It's been a while since I've reported a webinar, so today with the new series of Learning and Skills Group sessions, I'm getting back on the live-blogging circuit. Ok, kinda. Anyways, today's topic is (as you may have guessed) "Using live online training as part of a successful learning blend.". Charles Gould of Brightwave and Matt Turner of Live Time are going to be trying to answer the question that most people seem to be asking of synchronous learning. So, as most LSG webinars, I think this promises to be an interesting event. Let's get started.Charles and Matt seem to have discovered a huge demand for synchronous learning in the course of their consulting work in the elearning space. So let's see who's attending this webinar:17% Trainers11% Learning Designers20% L&D Manager19% E-learning Professional17% OtherHmmm... that's a fair mix and people have various different motivations for attending this webinar. Looks like one of the focus areas is to highlight the differences between webinars and a live, online training course.So what is the difference between a webinar and a live online training course?There are some subtle differences and here are some of them:Online training sessions are a bit more formal and have some well defined outcomes. They tend to be more action-oriented in their approachThey have objectives and motivations which are consistent across the trainers and the students.I could argue this a bit, but oh well! So anyway, back to main question - how do you integrate online training into your learning blend? There's various stuff that needs to happen before, during and after the session itself. Here's a picture that expresses Charles and Matt's thoughts about the activities that you may want to plan for online training. Online training is starting to be a good supplement to classroom and elearning activities. The benefits are quite obvious - costs, the lower carbon footprint, the ability to actually do it without any huge constraints. We need to look beyond just those benefits though - we can have lots of people in the training, we can all talk together, we can walk out without offending people and most importantly, its an nice way to bring geographical diversity to your classroom. So it's a little more than just a virtual classroom.That said, there's no opportunity for body language, eye-contact and then again there's a myriad of distractions available to us -- for example I'm live blogging at this moment.It looks like everyone's been involved with online training in some way or the other. So let's hear some of Matt and Charles' tips for online training.TechnologyAs you may already know, there are several options for online training tools. There's DimDim, Live Meeting, Webex, GoToMeeting, Lotus Live Meetings, Cisco Webex and Adobe Connect. If you're still deciding, here are a few things to consider:Bandwidth - does your organisation have enough bandwidth on the network to run this kind of thing?Storage - where will you save most of your data, recordings, etc?Risk - how secure is the service and how open or closed is the option you're using?Integration - are you using it with your LMS or other systems?Costs - how cheap or costly is your implementation going to be? How much staff time are you going to need?PeoplePeople, as we've already discussed have a myriad of distractions in their life. People are people and if they want to multi-task, they will! When you don't get eye-contact, it's a gigantic difference. If you're multi-tasking then you're perhaps going to be a good online training that's because you already know what your audience will do. So, what you don't want is someone reading a script. What you don't want is someone reading script. What you do want is someone bringing in a bit of a personality. Voice is crucial to the success of an online training session. Using a headset helps and perhaps a directional mike maybe? Trainers need to be hugely expressive online - remember people can't see you; so make peace with that and do what you can to overcome that hurdle. As human as you can sound, the better for you!ContentSo let's see what kind of subjects work well in this medium.I've now completely lost visuals- damn! So I'll just go with what I hear.Seems like soft skills are a good area to discuss online. Bringing in experts and to keep it short and simple is a good idea as well. Learning from suggestions that others make is a great way to influence behaviour. The more you can involve people, the better - 90% of the talking should be from the participants. Teach people how to use the tool and how to use the chat box. Just as Don does for the LSG webinars, it does helps a lot to get people used to the environment. This is the equivalent of getting people used to a training environment. Also, get people's views by using polls as an activity. This is the equivalent of how we do polls (show of hands) in a classroom. Don't overdo the poll though, but beware the meaningless poll - they can break up the momentum of the session. So use polls where you expect a distinct set of answers, but if things are just obvious, don't just do it for the sake of doing it.Final TipsAsk people what they'll commit to do once they've been through the session.What's going to stop them from doing what they'd like to do.Discuss these hopes and concerns with participants.Don't be ambitious - it's not about what you want to do to look cool. It's also about managing change and getting people comfortable with the medium.Roland from Live Time has a tip - the technology is there, but don't go overboard!The voice of just one person gets boring after a while, so vary it by bringing in audio, video, etc.Don't get flustered if things go wrong - remembers Murphy's law.Be flexible - something that works in one session, will not necessarily work in the next. The dynamics of people are extremely crucial to keep in mind.Online training takes time. To make something, simple, short without the benefit of physical presence and the interactivity that people expect, is always tough. So try getting as much of this work done up front and make sure you prepare well! © Sumeet Moghe, 2009

I am not sure whether you may have been watching in the last couple of days, one of those special events that I can surely guarantee you is going to help out redefine the whole concept of Management AND Leadership as we know it. As part of this year’s many worthy events around IBM’s Centennial celebrations, the last couple of days have been rather interesting following the IBM THINK Forum live event in New York City, where a whole bunch of really engaging, thought-provoking and inspirational speakers have been sharing their wisdom on what leadership is all about, but, most importantly, on what it takes to become a true leader in today’s, more complex than ever, (business and societal) world. If case you may not have seen it just yet, there is still plenty of buzz with multiple people live tweeting the event, but also some phenomenal live blogging done by Steve Hamm for Day 1 and for Day 2, where you can get a quick glimpse of some of the main highlights as well as a good bunch of video clips, as short snippets, that can certainly give you plenty of great insights on what happened during those couple of days. And talking about those videos I would love to spend a couple of minutes sharing along what, so far, have been my two favourite clips from the overall event. The first one coming from Mary Galeti, Vice-Chair The Tecovas Foundation, where she comes to discuss, in a little bit over a minute, how the leaders of today, and definitely, of tomorrow, are the new servants of the knowledge workforce, where they are no longer managing their employees, but leading them to excel at what they are truly passionate about. More than keep moving along with that traditional command and control attitude, she turns the whole thing around indicating how what really matters is helping out people become better at what they do and move out of their way! Whoah! Very powerful words to live by, for sure, and a clear indication of the impact of living social within the enterprise, and probably beyond, too!, seeing how embracing the Social Web philosophy may certainly help in shifting gears and help realise executives as well it’s much more beneficial, for everyone, to provoke a fundamental change in not only how we operate, collaborate and share our knowledge across out in the open and perhaps much more transparently, but also how we need to redefine our new leadership role(s) within the corporate environment, and in our own societies, to match today’s complex environment and its ever growing needs. Worth while a look for sure! The second favourite video clip is another one that doesn’t last more than a little bit over a minute and which features a rather peculiar interview by Errol Morris with Sam Palmisano, IBM’s CEO, and where he shares what, to him, leadership is all about. No, I am not going to spoil it for you much more than this, other than stating it’s quite refreshing to see how Sam himself identifies some of the key traits that are also permeating throughout the Social Web in helping identify the new leaders of today, errr, I mean, tomorrow. And watch out!, because those same characteristics would apply to our leaders in society today! Worth while having a look, specially, given the context of where Sam is coming from, i.e. celebrating those 100 years of existence from IBM itself and laying down the ground for the upcoming challenges for the next 100 years! Finally, there are plenty of other rather short interviews and video clips that came out of the IBM THINK Forum event and which I would strongly recommend you watch as well, specially, the ones by Joi Ito‘s, amongst several others in order to witness how world leaders of today are seeing their leadership roles shifting into preparing the way for the leaders of tomorrow … starting today! No time to waste…

