Reflections on #changecamp

Whew. It’s been a few days since we threw the first ChangeCamp. There was lots of energy and activity and if nothing else, people had their views and opinions go through a creative destruction process to create some new thinking and gain new perspective.  But there was lots more accomplished. In fact, I’m still going through the work that was done because there was so much. Here are some musings on how I thought ChangeCamp went.

ChangeLab

We wanted to play with the framework of the Open Space model which has sessions of 1 hour in length as the standard. I do believe that sessions longer than 2 hours start to have diminishing returns but we introduced the idea of a 3 hour session with specific sub-objectives for each 1 hour segment. The intent was to select project ideas that had been planned out a little bit and give people a 3 hour segment in which to recruit talent to bring the idea as far along as it could go. Rough code, wireframes, schematics, strategy, project plans….something tangible that a community of professionals could quickly build.

I would give this idea a passing grade with room for improvement. We refined this idea pretty late in the process so in the future I like to receive ideas for ChangeLab a few days in advance, perhaps via a standardized template, and have some trusted folks review the proposals so we can start the day knowing exactly which ideas will be going through the ChangeLab process. This will give the project owners a bit more time to prepare and we can announce at the beginning of the day which projects are a go and what kind of talent is needed to see those ideas through. We kind of made it up on the fly the day of and it was a bit muddled. It’ll be better next time.

The great thing was that it resulted in a meetup a few days later to continue the work of the initial ChangeLab. People got together on their own to refine the idea, codenamed Project Shamen. Awesome. (Interesting side note: the ChangeLab dealing with face to face meetups drew a crowd of programmers and the ChangeLab dealing with a web application drew the policy wonks. Thanks to Sean Howard for making this observation.)

Dotmocracy

Jason Diceman was kind enough to offer his services and tools as a dotmocracy facilitator throughout the day and next time I would like to work with him in advance to see how we can build in his process so that it’s a bit more planned. I don’t think we gave it its due. That said, there are still some good results on the ChangeCamp wiki.

Meet and Greet Module

We decided that the Intention Question for ChangeCamp should be broad but with a desire to get it more focused. We realized early in the planning process that trying to narrow it down with the planning team was counter-productive. As a combination “meet and greet” and work activity we randomly divided everyone at ChangeCamp into about 15 small groups and gave them the same question to ponder for about an hour: “What Problem Are We Trying To Solve?”  We knew that each person would introduce themselves but also talk about what drew them to ChangeCamp. This would help draw out from the crowd how the ChangeCamp movement should be more focused. But it’s also a flexible question in any context because the “Problem” in Toronto will be different than the “Problem” in Moose Jaw.

While I don’t like starting any event from a “Problem” mindset, I think the question worked in this context. We then tried to pollinate the conversations by having 1 person stay behind while the other members of the group dispersed and wondered around the space for 45 minutes, kind of like at a tradeshow going from table to table, seeing what other groups had talked about. My sense is that most people found another group and then stayed there for the duration of the time rather than wandering but that worked well enough.

This was a very generative exercise with lots of ideas being proposed. A super valuable exercise would be to bring all of the notes together and try to extract themes. As an event designer, I might try to force this activity in some way by making it a permanent part of the grid or by suggesting that at least one person take it on as a task. I didn’t have to do either in this case because Patrick Keenan and Indra Behrouz rocked it by picking up on this idea and running with it. First they tagged and created the themes, then they created a visual model of the themes. Truly stunning work in a couple short hours.

Twitter

Not sure what to say about Twitter except we broke it. #changecamp was the number one tag on Twitter for most of the day, the Search function on Twitter broke and Twitter served to bring people from outside Toronto and Canada into the conversation. We had people at ChangeCamp trading information within the session via Twitter. We organized the event through Twitter. Lots has been written about how Twitter is bringing communities and movements together. A great local example of how Twitter has served the community is with the #hohoto event that was hatched and planned on Twitter in 13 days. The resulting holiday party had 600 guests and raised $25,000 for Daily Bread Food Bank. Hyper connected communities=success.

