Facilitation workshop comes to Sydney this week

Due to the success of the first-ever Fantastic Facilitation workshop held recently in Melbourne, this week in Sydney there's another workshop on offer.

Where: Sydney, UNSW CBD Campus
When: Wednesday 03 November 2010
Download the flyer

Major workshop topics include:
•    What is facilitation?
•    Your role as facilitator
•    Encouraging feedback and dialogue
•    Motivational factors and keeping the end in mind
•    Relating to the people while sticking to the process
•    Shifting focus: big picture and next actions steps
•    Putting it all together: Fantastic Facilitation!

Gain some great takeaway tips such as: dealing with problem participants, improv techniques, how to get things moving and successful facilitation language.

Feedback from last month's Melbourne session

"Thought-provoking day packed with useful insights and practical know-how"
Linda Johnson, Communications Manager - Nestle

"Great. Loved it and will let my team know how much it will benefit them"
Jay Shaw, Project Officer (Change) - Department of Human Services

"Great to hear that others are facing the same issues. Some of the experiences and ideas shared will be really useful in providing options and solutions for issues I am currently facing at work"
David Kavanagh, Senior Officer Internal Communications - Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry

"Very much enjoyed Todd’s ‘style’ – the type of ‘natural’ facilitation style I aspire to"
Julie Tassone, Communications & Alliance Health Manager - JHG


Interested? Here's how to register
1. Register online
2. E-mail
3. Ring Melcrum directly: +61 2 9222 2810

Facilitation workshops in Melbourne & Sydney

In association with Melcrum Australia, I'll be presenting two workshops on facilitation skills for professionals in all fields. The first will take place in Melbourne (Tue 19 Oct) and the second in Sydney (Wed 03 Nov).

Fantastic Facilitation is a one-day workshop that gives you practical "how-to" techniques to facilitate meetings, conferences, workshops and other group sessions.

Facilitation comes from the Latin facile or facere meaning "to make easy." 

Good facilitation involves making interventions and applying processes that help the group move towards its goal more directly, enjoyably and quickly. A great facilitator is one who can bring the best out in people and promote positive group engagement with the task and each other - and who does so in a way that is largely invisible and seemingly effortless.

As a result of the training you will:

• Discover how to set yourself up for facilitation success in every situation
• Know what questions you should ask before you even enter the room
• Identify when and how to make skillful interventions
• Understand how to engage effectively with different groups
• Have a better understanding of group dynamics and how to affect them
• Gain confidence to handle "problem participants"
• Learn how to channel powerful emotions into productive outcomes
• Create your own toolbox of practical facilitation tools and techniques
• Produce a personal list of next three steps to further your facilitation

Register here for the Melbourne and Sydney events.

Social media is good for you (when done well!)

Today as I set out to share some highlights from my past two days at the Melcrum Social Media conference in Sydney, I notice that I've still got a nice buzz...not from the networking cocktail session but from the interaction, both face-to-face and on twitter during the day. Read on to find out why social media is good for you, some ideas on how to do it well - and don't miss your TOP TIP at the end!


Social Media conference highlights

During the conference there was a particularly active tweetstream and there have already been a few great blog posts about the conference; I particularly like the insights of Emma McCleary:

Social media is about long-term engagement; creating things that people want to use and growing spaces online that encourage people to work communally.

We’re all a copy and paste away from inside to outside so there’s no reason to categorise social media as a risk to your organisation or check every post, status update or tweet happening if   you’re not also checking emails or USB sticks that carry files in and out of your workplace.

and Alison Pignon:

...if you don’t trust your workforce, then you have a management issue, not a communication issue. Meanwhile, encouraging free and open discussion (based on a good social media policy and user guidelines) can only help to demonstrate the trust you do have in them. 

Rather than feeling that it’s absolutely necessary to first build a social media strategy and get buy-in from the whole senior team before launching a new tool, sometimes it’s just best to go out there and try it.

Here are a few of the thought-provoking gems provided by Euan Semple's report of the state of social media (for now...):

• Social Media is about "Globally distributed, near instant, person to person conversations" from Cluetrain Manifesto
• Online the Customer really is King/Queen: “If you don't want me to criticize your product, don't have a shit product."~Dave Weinberger
• "In a knowledge economy there are no conscripts, only volunteers (but we train managers to manage conscripts!)"~Peter Drucker

CORPORATE CULTURES

• Paradox of corporate cultures: going to useless, time-wasting, pointless meetings = good, but having useful conversations with people via social media = bad(?!?)
• What's it say about corp culture that staff are unwilling to enter things about themselves on company databases/intranets that they will freely put on web via FB, etc? Dramatically low levels of trust...

