also be interesting.  Some are free, and offer premium services for a fee.  Some only allow you to take control of your profile for a certain fee. The information collated on the site may include details that are correct or incorrect; and the information may be current or out of date.

One that I have registered with is ZoomInfo, which allows me to log in and take control of my profile free of charge. I have been able to clean up the information there – although since my first clean-up, a heap more out-of-date info has been added, and a second profile created based on a mere mention of my name on another site with a link to a blog post here.  I have been able to easily merge this in to my existing profile. (Although some of the changes I made today may still take some time to appear on the site!) The site also keeps cached copy of the content that they found my name in – some of which is now up to four years old, and no longer exists at the original site. It seems that although I can edit my profile, I have no control over what out-of-date info they store about me in their cache. 

This has mostly been a positive experience, although I don’t remember seeing a lot of security to stop anyone else (whether of the same name or not) taking control of a profile.

I did once have a similar experience with a site called “Spock”, which seems to now have been subsumed into “Intelius“, purporting to be “The world’s largest and most accurate public record source.”  Although this does still provide links to some relevant sites on the search results, it no longer gives me any control over a profile, and all of the  “more detail” links refer to a name only vaguely like mine, and all results are within the USA. This seems to me to be a rather limited view of “the world” – as I understand it, the USA only accounts for 4.5% of the world’s population (according to the US Census Bureau).  However, for those in the USA, the sort of information stored here can supposedly include criminal records and “background checks”, which you have no apparent control over. 

This trend highlights the great benefit of occasionally searching for your own name on the net – that’s how I found out about ZoomInfo. It’s worth occasionally finding out what others are saying about you online. However, this is easy for someone with a name like mine – a Scottish first name and a French surname. So far as I know, I am still the only “Keith De La Rue” on the net. I pity all the “John Smiths” out there, and those with names of similar popularity of other ethnicities. (The secret is to choose your parents wisely – or change your name!) 

The appearance of sites that gather personal info without allowing you any control is a disturbing trend. Given the nature of the Internet, I don’t see that an awful lot that can be done to directly stop it. I don’t believe that there is any particular “authority” that can regulate this somewhat unethical behaviour globally. Whatever happened to Identity 2.0?

In the meantime, I believe that it is worth taking control of your own online identity on these systems where possible, provided that you are not exposing yourself to other forms of unethical behaviour when you do.

Without wanting to make light of the topic, I wonder if there will be a trend in future to give children more unique names to help them to have a globally unique online identity? Maybe ICANN should take a role in personal names as well?

In order to clarify the consultancy services that AcKnowledge Consulting is offering to the market, I have drafted a collection of Capability Statements. A Capability Statement is normally a fairly straightforward document, outlining a technical function that can be delivered by an organisation – particularly one operating in an area like IT outsourcing. This is fine where the technical capability is readily understood by all concerned.

The main area  of this consultancy service is Optimising organisational efficiency by effectively managing and delivering the knowledge required to meet business demands – with a particular focus on meeting the demands of a sales force. This could be summarised as “Knowledge Management for Sales”, but the term “Knowledge Management” can mean many different things. Accordingly, I have developed a slightly different format for my Capability Statements, as follows:

• The Business Situation – an outline of the needs of a particular function or group within an organisation.
• The Challenge – some specific issues in this area that require attention, or that are presenting a problem.
• Where AcKnowledge Consulting can help – an outline of some of the specific ways that AcKnowledge Consulting can address these issues.
• Why AcKnowledge Consulting? – some supporting information on relevant experience that can be brought to bear in this situation, including testimonials from clients as appropriate.

These documents are written on a single page for each capability.  For an example, see the Knowledge Transfer Capability Statement.  The current list of capabilities and statements is available on the About page on this site.

I welcome any feedback or comments on these statements, and how useful you may find them for understanding the services described.

It was an interesting experience.  Trying to recognise people after all these years was particularly interesting.  Some of the school-ground and buildings seemed almost identical to what I remember.  Some of the buildings do seem much smaller than I remember, too!  The old back-stage lighting control room in the hall was boarded up! I spent many happy hours there… Some of the locations brought back poignant memories, one of which I have written about here. 

I met a few of my classmates.  It was interesting comparing notes on the events of the intervening years.  I didn’t really ever engage with school much, or with many of the people there.  It was great to be able to effectively start off all over again with the people that I did meet. I may be in touch with some of them again.  I even met an old family friend, who had apparently once been a student there.

One of my old teachers spoke at the formal part of the day on Saturday.  A 1925 student also spoke.  She was born in 1914, and attended the school when it was an “Agricultural High School”. They had a school pig, and many students arrived by horse each day.  Turns out that my mother (around the same age) knew her, but they met after they had finished school.  It was a smaller town in those days.

It was interesting to note the average age of the attendees.  I would put it at over 60.  Maybe nostalgia grows on you more as you get older?

It was interesting to note how memory seems to operate.  The people I spent most time with were probably the most memorable.  Yet I also met my Year 8 History teacher, who was only at the school for that one year, and we remembered each other quite clearly.  At least one person who I spent most of the six years there with who repeated Year 11 was not so clear in my memory.  I had already seen an old photo of him earlier in the day, and the name was familiar, but when we met and chatted I was struggling to get a clear picture of our time together.  (If you are reading this, Cam, I hope you take no offence!)

Life flows on like a stream.  It’s sometimes interesting to look at which things we carry with us, and which we leave behind.

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.

For a CoP to be successful, the community must become part of the practice itself… the community needs to become part of how they do their job.

People in an organisation will just not do things that aren’t part of their job accountability and that they see no point in doing. 

