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The Politics of Conversation
Four years ago I read and reviewed Keith Johnstone's book Impro, in which he explains how pervasive dominance and submission behaviours are in human interactions. He describes an example of physical dominance and submission (status displays) in our encounters with strangers:
Imagine that two strangers are approaching each other along an empty street. It's straight, hundreds of yards long and with wide pavements. Both strangers are walking at an even pace, and at some point one of them will have to move aside in order to pass. You can see this decision being made 100 yards or more before it has to. In my view the two people scan each other for signs of status, and then the lower one moves aside. If they think they're equal, both move aside. If they both think they're dominant (or if one isn't paying attention) they end up doing the sideways dance and muttering apologies. But this doesn't happen if you meet a frail or half-blind person: You move aside for them. It's only when you think the other person is challenging that the dance occurs. I remember doing it once with a man in a shop doorway who took me by the forearms and gently moved me out of the way -- it still rankles. Old people tend to cling to the highest status they have had, and will deliberately 'not notice' others while clinging fiercely to the (often walled) inside of the walkway. A bustling crowd is constantly and unconsciously exchanging status signals and challenges, with the more submissive person stepping aside.
Shortly thereafter I read and reviewed Peter Collett's The Book of Tells that teaches you to read status displays in body language, and specifically these six displays:
- Dominant/Threatening-Possessive (DT) signals -- "I'm the boss, do what I say or else"
- Dominant/Relaxed-Confident (DR) signals -- "I'm the boss, so I can let my guard down"
- Dominant/Controlling-Protecting (DC) signals -- "I'm the boss, and I make the decisions"
- Submissive/Deferring-Inviting (SD) signals -- "You're the boss, make your move"
- Submissive/Anxious-Shy (SA) signals -- "You're the boss, don't hurt me"
- Submissive/Helpless (SH) signals -- "You're the boss, what should I do"
Collett includes, in addition to body, hand, eye and face signals, some examples of spoken signals of dominance and submission:
- Dominant: talking first, talking most, interrupting, speaking loudly, speaking deeply
- Submissive: talking breathily, high-pitched speech, ending phrases with upturn in pitch, dropping names, ingratiating speech
Since then I have been speaking about the importance of Love, Conversation and Community, and specifically the integration of the three: Facilitating non-hierarchical, peer-to-peer conversations among people in community (i.e. with shared passions, shared objectives, or shared problems) who care about each other and their community. Today I asked myself:
Are these status displays, and our apparent unconscious need to make them, interfering with communication, and undermining the achievement of consensus, collaboration and non-hierarchical problem-solving?
Since our bodies are always 'saying' much more than our words, even if we monitor and try to extinguish (as facilitators) more obvious dominance behaviours (bullying) and submissive behaviours (wallflowers), there is almost nothing we can do to reduce non-verbal signals. Yes, we can create circles and get rid of tables, but you will still see a ton of such displays, in posture, eye, face, hand signals and tone of voice.
The courses I have taken in facilitation don't teach you to recognize or try to alleviate such behaviours, perhaps because it would be an impossible task. I know I am prone to slouch back, legs extended, hands on head with elbows out like antlers, a multiple dominance display. It must be very confusing to others when I try consciously to speak in an inviting, questioning, open-minded way while making such an aggressive non-verbal display!
Likewise I have witnessed people speak passionately and articulately about something, but leave the audience unimpressed because their body language betrays a lack of self-confidence in what they're saying. In particular I have watched a woman speak in a soft voice (raising her voice slightly at the end of each phrase) and be completely ignored and discounted, while a man a few minutes later, speaking in a soft, measured voice, said the same thing and was hailed as brilliant, everyone scribbling down what he said word for word.
So what do you think: Are there things we can do, both as facilitators and as conversationalists, to suppress power displays and displays of submission, so that listeners focus on what is being said, not how it is said or by whom?
Last Saturday I mentioned an article by Andrew Campbell that retrieves and elaborates on a fascinating model by Vincent Kenny on 'Dead Language' vs 'Live Language' and how power politics in conversation 'deadens' the language and dialogue and saps its power, creativity and usefulness. Language in conversation, the article explains, is sometimes wielded as a weapon, to stop thought and creativity and sharing and connection and everything else it is valuable for.
This is a second, more explicit 'abuse of power' in conversation. You know how it works: There are amazingly effective conversation-killers that those uncomfortable with change can use to stomp it out in a way that is almost impossible to defend against. "We tried that last year and it was a disaster." "If we allowed people to do that, we'd have chaos on our hands, costs would soar and productivity would fall." "We'd need to get the authority to do that from x and for reason y that would be almost impossible to get." Andrew's article provides more examples.
This raises a second question: Are there things we can do, both as facilitators and as listeners, to challenge and reject 'dead language' that stifles energy, innovation, courage and other collective qualities of a group necessary to bring about change?
I am very good at imagining possibilities (and throwing them out for consideration) and for gently (and not so gently) provoking people to want to change (themselves), prodding them to intend to act. I think these capacities are helpful in conversations in community. Maybe I'm meant to do these things in conversations, rather than being a 'neutral' facilitator. But since my imagined possibilities and provocations often produce these hostile dominance displays and 'dead language' responses, if I really want my ideas to get traction, I think I need to learn how to deal with these behaviours. What's your experience?
