Happy Saint Patricks Day!!, for those folks who may be celebrating it anyway… Today surely is a special day for a whole bunch of people all over the world. Well, for me, too! No, it’s not because on the Internet apparently it’s my birthday today, which it isn’t (Thanks ever so much everyone for those kind and warm wishes shared across though!). Once again, and like I have been doing for a couple of years now, I *lied*. My actual birthday date is in February (Yes, I am a true Aquarian!), as I have hinted elsewhere already, but in a way it is my birthday today as well. At least, what I would consider having been reborn again into the current life I have been enjoying for the last 8 years and counting… Indeed, 8 years ago, on March 17th, 2004, on such a special occasion as St. Patrick’s Day, I moved to Gran Canaria, as my permanent home. And I haven’t gone back anywhere else ever since! If you have been reading this blog for a long while you will notice how, despite the odd and awkward experiences here and there with my business travelling, I do enjoy traveling all over the place quite a bit. It’s probably the best option out there to get to know places, people, their languages, their customs, their traditions, their cultural traits, and whatever else. Amongst one of the best learning experiences in life. It’s also probably the best option to meet up a good bunch of close friends who no longer live near you in the same city, country or whatever, but that thanks to the wonderful world of the Social Web they are scattered all over. But, to be honest, the main reason why I love traveling, is because every time that I do it gives me an opportunity to treasure and appreciate why I work and live in Gran Canaria. My home. You know, time and time again, when I get to present at conference events, summits, workshops, seminars and whatever else on the initiative I started over 4 years ago on living "A World Without Email", and how the world of Social is helping us transform the corporate world of the 21st century as well as our societies as a whole, it surprises plenty of people how I can still get away with having ditched corporate email, rely quite heavily on social networks for business and still live and work in Gran Canaria. Even more when my own boss is thousands of kilometers away from me… Well, that’s my story. And I am surely grateful to my current employer, IBM, as they have been employing me for the last 15 years to give me an opportunity to demonstrate there are other ways to contribute, make yourself useful, have an impact, and enjoy with a passion what you do on a daily basis. Regardless of where you are in the world. It no longer makes a difference. Remember the blog post I put together a couple of days ago on "Everything is connected to everything"? That’s what I have been trying to prove all along. That with the emergence of much more effective and efficient collaborative, knowledge sharing and social networking tools we now have an opportunity to redesign how we do work, where we do it and with whom. And how it’s that flexibility and work life integration that would surely help knowledge workers become a lot more attached to the work they do, with a rather strong sense of belonging, ownership and co-responsibility for wanting things to work out just all right. To always want to improve the way your business does business, even if that means facing as well the ugly parts, to try to solve them in a meaningful and purposeful manner. All in all, to become more engaged, transparent, open, nimble, in short, sustainable and smart enough to carry on for a few decades more in perhaps one of the most complex, yet exciting, times in our lifetime as a species. That’s why I am celebrating today my 8th year anniversary since I arrived in Gran Canaria. I never expected I would be staying over here that long. In fact, after my family’s home, it’s the place in the world I have lived the longest in a row. And while I don’t know how much longer I would be living over here, since that’s something that you can never plan anymore these days (Welcome to the world of uncertainty! hehe), I can certainly assure you all that, to me, it’s all about enjoying every single minute of it, yes, the good old carpe diem, because you never know what’s going to happen tomorrow. Oh, well, hang on, yes, I know what’s going to happen tomorrow. Actually, beginning of next week, when I am on the road again for a couple of business trips to Belgium and London (again!) and where you can imagine how much I would be looking forward to coming back home and be greeted with something special , something that 8 years ago welcomed me to be part of its family, its extensive community, and still accepts me to be there for who I am. Yes, that’s Gran Canaria. That’s my home. That’s my life. We may as well enjoy it, don’t you think? Again, Happy St. Patrick’s Day, for those celebrating it, and happy 8th year anniversary, @elsua 4.0! Time to go off now and enjoy plenty of the beauty this paradise on earth island has got to offer! Ohhh, and if you ever come to pay a visit on your holidays or next business trip, get in touch! I would be delighted to show and guide you around … Or check my Foursquare’s checkins for some of the best places to hang out, as well as enjoy some of the most beautiful surroundings with incredibly friendly people and superb food. Oh, yes, I am a #foodie, too! But I am sure you have noticed that already, haven’t you?

Last week Dinesh, Nikhil and I encountered the second stage of our social business journey at ThoughtWorks. Over the week, we had a few conversations with other ThoughtWorkers focussing on one common question, "Where do I put x?". While our platform itself places no restrictions on where users can post content and while we have a really powerful search engine, the mental model of folders to place your information is still prevalent. It's been about four years since I last created a very structured folder system on my computer. Today I just save files where I please and then let Spotlight or Quicksilver find the files for me when I need them. Coming back to our social business platform though, the primary driver for this initiative was to answer a long standing knowledge management challenge at ThoughtWorks. Our aim at least when we started off, was to map our organisational capabilities and make them explicit for the average ThoughtWorker. While social media seems to have lowered the barrier for content creation and sharing considerably, there's a separate question about structure that we need to answer. How does the traditional world view of knowledge management fit in the world of social business?Prescriptive Structure Leads to Empty or Neglected ContainersUseful content doesn't come up by magic. Content also doesn't come up as a result of an imposed structure. Content arrives on platforms because some people feel a strong ownership for it and believe that there's value in sharing it. Over a period of time they use metadata such as tags, ratings and comments to provide a layer of information and commentary to the content. Given a reasonable amount of time, the structure for all the content on the platorm starts to emerge. Tag clouds help create a map for users so they can browse through the content. Search engines start throwing intelligent results for searches. User commentary, ratings and flags provide a layer of quality control over the content, helping all members of the community find the best content for the purpose. This is the phenonmenon of emergent structure that Andrew McAfee has spoken about in his book - Enterprise 2.0. The key however is in understanding that while content is valuable, context is significantly more precious. To know your colleague who wrote that phenomenal blogpost, to be able to see how people used her ideas, to be able to look at the other contributions by this user, etc are a generative side to the