I'm a big fan of Josh Bersin and I'm thrilled to be on the second LSG webinar of the day where he's talking about development driven performance management. I've had a rough afternoon having lost visuals on the previous webinar, so I'm hoping I have better luck with live blogging an event. So, I'm not going to say much more and I'll start writing away.Josh's topic stresses on how management and performance management has a profound effect on learning. By focussing on development as part of performance management, Bersin's found how companies drive high performance. Performance Management DriversPerformance management is a set of management practices to set measurable goals and objectives for employees and to assess achievement of such objectives. This leads to improve performance through coaching, compensation, development, etc. Most importantly, performance management is management!Companies focus on this to create a high performance culture and to decide compensation. And then again there's the reason of compliance, equity (ensuring fair compensation) and improving business results. Organisations want to align individual and overall business goals to ensure employees understand the kinds of contributions supervisors expect. Of course, we want to retain good people and reduce the cost of employee turnover.When it Breaks downPerformance management is underperforming though and the focus tends to become about goals than just performance. The focus is on the individual and not on the whole. Only 27% people in Bersin's research feel that this process helps employees align goals to company objectives. Bersin's come up with a maturity model that you see above. Most companies as you can see, sit at the bottom, but only a few companies actually tailor their practices for key workforce segments. They maintain success profiles of top performers and high value workers. Very few companies integrate career and succession management, coaching and performance support with their performance management models.The model needs to move from being competitive to being coaching and development driven. The competitive evaluation focuses more on appraisal while development driven performacne mangement focuses on coaching and development. This is crucial to the lifecycle of a company from being a startup to maturity."Companies that reach maturity, need to focus more on coaching and development" - Josh BersinThe coaching and development model does well in:retaining top performershiring the best peopledeveloping employeesdeveloping leadership pipelinesand developing great leadersThe competitive assessment model however does well in:responding to current economic conditionsplanning our future talent needsensuring complianceWe however don't need to focus on all goals equally. The focus needs to be where the impact is really high. Right now, our focus seems to be compliance and equity as against also focusing on improving business performance.The gap we need to overcome is the the gap between our activities and our expectations. Coaching has a strong impact on business results almost 150x and 200x greater. In a similar manner development plans have at least a 2x impact on revenue. This is all based on Bersin's recent research. This is good enough reason for companies to invest in development driven performance management. Keys to Transitioning to Development-Driven ApproachJosh recommends the following steps to transitioning to development driven approach.Change the definition of PMIntroduce CompetenciesCreate and support high quality development plans for peopleEnable managers to coachCreate frequent occasions to reflect on peformanceFor #1, Josh introduced a case study of Kelly services who have made performance management go beyond writing performance appraisals for hours over having rich discussion. They have now made performance related conversations more frequent and focus entirely on performance improvement. Conversations do not diverge to compensation, ratings, rankings. (I think that's key). They now have made employees responsible for developing their own goals for the year.For #2 Stacia and Josh mention that there's a direct link between competencies and an outstanding performance-driven culture. They have a strong research dataset for this. This seems obvious because: Competencies are almost a 'common currency' for assessing performance and potential for promotion. It gives employees a clear set of objectives.It helps the whole organisation to select high potential leaders effectively.Companies can provide success profiles to help recruiters and hiring managers to select for a position.Competencies allow L&D to create meaningful performance improvement initiatives.Competencies create alignment and a clear understanding of corporate culture and values.This is perhaps way too formal for a company like mine, but I do see the value that a clear articulation of competencies can bring to an organisation. Now what is a competency? It's a set of performance outcomes you can determine for individuals in your companies. These could be related to your core values, job effectiveness, functional areas, career development and leadership. The key is to break competencies down and not try to do all of them together. Also, fewer competencies work better! The idea is to think "capabilities not competencies", because if you focus too much on job descriptions then you're likely to become too granular to affect performance. The example Stacia picked up for #2 was from Flextronics, who created 15 competencies known as performance behaviours and provided examples of how these look like. The organisation then communicate these to their managers mentioning that it's critical to coach their direct reports to success.For #3 Josh mentioned the importance of individual development plans or personal development plans as we know them in Thoughtworks. There are several activities that you can create through learning and development to support employees to success. The example the duo introduced was again Kelly services. Kelly has already made employees responsible for development of their business and professional goals for the year. The moment  they enter these into their online system, they get to seek out recommended deveopment opportunities. This has caused a huge pull-based development culture amongst Kelly's staff. For #4 Josh mentioned that managers need to know how to coach - establish goals, help people monitor progress, find solutions to problems, appreciate strengths/ weaknesses, etc. This is something that I believe is key - a manager who can't coach is a bit of a paper pusher IMO.ADM is Stacia's example for this key. ADM is a 25000 strong company in the agriculture space. They've launched a coaching program to help managers understand how to effectively coach their employees. The program is 8 weeks long and is a thorough blended experience. It's apparently been hugely successful and ADM has saved $100,000 saving (in terms of retention/turnover/hiring) and a lot of leaders are looking to enroll in the program.Key #5 is something I really like because it's about reflection - which is a great learning tool. Feedback is a crucial tool that Josh mentions here. Stacia picked up the Travelex example here. Travelex has found that peformance management through regular 360 feedback is more frequent, authentic and useful than they were ever before. The response in that firm has been overwhelmingly positive, though the practice is relatively new.Josh lastly mentioned that we need to have integrated platorms that help automate such approaches. I would say however (with all due respect), that the focus should first be on the cultural change than the tool. There are several tools that perhaps do this - including Cornerstone, that Josh mentions.This has been a really dense presentation -- very informative and a great lot to reflect on later! Thanks Josh!© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

Summer is over and that, basically, means that I have just kicked off the next round of business trips from now till year end. And, indeed, I just did that, as I came back yesterday from my first one of those, this time around to Brussels, Belgium, where I had a wonderful time participating in a customer workshop talking about The Social Enterprise and its own wider adoption of social software. Fascinating and rather enlightening discussions, on both ends, over the course of 4 hours, no doubt!, but more on that later… For now, this is going to be just that unusual blog entry where I will be talking about something else, completely different, from the regular topics I cover over here. And all of that because of something that happened yesterday, on my way back home, that I guess is going to be difficult to forget any time soon. I have been doing business travelling over the last 15 years and, as most of you folks out there know already, some years more often than in others, but in most cases rather regular scheduled trips all along. Well, for the first time in those 15 years of being a road (Errr, I mean, air) warrior, yesterday I had the longest layover I have ever experienced at any airport. I was stuck in Madrid (In T2) for 9 hours non-stop. Yes, you are reading it correctly. 9 hours. Now, I can imagine you may be wondering why didn’t I hit the road, grab a taxi and head downtown to enjoy what promised to be a rather gorgeous autumn day, right? Initially, I thought about doing just that, but then again, coincidences in this world teach you that some times whatever you may have planned doesn’t always work out the way it is supposed to. Like this time. Just as I was on my way to Brussels on Thursday last week I found out that one of my former team colleagues, and rather good friend, who enjoys, just as much as I do!, a lovely glass of red wine over a delightful conversation, was also arriving, around the same time as me, at the same terminal, at the same airport where I was. What are the chances of that? She was flying from Milán, and I was coming from Brussels, so we decided to get together, catch up with each other properly face to face for a good couple of hours, enjoy the one or two glasses of red wine and just let part of the afternoon go by enjoying catching up after not having seen each other for a good while. And we just did that! We went to one of the bars at the T2 terminal, grabbed something quick to eat, and, of course, got ourselves a good supply of wine. That part of the afternoon was just absolutely brilliant! Believe me, don’t ever let people tell you that social interactions through the Web are just as effective, engaging and nurturing as those face to face, in real life. No way! There is no substitute at all for them! So whenever you have a chance to reach out and cultivate them, by all means, go ahead and do it! We had a wonderful time catching up with each other on what we have been doing the last couple of years and it was rather refreshing to see how that pure chance got us together in the first place while in Madrid’s airport. From there onwards, I shared with her a few tips on what to do in Madrid for the remaining time that she is going to be there, and we both departed to our usual schedules for the day. Hers to hit town and enjoy the lovely weekend before work kicks in next Monday. Mine, wait for a little bit longer and make my flight home after a few days away. And that’s where things went awry. What was supposed to be just one more hour before departing, it turned around into becoming a 5 hour delay before our plane finally took off! Goodness! I guess technical faults in an airplane about to take off can cause that kind of trouble. Anyway, if you are a frequent traveller you know how things go from there. First they tell you 30 minute delay, then 60 minutes, then we move into two hours, and, finally, on the 4th hour waiting there, things are now ready to head back home! That’s the kind of suspense I am not very keen on experiencing and living through on a Saturday afternoon, don’t you think? Anyway, a long time ago, after a continuous and rather frustrating experience, as a business traveller, of delayed flights, missing them altogether for whatever the reason or just about whatever other complication, one gets to learn that no matter how angry or upset you get about things, never mind picking up useless arguments with people, the delay is still going to be there, or if the flight is cancelled, there is nothing you can do at all either. So I tried to make the most out of my afternoon at Madrid airport and I think I reached the conclusion I need to pick up another one of my hobbies from all along that, lately, I had it almost abandoned: Read fiction. And a lot of it! Specially, when you are stuck at the airport with a bunch of hours before your next flight takes off. I love reading. I have always enjoyed it quite a bit, even when I was a whole lot younger and perhaps my mind should have busier with something else. However, as of late, perhaps in the last few years, I have neglected reading fiction for far too long, focusing, almost exclusively, around business reading, specially, around the top of the Social Web and the Social Enterprise. My iPad Kindle is ful with books around these business topics, and while I was listening to Spotify on my iPhone (Something for which I am very very grateful, since it made for a wonderful afternoon listening to some of my favourite #elsuastunes), I realised I didn’t have enough fiction materials. And, funny enough, while I was pondering about that and sharing the odd tweet here and there (Guess that’s what happens when you get stuck and bored at the same time!), a good friend of mine, Rogelio Pérez-Bustamante, gave me a quick phone call where we talked for a little bit. I tell you, things don’t happen just like that, without any purpose. There is always one. You just have got to go, figure out and find it! And seize the opportunity. For this time around, Rogelio actually told me that a rather good friend of his, Ernesto Uría, was just about to present live, this coming week, at 19:00pm CEDT on Tuesday, at the Ámbito Cultural of El Corte Inglés, a new book of delightful short stories under the suggestive title "Ficciones y Aflicciones" ("Fictions and Woes"). The book is in Spanish, and I have yet to find a copy of it for my iPad Kindle or buy it at the recently launched over here, in Spain, Amazon. But right there, while I was talking to him and he was sharing with me plenty of his notes about the short book, and how much he enjoyed it, I just realised I needed to read more fiction. It would have made for a fantastic and delightful afternoon, right there, if I did have a copy of Ernesto’s book and read through it. Somehow it just hit me. You know, with all of the stuff that’s happening out there, in our now more complex than ever world, a world in where we all know, and are starting to realise, that things would never be the same anymore, it still pays off to have some brilliant fiction reading sitting right next to you, whispering in your ear, enticing you to leave everything behind, "pick up" the book, and start reading, letting your mind do the rest. Yes, indeed, I do need to read more fiction, I do need to find a way to evade myself from being stuck at the airport for so long and don’t feel much into business reading, really (Hey, it was the weekend, remember?!). But it gets better, because while I had been pondering and musing further on about it all, and perhaps re-start that fiction reading with a splash and get a copy of Ernesto’s book, Rogelio shared with me the speech he himself is going to deliver on Tuesday’s public presentation of "Ficciones y Aflicciones" ("Fictions and Woes"). And goodness! Right there, it blew my mind away! What a surprising, refreshing and staggeringly good read! It’s just 8 pages long, but I can tell you they will certainly trigger that inner urge to want to know more. To get busy and start reading Ernesto’s book right away! Yes, I know, I know, you would probably be expecting by now to have a disclaimer or something, right? Well, here it is. Rogelio is a good friend who is now just starting to dive into this whole world of the Social Web and social networks; we have been having a bunch of conversations on why social networking is taking everything by storm, and how it is changing us all as a society altogether, and I can tell you his opinions about this financial crisis, as well as what he thinks of Europe, would probably make for one of the most fascinating reads out there on the Spanish blogosphere… Not to worry, I’m working on that! I mean, helping him out get his own blog going The truth is that I hardly know Ernesto (Here is a short, but rather good interview with him, in Spanish, if you would want to read more about him and his work), but you know how it goes, the friends of my good friends are also my friends, so pick perhaps this unusual blog entry with a pinch of salt or two, or, better, go and get a copy of the book and then let me know whether you like it or not. From what I have been talking to Rogelio about it, he just confirmed it would be one that I would enjoy to dive, back again, into the world of reading fiction. And after reading his opening speech, I would probably have to agree with him on it… Ohhh, and he’s been rather generous to allow me to publish it over here, before the book’s public launch on Tuesday. So go and grab a copy of it, in Spanish, at this link and start reading. You will enjoy it! See? This is probably what happens when you have far too much idle time in your hands, and brain!, on a Saturday afternoon, while being stuck at an airport for a few hours, wanting to find a way to successfully escape, for a while, from everything that’s happened around you. And somehow, yesterday’s experience has confirmed as well that perhaps every odd weekend I may post another entry on something rather unusual, not very much related to the topics I usually cover over here in my blog. They may make up for some interesting and serendipitous new findings and somehow I am starting to feel I may be enjoying it quite a bit! Hopefully, you, too, folks! (I will let you know, by the way, what I thought about the book itself myself, once I get my hands on a hard copy, but guess what’s going to be the first thing I’m going to be suggesting Ernesto pretty soon… Indeed, where is the eBook for me iPad Kindle? )