Category: Conversation
Categories: k-Blogs
Three Mini Book Reviews: The Back of the Napkin, Landscape & Memory, and Edible Forest Gardens
The Back of the Napkin, by Dan Roam
"Visual thinking means taking innate advantage of our ability to see, with our eyes and our mind's eye, in order to discover ideas, develop those ideas quickly and intuitively, and share those ideas with others in a way that they simply 'get'" This book is a brilliant elaboration on Bill Buxton's idea of sketching, with a catch.
The brilliance is in the simplicity and elegance of the model:
- people understand things better, and find them accessible, when they're sketched, competently and articulately, one step at a time, by hand
- collect everything you can look at that's relevant, lay it all out, organize and orient it, and then do triage on it
- define the problem using the 6 questions in the chart above, and illustrate it with the 6 corresponding types of graphic
- explore the 5 dimensions of ways of looking at the problem: simple/elaborate, quality/quantity, vision/execution, individual/comparison, and change/as-is
- when presenting the results of your problem-solving, start looking aloud, keep seeing aloud, continue by imagining aloud, and close by showing aloud (i.e. recreate the process you used to solve the problem) and then ask the audience if they agree with what you've shown (show, don't tell, and this question answers itself)
- this works best for complex problems
- all good pictures do not need to be self-explanatory, but do need to be explainable
The catch? The drawings in the book are simple but beautiful. Doing this well takes lots of practice, both in conveying your meaning graphically (the expressions on your stick men, and their poses, are critical to the audience's appreciation and understanding), and in using this technique to solve seemingly intractable problems. I intend to try it, but I'm so poor at drawing that it will take me a long time to get my sketches right. Fortunately, I'm really good at imagining possibilities, so my only problem with the technique will be my artwork. Really recommended.
Landscape & Memory, by Simon Schama
This hugely ambitious work was recommended to me by three friends. The notes and bibliography of this book alone are longer than some books I've read. Schama attempts to show, through a rigorous and detailed study of history and human behaviour, that we are all innately naturalists, that our bond with Gaia has always been powerful and that our sense of 'apartness' from nature is illusory. He says, at the outset:
If the entire history of landscape in the West is indeed just a mindless race toward a machine-driven universe, uncomplicated by myth, metaphor and allegory, where measurement not memory is the absolute arbiter of value, where our ingenuity is our tragedy, then we are indeed trapped in the engine of our self-destruction. At the heart of this book is the stubborn belief that this is not, in fact, the whole story.
Many of the stories he tells are rooted in his own ancestors' stories, and the book is intensely personal. He takes us through millennia of passion for nature and place, and our apparent fear and loathing of it. But right up to modern times this ambivalent relationship and "being-a-part ness" still resonates, he says:
The designation of the suburban yard as the cure for the afflictions of city life marks the greensward as a remnant of the old pastoral dream, even though its goatherds and threshers have been replaced by tanks of pesticide and industrial strength mowing machines.
I was not impressed by his arguments, which seem somewhat nostalgic to me, in this age of relentless and ruthless ecocide. But he is an amazing story-teller, and teller of the stories and lessons of history, and the book is compelling even when it is not persuasive.
Even more compelling are the stunning artworks which run through the whole book, such as the one above, that argue much more powerfully than words the inseparability of human spirituality from our love of and roots in nature. The book is an armchair visit to a vast science and history museum, and its stories of human altruism, savagery and struggle to live within and without nature, rootless and yet inexorably drawn to place, to home, stay with you a long time.
Edible Forest Gardens (Books 1 & 2), by Dave Jacke with Eric Toensmeier
What is most remarkable about this exhaustive and practical course in temperate climate (zones 4-7) permaculture is that only about 40 of its over 1000 pages are about the work of planting and maintaining an "edible forest garden" ("a perennial polyculture of multipurpose [native] plants"); the rest is understanding what to plant, when, and why. The whole idea of these gardens is to enable you to harvest an abundance of varied foodstuffs with almost no maintenance.
The theory takes up the whole first volume and needs every page. The challenge, you see, is that even what we might perceive as 'wilderness' is in fact nothing of the sort. Humans, right back to First Nations thousands of years ago, have utterly altered the vegetation that now looks so wild and 'natural'. On top of that, climate change has, since the ice ages, been continuously changing what grows where.
In order to allow nature to provide you, effortlessly year after year, a harvest of abundance, you first need to discover what naturally grew and what naturally will grow where you live. You need to study the botanical history of your home. Then, since it cannot be quickly 'restored' to natural, sustainable state (succession goes through many long intermediary stages and can take centuries to achieve equilibrium), you need to be smart enough to plan for a 20-30 year 'hurry-up succession' that will chivy the process along. You have to plant in stages, knowing that early stages are just preparing the soil, the ecosystem and the ground cover and canopy for later stages, and that some of the first things you plant won't be around at the end of the succession at all if you've done your job right. This takes serious knowledge and study, a lot of patience and relearning what our ancestors learned as a matter of course. It's in many ways a course in what Derrick Jensen has called "listening to the land".
There probably isn't anything you could learn that would be more important, for your soul, for your community, for your resilience in the coming age of climate change and other disasters that will require us all to become much more self-sufficient than we are today. Start now, and when cascading economic, social and ecological catastrophes hit us in the 2030s and bring existing food production and other systems to their knees, you'll be ready to gather the fruits of your labour.
Category: Activism: What You Can Do
Categories: k-Blogs
The Magic of Music
Some astute observations from Mickey Hart and Frederic Lieberman on the topic of our survival:
No human society, present or past, has lacked music. Music is therefore one of the very few human universals, which puts it on the same level as food and sex.
