Over the course of the years Hugh MacLeod has always been posting some of the most amazing content available out there on the Internet Blogosphere on various different topics, specially, related to Social Networking. One of the articles that I have enjoyed the most though was one he shared just recently, a couple of weeks back, under the title ""Reclaim Blogging": Why I’m giving up Twitter and Facebook", where he is stating, out loud, and very clearly, the main single use case of why blogging still has got a place within today’s Social Web: Your voice… Your blog *still* is your main personal branding tool! Interestingly enough, plenty of people have been questioning whether, now that we have got Google Plus as well, it makes sense to dump your own blog in favour of your social activities in the various social networking sites. And Plus being the latest one joining the already existing crowded club. A few prominent bloggers have jumped the shark and eventually dumped their blogs and moved the conversations, and further insights, into G+. And a few people have been asking me for a little while now, on whether I’m ready to do that myself and move over to Plus as well … or not. Well, the answer, right now, as we stand, is No. Yes, it’s true that I have dumped a good number of social software tools out there on the Social Web in favour of G+ itself, or, at least, thanks to it I have reduced my involvement with those social tools quite a bit. But there are two of them that I am not ready, just yet, to kiss good-bye and move them into SNS. One of them is my Flickr account and the other one, of course, is my blog. This blog. And Hugh explains it very very well how I, too, feel about it overall on why I still think there is a place and a time for blogging out there on the Internet, as well as the Intranet, by the way. Here are a couple of noteworthy quotes from his blog entry I thought were worth while sharing across: "The content on your blog, however, belongs to you, and you alone. People come to your online home, to hear what you have to say, not to hear what everybody else has to say. This sense of personal sovereignty is important." [Emphasis mine] Which he then develops beautifully with this other noteworthy quote: "And as I’ve said many times over the years, Web 2.0 IS ALL ABOUT personal sovereignty. About using media to do something meaningful, WITHOUT someone else giving you permission first, without having to rely on anyone else’s resources, authority and money. Self-sufficiency. Exactly" [Emphasis mine, once again] And I couldn’t have agreed more with that couple of rather inspiring and thought-provoking quotes. Blogging, indeed, does require a lot of hard work, lot of energy and effort about being constant, authentic (i.e. The real you!), honest, insightful, willing to learn and share plenty more, etc. etc. However, the returns have always been tremendously powerful. Blogging is your own personal voice (Whether internal or external), your own opinions on those subject matters that you are truly passionate about, your own real self. The individual that the world would need to figure out whether you are worth while reading or not depending on the nature and the insights of the stuff you share across. Blogging, in short, is your own personal branding tool. Your digital footprint out there. Your digital eminence in a place where your voice is heard loud and clear and where you call the shots on owning the conversation initially, inspiring others to improve your own thoughts and ideas over time, making it a tremendously empowering learning experience. Call it your own essential personal Knowledge Management / Sharing System, if you wish… Very soon, in just a couple of months time, my blogging experience will make 8 years and, as you may have noticed, it’s still going rather strong, with the exception, of course, of those hiatus that I seem to embark on every now and then, specially, when I am travelling. Yet, I still feel as if it were my first few weeks of blogging. The excitement is there, the energy, the effort and the willingness to start a conversation and invite others to chime in, as they may see fit, are all still there, just like back in the day, because, a long time ago I realised that my blog, more than anything else, became my online business card, my dynamic and ever-growing curriculum vitae, my own virtual community of folks who care and are truly passionate about the same stuff as me. And that’s just priceless! But if there would be a single reason as to why I still think blogging is worth while doing big time, picking further up from Hugh’s rather enlightening blog entry, is the fact of how of those last 8 years of blogging, my blog has managed to provide me with some pretty unique opportunities, both in a personal and work levels, including the last three of my own jobs, while at IBM, one of them being my dream job where next month will mark my 4th anniversary there! That’s just one of the many many reasons out there why I, too, wanted to take this opportunity to remind people, like Hugh himself did on that article, "on why we all got into blogging in the first place, all of those years ago…" Perhaps it’s a good time now to remind folks about it and, just in case you may be new to blogging and would wonder how you could get things going to help you start finding your own blogging voice and blogging style, allow me to recommend the one single resource that has taught me over the years a whole bunch of hints and tips, tricks, good practices, and blogging techniques: Darren Rowse, the one and only, ProBlogger. It’s probably as good as it gets to help you get off to a really good start in building further up your own personal brand and digital presence out there on the Social Web. Oh, and if you are in Google Plus, allow me to point you as well to this thread by Darren himself under the heading "Traits of Successful Bloggers" where he has shared plenty of insights and various different links to 12 different characteristics of (successful) bloggers: Playfulness and Creativity Innovation Connectors Community Builders Information Mavens Communicators Interest Entrepreneurial Spirit Originality Perseverance Focus Curiosity Now, on to the final reflection that I am sure most of you folks out there are thinking about already… With this blog post on reclaiming blogging am I implying that I’m about to leave the various social networking sites where I used to hang out at? Well, I don’t think so. I don’t think I’m ready, just yet, to dump it all, just like Hugh himself. What I can tell you though, and share across happily, is how both this blog and Google Plus itself have allowed me to become thicker, instead of spreading thinner over and over, at my social interactions to the point where it looks like I may have reduced my online social activities out there on the Social Web to these magic three: my blog (with my Flickr pictures I keep embedding here and there…), my one single Twitter account over at @elsua (I’m in the process of deleting all other alter egos, so feel free to connect with that account or add it to a Twitter List near you) and Google Plus itself. And so far it looks like I’m enjoying it quite a bit. How about you? Does blogging still play a key part in your social interactions? If so, please do let me know! Would love to add you into my daily blogroll … Yes, I do still have one and maintain it as well on a regular basis!

I've been to Singapore on a transit visa before. My visit however was so rushed that I left with half-baked impressions of the city and had really strong misgivings about the place. None of those misgivings remain today - I rate Singapore really highly now and I'll recommend it as a must visit destination to anyone who visits Asia. Singapore's a big island city-state, perhaps just a little larger than Bangalore. With a diverse population of Indians, Chinese, Malay, other Asian and several western expats, Singapore's got to be Asia's most global city. With English as a first language, it's perhaps Asia's most tourist friendly city and from what I've seen and heard, it seems to be a buzzing business destination too.My tryst with Singapore has been short, yet fulfilling. Let me tell you a little more about it.Orientation and AccomodationMy flight from Penang to Singapore was on Tiger Airways - a leading low-cost airline based in Singapore. We landed at the budget terminal in Singapore and after immigration we took the shuttle bus to Terminal 2 of of the main airport. Finding information and places in Singapore is never a problem and before we knew it, we had 2 tourist passes for unlimited travel by public transport for three full days! Sweet start. We'd deliberately chosen inexpensive accomodation away from the city center. Our hotel - Aqueen Balestier, is a cosy business hotel located near the Novena Medical center. A couple of train changes, a hop on the bus and we were right there at our hotel. I must say that we quite liked our hotel, it's away from the madness of the business district, yet conveniently located near some really good eating places and a train station. To top it the rooms are well appointed and unlike other hotels, the staff don't keep bothering you every now and then. So that was that.Getting AroundClick here for a larger imageAs I mentioned, we had a 3-day unlimited tourist pass that gave us access to all city buses and trains. So transportation wasn't a problem at all. The tourist passes are great value for money. They cost 26 SGD (19 USD) plus a 10 SGD (7 USD) refundable deposit. With the amount of hopping around that we did, it was well worth the price. Singapore's also a remarkably easy place to get around. Every bus stand has route maps for all the buses that stop there. There's an index of nearby streets along with a list of buses that'll take you there. Buses are really frequent too. As far as trains are concerned, Singapore's MRT is one of the most advanced and organised train systems I've seen. Every station has a locality map at each exit, so you'll never be in doubt for how to reach your destination. If nothing works, there's a fairly useful public transport journey planner that you can use. Of course, we never got to the point where we needed that app.This apart, streets in Singapore are very clearly signposted and that makes it a great walking city. In the city center, it's great fun to walk across various streets and take quick snaps of interesting sights without getting too lost. In terms of getting around, Singapore scores a perfect 10.SightseeingThere are several sightseeing opportunities at Singapore. We've been very ambitious on this vacation of ours so my wife and I decided to do the first two days of this itinerary on our first day itself! So the Victoria Theatre, the Merlion, The Arts Museum, Cavenagh Bridge, Little India, the Supreme court, the Parliament square and many other sights came our way on day one. It was hectic, but it was a lot of fun jumping from one bus to another, changing trains and walking around the city. Day one was also my birthday so a top of the world feeling was in order. The Singapore Flyer was just what we needed - the view of the city from atop the observation wheel is quite something. Unfortunately we didn't have a really great camera, so snagging pictures in the dark was quite tough. We did what we could and I'll try to put up the pictures on Flickr as soon as I can.Day two in Singapore was visiting one of it's must see attractions - the Singapore Zoo. Until recently I'd thought of the Taronga Zoo as the best I've seen. That hasn't changed, but I'll say that the Singapore Zoo is definitely an equal to Taronga. Not only are the zoo, the animals and their abodes in top condition, the zoo's keepers and commentators are very knowledgeable and extremely engaging presenters. Each of the shows that we went to, left us enlightened and wiser about the great wildlife that walks our planet. If you're in a mood to visit the zoo, I suggest you skip the tram and boat tickets. While it may seem convenient to hop on and off the tram and boat, you're more likely to keep walking the same stretch that you've already covered by these modes. In the whole day we did just one trip each on the tram and the boat, so I don't think it was worth the extra money. Another word of advice, particularly if you're in Singapore for a few extra days - 45 SGD (33 USD) gives you entry to all the three wildlife attractions in Singapore; the zoo, the bird park and the night safari. If the zoo was anything to go by, the other two attractions should be well worth the additional cost. I recommend them as must sees.We decided consciously to give Sentosa a miss - since most locals refer to it as 'So Expensive but Nothing TO See Actually'. However, we've found Singapore to be completely devoid of tourist traps. There's not a single place where we spent a dollar in vain. So I can imagine Sentosa will be interesting for those who like that kind of fun.FoodSingapore's truly a gastronomic adventure and matched Penang bite for bite. There's all kinds of food on offer, but if there's one particular meal I want to write about, it's got to be the dinner on my birthday. My wife treated me to a sumptuous meal with the legendary Singapore chili crab and a finely grilled stingray. When the menu says chilli crab, take it seriously - there's a lot of chilli in that delicious spread. But the mighty Sumeet is not one to be deterred by the spice. The spice from the crab and the stingray gave me strong battle, but like any other food gladiator I waged war. Claw after claw met bite after bite from me. It was a fight to the finish - I was sweating  profusely, but I wasn't going to five up. No sissy rice morsels to cut out the spice; in fact to be a man I added some extra chillies to the dish. Surely perseverance and bravery had to pay off - to the victor go the spoils of war. The crab lay vanquished, I slept satisfied. It was a massacre as you can see for yourself. A delicious massacre that I have no regrets about though. I'll gladly do it again.I enjoyed every meal in Singapore. It's definitely one of the costlier places in Asia, but well worth the price for the quality of food you get. The hawker centers, like in Penang, make it incredibly easy for you to find good food. Just walk into any place that looks cheap and crowded and you'll find great, scrumptuous food.I can keep saying this and never tire - Singapore's the most tourist friendly destination I've ever been to. You have everything you can associate with a vacation in Asia - great sights, friendly people, good food and none of the ills - touts, tourist traps, pushy salesmen or health scares. It's easy to navigate, a stone's throw from KL by train or by air and just so entertaining for a short holiday. I want to repeatedly recommend it as an absolute must visit.© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

A few days back my good friend Jack Vinson posted a rather interesting and thought-provoking blog post that would be incredibly relevant for all of those folks who happen to be rather active in various different social networking sites and who may be facing such a common problem as well. Under Fragmented social life he comes to question our inability to re-find good, relevant content because our interactions are just so fragmented and distributed out there in various social networks nowadays that we just can’t remember anymore where we may have shared this piece, or that one, and with whom. A real problem, indeed, if you are active in multiple social tools. Jack’s worry used to be my own as well up to no long ago, till I, finally, decided to settle down on The Big Three. Fragmentation is no longer an issue anymore for me, but rather quite an advantage! And here is why … A few years back, I was attending a Knowledge Management conference event where one of the keynote speakers was the one and only Dave Snowden, one of the folks I have learned the most over the course of the years around KM, Narrative and Complexity, amongst several other topics. Well, on that keynote he shared something that at the time I wasn’t really conscious about its potential implications, but, in due course, it’s proved to be rather accurate time and time again. And that’s the fact that we, human beings, seem to operate much better when our world is fragmented, when we think of fragmentation, or in fragments, rather than when presented with a whole. In short, our brains seem to process information and knowledge much better in small fragments than with the whole picture. That’s why, to me, it makes perfect sense to think about how various different social networking sites like Delicious, Flickr or Instagram, for instance, have been so successful all along. They do one thing (Share and store links, share and store pictures, respectively) and they do it well. Rather well. Thinking and reacting in fragments does make perfect sense. Fragmentation surely has got a place in how we interact with social networking tools. But what happens when that fragmentation goes out of proportion and it is just too difficult to manage by trying to figure out where both things and people are eventually? Somehow I suspect a new problem has emerged. Fragmentation getting out of control is probably something that not many of us would want to be facing at this point in time. We are already far too busy and rather hectic having to figure it all out already, don’t you think? And I know that in most cases, most of you folks out there are thinking about the well known Social Media Fatigue phenomenon that a whole bunch of different people have been writing about for a little while now. Well, I don’t think it’s actually a problem with that social media fatigue per se, as Mitch Joel puts it nicely under "The Social Media Fatigue Myth", but more with our inability to keep up with far too many social tools when things explode exponentially and we keep spreading thinner and thinner than ever, yet we keep bumping into the same social networks, but in different social settings. I am sure most of us could relate to that context, and, eventually, I think that’s also where Jack was aiming at with that original blog entry. How do we make sense out of it all and still remain sane when we have got more and more social networking tools coming along by the day? Well, since most of those social tools haven’t done a proper job, or they haven’t delivered just yet as you would have expected, to provide us with a unified user experience to re-find successfully that content we are interested in, despite the fragmentation I guess it’s probably a good time for us all to re-think our very own strategy with regards to where we would want to be, whom with, and what kind of conversations we would want to carry out. Like I have said above already, this problem of fragmentation and not being capable of finding not just the content I would need, but also the experts behind it, used to worry me quite a bit as well, more than anything else, because of that growing feeling of having spread far too thin at times. Till something called Google Plus came along and it made me re-think my whole involvement with the Social Web. Why would we need to follow the same people, all over the place, if they all keep sharing the same stuff regardless of where they are time and time again? Shouldn’t it be good enough to be exposed just that one time and move on? Are we just too afraid we are not being heard in multiple venues and that’s why we keep sharing the same stuff in plenty more? Why would we need to keep up maintaining our social presence in a particular social networking tool if we ourselves don’t see, nor find the value? Yes, indeed, lots of really valid questions and I am sure you may have plenty more out there! Like if I would delete my Facebook account would that mean I am less social now and may have lost my social mojo? Like if folks don’t interact with you directly does it mean they don’t interact with others and they stop living social? Too many questions, indeed, and perhaps too few answers along the way, too! What I do know though is that, thanks to Google Plus, I eventually had to stop for a minute, re-think about how I would want to make use of it, and question the validity of all the various social computing tools I have been using for a while out there on the Internet and perhaps try to put a stop at that fragmentation at a level I would still feel comfortable with handling. An exercise that, in my opinion, has allowed me to ponder whether I really need to be there or not, whether I need to keep following the same folks all over the place, whether I can start letting things go and watch how many of those things would really come back to me over time as part of that well known Social Flow. An exercise though that I can certainly recommend everyone to go through! Thanks to it I have now finally decided on The Big Three and, all of a sudden, that false sense of fatigue, of not finding what I am looking for, of not knowing who the experts would be is now a thing of the past. Still the fragmentation is there. Still having a blast with it. So, what’s The Big Three? The Big Three are basically the three main social networking tools that I have decided to invest the vast majority of my time in, when trying to live social and all of that based on a specific set of criteria along the lines of figuring out their business value (to me and those around me), my engagement and further involvement with each and everyone of those various social networks, where my customer base is at the moment, and where I would want to spend the largest amount of time immersed on an everlasting learning frenzy. And those three social networking tools would be the following ones in order of preference: IBM Connections Google Plus Twitter Connections because that’s where I live on my day to day work; Google Plus, because it’s allowed me to consolidate the great majority of my social interactions by moving the conversations over there, helping me become thicker and get rid of that social networking fatigue and additional / redundant fragmentation that Mike Elgan has explained beautifully over at "How Google Plus ends social networking fatigue" and Twitter, because I still find it rather valuable on its own, as I have mentioned in the past walking hand in hand with G+. Now, does that mean I will withdraw from every other single social networking site out there where I have got a presence? Well, probably not. In fact, I haven’t deleted any of my other social profiles out there just yet; what I can tell you though is how I have started to develop a much lower profile for all of them by participating every now and then and always by sharing content and further information that I wouldn’t want to re-find at a later time anyway. The stuff I would want to is all now going into one of those Big Three. So essentially the problem that Jack drew further rather nicely for all of us on the evil doings of fragmentation in the Social Web out there may have its days numbered, if we all start re-evaluating our main focus areas, based on our own business and personal contexts, needs and wants, as well as deciding where we would want to start placing both our energy and additional efforts and perhaps start sticking around with The Big Three. Yes, we don’t need to be everywhere; yes, we don’t need to connect with the same people time and time again in multiple places, specially when they are all just cross-posting the same content to just get your attention; yes, we can let things go and they will eventually find us back, if they really need to. It’s time to break that fragmented social life once and for all and, in my own case, I just happened to finally settle down on My Big Three. But what is yours? Have you decided already? Or are you moving along with that social fragmentation trying to make sense out of it anyway? What do you think?