A few weeks back, I spoke on the topic of "Making Feedback Work in your Teams", at the Agile 2010 conference. I felt like a really popular speaker looking at the full house I attracted to the talk and in hindsight I can imagine why people felt interested in the topic. Feedback is crucial to the learning process and supports the iterative nature in which people pick up their skills. You learn a bit, do a bit, get some feedback, learn a little more, do a little more and so on. Anyway, I don't need to harp on the value of feedback -- I'm pretty sure you agree.Something else has got me thinking by the way. When I was at Hampi this weekend, our guide Basava was really nice to let me ride his motorbike across the city. While I am a motorcyclist in Bangalore city, I'm not the most skilled rider you'll ever meet. So I had to go back into my bag of experiences to tell myself how I should ride the bike. Here's what I did:I told myself that Basava's bike was generally quite similar to my bike - the same manufacturer, same engine capacity and the same number of gears. Good start -- I was making a bit of a generalisation.I then looked at the gear-shifts and they were a bit different. After a bit of a struggle, I tried to convince my brain that this new bike, with a significantly more powerful engine was really just my bike with a slightly different gear shift. That wasn't true, but it was a way to represent information in my world. I was making a distortion of reality.Finally, I started to ride the bike in top gear. That said, this wasn't going to be my bike forever, so I didn't need to know everything about it. I just ignored everything that was new on the bike - the LED dashboard, the new controls, the decals, etc. I couldn't let myself be bothered by details that made no sense to me. I was deleting information.So, why am I telling you this story? It's because this is the way we generally build our perceptions. We view the world from a filter of past experiences and then create a new interpretation based on our generalisations, distortions and deletions. This is where feedback can be both valuable and meaningless. Feedback is valuable because it gives us valuable insight into the perceptions that our behaviour can often drive. On the other hand, when we don't see the correlation between reality and the resulting perception, feedback starts to lose its value. With that rather long introduction, I want to introduce a few anti-patterns which we should avoid when we're trying to share feedback.Perception minus RealityMost often, it's our perception that drives our feedback. For example we find some people really helpful, others to be really brilliant co-workers and others to be absolutely irritating. So, it isn't surprising that sometimes we jump straight to the perception instead of stating the reality that drove the perception. For example you may say, "Sumeet, you're a very committed co-worker." While it feels very nice to hear something like that, it gives me very little value, because I don't know about what behaviours I should repeat and why you really feel this way. OTOH, if you were to tell me what made you feel this way, it gives me some behaviour I can try and repeat. For example you could say, "Even when you weren't at Bangalore, I could see that you were in touch with us on the discussion forum, IM and video-conference. You took up a lot of tasks for the team during that time and it makes me feel that you're really committed to your work." You'll notice that the new version of the same feedback has two parts to it -- the observation and then the perception. This gives the recipient a direct correlation between behaviour and the resulting perception. Also, the observation is reality which is undeniable. It quantifies your perception, which by virtue of being personal is completely undeniable as well!Adjective OverloadAdjective overload sounds like this, "Weiwei is awesome to work with. He is very a understanding and effective partner. He is also very dedicated." Carrying on from the previous anti-pattern, adjective overload does precious little to strengthen any one's confidence or to improve their effectiveness. What makes Weiwei awesome? Why do you feel he's understanding and effective? What makes you believe that he is dedicated? Adjective loaded feedback leaves a lot of unanswered questions. OTOH, if the giver was to quantify this perception, it's likely to help the recipient understand the feedback much better. The observation+impact model works perfectly here. For example, "Weiwei always hears out my ideas when we're pairing. We draw out pictures on a whiteboard to reach common ground. This makes him an effective partner for me."Unspecified ConclusionsOn a certain team, I read the following notes "You work with everyone with no personal agenda." and "I think you should be a project manager soon." Going on from the last two anti-patterns, even this style of feedback gives the receiver nothing to work with. What does it take to be a project manager? What qualities does the individual already display? What knowledge, skills and aptitude does the individual need to pick up for the role? The unspecified conclusion gives none of this information. It takes the abstracted perception and doesn't justify it in anyway for the recipient -- as a consequence, it's nothing but a short lived ego-booster.Improve Effectiveness? No Chance!A lot of written feedback I've seen reads like this, "I'm sorry, I can't think of anything you can improve on." People need to be damn perfect for us to not find any ideas to help them grow. My ex-colleague, and Gordon Pask award winner Liz Keogh suggests that if someone was really good at their current job/ role, then we should investigate the next challenge they're moving onto or are longing for. That information can help us make suggestions that'll help them bridge the gap between what they're doing today and what they need to do tomorrow. So even if you're giving feedback to the ultimate perfectionist, consider what will help them grow into the next assignment they're moving onto.In my DefenseLast but not the least, I want to make a case for not being defensive when receiving feedback. If you've known me for a while, you know that I'm a big fan of Dr. Randy Pausch's last lecture. My favourite story is the one Dr Pausch told about his football coach, Jim Graham:"And the other Jim Graham story I have is there was one practice where he just rode me all practice. You’re doing this wrong, you’re doing this wrong, go back and do it again, you owe me, you’re doing push-ups after practice. And when it was all over, one of the other assistant coaches came over and said, yeah, Coach Graham rode you pretty hard, didn’t he? I said, yeah. He said, that’s a good thing. He said, when you’re screwing up and nobody’s saying anything to you anymore, that means they gave up. And that’s a lesson that stuck with me my whole life. Is that when you see yourself doing something badly and nobody’s bothering to tell you anymore, that’s a very bad place to be. Your critics are your ones telling you they still love you and care. "That story has stuck with me for the last three years or so. Feedback is a gift - people offer it to you with the best intentions. To argue against it or to offer justifications is equivalent to rejecting a gift. Granted all gifts don't come in the best wrappers and granted that all gifts aren't useful. The best you can do when you're receiving a gift though is to say "Thank You!". Just as we'll often go back home and then think of the best way to use the gift, it's a good idea to reflect on the feedback we get. Often we'll realise how we can grow from the feedback and equally often we'll realise that we can't do much with the feedback. Both possibilities are fine -- we just need to establish our openness to the gifts people offer us. To be frank, there are several other anti-patterns I could discuss here and we could keep going on until the cows come home. The fact is that I've got to close this post now and you must be tired of reading this weekly rant. If you like posts of this nature, I'll try touch upon other aspects of feedback in future posts. In the mean time please do let me know how you liked this article. Your comments help me tailor this blog to the way you'd like it to be.© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

