Bookmap: The Writer's Journey by Christopher Vogler

Legend has it this book originated as a seven-page memo outlining mythic structure for Hollywood studios.

In the memo, Christopher Vogler interpreted Joseph Cambpell's "The Hero with a Thousand Faces", the book in which "Campbell explores the theory that important myths from around the world which have survived for thousands of years all share a fundamental structure, which Campbell called the monomyth."

Vogler simplifies Campbell's more scholarly work into a practical handbook for writers. In a new preface to the second edition he answers critics who called The Hero's Journey formularic by saying it is a form, not a forumula. He goes on to make some interesting contextual points about its reception in "herophobic" cultures such as Australia and Germany. "Australians," he says, "distrust appeals to heroic virtue because such concepts have been used to lure generations of young Australian males into fighting Britain's battles..." while "...the legacy of Hitler and the Nazis has tainted the concept... distorted the powerful symbols to enslave, dehumanize and destroy."

A new section looking at several modern films in heroic context includes "Titanic", "The Full Monty" and oddly "Pulp Fiction". The latter doesn't naturally fit the form, so instead it's used to view the individual journeys of the three characters Jules, Vincent and Butch.

Cooperation - the future of the intranet?

I spent Monday morning at the first half of Coporate Social Networking 2009 at RIBA listening to a variety of speakers talking about the impact of social networking on the way we work.

I hadn't encountered Niall Cook of Hill and Knowlton before, but I agreed with much of what he had to say. He began with some great points about emerging tools, saying that the return on investment doesn't need to be high when the investment is low. He dismissed internal systems which "don't work any more... - even e-mail" - while the traditional model of an intranet is "publishing, not collaboration".
Work, business and employees are all changing, he says. People want to work differently. Leaders should be guides, not gods - and employees will demand inclusivity rather than command and control (at which point we got a nice Child With A Laptop slide).

"It's not just about connecting", said Niall, outlining a model with the headings "Connect, Communicate, Cooperate, Collaborate". Cooperation he differentiates from collaboration using the following attributes:

• no end goal
  
• no command and control
  
• structure emerges
  
• requires internal versions of Flickr, YouTube, etc.

The old IT model of user needs is dead, he contests - employees need wikis supported by social networks, or - and this is the risk - they will go outside the firewall and do it. Implementation needs be demand-driven, based on what employees are using already in their non-working lives, to create value. But, he warns, don't ignore culture. There is no point using collaboration software in a non-collaborative organisation.

Lee Bryant of Headshift talks a lot of commonsense on-line, so his presentation was what originally drew me in. Beginning with the statement that existing business processes are too inefficient and businesses can't afford them, he went on to talk about a future based on simpler, lower cost systems.

"Trust is cheaper than control", he states, explaining how social tools or a social layer can "rejuvenate old, unloved systems." He touches on the evolutionary nature of innovation, based on rapid feedback - something he feels intranets lack. Social networks and weak ties, he says, create an organisational immune system, which increases network productivity, not just personal.

Lee recommends that we make hidden data shared and use it to drive collective intelligence, an example: from usage statistics you can see which are the most valuable areas of an intranet. Unfortunately, they are rarely shared.
He talks about the "ambient awareness" which small-scale status updates create and the benefits for team working, he states that "90% of project management is communication".

He finishes with a vision of the intranet based on wikis which "locate publishing into the context of doing something" supported by social networks. You don't even need to create new tools - "use your existing directories", he recommends, by which time I was sitting with a very smug grin on my face.

Conclusions
I was pleased to see more forward-looking opinions siding against static intranets with old publishing models. I remember suggesting over a year ago to our team that Interact could easily be wiki-enabled to encourage more participation, without compromising the validity of the information.

So enabling collaboration (and cooperation!) with wikis, supported by a social networks seems to be a good emerging direction for organisations who want to lead by taking the next step.

Gurteen Knowledge Café: Imagining the future of knowledge technologies

If the idea of predicting the future currently seems rather foolish to me, it may be because I'm reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "Fooled by Radomness". I signed up for Tuesday night’s Gurteen Knowledge Café at the British Computer Society more in anticipation of good conversation than any hope of forecasting anything significant.

Conrad Taylor opened the event, framing technological change as "the co-evolution of tools, artefacts and environment" and suggested "science fiction, the future of personal computer and magic versions of current processes" as predictive approaches. After a video message from BCS President Alan Pollard, Chris Yapp spoke about the need for technology to augment and add to individual capabilities, "a neuro-physiological effect which increases attention-capacity" and the need for better algorithms. He made the surprising point that the technical capability outlined by Doug Englebart in his famous demonstration "A Research Centre for Augmenting Human Intellect" still does not exist.

Dominated by knowledge management professionals, the first group I sat with were uncomfortable purely discussing technology and the conversation quickly turned to shifts in society. Fears over security, data retention, defensiveness about intellectual property rights and reputation management appear to prevent progress.

One person commented that individual identity might be lost or changed due to mass participation and more sharing, but that younger people seemed to fear this less than older people. Since our opinions and the meanings we ascribe to things are founded on our life experience, what we learn will always reflect our previous experience and the sense we make of it.

Similar themes emerged after I moved tables. We talked about what Intellectual Property means now and considered how organisations will generate value in the future. We felt the cultural shift in ownership needed to be understood and "something like" the GPL or Creative Commons embraced more widely. The model which has served the music business for the past 100 years is no longer viable and there is a lot to be learnt from the open-source-software-and-consultancy model.

I sadly didn't share a table with Ray Shaw where the most off-the-wall conversation was always likely (and so it proved). The conversation continued over excellent food and drink which had me questioning the fact that it's around twenty years since I was a member of the British Computer Society. Perhaps it's time I renewed.