"TWU is the only place where you're happy to fail - an awesome program meant to prepare a person for challenges ahead." - - Student QuoteA testimonial like that from a student, makes my day. Over the last few months you've heard me make references to the new avatar of ThoughtWorks University (TWU) - our graduate training program. If you were ever to walk into a ThoughtWorks University term in full flow, it will look nothing like a training program you've seen. People working at dining table like set ups. Laptops and pairing monitors all around, a client who doesn't let up, index carded walls tracking progress for the project, and a team completely abuzz with activity. You'll feel like you've walked onto a proper software delivery project. That's been our motto for version 2.0 of TWU - work is learning, learning is work. I'm ecstatic to share with you how we've workscaped this training program, to help fresh graduates learn the ropes of technology consulting by being in the thick of real action. But before that, some context!The History"An all round learning experience from people with very unique and distinctive skill sets. An unforgettable 6 week experience!" - Student QuoteTWU is something most ThoughtWorkers are extremely proud of. An incredibly successful program, Kraig Parkinson started it in 2005 when we called it the Global Boot Camp. Every grad that we hired all across the world had the opportunity to travel down to our most vibrant office in Bangalore and attend six weeks of training with the best consultants at the company. As it turned out, 'Boot Camp' wasn't a really popular word with immigration personnel, and every now and then graduates got held up at the airport asking if they were undergoing any military training! So, after a round of brainstorms we decided to rebrand the program as ThoughtWorks University and ever since, the name has stuck.TWU started off as a really strong academic program, run by our consultants for our consultants. The target audience for the course were our graduate developers, business analysts and quality analysts. Our curriculum had three distinct parts to it. We had four weeks of shared curriculum, common to all the roles. We then followed this up with a week's discipline specific curriculum and finally a week's project simulation for the students to apply all that they'd learned. As you can imagine this was a really intense program where despite our best intentions we were pushing heaps of knowledge onto our students. Learning isn't knowledge transfer and our program lacked the affective context that students needed to be able to learn and remember effectively.The Catalyst for Change"I felt the trainers were great, and running a long simulation has given me the confidence for beginning work soon. These six weeks made me even more excited to be a ThoughtWorker." - Student QuoteSomewhere in 2007, my friend, colleague and past TWU trainer Patrick Sarnacke had an idea. While people enjoyed the five weeks of training, they seemed to learn the most in the project simulation. Not surprisingly, because they failed miserably in the project and failure's a great catalyst for learning. So Sarnacke said, "If people learn the most during the project simulation, then why can't we simulate a project for most of the course?" Of course, we then shrugged our shoulders and said to each other, "We've got a lot of material to cover - so this is never going to work." And so, the idea never took off until late 2009 when I went around interviewing (on camera) past students and trainers of the course asking what they found most valuable in the course. The answers I got were fairly unanimous. Most people pointed out the following elements as the most valuable:The project simulation, since they could see every practice in action and learn how to really do things.The discipline specific curriculum, since that's what they could apply immediately to their roles.The social interaction amongst grads and trainers across the globe, because that's where they serendipitously learned from each other.The individualised coaching that they got from the trainers, since we tailored it to their needs.Hmmm... surprise, surprise! Not many people said they found the five weeks of classroom training crucial. It seemed from the feedback that real work was the biggest driver for learning. Back to Pat's question then.If real work provides the best context for learning, then why not create a learning program where learning is a consequence of working on a real project?Time for some Soul-Searching"TWU provided us with a safe environment in which we were free to stumble, to question, to observe, and to learn. I will never forget my experience here." - Student QuoteSo my team and I acknowledged it was time to get back to the drawing board. Our big challenge was that we had five weeks of coursework to still complete. As we started to go back and analyse our coursework, we realised a few things:Sometimes, in the attempt to make training engaging, we spend 3 hours teaching things that take 10 minutes to just explain simply.Behaviour takes time and experience to correct. A lot of our consulting coursework (17 hours or so), focussed on changing behaviours through training. This was hugely ineffective; students forgot most lessons by the time we got to the project simulation and made the same mistakes we warned them against. Feedback and coaching during the simulation could have been a much better way to help students learn these lessons from a state of pain.As a company, we have very few best practices. If you look at the Cynefin model and then compare the constantly changing ThoughtWorks ecosystem to it, most of our practices are either emergent or novel. So while we tried to project a simplistic picture of our practices, it took real world experience to learn how things actually work. No wonder, our most common answer to students was, "It depends!"Last, but certainly not the least - learning out of the work context can tend to be hugely ineffective. For example, in a classroom it can take hours to explain how ThoughtWorks estimates projects and plans releases. It's a really controversial topic at times. OTOH, if you were to bring a newbie into a group estimation meeting and explain what we're doing, you could get that person onboard in a matter of minutes and they would just get it. So some topics were best suited to on the job learning.So we critically evaluated every part of our curriculum; even parts of it which we'd painstakingly created ourselves. For each part, we asked ourselves, "What if we don't teach this at all? What's the worst that can happen?" Turned out that the worst that could happen was that people would learn from their experience on the project. Why didn't we think of this before?Look Ma - No Training!"The lessons learned through project simulation could never be taught in a classroom." - Student QuoteSo, after much chopping and changing, we decided that our course would be two weeks of training and four weeks of project work for the developers and one week of training and five weeks of project work for the BAs and QAs. We decided to limit our training to the bare minimum skills and knowledge the grads needed to start working on their project. A large part of that training was an introduction to the ThoughtWorks ecosystem, our culture, values and principles -- something that none of us can do without.We also created several pieces of elearning to help students gain some basic skills when they needed them. Coupled with a social learning platform and a 6:1 student-coach ratio, we were looking at a program that focussed heavily on individualisation as against an experience that was one-size-fits-all-but-fits-nobody. Even with the elearning, we ensured that we were pragmatic in partnering with external content providers whose content met our quality standards.How it Went"I think four weeks of project was very helpful for the learning of the team. I think the end of week two and the beginning of week three was a time when the team was excited, nervous and overwhelmed. I think only two weeks of classes is good. A skill TWers need is learning when they start on a new project. I think the best way to do that is through experience - with good learning sessions when needed. And I think the last week was when we all actually realised what we had accomplished." - Student QuoteTWU XVII was the first formal run of ThoughtWorks University 2.0 and what a ride it's been! As expected, and as the quotes until now may tell you, information in context trumped instruction out of context in a huge way. The project was an environment for students to fail in safety. Failure created the need for people to learn and a catalyst for us to coach and teach. A real project environment also allowed students to learn to learn. After all, if we did training sessions all day, how could they deliver an application to the customer? So, a lot was down to the students being able to figure things out by themselves and learning from each other. Teamwork was the order of the day.While interactions with customers helped students hone their consulting skills, working with each other, overcoming arguments helped them strengthen their interpersonal skills. Facilitating learning lunches and doing Pecha-Kucha's helped them practice their presentation skills in a safe and fun environment. Open Space sessions helped them define their own learning agenda, as against being captive to a predetermined schedule. In the final week of the project, which I unfortunately missed - the students took leadership of the project and the trainers just stood back. That week saw the students come together and put up their most outstanding performance. Wonderful things happen when you just let go - and it was almost like the time when a bird lets her children fly. In an environment where they could pull learning just when they needed it, the students amazed their trainers. I'm not exagerrating one bit when I say I'm proud of what the students have achieved and I'm proud to be their colleague. As one of the grads said, "We've made a product which we're proud of."Our success with ThoughtWorks University has been the proudest achievements of my professional career. I think it's given me significant evidence about how people learn and has reinforced my beliefs about modern learning and development. It's been great fun sharing this experience with you and in future months, I hope we can make this experience better, faster, stronger. I'd love ideas from you on how we can do this - a lot of what we've done on the course is inspired by great ideas from my personal learning network and I'm sure I can lean on you for more such ideas. I'd also love to know what you think of today's blogpost, so do drop in a comment or two while you're here.Photo Credits for this post - JK Werner and Pat Sarnacke (the visionary pose!)© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

One of the many various different things I really enjoy about participating in the Social Web out there on a regular basis, is the fact you never really know where a conversation will be heading once it’s gotten started, specially, if that dialogue beings with a good bunch of the folks who are part of your social network(s) and who share a common passion for a specific topic, whether business related or not. In the last couple of days, once again, I have been exposed to such kind of conversations and, as I am reflecting today about them in this blog post, I can only be but rather grateful about them, because they have managed not only to inspire me to do better, but they have managed to completely change the way I work and interact with others. Welcome to The Secret Life of Your Bodyclock! It all started with a couple of Google Plus conversations where I was sharing a personal story of how about two months ago I decided to step back, stop the world for a minute, and reflect on how I needed to make some changes to some of the habits I have gotten so used to over the course of the years and start becoming a bit healthier again. I was going in the direction of a rather perilous road and thought it would be a good time to revert it. So I was sharing some first hand experiences on what that change has meant over the course of those few weeks, as well as share some bits of what that journey has been like all along so far. I couldn’t help, but be rather wowed by the tremendous amount of responses I got from the first thread. Lots of positive reinforcement, as well as a good number of really helpful and rather handy hints and tips on how to make both exercise and a healthier diet work for yours truly. It may be a bit too early to judge what the results would be like, but so far it’s been very encouraging! Thus I decided to take things into the next level and start another conversation on a topic I wanted to query folks about and see what they would say. During those few weeks where I have started some regular physical exercise (Running in this case), as well as a healthier diet, my morning routine has incorporated a one hour workout where I run about 7 to 8 KM non stop. And the funny thing is that I have discovered how I feel a whole lot less tired if I do that exercise in the afternoon, early evening, than in the morning, where I feel pretty much drained after that workout. So I went to Google Plus and I shared this question: "Dear runners of the world … need a little bit of help … What do you prefer … running first thing in the morning … or right after work by the end of the day? Just got back from my first run in the evening, after work, and feeling less tired than in the morning!?!? Ha! Go figure! // Thanks for any insights / advice you can provide " From there onwards an entire conversation developed where there was a mix of responses of people in my social network(s) who commented and shared their tips on why they would run in the morning, at midday or in the early evening. Lots of rather interesting insights! But there was one in particular that caught my attention specially, and which has triggered the creation of this blog post. You will see how this entry doesn’t actually have anything to do with the stuff I regularly blog about over here about KM, Collaboration, Communities or Social Computing. But does it really? Read on … In that thread, Sam Ramadan shared a rather interesting and intriguing link to a rather enlightening and educational documentary that has completely blown my mind away! Along with the link, Sam suggested that, according to some research, it’s actually much better for your body to run in the afternoon, early evening, versus the morning, where it could potentially become even dangerous at some point. Goodness! Imagine me reading that as I am doing my daily workout in the morning! Shocking!! Of course, I had to read further into that link and find out more … Goodness! Truly fascinating stuff! Sam, right there, put us all together in the direction of one of those rather wonderfully inspirational documentaries that will surely make people think twice about their daily habits, customs, needs and wants and whatever else and start paying more attention to what our bodies really need / want after all. In The Secret Life of Your Bodyclock you will find some pointers towards a Horizon documentary that tries to explain, based on that research, how our own bodies really operate according to our bodyclock and, most importantly, how we keep ignoring it time and time again at our own peril. Yes, I tell you, some pretty amazing stuff! The documentary itself is divided in four different parts (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4) and all of them make up for an entire day of what actually happens within our own bodies and our internal bodyclock. It’s rather interesting to see how we have actually been accustomed to following different habits throughout the course of a day and eventually find out how they may not be that beneficial to our bodies in the long run. And how by doing a few little adjustments here and there we may be able to turn things around for the better. Simple things like sleeping enough hours, including micro-sleeps or power naps right in the middle of the day, finding out the best times to eat and rest, or the best time in the end when we are the most apt intellectually speaking (It’s not 09:00 am in the morning, by the way!), or when we would get the best results from some medicines we may be taking, or when it would be the most adequate time of the day to exercise (It’s not early in the morning either!), etc. etc. are certainly going to help us all lead healthier lives, which, in the end, is going to help us become much more effective and efficient knowledge workers and people in general. And that is what I thought was remarkable from the 49 minute long documentary… That by doing little things, changing a bit our habits and adapting our routines to how our bodyclocks work, we are in a position to become more productive in the long run and live healthier lives, which, I guess is what most of us, including employers!, would want for everyone out there in the end! And I suppose that remote workers, i.e. those folks working away from the traditional office environment , the ones who have got plenty of flexibility when adapting their schedules to the nature of the work that needs to be done, could surely benefit from adapting those habits as mentioned and shared across on that video clip. Even office workers could adapt as well some of their own schedules to be a better fit for their bodies! I know for sure that, after watching it, I’ll surely be making some adjustments myself into how I can get the most of my own bodyclock and how it works for the better for me. Starting with changing that routine for the daily workout from earlier on in the morning, to late in the afternoon, early evening. And I will be more than happy to share the results over the course of time and see how those adjustments are moving along and whether my bodyclock regulates not only the way I live, but also the way I work. It sounds like a fun experiment altogether, don’t you think? Now, can you imagine having that kind of flexibility, say, 10 or 15 years ago? I guess that’s what empowering your knowledge workforce to take a bit more responsibility of their own health and work environment is all about. Not just about having the right (social) tools to get the job done smarter, not necessarily harder, but also having the right physical and mental health to be able to carry out those jobs in an effective manner … And it all starts by watching Part 1 of "The Secret Life of Your Bodyclock", which only lasts for 12 minutes … There you have it. Who hasn’t got 12 minutes to spare to become healthier by knowing a bit more about how our own bodies really work like and how we can start nurturing the right conditions for the perfect working (and living!) environment where we can all shine?: After watching through each of the video clips, I wonder what it would take businesses out there to start adapting themselves more to the needs of their knowledge workers than vice versa. Somehow I suspect we are going to end up in another win-win situation where flexibility, mutual understanding of each and everyone’s responsibilities and, above all, trust are going to play a key part to help define the perfect environment for the future of the workplace in the 21st century. Something tells me that knowledge workers would be ready for that re-adjustment, but would businesses be ready for it as well? What do you think? Is your business willing to respect, understand and adapt to your bodyclock? (I am just about to find out shorty myself …)