It follows that any tendency to consider music as a "luxury" is dangerous. This patently false idea leads to devaluing music in general education, often to the point of eliminating it entirely when budgets are tight. That Plato, Confucius and many other great thinkers have held music to be the indispensable cornerstone of education should help strengthen the resolve of parents and educators to make music part of every home and to maintain and strengthen music programs in our schools.
[ Spirit into Sound: The Magic of Music ]
Categories: k-Blogs
Memorandum to All Employees
Delivered By Hand
To all employees:
Beginning August 1st, you will no longer be able to send an e-mail to another employee of our organization. After some study, we have concluded that such e-mails are almost never the most efficient or effective way to obtain, provide or exchange information. In fact, we estimate that as much as 20% of our employees' time is wasted reading, writing and answering e-mails, beyond the time that it would take to communicate the same information using more appropriate means.
A face-to-face meeting, or, failing that, a telephone conversation, is almost always a more cost-effective way to convey or acquire information than e-mail. Our study suggests that in 95% of cases, a telephone call or impromptu meeting can communicate the needed information without the need for a formal appointment. Being available for such impromptu consultations is an essential part of every employee's work, and beginning this year our 360 degree performance reviews will include an assessment of/by all the people you work with, regardless of level in the organization, on their/your accessibility, which will factor highly into overall performance appraisal.
Effective August 1, all employee Calendars will be visible to all other employees, and any employee will be able to book time in another employee's calendar, with the invitee having the option of rescheduling or proposing another means to converse or meet, but not rejecting the appointment outright. We trust all employees to use discretion in the use of others' time, and to use this Calendar booking option only when attempts to reach the invitee by a visit to their office or by phone have failed. To avoid excessive 'telephone tag' our voice-mail system will also, effective August 1, no longer accept messages between employees of our company.
Please note that, in addition to face-to-face appointments, phone calls and Calendar bookings, there are a number of other technologies available for communications:
Let us know (drop by or phone us) how we can help you cope with any lingering e-mail addiction. Enjoy the freedom!
Respectfully yours,
The Management
(well, we can dream anyway)
Category: Communications Technology
To all employees:
Beginning August 1st, you will no longer be able to send an e-mail to another employee of our organization. After some study, we have concluded that such e-mails are almost never the most efficient or effective way to obtain, provide or exchange information. In fact, we estimate that as much as 20% of our employees' time is wasted reading, writing and answering e-mails, beyond the time that it would take to communicate the same information using more appropriate means.
A face-to-face meeting, or, failing that, a telephone conversation, is almost always a more cost-effective way to convey or acquire information than e-mail. Our study suggests that in 95% of cases, a telephone call or impromptu meeting can communicate the needed information without the need for a formal appointment. Being available for such impromptu consultations is an essential part of every employee's work, and beginning this year our 360 degree performance reviews will include an assessment of/by all the people you work with, regardless of level in the organization, on their/your accessibility, which will factor highly into overall performance appraisal.
Effective August 1, all employee Calendars will be visible to all other employees, and any employee will be able to book time in another employee's calendar, with the invitee having the option of rescheduling or proposing another means to converse or meet, but not rejecting the appointment outright. We trust all employees to use discretion in the use of others' time, and to use this Calendar booking option only when attempts to reach the invitee by a visit to their office or by phone have failed. To avoid excessive 'telephone tag' our voice-mail system will also, effective August 1, no longer accept messages between employees of our company.
Please note that, in addition to face-to-face appointments, phone calls and Calendar bookings, there are a number of other technologies available for communications:
- For simple, unambiguous, straightforward requests for information, approval, appointments or instructions, and replies to such requests, you can use the company's Instant Messaging system. The system should not be used for more complicated matters -- if it takes a respondent more than one minute to reply, it is an inappropriate use of this technology.
- For conversations that cannot occur face-to-face and which require looking at documents together, you can use the company's Desktop Video & Screen-Sharing system. This tool requires no pre-booking and can allow users to 'share' the contents of each other's screen while they converse.
- For 'FYI' type communications, the documents should be posted to the appropriate category of the company's E-Library, where those interested in the document who have subscribed to it by RSS will automatically receive notification about it. If you think someone should subscribe to a category they are not subscribed to, suggest this through an Instant Message.
- For surveys, where you are seeking consensus, in those rare cases where a face-to-face brainstorming is not a much more effective means of achieving it, you can use the company's Instant Survey tool.
- For group training or sending of instructions to a large number of people, you can use the company's E-Learning tool for asynchronous training, or, if interactivity is expected, the company's Desktop Video & Screen-Sharing system for real-time events.
Let us know (drop by or phone us) how we can help you cope with any lingering e-mail addiction. Enjoy the freedom!
Respectfully yours,
The Management
(well, we can dream anyway)
Category: Communications Technology
Categories: k-Blogs
How intranet teams should spend their time
Intranet teams need to use their time wisely. It is very easy to fall into the trap of dealing with urgent requests and problems, never actually making any progress.
Effective intranet teams must plan up front how they will spend their time to deliver both short term and long term benefits to their organisations.
The rule of thumb for intranet resources is:
- 30% effort for day-to-day maintenance
- 40% effort for projects and new initiatives
- 30% effort managing relationships with staff and stakeholders
For a team of one this can mean devoting one day a week to managing relationships with staff and stakeholders. In a team of 5 these responsibilities can be split between different roles.