HOW-TO

• "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." ~Sinclair Lewis
• How to run social media at your organization: Just do it! "Keep moving, stay in touch, head for the high ground" (from US Marines)
• When confronted by resistance (see "fear of losing control" below) and asked to "prove" the "ROI of social media?" Simply reply "what's ROI of not doing it?" Or, better still, "what's the COI?" (cost of inaction) of continuing to do nothing to engage with our own people?
• Beware of trying to "manage" online communities - they will grow organically, or not at all
• If you build it, they might or might not come... "It's easier to build a tool for the community than a community for the tool."
• And always remember: "No matter what you are trying to achieve social media adoption happens one person at a time and for their reasons not yours."

FEAR OF LOSING CONTROL (Hint: you never had it)

• People worry about "losing control". You don't have control anyway! What you DO have w. social media tools is the chance to influence
• "How do I control the msg?" - Try instead "management by being interested": seed existing conversations w. good questions (influence-not-control)
  
• These technologies surface what's going on in your organization (culture, behaviour, etc.) -->Agreed!:
• "Social media in organizations is great for surfacing morons"(!) - yes people will initially have a whinge, but they didn't start whingeing just because social media appeared; it's already happening around the watercoolers. Providing a forum surfaces problems that want fixing and (for those people who never stop whingeing) identify mis-matches in the organization that need addressing for everyone's benefit

BEING REAL

• Good tweets (that build trust & relationships), including those by staff on a corporate twitter account, need to be human and not corporate drone-speak; even inane tweets have a place if they are authentic and create connections
• Sadly, "Watching big corporations trying to get into 'this social media stuff' is a bit like watching your dad dancing at a disco" (LOL!)  
• The most tragic example lately: "BP's biggest failure wasn't only mechanical or engineering, it was in not actively building trusted social networks and not giving straight answers when given the chance

ONLINE EXPRESSION & LIVE INTERACTION

• "Even if no one read my blog, I'd still write it...makes me more thoughtful, more aware, notice more things" 
• Online media won't replace face-to-face interaction; a great use of online collaboration is to improve the quality of the face-to-face you DO have (e.g. by brainstorming ideas in an online forum before meeting face-to-face to arrive at a final decision, or getting a sense of someone's interests and areas of potential collaboration from their LinkedIn profile before meeting for a cafe-chat)

WHAT'S THE POINT OF SOCIAL MEDIA...?

• A few answers: it helps unlock the knowledge the exists in many people's heads throughout the organization/network, so people can find answers and information faster and easier - and get stuff done; it helps break down silos by encouraging interaction; it gives a place to have the conversations (they're already having) in a way that can be entered and influenced by managers and leaders - as equals and colleagues...

Finally, the thing I liked most about the conference was the sense that no one really has all the answers now. Like speaker Helene Bradley-Ritt put it, "implementing [social media] is a change journey" and on that journey we're all fellow travellers, so it was great to be a part of an event designed to help each other along the way to do great things!

Warm, twuzzy feelings...

What explains the need of our BlackBerry-bearing, Twitter-tweeting Facebook friends for constant connectivity? Are we biologically hardwired to do it? Do our brains react to tweeting just as they do to our physical engagement with people we trust and enjoy?

So how come I'm still buzzing today...? The answer to that question and the ones just above is found in this Fast Company article about research by Neuroeconomist Paul Zak (aka "Dr Love"), showing that social media can help spike oxytocin levels in the brain and reduce stress hormones cortisol and ACTH.

"Social networking might reduce cardiovascular risks, like heart attack and stroke, associated with lack of social support" because our brains interpret activities like tweeting as if we were directly interacting with people we have empathy for and care about: "E-connection is processed in the brain like an in-person connection."

Perhaps this is why so many Gen-Y's, whose lives are increasingly shaped by social media, expect to be able to maintain those important connections in the workplace - so much so that one source indicates "for 20 percent of Millennials, or Generation Y-ers (those born from 1980 onwards) a ban on social media in the workplace is often a deal breaker" when deciding whether or not to take a job. 