knowledge management puzzle. It's a side that opens up possibilities for serendipity which traditional content focussed approaches are unlikely to achieve.No Structure is a 'One-Size-Fits-All'The same presentation that I upload to a conferences space could be the one you look for in the technology space. While I like a Twitter style approach to finding interesting content, you may prefer a Digg style model. While one person may choose a communities of practice model to personal learning, another person may just look for a more structured sitemap/ folder approach. Regardless of which approach you choose, you're likely to marginalise a certain group of people. The modern internet has given us so many options that we're almost spoilt for choice and everyone looks at stuff differently. The key is to give people a way to personalise their knowledge intake in a way that suits them. Flexible consumption is the need of the hour. Personal Knowledge Management and Sense Making is the KeyThe modern workplace requires modern skills. While it's all too well to complain about chaos and information overload, a key skill in this age, is the ability to set up filters that help you make sense of everything. As Clay Shirky explains in the above talk, it's not really information overload - it's filter failure. People also need to be comfortable with missing stuff. If things are really important, they'll come to you. Others will repost it, there'll be heavy discussion and the content will rise in popularity. A huge part of the 'information overload complaint' also has to do with the gluttony and greed to be 'on top of everything'. Managing digital knowledge that matters to you, requires deliberate practice. Harold Jarche calls this the practice of personal knowledge management. Knowledge workers need to develop the skills to connect with others, exchange ideas and to contribute effectively to a knowledge collective. This requires inward facing categorising and sorting skills to deal with the flow of information. Organisations need to support knowledge workers through the journey of learning these skills, since it's crucial to their own success. The role of the knowledge management organisation then perhaps shifts to a higher touch, personal productivity consulting role. Over a period of time knowledge managers need to move into community facilitation roles because the traditional responsibilities of uploading documents to repositories will no longer exist. The only structure that's likely to make sense, is self selected structure.I'm keen to learn how other social media/ business consultants are answering the structured KM question in their organisations. Do you have an experience to share? Please drop in a few lines in the comments section and tell us your story. If you're keen to tell me face to face, I'm at the Learning Solutions Conference all of this week and I'd love to hear your thoughts. Is there a balance I'm missing? Let me know - I'm all ears!© Sumeet Moghe

Here we go again, already done with another one of those crazy, rather hectic and buzzing Mondays, and embarking on what promises to be quite an interesting and exciting week, as I am preparing for my next business trip, which, once again, is going to take me to two different cities in two different countries in the next few days. First to Antwerp, Belgium, to attend and present (On Being Social, as a panelist, and on #lawwe as a speaker) at the stunning BLUG event, where the agenda seems to be more impressive than ever; then, over the weekend, heading over to London, UK, where I will be staying till Wednesday, participating and presenting as well at Melcrum‘s fine Digital Communication Summit, as I will be talking about IBM’s journey towards becoming a social business sharing the experiences, lessons learned, hints & tips, and adoption techniques of our now 5 year old Social Software Adoption program called BlueIQ. Phew! You can imagine it’s going to be a rather intense week (Another one of those!), where perhaps stress will make its presence more than once, and, just now, when thinking about it, I can sense it’s going to show up a few times eventually. Nothing new, really, right? I mean, in today’s current business world who doesn’t that have feeling that some times, and, hopefully, just some times, there are just so many things going on at the same time that even juggling with them to see how many balls remain on the air proves to be quite a challenge on its own. My good friend Jacob Morgan captured, really nice, on a recent tweet, what the actual impact that stress is causing into the business world and although his tweet was just specific to the US, I can imagine how it would also be applicable in multiple other countries. If not judge for yourself:   did you know that the annual impact of stress in the workplace for the U.S. is over $400 Billion? — Jacob Morgan (@jacobm) March 16, 2012 Now, I can imagine that there would be plenty of various different things and activities you could do to help tame that stress and bring it back under control, since we all know that negative stress has never been rather helpful to one’s productivity and effectiveness. But yet, since we are all so busy doing multiple things and juggling with multiple projects, and whatever else, there is one key question that keeps popping up: Where do you get the time? You know, we are all so busy, we just don’t have it any more! We cannot even control it or have a little glimpse of what we are doing with it. It’s become the new economy. Along with Attention Management, of course, for that matter. But what if we would have that opportunity to address, manage and tame that stress to reasonable levels with something so relatively simple as one minute? Yes, you are reading it right. One minute! Nothing more, nothing less! Who can’t afford a single minute going by here and there then to achieve that new goal of living a stress-free work life and get so much more done? I am sure you may be thinking that I am dreaming, once again, or that I have become a bit of a utopian. But what if it were possible? Would you do it? … I bet you would! So allow me to introduce you to this absolutely delightful video clip of just over 5 minutes that will introduce you to the wonderful world of Meditation. In this case, One Moment Meditation by Martin Boroson. I bumped into this video late last week on my of my Google Plus circles and, of course, I just couldn’t help watching it through to see what it would be all about. And, I eventually, got to practice it!! Whoaahh. Really. And it works!! There are lots and lots of things that I could say about the video, how incredibly inspiring it is and all, but once again, I am not going to spoil it for you folks and I am, instead, going to encourage you all to watch through the video, right as we speak, even if you are not stressed out, so that, when you are, you know exactly what you can do to avoid it and move on with your work. I tell you, I tried it out while going through it and I can certainly vouch for how effectively it works, to the point where it doesn’t feel like you are doing it, and, yet, you are and getting the best results! Just brilliant! And painless! Again, you may not need it just now, or you may need it pretty drastically; the good thing is that after you watch it, it is just so easy to carry it on with you that no matter where you may well be, or what you will be doing, or what you will be working on, as soon as you notice that negative stress kicking in, it’s time then for that One Moment Meditation, and get back on track. Seriously, it’s that effective. What do you think? Does One-Moment Meditation work out for you as well? Feel free to drop a quick comment or two and let us know whether it is working out for you or not, and if you have other tips and techniques to help tame that negative stress share them across as well. I bet we would all love to know about them!