30% effort for day-to-day maintenance
Day-to-day maintenance can include:
- publishing and maintaining content
- providing support for publishers
- fixing technical problems
- assessing search logs
- maintaining the home page
- reviewing content areas with owners
- creating graphics
If day-to-day maintenance of the intranet absorbs excessive amounts of the team's time the intranet will never progress. This can lead to the the team becoming disengaged and experiencing a never ending workload.
[CM Briefing 2008-10 by Catherine Grenfell, read the full article]
Categories: k-Blogs
Should the intranet look sexy?
The design of public websites, particularly when they have a marketing or branding role, is vital. In these cases, a team of experienced graphic designers and front end developers work hard to create polished and beautiful designs.
When it comes to intranets, however, is their 'look and feel' so important? Fundamentally, should intranets look sexy?
Design of public sites
We are all exposed to the wide range of designs for public sites, from the very ugly to the very beautiful.
Major consumer brands have attractive and vibrant home pages, while even technology companies present polished designs.
These sites reflect the brands and images of the companies they belong to, making their design an important factor. The sites are also about marketing the businesses' products or services, and the design plays a role in engaging potential purchasers.
A whole industry has grown around delivering these highly polished and sexy sites, made up of specialists in branding, communication, marketing, visual design, web design and web development.
When it comes to intranets, do these same factors apply? Do intranets need to be sexy?
[CM Briefing 2008-09, read the full article]
Categories: k-Blogs
Content migration: options and strategies
There is a lot of work involved in redeveloping and relaunching an intranet or website. The project management challenges start early, and it is easy to overlook the time (and effort) needed to migrate the content from the old to the new site.
Yet, for its lack of visibility, content migration is often the single biggest activity in a web redevelopment. Certainly it is the least interesting, and unfortunately unavoidable.
This article explores a number of options for the migrating content, and provides some practical suggestions that should help it to go smoothly.
Redeveloping a site
Two factors often drive the redevelopment of a website or intranet:
- Moving to a new technology platform, such as a new content management system (CMS) or portal package.
- Redesigning the site, either to address the weaknesses in the current site or to add significant functionality.
Often these two factors are bundled together, with a technology selection process combined with a redesign.
In either case, there is a need to migrate the content from the old site to the new site. This is not a simple process.
A change in technology platforms makes the migration challenging, as does a major restructure or redesign of the site.
Unfortunately, there is no option for avoiding the migration, and careful planning will be required to get the best outcome.
[July KM Column, read the full article]
Categories: k-Blogs
Saturday Links for the Week: July 19, 2008
Photo from birdstar.org, one of the amazing shots from the Bond brothers of SW Ontario.
Disparity, Poverty and Environmental Health: I'm reading Hervé Kempf's How the Rich are Destroying the Earth (review next week). His message, from France, is essentially the same as Ian Welsh's in his new article There Was a Class War. The Rich Won. The message, and the messages that naturally flow from it, are:
- For the last 30 years, everywhere in the world, income and net wealth for the poorest 95% of the population has been, in real terms declining, even as income and net wealth for the richest 5% has doubled and redoubled. Disparity of income and wealth has never been higher. The top 1% in the US alone now receive almost 25% of its total national income.
- This economic improvement for 1-5% has come at an astronomical environmental cost, a massive increase in pollution and waste, the desolation of much of the Earth, surpassing the climate change tipping point, increasing global indebtedness to staggering proportions, pushing us over the edge to the End of Oil and Water, ruining ecosystems in much of the world and accelerating ten-fold the biodiversity loss that heralds the sixth Great Extinction in the planet's recorded history.
- There are no economic 'market' or technology fixes for either the economic disparity or the environmental devastation that continue to accelerate every day. What is left is belief in violent political revolution, belief in a collective new social consciousness that will drive a spontaneous plunge in global consumption and a massive redistribution of wealth, belief in the Rapture, or belief that our civilization is inevitably in its last century.
A Plague of Economic Locusts: Andrew Leonard at HTWW adds up the factors that have caused me recently to liquidate most of my investments. Favourite quote: "Faith-based economics seems like an unsound management philosophy, for those of us without the power to part the Red Sea and make a getaway from a falling dollar, rising oil prices, and insolvent banks".
A Symbol for Gaia: When I write about a better way to live, or about wilderness, or the need to connect with all-life-on-Earth, I've been using a photo of a temperate rainforest in the US Pacific Northwest Olympic range to "illustrate" the article. This is because there doesn't seem to be a symbol or logo for Gaia, for living in balance with nature. When I did a search I found the old 1960s environmental symbol (a take on the Greek letter omega). I also found the symbol at right, developed by gaia.com member (and author of the Gaia Girls book series published by Chelsea Green) Lee Welles. I really like the logo, since it taps into the aboriginal importance of quartets (four elements, four seasons, four directions etc.) and is based on a circle. During the search, Barbara Dieu pointed me to flickrcc, which shows you a collage of photos on any subject you key in. Birds in flight, forests and waterfalls prevail for photos tagged 'Gaia'. To me this is a fascinating way to capture "the wisdom of crowds" about a subject visually.
Booking Time for Real-Time Chat: Google now allows you to put a badge, like the one below, on your blog to indicate if you're available for an IM/VoIP chat via GMail/GTalk. You don't even have to have a GMail account to ping me. Problem is, I'm not available for such chats very often. So before I put the badge on my sidebar, I need to add to it a Google Calendar showing my 'conversation office hours', the times when I will be available. Ideally, it would be interactive, allowing readers to say what they want to chat about, so I can invite others to join in. May take awhile for me to set up.
