It looks like the blog post I put together on "The Fallacy of Social Networking" seems to have hit a chord with a large number of folks out there and while I am still catching up with plenty of the conversations that have sparked as a result of it, including some pretty compelling commentary on the article itself (Thanks much everyone for those lovely comments! I will be getting down to them shortly, too!), I thought there was one in particular that pretty much caught the overall sentiment of the blog entry itself that I thought was worth while bringing it up again over here to try to describe what John Hagel himself states pretty accurately under his famous quote "We all live on the edge […] specially, under plenty of mounting pressure", as we have been experiencing over the last 4 years and counting: "So now the fight is really on!". That quote is coming from the blog comment of my good friend Jemima Gibbons that she left yesterday and that I thought would be pretty much descriptive of where we are with regards to Social Business and the real impact it’s had within the corporate world over the course of the last couple of years. To quote her:  "A friend recently reminded me of the tendency of organisations to "co-opt and neutralise" any kind of dissent - that’s exactly what’s happening with social media now - big business is appropriating it and trying to quash it. Of course it is! So now the fight is really on" Goodness! And that’s only the beginning, because just recently you may have noticed how those kinds of awkward situations are on the rise and perhaps far too often laying out a landscape that I am not too sure we would want to dive into too much, although if you have got some additional ones you would want to add further along let us know, please, in the comments. We would very much appreciate it. My latest favourite example though, which has happened to be all over the place at this stage, on mainstream news media, TV, radio, social networks, blog articles, etc. etc. is the one from Guy Adams which ended up eventually on what I feel is the quote of the year so far with regards to the real power of social networks, beyond just the business world and well into our society as a whole for that matter:  "As a journalist, you know you are doing your job properly when you manage to upset rich, powerful and entitled people who are used to getting their own way. And you know you’ve really got under their skin when they pursue censorship, the avenue of last resort since time immemorial" That quote on its own clearly reminds me as well of Manuel Castells’ interview that I shared over here, where he was talking about censorship happening quite extensively within major mainstream news media (Mainly paid by governments and financial institutions) and how only decent journalists, as individuals, would be capable of standing up and fight out for what they know is the right thing: freedom. As Guy himself nicely quotes: "The internet era is meant to be different". Yes, indeed, it is different. Much different. And while reading through a bunch of different resources reflecting on the implications (That piece from Jeff Jarvis alone is absolutely stunning and worth while reading through it on its entirety!), while I am still pondering on the day before yesterday’s article on the topic of that fallacy of social networking, I just couldn’t help thinking of the absolutely inspirational speech from John Hagel back at the Social Business Forum, in Milan, which would fit in quite nicely as an additional follow-up to what we are currently witnessing and that Jemima described beautifully on her commentary. Here’s John’s full dissertation if you would want to start watching through it right away:  From Stress to Success - Pragmatic pathways for Social Business - John Hagel from SocialBizForum on Vimeo. The video recording lasts for about 22 minutes, and it would be totally worth it your time going through it, but if you would want to hold it, allow me to share with you what I learned myself from having listened to him live when he delivered that mind-boggling keynote and what other thoughts I have been building over the course of the latest happenings out there on the Social Web. It will help provide lots of background on where we are, specially, in a business context, and describe, hopefully, where we are heading altogether. So here it goes… John starts his presentation by sharing a bit of background about where the business world is at the moment, suffering from that ruthless mounting pressure that is compounded by social technologies in full force working with practices, technologies and institutions built from previous period(s) and how the latter are facing plenty of new challenges in today’s more than ever complex, networked and interconnected world. [Ohhh, excuse me for a minute, that's all what it would take me... Please do allow me to go for a little deviation on this reflection and share with you this brilliant one minute long insightful commentary from Carmen Medina on the changing role of leadership and how it is affected by social technologies, amongst other different elements, specially, in the area of decision making]:    Ok, back on track! Like I was saying, John described pretty nicely all of those various different pressures that business have been exposed to over the course of the last 3 to 5 years. And he also mentioned how the use of these new technologies will help address some of those challenges, although he admits there are still a number of obstacles, stating how those who overcome them will seize huge opportunities. And eventually succeed as Socially Integrated Enterprises. However, these social technologies can’t just be simply inserted in today’s organizations. To implement them we need to commit into full frontal organizational change, not only within the business world, but also in our societies, our governments, our education systems. Our selves. That’s how deeply rooted it needs to go before we can start ripping off some of the various different benefits of shaping up organisations to survive through the 21st century and beyond. There is an interesting point that he makes though, and that’s just the fact that we need to understand and fully embrace how the key to it all is that most of these changes will fail, only a third will succeed, and that is because of the implementation of these social technologies as a rational process. However, John claims, and rightly so!, if I may add, that change is a political process, not a rational one. It involves enemies, whose main interests are deeply challenged by change and threatened by change itself at the same time. Along that way as well, there are some champions for change, who would need to be strengthened as well or they will fail altogether, because the enemies of change hold the power and that’s ultimately the challenge of any large scale organisational change. WOW!! Too many challenges and obstacles right there!! Truly fascinating! And a tad scary, too, don’t you think? However, it gets better, because over the course of his presentation John gets to share as well the key to make it all work and that is all about how do we strengthen the champions and neutralize the enemies. We need to start thinking along those terms, if we would want to succeed. "Information is power", as I quoted in the day before yesterday’s article as well. Institutions are designed to provide some participants with some unique information and that gives them their power. However, here comes the disruption. What do these social technologies do? What key role do they play in the whole power, political, bullying dynamic within organizations? Well, they amplify flows of knowledge and information, inside an organisation, but across organisations, too! They involve an ecosystem of institutions of participation in these flows of knowledge, like I have blogged about a couple of weeks back, as the main core engine for how business gets done nowadays.  It keeps getting better, because, according to John, organisations themselves know how their positions of power and influence are now being undermined. So how do we confront that power? What do we do to achieve the change we have been envisioning all along? He talks as well, as part of the mix, about the power of social business and the role of evangelists (those champions) along with the power of social technologies and the use they make of them for their day to day workflows. Evangelists have got a natural temptation, apparently, one that I didn’t know of before listening live to John, so it was a new learning experience for me as well: they put a lot of money, invest a lot of money, knowing it will take time, but everything will change eventually; however, we need to invest on it now to make all of this information readily available out there. That’s where Community, Relationships, Creative Conversations are coming back, like they used to by the late 90s and early 2000s and, once again, we are, essentially, putting the enemies of change on notice; we are telling them what’s coming in terms at one level they are not going to understand, because business is business after all. Community is what you still do after work… And I am sure that if you are an online community facilitator at this stage you would be nodding your head in violent agreement feeling how that description is scarily and soaringly rather accurate altogether. Indeed! And that’s where the passive resistance comes along, with plenty of plotting around all over. At a time of mounting pressure, John adds, that passive resistance is even more furious, so that organisations and those enemies can remain within their comfort zone of what we do today, and therefore refuse the urge to change. We see fragile pockets of success, but often, the potential of impact is much reduced because of such resistance. And that’s why we may be perceiving today, right as we speak, how we are not as successful as we could have been from day one. I guess you can never get enough of it, right? The more, the better.  Well, this is where it does get even more interesting from Johns presentation, because from there onwards, towards the end of his dissertation, he comes to describe a couple of rather pragmatic pathways to avoid direct confrontation with those who are reluctant to change:  Focus on Metrics That Matter: That is, focus on the operating metrics, the essential KPIs of each and every business. Address the pain points in whatever the business operations area and inject whatever social software component(s) to try to address and fix that pain point. Don’t focus on figuring out the Return On Investment (The good old known ROI) of Social Media and the overall use of those social technologies, because that’s pretty much a distraction imposed by those resisting the change, so that they can win plenty more time while everyone else tries to figure out what we just simply don’t need to. There is a great chance that, eventually, focusing on those core operating metrics there would need to be very little investment in most cases, since it just tries to address a single pain point or two, so there won’t be any leap time. There will be, however, a good measure of progress by tracking how business operations are improving overall, demonstrating tangible performance improvement(s). Yes, John is spot on with regards to this one, since the enemies of change themselves are going to have a tougher time to object since you will be demonstrating how social technologies can affect key business operations that will impact them altogether right where it benefits the most: business growth. Even if you are an skeptic. Starting on the edge: The good old known mix of pull vs. push and how you could turn mounting pressure on improving overall business performance into something positive through social networking tools, community, relationships, creative conversations, etc. etc., pretty much like you can do with judo when you get to maximize your overall performance based on the strength of your opponent by using their force to your advantage as you swing along. Something that I can relate to pretty well, by the way, if I come to think about "Thinking Outside the Inbox", back in the day, to then living "A World Without Email" and, finally, in 2011 / 2012 landing in "Outside the Inbox - The Documentary". Indeed, what are the chances … Not too bad, eh? I know! Just brilliant, altogether! That’s pretty much an overview of some of the major key points you will be able to immerse yourself in by watching John’s 22 minute long worth while watching presentation. Perhaps that’s essentially what we would also need to do and embark on: re-find that purpose, that meaning, that focus on what Social Business can do to help accelerate better business outcomes and truly delight customers by not focusing on the low hanging fruit alone or whatever other silly battles, but eventually figure out a way to help us seize that "opportunity of minimizing the power of the enemy and maximizing the power of the champions", i.e. the evangelists. I didn’t know it back then when I put together that rather controversial blog post under the provocative heading "Dear Social Business Evangelist - Where Art Thou?", but I guess that’s the exact role I would be looking forward to seeing Social Business Evangelists embarking on from here onwards… "So now the fight is really on!"

