Tag: Knowledge work

Excellent tips for more productive conference calls

Jessica Lipnack provides an excellent set of tips and best practices for making conference calls more productive. For all the time I spend on calls, I frequently find them immensely frustrating. I plan on incorporating these practices in whatever calls I can influence.  I’ve excerpted a few highlights here:

Could you please repeat the question?

As promised, best practices for conference calls. Not surprisingly, I’ve discovered that I’ve done quite a few posts on the topic, for instance, here and here and here.

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And…why did I title this post the way I did? Surefire way to know if someone isn’t paying attention on a call: When asked to comment, they have no idea what they’re commenting on, thus, they say, "[see title]."

  1. No agenda, no meeting.
  2. Avoid status reporting
  3. Use screen sharing
  4. Rotate facilitator, note taker, timekeeper, "break" buddies
  5. Keep notes, display them, distribute immediately
  6. Check-in: go around face clock
  7. Get voices in room with "ice breaker" question
  8. Say your name each time you speak
  9. Generate heat: Discuss, disagree, decide
  10. Check-out around clock

…

The notion of a "face clock" is one of those wonderfully simple and powerful ideas that are so obviously useful once someone else has come up with them:

…6. Check in. Face clock? I better post that right here. One of the graphics that is useful for keeping people aware of one another has each person’s face at a particular hour on the clock. (Thanks, Tom Kunz, for inventing this idea and for allowing us to continue to use this graphic.)

Face clock

 

Could you please repeat the question?
Jessica Lipnack
Thu, 08 Oct 2009 21:03:17 GMT

You would do well to read the entire post (you should be following Jessica’s blog anyway).

Insight on the back of a business card

Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity, MacLeod, Hugh

Maybe all business authors should be encouraged to start their writing careers doodling on the back of business cards. Wouldn’t we all be better off if more of us invested in distilling our messages as crisply as Hugh MacLeod does here.

MacLeod started drawing on business cards to pass the time hanging out in bars in New York city, graduated to thinking in public on his blog, Gapingvoid, and now has his very own book. All of which is pretty compelling evidence as to which side of the following notion he comes down on:

image

Ignore Everybody collects a number of MacLeod’s cartoon with his observations on creativity. It’s particularly relevant if you’re called on to exercise more creativity in the chaotic stew that is today’s business world. Here’s a sampling of some of his keys:

  • The idea doesn’t have to be big, it just has to be yours
  • Good ideas have lonely childhoods
  • Allow your work to age with you
  • Put the hours in

Blinding insights? Not particularly. Smartly packaged lasting truths isn’t bad. Certainly more than worth the short and pleasant time it will take you to peruse MacLeod’s gift to us.

Emergent behavior and unintended consequences in social systems

One of the defining characteristics of Enterprise 2.0 implementation efforts according to Andy McAfee, among others, is the presence of emergent behaviors in the organization as participants interact with and adapt to new technology functions and features. The notion of ’emergent behavior’ is pretty well established in the study of complex systems. Yet it still seems to trouble many executives, particularly those with strong project management and operations backgrounds.

I was pondering this over the weekend and I think I’ve found a way to explain it in a more satisfying way.

Emergent behaviors are unintended consequences that make you happy.

We are social animals that have evolved to operate optimally in small groups (check out Dunbar’s number). As social systems get larger, they exceed our capacity to make accurate inferences and predictions. Complex organizations and political entities represent design solutions that compensate for these limits and allow us to take on tasks and efforts beyond the grasp of small groups. Technology adds to the complexity and increases the capacity of the system at the expense of making the system still more difficult to predict.

‘Unintended consequences’ is a consulting term for ‘oops.’ It’s a belated admission that it’s difficult to predict all the ways in which a system will react to its environment. A typical response is to work more diligently to lock things down, usually by squeezing out opportunities for human judgment and adaptability. This leads to the TSA and zero-tolerance policies that suspend six-year olds.

A better response is to stop treating people like interchangeable components in a machine and start designing with an eye toward integrating human limits and human creativity into our systems. Assume that the new system will produce unexpected results. Focus your design effort more on swinging the balance toward pleasant surprises and less on eliminating surprises altogether.

Eight years now at McGee’s Musings

Today makes eight years I’ve been posting here.