Imagine, blogs as a medium for real-time conversations! Thanks to Theresa Purcell for the link.
Manipulative Language, and the Abuse of Power in Conversation: Andrew Campbell retrieves and elaborates on a fascinating model by Vincent Kenny on Dead Language vs Live Language and how power politics in conversation 'deadens' the language and dialogue and saps its power, creativity and usefulness. I'm learning how to listen more attentively to conversations, their nuances, what is said and implied and unspoken, unconsciously conveyed. Now I'm discovering I must also learn to observe the way in which language in conversation is sometimes wielded as a weapon, to stop thought and creativity and sharing and connection and everything else it is valuable for.
The Wrenching Photography of Amy Stein: The photo above is an example of Amy Stein's disturbing and ominous photographs. Her full collection entitled 'domesticated' is here, and if you're not faint of heart it's worth a look. Don't say I didn't warn you. Thanks to Emily & Daisy at Our Descent for the link.
Why Is It Called a "Retreat"?: Evelyn Rodriguez writes about the need to turn off the noise from external sources, and to withdraw to our true selves, to rediscover them, to find our true bearings, our centre, before reconnecting with others, in order not to become too much Everybody-Else.
Geoff Brown Sketches the Civilization Bubble: A fascinating Nancy White style drawing by Geoff (above) shows us within Gaia, as a bubble, and the ways in which nature is pushing back against our unsustainable 'inflation' are depicted as pins, each threatening to burst the bubble if it expands any further. Brilliant.
Games for Change: If we're going to spend time playing video games, why not make them informative and get that energy directed at ways that can make the world a better place? Thanks to Graham Clark (who also supplied the quote in the thought for the week below) for the link.
This is the World Now: Another delightful miniature in words and images by Pohangina Pete. The world now does not make sense.
Thought for the Week: variously ascribed to Al Rogers or Eric Hoffer:
In times of profound change, the learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.
Categories: k-Blogs
There’s Still Time
At 52, there is still hope for me then ? Sponsorship or wait until retirement, that is the question.
addthis_url = 'http%3A%2F%2Fwww.psybertron.org%2F%3Fp%3D1585'; addthis_title = 'There%26%238217%3Bs+Still+Time'; addthis_pub = '';Categories: k-Blogs
Fishy Week
The subject of fish has come up several times recently - Tigris Carp & Salmon of (Doubt) Wisdom as wise advisors, BabelFish as a metaphor for language independent interoperability interface, and I had become convinced I’d heard of “talking catfish” somewhere before. I say heard of, because I was also recently thinking I was maybe hearing the local catfish amongst all the nightime noise of calling frogs, chuntering ducks, and chattering cicadas. An impression re-inforced when I caught a 3 or 4 pounder in the pond outside the front door and it growled at me.
Yes, this news story really does feature “Professor A. Bass” talking about coastal fish species Midshipmen and Toadfish that buzz and hum to communicate with each other. Trust me, he’s a scientist.
addthis_url = 'http%3A%2F%2Fwww.psybertron.org%2F%3Fp%3D1583'; addthis_title = 'Fishy+Week'; addthis_pub = '';Categories: k-Blogs
Photo: Down the river to the Castle Tower
HDR: Down the river to the Castle Tower
Yesterday we drove from Prague down to Cesky Krumlov, in South Bohemia. This is a picture-perfect town, perching on rocky outcrops and hemmed in by the winding river.
This is a HDR (high dynamic range) image, with 9 images combined together to give a hyper-realistic effect.
Categories: k-Blogs
Join Me September 28-October 1 in BC
Bowen Island by Richard Smith
I'm going to be on Bowen Island, near Vancouver BC, September 28 through October 1, for an Art of Hosting event. The program teaches several interactive meeting and facilitation technique skills -- World Café, Circle, Open Space Technology, Appreciative Inquiry -- and it would be great to have the chance to meet with as many of you as possible while learning something new and useful (and inexpensively!) together at the same time. Please look at the invitation, and if you decide to go, let Chris and me know ASAP -- it's not a large venue, though it is astonishingly beautiful. Hope to see you there!
PS: If you can't make that, I'll be in San Jose September 23-25 for KMWorld & Intranets, Quebec City August 8, Montreal September 18 and Vancouver September 26-27. Let me know if you're available for a meetup!
Categories: k-Blogs
Friday Flashback: Twelve Ways to Think Differently
In
May 2005 I wrote this post that, after it was picked up months later on
Digg and other popularity lists of web articles, turned out to be my
most-visited article ever:
Our minds are like our bodies -- fail to exercise them and they atrophy and break down. We live in an age of specialization, where we are encouraged to narrow our interests and our activities, to focus and limit ourselves to doing things at which we are very competent. So parts of our brain get a lot of exercise and other parts very little. What's worse, this can actually narrow our comfort zone, the range of things we enjoy doing or thinking about and are competent in. Many of our cultural activities and artefacts: political debates, win/lose competitions, hierarchies, laws, religions, 'best practices', systematization, uniforms, and monolithic architecture and design -- all tend to reinforce 'one right answer' thinking that discourages and ultimately excludes and prevents us from thinking differently. Even the mental exercises we do as we get older are designed to stem the loss of analytical skills and memory rather than broadening our thinking or our thinking ability. We live in a world of stultifying sameness and uniformity: physically, ideologically, intellectually. There is little motivation, little day-to-day need, to exercise the parts and processes of our brain that rarely get a workout.
