Planets Aligned

I’ve just stepped outside my front door to see the eclipse of the moon. It’s a deep, rusty red colour hanging there in the sky reminding us how insignificant we are. Pretty much puts everything else into perspective.

Volunteering & Complexity & Story

Over the last couple of years I’ve been working with Victorian local and State Governments on the future of volunteering – so this project on the Future of Volunteering looks interesting. Not the least because it’s using narrative research processes, tools and proprietary software Sensemaker TM developed by Cognitive Edge to explore an issue of critical public policy.

What are they exploring?
Is volunteering a doomed activity? Where will the volunteers of the future come from? What will motivate them? What might volunteering look like in the future? What forms might volunteering take (eg corporate volunteering, time-limited or project-based etc)?

The key objectives of the project are to develop an understanding of policy issues and implications given the changes in demographics and patterns of volunteering, as well as guidance for those organisations funding and managing volunteers. The initial focus is New South Wales; however there is already interest from other states and countries to replicate the project.

Any organisation or individual with experience in volunteering or managing volunteers is encouraged to participate in this programme. The more stories we are able to collect, the greater the pool of stories that can be used to identify themes and patterns around volunteering.

Visit the survey website for more info or to take part.

Project scope
This is the first government funded project using Cognitive Edge approaches to address a social issue, where the information collected will be available in the public arena. While there is significant interest from other states, countries and sectors, the initial focus will be

• The community care sector – volunteers, their managing organisations, funders and policy makers
• In NSW

The project will capture thousands of stories about volunteering from volunteers, managers of volunteers and policy makers. The new SenseMaker software will enable researchers and policy makers to access these stories directly in large numbers and examine themes and patterns.

Are we really in control of our thoughts & actions?

There was a really interesting article in the July 7 issue of New Scientist, written by UK writer, Mark Buchanan. It’s all about human behaviours and what influences what we do – the premise being that humans, like other animals, are influenced by their environment and by routines, meaning that a lot of behaviour can be predicted.

It appears that although we think we are reasoning out our decisions and choosing our actions deliberately, we may often just be responding more or less automatically to cues in our environment. Only afterwards do we make up reasons to explain what we did.

There’s also a lot about the role of non-verbal cues – and how we often respond to social signals alone. Others disagree and explore the difference between conscious and unconscious thinking. And this is where it gets really interesting. Research has shown that:

in…simpler tasks, people acting consciously made better decisions, but for more complex choices, acting on instinct proved most successful. The reason…is that conscious thinking cannot cope with evaluating many elements at once, whereas unconscious thinking is more holistic and can. “During unconscious thought,” (Dijksterehuis) says, “people can integrate lots of information together to make an overall judgement.”

When working with scientists in particular, the preference is to gather more data before making a decision. Maybe this is counter-productive, and when facilitating such groups for such purposes maybe we should encourage them to tap into their unconscious thinking.

Me In 4 Slides Comp

This is a great idea by Dan Meyer. See the winner here and the finalists here. Next time you have to introduce yourself using powerpoint – try something like these people have done. Great stuff!

And make sure you read the retraction – a great recommendation for Apple’s Keynote.

Too %*&# Busy!?

How often do you feel ‘too busy’? How often is the everyday greeting of ‘how are ya’? met with ‘Busy!’ It seems to have become a badge of honour. If you are not ‘busy’ what on earth are you doing? I know I often fall into this trap. I’m determined to work at avoiding it. This manifesto from Change This is a great reminder and I just love the starfish story. One of the points that stood out for me was the importance of belonging to, and being active in, networks. Enjoy.

Different levels of strategy

Last week I heard a friend, Stephen Petris, talk about his view of strategy in organisations. It made a lot of sense. I’ll try and capture the essence of his message. He was mainly referring to government organisations.

Corporate strategy encompasses the essence of the organisation – what it costs to exist and what value it contributes. It should articulate the expectations of the ‘centre’ and BIG initiatives – bigger than any portfolio in the organisation.

Business strategies are about achieving alignment with what’s changing in the external environment and the capability to respond. Because of the constant change that businesses are responding to this alignment is never achieved. It’s a way of making sure organisations are continually responding to the external environment – rather than stagnating.

Program strategies identify how individual projects contribute to outcomes. This is the area where something like program logic can be used to describe the contributions of various projects and activities to the broader outcomes.

Functional strategies describe the day-to-day business and how it is conducted.

This is a useful framework to have in mind when a client asks for a workshop to develop a strategy. First question might be: what level of strategy do you really mean?

Oh, and another thing Stephen said was that the meaning of ‘long-term’ has shifted. In his industry (agriculture) long-term used to mean 10 – 30 years; now it’s lucky to be three years (probably 12 months!) given the rate of change in the external environment.

Nice Site

This site is worth a look – simply because I like what they have done with the look, the messages and it encourages me to explore further.

The World’s Coming Alive

We’re coming out of winter. While our Western culture says we have four seasons, we all know that’s not right – various Aboriginal wisdom relates between 6 and 12 seasons, depending where you live. In this part of southern Australia, I call this time ‘re-awakening’. I’m not sure what the Wauthorong people would call it.

The birds are active. This morning I had to search to find a pair of wood ducks calling from high up in a tree. The ‘squeaky gate’ call of the Gang Gang Cockatoos is now common. Bees are foraging amongst the flowering plants. There was even a Southern Right Whale and calf playing just beyond the breakers – to the delight of local surfers at Bells Beach. I’ve seen lots of Grey Shrike Thrushes – very dapper birds with a great song – and the native orchids are popping up everywhere.

It’s good to be alive.

Chaos Rules!

This is a really cool slide show on how chaos can improve your business.

Metaphor to the rescue!

Imagine this. You have nearly 200 people in a room. It’s getting towards the end of a long day of travelling, meetings and workshopping – and you’ve promised to do some Social Network Analysis. You have about 30 minutes.

That’s the scenario I found myself in this week. I know people (Andrew Rixon) who know a lot about Social Network Analysis, but it’s not something I profess to even have much of an idea about really. I like the idea of it – but am still not sure how to use it. Anyway, I digress. And then there was a lot of talk about the importance of knowledge management. Here’s something else I only hang out around the fringes of. My mates at Anecdote know lots about KM – again I’m a novice.

So here I was in a large room (thankfully with lots of space) with lots of pairs of eyes wondering what the Social Network Analysis stuff was all about. Just quietly, I was wondering to myself ‘what was I thinking!!!’ including this when I haven’t got much of a clue what to do.

Andrew and I had talked about hubs and bridges and identifying those people in a group, but I was quickly running out of time and the troops were getting restless, smelling ‘beer-o’clock’ coming up fast.

There were about nine program areas in this group so my first step was to do the improv thing and ‘do something’ (I still wasn’t sure what to do next) – so I got them clumped in their program groups. Some were quite large, others were small (just a few people). It then occurred to me to use the city metaphor. So I suggested that each group was a ‘suburb’ and they were to talk amongst themselves to identify the characteristics of their ‘suburb’. This created great laughter, competitiveness and creative use of language. I then got them to identify the hubs (the ‘go to’ people) in their ‘suburbs’ and the bridges (people that provide links to others in the organisation) to other ‘suburbs’.

It turned out to be a quick and effective way of mapping the system and getting the participants to think about relationships and formal and informal networks. Phew!