I have been training for ages now. Some of the things I do have almost become part of muscle memory for me. I've always thought I do this well, but I hadn't quite nailed down what I really do when starting training programs. Well begun is half done, and I believe starting training is more than just calling out where the restroom is. It's about setting the tone for the days to come and to be able to introduce a safe environment for training. In today's blogpost I want to share some tips that you may want to consider when starting a training program of your own. Throw in some ColourPeople like colour, and people like pretty pictures. On day one I don't want my colleagues to walk into a black and white, drab looking, dimly lit room. So I obsess over the colourful pictures on the flipcharts that I put in the room, I take extra care to ensure that there's bright lighting and I like to have a lot of colourful stickies for students to use in the classroom. Sketch pens and crayons on the table depict an environment of fun and play, so I often throw them in for equal measure. Some of the photos you'll see here are indicative of the things you'll see us do at ThoughtWorks University.Get People to Know each otherThe one thing you don't want is for your group of learners to be strangers to each other. People tend to work well with those they know so I do what I can to have people get to know something special about each other. One of the activities I use for this is a game called "Find Someone Who...". I'm sure you can guess what it is - it's a game where I snoop around on Google, Twitter, the blogosphere and Facebook to find interesting facts about each of my students. I then randomly put them onto a sheets which I give to the attendees. Now they need to talk to each other and find a unique name to put against each interesting fact. This becomes a nice opportunity for all of them to know each other a little better and to showcase their personalities a bit too. I've seen that this works well as a start for a training program even when people know each other. There's always a lot of things colleagues don't know about each other, so a little mingle at the start can never hurt.Set the rules of engagementEvery workplace has it's ground rules. Training in it's own way is a workplace too and needs it's own ground rules. I like to agree these rules with the group when we start off, so that we can work together with a few clear assumptions in mind. What I do like to do however, is not make these sound like dictatorial statements. If you look at this picture, you'll see that I like to word these in a fun manner and I throw in a lot of colour so the ground rules don't seem like I took them out of a bland corporate handbook.Level the Playing FieldI usually don't like to make too much of a difference between instructors and students in a course. The more students start to see instructors as just experienced peers, the more they're likely to participate openly in training. At ThoughtWorks, we like students to challenge the instructors and that's why we position ourselves more as facilitators than just subject matter experts. To achieve this, we do a few things:Give the students an opportunity to become teachers through Open Spaces. This also an opportunity for them to define their own curriculum.I have trainers participate in initial activities with the students to set them up as equally fallible individuals in the experience.The rules of engagement applies as much to trainers as to the students. This helps everyone realise that we're in the experience as equals.Make things big and visibleLast but not the least, it's important that your audience is aware of what the schedule for each day is. It helps them prepare their minds for what's coming up and gives them clear expectations. Even when collecting individual hopes and concerns I like to make them big and visible so people can feed off each other's thoughts. We also keep a visible parking lot for off-topic conversations and if that starts to fill up in a huge way then that's a clear indication that the group needs to have these conversations soon. All our planning for Pecha Kucha nights and Open Space sessions happen in a big, visible fashion. This democratises the learning environment and helps the students be as involved as the trainers, in making the program successful.I'm pretty sure I'm missing some very obvious details that go into giving your training program a successful start. So if you've got something you'd like to add to this list, please be my guest and drop your notes in the comments section. BTW, I'm sorry about the recent irregularity with my blogposts. I promise to get back to a more predictable schedule from next week. In the mean time, I'm extremely glad to announce that I'm speaking at DevLearn 2010 at San Francisco. I'm both excited and nervous about the opportunity since this is my first time speaking at an eLearning Guild conference. I promise to try and put up a good show there though, so if you're at the conference do drop in to my session and give me some confidence!© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

In the last few years there have been a good number of people, out there on the Social Web, who have come and gone and who have remained quite an inspiration for yours truly in helping shape up plenty of the ideas and thoughts I have been sharing over here, in this blog, over the course of time, around the topics of Social Computing and the Social Enterprise. One of those special thought leaders in the 2.0 social space(s) is Kathy Sierra; someone I do wish would come back to the Internet Blogosphere to continue to inspire all of us with some of her amazingly insightful and rather enlightening articles on her blog, amongst several other places. She surely is thoroughly missed by plenty of us. Now, for those folks out there who may not have heard about Kathy just recently, or, at all, I can certainly go ahead and recommend you have a read of these two gems that she put together over at gapingvoid (Hugh MacLeod‘s blog) and which would make for some excellent food for thought around the topics of gamification and customer loyalty, respectively. Brilliant reads with lots of great insights to digest, chew on and learn plenty more about two of the most hyped conversations going on at the moment in the social media space. Must-read materials they would surely manage to change your own perception about both subjects. No doubt! But today’s blog post though doesn’t have anything to do with either of those articles. Perhaps, at a later time, I will talk some more about them. However, for now, I do want to talk about a particular YouTube video that has been making the rounds lately, and which features Kathy herself talking about a rather poignant, controversial, but equally important topic: Stop online harassment. While plenty of people have been talking about the controversy around the Google Plus policy about using our real identities, instead of fakes or pseudonyms, Kathy just focuses, in a bit over 5 minutes, on what I think is probably the main issue at hand at the moment within the Social Web: the potential risks and harm done by not putting a hard stop to online harassment. It’s a very touchy, thorny issue; one that perhaps does deserve a whole lot more attention by everyone than just this blog post by yours truly, more than anything else, because I suspect that all of us who have been online for a while, at some point in our lives, we have experienced some kind of harassment while making use of the Social Web and various (social networking) sites. So I thought for today’s blog entry I would go ahead and share the video clip over here, as a way to help bring forward some more awareness of the potential issues at hand, and, most importantly, some good guidance on what each and everyone of us can do to help out. It’s the least we could all do, more than anything else to perhaps show how for those folks involved in such harmful activities that there are better ways of participating from the Social Web, including protecting your own identify and virtual presence with a good purpose. This hasn’t got anything to do with patronising or trying to diminish people’s experiences on the Web, whatever they may well be. This is a whole lot more about educating people on what we could do to finally take a stand about such activities and help prevent them in the near future. All of us. Together. My good friend, the always sharp and insightful Euan Semple reflected on Kathy’s short video clip as well with a wonderfully inspiring short article under "Be the change" that makes that very same point across of educating and facilitating a better, and smarter, use of the social tools at our hand with this priceless quote: "Yes act in ways that cultivate positive behaviours and yes, be prepared to stand up and say when someone is "behaving badly", but stop short of telling other people what they should or shouldn’t be doing - it just tends to wind them up!" Exactly! I guess that’s the piece of homework that both Kathy and Euan have laid out nicely for all of us: look after each other against that "bad behaviour" and instead inspire, as Kathy would probably state as well, the creation of passionate users, because, at the end of the day that’s what it’s all about, as this priceless quote from "19 Revealing CEO Leadership Quotes" puts it brilliantly: "It’s so important to be happy in your role and to have passion for the role. I have made a conscious choice to focus on how I love the people and the products, and to be happy each day" After all, it’s our (virtual) home, isn’t it? I mean, the Social Web. My home. Your home. Our home. So we may as well treat it accordingly, don’t you think?, and start looking after each other in much more meaningful ways. For our own, and everyone else’s, good. It still is the least we could all do.

This isn't the kind of stuff I usually blog about, but it's high time I used whatever little reach I have from my blog to voice some collective concerns about our rising carbon footprint. Months back, I started following an organisation called 350.org. The premise is quite simple - our carbon footprint is increasing steadily at a rate of 2 particles per million (ppm) each year. We're already way above the healthy limit of carbon in the atmosphere - 350 ppm. Given our current reading of 392 ppm, in two decades we're going to see some pretty drastic consequences if we don't act fast. What could some of those consequences be? Let's take a look: Rising sea levels are likely to wipe out little countries and islands like Maldives. That means several people displaced from their homes, several people dying.The earth is going to be a far hotter and inhospitable place for life - the greenhouse effect Melting glaciers and ice-caps are going to create several domino effects on our climate and bio-diversity.The extreme heat is likely to cause an overheating of the earth's crust, leading to earthquakes, tsunamis, volcano eruptions and what not.The extreme heat is likely to lead to the worst droughts imaginable. In 2008, Australia has already suffered one it's worst droughts in a 1000 years!Forest fires are going to become more and more common, leading to a huge loss of flora and fauna.We could keep going, but I guess it's safe to say that the potential effects are quite scary. Now we can argue that all of this is conjecture and I'll stand on your side if you say that - no problem. The question I still want to ask is -- will you risk even a small chance that your next generation will not be able to see and enjoy this world as you do today? Just as my grandparents did for my parents and my parents did for me, I want to give my children (not here yet) an opportunity for a better life than I lead. I for one, am not going to leave that to chance. So I'm putting my stake in the ground and taking a stance. And frankly, so should everyone else because at the very minimum it takes nothing more than making a little noise. We can all do our little bits In 2006, Al Gore talked about averting a climate crisis and urged individuals to do the little things that could make a difference. The fact is that the developed world needs to take a lead in this as the developing world tries to catch up. Even by looking at the good old 80/20 rule, we can tell that we need to put our effort where the highest impact is. An example here is that each US citizen puts out 20 tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year! That's a whopping amount considering that people in India and Africa don't even put out a ton each year. The global average is five tons per person! But the point isn't about who's responsible. The point is more that we all should do our bit, simply because we can. Take a shower instead of a bath, ride a two wheeler instead of driving a four-wheeler, join a carpool, go solar where you can, buy fuel efficient lighting, buy carbon offsets when you travel, raise awareness through social media, create political pressure. Every little effort makes a difference. We can Innovate to Zero Emissions! Frankly, the technology is out there. Bill Gates pointed this out in his TED talk about innovating to zero carbon emissions by exploiting carbon free energy sources. This is a crucial bit of investment that developed countries need to make, so they can bring down their emissions and then set the tone for technology adoption in developing countries. That said, the governments will have no incentive to do this if we don't make enough of a noise about it. It's a fairly simple equation - the carbon footprint will keep increasing as more people have access to services. The widespread availability of technology is a good thing and we can ensure that our growth remains sustainable as long as we can fund the research that'll bring down carbon emissions substantially in the next three or four decades. Your voice counts in making this research funding meaningful for governments to invest in. The reason I'm blogging about this today is because today's the Global Work Party. Starting now, people at 7347 events in 188 countries are getting to work on the climate crisis. You can join one of these events as well. It's never too late! Make people hear your voice, raise awareness -- here's your way to change the world in a small way!© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

