• 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!

Unfortunately, I can’t really take them up on the offer to attend – not unless someone is willing to sponsor me for the travel and accommodation costs, etc – but you, dear reader, can still take advantage of the discount offer.  You get a $200 discount on each full-conference pass, and you can also sign up for a free expo pass, all by clicking through to the discount offer.

They did send me this some time ago, and I am not sure if there is a cut-off date for the discount, so you may need to be quick.

So now you can’t say that I never do anything for you…

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!

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.

“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).

This article effectively serves as a White Paper on the work that I have done in the past on a Knowledge Transfer Toolkit, and the related consultancy service now offered.

The Australian Collaboration Software Report

Are you currently using collaborative software, or are you planning to acquire it? Would you like to benchmark your experience against that of others? Are you based in Australia? Please fill out the survey at http://tinyurl.com/ozcollab now!

Matt Moore of Innotecture and I are researching the use of collaboration tools in Australia. “Collaboration” is a buzz term at the moment, and we want to get behind the hype to discover how organisations are selecting and implementing tools and whether they are benefiting from them. If you have experience with selecting, implementing or maintaining a collaboration tool within the last 12 months then we would like you to take part in this survey. 

Read more about what’s in it for you at: http://ozcollab.com/.

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!

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.