Other Thoughts

As part of another project, I’m working with TV Ontario on the AgendaCamp project and we did a bit of outreach to the community and got an interesting note in reply. One of the AgendaCamp participants from Windsor in October said that while the activity on the wiki had slowed down, the face to face activity had picked up. Windsor’s bloggers are meeting monthly, walking tours of the downtown have started and there is talk of a collective of artists buying a factory to create a live-work space. In this case it seems as though the AgendaCamp wiki was a place to start but the activity became too important to keep online and it was elevated to actual face to face contact, which is the most powerful form of human engagement. That said, keeping a record of the progress, photos of the projects and videos help spread and solidify the word so keep that wiki fresh!

It’s so cool to see the ChangeCamp activity heading down a similar path. I would love to hear some comments on how you thought ChangeCamp went (if you were there) or if you have any experience in OpenSpace/BarCamp/Unconference would love to hear your thoughts.

Rural/Urban Divide? Meh.

We had another great AgendaCamp on Sunday, this time in Kingston. Close to 100 people from all over Eastern Ontario braved the snowy roads to spend a day talking about how agriculture fits into Ontario’s changing economy. There were 44 separate and distinct discussions over the course of the day and one theme I noticed was the idea of a “Rural/Urban” divide and thoughts on how to solve it.

This notion of a “divide” didn’t sit quite right with me. Was there really a divide? If so, is it really about rural vs. urban? Some ideas that got tossed around on Twitter during the AgendaCamp included notions of “producer/consumer” and “grower/eater”. Something that bothers me about this is the linear construct that the proposed dichotomy inherently suggests. Things are grown, they magically appear in cities, they’re digested and it’s all over. The fact of the matter is that it’s circular and cyclical. It’s systemic. Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase “Farmers Feed Cities”, highlighting the importance of the relationship between rural dwellers and city dwellers. I saw a build on that phrase that read “Farmers Feed Cities. Cities Feed Farmers.” I thought that was a great way of describing the relationship.

Local food movements, slow food and the 100-mile diet are all gaining in popularity which is a good thing but there is a long way to go. What is a better way to describe the lack of appreciation (the divide) for the food production eco-systems that feed Canadian cities and farm communities? Is there something more accurate or an entirely different construct?

So far we have:

• rural/urban
• producer/consumer
• grower/eater

Thoughts?

Violins, Patterns and Context

The Washington Post recently published an article on a little social experiment they did. In short, they asked a violin player to stand at a DC subway station and play for 45 minutes during the morning rush. They wanted to see how many people would stop and listen and/or throw some money into the open violin case. The catch is that the player was Joshua Bell, arguably the finest classical violin player in the world, playing one of the most difficult compositions ever created, on a $3 million violin wearing jeans and a t-shirt. Seats at his concert will routinely fetch well into the hundreds of $$$.

The results of the experiment are in the article, but the upshot is that very few people stopped, fewer gave money and only 1 person recognized him. The discussion in the article focuses quite a bit on context. Does context matter when experiencing a work of art? Is it genius if nobody notices? In further questioning, some people didn’t even notice a violinist on their way from the train.

Why do I care about this experiment? It’s all about patterns. The brain is a pattern making machine, for better and for worse. It absorbs data and categorizes it according to previous experience. All of this happens at a pre-cognition level so we don’t even know it’s happening. This is a good thing because it means we don’t have to evaluate every piece of data we encounter in our day to day lives. The over-stimulation would render us practically useless.

The flip side of this amazing phenomenon known as the human brain is that it becomes difficult to absorb new information when we are engaged in a familiar pattern. That’s why some people didn’t even notice the genius of Josh Bell as they went past.

That’s why it’s so difficult to think creatively when engaged in familar patterns. It’s important to put people in unfamiliar surroundings with fresh stimulation in order to get them to come up with new stuff, make new connections and break out of old patterns. The old phrase, “we tried that two years ago and it didn’t work” is partly borne from the fact that the person saying that is sitting in the same physical location when it didn’t work two years ago. Put that person in a fresh environment and it is more likely for that person to pick up on a new piece of information that will encourage them to say, “even though it didn’t work two years ago, here’s why I think it’ll work now…”

I’ll let the philosophy majors flesh out the debates of Leibniz, Hume and Kant about the nature of beauty but I can tell you that if you want creativity, innovation and new direction people have to be physically and cognitively moved out of comfort zones that reinforce old patterns and power structures. In events that I design I will often introduce elements that are meant to do both. Holding collaborative events at art galleries, zoos or patios overlooking Whistler Mountain are all designed to remove people from their typical patterns. Playing punk music to indicate the end of an activity is designed to disrupt patterns and highten observational powers. It’s all part of the experience.

