It all started with Scott Robinson telling ThoughtWorkers that he wants to work with us. How did he do it? Through a really creative reverse Facebook-ad. Over the last couple of days, all ThoughtWorker denizens of Twitterville have unloaded on on the #DearScott hashtag - some amused at Scott's cleverness, some trying to socially network, others just being funny! I think #DearScott should be a way for just about anyone around the world who wants to work at ThoughtWorks to get in touch with us. It's just a great story of how social media is completely transforming the way we work, communicate and do business these days. All the best Scott, hope you do well at the interviews!© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

While a rather fascinating and inspiring conversation is developing nicely further on over in Google Plus, around a recent blog entry that my good friend Euan Semple published over at his blog under the title "Ten ways to create a knowledge ecology" (A superb piece of writing that, by the way, I can strongly recommend you all have a look and read it through as well, in case you haven’t done it just yet, as I do believe it’s probably one of the best articles published this year around the social transformation that businesses need to go through in order to become and live social, and help prepare for that knowledge ecology that Euan hints so nicely), the topic of communities and gardening communities through community managers (Or community facilitators) came up again and I thought I would go ahead and share with you folks this quick blog post where I can reference a rather interesting and very thought-provoking short video clip that tries to answer the question we have all been trying to answer all along: What is (a) community? You would remember how in the recent past I put together another blog entry around this very same topic trying to explain and define what a community is, and, most importantly, what it is not!, under the heading "Community Management Fundamentals - Where Do I Start?" Well, earlier on today, I bumped into this short blog post by my good friend Nancy White where she is referencing a brief video clip, rather inspiring, I may have to add, that pretty much explains it all very nicely on what distinguishes a community, and its many traits, and what not. Worth while watching it through, for sure! Thus I have taken the liberty of embedding the video over here, produced and released by non-profit organisation Essential Arts, as part of Bilocal, so that you folks could also have a look and watch it along: What is a Community? from Essential Arts on Vimeo. Pretty inspiring, don’t you think? Well, on that very same Google Plus conversation I linked above, my good friend, John Tropea shared another link to a recent blog article he put together under "Knowledge ecology related to facilitating CoPs", where he shares extensively what his experience in helping facilitate communities of practice has been all along, by referencing and annotating further a good number of the various different entry points that Euan himself referenced on the original blog post on knowledge ecologies. Another must-read! The rather interesting part from John’s article is his very succinct distinction between a community manager and a community facilitator in helping get the most out of the overall community experience without mandating how communities should really operate. Quite the opposite eventually, i.e. empowering them to manage their own flows of knowledge, their own connections amongst community members, how they collaborate with one another, and how they can help address business problems effectively, but without having too much intervention happening altogether. Acting more like leaders and facilitators leading and showing the way, rather than (community) managers trying to manage just another project; in this case a community. Lots of great tips in this regard shared across by John himself, that makes his blog entry a really good and worth while read for those folks who would want to unleash the full power of their own communities by perhaps just letting them go farther enough to discover their own value and build upon it over the course of time, as CheeChin Liew nicely added into the conversation with this priceless quote, picking up on another one from the one and only Dave Snowden: "You can’t manage community but you can create a community ecology" And that folks is one of the many many reasons why I am having a total blast at the moment, over at Google Plus engaging in such conversations as the one I tried to portrait briefly with this blog post that would surely help us all mature further on about our own ideas on the art of not just managing but facilitating successfully (online) communities. Yes, indeed, it’s a tough job! No-one said it would be an easy one, but with priceless conversations, resources and further links shared across by those in the know, as mentioned above, somehow the job does seem a little bit easier now, don’t you think?

Today at ThoughtWorks University, I tried a different format for the team's retrospective. This is a team that's one week into their first project and have finished their first iteration time-box. In order to introduce them to the idea that there are different patterns to retrospectives, I wanted to try a different way of conducting the ritual. Often retros are a very left-brained activity, with people doing a structured brainstorm, then analytically bubbling up the most important themes and then discussing action items to resolve or address the issues. I wanted to try a right brained format that takes a more creative approach to reflection and problem-solving. Let me tell you how I did what I did.Preparation for the eventOften we spend a lot of time in retrospectives just brainstorming issues, so I wanted to get that out of the way and determine the highest priority discussion items before the meeting. To achieve this, I tried Google Moderator. People could make suggestions of topics they wanted to discuss, vote items up or vote them down. We decided that we were going to discuss only the top five items that came up. By the end of it we had 130 votes on 10 suggestions from 26 people, so I'll say the preparation went quite well.To prepare the room for the meeting, I put up the above poster at different places in the room. I also laid out the 'table cloth' on five cafe style tables, by covering them with flip chart paper. To top it all off, I ensured that each table had pencils, crayons, markers, stickies and index cards. Everything that could stimulate their creativity.How I ran the eventSo once we were done with the voting, it was time to get to the meat of the activity. I did my best to keep to the essence of The World Cafe format. Here are the steps I followed:Since this is a new team, I started off with a safety check to determine if everyone felt safe to contribute their ideas and share their thoughts.Once I'd confirmed the safety levels in the group, I assigned a problem on each table.Each table had a minimum of four to five people on it.For the first round of 15 minutes, everyone at the table