Read the Twelve Ways
Our minds are like our bodies -- fail to exercise them and they atrophy and break down. We live in an age of specialization, where we are encouraged to narrow our interests and our activities, to focus and limit ourselves to doing things at which we are very competent. So parts of our brain get a lot of exercise and other parts very little. What's worse, this can actually narrow our comfort zone, the range of things we enjoy doing or thinking about and are competent in. Many of our cultural activities and artefacts: political debates, win/lose competitions, hierarchies, laws, religions, 'best practices', systematization, uniforms, and monolithic architecture and design -- all tend to reinforce 'one right answer' thinking that discourages and ultimately excludes and prevents us from thinking differently. Even the mental exercises we do as we get older are designed to stem the loss of analytical skills and memory rather than broadening our thinking or our thinking ability. We live in a world of stultifying sameness and uniformity: physically, ideologically, intellectually. There is little motivation, little day-to-day need, to exercise the parts and processes of our brain that rarely get a workout.
Read the Twelve Ways
Categories: k-Blogs
Proud to be an Aero Engineer
It’s a long time since I qualified as an Aeronautical Engineer and worked on Tornadoes, Hawks and Harriers, and I’m still a sucker for plane-spotting - civil or military. At a time when civil aircraft are all increasingly scale-efficient clones of each other, and air-travel a politically-incorrect chore, driven by ecolo-econo-geo-political considerations, it’s a wow to see the F22 raptor perform (here at Farnborough). A bit of creative freedom, even if it is equally non-PC to be a fan of a military fighting machine.
The display video opens (very briefly) then later an extended sequence (at about 2mins 50) with some amazing slow speed manoevres - you have to keep your eyes on the cloud texture to see which direction the machine is actually moving - tumbling like a snowflake, as the caption says. Clever stuff. I may have to add the F22 to my list of favourite flying machines - F6-Lightning (EE/BAC), F4-Phantom, Mig-23, Harrier, A10-Thunderbolt, F14-Tomcat, and now the F22-Raptor.
addthis_url = 'http%3A%2F%2Fwww.psybertron.org%2F%3Fp%3D1582'; addthis_title = 'Proud+to+be+an+Aero+Engineer'; addthis_pub = '';Categories: k-Blogs
Reframing Questions
Kathy
Sierra over on Twitter has been throwing two types of teasers at us
this week. The first are what she calls 'rules that aren't always
useful',
that I'd call 'false
myths and limiting generalizations', such as:
The problem with the false myths are that they can blind you to the truth if you accept them uncritically. They can constrain your imagination of other possibilities that are contrary to the false myth 'conventional wisdom'. They can lead you to make very bad decisions.
The problem with limiting generalizations is that they can lead you to oversimplify ("to get ahead in business women have to think and act like men"), to draw false dichotomies ("we either have to find new domestic oil or be forever dependent on foreign suppliers") and to stereotype ("working class whites will always vote Republican" which can lead you to draw false inferences from correlations, to write off classes of people, and to inhibit your creativity.
The second teasers Kathy has been tweeting are what she calls 'perspective hacks' that I'd call 'reframing questions', such as:
Here, for example, are ten false myths and limiting generalizations that I encounter nearly every day in business, and how, instead of arguing with those who spout them, I might reframe the discussion with a question to show those people, gently, another way to see the situation.
false myth or limiting generalizationreframing questiontalent shortage: if you want smart people to work for you, you have to pay them a competitive rate for their timewhat if you could produce an invitation so compelling that smart people would be willing to come together and solve a problem for free?business needs hierarchy: without instruction and supervision, work just won't get donewhat if you gave people an interesting, challenging, attainable objective and just trusted them to figure out how to achieve it?if you have a new business idea, you need to find 'angel investors' to finance it or there is no hope of it succeedingwhat if you got the prospective customers for your new idea to 'invest' in it, in return for a say in design and a better rate of interest than the bank pays?if you want to deploy a social network tool in the organization, you need to produce a 'business case' showing ROI and addressing security issueswhat if you just did an experiment, outside the firewall on your own time, using young tech-savvy employees, and then just showed everyone how easy, inexpensive and useful it is?marketing is expensive: if you can't achieve an x% market share with a new innovation in y months, it's not worth the riskwhat if you just developed a simple, inexpensive demo/beta/prototype, and showed or gave it away, and relied on word of mouth to 'sell' it?a company needs to provide an ROI to shareholders that is commensurate with its risk, or no one will buy shares in itwhat if you organized the enterprise as a cooperative, with members who received products for their investment instead of shareholders demanding profits and dividends?to make a new technology successful, you have to persuade management to make training compulsory for all, because otherwise people won't use it properlywhat if you only used technologies that are so simple and intuitive that they need no training, and are open source and public so they need no development?you need performance objectives and bonuses to motivate people to work hard and work smartwhat if you made work fun, and let people choose their own hours, and then asked them what else it would take to get them to do their best?a business that doesn't grow is doomed to diewhat if you set the objective of the business to grow better without growing bigger, and left it to the employees to figure out how to do that?you need to show your finished, quality product to customers; they won't ever buy an 'idea'what if you abolished the idea of 'customer', and instead partnered with the people who might buy your product and co-developed it with them
Isn't this cool? It's a bit like the technique in some martial arts of parrying with a deflection, defusing the attacker's momentum by changing the rules of the contest and putting them off balance.
What are the false myths and limiting generalizations that you are struggling with, and how might you use appropriate questions to reframe them, disempower them, put them to rest?