Over the course of the last few weeks, perhaps couple of months, I have noticed how I am starting to post articles about a good number of different topics on this blog that have expanded beyond the original intent to talk about Knowledge Management, Collaboration, Online Communities, Learning and Social Computing / Networking for Business. In particular, I have begun to become more and more interested in those subjects related to work life integration that are surely part of the business world, too, specially, when time and time again plenty of folks have been talking all along about that work life balance, but time and time again we have never seen it become a reality. Well, what if that balance didn’t exist in the first place? Most importantly, what if that work life balance has never existed, right from the beginning, despite what we may have been thinking about all along? Time then to wake up to that new reality of always-on, (inter)connected, and readily available, regardless of where you may well be, what device you may be using, who you may be connecting with, and what you may be working on at that moment? While I was in London a couple of weeks ago participating at the #UCExpo event, where I did a keynote session on the topic of Living "A World Without Email" (See this great article put together by Guy Clapperton to get a glimpse of what I talked about or this other link for the recording of the session itself) and the subject of work life balance came up from the audience when asking me how do I balance it all out not relying on corporate email anymore and instead having made the transition into social networking tools for getting work done. One of the attendees brought up the whole concept of work life balance and how important it is in today’s business world and how we all seem to keep neglecting it big time, and I just couldn’t help getting a chuckle or two, because, in reality, I have always thought that such balance just doesn’t exist. It is a big myth. It always has been! In most cases, indeed, it’s a myth that most corporations have made us, knowledge workers, believe is possible to have in today’s work environment as a way to combine our work lives with our private ones, when, all along, I have always stated that such balance just doesn’t exist and for a single reason: work has always won (and it will continue to win!). It has trumped life all along and it will continue to do so for many decades to come. Instead, a long while ago I have made the transition into what some people have been calling work life integration, where one of key words / concepts that has started making the rounds in the last few years, that is, flexibility, is gaining more and more importance and relevance as we move forward. Work life integration, and that flexibility, starts kicking in when both knowledge workers and employers begin to understand how we need to make a transition into measuring business performance by the outcomes and deliverables of what you produce, regardless of the time that it would take you to complete such tasks, rather than by just your mere physical presence, working a good number of hours, even if there is no more work to be done. It’s all about autonomy and how you are going to manage your work hours in the wider, larger context, of how you are going to live your own personal life. And we should all remember that we just got ONE life, and perhaps MULTIPLE jobs (Seeing today’s new reality, in the dozens!). Just recently I read this fascinating article, over at Lifehacker, that points to this other, much longer, but equally worth it, piece of research by Sara Robinson about how if your work week extends beyond the 40 hours per week you may be having a huge problem with your own productivity that you would need to tackle. And soon! There is no denying that in today’s corporate environment becoming even more productive and effective knowledge worker is going to ever increase our stress levels because more and more is being demanded from us, by multiple projects, teams, networks, communities and some times it’s difficult to juggle with it all. But what if we would take a step back, and realise that not everything is about work? That not everything is about being chained to whatever the computing device to get work done. That there are more important aspects out there, in our lives, that we should treasure perhaps even more than work, and I am not even taking into account the private quality time that we spend with our families, friends, relatives and loved ones, which we all know has been decreasing quite a bit over the course of time anyway, in the first place. In this particular case I am talking about something so fundamental as health, our very own health. Indeed, that aspect of our lives that we keep taking for granted, day in day out, till it’s perhaps too late and we cannot longer back out of it, because we didn’t pay enough attention to it in the first place. One of the things that I have come to terms with over the course of the last 4 years, when I started with this initiative of Living "A World Without Email", is that us, knowledge workers, are not that fundamental, critical to the business and indispensable that we think we are. In fact, we aren’t. Whether we would like to admit it or not, the business world will always continue to move on, with us, or without us, and things will be just fine. You know, it’s something that’s been happening all along, but that we have never realised about it till probably now. We all go on holidays for one, two or three weeks, or longer, if you are lucky enough! (Fascinating read that one, by the way, that I will be picking up on another blog entry), and we try to disconnect, relax, unwind from everything work related. We may be more or less successful in achieving that, but one thing for sure is that when we are not there, things keep moving on just at the same pace as before, if not even faster, judging by the amount of catchup most of us have got to do upon our return. That, in itself, is an indication of how we, knowledge workers, may need to start shifting gears and become more focused on what work is all about and what our personal lives should be about. It’s that integration between work life that needs to kick in, to understand that some times you will be working really hard for over 12 to 14 hours straight, because work would require you to do that, and then there would be other times where you may just be working 2 to 4 hours and the rest of the time you can dedicate it to spend it doing something else. The key challenge though would remain on how willing would those businesses be to allow for that kind of flexibility in the corporate environment and whether they would be able to support it or not. In my opinion, they surely would, because, amongst other things, they would haven’t have much of a choice, if they would want to retain their talent in fear of those knowledge workers moving elsewhere, i.e. to another business that would be much more accommodating for that same flexibility. That’s why, over the last few months we have seen how plenty of corporations have been paying attention to one key fundamental aspect that affects them, just as much as their knowledge workers: our very own health! I am not sure whether you may have noticed it or not, but plenty of companies are starting to carry out rather intense campaigns to raise awareness of how important and critical it is for knowledge workers to look after their own health in order to be able to perform better. I am sure most of you folks out there would have plenty of reasons to share across on why businesses are finally paying attention to such important matters, but one thing that is undeniable, to me, is that in this matter if one self doesn’t look after their own health, no-one else would. So, I am really glad we are now finally seeing this topic coming up on the table. It’s an important one. That’s perhaps why as of late, I am becoming a whole lot more interested in that work life integration from the perspective of taking into account other important aspects of how we can conduct work in a meaningful way, rather than in work itself. After all, we all know it’s going to happen eventually anyway, so if we can remain focused and purposeful about it, we should probably take into account other important aspects, like this one on health. It all became a lot clearer to me way back in July last year when I decided to take a bit more of a proactive approach in taking care of my own health by growing up the habit of doing daily workouts (and plenty of exercise!), a good healthy diet of learning to eat smaller portions of everything and get plenty of sleep, as I have detailed on a blog entry at the beginning of this year. From there onwards, interest grew in me further along as the results of my overall performance at work have been much better eventually in the understanding that the healthier you become, and no need to go through to the other end of the extreme!, the much more productive and effective you end up being. And that’s why I wanted to put together this blog entry over here today to highlight a short video clip I bumped into over the course of the last couple of days that I am sure most folks would find quite a fascinating watch, not only because of how relevant it is to this whole discussion of living a healthy life, while getting work done and enjoying plenty of good quality private time with your family and friends, but also for covering some stunning facts about how something so relatively simple as 30 minutes of physical activity on a daily basis can be so beneficial for us all. Indeed, in 23 and 1/2 hours: What is the single best thing we can do for our health? Dr. Mike Evans gets to describe a whole bunch of facts as to why regular physical exercise can help boost not only our health levels, but also our intellectual capacity, which is rather remarkable, because it comes to confirm how we may need to stop obsessing too much about getting work done, and perhaps start obsessing more with looking after own health, if we would want to become better at what we do. Very little more to add at this point on such important matters, other than perhaps include the embedded code of the video clip over here, so that folks could have a look into it and start pondering how and when they would need to start injecting such energy boosts that come along from that daily exercise in order to provide us with a higher quality life, which I guess is just as good as it gets. And don’t worry, work will continue its course. It always does. Right now, as an example, I am stuck in a hotel room in Madrid, trying to get some work done, but, alas, I can’t because my VPN connection to the Intranet is currently down. So, you see? The world doesn’t stop. It just moves on. Like you should be moving on! This time around the key challenge, and the good fight for us all, is all about trying to figure out how we can integrate it (Work, that is) effectively with other more important tasks dropped on to each and everyone of us: live fully a better quality life. See? Don’t you think it’s worth it every minute? And it’s just only 30 minutes per day… What’s our excuse not to do it then? Please don’t tell me it’s work, because it surely isn’t. It’s never been about work. It’s always been about how much good care you would be taking about yourself and what really matters to you. And I bet work alone does no longer cut it, does it?