discussed the problem I'd assigned to them and also potential solutions. The groups had the opportunity to discuss problems in many different ways. They could doodle on the table cloth, or even do elaborate illustrations to graphically record their conversations. They could use the stickies or index cards as facilitation tools. They could note action items, or just have a rambling discussion!After 15 minutes, I had one person stay back at each table to retain context and play host while others moved to different tables.As a cafe-host, I floated across tables to ensure everyone was comfortable with the topic on hand and had enough, safe discussion going on. Wherever I saw things getting stuck for too long, I interjected and let the group see a different perspective.I encouraged participants to link and connect ideas coming from their previous table conversations.In the last round of conversation, I asked people to synthesise their discoveries and to consolidate action items for the problem they were solving.Once everyone was done, I consolidated action items on a whiteboard, ensuring that most of them had an owner for them.How I think the event wentI actually felt we got a lot of discussion going in the retro and gave each item it's due importance. We got a lot of diverse perspectives and connections on each problem, which gave us a lot of interesting action items to work on. The cross-pollination across tables ensured that people were engaged through the discussions and that we were sharing ideas across small groups. In contrast to traditional retro formats, we spent an equal and a large amount of time on all issues, by trying to solve them in rotating, small groups. This means we now have a huge list of tangible action items that the team can execute to make real improvements. If you wish to run a World Cafe style retro and want to learn more about my experience, please do reach out to me. There's a lot of good information in the World Cafe hosting guides, so do use them. Of course, there's also the great book by Juanita Brown and David Isaacs.And BTW, if you have success with this format, please do drop a note on the comments section of this blogpost.© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

Last week, upon my return from my last business trip, I was hoping to be able to resume my regular blogging activities and share with you folks some of the interesting conversations I have been engaging with and other interesting resources worth while sharing across. Alas, my local Internet Service Provider, movistar, had other plans for me: no other than disrupt an entire week with a rather poor performance of my ADSL line to the point where I spent more time being offline, disconnected, than connected. Rather frustrating, to say the l east, but since a long while ago I learned to apply one of the key principles to blogging, i.e. never ever blog whenever you are upset about something, or someone!, I decided to take a couple of days break from posting something over here, waiting for the connectivity issues to be fixed, because I know if I were to complain I wouldn’t be getting any kind of response, like I never did back in October 2009. And it looks like today things are back to normal somewhat, which means, I am back to normal, too! Off we go with my usual blogging activities and what a better way of getting things going, once again, than with the inspiring video of the week? This time around Social Media @ Work. Indeed, this is a rather short video clip that lasts for a little bit over 13 minutes where you will see a whole bunch of thought leaders sharing their insights, experiences and know-how around the impact of social networking, not only behind the firewall, but also outside. Good friends like Neville Hobson and Livio Hughes, amongst several others, get to spend a few minutes sharing some insights further on why internal communicators should be paying attention, just as much as they have done for other traditional means of communication, to other new forms of engaging their audiences, like social media or social tools, in order to foster, cultivate and nurture a much more engaging dialogue amongst employees AND with employees right at the center of the interactions: Social Media @ Work from Red Sky Vision on Vimeo. There are a bunch of people out there who have been claiming all along how most knowledge workers out there are all marketers, in their own terms, and for those products they are really passionate about. Well, after watching the video clip a couple of times I think the same thing could be said about communicators, whether internal or external. With the existence, and abundance, of social networking tools, we are no longer having to depend on one or two individuals, or a small team of communicators, to help spread the message around. Instead, everyone is now empowered to become a communicator, engage their own audiences, and keep the conversations going on those important messages they would want to share across. Essentially, every single employee has now become the corporate brand, whether brands like it or not. All of a sudden, brands have now got, finally, a face, a voice. A passionate human being driving their message across to multiple audiences and the only thing that the Communications & Marketing teams can do is to embrace and facilitate that shift, that unstoppable change. They no longer control the message. Mind you, they never had… It is as if that opportunity to let it go, to abandon that command and control attitude from Communications & Marketing, is finally coming about as one of those corporate realities that no-one can neglect, nor should ignore. Yes, the video clip may well be oriented towards communicators and all, but if you take a closer look, beyond that initial focus group, you would be able to see how plenty of its key learnings would also be relevant for everyone who is involved with social tools. And that’s the whole beauty of the video itself, that it will provide everyone out there with plenty of advice on why it’s becoming an imperative to be very well versed in this social media space, if we wouldn’t want to be left behind, and why it’s no longer a nice thing to have but an essential key trait to be able to make the most out of your social networking tools suite, which, once again, is raising a rather important and critical question: Can the corporate world run their business successfully and effectively, without jumping into the social computing bandwagon, whether internal or external? Something tells me that it wouldn’t. It’s already passed that point of no return for most businesses out there, just like it’s done the same for our society in general, so the only remaining question would probably be "How are you going to empower and engage your employees to help them drive the message of what really matters to your customers, business partners and competitors?" Well, perhaps you would need to show them "Social Media @ Work" to get the ball rolling, if you haven’t done so just yet after all. And if you already have, show / share it with them anyway, as a good refresher of why living social matters. Now more than ever!