So here's your TOP TIP: don't just sit there - apply all these great ideas and get connected like your life depended on it...it just might! And please, allow me do my small part to promote your health: in just 10 seconds you can connect yourself with upcoming blog posts - enter your email address in the "Get blog updates sent to your email" box in the top-right side of this page or click on the "Get blog updates by RSS feed" button. (Wondering how RSS works? Watch this video.)

Technology as a loudspeaker - what are you broadcasting?

Technology is a terrific enabler and accelerator of organizational processes, but it's not a cure-all. Read on to explore the nexus where technology overlaps human behaviour and interaction; learn why it's important to know what message your technology is broadcasting - both to your employees and to your clients!


In April I was invited to a seminar in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on the uses of technology in higher education and corporate training.

Among other tech companies and educational institutions, Microsoft was on hand to showcase Surface, its "social way of computing," as envisioned for university campuses and business meetings of the future.

In this idealized future, businesspeople easily find and exchange information with world-wide colleagues and their road-warrior lives are made easier with access to timely information on hand-held devices that speeds them along to fruitful and interactive meetings.

It was pretty slick stuff: technology enabling a whole new way of doing business and, as you'd expect given the theme of the conference, there was a lot of enthusiasm and buzz in the room.

As human behaviour specialist, I was left wondering how these admittedly snazzy tech-tools would help you to deal more effectively with colleague who's just off a red-eye flight filled with screaming kids and has spilled coffee on herself in the taxi ride from the airport.

Or how those gizmos would help to effectively manage interpersonal conflict that might arise in one of these tech-enabled meetings...quite possibly with the frazzled and overtired colleague just described!

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose...

The more (and faster) technology changes, the more human behaviour remains stubbournly the same - complex, unpredictable and non-linear.

Now don't get me wrong: I love my gadgets as much as the next guy and technology is a great aid to our working lives. It's in the nexus where technology overlaps human behaviour and interaction, however, where we can clearly see that technology's role as an enabler and accelerator of what's already happening in the organization (you can even say it's also an amplifier) is not as straightforward as some tech-enthusiasts may believe.

For example, if you've been in meetings that look a bit like this unfortunate group - where people aren't engaged, there's an atmosphere of negative interaction and conflict, and a people manager who fundamentally can't manage people - then it's probably clear to you that no amount of technology is going to improve the situation.

Putting touch-screen computers into this meeting will not magically transform it into a smoothly-functioning team. Quite the opposite, in fact: in dysfunctional organizational cultures, technology is more likely to give people more tools to extend unhelpful behaviours and disengagement to a much wider audience, even faster (email flame wars, anyone...? or text messages that read: "PLEASE get me outta here! :-( MeetingFAIL!!!").

Technology as enable/accelerator/amplifier (or, behavioural loudspeaker) 

If you remember the classic technology equation (Garbage In = Garbage Out) and then factor in technology's role as enabler/accelerator/amplifier, it's clear that technology most often functions as a loudspeaker to surface dodgy behaviours in an organization. Technology therefore cannot be the quick-fix panacea to address unhelpful behaviours, because they aren't technology problems - they're management problems, and they need management solutions.

This fact about technology helps explain why some leaders are so resistant to introducing social media tools - because amplifying the kind of talk that happens in a toxic corporate culture will most likely serve to  increase dissastisfaction (and staff turnover), to undermine the command-and-control structure typical of such organizations...or quite possibly a combination of both.

So I would argue that our awareness of the kinds of behaviour being enabled/accelerated/amplified with technology (social media or otherwise) needs to at least keep up with the pace of technological change. And in many organizations that's going to be a pretty steep learning curve.

When it comes to awareness of human behaviour dynamics and taking practical action to create Positive Change, we can't release a new patch or upgrade each year, it's an ongoing effort. Thankfully it's the same complexity and unpredictability of people that also makes us hugely creative and adaptable - and that's very good news indeed for those looking to create Positive Change.

Some questions remain - what do you think?

My next post will tell you more about what Positive CHANGE looks like and how it can help shape behaviour and interactions in your organization. The end result is certainly worth the effort: effective teams that can take adversity in stride and maintain a positive focus on contribution and results.