I'm at what promises to be a great session with elearning's only bonafide rockstar - Tom Kuhlmann. Tom's the author of the rapid elearning blog and in my opinion one of the best community managers in the world. Tom's talk today is around lessons we can learn from the several rapid elearning gurus across the world. Tom's made a living out of helping people that are one or two person teams who have to do everything by themselves but don't necessarily have the budget or the skills to do it all by themselves. The rapid authoring tools like Articulate make course creation easier but now people have to do all of the work that originally a graphic artist, developers, instructional designers would have done in a team. Anyways, the Articulate Guru contest is such an amazing example of intelligent designers doing more with less. I'm going to catalogue live what Tom says we can learn from the 200 gurus who have submitted to the contest.Elearning can mean many things: Tom's talking about elearning from back in the day. If you look at the stuff you've done years back, you'll perhaps look at it and disown it! And then you look at cool courses around you and then you think what's wrong with you and what's wrong with your company? The key to remember that all the interactivity doesn't need to come from the elearning course itself. It could come from the classroom, it could be from a chat - think of your course as a media meatball. The top complaints Tom gets is that either they're not funny or they basically just don't have any point! Anyways, elearning can mean many things. We need to feel good about what we're doing because what we do can be useful to a specific audience and there's always room to learn and improve.Limted resources shouldn't hold you back:Powerpoint has been representative of several things, people seem to speak of it almost as a different literacy. From an animation point of view you can do a lot in Powerpoint. The only trouble is that you can't create much logic. You can definitely create interactive courses - the interactivity needs to be meaningful though.People like to laugh: If it's boring no one's going to look at it and the notion of humour changes over time. What was funny in the 80s may not be funny today. The challenge with humour is that 80% will find it funny and 20% will sue you. Also, we need to get beyond being stuck up. Just because a topic is serious doesn't mean it can't have humour. The idea is to not try to be funny, but to do real 'campy' stuff. People like seeing cult like viral things going on in the course, they like seeing their friends on video. The lack of professional polish is really cool because it makes things real. Tom's referring to this course when he's mentioning this. The campiness made it a memorable product though it wasn't the best in the world.Where's Waldo: People need to know where they are. This gives them a sense of how much more they need to commit to something, how much they've achieved. Think of how you read or buy a book. Could you read a book without knowing how big it was or what it contains or without having a table of contents? This is almost the way Steve Jobs presents - make your course easy for your audience to follow. Don't get people 'stuck' in a course, don't block the navigation. Give people credit for being adults - get them in, get them out and give them control. Just because you can doesn't mean you have to!How can you mix it up? If you just have scenarios after another, it can become monotonous. If you just have questions one after the other, then people are going to feel like you're interrogating them. We need to think through the pacing of our course and mix things up. This is also what we need to remember around not making our courses seem templated. Tom's got several rapid elearning models to talk about. Example being the the rapid situational interactive which he often talks about. But if he kept doing this screen after screen, it would be incredibly monotonous. The good courses are different from the bad courses in that they have variety.What is interactivity? There are several pieces of interactive things that you can do on a screen. Well from an elearning standpoint it's either a click and reveal or a mouseover or a drag and drop. Engage is a cool app for example. The trick that Tom mentions is that interactivity is meaningful when people are mentally engaging with the elearning. People do often get excited about mouseovers and things like that, but it's important that the interaction gives the learner something to do; eg: collect information and do something with it.Do you need to train people on how to use your course? Because if you do, then either you've done something hugely wrong or you've hired the wrong people. Do you really need to tell people that they need to click the blinking red button in the corner? Get over it!Beware of the Frankencourse: You don't have to do everything in one course! It becomes too much. Even Tom doesn't recommend that you use all of his tips in one single course. Don't just throw stuff together, develop a consistent look and feel and make everything 'blend well' together.Pay attention to details: Sweat the small stuff. Think about how you've placed objects on the screen. How have you justified text on your screen? Have you tested how your interactions work?Be creative and use the user community like free money: The Articulate community is one of the best, most supportive communities on the internet and is out there, responding to elearning professionals day in and day out. I must say I'm amazed at how cool the stuff on ScreenR is - people share such cool stuff. Some examples that Tom sharedTom promises to share links that I may not have posted here and you can take a look at these courses to get inspiration for your own stuff:Stephanie Hartnett's Motivation Course - great example of how you can do some really advanced stuff with humble toolsEWGA Dallas Chapter's Golf Course?SCA Supply Chain Academy's course on Understanding Safety StockThe Surgery Squad Rhinoplasty CourseThe Learning Nurse's Nasal SimulationKevin Thorn's Mission Turfgrass - it's so cool that you won't believe it's in Articulate! Tom mentions that the only criticism of this could be that there's way to many progress meters in the game.Mike Enders: Psyched in 10 - great storytelling, humour and narration. Nice easter eggs that get people attracted and then engaged. If you had to build just linear click and read courses, this is a great inspiration.Tom's encouraging us to use the community and become gurus ourselves. This was a great talk and great tips to take away. What a rockstar!© Sumeet Moghe