I find it amusing when people speak of social learning and technology enabled learning almost in the same breath. It's as if social learning is impossible without the help of technology. It's odd - didn't people have coffee table conversations before the age of social media? Did people not learn from each other? While I understand how the the recent explosion of the social web accelerates this process, social learning is hardly a phenomenon solely dependent on technology.In today's blogpost, i want to introduce 7 different patterns you might want to try out before you even take the plunge into technology enabled methods to facilitate social learning. At ThoughtWorks we see these patterns everyday and that's perhaps one big reason why collaborative learning seems to thrive at this company. Don't get me wrong - you're likely to still need technology. I hope though, that by applying some of these patterns you'll have taken several high impact steps to influence your organisation's learning culture. With that said, let's take a look at the patterns.Reface your Team SpacesImage taken from karthikc's Flickr stream under the Creative Commons license.If charity begins at home, learning's got to begin at the workplace. While we pay so much attention to the curriculum, it can't hurt to reconfigure the workplace to facilitate learning and collaboration. A few weeks back I read an excellent article by James Clay where he wrote about the importance of how institutions need to create spaces that encourage informal learning while creating a context for people to socialise and learn at the same time. The article made absolute sense to me, though it still intrigues me to see so many workplaces all across the world that adopt a closed cubicle and corner office approach.At ThoughtWorks we've taken a people centric approach to designing team rooms - the above picture is indicative of our open workplace approach. We keep experimenting with seating methods to maximise collaboration on our project teams - the uPod configuration is just one of those different layouts that we keep trying out every now and then. There are several benefits to such open layouts: people talk to each other and throw out ideas without any restrictions or walls. Information radiators and open wall spaces give people enough and more opportunity to collaboratively problem solve and find creative solutions. Most importantly, the open workplace allows for cross pollination of ideas across teams and 'departments', since we've torn down the unnecessary walls. Whether we we like it or not, we see things happen and we learn from each other's successes and failures.All the chest thumping aside, I completely understand that moving to a completely open workspace isn't trivial for those in cubicle and corner office land. Which is where I think you'll find these tips to build a collaborative workplace really useful. It's a huge, but really valuable change and all the little steps you can take to get there, are worth their weight in gold.Bring in the LunchImage taken from wetwebwork's Flickr stream under the Creative Commons license.Another pattern you'll see very often at ThoughtWorks is the idea of learning lunches or brown bag seminars. The idea is very simple. If you have an idea you want to share, or something you want to discuss or a concept you'd like others to learn about, organise a meeting over lunch so people can socialise and learn in a comfortable setting. These short, 30 minute, one hour or 90 minute sessions often end up being really valuable. The very fact that people have the opportunity to leave when they think they've had enough, makes it a relaxed setting, where participants aren't just sitting through the discussion because they were asked to. As a community initiated event, it provides an learning opportunity for the people, by the people.Pecha-Kucha Nights or Just Ignite ItImage taken from pecha kucha cologne's Flickr stream under the Creative Commons license.Something we've been tried recently is the idea of Pecha-Kucha nights or Ignite gatherings. You may have read my recent posts about how we're using Pecha Kucha at ThoughtWorks University. The idea of Pecha Kucha is fairly simple:Meet on a designated evening.People can present on any topic of their choice.Their talks should have no more than 20 slides which automatically transition within 20 seconds each.If you wish, you can allot a couple of minutes at the end of each talk so participants can do some QnA.I've seen some great Pecha-Kucha events -- the recent Agile Suitcase event at XP2010, is a prime example. The breadth of ideas that get thrown out, the accidental and serendipitous learning that we go through and just the remarkable insight it gives us about our colleagues and others attending the event, are just the kind of things you need to learn informally and socially. Do remember, Pecha-Kucha and Ignite aren't the only short - presentation formats. There's also Lightning Talks and Talk20.Open Space Conferences - For the People, by the People Image taken from edmittance's Flickr stream under the Creative Commons license.If there was ever a group learning pattern that was truly for the people by the people - it's got to be the Open Space approach. I've seen a few of these at ThoughtWorks and more recently at the XP2010 conference. In fact we use Open Space to define the agenda for several of our time-slots at ThoughtWorks University. As a company, we're also quite privileged to have a distinguished Open Space facilitator in our midst - Steven 'Doc' List. Doc writes extensively about the Open Space approach and you should definitely read his posts on the topic. Again the idea of an Open Space is very simple.At the beginning of an Open Space the participants sit in a circle. The facilitator will introduce the theme of their gathering, and invite all participants to identify any issue or opportunity related to the theme. Participants willing to raise a topic will come to the centre of the circle, write it on a sheet of paper and announce it to the group before choosing a time and a place for discussion and posting it on a wall. That wall becomes the agenda for the meeting.From that point, it's upto the group to attend sessions they care about. There are just four principles for Open Space conferences:Whoever comes is the right people: and so, you shouldn't be offended if some people don't come and the people that arrive are the people who genuinely care.Whenever it starts is the right time: spirit and creativity don't run by the clock.Whatever happens is the only thing that could have: once something's happened, we can't break our heads over it. We need to move on and let the group dictate the agenda.When it's over, it's over: we can't tell how long a discussion can take, but when we feel we're done talking we shouldn't need to stretch the discussion just to make for the time in our slot. As a corollory, 'if it's not over, it's not over' - participants are welcome to take their conversation beyond the planned slot, if they feel they'll gain sufficient value from it.There's also one law - "Law of Two Feet". The