Bookmap: The Halo Effect... and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers

Phil Rozenzweig's book impressed when I first read it by explaining in straightforward terms why "Five Steps..." and "Seven Habits..." type books aren't enough to ensure success in different contexts.

The explanation of the dangers of pseudoscientific approaches to studying performance is recommended to anyone working in organisational design. I also feel all business management courses should start with the story about cargo cults and coconut headsets. Learn more from this excerpt from the first chapter.

Bookmap: The Game of Chess by Harry Golombek

Having expressed my intention to learn the game "properly", my dad kindly dug out what appears to be a classic of the game. To develop my understanding of the game properly, I needed to learn the notation quickly. Happily, this doesn't seem as taxing as I had feared.

Harry Golombek's name wasn't familiar to me. He was either slightly before my time or perhaps I read the wrong newspaper. The public face of chess to me in the 80s was Bill Hartson of Mastergame, though the show sadly went the way of Pot Black and One Man And His Dog.

Happily there are plenty of commented games available on YouTube.

Gurteen Knowledge Cafe: Human Will and Human Won't

Last night's Gurteen Knowledge Cafe was full of fascinating conversation from the word go. Kate Hopkinson led the discussions on "Human Will and Human Won't", diving straight in with little introduction posing two questions: "What do you believe helps motivation and cooperation and what suppresses or impedes it?"

The group on my table began with incentives, feedback and recognition, through leadership, authenticity, shared values and consistency, then onto necessity, relevance, line-of-sight, communication, before leaping into crisis and the question of how to help people accept and learn to cope with constant change.

As usual, the range of views represented increased the scope far wider than my own context and I quickly realised how narrowly I had initially viewed the conversation. When I observe how limiting my own viewpoint can be, I feel the value of coming along to events like these to talk to people in similar roles in different organisations and I wish I could convince more people to come along.

Kate spoke about The Landscape of the Mind, a model she has developed to help people understand each other's preferred working styles. I began to feel uncomfortable here, the voice of Dave Snowden echoing around in my head, telling me that people change their preferences as they change context. Conrad must've felt the same way, commenting wryly as he did that "I don't believe in astrology, but people with my starsign never do." My own preferences seemed scattered throughout the model, perhaps leaving me somewhere in the middle, though I identified my current colleagues on either side of my category, not unlike real life.

I'd love to better understand the working styles of the people around me, but I fear many tools we're presented in our working lives - such as Myers Briggs - aren't up to the job and there is a real need to get smarter.

I'll try to keep a more open mind.

An engaging Tuesday...

Two engagement events on Tuesday: one highlighting the need for evolutionary change, the other examined the problems managers face every day.

Not many people get to travel to the top of the BT tower, which might partly explain why Tuesday afternoon's Gurteen Knowledge Café was so heavily oversubscribed. Add Dave Snowden speaking about complexity and you have easily the hottest KM ticket in town. I hadn't made the original cut, but my colleague Kevin was fading fast by Monday afternoon and arranged for me to go in his stead.

"How can we best keep employees engaged in their work, in the current economic climate?" – Gurteen Knowledge Cafe with Dave Snowden, Alex Wilson, Sharon Darwent – BT Tower



The afternoon began with a buffet in the revolving restaurant, which clicked into gear as we queued for dim sum, inducing a sensation faintly resembling seasickness. The restaurant completed a revolution as we sat and talked, picking out London landmarks through the gloomy haze.



David Gurteen welcomed everybody to the event and explained how the afternoon was going to work. As usual there was a great mix of first timers and regulars, which always helps get conversations started. The whole group of 80 or so were then ferried to the ground floor auditorium where we were welcomed by host Sharon Darwent and introduced to BT's HR director Alex Wilson. Alex spoke about the need for engagement during the current economic climate, stressing that BT faced its own challenges and didn't pretend to know all the answers.

Dave Snowden followed with his presentation introducing complexity, updated with some of the output from a recent Cognitive Edge engagement. His examples from the Liverpool museum project demonstrated the importance of collecting granular anecdotal fragments from children who had visited the museum and how SenseMaker helps signify, interpret and display them visually. Graphs showed how weak signal detection through the real time monitoring of anecdotes can lead to quick corrective action without the need for major interventions.



Moving back up the tower to discuss the implications highlighted some of the difficulties involved in helping people understand complexity and what it means for managers. Most people were happy to discuss their situations and propose solutions for each other's problems but were less sure about a revolutionary approach.



Many organizations carry out an employee survey every two years. It's a huge undertaking and an important input into strategy making. BT seems to be finding it needs to test the water more frequently and is taking quarterly surveys of samples of the organisation. It will be interesting to see how these more frequent inputs help the company become more agile.

As usual we decamped to a pub to make and renew acquaintances. I could’ve stayed longer, but I had another engagement.

"Newsletters are dead; Long live Engagement" – Jason Bates, David Paul

A smart walk back across Bloomsbury took me to Lincoln’s Inn Fields where Suzanne Clift of the Land Registry was hosting the Melcrum Communicators' Network's London Communicators' Group February meetup.

Jason opened the proceedings by focusing everyone in the room on the challenges facing organisations in the current climate before dividing the group into teams for a workshop. David then took over in the guise of Rupert Fotherington-Smythe (or someone similar), CEO of Gravelodge, a nationally-respected chain of motels which has grown in size, but lost something of its identity along the way. We had thirty minutes to put together a proposal aimed at reconnecting Gravelodge with its employees and reinvigorating its reputation.

Everyone in our team was keen. Jess and Beata were firing off ideas, which I managed to record and Cari structured into a proposal convincing enough for David to award us the contract! Key to his decision, he said, was our focus on getting the organisation to understand its original values.

We celebrated with a beer in the Pitcher and Piano on Kingsway and went our separate ways, all looking forward to next month's meetup.