It wasn’t going as I’d planned it. Sahana had dropped out of the trip at pretty much the last moment. This meant that we’d have just four people in our group to Nameri and Kaziranga as against the planned five. On the face of it, this didn’t seem much of an issue, except it hiked up the costs that we’d divided across five people. I like being meticulous in the way I plan, so this was a bit of a hiccup. As it turns out, some hiccups are for good reason.Onward to AssamSo on 21st Feb - a day I’d been waiting for months, we set out on our journey. Raji picked me and Chirdeep up, we reached the airport well in time, met Sudhir over breakfast, got into our flight and then made an uneventful trip several hundred miles away to Guwahati. Our first stop was going to be Nameri Tiger Reserve - a quiet forest tucked away not very far from the Assam-Arunachal Pradesh border. Nameri is known to be a birdwatcher’s paradise and we’d planned to stay at the forest department’s Kanyaka Lodge. While the roads from Guwahati to Balipara were OK, the route from that point on was nothing but an absolute nightmare. We’d made quite a few stops on the way - a few times for lesser adjutant storks, and once for some tea at the NH52 Dhaba. So, after a five hour bone rattling drive, we made our way into the lodge and were able to stretch ourselves.Rolling into NameriNameri is not short of accommodation options despite the limited footfall it receives. Nameri Eco Camp is the most popular property in the neighbourhood and is run by the Mahseer Conservation Society in the region. I haven’t heard very good things about the Jia Bhorali resort (Email: jiabhoraliwild@yahoo.in / joyda49@yahoo.in Mobile: 9435101614 / 9859262831), but I can’t believe it’ll be absolutely awful. We however couldn’t get accommodation in the Eco Camp, so we decided to go with the Kanyaka Forest Lodge which at Rs 800/- a night per room seemed like an absolute steal. Located right next to the 134 Eastern Planters unit which is part of the Indian Army’s Eco Task Force, the property is a good, no-frills wildlife enthusiast’s accommodation. Mr Sarat Sarma who runs the lodge on behalf of the forest department is a funny man who has limited knowledge about birds, but more than makes up for it with his enthusiasm. That first night, we slept really well - it’s funny to think how just sitting through a long flight and a long drive can tire you out.Exploring the WildernessThe next morning we were up early. The plan was to go rafting down the Jia Bhorali river. If you stay at the Kanyaka lodge, be sure to speak to Mr Sarma and have the boatmen either stay over at the lodge or come really early in the morning. The rafting point is about 10 kms away at a point called the 13th mile and an early start at 0630 AM gives you a good chance to spot birds. On that first day we were late, but the Jia Bhorali didn’t let us down. Ibisbill, Mallard, Ruddy Shelducks, Black Stork, Black Necked Stork, Pratincole… we found birds faster than we could call out their names. A part of me felt we were on a birding roller coaster. Be mindful though that rafting down the rapids is not an easy way to take photographs and while you’ll spot many birds on the way downstream, you’re quite likely to come back with no pictures.Post the rafting trip and a pit stop for breakfast at the Potasali camp we set out on a forest trek with Meenaram Gogoi. At Nameri Tiger Reserve, birdwatchers need a permit to explore the trekking routes along its peripheries. You’re usually accompanied by an armed guard just in case you run into an aggressive elephant or bison. Now, it pays to have a guard who is a birdwatcher and knows the forest well. Meenaram Gogoi is one such man. From Kaziranga, he’s what you’ll call a born wildlifer. As the birds whizzed past on the canopy, he would operate without binoculars and help us identify exotic species that we hadn’t ever seen before. A little pied flycatcher flew by, as did a blue throated barbet. A streaked spiderhunter perched itself in an unusually high spot. As we went ahead redstarts and bulbuls dotted our path. A crested serpent eagle played hide and seek while a buzzard and a booted eagle soared high above us. You don’t expect to see this level of activity at 11am, but Nameri was truly a different kettle of fish.As we trudged ahead and reached the Oubari camp, Meenaram started to get more alert. He had his mind on a more prized sighting - the white winged duck. You wouldn’t think of a duck being difficult to find, but these guys are shy and super elusive. They choose small ponds in the middle of the forest as their habitat and come noon, they go up on the trees and rest unless disturbed. We tiptoed to a haunt that Meenaram knew of. "Don’t talk, when I point out a location, look there without saying anything." And that’s exactly what we did. As we approached the pond though, we startled an otter. The otter lunged into the water and off flew some of the most beautiful ducks I’ve ever seen. We’d seen the white winged duck, but had no chance of getting a photograph. Damn!Over the next two days we spotted over a 100 bird species and trekked through some of the most beautiful woodlands you would have seen. Mr Sarma played eager host, Meenaram the astute guide and Jaykumar the caretaker was a wonderful cook who rustled up some simple, yet tasty food. If you’re a birdwatcher, then there’s nothing quite like birding in these evergreen forests. As we went down the Jia Bhorali for our last trip almost all of us felt that Nameri needs a lot more time than we had planned for it. Had we stayed longer and not had a hard stop to the trip, we could have come back with some pretty decent photographs. We didn’t, so I’m sure I’ll return there at some point to photograph the avifauna of the region. Until then, I’ll live with memories.Travel TipsHere are a few points that’ll help you plan your trip to Nameri:To get to Nameri, you can hire a taxi at Guwahati airport for about 3600 INR.To book Kanyaka Lodge, call Mr Sarat Sarma (the forester in charge) at +919435381990. He doesn’t operate by email but will mark out your name in his diary.The ensuite rooms are 800 INR apiece, though for hot water you’ll need to share one of the common bathrooms. You can also opt for a deluxe room with a TV and that costs 1000 INR each night.Food is usually simple and consists of local vegetarian and non-vegetarian options. Jayakumar, the cook is quite obliging with requests and is usually willing to do what it takes to please you.Rafting and trekking require separate permits and cost 280 INR and 320 INR respectively. Mr Sarma can help facilitate this.The boatmen’s charge for the rafting trip is usually the bigger amount - 3240 INR for the trip. Each boat can accommodate upto 4 people. So in hindsight it wasn’t too bad that Sahana couldn’t make it. It helped all of us be together.You’ll also need to hire a vehicle to carry your raft to the 13th mile and to pick you up from the end of the trip. This usually costs 1000 INR.Apart from birding, there’s also the pygmy hog breeding center to help in the conservation of this endangered wild pig. Well worth a visit and I also saw some pretty interesting butterflies in the area.I hope you visit Nameri soon - it was leg 1 of what’s been my most productive birding trip by far. Our next stop was Kaziranga - more about that in my next post. By the way, for this post and for this trip in general I tried using my iPhone as an alternate camera. I was quite pleased with the results in several cases. I'd love to know what you thought. So please, please, please - do share your feedback. I'm guessing you'll be able to make out the ones I shot with the phone, won't you?© Sumeet Moghe

Over the course of the last few weeks and months you may have noticed how there seems to be a growing trend of concern with regards to where the world of social networking and the Social Web, in general, is heading and how the original premise of wanting to change the world for the better seems to have now been forgotten, or neglected, by almost everyone, specially, those very same social networking sites (And I know I am using that term rather loosely nowadays) that once claimed to be changing the world according to those terms and make it a better place for all of us. But in reality what we are seeing is how platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus, etc. etc. are showing what they were really after in the first place from day one: our own personal data for free to then make business, their business, with it at our very own expense without asking, nor giving, anything in return.  