Other interesting questions remain: in what ways could technology actually expand and deepen our perspectives on human behaviour so we interact and engage with each other more effectively? Beyond being simply an enabler and accelerator, can technology serve to positively shape human behaviour and interactions...?

I look forward to discussing these questions and more at next week's instance of another technology-in-business conference: Melcrum's Social Media conference in North Sydney. See you there!

Social Media in Sydney - see you next week!

Still need convincing about the reach and relevance of social media? 

Check out this short video and then come along to Melcrum Australia's Social Media conference next week in North Sydney. The format is one day of workshops on the 29th followed by a day of speakers  on the 30th (for which I'll be acting as Chair). 

You'll hear lots of ways to integrate social media within your internal communication strategy from speakers representing Deloitte, Unilever, NAB, Suncorp, Ericsson, as well as Melcrum's own Robin Crumby. In addition, UK-based Social Media Consultant Euan Semple will offer a 1/2 day workshop on day one followed by a keynote on Day Two entitled Social Media: The communication revolution.

There's just a couple of spots left - so grab the conference brochure today and I'll see you there!

Social Media conference in Sydney 29-30 June

Still getting your brain around social media?

Join me as Melcrum Australia holds its 2-day Social Media Conference at the Vibe Hotel in North Sydney on 29-30 June.

If you're looking for ways to integrate social media within your internal communication strategy and align it with your key objectives, check it out.

The format is one day of workshops on the 29th followed by a day of speakers (for which I'll be acting as Chair).

On the 30th you'll hear a keynote entitled Social Media: The communication revolution by UK-based Social Media Consultant Euan Semple. Now I know, I know, everybody and his dog is claiming to be a "social media guru" these days - but I've heard Euan speak and he's been at it a lot longer than most. Personally I'm looking forward to hearing his latest thoughts on the following:

There has been a fundamental shift in the way we do business. How we communicate with stakeholders and how we organise ourselves to produce those messages has changed forever. Euan Semple examines:

• What these changes mean for communicators
• How they represent a new wave of exciting opportunities for 21st century businesses and their employees
• What lies in store for communicators and what role they will play in the future of business

You'll also hear speakers from Deloitte, Unilever, NAB, Suncorp, Ericsson and also Melcrum's own Robin Crumby.

Download the conference brochure here and I'll see you in Sydney!
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Promoting team engagement: article now online

You can find practical tips and techniques in my case study on Promoting team engagement at Lloyds TSB that's just been published at Melcrum's Internal Communications Hub.

To learn more about the details of this case study and get other great insights into building engagement, check out Melcrum's bi-annual Employee Engagement conference which I'll be Chairing on 21-22 April 2010 in Melbourne.
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Chair of Employee Engagement conference, April 2010

Melcrum Australia has once again asked me to act as Conference Chair, this time for their bi-annual Employee Engagement conference to be held on 21-22 April 2010 in Melbourne.

The event is geared to those managers whose current challenge is to keep employees engaged, motivated and focused on the right goals, helping employees to not only understand their role in the company strategy, but believe that they can influence the outcomes. As employees embrace this mentality, they will be highly motivated to help the organization innovate, grow and succeed.

This year's conference features a keynote presentation from the Great Place to Work Institute along with case studies and best practices from the following companies: St. George Bank, Virgin Mobile, Inchcape, KPMG, Woolworths, Melbourne Water, Deloitte, NAB, Telstra, VicRoads, Hay Group, REA Group and Ericsson.

Attend this year's conference and discover how you can help your company achieve its performance goals by:

• Sustaining engagement during major change
• Doing more with less: deliver results on a limited budget
• Enabling front line managers to be the key engagement influencers
• Redesigning intranets for collaboration and innovation
• HR practices linking employees to strategic intent
• Generating collaboration between Corporate Communication, Human Resources, Finance and Operations

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Change is a long car trip with kids in the back

Spare any change (ideas)...?

Melcrum's Change Communications conference in Melbourne has wrapped for the week and has, I think, been quite well received.

A major theme that I heard as I chaired the conference was that those in attendance wanted and needed communications professionals to take a strong advocacy role for change in organizations, to remind leaders of the people-related consequences of change.

The intention was clear, yet the frustration was palpable. What came through was that communicators find themselves largely unable to play this vital role in their organizations.