If you have been reading the last few articles I have posted over here in this blog, over the course of the last few months, you may have noticed how, as of late, I have become a whole lot more critical (Hopefully, in a constructive manner) around the whole subject of Social Business and Enterprise 2.0, in general, and, although I’m still a strong believer in the whole movement (I even think we cannot longer go back and do something else. It’s changed us for good!), I am starting to question the validity and merit of a good number of motives from companies to become successful social businesses, because in reality they aren’t. They are just grabbing the wrong end of the stick thinking and hoping it will work out eventually, when we all know it won’t, and get away with it. Well, it’s now time to up the game again and here’s another one of those thinking out loud reflections that’s been in my mind for a long while regarding Social Business and which I’m now more and more convinced it may be destroying our current business environment as we know it, more than anything else. Specially, in today’s financial conundrum. Here it goes: What if Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business are one of the main culprits why it’s taking us all so long to recover from this financial crisis? What if E2.0 and Social Business are the main reasons why we may no longer get the economy to recover as we could, or would, or should, have expected? What if we are all doomed and we are facing The End of a Job as We Know It? The first time that I read about that particular idea of how pernicious Enterprise 2.0 may well be to the corporate world was on a Twitter exchange with Eric Norlin, organiser of the always inspiring, thought-provoking and wonderful Defrag conference event, in Denver, Colorado, where he was mentioning how more and more he was convinced that Social Business, Enterprise 2.0 or whatever other 2.0 moniker, was killing the job market and current working conditions, because businesses were adopting this shift for the wrong reasons. A few months later, I am starting to become pretty much convinced myself that he was, perhaps still is!, on to something! If you look into the current business world out there you would see how one of the main reasons why corporations are adopting and embracing this social networking for business movement has always been cutting costs, i.e. optimizing the business with the right resources (apart from generating new business, that is!). That’s basically us, knowledge workers, still being treated as resources, instead of people, and acting accordingly when embracing all of these social technologies. HR still hasn’t made that transition from Human Resources into Human Relationships, at least, for the vast majority of businesses out there and this means that if Social Business can help them get their business optimise their resources they would be doing so, ignoring the people, and their needs, once again, and like it’s been happening for decades… Just think of it, how many times have we seen plenty of use cases on how beneficial social networking is in helping find the right experts within organisations, or find the right information at the right time, socialising business processes accelerating speed of response, improving customer satisfaction or just simply empowering knowledge workers to become much more effective and productive while getting work done? Far too many times, don’t you think? Well, right there it is when optimizing the business kicks in, because instead of thriving to become more sustainable businesses where people are treated like people, in a much more trustworthy, responsible and valued perspective altogether, we keep seeing how the business decides to go the other direction and optimises resources, i.e. continues further along with layoffs or resource actions, or doesn’t hire enough talent just to get by, since the current knowledge workforce keeps on being squeezed out all the way. Have you ever thought about when was it the last time that you worked 40 hours per week, or, basically, the number of hours you were hired for in the first place? Another example, when was it the last time that you were working only on a single project, with a single team, budget, mission scope, goals, etc. etc. Just think of it. Probably not in the last decade or so, if not longer! Shouldn’t we all be focusing on the long term strategy to become socially integrated enterprises where sustainable business growth becomes a norm, more than an exception? Shouldn’t we just leave behind that 20th century corporate mentality of just thinking on quarter after quarter, or on whether large corporations are pleasing Wall Street, or not (Don’t forget just how much Wall Street appreciates each and everyone of you! … Not!), and start thinking that if we don’t pay attention to such fundamental shift that social business is provoking in a proper manner we may eventually be sinking to never recover? I mean, just think of it, what smart, brilliant, young talented workforce would want to work for your business in, say, 5 to 10 years, when they find out knowledge workers are still being treated as resources, versus relations, i.e. people? When they find out making profits at all costs for the benefit of just a few is trumping those personal business relationships to rather alarming levels? When they figure out those older generations keep being optimised big time and they don’t have anyone out there, or hardly anyone, willing to transfer and pass on their knowledge, because they may not even be there in the first place? Aren’t we making it far too complicated, and, perhaps almost impossible, for future generations of the workplace to make a difference and have a significant impact? Let’s not forget how, as things stand out, right now, we are going to face a rather interesting business problem very very soon when the active working population will be outnumbered, big time!, by those people who are no longer working, i.e. retired, of those who are perhaps a bit too young to enter the workplace just yet… I am not sure what you would think, but I sense we are entering that stage of the point of no return, where Social Business in its purest form would need to come forward, make a stand, and show, and demonstrate, businesses, what a meaningful, purposeful, and successful social business that looks after both their customer base, as well as their employee workforce, is all about. Because somehow using Social Business, just like we did with Knowledge Management back in the day, to optimise resources to drive business revenue by cutting costs alone in the short term somehow sounds like shooting ourselves on the foot, to never recover from the injury… Do we really want to head that way, say, in the next 5 to 10 years? Probably not, so perhaps we should put a stop to it now, while we can and before it is too late. Last thing we would want to do is to keep making the very same mistakes over and over again. Haven’t we learned anything from the past experiences that have brought us to the current financial apocalypse we have been experiencing in the last few years? Can a business nowadays, in the 21st century, become a truly connected, transparent, nimble, successful and sustainable social business while optimising operations with layoffs is still lingering around in the background? I don’t think so. What do you think? Maybe, we need to rethink the current state of the business world, not just for the right now, but for the long term, and figure out whether social business can help us revert back and head into the right direction, because something tells me we do have the potential, the energy, the good effort, the excitement, the talent to making it happen, but what’s stopping us from realising it? Reluctance to change? To think and act in a completely different way than what we have been doing for ages? To perhaps come to terms with the fact that there is a better way of doing sustainable business and we may be too afraid of jumping the shark and live it? Well, maybe it is time to do so. Maybe we should. Before it’s just too late and can’t react in time any longer. There is just far too much at stake at this point, methinks, and not just for ourselves, but for those future generations of knowledge workers. What kind of legacy are we planning on handing over to them when we are all gone? How would you like to be remembered? As the one who planted the seeds to collect a wonderful harvest at a later time (by them), or as the one who just wanted to focus on the quarter by quarter survival without caring much about what will be happening next. Please do tell me you are made of the former kind rather than of the latter. Please. We need you. And very much so. Now.