Yes, indeed, the good old mantra of "If a service is free, you are the product". Well, now more than ever, we are seeing that taking place and on a far too frequent basis helping diminish our own perception of how wonderful social networking tools for business can well be. And if you look into recent examples of wrong-doings by Facebook, Twitter or even LinkedIn that we have seen all over the place we may be starting to think that we are all in big trouble. Plenty of folks have been talking about the consumerisation of IT and the corporate world for that matter, and yet what we are seeing, more and more often, is the industrialisation of what we once knew as social networking (sites). Now, this on its own would be rather problematic, specially, in the context of Social Computing and Social Business, and even more so if the focus would have been, all along, on technology itself, because, indeed, I would tend to agree that we would all be doomed and big time seeing how those platforms are starting to show their real intentions as to what they would want to do with our data.  Yet, social networking has never, ever, been about the technology, nor the social tools themselves. All along, and from the very beginning, over 18 years ago, they have been just that, enablers, allowing us to do the job, but never meant to be the end-goal  or the end-result. Their main advantage being that they have made our jobs a lot easier by empowering us into working smarter, but not necessarily harder. But again, they are enablers, not what our business goals should be. So, what’s social networking been all about then, you may be wondering, right? Well, it’s been, all along, about culture, corporate culture, about organizational change, about change management (i.e. How do you manage change in today’s more complex than ever business world), about all of those soft competency skills and abilities to facilitate a much more open, public, transparent and agile business, where hierarchies themselves no longer rule alone, but initially merged and blended with wirearchy, and all in all with the main aim of improving overall business performance, and sustainable growth by delighting your customers.  Thus Social Business has never been about technology, i.e. all of these social tools we have been making use of over the course of the years, but about delighting your customers by providing them with excellent products and a superior customer experience. And if there is anything to add about that is that we still have got plenty of ground to cover. We are only getting started, but it’s also true that we should not lose the focus and the purpose of why we have started this journey to become successful social businesses. And this is where I just couldn’t help thinking about the Social Business Forum event that I attended in Milan, in early June, where I had the great pleasure of seeing live (And talked briefly, too!) Steve Denning giving one of the most inspiring keynotes from the entire conference event, and perhaps the whole year so far under a rather interesting and thought provoking title: "Transforming the Workplace with Radical Management": Transforming the workplace with radical management - Steve Denning from SocialBizForum on Vimeo. On that 23 minute long presentation (See the video recording above) Steve shared with us lots of very insightful thoughts and ideas as to what makes companies successful and not so successful nowadays. The main key differentiator, apparently, and I couldn’t have agreed more with him, is whether businesses are prepared to delight their customers or not. If they are, they will succeed, if they aren’t, they would be struggling. In both cases he shared a good number of firms that have walked either way, and it surely was interesting to see as well how he sees the world of Social impacting that vision of improving customer experiences as perhaps one of the most powerful methods.  Yet, he also talked about how fragile Social is, specially, from the perspective of what we have got today, in terms of both technology and corporate culture issues that seem to stop us from achieving that goal of going the extra mile for our customers. Mainly because of two of the three basic modes of human interaction that permeate throughout the corporate world. To name Authority and Money. The third one is Social and as you can imagine, and according to Steve, I couldn’t have agreed more with him, indeed, Social is allergic to both of them in equal terms.  And this is where it gets really fascinating, because he continues to postulate something that I also read a little while ago on his highly recommended book on "The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace of the 21st Century", as well as the good number of conversations that we both carried out online a while ago on the topic of Leadership for WE-Magazine and that folks can access over here, thanks to the wonderful Ulrike Reinhard: that 20th century management has always been based on both money and authority, whereas 21st century management would embrace more the model of Social and Social Flows. To the point where he gets to describe two completely different ecosystems that would go as follows:   And, of course, the one on Radical Management:   His description of both types of management, specially, the latter one on Radical Management is priceless, more than anything, because through a good number of examples and a thorough description of traits and corporate values he gets to describe, and quite nicely, too!, what a Social Business would be like moving beyond that particular focus on technology alone and tackle the key issues to become such a successful social enterprise. To name:  New Goal: Delight your customer(s) where you need to ensure you provide a new role for managers, one that we have talked about over here a couple of times already, by the way, that is, Servant Leaders, along with new coordination mechanisms, a crucial and rather critical shift from value to values and, of course, a new way to communicate, and collaborate altogether. New Manager Role: From controller to enabler, specially, from the perspective of being capable of acting as a servant leader, enabling that opportunity of creating self-organising teams instead of continuing to live through that command-and-control micro-management mentality.  Coordination: From bureaucracy to dynamic linking, where, as I manager, you understand and fully embrace that you are part of the flow, even the information and knowledge flows, no longer protecting and hoarding the existence of silos of information, but also with one single unique goal: delight your customer.  From value to values: Radical Transparency, where you, as a manager, make the successful transition from preoccupying yourself with efficiency and cutting costs into inspiring human values that build trust, specially, transparency, because that’s what’s going to be at the heart of the matter when interacting directly with your employees, as well as with your customers and business partners.  Interactive Communication: Conversation, where you eventually come to terms with the fact that you are no longer in control of the message, nor the corporate brand, not your employees ability to communicate and share their knowledge. Where you transition from a top-down driven set of interactions to what human beings are really good at: conversations.  All in all resulting on a very similar formula that we have seen already in the past, but that we were not executing all of the various different elements all at once as one of his final slides suggests brilliantly and rather accurately, too!:  Thus, as you can see from his rather inspiring presentation, there is a lot of work that still needs to get done with regards to help provoke that transformation into becoming successful social businesses; and we may have well noticed how some of the social networking tools available out there may have gone ashtray on their ways and have started to show us what they were really going after, disappointingly, in the first place. Yet, our mission and aim should be higher. We cannot afford losing track, focus, meaning and purpose from our core initial mission: embarking on that journey to become Socially Integrated Enterprises. And for that, as Steve himself mentioned during his keynote we need to "be the strategy" (not support the strategy), we need to "master leadership storytelling" (As I have mentioned as well over here not so long ago with "Once Upon a Time … the Power of Storytelling for Business"), we need to educate our bosses (This is, certainly, going to be toughest one ever! But, hey, who doesn’t like having a good challenge ahead that will take months, if not years, to master and resolve?), we need to join with others, thinking that we cannot longer do it alone, so building strong personal business relationships and partnerships with other change agents and social business evangelists is going to be critical, to then, eventually, do what I think is the main reason why we have all embarked on this fascinating journey to shift and change the workplace of the future to face a new reality: our reality. That one where we "take charge of our future".  And that, folks, is why the opportunity for Social Business is still intact and why I feel that not only are we just getting started, but that we have got a lot still to accomplish that wouldn’t have much to do with social technologies, but with changing the way we do business, because as Steve quoted another Steve wonderfully:  "Your time is limited: don’t waste it living someone else’s life" - Steve Jobs Amen!!