idea is that if you're caught in a discussion that you're not contributing to or not learning from, then you should just use your two feet and go someplace else! And most importantly, no one should take offence to this.I've seen some really great conversations and learnings come out of Open Space conferences and if the idea interests you, I encourage you to pick up Harrison Owen's excellent book - Open Space Technology (A User's Guide).Take it Offsite - Away DaysImage taken from Sam Newman's Flickr stream under the Creative Commons license.A huge part of the culture at ThoughtWorks is how every year, each country organises an offsite for all the ThoughtWorkers of that country. In our culture we call these Away Days and I'm sure they have their parallels in the retreats that various other companies keep doing. Our Away Days are a great place for ThoughtWorkers to get together and not just know each other, but to informally learn from each others experiences. The geeky company that we are, I've seen beautiful things happen at Away Days -- geeks get together and write some code for an organisation like Unicef; we share good practices across our consulting engagements, we discuss a range of esoteric topics and we often listen to cool people like Andrew McAfee speak about their area of expertise. For a company like ThoughtWorks, this social interaction is just gold-dust! Of course, on the way we have a lot of fun as this post about our 2007 Away Day will tell you.Unconference It - Barcamps/ Geek NightsImage taken from kk+'s Flickr stream under the Creative Commons license.Just like Open Space, unconferences, particularly BarCamps and Geek Nights are a huge part of our culture at ThoughtWorks. While geek nights are a bit different and often have at least one defined, main event, barcamps are open-to-all, participatory workshop-events, where participants provide the content. Like Open Space conferences, barcamps are largely self-organised events where participants decide the agenda. The only difference is that barcamps are typically technology oriented gatherings, though in the recent past people have used the format for other topics as well. The idea behind barcamps is pretty simple:When you come, be prepared to share with barcampers.When you leave, be prepared to share it with the world. Barcamps operate on the 'no spectators, only participants' principle. Attendees should either do a session or contribute in some other way to make the event a success. If you wish to present a session, then all you need to do is prepare in advance and be at the event early enough to propose it. People at the event decide which sessions they'd like to see. Once you do present at a barcamp, you're obliged to share your knowledge with the rest of the world. Cool, isn't it? If you wish to host a barcamp, check the wiki page to organise such events.Conference It!Image credit: ThoughtWorks Bangalore.Last, but certainly not the least, I want to talk about a recent phenomenon, particularly at ThoughtWorks India. We've been organising an internal conference called XConf, which we're using as a platform to share innovative ideas, good practices and to socialise, meet and learn. Our first event at Chennai was a grand success and our upcoming event at Bangalore is likely to be even bigger. We keep the organisation of this event as simple as we can - we encourage all ThoughtWorkers from across India to submit ideas for talks; we then arrive at a shortlist for the event and then voila, it's time for us to travel to the host location and spend a weekend sharing knowledge, like there's no tomorrow. From all the experiences that you're likely to hear about this approach, you'll realise that there's a huge benefit in harnessing your company's collective intelligence in internal conferences. See if you can try something like this and talk to a ThoughtWorker if you're keen to know more about what we do at XConf.At the end of this rather long blogpost, all I'll say is that these are just a subset of the many social learning patterns I see at ThoughtWorks, which the world can learn from. Do remember that your lobby, your pantry, your cafeteria, your all hands meetings, your project onboarding practices, are all opportunities for you to create the context for social learning. So while technology is important, don't forget the human elements that build the foundation for any collaborative learning you'd like to facilitate at the workplace.What do you think of the ideas on today's blogpost? As always, I'm keen to hear your thoughts so do let me know by adding liberally to the comments section of this article.© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

It’s been over a month since I first started making use of Google Plus. Yes, me, too!, I still can’t believe I have been there for that long already! But I am back to Twitter. I am back to making active use of one of my favourite social networking tools out there, where I have been spending a large chunk of time over the course of the last four years and counting. No, I haven’t given up on Google Plus either. Quite the opposite! It’s now my top favourite social software tool out there on the Social Web, as I tried to reflect on a good number of different blog posts over the course of the last few weeks; something that didn’t happen for plenty of other social tools out there when they first launched. So what’s happening then? Does this all mean that I will be using both Twitter and Google Plus, in conjunction, when a couple of weeks back I ventured to state that my days in Twitter were numbered? Yes, indeed! It looks like that’s what’s going to happen: for the next few weeks, perhaps months!, both Google Plus and Twitter will be walking along, hand in hand, for yours truly. Why? Well, for a good simple reason, to be honest, I want to get the best of both worlds! Of course, who wouldn’t, right? Like I said, back then, when I was first getting started with making use of Google Plus, I ventured to state how my participation in Twitter would be diminishing to alarming levels in favour of G+, as I felt the latter was starting to become both my aspirin and vitamin for my social interactions, out there, outside of the corporate firewall. I still feel the very same way about Google Plus and how it’s taken over most of my external social presence from various social tools, over the last few weeks, but then again I still see great value in making use of Twitter itself, so I thought I would go ahead and share with you folks today how I plan to make them both work for me, specially, in the case of Twitter, since there have been a bunch of you who have asked me in the recent past how I plan to make use of it, now that G+ has got most of my attention. There are three different use cases for which I still think that Twitter is unbeatable and would probably be hard to beat over the next couple of years. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that Twitter should sleep it over thinking they have won already. They haven’t. It’s just the rest of the social networking sites haven’t caught up with it just yet, but they will. Specially, Google Plus. So what are those three use cases that would still drag me into Twitter on a daily basis? Well, here they are: Immediacy: Indeed, this is, perhaps, one of the most powerful use cases for Twitter at the moment, as I have mentioned in a series of blog entries in the past, specially, when facing emergencies of whatever the kind, whether natural catastrophes or whatever else. There is nothing out there that would help you get up to speed with world events and be in the know just as Twitter does. It just works! And it does a wonderful job at it. So when things break loose and information gathering becomes of paramount importance, more specifically, in a rather short period of time, Twitter is probably as good as it gets. The killer combination of hashtags, Twitter Lists, Local & Global Trending Topics and the right social network(s) surely make it an essential tool to have, which is why ever since I switched over to Google Plus I have come to rely much more heavily on both Twitter Lists and hash tags to keep me in the know within a matter of seconds. Priceless! Information Density: This is also perhaps one of my favourite use cases for Twitter as well. Never thought that 140 characters, or less, would prove to be so useful. Indeed, compared to Google Plus, the amount of information, links, golden nuggets, inspiring insights, etc. etc. you get exposed to in a single Twitter screen / page would probably make it worth while all the way to stick around with it for a while. It’s something difficult to see work just right and scalable in other social networking sites. And, to me, the perfect ground to mine top-notch, best of breed content that I would want to give it, at a later time, a bit more of a permanent home rather through this blog or perhaps G+ itself, which is where the conversations are happening at the moment. Yes, indeed, Twitter has just transformed itself into an invaluable information provider that I can easily scan, filter, mine, utilise further to the best of my abilities to be in the know of what’s happening out there in the good number of topics I am interested in or passionate about. Once again, in order to make it work for me I have decided to make a heavier use of specific hashtags (Like #socbiz #e20 #km #kmers #e2conf #cmgr #cmtybc and so forth) and Twitter Lists to make the most out of it trying to keep the noise at a bare minimum, so that signals keep popping up from all over the place. Mobile: In a recent panel I participated in, on the topic of Twitter, of course, I mentioned how perhaps the killer feature from Twitter itself, and, almost definitely, its bright new future may be aligned with the whole world of Mobile. No, I am not referring to the wonderful number of really good mobile Twitter Apps available out there for smartphones and tablets, but more along the lines of Twitter becoming an integral part of the Mobile OS, with the upcoming release, specially, of iOS 5, where the mobile user experience fully integrated with Twitter is probably going to take it into the next level. Just like we could send an SMS pretty easily, so will we, very soon, be capable of tweeting with the same ease of use, regardless of where we would be inside our smartphones. And since I have got an iPhone4 I can imagine how it would still keep dragging along my mobile use over time, specially, when I am on the road and would need / want to share updates quickly of what’s happening around me. Yes, the iOS App from G+ is a rather good v1, but I think it’s missing still a little bit on the Immediacy front I just mentioned above. And that’s it! Those are the main three use cases for which I am still planning to make use of Twitter from here onwards. The rest of the conversation(s), never better said, have moved already to Google Plus, where I am having a great time connecting back with both my Twitter networks, where about 2/3 of them are already actively using G+, and with long time gone folks Twitter made me forget about, because of the silly Twitter API limits I talked about briefly a while ago. It’s never been so refreshing to have them back into my social streams and learning what’s been happening to them and what they are working on without having that feeling I am missing something, which was always lingering around in Twitter for a long while, as a technical limitation of the system itself not being capable of handling well the river of news. That’s all gone now! I can, finally, decide for myself, whether to dive right into the streams or whether let them flow freely and move on. Now, it’s my choice. Not Twitter’s any longer. Which brings me to another key point I would want to share across to finish off this blog post, and which it is meant, specially, for those folks I used to follow in Twitter, but that I am not doing so any longer. At least, in the traditional way I have been doing over the last few years. Yes, that’s right. Ever since my conversations have now moved to Google Plus (See previous blog entries on the topic for more info…) and most of my Twitter networks are there already, I have decided to do some Twitter Hygiene, as my good friend, Marcia Conner would say, and unfollow all of those folks and move them to Twitter Lists, where I can still keep up with them all, but without having a cluttered timeline anymore. The smart folks at The Next Web explained it rather beautifully just the other day under a rather insightful and engaging blog post under the title "Why unfollowing is a good thing and why you should make lists on Twitter". It isn’t anything personal at all, since, like I said, I would still be in touch with them all rather through those Twitter Lists or through Google Plus itself, where they are already rather active engaging in a good number of fascinating conversations. It’s more about refocusing and reinvesting your time with both social networking sites without having to go and suffer from social fatigue or seeing multiple across the board repeated updates. Call it fine-tuning your social presence out there on the Social Web. I call it redefining a whole new experience where the conversation has moved into a better place to happen altogether and instead it’s left behind an amazing place to collect relevant and interesting content that will keep feeding those conversations for a long while. So if you are one of the folks I have unfollowed just recently in Twitter, don’t take it personal; it was never meant to be that; it’s just that I needed to redefine my own social presence with the huge disruption of Google Plus taking place a few weeks back!, it’s now time for me to readjust and get the best of both worlds; so, if you would want to stay in touch whether on Twitter or Google Plus itself, do reach out to ensure we are still connected. It wouldn’t be the first, second, nor third time that Twitter may have played its silly game of unfollowing inadvertently without me or you noticing it. See? That’s one of the reasons why I have moved elsewhere, but, after all, fear not, I am still just one tweet away from you, my dear social network(s)! Please, don’t be a stranger!