Two weeks back my friend, colleague and naturalist, Chirdeep Shetty presented a really vivid Pecha-Kucha talk called "The Truth about Tigers". It was a particularly inspiring talk - in fact, Chirdeep is my latest new hero for the passion that and connection that he spoke with that day. Chirdeep's talk and a few other such presentations that I've seen in recent months have made me think about the importance of infusing passion into our speaking and to heighten the sense of connection between us and our topics. In today's blogpost, I want to highlight my observations about this craft. Presenting Naked - The words of the "Zen Master" Garrey Reynolds' upcoming book, "The Naked Presenter" has to be one of my most awaited book on the subject of presentation skills. A few years back Garr blogged about making your next presentation 'naked'. His inspiration was the Japanese culture of community baths. A few weeks prior, he also spoke at Duarte Design about presenting naked - an obvious lead up to his book, but pretty awesome all the same. While the metaphor is a bit disconcerting to start with, it's a very strong message once you start thinking about it. The idea, as per Garr - "to soak with others in your in-group is to freely expose everything and communicate the naked truth." The 'naked truth' isn't always the sweetest pill to swallow as we learnt in Chirdeep's talk, where he wasn't afraid one bit, to expose the brutal methods that poachers use to kill our national animal. Chirdeep has spent months at some of our most famous forests and has even followed a tiger on foot. His knowledge and love for the big cat showed as he educated us about the animal, it's prey, it's behaviour, it's endangered status, and the reasons why we should do our best to save this magnificent animal. It's easy with Chirdeep's exposure, to try and impress the audience with your knowledge - instead, Chirdeep chose to tell an honest story that was inspiring, informative, persuasive and motivational. I'm so inspired just listening to Chirdeep that I'm undertaking an arduos two-week big cat trail in the heat of summer 2011 just to see these animals in their natural habitat. Maybe then, I can speak about them as eloquently as Mr. Shetty does. Pictures and Stories - Natural Connections Some of the high-points of Chirdeep's talk were the images he showed and stories that he told. Most of the pictures on his slides were his own. When explaining the behaviour of the cats, he mentioned the solitary and territorial nature of the tigers - in that fact, this picture is a rare contrast and highlights one of the beautiful moments of wildlife photography. As Chirdeep told us his story as a naturalist and supported it with pictures of his own, it created an extremely strong connection to the topic for us. For Chirdeep, it created a strong, natural connection for him as well. It wasn't a topic that he was talking about anymore, it was his passion! The fact that the words just rolled of his tongue, showed how deeply he understood the topic, and the stories and pictures made the topic more personable. I've mentioned this in a previous blogpost - stock imagery is great, but nothing beats a high-quality photograph that you took yourself. The dynamism of amateur photography completely surpasses the polished and therefore staged look of stock photography. In a similar manner, facts and figures about a topic are informative, but nothing tugs at the heart more than a real, true to life story! How can you bring in Passion and a Natural Connection to your talk? When I speak about the topic of presentations, I often mention a few key things to ensure when you're delivering a talk. I'll try to list them out here. Think of what excites you about your topic: Don't do a talk because you have to. Do it because you want to and genuinely believe. If you don't feel strongly about a topic, then don't present - send an email or create a rich document. You'll save your audience the trouble.Show, don't tell: If you look at one of the most effective speakers of our time - Steve Jobs always has a flair for showing things instead of just telling us about them. Take a look at his talks in 1984 and after his return in 1998 and 1999 and his more recent Macbook Air introduction, you'll realise that he likes to touch and feel what he's talking about. Now Chirdeep couldn't have brought a real tiger into the room, but he brought in what was closest - pictures from his time in the forest. Tell stories, don't give information: In 2005, Stanford saw a different side of Steve Jobs. This wasn't the 'naked' keynote speaker in a turtle neck. This was a man back from cancer, standing at a lectern and delivering a commencement address. While the setting wasn't particularly awe-inspiring, the speech was a lesson in earnest story telling. Steve Jobs' message to the graduates was to go and pursue their dreams, regardless of how foolish they may seem. He started his address saying, "Today, I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it - no big deal." That's exactly what the talk was about - three stories about his life that made him the success he is today. Back in the day he couldn't have connected the dots forward, but looking back, everything makes sense. He ended the talk with his now popular message, "Stay hungry, stay foolish." The message has stuck with me for the last five years, because of the power of Jobs' storytelling. I'm sure all of us can make messages stick if we told stories with similar conviction.The state of "No mind": One of my vivid Hollywood memories is a scene from The Last Samurai. In the scene, Tom Cruise keeps faltering when he spars using the Samurai sword and Shin Koyamada comes from the audience asking him to blur our everything that he's thinking about to get into the state of 'no mind'. I believe that's a particularly useful lesson for presenters. We can obsess about each detail when we prepare and design our talks. But as we step on stage, we need to shut our mind to the million distractions and prompts and focus on having fun and connecting with our audience. Yes, you may occasionally falter and yes there'll be the odd mess up. Take it in your stride and continue to have fun. If you don't show it, often your audience will not notice it. And if they do notice it, your best bet to carry on unhindered is if they're having fun. They can't have fun if you aren't, can they?The topic of presentations is something really close to my heart and I love thinking and continually practicing the craft. I'm particularly inspired by earnest, honest and 'naked' presenters and I'm sure that happens to you too. Are there some tips you'd like to share about today's topic? I'd love to hear from you, so please drop your nuggets of wisdom onto the comments section of this post. In fact, feel free also to drop in any feedback you may have for this article. I'm doing my best to get back to a regular schedule, so your commentary will be worth it's weight it gold!© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

If you have been reading this blog for a little while now, you may remember how there have been numerous ocassions where I have discussed how I am one of those folks who doesn’t really buy into both the whole generations or digital divide arguments. Gen-Yers, Gen-Xers, Baby Boomers, etc. etc., to me, are all part of the knowledge workforce and, if anything, instead of talking about different generations at work, I always tend to think that it is mostly about embracing and facilitating different working styles within the workforce. But what happens when each and everyone of those work styles don’t have a meaning, nor a purpose, for what they usually do? Well, we have got a crisis. A crisis of meaning. That’s the main premise that Roger Martin, Dean at Rotman School, talks about at the Big Think Web site under a thought-provoking, and rather evocative, short video clip under the title "The Crisis of Meaning in the Millennial Workforce", which lasts for nearly three minutes and which I would strongly encourage you all to have a look in order to find out a bit more on the state of things within today’s corporate environment, which surely would sound as a key issue of why we are potentially going through the current turmoil with this financial crisis. Now, Roger talks about that crisis of meaning for the younger knowledge workers, i.e. that generation of millenials. But, like I mentioned at the beginning of this blog entry, I don’t think it’s just a problem with millennials themselves, but more with the knowledge workforce in general, and with each and everyone of those working styles I mentioned above. So if you go ahead and scratch the word millennials and, instead, you put there Gen-Xers or Baby Boomers, or whatever else, you would still obtain a very similar result: an urge for each of those working styles to define a larger purpose or meaning for what each and everyone of us do in our day to day work. We could probably say that one of the common themes permeating throughout the short video clip is that one of employee motivation, engagement, or participation in today’s corporate environment; or the lack of, better said, something that seems to be a rather popular topic at the moment, and which I will be covering shortly as well in a separate blog entry, as it really heated up a fantastic conversation over in Google Plus earlier on in the week on corporate culture(s). But here is a good definition of that lack of motivation from the general workforce that Roger mentions in that video: ""Okay, so let me get this straight.  I’m supposed to come to work for you and work every day with the singular goal of maximizing the value of faceless, nameless people who can blow us off in a nanosecond if they had a bad hair day?  Am I right thus far?"  The truthful answer is, yes.  And the millenials are just saying, "Like, you got to be kidding me.  Seriously?" Like I said, scratch millennials and insert there whatever other moniker and it would still be spot on! Employee engagement and motivation are really two hot topics within the workplace at the moment. They always have been and will probably be. But perhaps that’s because we may have been looking into this crisis of meaning issue from the wrong end and we could probably very much need to apply some fresh thinking that would help us address the issue in a much more profound way to finally find that solution for it. And in this case, I do believe that Dave Pullin (Wish I could find the right Dave Pullin links to point you to him, but alas I couldn’t find them out just yet…) pretty much nails it as to put on the table what the real issue is at hand and what we, each and everyone of us!, could do to address it and fix it for those younger generations who have already started to enter the workplace. To quote: "You have the problem 100% backwards. It is NOT "How do we motivate people to devote their existence to the interests of business", it should be "how do we motivate business to devote their existence to people". Business has become the problem. People want jobs but no business regards itself as having an obligation or objective to create jobs. People want rewarding jobs but business wants to pay the least they can get away with. People want fulfilling jobs but business couldn’t care less whether jobs are fulfilling. People want healthcare, but we have HealthDontCare Businesses that want profit but couldn’t care less about people’s health. People want as much health care as they can afford, or to be healthy at the least cost, but we have Health "Insurance" businesses whose objective is to maximize the cost and minimize the healthcare" [Emphasis mine] Etymologically speaking, some people say that crisis means change, decision, choice, judgement, etc. Well, perhaps we do need to go through this crisis of meaning to really evaluate, once again, whether knowledge workers need to adjust to business or whether the business needs to adjust to knowledge workers. Something tells me, deep inside, whether we would want to admit it or not, everyone, that we already know the answer to it. We probably have already made up our own minds, but thing is, the challenge here is, is it *the* right decision, *the* right choice? Dave, once again, reminds us of what it may well be all about with a final brilliant sentence, extracted from the above comment, that I thought was worth while quoting over here as well: "Business is an artifact invented by humans for a purpose. But now it is humans that must serve the purpose of the artifact" Something tells me that it’s probably a good time now to remember, and to reflect, about where our real place at work is at the moment and where it should well be. Somehow, I think we all know the answer already, don’t we? Have a good one everyone!