I have to tell you - I haven't been doing much reading in the last 6 months or so. Tell me, with a 12 hour work day and birding to do in free time and a life to lead on top of that, where's the time for this? Anyways, I'm going to learn from an author today. John Maeda the author of Redesigning Leadership is keynoting the conference this morning. I'm curious to know what the talks going to be all about - very exciting stuff since I'm always kicked about learning and I'd love to be an effective leader. Heidi says John can speak to us as a colleague but also someone who can bring views from a different sphere. Currently he's the president of the Rhode Island School of Design. And so the keynote begins! John was mersmerised by Heidi's intro because it was about us and not about him and that's important as a leader. John is very interested in the idea of how to lead - he sees it as a practice. It began from his curiosity - eg his discovery of the lingo of financial terms. He did an MBA online to decode that lingo. He was a professor by day and a student by night. Leadership comes through living it and it's quite uncomfortable. Leadership has four stages/ aspects:Start from foundationsCraft the teamSense ActivelyFail productivesWe're living a lot longer than we did 30 years ago. So a four year college education or the two years masters add-on doesn't cut it for our evolution in this world. So you need to keep learning.Build the foundationsYou can't be afraid to get your hands dirty. MIT was a very clean place for John - RISD is a very dirty place that way. People want to understand and play around - a very elegant thing in John's view. John just got super-promoted and was at the top job of the school very quickly so he didn't really know how to do his job. So he bought a lot of books and he's been learning all the time. He's gotten to learn about art and design at the very core. Take a look at who the Alumni is. In the first year at RISD, people are supposed to unlearn what they know. For eg: they know how to draw, but the first foundational course is to break it down into drawing simple shapes such as black and white polygons. It helps all the artists understand their craft better by coming down to the foundations. Maeda is talking about knowledge starting from direction moving to concepts but then experience going to change concepts and affecting direction. So while the first direction is about mastery, the second is about originality. This creates what the human race is all about - innovating and improving all the time.Craft the teamFiguring out the team thing is quite a strange task. Maeda refers to the American basketball team which had Michael Jordan and the first two times the American team dominated, but then they couldn't get gold. What was wrong? You look at some oriental buildings in Japan, made of wood and these last several hundred years! In modern construction things don't last even a decade. The secret is in the materials they use by selecting the right wood from the mountains. In your team, the materials are the people. There's no I in TEAM. There's a lot of I in INDIVIDUAL. There's a WE in WELCOME. John is talking about someone at the omelette station at the breakfast buffet and that server made him feel welcome with his omelette! That kind of power is human power - doesn't come from a dialog box or hashtag. It was because someone believed hospitality and wanted to live that value.He brings up Marshall Ganz's book about the Power of WE. The book talks of a spiral emanating outwards - every leader leads about stories that lead outwards. It's not about autopilot; it's about engaging. Marshall's book calls leadership a practice. It's a practice that starts with Self - identifying yourself. Then there's the story of US - the connections in the group. And lastly there's the story of NOW, where the SELF meets the US and there's a task to complete. Every leaders story fits this very simple pattern. The only time you need leaders is in times of uncertainty. Story is a critical component in this - they can't hear you if they can't feel it. Sense ActivelyArtists are always doing a wrong thing at the right time! He talks about people wanting to fly kites - what good is that? Well a good thing there is to see and feel the wind. Also it's a good way to experience what it's like from the wind's perspective to see the person flying the kite or the kite itself? If you look at growth in the last 20 years. Median family income is increasing at a linear pace, but cost of medical care and education has increased exponentially. So the ability to be educated is diminishing given that our capability to fund is becoming more and more difficult. So we need to sense this and find other ways to learn. If you look at the monopoly in information with the number of printed books. The monopoly of universities such as Harvard, Princeton and Yale until 2000, their monopoly increased considerably. But post that, it fell quite a bit? Is there a disruption there because of the long tail? It's not longer a heirarchy in organisations these days - it's more an organisational network. The bigger thing is now a trans-organisational network. You're friends with your competitors.Fail Productively"Courage lies somewhere between fearlessness and recklessness"-AristotleJohn is showing us some of the scenes created using circuit boards. You've got to see this to believe it. It's art created with circuit boards - showing deep situations like a single fathers, CEO-ness and possession; a guy showing off his new smartphone. He talks about an experience in London - a workshop that involved drawing on sand. He met people from various walks of life. People had several problems and varied situations. There are two frames to leadership - Traditional and Creative. One being a symbol of authority, other being a symbol of inspiration. Traditional is about Yes or No. Creative is about 'Maybe' - the world is complex and you can be wrong. "If you manage a team of 10 people, it's quite possible to do so with very few mistakes or bad behaviours. If you manage an organisation of many more it becomes quite impossible." - Ben HorowitzWhen you're an A player, your median is quite high on the other hand your median as a leader will be quite low given all the mistakes that you'll make and you've got to be willing to make.John's book is about an honest recount of what it's like being a leader. He describes it as leading without all of the answers and being open to the critique. It's been a fairly inspirational talk and I enjoyed some of the ideas he threw out though the points I noted down were a poor replacement to his talk. The point John makes right at the end is that the economy is at a downturn in America. The innovations we're looking at come from Science Technology Engineering and Math (STEM). But a lot of the innovation also needs to come from Art. Yes we have more technology - it's everywhere. We're in a strange race with ourselves. We've always been in this evolution. We used to have a technology called the coffee table. This was before the TV. After the TV, coffee tables became defunct - now people stopped sitting around the coffee table, they sat around the TV now. And in the computer and mobile age, everyone's got a television in their face. It's the reality of the world. Technology realises progress at light speed. Electrons travel at light speed, people don't. We're stuck in a bit of a loop. When computers came first, they were awful and then there was the amazing invention of the CDROM - ability to store and share full colour images; great sounding audio and then movies on your computer. Then we had the web, and the web could do everything in the browser that we did everything we could using the CDROM. And then the mobile came and went through the same evolution as computers and the web. The evolution pattern is the same, culture hasn't moved forward though.When Maeda compares his time at MIT and contrasts his time at RISD with it. He looks at the combination of Design (making solutions) and Art (making questions). Artists are bold to be cultural entrepreneurs. The intersection is where cool stuff happens. Design is about balancing form and content. John shows the word FEAR written in different typefaces and it's quite amazing how the form changes the way we perceive the content. And then there's art. Art is harder - by definition it is. People who don't 'get' art are actually getting it because they recognising it is hard. It's about questioning authority. Artists ask 'Why' or 'Why not'. Why would you make art out of glass than drink from the glass? Why would you paint every day? Why not? By forcing us to think and question, we evolve our culture. VUCA is how the world feels today - volatile, uncertain, complex ambiguous. The anti-VUCA is visioning, understanding, clarity and agility. It's the new VUCA. A new creative way of thinking that changes the way we approach life.Scientists and artists both ask big questions, but they have different inflections. Both types of questions put together create powerful combinations. Artists are often inspired by scientists to see anew. There are artists who are scientists and vice-versa nowadays. There are designers who are scientists too. Designers are helping us see patterns in complex data. Art is merging with science. Policy makers need artists to help with sense making! Innovation is the combination of Art and Design. STEM needs to become STEAM with the Art popped in between. Check out http://stemtosteam.org© Sumeet Moghe