Just today I hit on a really neat metaphor to illustrate this…

These days, I usually work from my home office.  This is a small study off our family room, with a north-facing window (the sunny side in this part of the planet).  One of our cats tends to like to sit with me in the study.  (Her name is “Ares” - this a long story; to do with a once-aggressive cat, and young children that watched Hercules on TV and weren’t concerned about name genders.)

This time of year, sitting on the window sill in the sun is a favourite spot, but she also likes to sit on the desk beside me (often in the way of the mouse, ironically).  Another favourite spot is on top of the PC monitor (I still have a CRT monitor). This blocks the cooling vents, of course, and she will only stay here for so long before getting too hot, so she migrates from one spot to the other.

When I am the only one in the house during the day in the cooler months, I turn down the central heating, turn on a small heater in the study, and close the door. 

The door, however, doesn’t latch properly.  So, if Ares is outside the study, she will simply push the door open, walk in and take up one of her accustomed spots. This exposes me to a draught of cold air, and I need to get up and close the door.  (She is happy enough to go to the door and wait for me to open it when she wants to leave the room.)

Here – finally – is the point of this story.  Ares is quite happy opening the door for herself, but she never closes it again.

Why not? Because it is not part of her practice.  There is no way that it will ever be in her interest to close the door, thus – even though she would be physically capable of it – there is no way that I could ever teach her to do it. She would be incapable of even comprehending a need to close the door.

If you are ever trying to encourage your community to do something, just think about what you are expecting of them, and how they would view the task you are asking them to perform.

————

PS: When my mother was a child living in the bush in the Otway Ranges in western Victoria, the family had a horse that had learnt to open a gate, go to a water tank, and turn on the tap to get a drink of water.  Needless to say, the horse never bothered learning to turn off the tap or shut the gate, either…

It is very tempting to put off posting – particularly when you are incredibly busy – but for all aspiring bloggers out there, the secret is to post when something is on your mind, even just a few words.  A blog post doesn’t have to be a magnum opus, although when you have the time and inspiration that can be good, too. 

The most important thing is to keep up with a fairly steady stream, and keep your network engaged and building as much as possible!

One thing that I now find invaluable is Google Toolbar, which includes a spell checker – this is a lot easier that copying and pasting between Word and WordPress.  Of course, when I do finally get around to upgrading to the latest version of WordPress, it’s all built in!

So, any other bloggers out there, what is your posting average?

I realised that I hadn’t checked for dead links for ages, and ran LinkSleuth.  In fact, I may never have used it since setting up the WordPress blog.  This is a great little program that has always worked very nicely in the past, but this time it apparently caused complete chaos.  Half the posts on the site vanished, the theme changed back to the basic old WordPress look, and all the Categories vanished.

I am still not quite sure what happened.  I may have entered the URL into LinkSleuth in such a way that it behaved incorrectly; the way I have my site set up with redirects may have upset LinkSleuth; or LinkSleuth may just be a bit dangerous with WordPress for some reason.  I’m not sure about this, but I can’t find anyone else complaining about it on Google.

Ironic that I was about to take a full site back-up and install a later version of WordPress!  Thankfully, my host service provider, my good friend Stephen Brehaut at Sricom, was able to ride in on his white horse this morning and roll back the site to Tuesday, and I have not lost anything!

It is at times like this that you realise how much you come to depend on your blog, particularly when it is at the heart of your business!

Still, if you rely on older technologies like paper, they can be just as vulnerable to various sorts of damage…

I have spent the day in Sydney delivering a half-day workshop at the Data Quality conference, and spent some time catching up with Matt Moore in the evening over a refreshing drink or two – and a $10 steak.  We had a very small group for the workshop, but everyone seemed to get something useful from it.  It was actually quite fun having the small group – we only needed one table, so I came and sat at the table as well, and delivered the session from there.  More fun in the city tomorrow.

By odd coincidence, last night was also my first night at a Creative Writing course at CAE, which I am attending with my daughter Renée.  One of the exercises at the course was to write continuously – about anythng – for ten minutes.  You can imagine what was the first thing that came to mind.  So, just for fun, here it is – completely unedited:

This is an interesting time.  A beginning – several beginnings, in fact – and an end.

I have just completed my last day in the office after 35 years of work.  By odd coincidence, I am starting a course in creative writing on the same day.

Tomorrow is the first of May.  The first day of the rest of my life!  It is still a struggle for my mind to fully come to terms with this, even though I have now had seven weeks’ notice.  There still seems to have been so many things to do – many endings, handing over, thanking, good-byes.

I have in another way been rehearsing for this day for four or more years.  Planning, networking and organizing towards this new and uncertain life.

Uncertain?  Perhaps.  But also exhilarating, fresh, new – exciting.

I will be putting myself on the line now.  I am now an independent consultant.  I am hanging up my shingle, even though I am still working out exactly what is written on that shingle.

One of the most amazing things to me is all the words of encouragement I have been receiving.  “Lucky you!”  “How did you do it?”  This is one theme I have been hearing.

It is a great feeling – but also very humbling.

So how will things go from here?  It seems like I won’t be short of work.  Many of the potential opportunities that have been suggested may vanish once I start asking for payment for my services; but it really looks like enough of them will bear fruit.

There may even be travel – fulfilling a life-long passion.  There will be interesting people to meet.  And many more coincidental events – like starting a creative writing course – planned months ago – on the very eve of the first day of the rest of my life.

This is a great place to end this story – but it is only the first chapter.  The last 35 years have been training for this new day.  The first of May.  A day to celebrate spring in some parts of the world.  A day to celebrate revolutions in others.  What will I be celebrating on the next first of May?  I look forward with eager anticipation.

There will certainly be many things to learn over this time, and travel to places where the learning will accelerate.  New Caledonia at least.  Will there be travel to India?  To Dubai, Singapore, New Zealand, the UK?

I look forward to finding out, as I put my foot down on the first step of this amazing journey.