“Nearly 60 percent of projects aimed at achieving business change do not fully meet their objectives.” – IBM, 2008.

Why does this happen? As many working in Knowledge Management and related fields understand, it’s all about people and complexity. Organisations are increasingly dependent on people and what they know in order to operate successfully in today’s environment. It is no longer sufficient for organisational change to be driven by a small handful of people – there is no monopoly on ideas.

This is the topic of the presentation I delivered last Wednesday night at the Melbourne KMLF.  The slide pack is now available on SlideShare.

I have posted on this topic here before, and delivered an earlier version of the presentation at trampoline.  

Key points in this presentation are:

• Recent insights into effective organisational change.
• The impact of complexity and the importance of engaging people. 
• Creativity and the wisdom of crowds. 
• Social Media – the power of trust and openness.

For more background on the topics covered, here are some links to the material referenced:

• See the Wikipedia entry for Cynefin.
• Read more about Teresa Amabile’s work in an earlier post here – or see the original Harvard Business School article.
• See the RSA Animate overview of Dan Pink’s Drive on YouTube – The surprising truth about what motivates us.
• Read Greg Lloyd’s blog post about Drucker – Enterprise 2.0 Schism.
• See John Smythe’s Engage for Change site.
• See the Wikipedia entry for The Wisdom of Crowds.

For more on the change management tools and approaches mentioned, see these sites:

• Cognitive Edge - David Snowden’s site  – for Cynefin and complexity tools.
• Anecdote - Shawn Callahan and Mark Schenk’s site – for business storytelling, change and anecdote circles.
• Gurteen Knowledge - David Gurteen’s site – for knowledge cafés.
• Change Management Toolbox – Michelle Lambert’s site - for the change management cards..
• The Organizational Zoo – Arthur Shelley’s site – for the book The Organizational Zoo and the matching zoo cards.

Finally, see “How to organise a children’s party” on YouTube.

It was interesting seeing a photo of this painting after all these years.  I can recall my mother using the technique at the time, but oddly I have no recollection of seeing this particular piece before:

Now if we could only get governments to pay some real attention to this…

The issues

There are four Mega-trends in the world at the moment: Climate change, Demographic change, Urbanisation and Globalisation.  Energy is linked to all four, and water plays a role in two of the four.

Although we definitely have a number of crises on our hands in Australia, we sometimes forget that we are amazingly well-off compared to many parts of the world – for now.  We have plenty of water in Australia; it’s just not all in the right places.  We have excellent access to all known forms of energy; we are currently relying too much on coal & oil, the sources with the highest per capita emissions.  Our immediate survival is not under threat.  However, the time to act is now – before things get worse.  The “do nothing” option means that we can expect an increase in emissions of 50% over the same 50 year period.

We also often tend to see only the costs of the solutions. We need to remember that new technologies also create more jobs. There are sound economic reasons for changing the game. However, “changing our view of the future can be unsettling”. It would be much better for our economy to invest in technology rather than buying in offshore CO2 certificates!

What kind of future do you want?

Siemens have applied their “Picture the Future” innovation approach to these issues; this approach is:

Concept > Research > Scenario >Validation >Picture

The validation component is where they bring in partners, such as the CSIRO and university researchers – there were representatives from both of these presenting on the day.

Some of the key items presented were as follows:

Energy

• Energy production in Australia is currently responsible for 50% of our greenhouse gas emissions.
• The blueprint calls for the electrification of all road transport (bad news for petrol-heads, perhaps).
• We need to move to more renewable energy sources – for instance, geothermal has to become a major source of power generation.
• We also need to improve distribution technology. High-voltage Direct Current (HVDC) is the power transmission technology of the future, & could allow power sales to Asia.
• With the right technology, Australia’s daylight electricity demand could be met by a desert collector area of 30 x 30 km. Big, but a number that can be visualised!
• Electricity price will increase by 30%; but if household power efficiency can improve by 30%, then it means no change.

Water

• Australia’s water use exceeded our natural supply in the mid-90s.
• Some of our water assets were built in the 19th century – this is an industry that only changes slowly.
• Change also requires major change in community values & expectations – how much recycled water can we accept in our supply?
• Waste water “factories” can extract chemicals to produce fertiliser.
• We can be more efficient – for instance, Sydney today uses the same total amount of water that was used in the 70s, but with 1 million more people.
• Water usage reduction also reduces the power consumption required to distribute that water.
• We need a target of 65% power reduction for desalination plants by 2030.
• We need flexibility and adaptability – no single solution will meet all needs, and “formulaic approaches” are unsustainable.