Le Roi est mort, vive le Roi!

It’s only Wednesday, yet this week I’ve had three separate conversations in three completely different contexts around moving conversations that occur in the same place and time (ie. face to face) and extending those conversations online.

Conversation One

Part of my continuing work with TV Ontario and The Agenda on the Road’s AgendaCamp is to figure out how to leverage tools such as wikis and Flip cams and YouTube and Twitter to move the passion and energy from the face to face AgendaCamps to the web so that people who weren’t at the camp can participate and people who were at the camp can continue to make real change as a result of the conversations started at the camp. This is a challenge. It take lots of effort from the folks at TVO and Mark Kuznicki to get the communities flourishing pre and post event. It also raises an interesting question around the role of TVO in this regard. As a public broadcaster they are providing a technical platform for the conversations to take place, but it’s more than technology that is required. It takes community management. Or to be more accurate, Community Management. The reason for the CAPS is that this role of community manager is an emerging discipline that takes real skill and finesse to do successfully.

Conversation Two

I went to a meeting at The StoreFront, a community space in my neighbourhood that started off as an OCAD student project but has now evolved past that and is trying to figure out what to become in order to serve the needs of the community. So there is a physical space but that can only serve so many people and only one thing can go on in the space at any given time. How to multiply the effect of a physical community space? Online, of course. And the question pops up again: How Do You Effectively Move the Conversation Online? It starts with having an infrastructure to support that movement, so The StoreFront should be putting all of their meeting notes on their site but don’t have that capability right now. In the mean time we’ll have to link to some of the artifacts from the meeting. I did some graphic recording of the conversations, even though I’m no professional. I also recorded some of the report outs using Flip cams.

Conversation Three

On Monday I met with some people from a company in Ottawa called Intersol and they do face to face facilitation for lots of government clients and private sector as well. We got together to discuss the impact of social media technology and its relation (threat?!) to the face to face market. Having spent the past five years designing and facilitating face to face events I have a good understanding of how to get people to work well together. For the past two years I’ve been looking at social media applications in the corporate/enterprise context and specifically how to use them IN CONJUNCTION with face to face collaborative methodologies. Ie. how to move the conversation online after a corporate collaborative session.

The King is Dead, Long Live the King

I feel strongly that social media technology is democratizing the world because the functionality is not hard coded into the tools. It’s the users of the tools who are constantly coming up with ways to use the tools. As a result, the people who are skilled in group collaborative methodologies, facilitation and event design are becoming more valuable in a world of social media.

Face to face gatherings will always accomplish more than electronic events and there is an opportunity to create additional and lasting value by using new electronic tools to extend the conversations into the online arena. People who are schooled in human dynamics and interaction are extremely well positioned to be thought leaders in this emerging area.

Omakase Group helping with AgendaCamp

I’m proud to say that I’ll be helping out with a really cool initiative that TVOntario is doing as part of their Agenda with Steve Paikin (AwSP) program. The show is going on the road, literally.

AwSP will be broadcasting live from a few cities across Ontario and the topic will be about the future of Ontario’s economy with a focus on the dominant industries in each particular town. However the day before each broadcast we’ll be hosting AgendaCamp, an unconference on the same topic as the show. Modeled after Open Space Technology, AgendaCamp is a participant driven methodology that allows the conference topics to emerge organically and for the day’s conversations to emerge in the same way.

I’ll be helping to design the program for all five events over the next six months and facilitating the day’s proceedings with the help of Mark Kuznicki. It’s a great way to engage the public in the conversations that matter because everyone from mayors, industry leaders and the average citizen has an equal platform on which to discuss issues and propose solutions.

Further, with the help of Sean Howard we’ll be extending the philosophy into the online realm. All of the documentation, in the form of the written word, photographs and video will be incorporated into a digital platform that will allow participation from outside the unconference as well as in the time between events. It really is a new way of creating conversations amongst people who may be separated by time and space.