Category: Our Culture
- don't feed trolls
- two heads are better than one
- nobody reads the manual
- there is no money in [x]
- the customer is always right
- grow or die
- you can't be both profitable and socially responsible
The problem with the false myths are that they can blind you to the truth if you accept them uncritically. They can constrain your imagination of other possibilities that are contrary to the false myth 'conventional wisdom'. They can lead you to make very bad decisions.
The problem with limiting generalizations is that they can lead you to oversimplify ("to get ahead in business women have to think and act like men"), to draw false dichotomies ("we either have to find new domestic oil or be forever dependent on foreign suppliers") and to stereotype ("working class whites will always vote Republican" which can lead you to draw false inferences from correlations, to write off classes of people, and to inhibit your creativity.
The second teasers Kathy has been tweeting are what she calls 'perspective hacks' that I'd call 'reframing questions', such as:
- What might change if you view the Big Thing You're After as a component/subsystem of a greater whole?
- That really cool very specific thing you learned... what happens if you ask what else that might apply to?
- Instead of trying to change this behaviour, what if we tried to understand how it came about and adapted ourselves accordingly?
Here, for example, are ten false myths and limiting generalizations that I encounter nearly every day in business, and how, instead of arguing with those who spout them, I might reframe the discussion with a question to show those people, gently, another way to see the situation.
false myth or limiting generalizationreframing questiontalent shortage: if you want smart people to work for you, you have to pay them a competitive rate for their timewhat if you could produce an invitation so compelling that smart people would be willing to come together and solve a problem for free?business needs hierarchy: without instruction and supervision, work just won't get donewhat if you gave people an interesting, challenging, attainable objective and just trusted them to figure out how to achieve it?if you have a new business idea, you need to find 'angel investors' to finance it or there is no hope of it succeedingwhat if you got the prospective customers for your new idea to 'invest' in it, in return for a say in design and a better rate of interest than the bank pays?if you want to deploy a social network tool in the organization, you need to produce a 'business case' showing ROI and addressing security issueswhat if you just did an experiment, outside the firewall on your own time, using young tech-savvy employees, and then just showed everyone how easy, inexpensive and useful it is?marketing is expensive: if you can't achieve an x% market share with a new innovation in y months, it's not worth the riskwhat if you just developed a simple, inexpensive demo/beta/prototype, and showed or gave it away, and relied on word of mouth to 'sell' it?a company needs to provide an ROI to shareholders that is commensurate with its risk, or no one will buy shares in itwhat if you organized the enterprise as a cooperative, with members who received products for their investment instead of shareholders demanding profits and dividends?to make a new technology successful, you have to persuade management to make training compulsory for all, because otherwise people won't use it properlywhat if you only used technologies that are so simple and intuitive that they need no training, and are open source and public so they need no development?you need performance objectives and bonuses to motivate people to work hard and work smartwhat if you made work fun, and let people choose their own hours, and then asked them what else it would take to get them to do their best?a business that doesn't grow is doomed to diewhat if you set the objective of the business to grow better without growing bigger, and left it to the employees to figure out how to do that?you need to show your finished, quality product to customers; they won't ever buy an 'idea'what if you abolished the idea of 'customer', and instead partnered with the people who might buy your product and co-developed it with them
Isn't this cool? It's a bit like the technique in some martial arts of parrying with a deflection, defusing the attacker's momentum by changing the rules of the contest and putting them off balance.
What are the false myths and limiting generalizations that you are struggling with, and how might you use appropriate questions to reframe them, disempower them, put them to rest?
Category: Our Culture
Categories: k-Blogs
The Shape of Music
Let me put that another way: Do you like music? Because, inescapably, they are the same question, and the 'why' of that riddle has perplexed natural philosophers and musicians for at least 3 millenia. Of course our mathematics cannot really describe nature, but it is tantalizingly curious that nature should be even approximately describable by our humble equations, and for those curious about that "unknowing exercise of our mathematical faculties" we call 'music', Seed offers an intro article by Dmitri Tymoczko, discoverer of the bold new math of music, a short article one might call A Young Person's Guide to the Orbifold Quotient Space Theory of Music.
Read carefully, there will be an exam later ... read more »
Categories: k-Blogs
The wedding dress and other cases of revisiting the past
Last night I had an impulsive wish to try out my wedding dress. Next to the pleasure of realising that it still fits, the experience brought lots of thoughts and feelings.
Of course, it brought the memories of the day (actually days, since we celebrated twice, in Russia and in the Netherlands) and the strong feelings behind it as we did a little dance in a living room.
However, as soon as I put the dress I also remembered that I actually planned to wear parts of it on more occasions, but never looked around to find matching pieces to turn it into something that doesn’t resemble the original look and never looked for an opportunity to wear a new combination. Which is pity, since I loved the dress and the idea of wearing it more than once.
As my mind started to work in that direction, I found that I already had the matching pieces (so I tried a combination immediately) and the occasion (so I discussed it with Robert and even thought of a matching outfit for him).
And then, of course, I saw a parallel to the PhD chapter that I’m currently working on and a discussion how the past, captured in my weblog comes back to live, gets combined with other bits and becomes part of the future…
Tags: blog reading, blog writing, liveRelated posts
Categories: k-Blogs
Photo: panorama - from the pews to the frescoes
Panorama: From the pews to the frescoes
I've now spent several days in Prague, in the Czech Republic, taking a holiday at long last. This is a tremendously beautiful city, even when it's packed with tourists.