This is one component in a continually evolving collection of tools and practices that constitute my work practices. I’ve been thinking about how best to understand that constellation of tools and practices and about ways to make the path smoother for those who may be earlier in their efforts. We all want to get there in one simple step. That isn’t possible. On the other hand, it’s also not necessary to spend quite so much time wandering in the poppies, which is what it feels like some days.

If you have a moment and feel so inclined, tell us a bit about your efforts and experiments. And tell me about what you would like to see more of here. As always, I greatly appreciate all the people I’ve been able to meet and interact with as a consequence of writing here. Thank you.

One entrepreneurial editor’s heuristics for today’s business environment: Alan Webber’s Rules of Thumb

Rules of Thumb: 52 Truths for Winning at Business Without Losing Your Self, Webber, Alan M.

Alan Webber was the managing editor of the Harvard  Business Review and, wearing an entrepreneurial hat, was a cofounder of Fast Company magazine. He’s hung out with and paid attention to lots of smart people and he’s managed to acquire substantial experience in his own right. In Rules of Thumb Webber seeks to distill some of the lessons he’s learned for the benefit of the rest of us.

These kinds of books depend on whether the authors can tell a good story and whether they have any substantively useful insights. As you might expect, Webber has an excellent collection of stories, well told. More importantly, he delivers on the insights side. A few of his rules fall flat or feel clich d but the bulk reinforce and extend themes I find important and frequently open up new perspectives.

Here are the rules Webber presents; it’s worth your effort to see what he does with each.

  1. When the going gets tough, the tough relax
  2. Every company is running for office. To win, give the voters what they want
  3. Ask the last question first
  4. Don’t implement solutions. Prevent problems
  5. Change is a math formula
  6. If you want to see with fresh eyes, reframe the picture
  7. The system is the solution
  8. New realities demand new categories
  9. Nothing happens until money changes hands
  10. A good question beats a good answer
  11. We’ve moved from an either/or past to a both/and future
  12. The difference between a crisis and an opportunity is when you learn about it
  13. Learn to take no as a question
  14. You don’t know if you don’t go
  15. Every start-up needs four things: change, connections, conversation, and community
  16. Facts are facts; stories are how we learn
  17. Entrepreneurs choose serendipity over efficiency
  18. Knowing it ain’t the same as doing it
  19. Memo to leaders: focus on the signal to noise ratio
  20. Speed = strategy
  21. Great leaders answer Tom Peters’ great question: "How can I capture the world’s imagination?"
  22. Learn to see the world through the eyes of your customer
  23. Keep two lists. What gets you up in the morning? What keeps you up at night?
  24. If you want to change the game, change the economics of how the game is played
  25. If you want to change the game, change customer expectations
  26. The soft stuff is the hard stuff
  27. If you want to be like Google, learn Megan Smith’s three rules
  28. Good design is table stakes. Great design wins
  29. Words matter
  30. The likeliest sources of great ideas are in the most unlikely places
  31. Everything communicates
  32. Content isn’t king. Context is king
  33. Everything is a performance
  34. Simplicity is the new currency
  35. The Red Auerbach management principle: loyalty is a two-way street
  36. Message to entrepreneurs: managing your emotional flow is more critical than managing your cash flow
  37. All money is not created equal
  38. If you want to think big, start small
  39. "Serious fun" isn’t an oxymoron; it’s how you win
  40. Technology is about changing how we work
  41. If you want to be a real leader, first get real about leadership
  42. The survival of the fittest is the business case for diversity
  43. Don’t confuse credentials with talent
  44. When it comes to business, it helps if you actually know something about something
  45. Failure isn’t failing. Failure is failing to try
  46. Tough leaders wear their hearts on their sleeves
  47. Everyone’s at the center of their map of the world
  48. If you want to make change, start with an iconic project
  49. If you want to grow as a leader, you have to disarm your border guards
  50. On the way up, pay attention to your strengths.; they’ll be your weaknesses on the way down
  51. Take your work seriously. Yourself, not so much
  52. Stay alert! There are teachers everywhere

Asking more relevant questions about focus and multitasking

I’ve been uncomfortable with the ongoing discussions about the promise or threat of multitasking without being quite able to articulate why. Stowe Boyd finally helped my crystallize my concerns with a nice dissection of the most recent wave of debate on the topic. Let me extract two paragraphs from his excellent analysis:

So, the war on flow continues. I liked the study from a few years back that equated multitasking with smoking dope in its effects, and perhaps the most masterful attack was leveled by Christine Rosen in her Myth Of Multitasking (see Christine Rosen Joins The War On Flow), or Nick Carr, who said the Web is making us stupid. They are all looking backward, and using old tools to measure, ineffectively, what is emerging.