There is probably very little doubt out there still about the huge potential, and impact, that Social Networking has been having within the corporate world over the last few years, to the point where a few folks have ventured into suggesting that we are witnessing the tipping point of how we are redefining the Future of the Workplace itself, something that has become, over time, one of my favourite topics as of late and which has finally triggered a thought that’s been lingering in my mind for a quite a bit already: from now onwards I’ll stop talking about Social Business (And leave it down to those folks who coined it first, for our own social good) and, instead, move on with "The Social Enterprise". And, more specifically, I would like to welcome you all to The Era of Intrapreneurship! There are plenty of blog posts out there that have covered very well the topic of "The Future of the Workplace" and the impact of social computing in helping shape up the business world to become a whole lot more open, engaged, transparent and nimble. However, there is one particular article out there that became one of my all time favourite ones around this very same topic, and more than anything else, because it describes, pretty well, how work has evolved with the emergence of the Social Web in the last few years. I am not sure whether you folks may have read it already or not, but, if you haven’t, it’s probably one of those blog entries that I would consider an essential reading for people who are interested in getting a glimpse of what lies ahead, if not already! Check out Irving Wladawsky-Berger‘s "A New Style of Work". Irving’s blog is probably one of the most refreshing, enlightening and entertaining reads you can bump into at the Internet Blogosphere. In case you may not have subscribed to it already, I can surely recommend you do so. And that blog post I mentioned above would certainly confirm why it’s a worth while read time and time again. In that article he basically defines the work life of Trust Agents, what I would call as well Wild Ducks, that group of knowledge Web workers who do lots of smart work together gathering in social networks, communities and whatever other informal groupings to carry out that piece of work they are truly passionate about and connected with one another due to a common affinity. Nothing to do with hierarchies, nor with organisations, nor with project teams, just plain wirearchy, without which all three of those would probably not exist today, as we know them. Apparently, what Tom Foremski has defined as an "atomic" business model as well. "A New Style of Work" is a wonderful trip down the memory lane as well that will certainly act as a refreshing reminder of what the Web used to be and what it is today and, clearly, this particular quote states what’s meant for each and everyone of us as individual knowledge workers: "My time is now my own. I have a lot more flexibility and personal choice in what I do and how I spend my days. The boundaries between work and personal life, already very porous when working at IBM, are practically non-existent. But, as a self-employed individual, I am also on my own. While the various institutions I work with provide me some degree of support, their infrastructure and processes are geared to support their full time employees, not part-time professionals and contractors. I thus have had to come up with my own infrastructure and processes suitable for my present distributed work style" To then finish it off with this other insightful quote that I am sure plenty more knowledge Web workers out there would agree with blindfolded: "The Web has now essentially become my primary work infrastructure. My work processes are essentially web-based processes. While I use physical offices when spending time at any one of the institutions I work with, by primary office is the Web. My primary business address is someplace out there in the cloud" This is exactly what I meant with the title of this blog post when welcoming you all to the Social Enterprise and the Era of Intrapreneurship. You are not reading it wrong. I actually meant every letter: The Era of Intrapreneurship. An era, where thanks to the Social Web, whether internal or external, or both!, knowledge workers, for the first time ever, are now in charged of their own productivity, of their own workflows and personal business relationships with others, of their own responsibility not only towards the work that needs to be done, but also towards the fellow peers they collaborate and share their knowledge with. Thanks to that Social Enterprise we are starting to see how knowledge Web workers are becoming a whole lot more open, public and transparent in narrating their own work, therefore making observable work an integral, critical and paramount activity at the workplace; we are starting to witness how knowledge workers are shaking off their fears for the work they do, or don’t do! as well the fears of no longer being considered indispensable, despite the the huge amount of knowledge they have accumulated over the course of the years, or those other fears of no longer being considered the experts they once thought they were. In short, fear is out, having fun @ work is in. It’s that social revolution that we are witnessing entering, slowly, but steadily, the corporate world, that’s certainly going to help us move along, not thinking along the terms of becoming a social business, but more embracing that social transformation that trojan mice typically would provoke as intrapreneurs. It’s that social revolution and transformation that will help us all understand how critical it is for each and everyone of us having the right access not only to relevant information and content resources, but also access to the people behind it by nurturing and cultivating those relationships and networks on a regular basis in order to make better, smarter, more sensible and more informed decisions, regardless of wherever we may well be, whether in a physical office location, or while working from home, while travelling or while at a customer site. What will matter then is how work will start shifting around us, and not the other way around, as it’s been happening all along over the last few decades. Iriving’s account of how, amongst several other social flavours, mobility, i.e. going mobile, and blogging, specially, as one of the most powerful ingredients to help boost your own personal brand vs. that one of the corporation (as I have blogged about over here myself a few days back) is probably as good as it gets in helping set the stage of how the workplace has been transformed into something so empowering as helping employees take a bit more co-responsibility of their own workflows, without having to wait for orders, or being told what they would need to do. Quite the opposite, in most cases, the center of gravity has been, finally, lowered down tremendously, to the point where it’s through those informal social networks and communities they themselves co-facilite the ones who will be defining what work needs to get done and with whom. Something that, to me, represents the true spirit of Entrepreneurship, in our case, for this article, Intrapreneurship. Something that, for the first time in a long while, could be classified as a truly inspirational social revolution that will help transform not only how we do business, but also how we behave as human beings in our very own societies. My dear friend, Susan Scrupski, couldn’t have put it in much better words than this wonderful gem she shared earlier on today to describe what I have meant all along with that social revolution within the enterprise: "[...] The zeitgeist of Social is about introducing the promises of Web 2.0 (Openness, egalitarianism) to reinvent the way things have been done in prior eras, evolved from industrial age principles, e.g. Taylorism. Social is not about anarchy ; it’s about freedom and democracy and innovation. It’s not about rigid structures and hierarchies; it’s about transparency and honesty and re-distributing power to create agile change motivated by passionate, engaged actors. It’s about leadership that rewards and recognises talent and instinctively has a collective understanding of the community it serves, because it’s tuned into what they think, as well as what they do. It’s about authenticity and trust. (Yes, trust)" Like I said, I couldn’t have put it in better words than those and if you haven’t read the entire piece I would strongly encourage you all to go ahead and do so and go through the highlights of a keynote with 45k attendees that may have marked the beginning of that Social Revolution within the Enterprise itself. Essentially, this is not about becoming a Social Business; because with the word "Business", we lose all of the original intent that sparked the creation of that Web 2.0 movement back in the day that Susan talked about in her post. We need to go beyond that! Further beyond that! This is all about embracing and living a new state of social empowerment that will break the status-quo within the Enterprise, and I do realise that for plenty of people out there I may be in fantasy land myself and won’t probably see it in my lifetime or perhaps a bit too deep into my Hippie 2.0 shoes, but just like recent global events have shown us, we are witnessing a truly unique historic moment where, now more than ever, it would be up to each and everyone of us to decide where we stand, i.e. whether we would want to co-lead it, or wait for it to blow us all away without remedy and no point of return! It’s your choice. It’s our choice. And I guess, if you have been reading this blog for a while, you know on which side I would be standing, right? … Well, what about you though? Are you also a wild duck, one of those critical trust agents, intrapreneurs ready to co-lead that social change within your own enterprise? Are you ready to drop Social Business and instead continue to live the Social Enterprise Revolution we all once truly believed in, when we all thought we could change the world with the Social Web? What do you think? Of course! Come on and join us! The waters have always been lovely!

The last week has been absolutely incredible. The Agile 2010 conference seemed to be heaps bigger and better than last years conference and that seems to be a continuing trend. I was able to deliver a solo workshop on "Making Feedback work in Your Teams", to a packed house. More on that later, but the best feedback comment I got was, "I could listen to Sumeet all day!". Well, whoever wrote that, thank you! I'm sure if you do spend a day listening to me, you'll quickly realise how awful I can sometimes be. I spent a significant amount of time chatting with Martin Fowler - which may seem surprising, given Martin's a fellow ThoughtWorker, but then he's been busy writing his book, so we haven't seen him in India much recently. And I had Esther Derby walk up to me at the end of my talk and call me her ally, which was particularly heartening - thanks Esther for being a valuable participant in my workshop! I'll be particularly delighted if I could someday join forces with Esther and deliver a joint workshop on feedback in Agile teams.But today's blogpost isn't about the conference and Agile. Today I want to share with you one of the most magical experiences in my life and what I've taken away from it as a learning and development professional. So, some context - the conference was supposed to happen in Nashville, Tennessee. Unfortunately Nashville was hit by one of the biggest floods in many years and that made us move the conference venue to the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort. At first I was a bit disappointed - I'm not one for amusement parks and in fact, I passed up my first opportunity to be at a Disney World in Hong Kong because I don't really care for the rides. "Just another amusement park.", I thought. Then again, I don't like sitting in a hotel when I'm in a new place and if I was going to be in Orlando, I had to go to Disney World if only for the record. Having spent time at the four major Disney World parks, I now have a completely changed opinion. In that itself, I've learnt a lesson to never judge a book by it's cover. The magic of Disney World is something for you to see to believe. If you don't like amusement parks, my words will have little effect on you, but I know that if you do chance upon this amazing place, you'll understand why Disney World is such a popular destination. Each day that I visited the place, I felt a strange heart warming happiness - unlike anything I've ever felt before. I felt like a child once again and yet I didn't find anything childish. There were important lessons for parents, children, professionals - in fact, I kept relating the way Disney does their business with the way we should train and present. Today, I want to share with you what I've learnt about my trade from these dream merchants.Keep things Simple"I am interested in entertaining people, in bringing pleasure, particularly laughter, to others, rather than being concerned with 'expressing' myself with obscure creative impressions." - Walt DisneyDisney movies maybe an elaborate affair in production, but for the audience, they're incredibly simple stories and morals to digest. If you think of any movie, you'll realise that the storyline revolves around a simple moral. Finding Nemo is about parents letting their children take chances and for children to realise why their parents care. Tinkerbell teaches you to believe in yourself. Toy Story and Up are about friendship, loyalty and the spirit of adventure. There's not a tale in the Disney cabinet that takes effort to understand. I love this, because the simplicity of Disney movies make them memorable for not just youngsters, but also grown ups.It's a lesson for trainers and presenters - simplicity takes effort. Simplicity is not equivalent to being simplistic. It takes great creativity to powerfully express an idea and yet make it easy to understand. I have never forgotten how Crush the turtle from Finding Nemo says to Marlin, "You never really know. But when they know, you'll know. You know?". I'm not a parent yet, but that's a great parenting lesson right there - it comes halfway through the movie after a significant amount of storytelling. The key is that Disney took the pains to tell a story that would make that message stick. And stick it has. When we do our presentations and training, what's our simple message that will always stick through? It's food for thought, isn't it?Set a Theme"We like to have a point of view in our stories, not an obvious moral, but a worthwhile theme. ... All we are trying to do is give the public good entertainment. That is all they want." - Walt DisneyDisney World's success is in being the world's first theme park. It's not just an amusement park with rides, it tells a story. So while Magic Kingdom is about making dreams come true, Animal Kingdom is about celebrating our planets biodiversity. If Hollywood studios is about celebrating backstage action from our favourite movies, Epcot is about education, science and innovation. Every corner of these parks, stays true to it's theme. Steve Jobs, one the best presenters of our era, does this with uncanny predictability. For example when he keynoted Macworld 2008 to announce the Macbook Air, he started off with the theme, "There's clearly something in the air today." To this day, it remains one of his most memorable keynotes in the way he introduced his latest family of notebooks.Themes allow our brains to relate items of information to each other. Our brain stores related information in contiguous areas, firing more neurons which eventually leads to better retention. Dr John Medina's book on Brain Rules is a fantastic text on how our brain works and even he says, "Our brain pays attention to patterns." So create that pattern by setting your theme and watch your audience sink into the experience.Entertain before you Educate "Your goal is to entertain, not only inform. The funnier you are, the more people will know you're smart because it takes great intelligence to be funny." - Guy KawasakiI spent a lot of my time in Epcot, Disney's educational park. I was particularly amazed at how Disney has gone to great lengths trying to make education fun. I wish I'd experienced this as a kid - I would have taken a stronger interest in science. Each ride was not just fun, but it was memorable. On Mission Space, I learnt how astronauts have to train to go on outer space missions. On Soarin I learnt about California and it's beautiful landscapes. On Living with the Land, I learnt how new ways of making agriculture more productive. On Test Track, I learnt how car manufacturers test their vehicles. On each of these rides, I learnt a little bit but had heaps more fun. Our brains are conditioned to remember interesting events. To create strong memories, we need an affective context. Disney creates an affective context on each of their rides and shows and I think if I can find use for some of the things I've learnt, I'm unlikely to forget these experiences.As Dr Medina says, "The brain doesn't pay attention to boring things, and I'm as sick of boring presentations as you are." That statement is quite conclusive in that we need to do more to make our topics interesting and fun for our audience. Hiding behind the excuse that a topic is dry isn't enough anymore; in fact, it's a waste of time. If we care about our topics enough, we need to find ways to make them interesting. Sometimes it's not easy and we need inspiration. Hans Rosling's fun talk on an incredibly dry topic, is testimony that this is possible.Create an Immersive Experience"Until a character becomes a personality it cannot be believed. Without personality, the character may do funny or interesting things, but unless people are able to identify themselves with the character, its actions will seem unreal. And without personality, a story cannot ring true to the audience." - Walt DisneyOne of the key things I noticed with the Disney World experience is how committed the entire crew is to ensuring that you're totally immersed in the experience. When you enter the haunted mansion, it's not your ride that begins, your attendant emerges saying, "Your time has come." When I got onto the Kilimanjaro Safaris, it wasn't about getting onto a jeep - it was about going on a two week trip and keeping your eyes out for poachers. The attention to detail is so minute that when you take the train from Rafiki's planet watch, you don't go to the Africa exhibit, your attendant sees you off to Harambe village in Africa. The Asian exhibit has moisture affected walls just as you'll see in India; a dhobi ghat with clothes strewn across the steps just as you'll see at many places in our country. All the Disney characters stay true to their mannerisms, every moment of the day. For long everything felt so real that I believed I was walking through a real life Disney movie!The immersive experience creates hugely memorable experiences. The race to find the poachers, the quest for the Iguanadon before asteroid impact on earth, the extreme g-forces when our rocket took off from the space station, have created a huge impression on me, which I'm unlikely to forget. This is a crucial lesson for trainers in particular - we learn lessons where we're kinesthetically part of an experience. As Nick Shackleton-Jones often mentions - it's ridiculous to think about learning as just knowledge transfer. The trainer of the future, inspires and involves learners in an experience of co-creation through storytelling, scenarios and simulations. Our approach with ThoughtWorks University has been a step in this direction.Performance Counts"Fantasy, if it's really convincing, can't become dated, for the simple reason that it represents a flight into a dimension that lies beyond the reach of time." - Walt DisneyAt Disney World, the show takes precedence over everything else. Perfectionism is the name of the game and you'll notice that they've gotten so good with their shows that they know how to run them without fail, each time. They don't put a step wrong, whether it's Donald's walk, Mickey's wave, the fireworks at Magic Kingdom or the Jammin' Jungle Parade. It appears they've practiced so hard that to improvise is never a chore. The flawlessness of execution is something for you to see, to believe me. The result is a perfect show that'll ring in your memory for years to come. As practicing experts, we're in a similar situation when we teach or present. We can choose to go out there and play it by ear, or do our audience a favour and practice diligently. There's heaps we can learn from the art of public performance, and we owe it to our audience to give them the most engaging, interesting and entertaining learning experience possible. The thought about performance also reminds me that Disney doesn't overdo live performances. If there's something that could be a recording, then they just leave it that way. For example the briefings for the rides - they seem live, but they're not! This is yet another lesson for us - never do a live demo if it doesn't add significant value. It's a recipe for disaster, creating an additional point of failure for your presentation or workshop. This is not to say you shouldn't do anything live. You just need to be pragmatic about what's valuable and what's not.It's tough to write all about my Disney experience in words. Call me shallow, corny or cheesy - there are 17 million others like me in this world! I loved being at Disney and learning about Walt has given me heaps of inspiration for the next few years. I guess it should suffice to say that I'm almost a new, refreshed person after my time at the parks.On a sidenote, please drop in a comment to let me know how you found today's article. If you're in Bangalore, do catch me for a coffee and I'll show you some of the pictures from my visits to Disney. I'm in Chicago as I write this post, and I'm missing the place already. I could stay there forever!© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