The schedule for the Agenda on the Road and AgendaCamp events is as follows:

Windsor: October 19/2
Sault Ste. Marie: November 16/17
Eastern Ontario: January 18/19 (city TBD)
Thunder Bay: February 8/9
Waterloo: March 29/30

This particular conversation is incredibly important if Ontarians are going to evolve to changing needs and emerging global trends, otherwise we’ll be left behind. Politicians need to hear this conversation and need to hear from you so even if you can’t make it to an event or attend the broadcast of the show, please engage in the online conversation. Make your voice heard. In case you haven’t heard, major disruptions are occurring right now and with disruption comes fear but also great opportunity.

Corporations Need More Right Brain

Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED talk is pretty astounding. It’s an inspiring story that she tells very well. If anyone is looking for a bit of a “how-to” on presenting, check out her talk. I’m pretty sure it would have the Heath brothers’ seal of approval.

But rather than write about her presentation, I thought I would mention one of the points from her talk. In short, she is a neuro-scientist and she says that the “right” side of the brain, which is normally associated with creativity, is the side of the brain that sees big pictures, gestalts, overall patterns. The right side of the brain is also responsible for imagining possibilities, combining things in novel ways, modeling, seeing things with the mind’s eye, etc.

The left side of the brain is the analytical side. It’s linear and is responsible for vertical thinking, which tends to select, while in the process of decision making, one option to the exclusion of others. The left side is responsible for absorbing the data that it is constantly collecting and assigning it into the bigger categories that the brain is so good at creating. This saves time so that we aren’t constantly evaluating each new piece of information that comes into us but we can pick little pieces of data and draw conclusions based on our past experience.

So, what Taylor says is that the right side of the brain is responsible for the past and the future and the left side of the brain is responsible for the present. What’s the connection to corporations?

One leading management thinker (the name escapes me now) said that corporate strategy is simply a series of predictions. If that’s true, executives should be thinking a whole lot more time in right brain intensive activities than they are. More serious play, more work with images, more work with divergent sets of knowledge and experience, more work with looking for weak signals and imagining those signals being amplified 5 years from now….but this isn’t happening. It seems as though the higher up the food chain they get, execs are more and more concerned with the present rather than learning from the past and making better predictions about the future.

Working with 3D, Physical Models

If we think of common business concepts as models (eg. financial models, organization charts, strategies, etc.) then those models can be represented/displayed/constructed. They can be represented in a spreadsheet, a Visio diagram or a PowerPoint slide. By their very nature, models contain less information than the things they represent. That is, in fact, the definition of a model.

Part of what I do in my line of work is to get people to compare models and surface the assumptions that went into the creation of their models. When the model was created SOME assumptions had to be made. Sometimes those assumptions are explicit, sometimes not. By learning about what other people are thinking and what makes their perspective unique, greater understanding of the models can occur, changes can be made and ideally two or more models can be combined in novel, innovative ways.

All of that to say…by having people create physical (3d) representations of their models, such as having them build a representation of a supply chain out of pipe cleaners and Styrofoam balls, more information about the model and its underlying assumptions begin to emerge. There can literally be different perspectives on the 3d model as you’ll have people clustered around a table and they each see it slightly differently as its constructed. As well, people tend to learn and retain more effectively when they are actually moving parts and pieces around. This process of co-creation and retention can result in what is commonly known as “buy in”. Actually, I would go so far as to say that this process of co-creation goes beyond “buy in” and moves into the realm of “believe in”. Believing in something is much more powerful than simply agreeing to it.

When I was leading a workshop at the VizThink conference in San Francisco I had the group quickly go through an exercise where they built 3d models of some basic business processes. Here are some photos from that workshop.

Introducing the Global Collaboration Cue Card Project

I had an opportunity to present for 60 minutes as part of the Council for Communication Management conference in Toronto on May 1st. The CCM brings communication professionals together to brainstorm, share best practices, network, etc. I think I stretched some of the participants’ minds a little bit, talking about Wicked Problems, Collaborative Event Design, Graphic Facilitation. My presentation was a bit off the beaten path but I hope that it was engaging for most of the crowd.