Many attendees questioned how to effectively counsel leaders who advocate secrecy, low information-sharing and last-minute revelation of tough messages, on the grounds that they "don't want people to react" to the changes.

In fact this seemingly thoughtful intention causes no end of drama, as communication professionals (or anyone on the receiving end of meagre information dribble and too-little, too-late change messages) can confirm.

The reason for this is simple: human beings are neurobiologically hardwired to react to the things that happen around them - and the greater the perceived threat, the stronger the reaction. 

Our advanced survival system

In the interest of survival, we have evolved a system (the limbic system) that is brilliant at bypassing our slow and ponderous rational brain by reacting at lightning speed to possible threats. Whether that's an object that enters our visual field and just might be a snake/spider/other nasty, or an announcement that puts in question our ability to earn a living, threats produce a reaction in the brain long before the rational mind even begins to absorb the more subtle connotations and factual details.

So, in short: people cannot NOT react to things. 

What can and sometimes does happen is people become aware of the reaction and choose to use that powerful emotional energy in a different (ideally, more rational) way.

Communicators can therefore help themselves and, by extension, their stakeholders and clients, by learning about the nine predictable types of limbic reaction and tailoring their communication plans and key messages to calm down people's agitated limbic responses. Doing so makes it more likely that people will be able to manage their own reaction, as the rational brain is given the chance to become more engaged to give a more balanced hearing to the rest of what is being said.

Change is a journey

Speakers at the conference often made the point that "change is a journey". I would agree, though I'd modify that slightly: change is like a long car trip with unruly kids in the back seat, where the kids in question are the reactive emotional responses that people's limbic systems produce. 

Why kids in the back? Well the limbic system, for all its power to help us survive, is not very sophisticated. It is located in some of the most ancient parts of our brains - the ones we share with all sorts of other mammals - which means when we're operating solely from our limbic brain, we're about as sophisticated as a poodle or a goldfish. 

Or a five-year old kid. 

Such childish reactions can take a variety of forms - bullying, sulking, throwing temper tantrums, and a range of other knee-jerk reactions.

So as we consider our leaders and communicators in the front seat trying, like mom and dad, to move forward with the journey AND keep the peace and sanity in the car, let's take a look at the nine kinds of little kids in the back seat of our car journey:

1. "We all have to follow the rules! Mom! Dad! Johnny's touching my side of the car!!" (Perfectionist/Rule-followers)
2. "Is everyone OK? Daddy, do you want a neck rub? Mom, can I sing you a song to make you happy?" (Giver/Carers)
3. "Can't we get there faster? Hey let's race the car next to us! Let's visit every attraction on the list!" (Performer/Achiever)
4. "Didn't you bring my special seat for me? Awwww no one understands me, I have special needs..." (Romantic/Individualist)
5. [says next to nothing, watches everything and everyone, probably tracks the route on a map and notes everything with interest] (Observer/Data-gatherer)
6. "Are you sure you know the way? Do we have the right map? What if we run out of gas? Were we supposed to take that last exit...?" (Loyal sceptic/Paranoid)
7. "Hey! I've got a GREAT idea, let's have a singalong! Let's play count-the-cars! Hey who wants a game of rock-paper-scissors? Ohh, I know...let's stop and eat at that place, that looks great!!" (Epicure/Fun-seeker)
8. "We're going to stop NOW. I want OUT of this car. No actually I changed my mind, we're going to drive ALL night and get this over with!" (Protector/Bully)
9. "Hey, let's calm down everyone. What can we all agree on? What do you want mom? And you dad? How about you, sis? OK so the consensus is..." (Peacemaker/Facilitator)

If you'd like to find out more about these nine kids (and their adult counterparts that you may be currently experiencing in your workplace...) email me for further details. If you were an attendee at the Melcrum Communications Conference in Melbourne last week, be sure to inquire about the special "Change is a long car trip" offer.

That's all for now - enjoy your weekend!

TM

Chair of Melcrum's "Change Communication conference" April 2009

Melcrum Australia has asked me to Chair their Change Communication conference to be held on April 1st & 2nd, 2009 in Melbourne.

Billed as an opportunity to "tap into the experience of your peers to learn how to create great change initiatives," the speakers will represent a diverse mix of industries and organizations, including: McDonalds, Microsoft, Qantas Group, Energex, St George Bank, Toyota, and Suncorp, to name just a few.