Earlier on today, and continuing further with yesterday’s blog entry on "The Social Enterprise - Welcome to the Era of Intrapreneruship!" that I shared over here, my good friend, the always insightful Susan Scrupski put together a follow-up article that absolutely pretty much nails it for me on this whole topic of transitioning into "The Social Enterprise" from "Social Business". Under the rather thought-provoking title of "Zen and the Art of Enterprise Maintenance" Susan herself has set up some homework for all of those folks out there who may be involved with Enterprise 2.0, Social Networking / Computing or Social Business (In my case, Social Enterprise). To name: "We are aiming to change the world of work". And somehow although plenty of folks out there would see that as a call to (silent) arms I tend to think more along the terms of the Awakening 2.0 that a bunch of us have been waiting for a long while now… Further down in that article Susan gets to explain, in a rather enlightening and insightful fashion, what she actually means with "We are aiming to change the world of work", which I guess is probably rather well described under this golden nugget: "To get to the "fix" part of this equation, it’s going to take the smarts and knowhow of everyone who’s focused on the Enterprise. There’s a great thread on G+ from Sameer Patel on the "how." The lasting value will be to apply the spirit of social revolution in the enterprise to the practical application of social in the enterprise" To then finish it all off with setting up the challenge ahead for all of us: "This is the hard part. Delivering on the promise of social. So consider it a clarion call for all practitioners, consultants, and vendors (big and small): Figure it out. Bring it home for the rest of us and the planet. We’ve done the first hard part which is selling the promise of revolutionary change. And we’ll keep beating that drum, btw. It’s the backbeat to the song we’re singing" Of course, as I finished off reading through her blog post I just couldn’t help thinking about the "Figure it out" part of her article and start thinking about potential solutions. And while catching up further with some other interesting reading I just couldn’t help pondering that we may have a holistic solution far too close to each and everyone of us to realise about it, and make it work. It all came clearer to me when I re-discovered a rather inspiring video clip that re-introduces a very innovative and creative concept that I would love to see it being explored by the enterprise world and not just by a few companies: The Circular Economy (Re-Thinking Progress) In a rather revealing article over at the Guardian, Rosie Bristow describes quite nicely how the current linear economy hasn’t taken us too far ahead; quite the opposite! It seems that it’s made things a whole lot worse, not just for the business world, but just as much for both our societies and the world we live in: "The basis for this thinking is that the linear way in which the world economy currently operates fuels a culture of consumption and creates more waste than is sustainable in the long term. In contrast, the living world operates in a circular cycle where the waste of one species provides the food for another and resources flow" That last sentence is probably as good as it gets and it reflects how, once again, nature may be a whole lot wiser than all of us in managing her own resources to create, cultivate and nurture progress. Her progress: the one that affects us all in our day to day lives. So Rosie keeps wondering whether we could make the switch towards that Circular Economy along these very terms: "What would a circular economy look like in practice? The video suggests that it’s about redesigning and rethinking products so that after they have been used by humans, their component parts return to manufacturers, with biological elements being used to support agriculture and valuable resource parts such as metals being used in the creation of new products. In this way, today’s goods become tomorrow’s resources, forming a circular cycle" Not such a bad idea, don’t you think? While musing about Susan’s and Rosie’s articles I just couldn’t help thinking that perhaps what we really need to fully embrace and live the Social Enterprise would come pretty close to this whole concept of the Circular Economy, where we try to mimic what nature has mastered doing over the course of millions of years without facing too much trouble, till we humans started reverting that trend. Perhaps both growth and progress are meant to be that way. Perhaps we should starting shifting gears and introduce that whole concept of leasing / borrowing, instead of owning, which, if you ask me, is pretty close to what we would be doing with that Social Web activity we have all fallen in love with: sharing! Sharing what we know, our experiences, our skills, our knowhow, our selves, so that others could benefit by reusing it themselves and make it better. Sharing our connections and personal business relationships, so that others would benefit from those new relationships instigated by empowering connectors / hubs. I am not sure what you folks would think about it, but this key trait from the Social Web / Web 2.0 does come pretty close to this whole concept of the circular economy, where progress is being made not so much on how much you grow, but by how much you are capable of reusing and learning along the way to create something better without having to destroy, without remedy, something in between. It’s probably that openness, transparency, and trusting relationships in the system that surely have made it work for nature all along (Because she always knows what’s best for her and those around her…) and perhaps we need to fully embrace those critical social aspects to "figure it out", as Susan mentioned. Plenty of food for thought, for sure! And for those folks who may be skeptic about re-thinking new ways to help us progress further into the 21st century, let’s look at what that linear economy has managed to do in the last 3 to 5 years to see, and realise, we are probably not much better off than what we were a few decades ago after all… Yes, we need a reboot. And pretty desperately. We have been probably needing it for over a decade already, and in times of (financial) crisis (Crisis as in choices / changes), we need now more inspiration than ever to leap forward and provoke that shift towards a Social Enterprise: a sustainable and engaged economy where all factors are looked up equally, including the resources we have got available to us all, so that growth finally makes its move towards progress, respectful and sustainable progress. And that’s why from here onwards I’ll be making a huge effort, my ¢2, really, to start transitioning myself from that linear economy of consumerism, just for the sake of consuming, into that circular one by applying some smart and educated thinking in what I consume and buy and what I don’t. That basically means I will be looking up to those businesses that would want to start making a difference and change our future and I do seriously hope that my own company will be jumping the shark, too!, as it enters its second century of existence. But what about yours? Is your business ready to embrace and live the Circular Economy? Do you think it’s worth while trying? Do we have a choice any longer? After all, what would we lose not trying it, right? Probably not much, but a lot to gain, for sure! Our very own survival as a species.

It was a great week at the Agile 2010 conference and it's very exciting to see that we're almost moving to an age of Agile pragmatism - what some will call post-modern Agile. It's often surprising to me how many misgivings and naivety gets attached to Agile. As Agile gets more and more mainstream, conferences such as Agile 2010 set the ground for the community to converge and discover best of breed approaches. I was fortunate to meet many interesting people and I must say the talks I went to, lived up to a very high standard as well. I've picked up a bunch of reflections from the conference and from those I want to quickly write up what I think Agile is absolutely not and I'd love to hear from you if you think I'm wrong.Agile is not about wasteful processWe never do things for the sake of doing things. Every piece of work we do needs to seek out some value for the customer. As we get better at doing agile, we need to question ourselves about the value of pretty much everything we do. For example one of the biggest wastes I see are in agile iteration planning meetings (IPMs). In traditional IPMs, the entire team gets together and discusses the stories they'll play in the upcoming iteration. They then re-estimate all the stories, task them out individually and then place the individual tasks on the card wall. This takes ages for the meeting to get over. I question the value of reestimating stories -- if you don't have an estimate for your story then there's no reason why it should be in scope for the iteration. If you do have an estimate for the story and none of the assumptions from the time of the estimate have changed, then why reestimate?I feel similarly about groups of people tasking out user stories - there's no better example of design by committee than this. Ideally we should be performing activities just-in-time, otherwise we just create inventory on our card walls. IMO the best time to task out a story is when a pair of developers picks it up from the card wall and starts to work on it.In a similar manner, I feel that teams need to be a lot more efficient about retrospectives. Retrospectives are valuable when the team has meaningful discussions about the problems they're facing. However most retrospectives seem to spend most of their time just brainstorming issues. I can say that for many retrospectives I've facilitated - so I'm not free of blame! A team that really cares about continuous improvement needs to generate retrospective discussion items continuously. In the recent past, I've tried to initiate the brainstorm much ahead of the actual retrospective meeting, so the team has a prioritised list of issues they'd like to discuss. I've used tools like Google Wave (soon to be discontinued) and Google Moderator for this. This makes the retrospective meeting itself hugely productive and we get a lot more done by way of discussion.These are just examples of waste we create on projects and that we can easily avoid -- I've generally observed that if I feel hugely uncomfortable about an activity or feel it's a 'necessary evil', there's definitely waste somewhere. That's a sign to refactor our team processes.Agile is not about indiscipline"Agile is about doing things that make our life simple. That doesn't mean that doing these things itself is easy." - Akash Bhalla, ThoughtWorkerI love that quote by my colleague Akash. We often mistake the fluidity of agile practices for a lack of discipline. As it turns out, Agile requires significantly more discipline and team commitment than traditional projects. The idea is a to practice good habits to an extreme. So just because we have user stories, doesn't mean that we don't track conversations related to them. User stories are a placeholder for conversations, but when those conversations do happen, we need to be diligent in tracking them. The card wall is everyone's responsibility, not just the project managers. It takes great discipline to be responsible for updating the status of your work on the card wall. That's our commitment to our team. In a similar manner Agile teams need to be fanatical about communication. Very often the lack of colocation becomes an excuse for not communicating frequently. Yet there are some of us who ensure that we communicate so frequently and with such a high degree of quality, that distribution almost never seems like an issue. This again needs discipline, because it means that apart from doing the easy part of communicating with our colocated team-mates, we also take the pain to communicate with those at a different site.Agile is not about a lack of visionAgile isn't all about eliciting a bunch of stories and delivering them in blind incremental fashion. We talk about delivering stories in the order of highest priority for the customer, but the fact is that a customer is making very poor guesses when looking at a flat list of user stories. Somewhere someone needs to spend time discovering the big picture of the project with the customer. This means seeing the project as a whole while iterating through development by delivering increments that slice through all streams of functionality. This is why Jeff Patton's story mapping approach is so popular for being able to envision your product. It tells the story of the application, though even that is only a step in the larger scheme of product discovery. The user experience of the application can't happen at a story level. Somewhere, someone needs to set the vision for the application's user experience so the entire team has a vision for what they're developing towards. As Jeff says, "Discovery and delivery are inseparable." Stories in isolation deliver no value - they deliver value as part of shippable software and the team needs to have a collective vision of what each shippable increment will do. As the product owner on ThoughtWorks University, this is what I set expectations for with my development team.Agile shouldn't be about dogmaLast but not the least, agile is not about dogma. As I've expressed earlier agile is all about delivering value to the customer. We often become very dogmatic about practices when the practices really are only a means to an end. For example, I feel that standup meetings don't HAVE TO BE a standard practice on an Agile team, especially across distributed teams. If it's about communicating status, then the team's card wall should do that on a continuous basis. If the card wall isn't up-to-date, then that's a huge smell. If it's about removing blockers, then that should happen continuously as well - that's the reason why we sit at one table, in a team room. If it's about public commitment, then again, that should happen continuously by communicating across the table as often as we can. In a time where we can use tools like Yammer to create a continuous stream of information about a project, I tend to think of standups as ceremony for the sake of ceremony and IMO, an outdated practice.In a similar manner, we need to overcome the dogma that for effective collaboration, you need colocation. For effective collaboration what you really need is the discipline and the passion to communicate. Folks like Keith Voos and Bill Krebs have provided empirical evidence to prove that we have reached a point where technology can help bridge geographical distances. So, the next time we feel we're being prescriptive with our process, we need to think again and ask ourselves if we're going through a practice only because that's the way we did it in the past. The world is evolving and so should Agile. I'm no Agile guru. In fact, at the conference I introduced myself as an Agile nobody. I do however have strong views about practicing Agile effectively through my association with ThoughtWorks in India and with ThoughtWorks University. I may be wrong in what I've said on the blog and one way or the other, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Do let me know by dropping a comment or two on this post.© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

One of the main issues large corporations and small businesses have been having all along, when trying to go through that business transformation towards becoming a Social Enterprise, has always been the lack of an effective governance model and eventually decide to go for the easy way out: blocking social networking sites at work, hoping that knowledge workers would make better use of their own time, instead of goofing around, supposedly, when in reality they will just be switching devices and access those social networks regardless. Even without having to use your company’s resources. It’s been one of those recurring themes that we keep coming back to time and time again, over the course of the years, and the solution always seems to be the same one, unfortunately. Instead of perhaps working a bit harder in trying to understand, address and mitigate whatever the potential risks, but also taking advantage of the many different benefits behind social networking for the enterprise, we keep bumping into news items that seem to confirm quite an interesting trend: instead of working your way towards a robust, trustworthy, essential and rather elemental social computing policy and guidelines, folks seem to want to leave that to others to figure it out, if anything at all, when it’s probably a bit too late already. I remember the day when IBM was first facing that very same issue, on whether to put together a social computing policy and guidelines or not. At the time, May 2005, it was rather refreshing to see how instead of the company trying to figure it out by itself, on its own, it decided to rely on a group of prolific bloggers to come to the rescue and eventually put that policy on a wiki page over the course of two weeks. From there onwards, and 6 years later, two different revisions coming along and we now have got IBM’s Social Computing Guidelines, which we could possibly say have become an industry standard that other companies have adapted to their corporate culture and values to make them their own and shine through all the way. And it all got started with just a bunch of bloggers! Fast forward to 2011, and I am still finding it somewhat provocative, and perhaps a bit too sad, how plenty of businesses still keep blocking the use of social networking tools, as business tools, thinking they can get away with it without making things potentially worse, for them and for their employee workforce alike. And it’s not just like we are back into 2005, or earlier when help and support were scarce; nowadays we have got a whole bunch of rather insightful articles and resources that can prove to be rather helpful when trying to draft your own guidelines and governance models (Those are some rather good resources to get you going, if you don’t have one just yet, by the way…) to match your company’s corporate culture as well as your values. So there is probably no excuse any longer, is there? The interesting thing from this whole debate about governance models and social computing guidelines and whether to block access to these social tools or not, is that policy and guidelines don’t necessarily need to be boring and unsubstantial. Quite the opposite! It could well be plenty of good fun! In fact, it should be a fun activity. Like my good friend, Mark Masterson, would say, "If you treat people like sheep, they would probably behave like sheep". If you make it a fun activity, if you trust them to do the right thing, since you have hired hard working professionals in the first place, they would look at it and fully embrace it, internalise it and own it, to the point that they would match those guidelines to their own overall values and corporate culture of the business. And that’s probably as good as it gets, because the last thing you would want to see, as a hard working, socially networked professional is to witness how internal social tools get abused by others who think they just finally got Facebook for the enterprise to hit their next date! It just doesn’t work that way! And here is a good example of a social computing policy and guidelines that combines fun, creativity, innovation and the right messages to be shared across in a format that’s very easy to digest. A video clip that lasts for a little bit over 4 minutes. Take a look into Social Media Policy, a YouTube video put together by the Department of Justice in Victoria, Australia (Yes, the Department of Justice! Who would have thought about that, right?), which explains quite nicely their own social media policy that they are using: Fun stuff, eh? Well, after watching that video and seeing what’s possible to become a Social Enterprise, even for late-joiner industries like Government, I guess there isn’t probably any longer an excuse for you, as a business, to work your magic, just like they did on the video, and put together a policy and set of social computing guidelines that would be respectful and trustworthy of your employee workforce, as well as youself, as a business, towards your corporate culture and those values I mentioned above. That policy would eventually become your flagship as you enter the world of living and embracing social, just like it did for us, at IBM, over 6 years ago, just like it does for Victoria’s Department of Justice. The good thing is that you will no longer have to go the easy way out of blocking access and face the consequences. Quite the opposite; it can be quite an inspiring and creatively fun activity that everyone can contribute and benefit from. And, right there, that’s the next challenge for all of you who may be reading this and not have that policy in place just yet. What are you waiting for? When are you going to start? Don’t leave for tomorrow what you can begin today! Make it fun, inclusive, participative, engaging, empowering, open and transparent; get that creativity juice going with all of that smart talent that is surrounding you and you will be off to a great start! Your first step towards becoming a fully Integrated Social Enterprise.

