“Recent research has shown that conversation is important for improving innovation. It has also been found that conversation improves group and individual performance and knowledge sharing. This article will address some of the principles of innovation and how conversational techniques can be harnessed to improve business outcomes.”

My previous article on The Art of Conversation has now been updated and published as a chapter in the Ark Group report Innovation and Transformation Through Knowledge Management, edited by Evie Serventi. This version is repitched as The innovation conversation. This came along just after I presented on the topic at KM-UK in London in June last year.

The report can be ordered from Ark Group here. You can also see the contents listing and a summary here.

Other chapter authors in this report include Dave Snowden, Stephanie Barnes, Debra Amidon and Nick Milton.

In 2011, 4,565 asylum seekers arrived in Australia by boat – less than 3 per cent of our total permanent intake in that year (ASRC). Why should this be considered as sufficient for us to require better ”border protection”? This policy does have a precedent:

“Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.

“… Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”

- Hermann Göring, 18 April 1946 (Gilbert, GW 1947, Nuremberg Diary).

Intro

• Why do you use Twitter?
• Do you want to use Twitter for business or pleasure?
• What to you want to achieve with Twitter?
• Does it matter?

 I won’t be telling you how to get 300,000 followers; but I can tell you how I have got to 1,400!

Why I use Twitter

• Working on joint project – questions and answers.
• Offering tech help – stuck volume control on iPad.
• Retweeting observations: “If only they enforced bank regulations like they do park rules, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
• Reading thoughts: “Closed networks are ignorance amplifiers”.
• News: The world’s lightest material has been created – a nanotechnology metal grid 100 times lighter than polystyrene foam.
• Sharing domestic activities: Making Christmas pudding.

 http://delarue.net/blog/2012/04/a-series-on-social-media/

How to get “Klout”

• Set goals?
• Develop your own voice
• Get noticed
• Find interesting hashtags and use them – eg #km, #kmlf, #kmedu
• Find people using paper.li and tweet on their subjects
• Get re-tweeted by influencers 
• Klout.com is interesting, and gives some guidance on your effectiveness.
• It can tell you a bit about your style
• It isn’t everything, and don’t compare yourself too much with others, as it can be gamed.
• It can be misleading: eg, am I influential on Melbourne, Sydney and the Philadelphia Eagles?

 http://klout.com/

How to misbehave on Twitter

• Multiple @s too often
• Nothing but links
• Duplicating same link > 25%
• Posting same tweet too often
• > 50% “app spam” – 4 sq, blip.fm, etc
• No activity for over one month
• Fewer than 10 tweets
• Never interact with followers
• Over 90% RSS feed
• Follow back < 10%
• All talk, no interaction, over 24 per day
• Unoriginal – > 70% RTs
• Self-obsessed – > 50% of tweets about themselves
• Unpopular – < 30% follow back

 http://thetwitcleaner.com/

Expanding your scope

• Set goals.
• Choose who to follow – look at lists. Where is your audience?
• Tweet throughout the day. Use schedules, but be there to follow up.
• Use a simple handle that is easy to remember.
• Use your profile – include useful info, a welcoming picture and link to landing page.
• Connect with other social networks
• Do not use protected tweets or validators – make it easy!
• Remember to think about context, particularly if you are tweeting via another social network.
• Be helpful to others – it’s not all about you.
• Be nice – don’t name and shame unfollowers.

 http://inboundmarketinggeek.com/twitter-mistakes/

And who knows? Some of that may even make some sense. Thanks to those on Twitter who tweeted some of the links I have used here.

I was interviewed in March on The link between comms and knowledge management for the chapter blog, and I was profiled in the February Connect newsletter.

Now I am the subject of an article published on the main web site – Tweak your business conversations to achieve more, highlighting the topic that has been discussed on this blog before, and mentioning my upcoming appearance at KM-UK in London in June.

Let’s talk Social Media (Nov 2011)
Social media is not only something you can no longer ignore, it’s part of a bigger shift that is changing everything…

To tweet or not to tweet (Dec 2011)
Let’s first dispel the myth that it’s all about telling people what you had for breakfast…

Time to face facts (Feb 2012)
The real power of social media is in opening the shop or factory walls, and letting the customers in – making them part of the business…

Do these reflect your experience of social media? I would love to hear your thoughts…

A PDF version of the article is now available for download from this site.

This is planned to be the first in a three-part series at Business West. I have just submitted article number two, titled (for now) To tweet or not to tweet. You’ll see it first on Business West.

As I have been doing a fair bit of both work and writing on collaboration recently, I have been attempting to sharpen up my own ideas about these techniques and the differences. In practice, I tend to modify the techniques to match the context, rather than necessarily follow a strict format, but it is useful to understand the origins and strengths of the different approaches.

David has spelt out the differences quite thoroughly in his article, but I thought that it may be helpful to put together a bit of a summary here, also drawing on my own experience and observations.

As David is at some pains to point out, he is not saying that there is anything wrong with the World Café approach – it is just different. Each approach has its place and purpose.

David makes the point that World Café tends to have a fixed structure, whereas Knowledge Café can be more varied. However, there are also a number of other techniques used by some practitioners based on the World Café approach, such as Pro-action Café, which adds some features of Open Space Technology to a more focussed World Café to explore specific issues and produce action plans.

I see either format as potentially valuable in a range of contexts, alongside many other conversational techniques. These techniques can help both community groups and business organisations to share knowledge, build rapport and develop solutions to problems. As David has listed in his article, these can include:

• Peer Assist
• After-action Review
• Post-project Review
• Knowledge Café
• World Café
• Open Space Technology
• Appreciative Inquiry
• Unconference
• Barcamp

Here in Melbourne we also have our own very special format, Trampoline,  which is now being taken to the wider world.