….

If you judge a juggler by how many times the balls hit the floor and contrast that with someone throwing and catching one ball at a time, the juggler will lose. But the juggler is doing something else. You could argue that doing it that way makes no sense, that throwing one ball at a time is more efficient, leads to less sleepless nights, and doesn’t confuse the mind. But it isn’t juggling.

The War On Flow, 2009: Why Studies About Multitasking Are Missing The Point
Stowe Boyd
Sun, 30 Aug 2009 12:33:48 GMT

The current discussion around whether multitasking is good or bad flounders on a host of unarticulated and unexamined assumptions. The question is not about whether multitasking is a better way to do old forms of work; it is about what skills and techniques do we need to develop to deal with the forms of work that are now emerging. There is a complex interaction between an evolving environment and developing technologies. Much of the discussion to date is comparable to trying to understand the automobile as a horseless carriage.

I am reminded of an old observation by author Larry Niven; "good science fiction writers predict cars – great science fiction writers predict traffic jams." One of the useful things to be done is to spend a more time watching the juggling (to borrow Stowe Boyd’s image) and appreciating it on its own terms instead of criticizing it for what it isn’t.

Hacking complex knowledge problems: Van Halen and Brown M&Ms

I had never actually heard the story about Van Halen and brown M&M’s before I came across this Boing Boing entry. Of course, Boing  Boing is always a good for fun stories. Here’s one that also has a useful point about dealing with complex knowledge problems between organizations.

 

nomms.jpg
Spotted via Andrew Baron’s tweetstream, this fascinating — no, really! — snopes article on why Van Halen had that line in their concert rider about ABSOLUTELY NO BROWN M&Ms EVER.

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Snopes.com: Van Halen Brown M&Ms. The actual 1982 rider was first published online at smokinggun.com in 2008.

 

Van Halen had good reason to ban brown M&Ms in their concert rider.
Xeni Jardin
Wed, 05 Aug 2009 23:49:58 GMT

Take the time to check out the Snopes article (Snopes.com: Van Halen Brown M&Ms). It presents a design problem of how to ensure that an organization you’re contracting with is exercising the appropriate attention to detail. It reminds me of a similar design hack/lesson I learned first back in the 7th grade. A version of that lesson is, of course, available courtesy of a moment’s effort with a search engine(Directions Test).

What makes this example important is that more and more of our work gets done through other organizations. That increases the problems of incomplete contracts where the tasks in question are sufficiently complex and the environment indeterminate enough that it is difficult, in not impossible. to specify all the relevant conditions in advance. "Brown M&Ms" provides an excellent reminder that the point of the contract is to ensure a successful outcome for all parties.

Gist – a Farleyfile for the 21st century

I’ve been part of the private beta of Gist for the last several months and am still wrapping my head around it. They’ve just opened up the beta for wide consumption. Here’s the announcement from CEO T.A. McCann.

Today, Gist brings you a better way to communicate and build stronger business relationships.   After a year in limited release and with the input of over 10,000 beta users, we have created a new system to aggregate, organize, prioritize and focus your time on the most important things.   We connect to your inbox or social networks to discover your key contacts and companies, automatically prioritize them and bring together personal communications, news, blogs, and the real-time web all into one neat package.

131108102856innovation

We assert a few things are true:

  • There will be more information, in more places and it s growing at an increasing rate
  • Systems will need to evolve or be created that help users harness the power of the information
  • Success in business is driven by strong relationships, both in quality and quantity
  • Companies who can quickly respond to customer demand are successful

Gist is a game changer and I am proud to be part of the team that has brought it from concept to a robust and useful solution.  We are privileged to work in such an exciting and evolving space, with great investors and,most importantly, incredible users who will continue to help us focus on what is most important and most valuable.  Thank you for the privilege to make a radical shift!