As a facilitator, I realise that I'm interested in some of the things that no one really cares about. These things however are the things that make a very silent difference to a group's collaboration and learning experience. For example, I like to come in early in the morning to ensure that a training room is set up in a pleasant clean fashion. When arranging a meeting or a workshop, I like to not just ensure that there are enough stickies, index cards and pens in the room, but also that it's easy for people to pick up one of these tools and participate. When facilitating an open space, I like to ensure that I set up the agenda wall with explicit instructions and a clear indication of venues and time slots.I like getting the whiteboards clean and keeping the right flipcharts on the wall. When facilitating, I maintain an invisible presence so I can help people out only when they need me but not be a barrier to the decision making or discussion process. Sometimes that means getting a projector in place or bringing in stationery or even picking up trash from a corner. These are boring, mundane tasks which most people may find frivolous and will most often neglect. I guess I am a facilitator because I am happy to be a servant to my group and do this work.© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

There is no doubt that this week will probably be remembered for a long while, in the Social Enterprise space, at least, as one that served as the tipping point of embracing a new dynamic within the corporate world that is slightly different than what we have been witnessing all along with Social Business in the last couple of years. As we are wrapping it up, I am more and more convinced now that there are a good number of subtle differences between Social Business and Social Enterprise and somehow the main key differentiator between one and the other has got to do with a simple idea, yet with a tremendous powerful meaning: Social Revolution. If you have been reading a couple of the blog entries I wrote this week, and, most importantly, a good bunch of the links I shared in those articles, I think we are witnessing that Awakening 2.0 phase I mentioned back then that is helping us all, knowledge workers, realise how this is our moment. Our true moment. Our opportunity to re-find and re-define our purpose in our workplaces, our wanting-to-make-a-difference moments; in short, experience that self-discovery journey of what we really want to do with our work lives, because, whether we like it or not, that’s also going to reflect on our own personal lives altogether. We now, finally, feel a whole lot more engaged, empowered, trustworthy, appreciated and … respected. And all of that thanks to the revolution social computing within the enterprise has, at long last, provoked within the business world, as well as in our society, as we know it. Something that my good friend, the always inspiring and very thought-provoking, Deb Lavoy, put together, beautifully, with this golden nugget in a recent blog post: "If the industrial revolution’s idea of a great business was one in which every role, process and activity was well defined and controlled by management, social business is one in which every employee and customer are aligned around a common purpose" To then follow it up with this other one that I, too, feel rather identified with: "Social Business is one that recognizes that their mission is engaging hearts and minds to achieve excellence. Social Business is about respecting people" Deb’s superb article under the suggestive heading of "Could E2.0 really mean Enlightenment 2.0?", and which I strongly encourage you all to read through it as I am sure it would leave a wonderful taste just before the weekend kicks off for everyone, finishes off with a final remark that would be very suitable, in my opinion, for both Social Business (= Customer focus) and Social Enterprise (Workforce focus) and the kind of impact they both have, whether internal or external, with the emergence of social networking at the workplace: "A Social Business is a business that respects and profits from the complexity and unlimited potential of people" But it’s not the only article we have seen this week covering this very same topic of the "Social Revolution within the Enterprise". Take a look, for instance, into this other brilliantly written blog post by another good friend, Bill Ives, under the title "The Gig Economy - Intrapreneurship - A New Style of Work" which pretty sums up this shift in the way we work with this rather inspiring quote as well: "[...] one of the ways that things have changed is now workers are much more transparent about their work and having more fun at the same time. We are out from under the hierarchical cloud imposed by the industrial revolution. It is easier to do this as an enterprise of one that is connected to many organizations as I have experienced" Once again, both themes of Observable Work and Intrapreneurship coming along nicely to help us define the future of the workplace. Our workplace. One that it is for us to define and shape up over time, according to how empowered, and engaged, we feel in doing what we love doing: our jobs. But there is more… Check out this other great piece, over at Forbes, put together by David Kirkpatrick, under the heading "Social Power and the Coming Corporate Revolution" to see how, once again, the business world is about to be hit, without remedy, by that thing called the tsunami of the Social Web and what it has meant for our society as we know it in helping transform how we live and fully embrace those 2.0 core values of openness, transparency, engagement, trust, respect, and, above all, sharing. Another worth while read, for sure, to have a good glimpse of what’s to come, specially, based on the good number of stories from companies who have already embraced such social transformation and those that are facilitating it and what’s meant for them all along, containing as well, perhaps, one of my all time favourite quotes by another good friend, John Hagel, on such a key important trait for every single business transaction amongst knowledge workers and business people: Trust! "Trust is built by sharing vulnerability [...] The more you expose and share your problems, the more successful you become. It’s not about the top executive dictating what needs to be done and when, it’s about providing individuals with the power to connect" Absolutely spot on comment on what I truly believe the social revolution for the Social Enterprise would be all about. And talking about John himself there is another really interesting article that I would want to point you folks to, so that you can have a look and find out plenty more about why I mentioned above that I feel we have reached that tipping point of that internal social transformation provoked by social computing. In "John Hagel on Empowerment, Management Fears, and Social Software in Business" Adam Ludwig conducts a rather insightful interview with John, where the latter gets to talk about how we have already started the transition from being managed to being lead; to have leaders, instead of managers, acting as servants helping facilitate and get the most, and the best, out of their knowledge workers; to move away from the traditional hierarchical structures where a few told the vast majority what to do and what to think, to an environment where work gets regulated and done by both networks and communities, helping facilitate that transition from knowledge stocks into knowledge flows. His description of how empowering it is to lower the center of gravity in decision making and problem solving is absolutely fantastic! Just as well as how social software tools help lower down tremendously both transaction and friction costs allowing knowledge workers to become more productive by solving business exceptions much faster, without having to rely anymore on traditional tools, which, on their own, probably made handling exceptions even worse over time! (Hint: email!) Finally, one of my all time favourite ideas, the one that keeps me coming back to work, day in day out, that John gets to share on that interview, and which I think is the main culprit of what we are witnessing with the social revolution within the enterprise, on empowering and engaging your employee workforce, is passion. Passion of your knowledge workforce about what they do, what they believe in and the connections and relationships they have been able to build over the course of time as a result of it. Connecting people with a common affinity / passion for a particular topic, specially, work related, is a very powerful thing, as John mentions: "Passionate people are deeply motivated to improve themselves and drive themselves to the next level of performance". Now, I am not too sure whether we are entering a new era of Enlightenment 2.0, as Deb suggests in her blog post, that I referenced above. Perhaps it may well be so. What I do know though is that this week we have just opened up the door towards a much more socially integrated, empowering, open, transparent, engaging and nimble enterprise and that has got to mean something. There is no way back. Welcome to the Era of the Awakening 2.0! Have a good one everyone!

A few days back I watched a pretty awesome video by Nick Shackleton Jones about the Affective Context Model. Nick told a great story about the importance of the affective context - the emotional metadata that allows us to connect and remember various pieces of information. Nick's also written a splendid article about this very topic for those who want more detail. Nick's video was a great illustration of why push-type learning tends to be ineffective and why despite our best efforts, learning is never effective unless an individual feels a strong, apparent need for it. While a huge portion of our training budgets goes towards creating the content for learning, we seem to ignore that people learn only when they see a strong need. As I've mentioned earlier, context trumps content in the modern L&D world, and as L&D professionals we need to be able to create a work context that allows knowledge workers to learn when they experience a strong desire to do so. As instructional designers, we need to workscape our training programs so they can provide our learners the affective context around which they can pull and retain information themselves.Last month, Josh Bersin wrote a thought-provoking blog post about how, despite all the advancements in technology and the Gen X/ Y debate aside, the way people learn hasn't really changed. He made some really simple, but astute points:Mastery (not in Dreyfus terms) means being able to apply knowledge - until someone performs a task themselves, they don't really learn it.People learn by doing.The purpose of training and development is to accelerate this process - and yet we don't pay adequate attention to 'workplace learning'. We're still stuck in the classroom paradigm.Management and leadership drive learning in an organisation. L&D has little control over workplace practices; a true learning organisation learns even beyond the traditional boundaries of L&D and it's the responsibility of the management, leadership and really everyone in the organisation to drive this culture.I've found some of this thinking extremely motivating in the context of my new found fascination for workscapes. In today's article, I want to share with you my thoughts around why we need to evolve towards full-blown workscapes as against a purely course focussed approach. Hopefully some of my thoughts will resonate with your own and I'd love to hear how you feel about this topic.Recognising False EleganceI grew up in this industry doing a lot of standup training. I still do a lot of that. I've done a fair bit of elearning and I've seen and created some great courses and some awful courses. I've grown to believe that we live in an age of false elegance. Hear me out. Some of us have made it almost an art form in the way we engage and entertain people. Our training sessions just flow by and people seem so entertained, happy and involved that it's no wonder they rate our programs highly. In fact we make the experience so pleasant and memorable that they do amazingly well in the post-training assessment as well. Coverage is hardly a problem - we cover 95% of our target audience. Yet, when it comes to retention and eventual transfer of learning to the workplace, most of this amazing learning investment is lost.Take the story further and we automate our flawed training processes by creating 'engaging elearning'. People love the slot games and tic-tac-toes that we add into our elearning courses. Best things ever! We now train 100% of our people at a third of the cost and quarter the time. In fact, we throw in bonus courses and still save ourselves a lot of money. Guess what, we still can't make a difference to the bottomline. The really effective elearning is where people actually practice real-world tasks, but we have little time for that post our fascination with card games and flashy animations.This is what I call false elegance. Our solutions look really polished and slick, but under the surface they do precious little. We need better approaches and a renewed focus.We're Living in ChaosDave Snowden's landmark work on the Cynefin model will remind you of your workplace. As it turns out, traditional elearning and training focusses on the 'Simple' domain of Cynefin. There are clear cause and effect relationships and therefore it's easy to determine how you can respond to problems in this domain. Definitely easy stuff to teach. With the fast changing nature of business, only simple, repetitive processes fall under this domain. Most knowledge work falls under the Complex, Complicated and Chaotic domains, where we our answer for causality is a broad, "It depends...". If your job is to train knowledge workers, think of how many times you say those words in a classroom versus giving a clear answer and you'll realise how little of what you teach falls under the Simple domain.Our obsession with training however has meant that we try to dumb down chaotic problems by trying to break them into several best practice solutions. We then try to find an attractive package for this collection of pseudo-best-practices and push them down the throats of our unsuspecting learners through meaningless games and activities which have no relation to the real world. I'm not surprised people find it difficult to apply classroom learning to their day jobs.We need On-Demand Solutions"We have built our education systems on the model of fast food. This is something Jamie Oliver talked about the other day. You know there are two models of quality assurance in catering. One is fast food, where everything is standardised. The other are things like Zagat and Michelin restaurants, where everything is not standardized, they're customized to local circumstances. And we have sold ourselves into a fast food model of education. And it's impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies." - Sir Ken RobinsonHave you ever thought of why your employees access Google more than your intranet? Or why new employees seem to use your learning tools more than the grizzly old consultants? It's because on-demand is the real buzzword we should have been thinking of all the time. Information in context, trumps instruction out of context. The power of Google is in being able to provide answers to people's current problems and needs. A new hire doesn't want to look silly in her new job, so she does all she can to get up-to-speed with her new job. She's happy to go through badly crafted materials on your intranet because it answers her emotional need to feel competent. Isn't it ironic then that we focus all our efforts on creating entertaining sessions and pretty elearning when a similar effort to meet people at the point of need could potentially reap greater rewards?Training seeks to solve tomorrow's problems using yesterday's wisdom. I'm not saying yesterday's wisdom is not valuable - indeed it is. All I'm saying that our work is changing in a way that yesterday's wisdom can only guide decision making for the new problems we'll face tomorrow. Our approach has some fundamental drawbacks, which Tony Driscoll very eloquently describes as the seven scary problems of our status quo. To me, it tries to overcomplicate what could be a very simple solution e.g. connecting a newbie to an experienced coach, or finding her some advice. We need to simplify our approach and move the availability of training and education to the workplace.We need Diverse SolutionsWe're beyond the point where a single solution can solve all performance problems. People learn iteratively and over time and when we look across learning paths for a capability/role, we'll notice that different outcomes need different learning solutions. More importantly, as Sir Ken Robinson says, "It's about customizing to your circumstances, and personalizing education to the people you're actually teaching." So, the model of courses needs to almost give way to learning suites. I remember my colleague Jason Yip saying he attended "Getting to Yes" training that he really benefited from . OTOH, a little Al Gore talk on TED has spurred me to learn so much about the climate crisis eventually leading me and my wife to support movements such as 350. And while learning styles don't really exist, there are two truths about learning:people have different learning preferences and workflows (not VAK - sorry);and different topics merit different treatmentsThe key operative word is 'different' and we need to be able to craft diverse learning solutions to be able to cater to our audience and our organisational capabilities.Deep Specialisation in Business, Diverse L&D SkillsIf whatever I've said until now is true - our age of chaos, the need to bring learning to the workplace, and the need to be diverse; frankly, it's really difficult for a 'generic' L&D consultant to achieve all this, without a strong appreciation of the business. The evolution of the modern L&D professional has to be in the direction of specialising and generalising at the same time. This is a bit of an oxymoron, except that learning professionals need to specialise in their organisation's business and generalise in the L&D space. This makes it easy for us to create contextualised solutions for the business that make absolute sense, as well as pick from a plethora of tools that this age has put at our disposal. Fortunately this isn't impossible - we just need to shift from our 'trainer' mindsets. As we open our mind to the possibilities, we'll realise that:Our job as L&D professionals is to ensure a timely response people's need to learn.When we need to push learning, we need to create the affective context for learning via stories, simulations, and scenarios.Training programs with simulated pain points and resultant skill practice create lasting impact and aid retention.Our job is not just to teach content, but to also create the context for learning in the workplace. At a minimum, this means helping people 'learn to learn'.We can't possibly account for all the knowledge in the enterprise or teach our way out of trouble. By connecting people to other people we ensure that collective problems merit collective solutions.Not all new solutions are technical - our facilitation experience still counts for something.Our training departments aren't dead - they're reborn. All we need to do, is wake up to the reality of our modern world and revel in the options it has given us today. Workscaping can happen at every level - your next training program, your team, your office, and your entire organisation. The key is to think lean and find the most effective and yet the most timely ways for people to learn in the context of their everyday jobs. That's when we can evolve to being true learning organisations.What do you think? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments section of this post. Don't be bashful, drop in a line or two!© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