Continuing our newly established tradition of Pecha-Kucha nights at ThoughtWorks University each Wednesday night, we did our second Pecha Kucha night today. Again a whole lot of fun, great serendipitous learning for all of us and an excellent insight into various presentation styles. It's a bit unfortunate that I'm away on holiday for the next two weeks of TWU and I'll miss the events on the next two Wednesdays. Anyways, here are some of the presentations people put up and again they're no substitute for being there live at the event, but they're definitely indicative of what you could expect at such evenings. Do remember that you can see most presentations on slideshare using the tag twupk. This is my last post on the Pecha Kucha nights for this term of ThoughtWorks University, but you'll hear more from me when I'm back and we start the third term for this year. Sam Tardif - 17 Reasons why AFL is Better than your Favourite Sport 17 Reasons why AFL's better than your favourite sport Abubacker Siddiqui - Health Health Stuart Greenhall - What Consultants can learn from Optimus Prime What consultants can learn from Optimus Prime Priyanka Shah - Indian Classical Dances Garima Singh - Introduction to GIT Rohit Bansal - Running a Green Business The Green Business Akash Bhalla - The Consequences of Actions © Sumeet Moghe, 2009

A few weeks back I was all set to start working with a friend of mine. I rate her very, very highly and she was going to be a real asset to ThoughtWorks when she'd join. A couple of weeks before her joining date though, I spoke to her and learned that her client can't release her from her current project. When we caught up, it appeared that her employers hadn't communicated her planned exit to the clients and at the eleventh hour they threw a fit. My friend and I spoke at length about possible solutions, but it looked like she was irreplaceable on her project -- given that she was leading it. While I admire my friend's decision to stay back on her current job to serve her existing customer, it seemed to me that her project was at a really high risk if it was so dependent on her.On Agile teams we often talk about the truck factor: "The number of people on your team who have to be hit with a truck before the project is in serious trouble".While being hit by a truck isn't a very pleasant metaphor, you could easily substitute that occurrence by people leaving their jobs, going on vacation or falling sick. The smaller your truck factor, the more risk your project is at. The larger your truck factor, the better you're managing your risk. So if all that needs to happen for your project to fail is for you to leave the company and go, then I argue your project is already at a really high risk and there's something you need to do about it. I've often heard my colleague and ThoughtWorks consultant, Angela Ferguson talk about the importance for consultants to plan their obsolescence. It's an interesting thought - because if you're the 'hero' on your project, you perhaps want to retain that status. Unfortunately, being a hero isn't the best thing for your clients! So in today's post, I want to talk about three simple strategies that can help you plan your obsolescence in your team.On typical, leader driven, command and control projects, there's only one person who has a vision for how the final product takes shape. They understand the strategy, the release plan and even plan the little bits of work that each member of the team performs. As it turns out, when these people leave, the project is in absolute shambles. Agile teams mitigate this risk by applying the practice of Collective Ownership. The idea is for all members of the team to contribute ideas to every segment of the project. This defies traditional wisdom where a single architect is responsible for unifying the vision for your project. Agile however, is based around real-life experiences with human behaviour, and the one thing we know about people is that they make mistakes! Architects/ Chief Designers/ Project Managers all make mistakes - and they're not wrong to do so. Unless you're dealing with a trivial piece of transactional work, it's impossible for one person to know everything about everything. By ensuring that everyone explicitly understands and contributes to the project's design and planning, you encourage diverse perspectives, and reduce the risk of letting one person's mistakes fail the project.So the next time you're planning out some fancy solution-ing workshop, include the rest of your team members in it. Try an Agile Card Wall to track and manage your project's progress as against a plan on Microsoft Project, which only you can see. Yes, you'll need an electronic version of your plan and you may have distributed teams as well -- in that case use a collaborative project management tool like Mingle. Remember, you need to move from a point where it's your project plan, to a point where it's the team's shared vision.The other thing you'll see on Agile teams is the act of Pairing. The idea is to have two heads solve a problem instead of just one, thereby achieving some interesting benefits. Firstly the quality of the work goes up, because while one person is creating the output, another person is checking it. The increased quality always leads to big savings on the project as time goes on."Laurie Williams of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City has shown that paired programmers are only 15% slower than two independent individual programmers, but produce 15% fewer bugs. (N.B.: The original study showed that 'error-free' code went from 70% to 85%; it may be more intuitive to call this a 50% decrease of errors, from 30% to 15%.) Since testing and debugging are often many times more costly than initial programming, this is an impressive result." - The EconomistThe other, more intangible benefit of pairing is that of knowledge sharing. Constant rotation of pairs ensures that every understands every part of the project almost equally well. This again helps ensure a higher truck factor on the team. So think about this from the perspective of L&D and elearning projects - how about having instructional designers pair with builders and project managers. How about having builders pair with testers and how about having SME's pair with all the different roles? You can build a truly cross-functional team that can deal with the risk of losing a random person.Last year I read a really interesting article on the Harvard Business Review blog about why the wrong people get laid off at their jobs. From the blog, "Legend has it that Gordius, king of Gordium, tied a knot so intricate that no one could untangle it. There were no visible ends. It lasted for centuries." The article discovered that the people that often got laid off were the people whose work the company understood quite well. It often didn't matter that they were superb workers - the fact was that people understood the risk of doing without them. On the other hand, people who were Gordian Knots - who performed well, but