For the last few days I've been reading Marcia Conner and Tony Bingham's book - The New Social Learning. It's an intriguing read, with several interesting case studies from organisations that are using social media to advance their business goals. Replete with heaps of evidence from the real world, the book is one that I recommend to anyone making a career in L&D. While I was reading the book on my Kindle, I was possessed to share all the wonderful insights I was getting from the book. It felt natural to tell my friends and connections about this awesome book. As I've posted stuff to my network, I've realised how being social is inherent to not just my personality, but also to everyone of us. We've always been social learners, and modern social media is just helping our natural tendencies. From the time of cave paintings to the modern age of of microsharing via Twitter, our way of learning and sharing hasn't changed -- only the landscape is different. In today's blog post, I want to share some of my thoughts about building a social learning culture in your organisation.Think Big, Start Small and IteratePeople are social in many different ways and depending on the goal they need a different social paradigm to communicate. I think of this as the way people play a game of Mafia when they are in a party, try karaoke at a bar and just sit around and have a nice little chat when over an intimate dinner. In a similar manner, your social learning infrastructure isn't complete with just an online forum or mailing list. One of the reasons I found Marcia and Tony's book really interesting is that they've looked at the social learning phenomenon from various angles, ranging from media sharing via channels like YouTube and going to immersive environments such as Second Life. When people want to share a stream of consciousness, they can use a Twitter style microblog - mimicing a constantly abuzz watercooler in the pantry. When they want to reach out to other practitioners they use communities of practice - much like special interest groups of yesteryear. When they want to work together, they use collaborative tools such as Google Apps and when they want to build their collective intelligence they use a wiki such as MediaWiki to build that together.Some common pitfalls with social learning implementations is to either implement narrowly or to over engineer! The key here, is to work as startups do -- think big, start small and iterate from there. It's important to have a vision of the various ways you see people interacting. At the same time it's important to start with small, high impact rollouts, iterating constantly towards the final goal. One of the highlights of my talk at DevLearn will be around how ThoughtWorks has iterated over the last decade or so, to come up with a learning infrastructure that meets our organisational needs.Don't just think TechnologyIf you follow this blog, then you may have read one of my older posts about social learning patterns that are not technology dependent. The key to remember that social learning is not entirely about the technology that enables it. The beauty of technology is that it helps transcend geographies. That said being social is hardly dependent on technology alone. It depends on the culture you create and the opportunities they get each day to learn in a social context. In that blogpost, I've outlined seven patterns to facilitate social learning in the enterprise without an over-reliance on technology:Reface your team spaces to encourage conversations, sharing and collaborative problem-solving.Try brown bag lunches where people can share the latest and greatest that they've learnt about in recent days.Try Pecha-Kucha nghts to provide people a forum to share their ideas in a fun way, in a short amount of time.Open Space conferences can be a light-weight mechanism for people to pull learning in a group setting.Offsites are a great way to socialise and learn from a large number of people with varying expertise.Bar Camps and similar unconferences are an excellent way to self-organise learning amongst large groups.Internal Conferences could be your way to have people share good practices in a contextualised setting for learning.I'm sure you'll have several more ideas about social learning without technology, so feel free to drop in your thoughts in the comments section of this post.Find the Evangelists, Ignore the Bozos, Respond to the CriticsSocial learning strategies are nothing without the people behind the scenes. Nothing that you do is likely to be everything to everyone. It's important to seek out the people that believe in the power of the social media approach to not just evangelise the methods but also to community manage in the initial stages. It's a huge mistake to believe that if you put usable tools in place, adoption will follow. It's crucial to get the people most excited about your approach, behind the initiative. Guy Kawasaki, in The Art of Innovation advises us to not let the bozos grind us down. The idea is to understand that you can't make everyone happy and there'll be those who will tell you it can't be done. For starters at least, it's important to ignore them and move on. If your ideas are good enough, the evangelists will help you win and adoption will follow. That being said, your critics (not the bozos) are the ones telling you they care for your success. So respond to your critics' concerns over time - don't pressure yourself to do it all in one go, but commit yourself to addressing their concerns. Critics can often be opinion leaders too - so winning them over is a way to get a new evangelist!Todays post is inspired by Marcia and Tony's new book and I strongly recommend you pick up a copy. The amount of research the two authors have done is quite amazing and is well worth your reading time. I'll leave you at just that and remind you to catch me up if you bump into me at DevLearn 2010 in two weeks. Some news about that - I'm facilitating two Breakfast Bytes in addition to my concurrent session:Thursday, Nov 4, 2010: Social Learning Patterns in the EnterpriseFriday, Nov 5, 2010: Vampires, Werewolves and Silver Bullets - Understanding and Dealing with the Myths of e-LearningJoin me at those - I'm really looking forward to learning socially from you!© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

A couple of years back the folks over at oDesk put together a rather interesting and insightful YouTube video clip around The Future of Work, which lasts for a little bit over 6 minutes, that surely is worth while going through, specially, the last minute and a half, as it would remind plenty of people how close it is to the well known series of the "Did You Know?" videos. The clip comes to ponder about the future of work and how social computing tools are helping redefine the current workplace as we know it. Two years later, it looks like pretty much all of the main key messages from that video, still resonate quite a bit, thus making us all wonder whether things haven’t changed that much after all. You would expect that they may well have, but have they really? Well, I am not sure what you would think about, whether we have shifted gears and moved one step further, perhaps two, from where we were in 2009, but I strongly believe that we surely have made some giant leaps into embracing, and adopting social networking tools as one of the most powerful methods to help redefine how work gets done nowadays. However, if there is anything clear coming out from back then and into today, after watching that video clip, is that a few of the annotations made during that six minute long clip are eventually a reality just two years later, in 2011, if not even further! Let’s have a look with some examples: Priceless quotes like "Project teams at work are beginning to resemble movie production teams", or "Although home is still the most common location, millions of virtual team members work from just about anywhere", or "Employers will have access to a larger and more skilled workforce", or even "Individuals will have more freedom and power than ever before" (One of my favourite quotes, by the way!), come to confirm, quite clearly, how we may be living through a time in which the future of work is a whole lot more transparent, flat, competitive, and on demand than ever before thanks to that emergence of social networking tools that we have mentioned above already and that are taking the business environment by storm. And when talking about competitiveness we should probably not forget about high performing teams either. And how they themselves, when making use of social software tools, keep augmenting, even more, their already high performing working methods, to the point where the time finding the right experts has now gone down from several hours a week, to perhaps just 5 to 10 minutes. Or how the time to search AND find the right information at the right time has been also improved dramatically helping those high performing teams reach new levels of engagement, responsiveness and collaborative, as well as innovative, interactions by their own urge to keep up cultivating and nurturing those personal business relationships that they have been building over time. However, we should not forget that what businesses out there would be the most interested in at the moment would be what my good friend Dr. Anne Marie McEwan calls Value Creation that she has blogged about earlier on today under the suggestive title "High-Performance Work Systems". How it is all about efficiency and effectiveness (Whether amongst individuals or between groups, i.e. teams, networks and / or communities), about embarking on a constant learning curve that never ceases to stop, as it provides an open window into meaningful, motivating and engaging work. Some really good stuff in there! In a way, it reminds me of another blog post I put together a couple of months back of how this helping redefine the future of (meaningful) work AND of the workplace, is also helping redefine the role of the Knowledge Worker him/herself, which just recently, a couple of days ago, my good friend, Harold Jarche beautifully reflected on as well into re-shaping up "The new knowledge worker", one who seems to breathe plenty of critical thinking and a rather empowering inner urge to want to make things right or as Thomas Stewart would say: "A knowledge worker is someone who gets to decide what he or she does each morning". With a purpose, if I may add. Mind you though, Harold pretty much nails it as well when he comes to conclude that not all of the work is done. As much as those high performing teams, networks and communities are dictating how work happens around them and their networked structures, there is still a larger population of knowledge workers we cannot afford neglecting, nor ignore, and leave behind, just because they haven’t embarked on embracing social networks as part of their game. It will be, indeed, our role to lead and help facilitate those folks come on board as well, at the their own pace, at their own time, i.e. when they feel it’s the right one, with their own rules, with enough preparation to make it work for them and their needs. And somehow, like I have already been hinting out there on one of my recent Google Plus posts, I suspect that the glue part of the organisation that’s going to have a paramount role, if not far too critical to fail altogether in provoking such outrageously optimistic change into bringing some sensemaking to truly realise  The Social Enterprise vision, would be Human Resources, our good old HR organisation(s); as the one and only, Marcia Conner, described really nicely in a recent article over at FastCompany under the heading "Now that people finally matter to businesses, HR is the next big thing". It surely is! In fact, it’s been all along! Even more, from a Social Enterprise perspective, it’s perhaps the final frontier for all of us, knowledge (networked) workers, out there to claim that our work is now done! Alas, we are not there just yet. Still plenty of work to be done! So we better roll up our sleeves and keep driving innovation further into meaningful work to help shape up the future of the workplace, our workplace: networked, more trustworthy, transparent, engaged, open and nimbler, in short, empowering altogether for ALL of us. Not just a few.