One of the reasons why I really, really, like the Social Web is because, every so often, you get to bump into those little gems that most folks don’t notice, but that when going through them you pretty much feel they are so special that you just can’t help but re-sharing it again, hoping that others would bump into those precious little things and feel just as inspired are you are after watching them. Well, last week I had another one of those moments and now that I have managed to get some time to blog about it, I thought I would go ahead and point you to two minutes of pure gold: Ira Glass on Storytelling. You gotta love creative work. It’s probably one of those human traits that we couldn’t possibly live without. It’s part of our genes, our DNA; perhaps one of the several other things that make us unique. But the truth is that, in most cases, it doesn’t just happen. It requires lot of effort, energy and hard work, and perhaps feeling totally inspired altogether as well. Well, if you are very much into creative work then, in whatever form or shape, this is probably one of those blog entries that I think you would enjoy reading further … Last week, over in Google Plus, I shared a post to a rather short video clip titled "Ira Glass on Storytelling", where you can certainly witness some of that creativity I mentioned above already. It’s just a short video clip of a little bit under two minutes where Ira Glass himself gets to talk about the process of putting together stories, what it takes, what it involves, both from a process perspective, to how it actually works out, about doing some creative work, and how in some cases, perhaps most cases, things don’t tend to work out all right, at least, in the way we expected it to be and for a rather long period of time. The rest is just an absolutely delightful account that pretty much describes why the whole process, even while you are still learning, or why you are failing to some degree, is very much worth while. And why we just need to keep pushing further along… Ira Glass on Storytelling from David Shiyang Liu on Vimeo. The wonderful thing though, for me, from sharing this post amongst my Plus networks, was that one of my good friends, Rachel Happe, left a great comment where she eventually pointed out to the entire video clip, which is actually an interview with Ira himself, divided in four parts (Part I, Part II, Part III and Part IV), where he gets to talk about Storytelling, the power of the anecdote, what are those moments of reflection while telling stories, how we can go out there look for great stories, why some times we may not be as creative as we thought we were (And lots of practical tips on how to overcome those roadblocks), how we have got that special ability for good taste and for getting rid of cr*p, and how we should use it as often as we possibly could. To then finally finish it all off sharing a couple of pitfalls that people seem to make when putting together stories, using whatever media, and which he advises on avoiding time and time again… But I will let you go and find out more about those two for yourself by watching Part IV of the interview. Here is Part I to get you started: Some pretty amazingly inspiring stuff on that short interview for sure, that, all in all, lasts for about 17 minutes. The truly fascinating stuff though was that while going through it, and thinking about the various different phases of my own creative work, I couldn’t help agreeing big time with plenty of the advice and great tips that Ira offers in order to not just find some really good stories, but putting them together nicely with that top-notch piece of creativity we all seem to have and which definitely needs further development. Even at that stage where we may not be sure anymore whether it is worth it or not, which Ira establishes at around the 2 year mark of having started it. Too funny that, when I started with my own blogging, both internal and external, I went through that very same phase, twice!, and around the very same timeframe. Those two years he mentions! Pretty soon though, in October and December this year, it will be my 6th and 8th year anniversary of blogging and somehow I feel I may have gone pass that initial roadblock, although from time to time it keeps coming back. I guess that’s why you may have seen how some times there are some quiet periods where I don’t blog just as often. I know as well that my blog posts feel pretty much like stories, at least, that’s what plenty of you folks keep telling me, and lengthy ones, too, for sure! (By the way, trying to work a lot on that one at the moment to tame the beast !), but somehow, somewhere in there, and every now and then, I sense that I need to go ahead and enter a moment of reflection and figure out whether that creative work needs shaping up, rework, further enhancements or just pretty much carry on with it. It is in those moments that I realise that, while watching Ira’s interview and thinking about my own blogging style, every now and then, I still enjoy, very much so!, going through this wonderful presentation on "The 25 Basic Styles of Blogging … And When To Use Each One" to try to figure out whether I may have shifted focus into something else, i.e. another blogging style, and figure out the reasons why. It’s over 4 years old, but still as relevant today, as it was back then. That’s why I wanted to finish off this blog post on The Inspiring Video of the Week with that additional helpful tip on finding and figuring out your own blogging style and voice, because "[...] your taste is still killer!" After all, who doesn’t want their own blogging to "[...] have the special thing that we wanted it to have", right? The 25 Basic Styles of Blogging … And When To Use Each One View more presentations from Rohit Bhargava (I was hoping to be able to post this blog entry yesterday evening, but, instead, I think those of us who were lucky enough to watch it, AND live it! (Even on TV), we have probably witnessed one of the most insanely electrifying Finals in tennis that you can ever imagine! Over 4 hours of intense, relentless, never-ending, brilliant, talented and highly spirited fighting, that eventually had to have a winner. Another clash of the titans, for sure! One thing confirmed though, once a nadalista, always a nadalista! Vamos Rafa!!!)

At TWU, I have heaps of fun doing our little Pecha Kucha Nights and last week was no exception. Now I upload the slide-decks here, but I must say that's never a substitute for a live performance. Plus I've always been wary of scaring our speakers with a video camera in the room. Luckily Steven Hill decided to film himself during his Pecha Kucha talk and I had no idea his talk was going to be such a laugh riot! I'm actually going to plug Steven's talk as an example of how simple slides and a relaxed presentation style and rate of speech can have a really memorable impact. Don't miss this, it's absolutely worth the watch.© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

Over at the BrainYard, my good friend, Rachel Happe, put together, just recently, a rather interesting and insightful blog post under the heading "Got Culture? Use It To Drive A Successful Social Business" where she comes to confirm what a whole bunch of us have been saying all along for a while now; that for an Enterprise to succeed in living social culture is going to play a key role at the same time that online communities will continue to be the major drivers of social software adoption, both inside and outside of the firewall. However, it won’t be easy. And it won’t take place overnight either. There will always be a good bunch of roadblocks, inhibitors and whatever other issues, like reluctance to change or fear to think and act differently, that would need to be addressed and all of those would be, pretty much, around augmenting your already existing corporate culture and values to address those concerns, as that social transformation continues to happen. The key question would be whether your business is well prepared to invest, heavily enough, in shaping up its own culture to re-adjust and become a truly Social Enterprise. In that wonderful article Rachel offers some great help and very adequate suggestions on how to get the ball rolling. She eventually comes to talk about the stuff that most folks haven’t considered just yet in any open and transparent collaborative and knowledge sharing environment. The soft skills. Those skills that are hardly taught anymore when you are hired into a company and that, in most cases, are always treated, and considered, as a given. In short, once you joined the company collaboration is a natural task / activity and, by default, you are pretty good at it. Just like when they handed over your laptop, your mobile phone, your email address and that’s it! Off to work! Well, it doesn’t work that way. Collaboration has always been a buzzword and a tough challenge to meet up by competing knowledge workers who have been brought up all along with mantra’s like "Knowledge is power" (So why should you share it, right? Sharing your knowledge will relinquish your power, don’t you think?). Nothing to do with social computing tools alone, really. It’s how most of us have been brought up in the corporate world for decades and why, despite all of that time, we still have to come to terms with a truly collaborative and an open knowledge sharing culture where Knowledge SHARED *is* power. That’s when things do really get interesting! There is no doubt that effective collaboration that is happening amongst individuals, teams, networks and communities, as part of that social transformation of culture, process and people, is a key success factor to become a Social Enterprise. It’s also true that most knowledge workers out there "aren’t all naturally good at collaboration", as Dan Keldsen would say, even though you may have enough elements to facilitate and enable that collaboration; in fact, most knowledge workers have never been trained, nor educated, on becoming powerful collaborators, specially, when being confronted with a good number of different collaboration personas and contexts . They have just been told that collaboration, specially in today’s virtual, distributed corporate world, is just the norm. It’s how we work, how we get stuff done; in short, how we become smarter at what we do. But is it really? I am not sure what you folks would think about this, but, for a good few years, I have been missing, all along, plenty of helpful and relevant education resources, driven by HR, that would help knowledge workers understand collaboration for what it is and help facilitate their on boarding of collaborative and knowledge sharing tools in order to make the most out of it. Specially, since not all of us are true, natural collaborators. And, once again, here we have got social networking tools coming to the rescue and we still haven’t got that critical component of educating your own knowledge workforce about how, when, with whom, for what purpose and why collaboration needs to happen, and what would be the options available out there. So Rachel offers three different approaches that would probably give you a good start to begin thinking about how you can make your own corporate culture much more open, transparent, engaged and nimble to embrace collaboration and social technologies and funny enough without making use of any of that! Again, touching base on the soft skills. Here you have got them listed, so that you can get an idea: "Use evocative images to spur a detailed discussion of cultural norms and expectations Use specific examples of online behaviours and statements to discover what’s culturally unacceptable, uncomfortable, neutral, and positive Express the same context in different ways, using different tones and wording to determine tone vs. content comfort" Corporate culture has always influenced collaboration. For better or for worse. And the same would pretty much apply to social software tools as well. I am sure that, by now, you folks would know about businesses whose cultures are not very keen on collaboration and knowledge sharing, and other companies where they thrive on collaboration, even with or without making use of social computing tools. The interesting thing is that, once again, social tools will provide us with a unique opportunity to decide whether we would want to influence culture to lead in the right direction, or keep making the very same mistake over and over again. The good thing is that it’s our choice. We get to decide how influential corporate culture is going to be for every business out there that wants to become a social enterprise. We get to decide how critical and paramount collaboration and sharing amongst groups is going to be from now onwards, because originally, and that was to be expected, social networking tools do facilitate, or even make it easier, for collaboration to take place. Take IBM (My current employer), for instance. Traditionally, collaboration is a core part of our values. It’s in our genes, our DNA. It’s an integral part of who we are. Of course, we do have silos, as well. Who hasn’t? Some of them are actually valuable altogether, although probably the vast majority shouldn’t be there in the first place. Still it’s hard to imagine an IBM that doesn’t breathe collaboration and knowledge sharing over the course of decades (You may have heard about how the IBM Forums just recently marked their 40th year anniversary in the company). Well, our social transformation over the last few years has enabled us to take collaboration into a new level, one where we are breaking down those silos, at a rampant pace, although sometimes you still have the perception it doesn’t happen fast enough, when it is!, by encouraging fellow colleagues to continue to make use of social tools, both internal and external, to foster a much more open and collaborative work environment where there are hardly any hierarchies, structures, top-down mandates, etc. etc. Just a peer to peer collaborative effort where we are all learning day in day out how to make the best out of it. And it is with that learning experience mentality put in place that I thought I would go ahead and close off this blog post sharing a short list of the commonest traits I have been exposed to from other fellow colleagues that could surely help any corporate culture become more collaborative and therefore address the needs to augment those soft skills. Starting with yours truly, by the way!, since you are constantly exposed to them as one faces the reality that in today’s business world we can no longer do our jobs alone. We always depend on other people, on their skills, their experiences, their know-how, their willingness to help out when you need it and so forth. Mind you, we are talking about powerful characteristics here that have kicked in a rather complex multicultural environment across the board. But I am sure those would apply as well to other companies. IBM has got a presence in over 170 countries, with 400k employees, distributed in over 2000 offices, with 50% of its population with less than 5 years at IBM, with 73% of managers with remote employees reporting to them, and with over 40% of the entire workforce working mobile. Probably as complex as you can get, don’t you think?, and perhaps the perfect ground for virtual collaboration to flourish all over the place. So what are those common traits that powerful collaborators have been permeating across throughout the organisation, when using collaborative, knowledge sharing and social networking tools? Let’s see: Be a good listener: Indeed, most of the potential conflicts that can happen in a multicultural collaborative environment are happening because knowledge workers just simply don’t listen well enough. Sometimes it’s much better to listen, focus and pay attention to what’s been said than to utter words to just get your voice heard. Be innovative: Always be looking on the bright side of injecting innovation into everything you do. It’s those new, unexpected ways of doing things different that are so refreshing and empowering when collaborating with fellow colleagues. Be creative: Creative work is critical for every powerful collaborator out there. Creativity is a craft we all have, some folks develop it more than others, but it’s still an integral part of who we are, as human beings, so if we exercise our own creativity every day there is a great chance it will leave a mark over time difficult to forget. It will help spark more innovative ways for smart work to take place eventually. Be curious: This is one of my favourite characteristics in powerful collaborators when working in a complex, multicultural environment. Being healthily curious about those around you who you are collaborating with would make you much more focused, and keen on working together effectively. It’ll also help you understand how some things do work in some cultures and why they may not work in others. By you having an understanding of how others think you would be in a better position to collaborate more effectively. And vice versa, of course. Be confident: Absolutely! Every knowledge worker out there has been hired by their company in the first place, because they have got both the skills and experience to carry out their jobs and, secondly, because they are all hard working professionals. So, without hesitation, show that confidence. They need it, just as much as you do. Be polite: This is perhaps one of the most underestimated, yet most powerful and empowering, characteristics that keeps getting neglected, time and time again, in a corporate environment, and perhaps elsewhere, too! There is nothing out there that beats a heartfelt Thanks! for helping out those in need, for finding the right experts, for achieving together a common goal, etc. etc. Being polite can take you very far, whether when asking for help or even when giving it out. Try it! Be helpful: If I were to pick up what I think is the most significant and mind-blowing characteristic from the ones shared over here today for any collaborator out there, being helpful is probably as good as it gets. Always being willing to help others, even if you yourself are busy, too!, can help you build social trust amazingly fast and with very profound marks that everyone will remember when wanting to collaborate with you. You do it for them today, they do it for you tomorrow. In the open and transparent world of social networks, that’s how it works. Be authentic: Not much to say about this one, right? Don’t you think? When collaborating with others and using social tools, why pretend to be who you are not? Why bother playing a role that you, yourself, don’t even feel comfortable with in the first place? Authenticity is a key trait from the open Social Web, pretending to be someone or something else, would only harm your online reputation over time. Just be you. It’s enough. Be passionate: Of course, I couldn’t close this list off with another one of my favourites. If you have managed to take some time to observe and watch those powerful collaborators around you, you would see how, for most of them, passion, or being passionate about a particular topic, runs through their veins. It’s what drives them to work; it’s what gets them motivated to share their knowledge, collaborate, learn and inspire others. It’s that passion that drives them in the long run to want to build long lasting personal business relationships with those folks who they share a common affinity with. Don’t neglect your passion; don’t let it go unnoticed; don’t feel bad, or embarrassed, for showing it, even if others make fun of it. You know what? They just wish they all were as passionate for what you do as you are… Seriously. Let it shine! Let it carry you into becoming a powerful collaborator yourself. And, finally, the last one of those traits that surely adds further up to those soft skills that help knowledge workers becoming much more efficient and effective at what they do and how they collaborate with others, and also one of my favourites: be yourself. Allow others to trust you for who you are and for what you are good at. Honesty, flexibility, understanding, openness and transparency, amongst several others, can pay big dividends over time. Being yourself, showing that hard working professional you are will only reflect back into others always wanting to work with you together. Because, after all, who doesn’t want to mix and mingle with passionate top performers, right? Now, I am sure you may have yourself a good bunch of additional traits, characteristics, etc. etc. you may have experienced or learned about from other powerful collaborators out there, or even yourself. Care to share and add further up into the conversation with an additional comment or two and let us know what would make open collaboration stick within your organisation to become a Social Enterprise?