Gist a better way
T. A. McCann
Tue, 15 Sep 2009 12:18:47 GMT

Here are some pointers to other coverage and commentary about the service that are helping me get a better handle on the value of this evolving service:

What is a Farleyfile you ask? There is a Wikipedia entry for Farleyfile, but I first encountered the concept in one of Robert Heinlein’s novels, Double Star, about a hack actor forced to double for a kidnapped politician. Heinlein’s description captures the essence of the challenge and the solution that Gist promises in this 21st Century incarnation:

The tightrope act I was going to have to attempt was made possible only by Bonforte’s Farleyfile, perhaps the best one ever compiled. Farley was a political manager of the twentieth century, of Eisenhower I believe, and the method he invented for handling the personal relations of politics was as revolutionary as the German invention of staff command was to warfare. Yet I had never heard of the device until Penny showed me Bonforte’s.

It was nothing but a file about people. However, the art of politics is "nothing but" people. This file contained all,or almost all, of the thousands upon thousands of people Bonforte had met in the course of his long public life; each dossier consisted of what he knew about that person from Bonforte’s own personal contact. Anything at all, no matter how trivial–in fact, trivia were always the first entries: names and nicknames of wives, children, and pets, hobbies, tastes in food or drink, prejudices, eccentricities. Following this would be listed date and place and comments for every occasion on which Bonforte had talked to that particular man

When available, a photo was included. There might, or might not, be "below-the-line" data, i.e. information which had been researched rather than learn directly by Bonforte. It depended on the political importance of the person. In some cases the "below-the-line" part was a formal biography running to thousands of words.
…

"God’s mercy child! I tried to tell you this job could not be done. How could anyone memorize all that?"

"Why, you can’t, of course."

"You just said that this was what he remembered about his friends and acquaintances."

"Not quite. I said that this is what he wanted to remember. But since he can’t, not possibly, this is how he does it….

"These are things he would like to remember if his memory were perfect. Since it isn’t, it is no more phony to do it this way than it is to use a tickler file in order not to forget a friend’s birthday — that’s what it is: a giant tickler file, to cover anything."

[Robert A, Heinlein. Double Star. 1956. Del Ray Books. pp.151-154]

Most of us are called on to cope with an order of magnitude or two more relationships than our parents or grandparents ever contemplated. Applications and information management services like Gist are becoming absolutely essential if we hope to cope with those demands.

Tech Support Cheat Sheet

 'Hey Megan, it's your father. How do I print out a flowchart?'

Tech Support Cheat Sheet
Mon, 24 Aug 2009 04:00:00 GMT

 

There’s a striking amount of wisdom and good advice packed into this flowchart. It’s not about the body of knowledge stored away in your head. It’s about a robust strategy for generating and testing ideas that are likely to be productive.

What puzzles me is why individuals choose not to employ such a simple strategy.

Fun with constraints, knowledge, and design

Paula Thornton, my friend and co-blogger at FASTforward, tweeted the following this morning

image

which reminded me of a little constrained exercise I did back in February. That exercise started with this tweet

image

and a blog post that generated some fun discussion.

What I didn’t do was publish the final list of C-words that were ultimately generated in the ensuing discussion. Again, the constraint was C-words relevant to conversations about knowledge. Here’s the list (including "constrain/constraint" that all of you created:

Calculate
Calibrate
Canvas
Capture
Catalog
Categorize
Censor
Certify
Challenge
Change
Characterize
Chart
Check
Cite
Claim
Classify
Cluster
Circulate
Circumscribe
Circumvent
Coalesce 		Coax
Co-create
Codify
Collaborate
Collate
Collect
Collude
Combine
Comment
Communicate
Compare
Compile
Compose
Compute
Concatenate
Conceal
Conceive
Conform
Confide
Connect
Connote

Consider Consolidate Constrict Consult
Constrain
Constraint Construct Contribute Converse Convert
Convey
Coordinate Copy
Count
Craft
Cram
Create
Critique
Crystallize Cultivate Curate
Customize		 Capital
Case/Case Study
Cause
Channel
Characteristic
Chart
Collage
Community
Compendium
Competence
Component
Concept
Concern
Construct
Content
Context
Convention
Conversation
Culture 		Coherent
Complete
Concise
Conditional
Consistent
Contingent
Contradictory
Convergent
Cryptic
Current
Cursory