Some of the benefits of attending include learning how to:

• Understand the psychology of change
• Use innovative techniques to drive change in your organization
• Evaluate the most effective channels for communicating change
• Minimize employee uncertainty and resistance to change
• Encourage employees to use new processes and support new business objectives
• Communicate and deliver a sustained cultural change program

For more details and to register, check out the conference brochure.


Melcrum & tm

I'm happy to say that this opportunity represents the latest instance of a continued and growing association between Melcrum and tm. Over the past year, this association has included acting as Chair of their Employee Engagement conference in Sydney last May and presenting a workshop at their Strategic Communications Management Summit held in Sydney in September.

We are also in talks to produce case studies based on communication-related tm client work using the NeuroPower framework (as developed by author and strategist Peter Burow) and an article or series of articles on the useful connections to be made between neuroscience, brain research, culture change, communications and employee engagement, to potentially appear in Melcrum's bimonthly publication Strategic Communication Management magazine.
TM

Sydney workshop: Is your organization change-ready?

On the morning of Tuesday 09 September I’ll be presenting a half-day workshop on communications and change in Sydney at Melcrum’s 5^th annual Strategic Communications Management Summit.

Is your organization change-ready?

A change initiative - whether a merger, acquisition, restructure, change in leadership or other shift in strategy - is typically undertaken for practical business reasons. A change that makes sense on paper, however, can fail to deliver the expected value if the change process is not supported with tangible actions in the short term.

People issues once were considered “soft” issues, but organizations have learned there are hard consequences to mismanaging people issues during a change, including employee disengagement, dropped productivity, decreased revenue and loss of competitive advantage.

In this informative and interactive workshop you will learn how to use communications as part of a holistic strategy to shape organisational culture and mitigate the people risks in the change process.

Using client examples, I will describe an approach to culture change that features proven models and offers practical tools to identify, prioritize and address these risks. Participants will leave the workshop with new insights on how to help their organizations to be “change-ready”.

For more details download the summit brochure.

Go here for registration options for this pre-summit workshop and for the full two-day summit on 10-11 September.

TM

Employee Engagement - interview podcast now online

Alex Manchester of Melcrum Australia recently interviewed me after I chaired the Melcrum Employee Engagement conference a few weeks ago here in Sydney. The interview is now available - you can listen to the podcast here and read coverage of the conference highlights on the Melcrum internal communications Hub.
TM

Chair of Melcrum's "Employee Engagement Conference"

I've been invited to chair Melcrum's upcoming Employee Engagement conference here in Sydney. On from 29-30 May, with a couple of pre-conference workshops on the 28th, it will feature lots of advice and expertise in an area of great organizational interest. Check out the brochure here.

Melcrum is the global membership organization for internal communicators, connecting more than 25,000 communicators through research and training to share what works, with the view to improve the effectiveness and influence of internal communication in business.
TM

Blackberry backlash - toting a double-edged gadget

Well it’s finally happened. I’m being issued a Blackberry.

Like Neo being plugged into The Matrix for the first time, I am at once terrified and fascinated with what life will now hold for me. There’s really no going back.

I’ve been thinking about this development for some time now and, as so often happens, I’ve come across all sorts of references, research and ramblings on the subject. Here are some highlights, posted in my pre-Blackberry phase while my innocence is yet intact.

Blackberry backlash

Why, you might ask, have I such trepidation?

It could be a result of the countless haggard souls I’ve watched as they charge blindly down city streets – heads down, eyeing fixedly their handheld addiction – looking for all the world like a cross between an Olympic power walker and Night of the Living Dead.

No wonder some wit in London came up with the idea of a padded lamppost campaign to highlight the absurdity of these Crack(berry)heads walking down a packed city street while paying nearly no attention to where they are going.

There was a great article in last week’s Australian Financial Review. Entitled “Blackberry backlash building,” the title article perfectly captured my personal ambivalence about these ubiquitous little gadgets: neither panacea nor plague, more like a double-edged sword with the power to do good or ill, depending on how it is wielded.

The AFR article makes the point that there are upsides:

“…users are more productive, they are freed from their desks to build relationships with colleagues and clients and they can create more balance into their work lives by pocketing the device when they take a day off”

On the other hand:

“…users tend to be unnecessarily distracted by inconsequential emails, delegate less, put too little thought into their email responses and are sometimes only there in a physical sense when other people really need their full attention.”