How can it happen?

Now the tricky part. Siemens have “painted the picture” – the technology is here, but now it is ”up to the legislators to determine how it can be managed and paid for”.  We need a better regulatory & legislative framework to make it happen. Do our governments have the will to do this? Siemens also suggest that the “power generators have to contribute”. 

Imposing a pricing regime alone should not be expected to change behaviour – it certainly hasn’t worked for petrol – we need other solutions. 

What can we do?

What can we each do to encourage real change? Can individuals make a difference?  For one thing, we need to tell our political parties that our voting depends on them taking the right steps.

The success of “Earth Hour” was quoted as an example of how rapidly people can become engaged in a change initiative.  Over just two years, Earth Hour has grown from just one city to over 4000 cities in 88 countries.  From the Earth Hour site:

Earth Hour started in 2007 in Sydney, Australia when 2.2 million homes and businesses turned their lights off for one hour to make their stand against climate change. Only a year later and Earth Hour had become a global sustainability movement with more than 50 million people across 35 countries participating. Global landmarks such as the Sydney Harbour Bridge, The CN Tower in Toronto, The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, and Rome’s Colosseum all stood in darkness, as symbols of hope for a cause that grows more urgent by the hour.

In March 2009, hundreds of millions of people took part in the third Earth Hour. Over 4,000 cities in 88 countries officially switched off to pledge their support for the planet, making Earth Hour 2009 the world’s largest global climate change initiative.

* For more information, download the resources from Picture the Future here.

• 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.

The topic of organisational change – and getting people more involved in it – is something I have been becoming quite passionate about for a while now.  This presentation at trampoline will be the first time I have presented on the topic. I intend to develop this work, and its linking themes, in time to come.  I am currently playing with a new term for this – “orgsourcing”. You heard it first here!

One of the sessions I attended was led by Don Miller, of the Melbourne Centre for Ideas. Don briefly spoke about the comparison between western ideas of freedom, and how “total” freedom can actually limit creativity. (My paraphrase.) The point is – when we are given some form of constraint, we can often become more creative.  Some creative fields come with built-in constraints.   For example, an architect will usually be constrained by the available land area, and by design restrictions imposed by materials, technology, planning regulations, etc.  When we start to test imposed limits, we can also frequently break new creative ground.

To my mind, a classic case of this is the design of the Sydney Opera House.  When Jørn Utzon first drafted his designs for the famous “sails”, it was said that it would be impossible to build with the concrete technology available at the time. The design was changed during the development process, yet it is unlikely that the current globally-recognised design would have ever been built if the construction limitations had not been pushed as they were.

Don led us in a brief exercise to illustrate creativity under constraint. We were asked to spend 10 minutes writing – on whatever topic we chose – with the constraint that every word must include the letter ‘e’.  We were also asked to write at least six lines of text. 

Given that ‘e’ is the most common letter in the English language, this is not as severe a constraint as restricting other letters, yet still enough of a constraint to encourage some creativity! For one thing, it completely rules out the conjunctions ‘and’ and ‘but’, forcing some creative use of punctuation to replace them.  (Try it for yourself.)

At the end of the session , we all read out our pieces.  The seven or so of us at the table were all able to complete the task, with a very varied set of results.  One was a “meta-text” – a piece about the task itself.  For reference, here’s my piece:

Wearily, Eve went westerly.  She previously called her boyfriend, when her vehicle expired. He delayed. She waited; she waited. Darkness fell. Remoteness, loneliness grew. She called repeatedly – response lacked. Heavily, she trudged ahead, seeking help.

Lightness somewhere, beyond the trees. Her prayers went heavenward; her feet westward.

Where’s Edward?

This exercise rather put me in mind of the old piece by Stanislaw Lem, in which a poetry-writing machine is challenged:

“Have it compose a poem - a poem about a haircut! But lofty, noble, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter ’s’!”

Then, “a melodious voice filled the hall with the following:”

Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.
She scissored short. Sorely shorn,
Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed.
Silently scheming,
Sightlessly seeking
Some savage, spectacular suicide.

… And speaking of constraints, this was originally written in Polish, and translated into English by Michael Kandel.

The brief was a keynote presentation for Panviva’s annual SupportPoint User Conference.  SupportPoint is a “Business Process Guidance” system.