DevCamp Bangalore 3 is happening at ThoughtWorks's Diamond District office at Bangalore today.Registration Like any BarCamp, registration is on the wiki and there is no registration fee.DevCamp is an un-conference by the hackers, for the hackers and of the hackers. It's a species of BarCamp where anything a lover of computers and technology would consider important or entertaining goes. The first DevCamp took place a little over two years ago, and we've always had a lot of fun being a part of this event; we're hoping to keep that trend going with DCB3.What's in store?DCB3 is going to be packed with informative presentations, Fishbowl sessions, lightning talks, and much more, so don't miss it!Interested in doing a session? Please keep in mind the fact that everyone at DevCamp is a hacker, a pro. Assume a high level of exposure and knowledge on the part of your audience, and tailor your sessions accordingly. Avoid 'Hello World' and how-to sessions which can be easily found on the net. First hand war stories, in-depth analyses of topics, and live demos are best.Add your abstract/presentation topic here. Don't forget to sign up, and do pass the message along to anyone you think would be interested. Hope to see you there!© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

This is not the first, nor the second time, and I am sure there will be a third time, and many more!, at some point, that I have either heard or read about something that I would think would make pretty upset all of those folks who work on the Internet or with technology in general. Yes, I am referring to the so-called Knowledge Web Workers. Specially, those folks who have made the Social Web their new home. Indeed, in a rather thought-provoking, but very inspiring, article, Douglas Rushkoff comes to question whether we are witnessing the end of jobs as we have known them for centuries and whether we are pretty much experiencing the birth of a unknown need, till now, of a renewed model of jobs. In Are Jobs Obsolete? Douglas keeps questioning whether technology (And the (Social) Web) are part of the main problem we have been having over the last few years in the jobs market with having less and less of them. In a way, not his words, but mine, plenty of folks feel one of the culprits why the jobs market is not recovering fast enough is because of Enterprise 2.0. Or the Social Enterprise. And in a way, they do have a good point. With the emergence of social software tools and the Social Enterprise, reducing costs, generating more sales leads, improving knowledge flows, faster problem solving, rampant innovation, retaining top talent, keeping current employee workforce happier and more engaged with much lower attrition rates, are some of the very attractive reasons for employers out there to pay attention to social and try to make the best out of it, without having to hire more human talent. Why would you want to hire more people when your current workforce has tripled their productivity, as well as their customer satisfaction, by using social software tools, don’t you think? And right there we have got the main problem. Knowledge workers are not getting hired, because social computing tools are helping solve most of the companies’ problems / issues without having to spend extra money on hiring new resources. The reality though is quite different. And rather refreshing altogether! Perhaps what could be needed and we just didn’t know about it from before. What employers are doing, and facilitating big time altogether!, is the creation of an Army of Social Intra/Entrepreneurs, who mingle amongst each other, both inside and outside of the firewall, so the traditional concept of a company’s walls are no longer there, fully networked and wired into a complex matrix of personal (business) relationships, that are going to define work for themselves without even, if it needs to be, counting on those employers in the long run. Allow me to explain… They have got everything they need: the skills, the knowledge, the time, the energy, effort and support from others, their extensive and ever expanding networks, and something else that is starting to emerge big time and which, right now, seems unstoppable: plenty of free idle time to do what they have been passionate about all along. And that may, or may not, be related to work. And this is exactly the point that Douglas makes beautifully in his article. The fact that our traditional concept of work, the one we have been living under over the last few decades, and, which in most cases has been dictated upon us by others without us having much of a say about it, is starting to decline and leave its way behind into a new model of work. One where the traditional corporate environment and the traditional mindless jobs are being overtaken by what a bunch of folks would now call Knowledge (Web) Work. I remember having read in the past some piece of research (I wish I could have bookmarked it, when I was going through it!) that claimed how amazingly good we are, as human beings, when we have got plenty of idle time in our hands, instead of the traditional job / work, in order to create something new. Whatever that something would be. In fact, some employers are already facilitating some of this themselves by allowing their employees to spend some time out of their own work doing something else. Totally unrelated with their jobs, and perhaps more aligned to their personal passion(s) they would want to pursue further. And time and time again it has been proved to have worked wonders. So if jobs are becoming obsolete, as we have known them for a long while, and it is starting to look like that!, and we keep building those armies of socially networked intra/entrepreneurs, there is something else that the Social Web, and the Social Enterprise, are helping provoke within the corporate environment: a transition away from measuring performance by your sheer presence and instead measuring that same performance based on the results you provide and deliver, resulting in the elimination of the traditional work hours. Matthew Ingram describes it himself beautifully in a recent blog post over at GigaOm under the heading "Do we need defined hours of work any more?" and that my good friend, the always inspiring and KM blogger extraordinaire, Bill Ives, developed further under "Do We Need Defined Work Hours?" as well. Indeed, one of the most fascinating aspects of social computing within the enterprise is how it has helped knowledge workers, AND their employers, realise how it’s much more beneficial to measure business results than the hours you put at work while at the office in a place nearby your boss, so that he / she can see you are working away like crazy, when perhaps you may not well be. I am sure there would be plenty of you folks out there confirming how even though this may well be the current trend it may not be extended enough to appear across the business world, and I would agree with you that may well be the case; maybe, because there will be companies out there that have not started their way just yet to live social, but, eventually, they will. They probably won’t have much of a choice. And the main reason being, I would probably venture to state, it’s due to that socially networked army of Intra/Entrepreneurs that keeps getting bigger and bigger by the day as they themselves keep re-defining the current workforce of the 21st century based on the networking relationships they keep building, cultivating and nurturing over the course of time. The Trust Agents, the Wild Ducks. The ones who understand that the future of work, their work, is to probably move around the edges, or towards the edges, as my good friend, Harold Jarche put together, rather nicely, a couple of months back under "The 21st century workplace: moving to the edge" with golden gems like this one: "The 21st century workplace, with its growing complexity due to our interconnectivity, requires that we focus on new problems and exception-handing. This increases the need for collaboration (working together on a problem) and cooperation (sharing without any specific objective). One challenge for organizations is getting people to realize that what they know has little value. How to solve problems together is becoming the real business imperative. Sharing and using knowledge is where business value lies [...]" And that’s why those companies that have decided to become social enterprises and empower their knowledge workers to fully live social have already gotten started the path of preparing, facilitating and embracing the knowledge workforce of the future where work will be defined, and carried out by themselves, without having a traditional job, without having defined work hours, with a relevant work life integration that really matches their needs and in an environment where facing complexity and chaos in problem solving, ideation and exception-handling (Read further Harold’s take on that to see where we are all heading…) is going to bring innovation further up into a new level: networked, interconnected, collaborative, open, transparent, knowledge sharing based, engaging and empowering on delivering excelling business results and no longer that sheer presence we have just gotten too used to over the course of decades. The main challenge remains though for all businesses out there: what are you doing to help prepare and facilitate that army of socially networked Intra/Entrepreneurs, both internal and external? Those who know your company best, your business and your customer base inside out, those who have got all of the knowledge, experience, know-how, skills, AND networks, to help you, as a business, survive in the 21st century? Because, something tells me that if you, as a business, are not ready just yet to help facilitate that change, and be well prepared for it, they will be moving on eventually … and won’t be looking back. After all, they already have their jobs, their work hours, their passion and motivation to do the work and their extended networks. Basically, the work they themselves have defined over the course of time. With or without you. What shall it be?

In the past couple of years that I've had a Mac, a lot of people I've spoken to about presentation skills have remarked to me, "Oh, but you have Apple Keynote for presentations. It's so much better than Powerpoint." At the end of several of my presentations people ask me, "You didn't do that in Powerpoint, did you?". Whenever I do one of my talks on presentation skills I invariably have some people in my audience start off the discussion with a "Powerpoint sucks..." refrain. And the fact is that I've very loosely used the phrase "Death by Powerpoint..." in my conversations and talks. Today, I think it's high time that we give Powerpoint a proper defense. Let me say this -- there's nothing wrong with Powerpoint. It's probably the most versatile presentation tool on the planet and gives us a lot of power. The fact that we misuse it and give it a bad name has nothing to do with the quality of the tool itself. In fact, to rest my case I've gone ahead and created some awful slides using Apple Keynote and I assure you it took me little effort. I'm pretty sure I can do an awful Prezi and do similar stuff with Slide Rocket and Google Presentations. Convinced? I thought so! Now to the skill of making good presentations. I think it's so simple, that anyone can do it.  Nancy Duarte has made that point with an amazing presentation created solely in Powerpoint (above). In fact I'm going to use three presentations by our ThoughtWorks University students to make my point about things that you should absolutely do when you want to create effective presentations. And hopefully then, the tools will cease to matter. Think Stories, not Facts And I'm not talking about stories of the once-upon-a-time variety, though they may be cool too. I'm talking about why anything that you will say means anything to anyone. This is about how can you weave your message into an engaging timeline that captures attention, creates interest and evokes emotion. Last week, I shared with you SG Hill's hilarious Pecha-Kucha talk. Steve's talk had really simple tips on how to generate traffic for your blog. I could actually summarise the facts in a few lines: Start a blog.Get an analytics service to track your readership.Try a snazzy blog title, and creative post headlines. Have your friends comment liberally.Mention your blog to your friends.Provide an RSS feed.Publicise it on social networks.That's a really simple set of facts. In fact, they're so simple that they don't even need a presentation. I could put all of that into a single slide with bullet points or maybe even email it across. That however, isn't memorable enough and the way Steve wove these pieces of advice into a story of his own experience was funny, engaging and created a lasting impression. If I had to introduce someone to blogging, I'm now going to point them to Steve's video. The point I'm trying to make is that your presentation is more than just the facts that you want to convey. In fact I argue that presentation are more about entertainment and excitement than education. If you can as get people interested and excited about your topic; that's enough to get them to learn about the facts by themselves. In that, it's often more important as to what you don't say than what you do say in your presentation. Ditch the Templates Most Keynote and Powerpoint templates are really well intentioned. Both Apple and Microsoft however, are trying to satisfy the natural urge of most users and companies - the urge to bullet point. No wonder most templates tend towards a bullet-point layout for their slides. Now of course you don't want to be like the others, do you? I'm sure you want to be different. If you do, you're perhaps on the right track. "Be interesting, or be invisible." - Andy Sernovitz The fact is, that in most cases you don't need a template. You just need a blank slide that you overlay with full-bleed images. Last week Andrew Kiellor did a pretty amazing presentation, giving us a tour of what we should see in Australia. I've embedded the presentation for you to see (above) and you'll notice that Andrew has maintained visual harmony in the top right of his presentation by moving an arrow across Australia's map. In that, it fits with his presentation title; Australia - A Tour. By including real, dazzling images of landscapes across Australia, Andrew didn't just have people gasp in the middle of his presentation, he also negated the need for a template. I'm not saying that you'll never need a template though. There are times when you want to create a strong, visual consistency across your presentation and a template is real handy for doing that. Garrey Reynolds' presentation on thinking like a designer is an example of one such situation. In such cases I recommend you create your own templates. And believe me, it isn't rocket science. If you can get smart at using master slides, Tom Kuhlmann can show you just how easy it is. Meaningful Imagery Counts A few weeks back I saw Sam Tardiff do a cool presentation with a provocative title - 17 Reasons why AFL's better than your favourite sport. Now Sam's presentation may not be the prettiest presentation on the planet, but he very effectively takes images from real life and puts them in front of the audience to let them see why AFL is a superior sport. I particularly like reason 14 - take a look! There's something about visual evidence that makes messages stick for our audience. It's important to note that where a single image was going to struggle making a point, Sam used a video. In a time when most presentation tools allow unbridled use of media, it's crucial that we exploit it. It's also crucial though, that we maintain relevance. It's easy to go overboard with irrelevant stock imagery and as Martin Fowler often says, "Stock photos are the bullet points of the 21st century." I can't help but agree when I see cheesy, overused stock imagery on slides when an earthy, real life image could have done a world of good. Garrey Reynolds of Presentation Zen fame has an excellent article on 10 ways you can use images poorly in presentations - an excellent list of mistakes to avoid. And if you needed some inspiration on how to create beautiful slides you can be proud of, do read my 7 tips to whip your slides into shape. I strongly believe that bad presentations have to do more with the presenter than the tool. That said, you need a capable tool to help translate your actions into a show. Powerpoint 2010 (Windows only), is a worthy upgrade and there are several good reasons for you to add it to your presentation arsenal. Sure, there'll be a few tools here and there that have an extra feature or the other, but I guess nothing beats Powerpoint's all round capabilities. And if you needed help on how to effectively use the tool, you always have experts to reach out to for help. So the next time you feel like blaming the tool, please don't. Go back to the drawing board and just try harder! Update:BTW, if you wanted to take your presentation skills to the next level, here's your opportunity to learn from the best. Hear live from eight presentation experts without leaving your home - ain't that amazing?© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

I am not sure whether folks may have noticed it, or not, but it surely looks like every couple of years, or so, we keep having an influx of articles, blog posts, mainstream media items, etc. etc. on how more and more businesses are continuing to block the use of social software tools inside of the firewall, just because they feel their employee workforce may be goofing around more than they should. In fact, they shouldn’t at all! So, once again, we go for the easy way out and, instead of figuring out what we could do to address and fix that concern, once and for all, we are witnessing how companies decide to go ahead with the blockage of the Social Web, just because they believe their knowledge workers are no longer as productive as what they should. It’s starting to get pretty boring, and rather disappointing, after all of these years, don’t you think? I mean, that’s only half of the equation, isn’t it? Yes, of course, there will be a group of knowledge workers, on every company out there, who would try to find any means of not wanting to do their jobs and, instead, do something else. And not just with the Social Web. We have been experiencing this very same concern back in the day with email, Instant Messaging, the Internet, the water cooler, etc. etc.;  all of them having been blamed, over the course of decades, for being responsible as well for people’s lack of productivity and for getting us all far too distracted from real work. And, lately, it looks like the next victim from that group is gaming or playing games at work. Like Angry Birds. Now, I think you would all agree with me that group of folks who are always finding an excuse to wriggle themselves from their daily work duties are much more of a profound problem with HR itself, and, specially, with the methods they may employ to hire new employees, supposedly, as hard working professionals. Perhaps they may not. So why do we keep blaming technology, and this time around, the Social Web in particular, as the main culprit that keeps enticing knowledge workers into goofing around activities? And now, we have got a new layer … With all of the buzz going on about gamification, it looks like the latest scapegoat to help prevent employees from becoming more productive is playing games. But what happens *if* playing games actually makes you *more* productive? That’s the rather thought-provoking idea behind one of my favourite futurists out there: Ross Dawson, who, just recently, put together this rather insightful blog entry (Under the heading "Angry Birds and productivity at work: why distractions can help") where he comes to share how "people who browsed the Web in work breaks were more productive than those who continued working or did other things on their break", quoting a recent piece of research under the suggestive title "Impact of Cyberloafing on Psychological Engagement". Just think of it, what would happen if, indeed, playing games at work would make us all more productive, as a way to provoke an interruption in what we are doing at that particular moment to help us break through on a potential issue, or problem, we may be facing and for which we don’t have a solution just yet? And then, when occupying our minds with something else that allows us to trigger our thinking braincells… bang! we find the solution to our problem?!? Isn’t that quite something? Now, let’s face it. How many times have we been in that use case scenario ourselves, that I have just described above, specially, while on those long working days we keep adding further up time and time again and in which we would eventually need some kind of distraction to help us re-focus, address whatever the showstopper may well be and move on to the next thing… with the problem solved? I am not sure about you folks, but I have got moments like those pretty often, specially, while working on a virtual, distributed environment of multiple projects, multiple teams, multiple tasks at hand, but all of them ending up, always, with the same deadline. Sometimes it pays off to step back, relax, do something that doesn’t have anything to do with what you got stuck with in the first place, let your brain do its magic, find that solution, apply it, and move along, once again. The Social Web is brilliant at doing this. Just as well as playing games. Believe it or not, I am not much of an Angry Birds fan; instead, I play Words with Friends. Why? Mainly, because, first, it gives me an opportunity to unwind, relax doing something else, while my brain keeps thinking of a solution to something I may have gotten stuck with, and eventually be done with the interruption having another problem fixed, but, also, secondly, because playing games at work allows me to build further on my social trust with my peers, customers, thought leaders, friends, you name it, as I have blogged about in the recent past. Yes, indeed, the key message in here is how are we going to handle our interruptions, while at work. Having too few is perhaps not such a good thing, since we all need to come to terms with the fact that we can’t work and be consistently productive 8 hours straight. However, having too many is not such a good thing either, since it would probably become far too complex, over time, to stay focus while trying to achieve something. However, when looking into this more in detail, we may need, perhaps, some new, fresh thinking to apply and help us solve the issue with interruptions. Something that I have already talked about last week and which my good friend, Harold Jarche commented on, brilliantly!, on Ross’ blog entry: Measure your knowledge workers by the results they deliver, i.e. their overall performance, and not by their sheer presence at work, or how many hours they put together behind them day in day out. To quote Harold, since I think he pretty much nailed it, as far as I am concerned, on what I do strongly believe needs to happen within the corporate world, and beyond, if we would all want to facilitate, embrace and live the upcoming Era of the Social Enterprise: "What’s wrong with playing all day? We need to discard the Taylorist notions that time is money. Results are money. If I play all day and bring in more revenue than my peers who don’t play why would you want to stop me? A results oriented work environment gets rid of this notion of time for money. It doesn’t work in a creative economy" [Emphasis mine] So, to close off this post, every time that someone comes up to me and shares that influx of news items, blog entries, or whatever else about companies banning social media tools, I just can’t help but share this blog post I put together a little while ago on "Top 10 Reasons to Ban Social Media in the Organisation! — Really?", which comes to reference this excellent resource put together by Jane Hart that confirms that instead of going the easy way out and keep blocking these social tools, we should perhaps, and finally!, do another piece of research or study on the impact of NOT having social software tools, or games, to build trust, connect, collaborate and share your knowledge with your peers, customers and business partners. Something tells me that study would actually be rather revealing, if not too shocking altogether! And that’s probably the main reason why we haven’t done it just yet. Too scary of the real impact of not living social to help you become more productive at what you do, regardless of the interruption(s).