I've just run into Connie Malamed's sessionabout research around visuals and I'm late. I'm going to start blogging right away. Connie's been talking about the power of visuals - e.g how Dan Roam simplified the US healthcare problem. Connie's the author of one of my favourite books - Visual Language for Designers. I'm going to struggle to give you the complete picture (pun intended) because Connie's book is really what you should read for this kind of thing. Here's what she's covering. Why we're wired for graphicsEveryone's worked on courses where the visuals could be better. We have 1,200,000 fibers in the optical nerve as against 30,000 auditory in the auditory. We're hardwired for visuals. This is why we have the picture superiority effect where an image trumps words for descriptions most of the time - what we call "a picture speaks a thousand words". Pictures are a much closer replica of our environment than words. So how do we process visuals. We have a store called sensory memory and we process from visual and auditory sources.  We take input from the sensory memory into the working memory. A lot less information actually comes through the working memory to get encoded into the long term memory. Working memory limits the information we process. That capacity is quite limited - 4 bits of information at a time. This is information from top cognitive scientists. Information in this working memory is quite short, it lasts only a few seconds. So how do we represent visual information? We represent images differently from works. These are internal representations that represent some physical characteristics of the real object. It may not be exact - maybe a line drawing of the actual picture. We represent things to ourselves very simply and that's a case for simplicity in graphics. Our capacity for remembering pictures in long-term memory is enormous. You could go to an image library and recognise all the pictures that you've ever used. People give meaning to the visuals that they process. You add context to the images you see, your values, what you understand, your culture, your beliefs. "The mind is not a camera" - Stephen KosslynWe're not just recording devices, we're adding to the worlds as we see it. This said, we can go wrong with graphics - take a look. Research inspired design can therefore help. It's based on evidence and facts and can be applied to the real world. How do you speed up your message?Preattentive processing - we're always scanning our environments and by doing that we create a coherent picture of what we see and how we make sense of it. What things pop out? We notice these features quite strongly. There are certain characteristics of visuals and graphics that we can make pop out to make use of preattentive processing. Grouping is another technique that helps people understand things that go together. Connie shows some interesting ways to do the 'pop out':Colour contrastUnusual elements in picturesSize contrastShade contrastDirection and position in pictures - what in visual language we call orientationMotion vs stationary Depth ShapeHow do we do the grouping then? How do you let your learners know what goes together?Proximity is an obvious way to group elementsColor is also a great way to group elements togetherSimilarity is also a great way to create grouping; eg: several colored circles close to each otherThe law of common fate - we usually group lines or anything that's going in the same directionConnectedness - objects that are connected with lines or another visual element seem groupedThe boundary principle. Anything that's within a single boundary gets grouped togetherHow do we make graphics efficientWhen elements of a graphic are consistent in meaning, the information is easier to process. Connie showed us examples of where we read the words RED, GREEN and BLUE in entirely different colours. This obviously was strange for the entire group. What if the arrows for a skydiving graphic go up instead of a downward direction that actually is the direction in which we would actually dive. There's something to say about reducing realism - it makes graphics cognitively efficient. Illustrations are a great way for novices to learn, as against elaborate 3D pictures. It provides fewer distractions, it takes less time to percieve, it minimises load on working memore and it's easier to encode this in our long term memory. So how do we actually achieve this?Reduce noisy detailIncrease contrastMake it minimalistic - silhouette instead of detailed pictures maybe?Fewer colorsLess detailSmooth surfaceMinimal shadowsGoing from high fidelity to low fidelity graphicsUse of line art instead of detailed picturesUse of iconic forms; everyday icons like shopping carts which people The use of symbols - people recognise this stuff very quicklyHow do we connect through emotions?Can your image create a reaction in your audience's body? Images have that ability to move us in some way. Emotion and cognition are really tied together. Emotions affect mental process. They capture attention, increase brain activity and can really improve retention. This is because we build associations with images based on experiences. We are also particularly attuned to faces - this is something I've observed too. Our eyes move towards even cartoon faces. In fact that's one of the first things that we see on a visual. It's almost a way to create a 'pop out'. Connie is showing us this image. Emotional images are definitely awesome for changing attitudes. Graphics with statistics can create emotion around the numbers. Think hungry child in Haiti when you're showing a graph on poverty.There's another side to emotion as well - surprise! Surprise results from novelty and humour. It comes from the unusal juxtaposition of elements and it comes from unexpectedness. How do we make the abstract concrete?Abstract graphics make understanding quite easy in some cases. Charts and diagraphs, graphs, maps, timelines, visualisations, etc provide an abstraction of the real images. You can use diagrams to show the big picture view to people. Diagrams can really simplify things for your audience. You can try to externalise people's internal mental models. For example if you're teaching the sales funnel, then use the funnel metaphor to explain it. Use graphs to present quantitative information. Maps can show so much more than geography. Timelines can show progression, evolution and history. Tables don't need to be boring and text based. You can use visual tables like this one!This was such a great, information dense, yet engaging talk by Connie. Explains why she's one of my favourite bloggers and writers.© Sumeet Moghe

In the recent past you may well remember a couple of blog posts that I put together over here around the subject of the Circular Economy, right?, as perhaps one of the most forward thinking initiatives towards sustainable, social, purposeful and meaningful growth, maybe much deeply inspired by the world of Social Business. Well, now, here it comes The Share Economy with a far too similar mantra that most of us, socially networked knowledge workers, have been embracing, and living!, for a good while now: Sharing! In a world where plenty of our activities, whether personal or work related, are always pretty much individualistic, as we are starting to come around group activities, eventually, with the emergence of social networking tools, even though there is a group of people out there who keep claiming that the (Social) Web has made us all far too isolated from the rest of the world, to the point where people decline any physical contact or fail to grasp social physical cues anymore, it’s rather refreshing to see new and very innovative initiatives like Uniiverse, whose motto is nothing less than a tremendously inspiring "Platform for Collaborative Living". In a business world, where 80% of the knowledge workers, so, that is, 8 out of 10!, are not happy with their