The brief was to deliver a Keynote presentation, and to set the theme for the conference: “Communication and Collaboration”.  The underlying theme that I used to couch this on was Creativity, and the importance of creativity in both leadership and knowledge work.  The slide pack is available on SlideShare.

I have used this as a good opportunity to shake off (at least some of) the shackles of PowerPoint – by using lots of pictures, and a lot less words.  Some of the photos are mine, and most of the rest are Flickr “Creative Commons – Attributions” licensed photos, all with links on the relevant slides.

As there are lots of pictures, some of the slides may not be clear without the voice over (which maybe I’ll add to SlideShare later).  The initial point is explaining my initial perceptions of creativity – influenced by the paintings of both my mother and my sister.  (See the post “Moving mountains” on this site for more of this story.)

The next section refers to the material in this post on creativity in leadership, and briefly touches on my thoughts on Change Management. I then go over some of my past experiences with a Knowledge Management Toolkit, and how we went about developing it.  The final part of the presentation picks up on a recent post on story at Anecdote, which includes a link to the story of “the one-armed boy”.

With that explanation, I hope it all makes sense, and that you enjoy this as much as I did!

Talking Cock (v.): A Singaporean term meaning either to talk nonsense or engage in idle banter.
 - The Coxford Singlish Dictionary

Over the last few years, I have had the privilege of traveling to Singapore on a number of occasions to speak at conferences.  I have greatly enjoyed the experience - both the conferences, and wandering around Singapore as a tourist.  I have met some fantastic people there, and have greatly enjoyed the culture – and the food!

Singapore is a land of contrasts.  It is richly multicultural, with all public signage in four languages.  The population is predominantly Chinese, yet most of the public institutions are as British as they were before independence.  It has earned a reputation as a non-democratic nation, yet the country is alive with art and innovation, and not in the least like a totalitarian state.  I feel safer walking around the streets anywhere in Singapore than I do in some parts of Melbourne.

Some would like to portray Singapore as a place where freedom of speech is suppressed by the government, yet Singapore is now becoming increasingly open. One friend I have made in Singapore is Enrico Varella.  Enrico introduced me to a fantastic local web site – Talking Cock.

This site bills itself as “Singapore’s premier satirical humour website”, and includes the delightful Coxford Singlish Dictionary.  (Singlish is the version of English spoken in Singapore.)  Talking Cock presents itself as apolitical: “Our main aim is to celebrate all the nonsensical parts of Singaporean life. We make fun of people in every sector, strata and profession in a completely democratic way.” Yet a sensitive government could easily take much of the satirical content on the site as criticism and take action against it.  The site also warns that “We have employed… language which might be upsetting to some and which some consider unsuitable for children.”

So what does this have to do with Mr. Conroy?

It appears that Australia’s Communications Minister, Senator Stephen Conroy has proposed imposing a filtering system on the Internet.  This purports to be an attempt to shield children from inappropriate content.  A number of people have raised many problems with this.  At the very least, it would significantly slow Internet traffic for all Australians – some estimates put it as high as an 87% reduction in speed. If indeed it is primarily aimed at protecting children, then it also takes away from parents the responsibility of making their own decisions on what is suitable for their children.  There are many more arguments about this proposal – others have advanced these very eloquently.

My view on this is typified by the Talking Cock website.  Would this be one of the estimated 10,000 sites that our government is likely to block as “unsuitable”?  Would we block a site that the Singaporean government overtly allows?  If not initially, would sites such as this be blocked in future? Is it possible that our current or future governments would block sites that are deemed to be critical of the government of the day?  And if so, how would we ever know which sites were being blocked? 

This all seems like an attack on freedom of speech and access to information that is far too open to abuse.  Who will be making the decisions about which sites will be blocked, anyway?

If Talking Cock was determined to be a site that should be blocked, will my blog site also be blocked, because of this post?  As I also use this site for my business, would this expose the government to a liability for unfair restraint of trade?  Does the fact that the site you are looking at now is actually hosted on servers in the USA make me more or less likely to be subject to government scrutiny?

It seems that Mr. Conroy is attempting to use a simplistic industrial-age concept to address a very complex problem, and like most simple solutions, I believe that it is totally inappropriate.

Will we be able to say in future something like this statement on Talking Cock’s home page:

We donno how we’ve escaped the speech-smothering tentacles of the state, but we suspect it’s got a lot to do with you Singaporeans and your tremendous (and very touching) support for us since we began.

Read more about this on the previous post here, or go directly to the full list of the lyrics.