London calling

I’ve heard many justifications for the compulsive checking of these devices whenever they beckon with a sudden bursts of light in the dead of night. Many of these have to do with differences in time zones, the 24/7 nature of the global economy and the like. But allow me to share an anecdote that a colleague passed along to me during dinner the other night.

A mate of his in Hong Kong spent most of an evening out on the town with my colleague and other friends obsessively checking his Blackberry. His rationale? “London might be trying to get in touch with me!” What went without any mention was his increasing state of inebriation (in parallel with his electronic distraction); quite whether anyone, in London or otherwise, would want him to be making business decisions at that point was a question that remained discreetly unasked.

Speaking of questions, I have two: one concerns etiquette; the other relative (self-)importance.

Mind your manners

Many people with these devices are guilty of the most appalling breaches of etiquette and social niceties. I mean think about it: until quite recently if someone sat in a meeting either sneaking a peak or indeed staring outright into that delicate space between the tabletop and their own groin region while obsessively fiddling in said delicate region with their fingers they'd have been sternly questioned if not in serious peril of a sexual harassment charge. No longer (that is, provided that they DO have a Blackberry down there!)

It's not just in meetings - as the above list of Blackberry negatives indicates, people are increasingly present in body only, while their attention is seriously compromised and thereby any intelligence they might usefully bring to bear on the conversation at hand.

At a dinner of senior managers the other night I noted their Crackberrys were littered around the table like so many drink coasters, with people reaching for their gadgets just about as often as they did their drinks. Mine was the only spot not so adorned, I noted with smug superiority. But will I still be that guy in a week’s time?

I love the following list that Judi MacCormick devised and that appeared in the AFR article last Tuesday (p 59, 06/05/2008):

Is it (or are you) really that important?

On the broader subject of just what role email should play in our (work) lives, I’ve been intrigued by an experiment that Luis Suarez has undertaken. He wants to give up on work email.

I can practically hear the sharp inhalations of breath and/or snorts of disbelief that might greet news of such a project…but he’s actually been quite successful at it.

All of which offers some hope, if only we’d stop and think about it. For my part, I’m content to take the salient lessons and warnings from the above experiences and see what awaits me.

Wait, do you hear that?

Is that the sweet sound of technology-enabled freedom I hear approaching, or...

...the sickening squelch of The Matrix cable connecting to the socket at the base of my skull as I float in my pool of liquid nutrients and the machines begin to feed off my life energy?

Stay tuned, I’ll let you know!
TM

PS -Hat tip to Alex Manchester and The Melcrum Blog for the info on Luis Suarez.

What's coming up on the tmc blog

Today I'd like to give you a glimpse of some ideas I've formed during conversations and experiences over the past two weeks and give you a preview of blog posts that are coming up.

I had a conversation with my friend Sakyakumara in Cambridge, who's generously shared his thoughts with me on the subject of "MAGIC" negotiation and whose workshop rolls out next week in the UK. Our chat provided the prompt for me to explore further what happens with the brain when we're told to do something (à la command-and-control style management) vs when we're asked to be part of the decision-making that results in a decision. Watch for a post on this subject soon.

I've also spoken to Melcrum Australia , an conference organizer and publishing house working in the domain of effective internal communications. We discussed the subject of online social networks and wondered out loud: have we hit "Facebook fatigue" or are these networks still relevant today? The fruit of those discussions will, I hope, be a weeklong series of articles appearing here and possibly on their members-only blog, The Internal Comms Hub.

Working this week with a very bright bunch in the Human Capital team at Australia's largest professional services firm highlighted a couple of themes that I look forward to writing about in the weeks to come: first, what are the significant differences between the male and female brains and second, what in neuroscientific terms is the value of providing affirms and positive feedback to people?

While compiling a project proposal last week for one of Australia's top global investment banks I became familiar with Keith Sawyer's terrific book Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration. Watch this blog for a review of the book this weekend, part of a new series of book reviews.

Next week I'll be in Melbourne working with a group of senior partners, again at Australia's largest professional services firm. While I'm there I plan to connect with my mate Adrian Cropley to discuss holding a NeuroPower information session/workshop to be held in Melbourne looking at how neuroscience and brain research offer insights into the area of Change Communications. More info to come on that one, watch this space!
TM