The way in which I started my presentation was to give each person in the room (about 60) a blank, unruled cue card and asked them to illustrate, without the use of words, how they would communicate the notion of “collaboration” to a person who couldn’t speak their language. I gave them a minute to do that and when they were done, asked them to find a partner and on a third cue card create an illustration that combined each partner’s work.

I then dissected the exercise a little bit and talked about how words are in fact models that are loaded with assumptions and values and how communicating with graphics is an effective method for conveying underlying and unspoken meaning.

The Global Collaboration Cue Card Project

As a result of this exercise, I am now endeavoring to spearhead….drumroll please…The Global Collaboration Cue Card Project. With the length of this title and all of the capital letters, I feel as though I should be announcing this at TED or some such conference. It’s not that impressive. All I’m doing is posting all of the cue cards that I get on a Flickr group and I hope that others will copy the activity and add to the set. It would be very cool to see how many different interpretations of collaboration can be created and what common visual themes exist. And it’s all done without words!

Looking at the “ins” & “cons”

When designing large collaborative sessions with complex topics it is almost always the case that there is a big variance between the few people who know a lot about the topic and a few who have little to no context and everyone else falls somewhere in between. Sponsors are generally very anxious to do a lot of “education” around the project so that everyone gets up to speed. Usually this results in a desire to do a 3 hour PowerPoint presentation. This makes me cringe. (I don’t understand how the same people who complain about sitting through 3 hour presentations end up with a desire to present one.) I try to explain that people don’t learn well this way and the information will not stick. 

I started reading a book recently that has really helped me hammer my argument home. Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams by Mitchel Resnick of MIT talks about the difference between instructional learning and constructional learning. He argues that by telling people what you think they need to know, the results are mediocre at best. By having people create something on their own (or with small groups), the concepts are much more likely to stick. It’s a learn-by-doing approach.

With the type of work that I’m in, this concept wasn’t new to me, but the fact that I can now summarize the concept in a framework that clients really seem to get, was a valuable insight for me. I think most people know this as well, but with a lack of a better tool than PowerPoint to use for “education”, it seems to be the default. Suggesting the “instructional/constructional” framework to clients seems to introduce the contrast between socratic methods and constructional methods. They suddenly see “the other side”. By giving the other side a name, it’s easier to convince them of the benefits of giving it a try. Like the old saying goes, “A fish doesn’t understand water until it experiences air.”

I’m curious to know if anyone else has had this type of experience; where you don’t necessarily learn a new concept, but learn a new way to express it that seems to have a lot of resonance. Please comment!

Looking at the “ins” & “cons”

When designing large collaborative sessions with complex topics it is almost always the case that there is a big variance between the few people who know a lot about the topic and a few who have little to no context and everyone else falls somewhere in between. Sponsors are generally very anxious to do a lot of “education” around the project so that everyone gets up to speed. Usually this results in a desire to do a 3 hour PowerPoint presentation. This makes me cringe. (I don’t understand how the same people who complain about sitting through 3 hour presentations end up with a desire to present one.) I try to explain that people don’t learn well this way and the information will not stick. 

I started reading a book recently that has really helped me hammer my argument home. Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams by Mitchel Resnick of MIT talks about the difference between instructional learning and constructional learning. He argues that by telling people what you think they need to know, the results are mediocre at best. By having people create something on their own (or with small groups), the concepts are much more likely to stick. It’s a learn-by-doing approach.

With the type of work that I’m in, this concept wasn’t new to me, but the fact that I can now summarize the concept in a framework that clients really seem to get, was a valuable insight for me. I think most people know this as well, but with a lack of a better tool than PowerPoint to use for “education”, it seems to be the default. Suggesting the “instructional/constructional” framework to clients seems to introduce the contrast between socratic methods and constructional methods. They suddenly see “the other side”. By giving the other side a name, it’s easier to convince them of the benefits of giving it a try. Like the old saying goes, “A fish doesn’t understand water until it experiences air.”

I’m curious to know if anyone else has had this type of experience; where you don’t necessarily learn a new concept, but learn a new way to express it that seems to have a lot of resonance. Please comment!

Next Page »