whose work no one understood were the ones that seemed to keep their jobs. While this strategy may seem to help you as an individual, it's more likely to backfire. Firstly, if no one understands your work and you're not as good as you think, you're likely to get fired anyway. More importantly, the mystery around what you do may protect your status but hurts your client, as a consequence hurts your employers and then hurts you. The examples of the AIG and Lehmann collapse, finally triggering the downturn there for us to see.So if you really care about your clients and your employers, spend some time each day, demystifying what you do. Refine your job description, create standard work that'll help you teach others what you do, coach others to perform your tasks, write a wiki page for each of your individual capabilities. Create a toolkit for a potential replacement. Think as if you were going to roll off the project tomorrow! While I've put my friend on the spot when writing this article, I realise that despite all the great wisdom out there, I haven't been great at planning my own obsolescence. Which is why you'll see this post when I'm on vacation - I want to see how my pet project performs in my absence. I've done what I can to narrate my work and hopefully the team is fully empowered to make my decisions when I'm not around. Over the next few months, I want to ensure that I detail each piece of work that I do for my employers. If anything, that'll give me the opportunity to try different roles in the organisation - if the opportunity comes by.What do you think about the idea of planning obsolescence? I can understand the choice of words can be a tad depressing - though I'm keen to know from you if my argument made sense to you. Do let me know what you think - I'll look forward to your comments on this post.© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

In the last few weeks a lot has been written about whether Google Plus is the ultimate killer social networking site of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or several others, you name it. Perhaps we have seen far too many articles and blog posts on the topic and while I do think it’s just a bit too early to make such kind of statements, even if Google Plus has just reached over 25 million users already. I still think it’s a bit too early to be announcing the painful death of each of those social networking environments. Let’s not forget how long it took both Facebook and Twitter to become mainstream and reach that tipping point of no return, of rampant progress, of gaining enough relevance and importance to stick around for a while, in short, of having enough global impact that almost everyone has heard, or knows about them. G+ still needs to reach that level. I do know though it will reach it eventually, perhaps even sooner than anyone else!, but what I am rather surprised about is the fact that hardly anyone has talked or blogged about the fact that Plus does present a real threat to the king of communications, collaboration and knowledge sharing: email! And here is why. I know, and I do realise, I am very much due a couple of posts on this blog around the progress reports from my long standing initiative about living "A World Without Email"; it’s been a good few months since the last time I published such reports and I am sure folks would be curious to know how things have been going all along since the last one, so I have already started to draft those posts, which are going to be a bit massive, by the way, since they will contain lots of interesting reading materials on the whole topic of ditching corporate email. Thus stay tuned for them coming up shortly! However, I thought I would perhaps give you a tease with this blog post here today to share some further insights on why I *do* believe that Google Plus poses a potential real threat to email. But before I go ahead and do that, I would strongly encourage you all to have a look into a rather interesting, and great read by Matt Hames in a recent blog entry titled "Google+ is not taking on Facebook, it is taking on e-mail" where he exposes some of the issues, or problems, email has been having for decades, and how Google Plus, once again, would apply that aspirin and vitamin effect to address those pain points and fix them all. Here is a noteworthy quote from his article: "Yes, e-mail is a simple way to share some interesting learning. Think about how many e-mails you get with NY Times articles, or mashable articles, sent to a dozen or so people, with no context just "hey, read this". The "hey, read this" is often written as - FYI. Worse still, e-mail is a black hole for knowledge. Once in yesterday’s e-mail, its destined to be ignored and eventually deleted. Even if it is thoughtfully placed in a folder, e-mail search isn’t great. And e-mail conversations are the worst. People end up blaming the original e-mail for all the subsequent ones. And someone coming in late won’t be able to follow the conversation." [Emphasis mine] I would strongly recommend you to read the rest of it; it will be worth while your time in setting up the stage on why G+ may well be marking the end of email as we know it over the course of time, which is something that I am sure most of us would find rather ironic seeing what a strong player GMail is, for instance, at the moment. But it could surely happen! In fact, it’s already happening! Yes, that’s right. As most of you folks know already, I have been using Google Plus for a little bit over a month already, and during the course of that time I have noticed a drastic decrease on the number of inbound corporate emails, as well as external, personal ones over the course of time. So in the last 4 weeks, and what I have got this week so far, I have received an average of 9 emails per day, compared to 15 received last year over the same period of time, or compared to the 33 I received in 2008, when I was first getting things started. So right there, you can see a decrease of nearly 60% of emails for that 4 to 5 week period of time, in the 4th year of tracking progress from the previous year, which is a rather substantial reduction on my inbound email count, compared to previous years. Not sure what you would think about it, but I am finding it rather remarkable and mind-blowing to finally have an external social networking site that can help me tame the email beast, even further, onto becoming unnoticeable altogether, pretty much like IBM Connections does for me today behind the firewall with corporate email. So, at this point in time, I am sure you may be wondering what kinds of interactions that I used to have through those few inbound emails are now coming through Google Plus. Well, here is a short list of the most frequent ones: Questions & Answers (Whether public or private): the fact you can post a question to a circle, or to one or more individuals from the same single interface, along with your various Stream(s) is priceless! Specially, when you can aggregate all of those responses in a single thread altogether as well without going insane trying to make some sense into it! Information Sharing: Along the lines of sharing links to interesting Web sites, blog posts, etc. etc. publicly or through your circles. What Matt mentions as one of the strongest selling points from G+ … sharing! And no longer just a social networking activity per se, necessarily, on its own. In Google Plus we don’t facebook, nor tweet, we just basically share. Something that everyone can relate to without using foreign language terms to most folks, just like "I will email it to you".  