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.’

OK, so it’s not original – but I rather like it. Received by email from my son:

A boat docked in a tiny Mexican fishing village. A tourist complimented the local fishermen on the quality of their fish, and asked how long it took him to catch them.

“Not very long.” they answered in unison.

“Why didn’t you stay out longer and catch more?”

The fishermen explained that their small catches were sufficient to meet their needs and those of their families.

“But what do you do with the rest of your time?”

“We sleep late, fish a little, play with our children, and take siestas with our wives. In the evenings, we go into the village to see our friends, have a few drinks, play the guitar, and sing a few songs. We have a full life.”

The tourist interrupted, “I have an MBA from Harvard and I can help you! You should start by fishing longer every day. You can then sell the extra fish you catch. With the extra revenue, you can buy a bigger boat.”

“And after that?”

“With the extra money the larger boat will bring, you can buy a second one and a third one and so on until you have an entire fleet of trawlers. Instead of selling your fish to a middle man, you can then negotiate directly with the processing plants and maybe even open your own plant. You can then leave this little village and move to Mexico City, Los Angeles, or even New York City! From there you can direct your huge new enterprise.”

“How long would that take?”

“Twenty, perhaps twenty-five years.” replied the tourist.

“And after that?”

“Afterwards? Well my friend, that’s when it gets really interesting,” answered the tourist, laughing. “When your business gets really big, you can start buying and selling stocks, and make millions!”

“Millions? Really? And after that?” asked the fishermen.

“After that, you’ll be able to retire, live in a tiny village near the coast, sleep late, play with your children, catch a few fish, take a siesta with your wife and spend your evenings drinking and enjoying your friends…”

And the moral of this story is: know where you’re going in life – you may already be there!

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!

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

“We go on being children, regardless of age, because in life we are always encountering new things that challenge us to understand them, instances where a practiced imagination is actually more useful that all laboriously acquired knowledge.” – Milan Kundera.

This is quoted from an essay by Shaun Tan – PICTURE BOOKS: Who Are They For?

C S Lewis has also written (in the Narnia chronicles) on the importance of retaining a child’s view of the world.  (Not to mention the biblical injunctions.)

I have recently completed the StrengthsFinder assessment.  The accompanying book by Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton provides a brief description of how the human brain develops.  We are born with “a hundred billion neurons”, and we keep “about that many up until late middle age.” More importantly, these neurons form connections – synapses – with each other.

By the age of three, “each of your hundred billion neurons has formed fifteen thousand synaptic connections with other neurons.”  But from this age, these connection start to fall into disrepair.  “… between the ages of three and fifteen you lose billions and billions of these carefully forged synaptic connections.  By the time you wake up on your sixteenth birthday, half your network is gone.”

This may not be final – there has been some recent work on brain plasticity (by Norman Doidge in The Brain That Changes Itself) – but it appears that in general the connections within our brain do not change appreciably after that age.

However, Buckingham and Clifton state that our effectiveness depends on how well we capitalise on our strongest connections; the point of the book and assessment.

We have a huge number of connections while we are younger in order to soak up all the new sights, sounds and experiences.  But while we have all these connections, we are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of signals.  In order to start making sense of everything, we need to develop a way of focusing on some signals, and blocking out the background “noise” of other signals.  We do this by progressively destroying the less “important” connections.

As our genetic inheritance and early childhood environment help us to sort out our neural pathways, our natural talents – our strengths – begin to emerge.

One of my strengths is apparently “Ideation”:

You are fascinated by ideas… concepts… Yours is the kind of mind that is always looking for connections, and so you are intrigued when seemingly disparate phenomena can be linked by an obscure connection… a new perspective on familiar challenges.

You revel in taking the world we all know and turning it around so we can view it from a strange but strangely enlightening angle. You love all these ideas because they are profound, because they are novel, because they are clarifying, because they are contrary, because they are bizarre…

This all makes me wonder.  Is it just possible, then, that some of the more creative, imaginative and intelligent people among us are those that have managed to retain some of the “child’s brain”? Conversely, have the most supposedly “grown up” of us in fact shut down too many connections, and lost the ability to enjoy the contrary and the bizarre; to see and feel the wonder of the world and the people around us? 

Perhaps we need to continue to expose ourselves to the “new things that challenge us”.  Give our imagination a little more practice.  Explore the things that we haven’t made sense of yet, flex a few synapses, and enjoy some of the noise that our “adult” brain would like to block out.

US researchers said they are able to selectively erase memories from mice in a laboratory, raising hopes human memory afflictions like post-traumatic stress syndrome can one day be cured. 

An initial step has now been taken towards the ability to erase memories.  This takes us one step towards the scenario in Philip K Dick’s story – now also John Woo movie, starring Ben Affleck and Uma Thurman – Paycheck.

In the movie, this capability is used for less altruistic purposes. 

Even though most science fiction writers deny that they predict the future, it is always interesting to see life imitating art…

My contribution to this was a musical item.  It was introduced something like this:

Australia actually has a long history in Knowledge Management.  Over a hundred years ago, we had two key practitioners in the field – ‘Banjo’ Paterson and Henry Lawson.  They did some ground-breaking work in conveying knowledge of life in rural Australia to the emerging urban environment. 

They collected knowledge using Anecdote Circles (around the campfire) and delivered it as Springboard stories, often published in a major Knowledge Management publication of the day, The Bulletin magazine.

Tonight, we will look at one of Banjo’s key archetypical characters, Clancy of the Overflow.  Clancy works in an ideal environment as a drover.  The Narrator is contemplating his lot in his “dingy office”. 

We are updating the story: how would these knowledge workers fare in today’s collaborative environment?

To find out, read the full lyrics.  Breaking news: The video is now on YouTube 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…