It’s that time of the week, almost the weekend!, where we could all do with a bit of an Inspiring Video of the Week, don’t you think? The last series of blog posts that I have put together over here in this blog in the last few days have been on the long side of things and while I do appreciate everyone going ahead, reading through them and leave behind some wonderful comments (Thanks much for that, indeed!), I think most folks would also appreciate a shorter blog entry every now and then with a clearer, sharper, insightful message being shared across, right? So how about this one: THINK, about making the world work better.  Indeed, that’s the title of a 10 minute long video clip that has been shared, a little while ago, over in YouTube by IBM (So the usual disclaimer would apply in here, before anyone starts wondering, I happen to work for that company for over the last 15 years) and which I think would make for a rather interesting reading, if we would want to venture into figuring out plenty more about that "Circular Economy" that I have covered in the recent past a few times already. IBM itself calls it Smarter Planet, but I think it would be much more suggestive and inspiring altogether going ahead with that mantra of what’s behind the Circular Economy and how it helps us focus on just simply making good, healthy progress. Either way, I wouldn’t want to extend myself for far too long, other than to mention how the main theme behind this rather inspirational video clip is all about something that seems to be lacking nowadays in the world out there, in general, and that we probably need to bring it back very soon, and pretty badly, if not already!, if we would want to keep progressing nicely as sustainable, profitable businesses, as meaningful cultures and as societies representative of the human nature: sustainable growth through critical thinking, based on these key elements: "seeing, mapping, understanding, believing and acting". Amongst others …   Not too shabby, don’t you think? I am not sure whether you may have read it or not, but the video clip reminds me of a superb, rather short blog post from my good friend Euan Semple under the heading "What I think" which would nicely summarise what I actually meant above when I said critical thinking and how we seem to be lacking, generally speaking, those key skills, specially, in the world of the Social Web, when you would imagine that it wouldn’t be like that, given the chances and the many opportunities that we nowadays have to connect, collaborate, share our knowledge, converse, learn and innovate together through a good number of those social technologies. But Euan himself describes it much nicer than what I could possibly do myself, and I am going to take the liberty of quoting a couple of sentences and leave the rest out out to you to head over to this blog entry to read the rest …  "We all have the ability to think seriously. We all have the right to say what we think […] We are on the brink of working out new ways to productively combine what we all think […]" Perhaps, we should all start doing a bit more of that critical thinking that I have mentioned above, in order to try to solve some of the most urging problems we keep bumping into as a society, instead of figuring out why we cannot longer make sense of the Trending Topics of, say, Twitter or why Twitter closed off the door for things like LinkedIn or Instagram. Seriously? Don’t we have better, more impending issues to work on as a collective through using these social technologies to think AND act? I think so. I know so! Thus we better roll our sleeves and get down to make the world work better… It would be about time, don’t you think? Have a good one everyone!

I'm sitting in a Mobile Learning session with one of my favourite people and authors - Connie Malamed, so forgive me for being extremely nice with my write up if that's what happens by the end of this talk. Connie's had a journey learning about apps on Mobile. She wanted to create a performance support app for instructional designers. It's called Instructional Design Guru. You should check it out. In today's talk she's going to tell us how you can walk through the design experience before you hand it over to a programmer. As instructional designers we have the skills to do this, it's just a question of thinking through each of the decisions that we're going to be party to.When designing for mobile it's important to think of the context. Connie talks about the journey in a few steps: 1. Define the problem 2. Research and Ideate 3. Define the Solution 4. Develop the AppEveryone has ideas about apps! 5.9 billion mobile subscribers in the world. 1.2 billion of them are mobile web users. 63% more smartphone users in 2011 whereas laptop growth has been just 15%. So why mobile? First things first - it's convenient. People almost always have their phones with them. It's very relevant and contextual to the experience that someone's having at the time. People are always out there with their phones and helps with content generation. There are varied devices and mobiles do reduce friction by bringing down barriers. There are mobile collaboration tools and mobile is a far reaching phenomenon. In Africa for example mobile penetration is far ahead in comparision to computers. And lastly, mobile gives you the ability to design for either push or pull. Which is a great thing for learning design.There are several approaches for learning on mobile: * micro-learning: self paced mini lessons in varied media. eg podcasts * synchronous: virtual classrooms using mobile webinar tools * assessments: tests, surveys, polls * social media learning: enabling networks for learning * learning games: challenges and simulations * performance support apps: references, job aids, collaboration, social, augmented realityWe'll focus on performance support. The key here is a few interesting things: * it's just in time - the ability to quickly get information in the context of work * it's part of the workflow and is seamless with the act of doing something * it occurs when needed * it uses a pull model * the learners can apply the skills immediately - great for cognitive load since you don't need to remember heaps before you perform a task.There's a fair range of things you can do with mobile learning and mobile performance support: * queries to PLN - no need for an app here * QR codes - used widely in marketing, but you can get people to get to information in context here * Automatic text message reminders can be great as in context prompts * Checklists, references, job aids are also interesting tool - that's the territory Connie's explored * Augmented reality is a good in context training approachConnie talks about a doctor receiving surgery advice on SMS. Quite amazing when you think that it saved someone's life. It's performance support too! Mobile performance support needs to fit within the overall learning and mobile strategy for your organisation.In any case when you think of performance support, you've got to address the 5 moments of need: 1. When learning for the first time 2. When wanting to learn more 3. When trying to remember or apply 4. When things change 5. When something goes wrongMobile helps in particular with the last three situations! Think of tools like HVAC calculator. Or iBartender to make fun drinks when you don't know how. eMocha is another interesting data collection app for healthcare.Design ConsiderationsNow how do people use phones? People mostly use them on the go. They're usually distracted - so remember they don't have your full attention. People use it in context - eg: Maps, Layar, Foursquare. 40% people use phones in the bathroom. People use phones when they're bored! People use them at their desks - it's a good way to impress them. People use them for micro-tasks - running an errand, paying a bill, watching a video. People use phones when they're relaxed and in a varying set of emptional states.So the conclusion is: * Short bursts of activity * One handed * Simple features first and complex next * Text messages are hugely popular!So what tools do you want to use? You want to figure out the use case scenarios. eg: You're at a museum you want to look up information about the artist and the painting. Or you're doing repairs - you have a complicated situation you need help with.Second, you want to research similar apps. What other apps are out there that do similar things like your app? It can be fairly time consuming and by the way you need to spend money!Third, what gestures will you need? This is not your grandma's mouse! The mouse is an intermediatary while playing with touch devices is quite intuitive. Even a kid can do it as Connie demonstrates. So think of taps, pinches, flicks, drags, presses and the stuff that actually happens in the mobile world. Luke W has a lot of stuff here about how to design for mobile. Take a look at his gesture reference cards.Fourth, what hardware will you use? You'll have several different types of media that you may want to use but will your hardware support it? Does your hardware support geolocation if you're trying to use that in your design? The phone camera can be quite a useful tool. There's the accelerometer as well as is near field communications using RFID technology. So two phones close to each other can share information with each other. iPhones don't support this but you can work around using bluetooth. Be careful to focus to on the primary task.So how do you communicate your design?Three important things to consider: * Write you specs * Diagram the structure of your app * and be absolutely sure to wireframeWhen you're writing specs for your app, you have several ways of doing it. You could write detailed requirements specs or you could even do user stories. There are definitely other things that you want to specify, such as personas, programming language that you prefer, web or native, task diagrams, your overall vision of the apps functionality, etc. Be sure to diagram the structure too. There are three general structures: * Flat, no heirarchy * Tabs * Tree structure which has a fairly complex heirarchyThere are several wireframing tools available on the internet for this kind of stuff and well, you can just do Powerpoint, Word and maybe just pen and paper.The other thing to thing to think of is visual design. What icons will you use? What will your touch target sizes look like? What metaphor will you use? For example the Compass app has a real world compass metaphor. If you do pick one metaphor, be sure to follow it all the way through.Technology DecisionsNative apps of course are faster give you access to the phone's hardware, etc but the cost of programming is high and you get very platform specific and you've got to conform to the marketplace rules. The web on the other hand is portable, cost of development is lower and works on various platforms. Also it's easier to prototype this. The disadvantages however is that you're internet dependent and then you don't get the speed and hardware functionality of your native apps. You can of course create hybrid apps using stuff like Titanium. Do also be mindful that you need to use native languages to program for mobile platforms - so your programmers need to know the specific languages. There's quite a few mobile authoring tools out there as well, but be sure to check on native compatibility and the publishing structure there.© Sumeet Moghe