Customer Interactions: This has been one of the most refreshing interactions I have been welcoming to G+ right from the start. Most of the customers I interact with are already heavy, active users of Plus; we started interacting through Twitter, LinkedIn and through blogs, and, lately, I am finding out how those interactions are happening on G+ alone and no-one seems to be complaining about it. In fact, long standing issues from other SNS are a thing of the past. There is now a flow, a tracking record, an opportunity to share publicly or privately without having that worry whether the system will mess up or not, or whether unwanted parties would have access to those private exchanges or not. Sharing just happens naturally and in meaningful way: a conversation. The way it was always meant to be. Remember blogging back in the day?  Discussion / Conversation: What before used to take place as a back and forth "Reply" or "Reply to All" it’s now finally finding a place where that clutter to carry on a longer, deeper conversation is no longer there and instead Plus has taken over by allowing interactions to take place for as long as they would need to, that is, for the entire life of the dialogue itself, without the frustration of having to struggle resurfacing the conversation, i.e. re-finding that email, or the entire string of emails exchanged. Priceless, if you just want to focus on the conversation without having to worry about the technology. Plus makes that worry rather redundant, which is a nice refreshing change. Social Capital: Every so often, I used to receive emails from fellow colleagues, customers, business partners, friends and other external parties just "to keep in touch", to find out how things were going, whether things were all right, about how work is progressing, personal related stuff, etc. etc. Basically, social capital related interactions of people genuinely interested in keeping in touch for the sake of cultivating and nurturing long lasting relationships. Never before has sharing of pictures, video clips, music, general interest topics become so relevant and part of those daily interactions. It’s my daily dose of caring to improve those social capital skills with others, but with plenty of ease of use altogether. And, finally, Business: Yes, indeed! Interestingly enough Google Plus has already started to morph a good bunch of the conversations talking about Plus itself and how it works to conduct business, in the most general sense, whether personal or work related and since a few folks have asked me about this one already, I think I’ll develop it further on a separate blog entry where I will reflect on whether G+ is ready for the Enterprise. Or not. A quick hint… it’s getting there! And pretty fast, too! So will Google Plus manage to kill email altogether, or reduce it by large numbers, or, at least, help us all reduce our current dependency on it? Well, if I judge things based on my first month of interactions with it, I can probably vouch that Yes!, it will do and sooner than we expect, as more and more people start making their way into it and find out how much more different it is interacting through it than through other social networking sites, where headaches and increasing frustration are no longer there. The challenge will remain whether Google itself would want G+ to be more successful than what GMail is today and how is that going to put things together in the near future. Remember Google Wave? They all said that it was going to redefine the way we do email today. Yet it didn’t deliver, although it was a great solution. No doubt! Well, this time around I think Google Plus is still a great solution and will probably manage to help us all free ourselves from the email yoke! And I may be able to add… about time, too! Mind you, like I have been saying all along since February 2008, I still see plenty of really good use cases for which email is probably the best tool out there, specially, for 1:1 private, confidential, rather sensitive exchanges or for calendaring and scheduling. I also realise that some professions would consider email an essential tool to live by, specially, for auditing and tracking purposes, but for the rest of us there is a window of opportunity to reduce our addiction to it and we should not let it go this time around, like we have done with a bunch of others … Have you started to notice a decrease on the amount of emails you have been receiving since starting to use Google Plus yourself? Drop a comment and let us know…

I pride myself on being an excellent vacation planner, but somehow none of my vacations seem to start on a very auspicious note. The last time my wife and I took a similarly long vacation, we were stalled by protesters at the Bangkok airport, and at the last minute we had to take detour via Singapore to begin our vacations. It bled us the extra dollars and well, wasn't much fun! Till last night, it seemed that our vacation was blessed by the gods. Speaking of gods, there's a saying,"Man proposes, god disposes!". I'm not sure god had much of a hand to play in this, but here's what happened. We had tickets to travel by the 1715 train to Trivandrum so we could then catch the Sunday flight to KL. For some reason, I'd entered the 2145 train on my Tripit itinerary and my wife and I planned our day at office with that assumption. So well, you can imagine the fiasco thereafter - we reached the train station in the hope of catching the train, only to know that I'm actually a crap planner and we'd missed our train hours back.Well, I wasn't going to allow our vacation to be derailed (pun intended) by such a minor setback. So, autoride back home, some time on the internet and we had air tickets to Trivandrum. And so, this morning we got on the 1020 Air India flight to Trivandrum - our destination, Kovalam beach. Does that sound awesome? Not quite! Well, Kovalam beach isn't the best place to visit during the monsoons. It's off season, most places are shut tight, the area has almost a deserted, sleepy look and every picture of the beach looks like you took it with a badly scratched lens. We took some time out to tuck in a very heavy meal of chicken, beef, fish and porrotas though the oil didn't seem to do much good to my tummy. Anyways - I spent a good part of the evening in the hotel swimming pool. And now, I'm tired, cranky, bored and I'm waiting to take my flight out - 0800 this morning, I'm outta here! Gotta set that alarm.© Sumeet Moghe, 2009