Remember – it’s the conversation that matters!

I am presenting an updated version of the Knowledge Transfer Toolkit presentation - read more about the background on this site, including this recently published article. The outline of the presentation is as follows:

Building and managing a knowledge transfer program:

How do you encourage technical experts to share their knowledge with others in the organisation that need it to do their jobs? How do you maintain currency and accuracy? This case study presentation will explain how to build a successful knowledge transfer toolkit.

Topics include:

• Encouraging knowledge-sharing behaviours
• Building a program-managed multimedia toolkit, comprising content, communication, learning and social media
• Governance – keeping content up to date
• Engaging the target audience in improving content
• Using social media principles to build trust and engagement

View or download the slide pack on SlideShare here.

This article has documented in a little more detail the recent research that highlights how conversation can actually make us smarter and more innovative – this research is from:

• Anita Williams Woolley et al, who found that “small groups demonstrate distinctive ‘collective intelligence’ when facing difficult tasks”.
• Steven Johnson’s book Where Good Ideas Come From, on cultural progress and how innovation really works.
• Oscar Ybarra et al, showing that even brief, friendly conversations can improve individual mental function.

This research is summarised and drawn together in the article, along with other thoughts on conversation, change and social media.

Download a copy of the article here.

We came together to talk about – and experiment with – various tools and techniques of group facilitation.  The retreat was arranged by Viv McWaters (@vivmcw) and Johnnie Moore (@johnniemoore), who had also just flown in from a couple of weeks of facilitation in the Solomon Islands and other places.

As much as it was about learning and doing stuff, it was about relaxing and having fun. I was there as Matt Moore (@engin_eer) had invited me. (Thanks, Matt!) Although I did already know some of the other people there, it was also a great time of meeting new people. It was also the first time that I had picked up a guitar for over a year – Geoff Brown (@geoffbrown3231) very kindly didn’t protest when I borrowed his every time he put it down!

Wildwood was a bit run down, as it was actually on the market, and the owner was no longer resident on site. The catering was excellent, and the location marvellous, but the nights were getting cooler, and the wood fire heating was rather short of fuel. Some of us tracked down some wood, and Geoff kindly wielded the splitter. Given my experience with wood fires at Blackwood, I got the Coonara going on the first morning there, and kept it stoked up for the duration. (For which I was christened “fireguy” by Johnnie.)

One of the highlights was the evening that I was sitting around fiddling with the guitar (or guitaring, I guess), and Johnnie suggested we improvise a song. After a bit of work, we got a chorus going, and improvised as many verses as we could as the others came into the room – and then ran away to the other end of the room as quickly as they could!

The tune was Waltzing Matilda – the best-known tune – and the chorus was as follows:

Facilitation of deep conversation.
Our congregation at Wildwood Retreat.
If we all make our way to
Deep in the Otways
We’ll have a confabulation, won’t we?

I guess you had to be there.

So what did I learn? I did pick up some facilitation techniques. But I think that I learnt more from Johnnie’s style and approach to facilitation.

Johnnie’s approach to facilitation is one that could best be called informal. Shawn Callahan (@unorder), another friend and long-term colleague there, has blogged his thought on the retreat here, with a very thoughtful piece on Johnnie’s approach. Shawn quoted this as “notice more, do less”.

I personally found this approach incredibly refreshing. After learning a few techniques elsewhere recently that place great emphasis on planning and preparation, I was beginning to feel that my preference for putting the emphasis on “making it up as I go along” was perhaps somewhat frowned upon.

Not that I don’t plan – in fact, I often plan in great detail, but I am always prepared to modify the plans to meet the need of the audience and the context at the time of delivery. (There’s a military term for this: “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy” – although the use of the term “enemy” is not really appropriate in this context!)

There was a strong improv theatre flavour to what we were doing – and not only in the song. As Shawn has written, the emphasis was on emergence. Emergence is what happens in complex adaptive systems – and a group of people together, involved in cognitive work and interacting, make a complex adaptive system.

One example of how complex patterns emerge is in the movement of a flock of birds.  It has been said that the birds only follow three very basic “rules”:

1. Fly towards the centre of the flock
2. Match speed with the birds on each side
3. Avoid collisions

Yet from this simple set of procedures, amazingly complex and intricate patterns of movement arise.

Improv theatre also follows a set of basic rules. Michelle James (@CreatvEmergence) once wrote about this in the blog article Improv Theatre and Complex Adaptive Systems. (I’m not an expert on improv myself – although I did take part in a rather fun improv exercise at trampoline last Saturday!) Michelle lists a set of seven “rules” of improv, and particularly notes that when the players break these rules, it makes for bad theatre. The emergence is lost:

So, what make it “look hard” when it is not working so well? Simple: any violation of the principles. If one of us tries to orchestrate, or worse impose, our own agenda or plot on the piece. If one of us tries to be the “star” and take too much focus. If even one of us is not present to what is unfolding, moment-by-moment. If one of us worries about the plot, and starts to figure out how to “save” it. If we expect that someone should respond in a certain way. In short, anything that gets us out of the moment and what is emerging – and into our controlling heads.

So I see this as support for Johnnie’s “notice more, do less” facilitation approach. You need the groundwork there first – you need to have an understanding of the group of people involved, and some sort of plan or general direction. You need to do the “Hosting”. But the rest is up to the people themselves.

Let the results emerge.