You may remember how in previous articles that I have put together over here in this blog I have mentioned how, lately, I am going through one of those stages, where instead of participating rather actively in a good number of various different social networking sites, I’m now more inclined towards plenty of reading and listening what’s happening out there, then do a bunch of more reading (books, articles, white papers, etc. etc.), followed by lots of additional self-reflection and learning on the sides from watching video clips, mainly of conference event recordings available on YouTube and, eventually, come back to the blog to reflect on some of the stuff I have learned in the process. Yes, indeed, in short, I am spending now more time blogging than in the usual social networking sites, the so-called message boards. And today has been no different. Specially, since I have been catching up on a couple of recent keynote speaker sessions that have totally blown my mind, since my head is still spinning with dozens of ideas and I just can’t help thinking about them. And all thanks to the State of the Net 2012 conference event, hosted in Trieste, Italy, by late June. And all thanks to having watched, in much anticipation, two of my favourite mentors and thought leaders in the space of the Social Web, Knowledge Management, Collaboration, Narrative and Sensemaking: Euan Semple and Dave Snowden. This is the first part of two blog posts that I will be putting together to summarise some of the findings of what I learned from having watched both presentations over the last few days, starting with Euan’s "People Tweet" and then the second article on Dave’s "Tacit Knowledge", since I was originally putting together a single blog entry and it was just getting a bit too long, so I eventually decided to split it up in two to help digest it better, since there is just far too much good stuff in both of their keynotes that I wanted to touch base on as my key learnings. So here is Part One and stay tuned for Part Two coming up shortly already! In "People Tweet" Euan gets to talk for a little bit over 25 minutes on the state of Social Media in general and how, in a way, he misses the good old Social Web, where really good conversations were taking place, as opposed to today when it looks like broadcasting short bursts with your own messages along seems to be the rage of the so-called social tools, specially, those bursts that are no longer shared across by people, but by corporate drones or bots just wanting to get the message across, without an opportunity to engage in meaningful dialogue. Indeed, the good old known sense of belonging, of connectedness, that we seem to have lost at a rampant pace nowadays, apparently. Euan comes to state that part of the reason why we are heading that way and why we should question it eventually is how much we have ending up industrialising our lives to the point that for a society that tries to move on from the industrial revolution into the digital revolution, we seem to be going in the wrong direction, and perhaps even without not noticing. How we may have sold our souls in the name of security, of safety, of our own jobs, essentially, even though that’s no longer anything else than a myth. Job security, that is, specially, in today’s current financial econoclypse. He worryingly states how the vast majority of the Social efforts out there done by businesses are now down to outsourcing it to agencies, and put a check on Social, and move on, without realising their decision making / power almost disappears from the entire equation for something so important as collaboration amongst knowledge workers and their customers and business partners.  It’s been fascinating watching him talk about how much of the business world today is rather paternalistic, to the point that strong hierarchies are still in place making most of the decision making process as an outsourced activity, reminding me, big time, of the recent TEDx Talk from Isaac Getz on the issues and concerns of doing so. Truly loved his quote on how "we have sub-contracted storytelling to broadcasters" to the point where they are no longer our stories, but someone else’s, in most cases losing the context of what we wanted to transfer and share across in the first place! Goodness, not sure what you would think, but that, right there!, is a massive wake-up call for all businesses out there thinking they are living social this way thinking they will be all right. No, they won’t. Never will. Bound for failure sooner rather than later.  One of the things that Euan thinks we have gone ashtray with when talking about the huge potential of the Social Web and that we have started to miss big time on is having grown-up conversations, for us to start using these social tools for serious things, for things that matter. And how we keep failing about finding our voice because of how fearful we may well be about tasting the lovely waters of writing, of blogging, for instance. From there onwards he starts advocating for how we need to revert that worrisome trend and encourage knowledge workers to not be afraid about writing what we think, what we know, what we say in face to face interactions about things that matter, because there is a great chance that in doing so we will have a good opportunity to change things that may work relatively well, or not. And improve them for the better. But it needs to start somewhere. And Euan thinks that blogging may well be a great starting point and I must say, while putting together this article, that I couldn’t have agreed more with him, having followed that approach myself for over the last 9 years with thousands of blog posts shared both internally and externally and realising how much blogging has meant for yours truly not only on my own personal career, but on sharing across ideas with other folks who may be interested in and helping improve them engaging in those same conversations that Euan mentions on his pitch.  Ha! Who would have thought that blogging would be so powerful in the era of social tools, errr, I mean messaging board systems like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so forth? Not too bad, eh? Thus, where is your blog in all of this? Think about it as Euan pretty much nails with his commentary about how most of the corporate communications out there are nowadays de-personalised to the point where they are mimicking management speak, where they lack the passion and the emotion of the messages you would want to convey across…  From there onwards he comes to question everyone about when was the last time that we sat down to think about work, to seriously think about why do we do what we do, about the consequences of what we do, about the huge potential of introducing networks behind the firewall, exchanging ideas, sharing with one another, to help democratise how information and knowledge at the same time flow throughout the organisation altogether. What Euan, quoting David Weinberger, mentioned as "Writing ourselves into existence", which is definitely the perfect introduction to the next section of his presentation where he talked about the perfect blend of hierarchy (Which have now worryingly institutionalise far too much altogether!) and wirearchy in businesses where there would need to be a combination of both in order to get the best outcomes from both of them. Where managers need to shake off that flavour of command and control, suit-and-tie, within their organisations and instead realise you are just one node of the network, one of the leaders, who just basically needs to lead by example, lead with an attitude, not your title, or diploma altogether but through ephemeral meritocracies. Just brilliant! Long live all of those trojan mice!  Now, there are a few other things that Euan gets to talk about on that keynote speaker session that I will leave it down to you to watch and enjoy further. Perhaps, I would just want to leave things over here embedding the code of the video, so you can play it right away, and by including as well what’s my absolute favourite quote from his entire dissertation and which is just worth it on its own. Again quoting David Weinberger, and nicely captured as well by my good friend Samuel Driessen:  "Love is what makes the Internet hang together, the basis human desire to want connect to each other" Demonstrating, once again, how the Social Web, as we know it, is a whole lot more than just a bunch of social technologies and tools that we have got out there at our disposal for fun and play and whatever other trivial stuff we are just too used to. We need to be able to re-find our focus, our purpose and our meaning, without fear taking over our actions and interactions, and keep thriving on that journey to become a successful social organisation, whatever that may well be. Essentially, the one we have all envisioned from the very beginning, back in the day. And it looks like writing out loud our way there has never been more powerful to achieve that goal. Even today, more than never…  