Last Wednesday, Richard Lee treated us to a great Pecha Kucha performance (above). His talk - "More than Words", was not just a treat in terms presenting naked, but also used a style of presentation visuals. Richard hand drew all his visuals, creating a very organic, edgy feel for his talk. Now that's something I've been thinking about. I have a love-hate relationship with stock images. There are times I like them, but then there are other times when they're just inappropriate. In today's blogpost, I want to cover off some reasons why you may not want to use stock imagery in your presentations.AuthenticityStock images are beautiful. Actors dress up perfectly; they put up the right expression; the lighting and the backgrounds fit perfectly -- it's symphony in action! And that's where they sometimes fail. Real life isn't all that perfect. In fact real people don't even dress as perfectly as the actors on stock images. If I was doing a generic presentation at a conference the picture on the left hand side (above) could be a great one to depict a meeting or people trying to collaborate in a physical space. On the other hand, if I was to be presenting at ThoughtWorks, I'll get laughed at for using that same picture. We're a company of geeks and to start with we have a very informal dress code at the office. The photograph on the left is just not authentic. The image on the right, however, is a real ThoughtWorks image from a real meeting and provides a more authentic representation. It's fairly important to tailor visuals to an audience and while some visuals may just be more stunning, authenticity often trumps asthetics.Story TellingIn presentations, your images are not just placeholders for your speech. Often they tell a story. For example the picture above is a great example of teamwork for me, and is an opportunity for me to tell the story of how these two acrobats worked as a team to create stunning poses and an awe-inspiring performance. I could choose a stock image instead, but it takes away the opportunity for me to tell a story from my own experience. The bane of stock photography is that the visuals lack context. When you click your own images or use images that capture a moment from your own life, you can tell stories that no one else can. That's something that makes your presentation unique. Your presentation is your 'purple cow'.Recreating Real SituationsOften times, stock images are just so generic that they struggle to capture the dynamism of a real situation. In the case of Richard's presentation, he wanted to pick out situations that we'd all seen in recent days to make his point about how people might mean something completely different from what you think they're saying. While extreme Photoshopping skills might help you along, sometimes that's way too much trouble. In Richard's case, he found it easier to borrow my tablet and sketch together a bunch of images to show examples of how people in our team talk about food, hiring rickshaws and choice of apparel! Sometimes it may mean that you have to try and snag a photograph with the help of your colleagues at work and use that image for your presentation. The key here is to stay true to your story and to ensure that you're recreating it in a credible manner."Stock images are the bullet points of the 20th century" - Martin FowlerWhile I'm not as critical of stock images as Martin and I continue to use them quite a bit in my presentations and elearning, I like to be pragmatic about their use. The fun thing about presentations is that there is no silver bullet. Slides are only a medium to express your thoughts and should be secondary to your story. So while my Pecha-Kucha offering career advice to TWU grads primarily used stock images, my other Pecha-Kucha on how the magic never ends at Disneyworld Orlando, uses a lot of my own photographs. I am particular about beautiful slides, but I'd like to warn you against doing that at the cost of your story and content. After all, the presentation is not about the slides, it's about you and what you want to share!That brings me to the end of this little blogpost and I'm sorry I've run late this time; do let me know what you think by leaving a comment or two.© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

There are plenty of various different reasons as to why, for the last few years, I have been really excited about the emergence of social software tools within the corporate environment and beyond, but there is one in particular that keeps getting my attention, time and time again, as it has been helping bridge a number of various different disciplines letting them feed, each and everyone of them, from the same source to perhaps become eventually one and the same. Knowledge Management, Collaboration, Social Computing, Learning and so forth are coming along nicely, at long last, looking for a common identity that would reflect a purpose within a work context and it looks like Storytelling is helping big time become the unifier business component a good bunch of us have been looking forward to from all along to boost the way we share our knowledge and collaborate also within the workplace environment: that is, through (beautiful) stories. At this point in time I think it is undeniable the Power of Storytelling in helping knowledge workers not only transfer their knowledge effectively across with others, but also learn plenty more along the way. There have been lots of great write-ups and insightful articles along these terms on the many reasons why storytelling helps make messages stick, but the truth is that telling stories is not something new and related just to social computing. Quite the opposite: "Since the first humans gathered around a fire, we have been telling stories". In fact, "telling stories is fundamental to how we make sense of this often confusing world, how construct our identities, and how we tell each other who we are", as Sarah Jansen wrote beautifully over at the Zahmoo blog a couple of months back. I, too, have been blogging, just recently, about storytelling and creative work, about what makes a good story and how to share it across or about the power of storytelling and narrative in helping businesses realise their true full potential of the amazing talent their knowledge workers have and how to make the best out of it by helping (re)surface conversations, stories, experiences, know-how that, for a long while, have been hidden away in people’s heads. And now, slowly, but steadily, and thanks to the wonderful work of social tools, we are witnessing how storytelling is no longer a dirty word, but pretty much a highly recommended activity to engage in, whether internally or externally. So I thought that for today’s blog post I would ahead and highlight how powerful some stories can well be to not just share your knowledge across, as well as embrace a rather fascinating learning activity coming along nicely, but also about how they involve something that is pretty much unique to us, human beings, which is emotions. Rather touching emotions in most cases. Like this week’s Inspiring Video of the Week. Now, I am not going to say much more about this precious little gem that lasts for a bit over 3 minutes, other than ask you to stop whatever you may be doing at this very moment, sit back, relax, and hit the Play button. And prepare yourself to be wowed and touched in plenty of special places! Perhaps places you never thought you would have them, any longer, anywhere near you. Yet, after watching it, I am sure you will get to enjoy and treasure them just as much as you used to up to not so long ago. This is perhaps one of my all time favourite Inspiring Videos of the Week, and I am certain that, after you watch it, you will know why. Compelling, touching, mind-blowing are some of the words that surely fall short in describing how wonderfully delightful it is and what powerful messages it conveys throughout! Get ready, here it comes!: So, what do you think? Do you still feel that storytelling, whether work related, or not, doesn’t have any business purposes within today’s corporate world? Silence of Love surely is going to help us all get rid of that assumption and start figuring out ways of how we are going to incorporate telling stories and narrative into our long term strategy of becoming a powerful Social Enterprise. Something tells me we would all be much better off…

Today I'm attending a webinar by Rick Altman, called "Why most Powerpoint Presentations suck.", a part of the Outstanding Presentations workshop (#opw on twitter). The workshop series is an attempt by a bunch of presentation skills experts to share their wisdom freely with us - the masses. It's very late in the night here at Bangalore and I need a really good presentation to keep me awake and taking meaningful notes, so what you see here will be really the best I can try to gather from Rick's talk. Rick is the Author of "Why Most PowerPoint Presentations Suck" and that's predictably his topic for his talk. BTW, these are liveblogged notes.Oh no! Ellen says we'll start in a few more minutes -- that's not fair! It's disrespectful to the people who do come on time to have to wait longer. One way not to make your presentation suck - respect people's time! Looks to me that Ellen dropped the ball a bit there. Anyways, we start 5 minutes later than planned - so it isn't too bad. Looks like the chat is quite limited -- not that awesome for a webinar at this time, especially when there's a twitter hashtag on their for people to air their thoughts and it's not the most convenient thing to switch between the webinar tool and twitter itself! Meh...There's a lot of drivel that people begin their presentations - e.g. a loaded agenda and all about the speaker. Why do 99% use a tool that's an object of such derision? Death by Powerpoint?Most people spend less than one hour learning Powerpoint. Some times 15 minutes! They spend the next five years using the same limited skills. Those who do it fast are thought to be experts and those who teach others are called gurus.Most people who go about creating content, go about creating it backwards e.g. the company's virtues, mission statement, etc. What does that say about the presenter's ability? It tells me the presenter's topic itself isn't the strongest thing about the talk. Similarly, bulleted slides dump down perfectly good ideas, because then speakers are speaking to slides and the slides are getting between them and their audience. That said, all Powerpoint isn't bad. "Powerpoint is a good finishing tool, but should we start with it?" I agree that starting analog on pen and paper is a good way to start preparing for presentation.DesignWhy do people cram every word onto their slides?they're lazythey don't know any betterand many other reasonsMany presenters don't believe they can design their way even out of a paper bag, so Rick wants to share some survival skills.People don't come to see your slides. They come to hear your expertise. That said, it's not about you. They need to be convinced that you have their interests in mind. You need to get away from the computer and that sometimes means fast paced doing and undoing and often paper is best way to generates ideas at speed.Design - a plan for the structure and functions of an artifact, building, or system. Nowhere does that say decoration. Design != DecorationQuestions to ask yourself:Do you know your stuff?Have you prepared diligently?Could you give the presentation without any slides at all?If you're really prepared, you can get through even bad slides. That said, if you were well prepared, you are likely to have minimalistic slides, because now your visuals are never a crutch -- they only reinforce your core message."Few slides and few presenters can function properly with excess verbiage"When you have too much text on your slides you feel compelled to read from it, and that makes you look like a complete idiot in front of your audience, because they think you're a bozo who doesn't know your topic. And 'postage stamp' like photos on your slides do your presentation no good.There are several ways to reduce text on your slides -- one way out as Rick suggests is to first reduce your bullet points to 3-4 words each or less. Not my idea of doing this properly, but OK - I'll listen on. Rick's approach seems to be very different from mine, where I'd break up his one slide into several more slides, but I guess it's not a bad approach.Other Reasons for FailurePeople cram text on their slides because:they don't know any better;OR they are addicted;OR they are trying to create leave-behind;OR they're required to.The first problem is a big problem, though easily solved through some education. The others are a bit more difficult to deal with. Clearly text is how you inform people of something, but imagery helps people feel something. So text itself, often doesn't do it.The problem of trying to create leave-behinds just leads to slideuments.Thanks for mentioning this, Rick. If your slide functions as a good document, then it's neither a good slide nor a good document. Rick suggests that we use the notes page to create our documents and the slides to be just slides -- that's good advice. I like Nancy Duarte's great video that helps how you understand why you should present your slides and distribute your documents and not vice-versa.Being required to have lots of text on slides makes us as drones of presenters and it makes our audience nothing but zombies! Rick suggests a show-and-tell technique where you say something and then display it on screen. Again, not something I agree with -- I'm less forgiving than Rick.Crafting Better MessagesHere's Rick's wisdom on making better presentations:Take the three-word challengeBigger is rarely betterWhitespace creates emphasisDoes your boss need a detox program? Audience members need more than something to think about. You want your audience to actually do something after you've presented. Unfortunately text does little to connect on emotional levels for them to feel the weight of your message.Animation without EmbarrassmentSmart sequencing is the key to increased understanding. Abuse of animation ranks highly amongst top presentation annoyances. Flying text is bad animation. OTOH the use of animation to progressively build an image or to reveal a concept sequentially is much more effective.Good animation promotes increased undestanting and appreciation of the topic. It calls attention to the topic, not to the tool.The animator's oath:I will use custom animation wiselyI vow not to offend the sensibilities of my audience.I will not use animation just because I can!Rick has a few other suggestions for animators:Thinking "sequencing" when you hear "animation".Spoon feeding chunky data is critical to better understanding.You can't go wrong with fade.I wish we said "it depends" at least once in this talk! Really, going to point of saying we should use fade is a bit too simplistic for the plethora of presentations we end up doing.I've found Rick's advice a bit prescriptive and silver-bulletish and guilty of not sharing some fundamental design wisdom that Gary Reynolds of Presentation Zen often shares. This is not to demean Rick's talk, but some of this talk isn't necessarily what I agree with a 100%, though I share Rick's goal to make better presentations. Anyways, staying up late hasn't served me awfully well tonight, but I'm happy to bite the bullet and do this again next time. If nothing, I'll reinforce what I already know.© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

A couple of months back you would remember how I put together a couple of posts over here in this blog where I shared some of the highlights from the recent Social Business Forum 2011 event, which took place on June 8th in Milan, Italy. Well, a couple of weeks ago my good friends from Open Knowledge announced that the video recordings from the different keynote and breakout sessions are now available for public viewing over at the Social Business Forum Agenda Web site. So I thought I would put together this quick entry to point you all to the main site where you would be able to find them all, including the recording of the breakout session I did on Organisations or Communities. If you have been reading this blog for a while now you would remember how, over the course of time, I have been musing all along that one of the major key drivers of social software adoption within the enterprise, and beyond, is not necessarily individuals themselves, i.e. knowledge workers, as individuals, but the informal groups they form, based around a common topic or affinity; basically, informal networks and communities of individuals gathering around about specific subject matters they are truly passionate about, wanting to share their knowledge across, their passion as well as keep learning along the way. This major driving force of adoption of much more powerful and emergent collaboration and knowledge sharing tools results in a massive shift of how corporations operate, both internally and externally, transitioning from the old concept of project teams, imposed from high above to top down by the organisation itself, to different collaboration patterns, or personas that clearly reflect the complexity of the working environment we have been exposed to over the last few years. After all, when was the last time you were working on a single project, with a single project team, in the same building, or location, or even country? Probably a long while ago, I can imagine, specially, since it looks like nowadays most knowledge workers are working on multiple teams, with multiple projects and initiatives and perhaps now more distributed than ever all over the world. This new dynamic of how work gets done is basically the main premise of what I tried to describe on that particular breakout session I did at the Social Business Forum event, where I basically explained how Social Computing tools are taking by storm the corporate world to define the whole concept of the Social Enterprise as more and more businesses are transitioning from Globally Integrated Enterprises into Socially Integrated Enterprises. From there onwards I also spent a few minutes talking about some piece of research that my colleagues from the IBM Almaden Research Lab (Specially, Tara Matthews and her extended team) have been conducting over the course of the last few months on the topic of Collaboration Personas, or Types, that clearly define how the traditional concept of collaboration amongst small groups of knowledge workers is transforming itself, breaking down the silos, where it may be more appropriate and suitable, into a much more complex collaborative environment where multiple sets of contexts are helping redefine how we are collaborating amongst each other in a much more open, public, transparent and effective manner. Thus, with all of that said, as a quick and short introduction, I would like to take this opportunity to share with you the links to the video recording as well as the presentation materials themselves, stored in Slideshare, so that you can have a look and explore further the concept of whether communities and networks are slowly, but steadily, taking over the traditional concept of organisation, or not, and how work that used to get done in the recent past in locked down, protected silos is now transitioning into a new method of engagement, where collaboration and knowledge sharing are no longer nice things to have, but overall business imperatives that every company should prioritise as critical for their own survival in today’s knowledge economy. Here is the embedded code of the video recording: Organizations or Communities? - Luis Suarez from SocialBizForum on Vimeo. And here is the presentation materials themselves that I used for that presentation: The Socially Integrated Enterprise: Organisations or Communities? The new Collaboration Ecology - Luis Suarez View more presentations from SocialBizForum Hope you have enjoyed watching it throughout and please do take a minute or two to share in the comments, whether you are also starting to witness such social transformation, or not, within your own organisation with those emergent networks and informal communities to help redefine the future of the workplace. Our workplace. I would love to know more …