Can I say how excited I am to be at this webinar with Charles Jennings? As a big fan of Jay Cross' idea about workscaping and as someone who's put this idea into action, this is definitely a topic very close to my heart. I don't know what Charles' agenda is, but if it's about the way work and learning are synonymous, I'm sure he'll strike a chord with me. These are my liveblogged notes from the webinar, totally unplugged -- so I promise to keep it as honest and real as I possibly can.So what does Charles want to talk about? What are the key challenges that organisations face today? Change is increasing everyday and we need to keep emowering our workforce to keep up with change and keep building their capabilities. We don't do training right - we, in fact do it very inefficiently. Charles is going to present a model on experiential learning that really works and hopefully he'll share some empirical evidence for this as well. Nom, nom, very exciting.Charles asks us to think about some of our most significant learning experiences and to think of where they occured. For me most of my learning happened at work. Charles has picked up my favourite example to explain experiential learning. I use the example of how we learn to ride a bike - we got bare minimum instruction, but we learnt from experience, failure and reflection. We didn't real a manual or go through detailed training -- we just did it and learned!"Learning is all about action. It's not about storing stuff in your head." - Charles JenningsThe Trouble with current Formal Learning ApproachesMuch of formal learning is content rich and interaction-poor. We learn to know but we hardly learn to do. I called this the phenomenon of growing the knowing flab vs building the doing muscle. This is the big problem with formal learning programs in organisations these days -- if there's a best practice, content rich training works. OTOH for most knowledge workers, it's an interaction rich approach that's crucial, because it prepares us to face complicated and complex problem domains and thereby deal with novel and emergent practice.Most away from work training and learning leads to the phenomenon of the forgetting curve, because instruction out of context leaves nothing for workplace performers to remember and apply what they've been "told".Most of the participants like to get involved and try things out. They like to have dialogue and discussion. They like presentations which are organised according the logic of how they work and learn. They like to experience how things work. This is amble evidence that proves that people like to learn through interaction, working with others and real experience.Real Adult LearningHumans like other animals learn through experience, practice, conversation and reflection. Real adult learning is about acquiring new ideas from experience and retaining them as memories. Instead of structuring learning around content, we need to structure them around creating learning experiences.Charles is now introducing the 70:20:10 model from the Princeton University which says that we learn 10% from training, 20% through observation and 70% through real experience. This is a model, not a recipe, but has significant evidence about this.70:20:10 is a framework for thinking outside classes, courses and curricula. Most organisations spend their money on the formal training curriculum, where the bulk of the budget should ideally go to helping people learn from experience. A lot of the evidence comes from the initial assertions by Jay Cross and then from studies by Capital Works , Education Development Center at Massachusetts, US Bureau of Labour Statistics and Institute of Research for Learning. Charles will give us more evidence and studies later.Incorporating 70-20-10 in Value Based Learning StrategyFirst things first, this is only a model and not a silver bullet. The percentages are only indicative. So Charles recommends that we don't get hung up on the numbers and focus on the context because implementations will vary with the problem on hand. "Informal learning is generally more effective, less expensive and better received than it's formal counterpart" - Jay CrossThis is quite understandable, given that you're very very unlikely to see behaviour change through classroom sessions. OTOH, this is extremely likely to happen with the constant "interventions" that informal learning creates for us. Most managers say that they learn through informal chats with colleagues, search engines like google and through trial and error. This is some real research from Good Practice. Charles mentions that thinking 70-20-10 requires a mindshift and cultural change whereby we can, as learning consultants help our organisations understand and be aware of the opportunities we need to create in the workplace people to pick up and hone the skills they need to grow. This means working with businesses to create sizeable investments in informal learning, getting managers involved and development driven performance management.Charles also suggests that we include 70-20-10 thinking in the competency framework of various job families. This is something we've tried to implement via the concept of learning paths. Charles suggests through that we go a step forward where we list out recommendations in each area of the 70-20-10 model for each role to seek out their development through experience, observation & feedback and formal learning.The Role of ManagersManagers are strongly involved in the development of their people. Not just Charles and I, Esther Derby says so too. Managers have the most impact in terms professional development and the mindset of "let's throw them to the trainers", takes away a lot of responsibility from leaders. The corporate leadership council has research that says that people who work with managers that are committed to developing them, outperform those with less involved managers. (I think that's what I saw, though I could be a bit wrong)Working with team member through learning logs, coaching regular feedback, and goal setting are crucial skills for managers.L&D's Readiness for 70-20-10The focus of L&D has to change:Moving from maintaining catalogues of courses, etc to managing workscapes.Moving from designing and developing materials to supporting learning experiences in the workplace.Moving from a course centric approach to a performance centric role.Moving from predominantly classroom and elearning driven approaches to a multi-channel, multi-modality approach.Finally we need to move from a learning focussed approach to a performance and productivity focus.Great stuff from Charles, I really liked the stuff he's mentioned and this resonates with my own approach in L&D. Thank you!© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

Continuing further with that series of blog posts on meaningful and smarter work and how it is helping the corporate world redesign the future of the workplace to make it much more networked, interconnected, open, egalitarian, non-hiearchical, unstructured, porous, chaotic, trustworthy, engaging, transparent, agile, dynamic, empowering and whatever else you would want to add further up (Phew!) to realise the Social Enterprise dream, I thought I would go ahead and share a bit of special entry today where we can keep talking about it, although it’s not going to be me the one doing the talk, but one of the folks I have long admired and from whom I have learned tremendously over the course of years in the areas of Knowledge Management, Communities (Of Practice, a.k.a. CoPs), Complexity, Enterprise 2.0 and Social Computing. Of course, I am talking about the one and only: John Tropea, whose blog posts, tweets, plussings and tumblrs are always highly recommended reads and a must-subscribe, too!, in case you may not have done so just yet. You should. It’s worth every minute of your time. Take, for instance, this particularly rich and very insightful conversation over at Google Plus, on the topic of Corporate Culture and whether we can exert some influence in changing it, or not, through social networking, collaboration and open knowledge sharing, all of it as a result of a follow-up conversation from a brilliant blog post that originated from my good friend Jack Vinson under "Culture is nebulous, focus on what you can change". In it, John gets to share quite an amazing array of insightful comments, along with helpful links that surely help understand how changing the corporate culture of an organisation is definitely not as easy as one would expect. Plenty of food for thought for those internal social computing evangelists out there who feel they are on to another league trying to shift gears and change their corporate culture as they know it to start living social. Well, perhaps it is not as easy as what we have been told all along… Worth while a read, for sure! However, the main purpose why i wanted to put together this blog post in the first place was to continue making that connection between previous blog entries on redesigning the Future of the Workplace that you folks have read over here lately, and in plenty of other places, I am sure, and build further up on it pointing you folks to what I think is probably one of the best blog entries you will read this year in 2011 around that very same subject. It surely has moved pretty quickly into my Top 3 favourite articles that I am definitely going to keep coming back over and over again to digest all of those hidden gems that keep coming up every time I read through it. Already done with my third reading of the post since it was first aired out yesterday and still learning new insights! Go and have a look into John’s latest take on how wild ducks, trust agents and intrapreneurs are continuing to take the corporate world by storm gathering informally in groups, whether teams, networks or communities, amongst several others (John mentions a few of them as well!) to carry out that meaningful, smarter work that they themselves feel rather passionate about in the first place! Work, by the way, that’s not mandated from top-down, i.e. the strict organisational structure(s) we have all gotten so used to over the course of decades, but work that has been defined by those groups themselves, just because they share a common affinity, a bunch of free time and a passion to carry it out. Yes, something like finally being capable of freeing up the human batteries within each organisation, as in freeing up those free radicals that know why, what and who they network with in the first place, what John calls freelancing in the corporate world and which more and more seems to help define how work gets done nowadays, where the center of gravity, or power of decision, has been lowered down more than ever before and where being more agile, open, transparent, engaged, empowered, and networked seems to have set up the new rules of the workplace. And it is starting to look like it’s here to stay, too! Indeed, not going to expand much further on this blog entry itself, since I’m sure you will be enjoying John’s article plenty more. It’s a long, extensive, brilliantly covered and rather comprehensive read on what that new freelance corporate work looks like and how we have already started the transition to it. In "The future of work is to freelance within an organisation - choose your task, assemble to work, then dissolve" you will see how there are plenty of numerous references to other thought leaders in this space and what they have been thinking about this particular topic for a little while now. And while it may look a bit overwhelming as you go through it, you will notice (As my good friend Jon Husband also mentioned in a comment) how there is some very nice momentum building up around it by multiple thought leaders and that can only mean that the shift towards that work model may have gotten started already and John has managed to capture it beautifully into one of those blog articles that would surely have a permanent home in our hearts, and brains!, for those of us who would want to see the Social Enterprise dream come true. And the sooner, the better! Hope you enjoy reading through it, and from here onwards I just wanted to share a special Thanks! with John for having put together such amount of hard work in assembling all of those great insights and share them across in that outstanding, must-read, brilliant blog post. He’s done us all a huge favour and I can see the day where we will look back into that article as the seminal work that consolidated what a good bunch of us have been saying for a while now as well… Intrapreneurship is here to stay! Are you ready, finally, to embrace it?