This was the second major church we've been into, and it's a beauty! Seemed like the perfect opportunity to try out an experimental panorama technique, with six hand-held photographs stitched into a single image.
(You'll want to view this nice and large.)
Categories: k-Blogs
Five Ways to Make a Point
Take a look at this article from salon.com, written by UC Prof Mike Davis. The words that came to mind when I read it were succinct, witty, provocative, and well-researched. He manages to capture the essence of what has led our civilization to the brink of collapse in just two pages, packed with data, rhetorical questions and persuasive argument. This is the kind of writing that moves people to action, to change their minds, and to pass along the essay or its contents in conversations with others, virally.
Davis is, I expect, preaching to the largely converted. His work is rhetoric, which despite its modern negative connotations means simply persuasive, effective oratory (the word predates the printing press and hence initially referred to speech, not writing). Whereas some people believe that debate is the best means of persuasion, I have come to believe that most people will only accept an assertion or idea if they're ready for it. If they're not, a debate will only tend to polarize their view, put them off. Rhetoric at its worst can inflame ignorance, but at its best it can inform and stimulate those who are already inclined to believe something, so that they can then decide how to act on it, and pass on their learning, rhetorically, to others who are so inclined.
A rhetorical question is not (necessarily) one for which the answer is self-evident, but rather one presented for persuasive effect, to provoke thought consistent with the arguments the speaker has just made or is about to make. It is intended to evoke emotion, either positively or negatively. If the audience is ignorant, inclined to groupthink, insecure, frightened or incapable of critical thinking, it can be dangerous ("Are we going to let these people take what we worked so hard for?")
If the audience is informed, independent, self-confident and thoughtful, however, such questions are powerful and useful, because they force you to think, and sometimes to challenge conventional wisdom, to think differently. They are often preceded or followed by another useful device, the rhetorical or oratorical pause. Such a pause (which many speakers are afraid to insert into oratory in case it merely causes audience discomfort) is intended to cause tension, to force the audience to try to anticipate what will come next, or to reflect on what has just been said that was presumably important.
Davis' article is so compelling, I think, because of a combination of new information, provocative questions, and great rhetoric.
Recently I've been listening, paying more attention to conversations: their flow, their pacing, their iteration of ideas and comprehension and meaning, the power politics often present inside them, their effectiveness. Because Generation Millennium has somewhat rediscovered (texting notwithstanding) the oral culture of the pre-Gutenberg era, I've been listening to them practice conversation. Their ability to achieve comprehension (largely by successive approximation, iteratively, Q&A, action and reaction, until consensus is reached) is extraordinary: very effective and hopelessly inefficient, but done so quickly that it succeeds. But it is the opposite of rhetoric. Good rhetorical oratory rarely contains the most frequent two words in Gen Millennium speech: "I mean".
I also find that modern conversation contains few rhetorical questions or pauses: There is simply no time for them. And there is little time for information. When information is presented that is new, and not consistent with the worldview of the listener(s), and not presented in the context of a simple "A or B" dichotomy ("Is Obama better or worse at...?"), it is as if the audience simply doesn't know what to make of it. If you listen to this speech (thanks to David Parkinson for the link) you can see how new information that makes an oversimplified debate more complex leaves the audience (in this case mass media talking heads) utterly dumbfounded. If the new information doesn't fit, it is discounted, ignored, considered as outrageous, an affront. You didn't answer our simple dumb question!
Which of course it is: It is intended as an affront (literal meaning of affront: in your face). While this may not work in the context of dumbed-down mass media reporting, it can be extremely effective when the audience has the patience, curiosity and self-confidence to be affronted.
Generation Millennium has learned one traditional (and now rare) conversational skill: storytelling. They have discovered that the easiest way to create a context for understanding is to tell a straightforward ("and then...") story, instead of preparing and presenting an analysis. They 'get' that if they understood what happened, and what should be done about it, then so will the audience if they hear an accurate narrative that 'recreates' the speaker's learning.
Recently I've learned of another effective means of communicating information in a presentation or conversation: the use of simple visuals. I would highly commend to you Dan Roam's new book The Back of the Napkin, which explains how to use elementary visuals, skilfully sketched by hand on a napkin or whiteboard while the audience watches, to convey information and to persuade (the illustration above is from that book, and a video explaining the ideas in the book is here). It draws on the fact that we are all programmed, in our pre-civilization DNA, to learn, discover and understand visually, not by reading text. One of my most popular conference presentation subjects is Adding Meaning and Value to Information (largely through visuals), and most of my presentations now have no bullet points, just pictures that I talk to.
So in short I think there are five techniques that can be used to make a point effectively, in a conversation, presentation or written article:
- Present new information, clearly and articulately.
- Ask provocative questions.
- Tell memorable stories.
- Use visualizations to convey meaning.
- Employ powerful rhetoric -- be clear, logical, clever, funny, well-paced, original, truthful, concise, provocative, and passionate.
How would you score yourself on the use of each of these five techniques? I think I'm pretty good at #1. I don't do #2 nearly enough, or well enough. I'm still poor at #3 (I need to craft and memorize my stories). I'm getting better at #4 but I need to practice sketching, and making my visualizations clearer and less dense. Dan Roam says: "All good pictures do not need to be self-explanatory, but they need to be explainable." And my rhetorical skills need a lot of work: I still often lack the courage of my convictions, and I tend to be too serious and too long-winded.
How about you (that's a rhetorical question)?
Category: Conversation & Language
Categories: k-Blogs
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