This morning at LSConf, the our speaker is Erik Wahl of Art of Vision fame. The conference site describes him thus, "By breaking apart traditional thinking, Erik challenges and inspires his audiences to redefine commonly held assumptions and misconceptions about "creativity," "goals," "success," and "vision." Discover how you can sharpen your creative skills and identify a personal style for inspiring yourself and others to rethink vision and purpose." Very exciting, let's see what he has to say.I can't tell you how awesome this guy's start is. Check out this video to get an idea or maybe this video as a teaser. What a masterpiece this guy creates in just about 5-6 minutes! His hands are dirty, he is in the thick of work within a room of at least a 1000 people. I am in awe. Erik is saying that if we go to a school, and we ask "Who can draw?" everyone raises their hands and now when he asks that question in this room only a few hands go up. Every child is an artist - how do you remain an artist as you grow up? Erik talks about the most important meetings and he wants you to take those meeting notes using Crayola crayons - one of the most recognisable smells amongst adults. Apparently it reduces blood pressure. Drawing is a learned skill like anything else - math, science, design, what have you. He's seeking out the courageous, colourful ideas that are hidden amongst all of us. He's talking about breaking out of our comfort zone - business as usual or technology as usual. We move on to the show "Fear Factor". Erik picks a member of the audience by just throwing a ball and picking the guy who catches the ball. This guy is now going to lead or will delegate to someone else to lead with Erik. And of course, this guy puts his boss on the line! Erik is giving everyone an opportunity to pull out their iPhone because this will be great YouTube material. Surprise, surprise! The guy on stage wins the brilliant painting that Erik drew up live. Taking a risk got this guy a dividend he didn't expect. Fear kills performance - embracing risk creates unexpected results. FEAR = False Evidence Appearing Real.Do we have the ability to focus, to then commmit but most importantly to adapt? What is the ROI on creativity? What is the ROI to have a differentiation? What's a creative idea worth? In today's market the strongest currency isn't the Euro or the Dollar. The strongest currency is trust. The question to ask is that if we were to start from scratch today what would we paint on our blank canvas? How can we leverage the currency of trust and community to spread our ideas? Our greatest innovations in this world take place on the border of chaos and order. Our mind is a machine that never sleeps. We need to unlock the potential of that mind by combining left brain thinking and right brain thinking. We're getting conditioned to think in a one dimensional way that is about a single right answer. We were taught to be increasingly risk averse, increasingly operationally excellent. Too much focus on the left brain.Time = Money? If we allow money to equal time, we cheapen the value of life. We turn great interactions into transactions. Instead of thinking of ways to ignite our passion or work smarter, we're looking at how many dollars and how many checkmarks we got. Where will the vision for the future come from if we go logically, linearly with the equation of Time=Money? Today we're bombarded with ideas and stimulus in ways than never before. We try to generalise and predict what might arrive by using only a part of our brains to deal with this stimuli. Is there a way we can unlock the potential of our minds when we can look at this stimuli and build emotional connections that'll drive future thoughts?Erik wasn't always an artist. He was told he didn't do things right. And then 9/11 happened and his business collapsed. And by luck or accident he went to a local art store at that point when he touched the canvas, his perception of himself as an artist changed. And that changed his life. He stopped selling his artwork seven years work to raise money for charity. Creativity is now the corporate capital. He will now hide his Monroe painting and he'll drop clues on twitter for people to find it. This is his way of engaging differently! Can we think of ways to engage differently? Do we really need to think like everyone does? We need different ways to experience the world. Most people will see a challenge - can we look at the same challenge as an opportunity? As a finale, Erik does things differently. To the brilliant music in the background and to a standing ovation, Erik draws up Steve Jobs - upside down. Just take a look at the video above (hopefully it'll process by the time you see it). Great talk. It's tough to think of whether you have 10 things to take away from this talk. Was it inspirational to feel that everyone of us is creative at some level? Was it about questions than answers? Was it goose-bump-generating? Was it something that tells me that I can be different? Does it tell us all that we can break free? Hell yeah!To call Erik Wahl "another speaker" is the equivalent of calling the Mona Lisa "another painting." - from his website, but true. It's not often that I have to video sections of a talk to share the emotion it evoked for me - this is one of those talks. I had goose-bumps watching this guy draw to the music and his passion, for art and his brush strokes was palpable. There's an artist in all of us - we got educated, we grew up. We have the opportunity to paint a canvas for the future - free of constraints, free of inhibitions. We need to believe in the currency of trust, believe that the future will be what we'll make it to be regardless of who we are. And that future won't be wonderful and beautiful if we continue to think exactly the same way as we did yesterday. That future needs us to think in ways that we haven't thought before. Thank you Erik - I had to stay back and miss the next talk if only to shake your hand for this inspirational morning. The conference was worth it to just feel your energy.© Sumeet Moghe

(This is Part Two of the series … Part One can be found over here) And on that spirit of what the real impact of Social Computing is, we are going to move onwards on to the second keynote speaker session that I would want to share with you all and talk for a bit about it. Again it took place at the State of the Net 2012 event, the same one where Euan was also one of the keynote speakers. This time around though by one of my favourite thought leaders and KM / Complexity mentors, the always insightful and incredibly knowledgeable Dave Snowden, whose blog, along with Euan’s, are two of my most essential, critical reads of the day, every day. Couple of the main online resources on KM, the Social Web, Collaboration, Narrative and Complexity that keep feeding my brain into the bursts that you folks get to read over here and in other social networking sites over the course of time.  Thus when I bumped into Dave’s recording of his keynote "Tacit Knowledge" I just couldn’t help finding some time and watch through it. It lasts for a little bit over 35 minutes, but it’s one of those essential recordings of the year you just can’t miss out on and I am not too sure I’m going to be doing proper justice to it by sharing along some of the golden gems and insightful glimpses that Dave himself shared throughout all of that time. However, I’m going to try it, encouraging you all though to not miss out on the video clip itself, because it’s one of the most essential resources on The Social Web, KM, Narrative and Storytelling, Complexity, Collaboration, etc. etc. that you would find out there. Yes, indeed, that inspirational altogether and here’s why. As a starting point, Dave gets to talk about tacit knowledge, about the differences between knowing and knowledge and where we should be focusing on. Knowledge is basically collective in nature. And as groups who get to share and exchange that knowledge he brings up a superb point of encouraging, within organizations, the setup of crews (In the military sense) to replace teams, as the latter have got to go through a process of formation and knowing the capability of other people, whereas crews themselves can immediately perform since they are ready to go, trained on role and their role expectations well defined. Brilliant point as well to focus on exaptation, not adaption citing Apple as being the prime example. Truly enjoyed his definition of such concept as well as that other notion that we all live in a state of messy-coherence, although I won’t be saying much more on it, other than encouraging those folks in favour of management, and managing things and people, in general, to go and have a watch. It will help change, or snape, your prospecting on managing things and people. However, the main starting point from Dave’s keynote, and which I got as a key takeaway is how organizations, as we know them today, need to switch from robustness, i.e. organizations preventing failure, to resilience, that is, organizations no longer risk averse, but very capable of learning, adapting, in an agile manner, and recovering quickly from those failures. And how if we would want to make our businesses successful we need to starting thinking about architecting on the assumption of failure and not on the assumption of success, and we would all be much much better off! Truly fascinating!   "Best practice is a bad idea. Full stop" Dave’s words, not mine, not much to do with the flow of this article, I know, but I just loved it when he mentioned it, because, as plenty of folks out there who know me would tell you, for a long while "best practices" still remains as one of my pet peeves, specially, when dealing with knowledge work. They just don’t exist and I am surely glad Dave was so categorically when stating that quote! Loved it! Ok, moving on …  One of the interesting things that you may not know about Dave, but that I have learned from him over the course of the years that I have known him is how when you talk to him, or watch him speak on a keynote, he gets to talk about a whole bunch of different things that initially don’t probably make much sense together, but when you look into it as a whole and you muse about those conversations or presentations you would see how it just makes perfect sense. That’s the full impression you will get as well from this keynote and it’s all probably down to his perception of how we are all Irrational creatures, pattern based intelligences, and not information processing devices. And the best part of that is that we make lots of decisions along the way under these circumstances! Wait till you see his short dissertation on sensemaking and how he describes it as see, attend and act model, three completely different processes altogether.  He also talked about singularity, how and why it’s not going to happen any time soon, not just from a cognitive perspective alone, but drawn from plenty of research around the implications of our physical bodies in constant contact with the world and how we make decisions and choices based on the combination of both of them. Mind-blowing, is the only word that I can think of to describe his insights in this space.  He also discussed how human knowledge requires mediation. We don’t trust something just because it’s published, we trust it because we link through a human network of some type. He ditches the whole concept, notion of Web 3.0, and instead advocates, big time, about how the Web is turning itself into a distributed App environment, where we would get to use multiple specific Apps which embody human knowledge and facilitate us to create composite, allowing to create massively coherent systems. And funny enough if I look into my own Social Web consumption and production of content, he’s absolutely spot on!  From here onwards Dave moved on to what I thought was the best bits in his inspiring repertoire, because he talked about how we need to humanise the Web, how we need to actually recognise that we are humans and we live in a human system. How we have had three decades of a so-called techno fetichism where we needed to adapt to the tools and that implied that we didn’t do much of a good job at it, and how if we pick up a tool it will need fit our hands, and that way we no longer need to re-engineer them, i.e. our hands, to fit the tools, but adapt technology and tools to our hands themselves, which is what we have been doing for thousands of years already. Ha! Taking the whole concept of mobile and HCI into a new level altogether!  "Extrinsic rewards destroy intrinsic motivation". Another one of those priceless quotes that I just have to jot down somewhere on this blog post to remind me every time that someone brings up either intrinsic or extrinsic rewards to motivate your employee workforce. Perhaps one of the biggest issues within the corporate world at the moment, don’t you think?  Incredibly inspiring his words as well on being proactive, on not focusing on measuring networks or the use they make of the social tools at their disposal, but instead stimulate the formation of networks around purposes. Distributed cognition, as we he calls it, giving them freedom within constraints to make decisions. Apparently, the key here is to have those constraints. That’s how we seem to operate better, as human beings. Goodness, who would have thought about that, eh?   Fascinating commentary as well when he describes how we are really homo narrans, vs. homo sapiens. How we are the storytelling apes. Even to take things one step further how the primary mechanism for human knowledge transfer and meaning is through stories. Stories determine our culture. We live in a narrative flow which constrains and directs the way we think, clearly reminding us all the power of storytelling, even for business purposes, like I have recently blogged over here as well.  His final words during his keynote were very motivational and moving altogether, because he kept encouraging us all to, once and for all, leave behind that techno fetichism that has been with us for decades, even on the Web, and how we need to embrace the fact that we have a need for constraints and human interaction. How, used properly, technology can augment human memory and experience. How, used improperly, it can destroy human capability. His final words: "We live in a time of choice between those two alternatives"… And it’s our choice to go for the right one. And somehow I think we all know, deep inside our heads and our hearts, which one we would need to go and aim for, don’t you think?   Whoahh! What an adrenaline rush! Head spinning wildly, eh? Well, that and so much more is what you will be getting yourself exposed to if you just hit play, on the embedded YouTube video link shared above, but I would just want to leave you now with what is my favourite quote not just from his keynote session, but perhaps from the last few years that I have been involved with Social Computing myself. It’s just so close to some of the recent stuff that I have been blogging about, that’s just perhaps a bit too scary, if not hopeful, that we are on track on to greater, better, bigger, more meaningful things. If not, judge yourself from this quote: "98% of our genetic history is as clearly seen as hunting gatherers; our brains and social processes evolve for small, family clan-type groups and tribes. A model of an organisation all for that matter and economic model of society which is based on personal self-interest is fundamentally inauthentic to the nature of human evolution. We evolve as social entities, able to act and know things socially, not individually, and you can start seeing that happening on the Web". Colour me excited and rather privileged for having the great pleasure of thanking both Euan and Dave for their truly inspiring keynote sessions that surely have helped me overcome, big time, those moments of weakness that we all know we face every now and then. Whenever I would have the next one, I will just start reading that quote from Dave and remember both these two articles and their presentations. And I know I’ll be just fine. And I’ll know things will be all right eventually, too!, getting back in business with all of that excitement and joy of continuing to make a difference. Our difference. Yours and mine.

This woman is a star and while not everything was new for me, she's an inspiration to see how much ground you can cover in 60 minutes.Here's just a compilation of the tweets I put out just during here session. And just so we don't lose this in a year's time, here's a list of the tweets from the talk:Do you want to see some amazing showcases of #html5 - check this out http://www.apple.com/html5/ @jkunrein attests this resource #LSConOne more type server for you to use with you #html5 content (not free) via @jkunrein at #lscon https://typekit.com/Adobe captivate #html5 encoder. They are really getting behind the new web. Via @jkunrein at #lscon http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/captivate_html5/Tumult Hype - @nickfloro mentioned it, I love it and now @jkunrein is telling us about it too! #html5 animation #lscon http://tumultco.com/hype/Another SWF converter that allows you to port over your animation to #HTML5 via @jkunrein at #lscon http://www.sothink.com/We've used this encoding tool + player before - Brightcove via @jkunrein at her #html5 session at #lscon http://www.brightcove.com/en/And one more free player you can use with your web video content #html5 via @jkunrein at #lscon http://www.jplayer.org/Another video player you can use for web video #html5 via @jkunrein at #lscon http://videojs.com/A free #html5 video player you can use - Sublime #lscon via @jkunrein http://sublimevideo.net/Another video encoder for #html5 compatibility via @jkunrein #lscon http://zencoder.com/Studio style (pricey) video encoding for the web #lscon via @jkunrein http://www.telestream.net/Miro-A super simple way to convert almost any video to #html5 compatible formats #lscon via @jkunrein http://www.mirovideoconverter.com/Raphaël is a JavaScript library that'll simplify your work with vector graphics on the web #html5 via @jkunrein #lscon http://raphaeljs.com/Optimise your PNG files #html5 via @jkunrein at #lscon http://imageoptim.com/Surfacing this site since @jkunrein mentioned this in her talk today #html5 learning #lscon http://www.html5rocks.com/en/Use browser sniffing to figure out what browsers access your content so you can do different things for different platforms #lscon @jkunreinParallax scrolling is an interesting content delivery mechanism I'm seeing on websites and magazines. @jkunrein is showing it #LSConBtw, for really enriching articles by @jkunrein keep checking out stuff she writes for #lsmag http://www.learningsolutionsmag.com/authors/304/judy-unrein #LSConCheck out the #html5 starling murmuration and dynamic video here http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/ #lscon via @jkunreinFor some reason I wasnt following @jkunrein. You should see her blog http://onehundredfortywords.com/ #LSCon"@CUtrain: Loved the quote by @jkunrein Create interactive courses, "stop the navigation rage." @bschlenker what I learned yesterday #LSCON"© Sumeet Moghe