work anymore, and probably with their lives either, since work / life are now so intermingled with one another that’s becoming quite a challenge to distinguish which is which, here comes Uniiverse, once again, sharing along how there may well be a much better approach out there to continue providing us with an opportunity to have a "happier, more sustainable and a better lifestyle", which doesn’t seem to be too much of a bad idea, if you consider the current state of things, whether on a personal level or a work related one. And all of that, because of a single magical word: share! Indeed, the folks behind Uniiverse have put together a rather interesting and thought provoking initiative where they have sparked the idea of sharing and contributing into building what may well be the next wave of social interactions, as Social Business keeps taking by storm the corporate world encouraging, if anything, not just connecting and collaborating amongst knowledge workers, but just something so fundamentally simple and, yet, so incredibly powerful, as sharing. Sharing for the sake of sharing. Like the good old Knowledge Management mantra, sharing your knowledge across for the sake of sharing it and without asking for anything in return (cf. "In the context of real need few people will withhold their knowledge" by Dave Snowden). What IF we would then shift focus and instead of hoarding and protecting our knowledge, as we keep thinking that "Knowledge is power", which, obviously, has not made things much easier for the vast majority of people, if we currently take into count the financial crisis we have been going through over the course of the last few years, we would go ahead and, instead, share it across freely, so that others could learn and become better at what they do, just as much as you would be able to do it yourself from the knowledge that others share with you ("Knowledge shared is power"). Wouldn’t things run much smoother towards that "happier, more sustainable and a better lifestyle"? If so, what’s stopping us then? Our ingrained ability to fight against each other to have a position of supremacy and power, over the others, as well as influence, which in most cases would only serve a few and no-one else? Or is it because we are far too scared of the huge potential behind that simple act of sharing? Imagine an example: what do you think would happen if all of a sudden, everyone in the corporate world, going from the bottom line to all the way to the top (i.e. Regular knowledge workers, and top executives alike), would come across in an exercise of radical transparency and share their pay slips, that is, their monthly salaries, like Rachel Happe was mentioning over three years ago in a rather thought provoking blog post under the title "Radical Transparency: Where The Rubber Hits The Road"? Do you think we would benefit from that act of sharing as a result of that transparency exercise? Tough one, eh? I think we would and here is why… With (knowledge) sharing there comes an opportunity to become much more open, transparent, nimble, trustworthy, agile, engaged, responsible, interconnected, bonded, etc. etc. Essentially, some of the various main key traits behind living and embracing a Social Business, and, in a way, if you look into it much closer, the folks at Uniiverse have actually shown us what it could potentially look like. Take a look into this YouTube video clip that lasts for a little bit over two and a half minutes and which shows the power of sharing and building an entire economy around it. Worth while a look for certain! Not sure what you would think, but with the emergence of all of these social technologies I sense we are a lot closer than what most people would think from truly realising that Sharing Economy. And somehow, just like the Circular Economy that I have talked about in the past, they both seem pretty good solid options to provide us with that sustainable growth for a better life. Our life. What do you think? Still consider that sharing doesn’t add any value to you, as an individual, or to a group, a network or a community? Perhaps we need to start re-thinking about our priorities and evaluate, once again, whether protecting our position, power and influence, that is, our knowledge, is worth while after all, instead of putting it to good use and help others become much more effective at what they already do. Somehow, the connection to Servant Leadership is clear, it’s right there!, and so is that connection of Social Business and open (knowledge) sharing. So what do we have to do to make it all work? What would make it click for everyone? It just doesn’t sound too difficult, does it? I hope not. Let’s hope not! Let’s do it then! Let’s share!

I've just run into Joseph O'Malley's session on Micro-Learning. Given my fascination with YouTube and things like 50 Lessons, this is a topic I'm quite interested in. So I'll just liveblog what I'm learning. Joseph seems to be a very entertaining guy, given the conversation he's striking before the talk begins. So I think the session (which is a full house) will be entertaining to say the least. Joseph is the senior director of knowledge for St Luke's Health System. Directors go to project meetings and take credit for others work. He's an average person who wants to do great work and wants to share. He hopes that we can take his experience and make it work for us. So we're sitting back and relaxing and letting him drive. His session is called 'How Britney Spears inspired learning innovation..." - LOL! St Luke's is a non-profit and the IT training team has three elearning programmers and four classroom instructors. In healthcare, there's a strong case for instructor led training and these guys take care of the entire life cycle of the learning.The challenge is that of time. Any time in elearning or training is time away from work. People in Joseph's session get ideas from many places, but this idea came from celebrity gossip! That's how Britney got involved in all this. Britney is unleashed and Joseph promises that you'll see her everywhere because of him. Joseph claims that his inspiration came from the Britney Spears umbrella incident where she had a bad day, shaved her hair and then attacked a papparazi's car using an umbrella. So Joseph's team got onto the web looking for the video and went to CNN and they noticed how the videos are just a few minutes long - two and half minutes at an average. If news agencies can educate the public on important topics in less than three minutes, Joseph's team should be able to do it four, shouldn't they?So what is micro-learning? The ability to provide short snippets of education electronically. They called it Knowledge Nuggets - memorable education delivered in four minutes or less. Joseph's urging us in his really funny way to not get caught up in who invented the term or the definition. So for the project they decided they wanted a large audience, geographically distributed. The topics would be high level concepts, detailed, step-by-step instructions wouldn't work. Minimum, simple retention and application of basic knowledge. The time limit was just four minutes and they were strict on themselves. That said post-tests and knowledge checks were outside this our minute time limit. The ProblemSt Luke's approach to quality improvement is called PI and they want all employees to have an awareness of it. They provided this education during new hire orientation and it used to be a 30 minute lesson delivered all in Powerpoint and the fact is that it didn't work. Only 6% could name the stages of PI correctly and the remaining 94% didn't know about it at all. Not good, eh? So what did that education look like - it was a 41 slide bullet point fiesta with a questions slide at the end! For better or for worse, Joseph's team used ADDIE to guide them through the development process. Here were the problems:Too complicated - too much information up front.There was no branding - the PI model didn't have links to strong imagesThere was no context - no simple story to understand how they could use it.There was no St Luke's - the education needed a familiar elementSo Joseph's team grabbed people from the steering committe and came up with education objectives and put a set of design objectives to keep it simple, engaging and short. David will now show us what he pitched to PI steering committee of St Lukes. He explained the micro learning concept, the simplicity and the intent to keep it engaging, humourous and fun. More importantly they decided to use real St Luke's people as actors. They went with some real graphics, real storyboards, tangible proofs of concept that helped the leadership understand what they were upto. They actually used real sketches to explain to the leadership what they were trying to do. Joseph's stuff looks like a really great story, helicopters on the hospital, a big problem and a crack team coming together to solve the problem. How the team actually came together and put together the solution modelled the different phases of the PI approach, a nice headfake to learn how the approach actually works. The management loved it but didn't believe that the team could do it in four minutes. They had a request - they wanted a knowledge check at the end of the module. They also had to have a compromise to use a funny mnemonic - Polka Dots Make Animals Itch. This is ridiculous to me, and for Joseph's team this didn't fit their story. They decided that they'll do two knowledge checks. One would be a high-powered executive PI Game. The other knowledge check would be Luke a dog with polka dots.Joseph's now going to now show us the actual knowledge nugget. The video looks really slick, but nothing you can't do with a little bit of effort. It's humorous and is very similar to the approach that common craft follows with their videos. The story they've got up there is not just funny but also attractive and engaging and it does end in four minutes. Joseph is showing us the knowledge check and the fact is that even without the knowledge check people were able to apply the model. The Luke dog polka dots knowledge check is really funny - if you get things right, the dog stops scratching and is happier. The PI executive game looks even cooler - they actually had people in leadership roles playing actors because they believe in this thing. This is a great example of how leadership involvement can be really effective. The leadership people were happy to do ridiculous gigs to support this. They used real people's voices too to give it that little extra. I'm so impressed - this is way cool stuff. They even gave their actors credit. The fact is that you can do stuff like this in Powerpoint.What were their results?94% of the employees who viewed the knowledge nuggest passed the post test on the first try. The course satisfaction score was 4.89/5.00. After 6 months 96% knew what PI was, 94% were able to cite the room signage story from the video as an example. 68% could list the five phases in the correct order. All this for 44 hours of effort creating the video, 28 hours to create the executive PI game and 14 hours to create the Luke game. The tools they used were digital cameras, Flash, Photoshop, Sound Booth and After Effects. Investing in things like pen tablets made things really easy. They've done more knowledge nuggets ever since like "What is Knowledge Management", stuff around the influenza vaccine, ER trauma, patient safety, etc.Joseph has really encouraged us to look out for inspiration just as their inspiration was Britney and I think this was one of the best presentations at the conference. You can follow him on twitter too.© Sumeet Moghe

First, we have the Circular Economy. Then we have the Sharing Economy and, upon my return from my last business trip to Antwerp (For #BLUG) and London (For the Melcrum Digital Summit), here we have got what I call a pretty cool, inspiring, thought-provoking, mind-blogging new initiative that takes the whole concept of sustainability and growth in a responsible manner into a new level. One where it’s proved that it can be done, where it needs to be done, if we would want to survive accordingly in the next few years, as a species. Welcome to The Co-Operative Ethical Plan 2012 - 2014 (and beyond)! It was a couple of years back, perhaps even longer than that, when I first read from my dear good friend Rob Paterson about that noble, innovative movement of localising global businesses, essentially, referring to that perspective of how, more and more, we are going to experience how everything is going to be run locally, business wise, except perhaps for a handful of rather large corporations that seem to be well established in the global markets, and we are entering that phase where local businesses would strive not only for good, healthy growth, but also a sustainable one; one where they would live to support the growth of their local communities, which in return, would help local businesses become more profitable, in a much more open, transparent, collaborative and community-driven manner. And that can only be a good thing, seeing where the other way has taken us so far. Well, I come back from those recent business trips, which I will be talking about shortly as well, not to worry, and lo and behold, I bumped into this absolutely delightful YouTube video clip, of just under three minutes, which describes what I would think Rob had in mind for that kind of localised sustainable and profitable business. The Co-Operative. Checking out their web site’s Join the Revolution entry could not have had a better mantra to live by: "we launched our groundbreaking Ethical Plan with one clear goal: to be the most socially responsible business in the UK" [Emphasis mine] and it looks like they are aiming big because they are also planning on inspiring other people from all over the world. And I suspect they would succeed doing so, because while watching through the YouTube video it sounds like they are already well under way to make it happen. And I thought that, instead of me telling you all how they plan to make it work and provide us with a better, more sustainable, and socially responsible business world, I will leave it down to them to convince you of the rest, like they did with me, when I watched that clip. If not, judge for yourselves: Truly inspiring, don’t you think? A couple of weeks back I put together one rather thought provoking blog entry under the controversial heading of "Why Social Business Keeps Failing to Deliver" and I guess, after having watched that video clip and the amazingly good commentary that sparked the post, that, to me, Social Business has now got a new mission. And a much more important one. Like I mentioned elsewhere, very soon I will be moving on away from the term Social Business (Leaving it for what it was meant to be all along in the first place!) and instead I will be using another concept I have grown to be very fond of to try to reflect what I mean with all of this social networking for business. But, for now, if open, trustworthy, public, transparent, agile, democratic, engaged, adaptive, empowered, interconnected, socially sustainable, etc. are what social businesses are all about, I guess The Co-Operative has just shown us all how it can be done. Successfully. And still while aiming for driving profit and growth. For everyone. Yes, I guess you can call me a utopian, a true Hippie 2.0 of sorts, but can you imagine the corporate world behaving in the very same way? Can you imagine what social business would be like eventually? Let’s not imagine it then. Let’s make it happen! Let’s show and demonstrate what true, real, successful social businesses are all about. We have got nothing to lose, but a lot to gain… Our very own survival as a species… Welcome to Humanity 4.0! Humanity 4.0 View more PowerPoint from Michelle Holliday