Paul Trueman is posing a few challenging questions to us today:How do you get learning buy-in? How do you ensure that individuals want to learn, that managers give them the time to learn and that executives give you the budget to make it happen?Paul says it takes more than just smooth marketing talk to make this work for you and today he'll tell us about how we can influence stakeholders and make our L&D abilities visible. Very interesting, and something I really need to learn. Do remember, these are unedited, live-blogged notes.Paul's in the middle of some interesting research that I guess leads to this talk. Paul does a whole heap of work, ranging from internal consulting to good old, face to face training. Paul is starting off asking what our biggest concerns are about promoting our L&D departments. Here are some of the responses we saw:MindsetsBudgetsBalancing quality and valueTailoring content to demandGetting mangement to understand where we're coming fromResistance to changeGetting management to understand the value of investing in learningGiven some of those responses Paul's moving into the agenda for his presentation.How can we promote learning and development as a beneficial investment?What are the key drivers for different stakeholders?How can we articulate the value learning and development adds to the business?How do we communicate the benefits to learners?A background of Paul's Case StudyPaul's work is with his company, Eaga Plc. Eaga is a Newcastle company, partner owned since 2007. They have about 4500 partners and they manage the government's warm front scheme and the BBC digital switchover scheme. Their culture is about empowering people, ensuring they look out for new ideas and to find new ways of delivering services in an innovative fashion. The culture sounds like what most companies claim to be like, and what ThoughtWorks is like! The Eaga people development team has 22 people and currently invest 2 million GBP in training each year. They have heaps of face to face delivery with the support of their LMS. They seem to have a strong set of values focussing on embracing change and continuous improvement. That's a win for the L&D team because people are keen to keep improving and they don't have to drag people into initiatives and embracing change helps them to keep turning around soon to respond to the organisation's changing skill needs.Promoting L&DPaul and his team promote L&D by conducting an annual partner engagement survey. Eaga has also has five key divisions with a key L&D partner assigned to work with each division. They support all their partners with additional academic funding options. They fund 50% of any external courses if that is relevant to their business.They listen to their internal customers and take training evaluation very seriously. They also ensure that each partner has a personal development plan with the support of their line managers, L&D and HR.Managing StakeholdersEach partner wants skills development and career growth. So if the L&D teams don't invest in training approaches, this pushes the partners back. Paul's showing us several quotes and testimonials from his partners proving his point.Paul also mentions that his department level stakeholders are looking for ways to make their groups more efficient. Again, he's showing us several testimonials from the managers that show their satisfaction.Senior level management wants to know their skills base to be able to make effective business decisions on partner allocation. Paul and his team need to keep the senior management informed about this current state of the world so they can use this information to decide how they'll drive the business.The key that Paul is trying to drive is that we need to go from the value that each individual stakeholder's looking for and communicate in a language that makes sense for them. I thought Paul's messages were quite simple and very common-sensical though I didn't get heaps out of it. In any case, you are welcome to carry on this discussion with Paul on his email address. It takes heaps to come out and tell your story, so I congratulate Paul on that! And btw, if you wanted to learn about more influence patterns, please do look through Mary Lynn Manns' work in this area.© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

As a result of John Tropea’s wonderful blog post from yesterday, which I have blogged about over here, there has been also quite an interesting and rather refreshing conversation developing on the side over at Google Plus around the topics of business processes, BRP (Barely Repeatable Processes), the role of traditional hierarchies and structures in today’s work environment while mixing and mingling with a networked organisation and where learning fits in there altogether. Some fascinating stuff in there, for sure! And one of the various reasons why I keep digging quite a bit G+ over other social networking sites. The depth of the conversations has been like no other so far! And it’s thanks to those conversations themselves how one keeps bumping into golden nuggets like the one shared yesterday by Dennis Callahan on that very same thread around "The Future of Work". Yes, indeed, you may have noticed how the last few blog posts have continued to raise my interest around the topic of The Future of Work and how social networking and social computing tools are helping redefine how we view and interact at work within a corporate environment to make it much more open, transparent, trustworthy, networked, meaningful. Well, it looks like that interest keeps growing further, specially, after going through that fantastic article put together by Dennis where he has shared 19 different very enlightening and educational resources on The Future of Work, ranging from links to other insightful blog entries, to short video clips, presentations, etc. etc. Quite a goldmine on its own right there, for sure! However, from all of those resources mentioned by him, and which I would strongly recommend you all go through them, since they will be worth while your time, specially, if you are interested in this topic as well, there is one in particular that I thought I would expand further on it for a bit. More than anything else, because of how much it resonated with how I view work myself, but, perhaps much more importantly, because of how well it describes the current work I have been doing myself, and a whole bunch of other people!, for the last few years. And still going strong… Time and time again I keep getting asked what my work day as a KMer, Community Builder and Social Computing Evangelist looks like, specially, while working at a large IT corporation that has been there, alive and kicking, for the last 100 years and counting… At times, it presents a bit of a challenge in itself, since I guess it’s pretty tough to try to describe what you are passionate about in an eloquent manner; too many things to cover in such a short time!; basically, that stuff you know you could talk for ages and ages yourself and never get tired of it. Yes, I guess that passion for what you do will describe it quite nicely at this stage. Well, T.A. McCann, founder of Gist.com, just did that beautifully for me over a couple of minutes in a short interview under the suggestive title of "The Future of Work Is Now", which he himself blogged about over here. It’s a priceless gem, for certain! I can tell you that! If we have been talking for a little bit now about The Future of the Workplace, about what meaningful, networked, freelanced, intrapreneurial (corporate) work is all about, T.A. McCann pretty much nails it on that short interview. I just couldn’t put it in much better words than what he did. If not, judge for yourselves: Mind-blowing, isn’t it? Who would have thought that in that future of work concepts like multiple jobs across a working lifetime, having fun @ work, work life balance no longer there, retirement would no longer exist, do your best effort at all times, connecting and reaching out to others who share a common passion on a particular topic / goal with you, learning as a key driver of working together effectively, etc. etc. would be helping redefine how we view AND live our workplace(s). And all of that thanks to the emergence of social networking tools within the enterprise and beyond! Not too bad, right? I am not sure what you folks would think, probably  that I am a dreamer or someone trying to live to the fullest an unrealistic, utopian business world that will never see the light, specially in today’s working environment. Perhaps too optimistic, too outrageously excited and eager for what’s to come. Well, may be. May be not. Who knows. The reality is that’s the current work environment I have been living, experiencing AND enjoying for the last couple of years, and I know for certain I am not the only one going through this, so I doubt it would be a dream any longer. More of an ever-growing reality, rather. It’s probably just a matter for us, knowledge workers, to define how we would want to make it work for ourselves; basically, have knowledge workers create and define their ideal job role(s) and get down to business. After all, remember, "Individuals will have more freedom and power than ever before."

This morning, the Times of India newspaper was an ad-fest. Someone on the newspaper design team had decided that providing a page that was just a third of the original paper size would be a clever way of introducing a large advertisement before readers even saw the front page. Sounds like a great idea - preserve the sanctity of the front page, and still sell a costly front page ad that readers see first up. Turns out, they're not as smart as they think they are. No one on the Times design team seems to have thought once about the importance of function with form. People read newspapers sitting in their living rooms, in a train or at an airport and they need the convenience to hold the paper open, just as you see me do in the photograph. A page that's just a third of original width means that I can't hold my newspaper open without the inconvenience of one of the sheets continuously falling off. This is annoying; and Times, you've got to know how much I hate you for designing a paper with such little intelligence.Then again, a lot of us tend to design beautifully without much emphasis on utility. In fact, we do it so often that it's unfair to call it design -- it's merely decoration. When I take this mistake to the realms of presentation design, this makes us create presentations that are either peppered with decorative information or decorative visuals. Simplicity however, doesn't need decoration. Simple presentation design demands that we make our idea easy to understand, visually clear and without confusion. In today's blog post, I want to discuss a few ideas that can help you create high-impact, simple presentations that'll make your message stick with your audience. I can't say I always do all of what I'm writing, but I can say for sure that if I did this more often, I'd be a much better speaker by the end of it.Crafting an "Easy to Understand" Message"Making the simple complicated is commonplace; but making the complicated awesomely simple - now that's creativity." - Charles MingusPeople often confuse simplicity with being simplistic or dumbing down your message. You can do no bigger disservice to your topic if you're trying to dumb it down for an intelligent audience. You want to let your topic be as complex as it really is, but your true creativity stems from being able to make it easy for others to understand. A couple of weeks back a colleague and I were talking about the rule of three in presentations. The rule of three is a simple theory that exists from the days of Aristotle and his book Rhetoric. The premise is quite simple, people comprehend, remember and enjoy information that comes in a group of three. There are several examples of this:The Three Musketeers, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Three blind Mice and the Three Stooges are all symbols in popular culture and literature that are memorable and stick in your head from the first time you see them.Several popular quotes and figures of speech incorporate the rule of three. "Friends, Romans, Countrymen..." from Shakespeare or "The father, son and the holy spirit." of the Holy Trinity and "Lies, damned lies and statistics." from Benjamin Disraeli are all great examples we all remember and quote till today.You'll notice that filmmakers structure their movie scripts in a similar manner. Love stories start with how a boy meets a girl and then how their relationship faces some trouble and then how everything works out in the end. In tragedies, I guess everyone dies at the end! On the other hand, thrillers begin with a low-key scene setting, a high tension drama, and then a fast paced closure. Comedies too, follow the rule of three.The 70-20-10 rule of learning, the 90-9-1 rule of online communities and Guy Kawasaki's 10-20-30 rule of presentations are memorable lessons in contemporary business. You hear them once, you don't forget them because of the way they use the rule of three.I could keep giving you examples till I convince you, but I guess I'll rest my case here. The rule of three is a simple idea to apply to your presentations, so you can tell an effective story. Here are some ideas for you to chew on:Consider structuring your presentation with three clear sections. Here are two examples: Problem, Solution and The Way Forward (when presenting a plan);or Current State, How we got here and Lessons Learned (when presenting a review);Think of the three key things you'd like your audience to remember at the end of your presentation. Keep reinforcing those three key messages with examples, anecdotes and exercises in your presentation.When you're teaching introduce no more than three critical tools that your students can use. If you're presenting case studies, present no more than three distinct examples.The rule of three creates a lot of discipline with presentation design. Remember, if all you had to do was convey facts, then an email conveys facts much better than anything else. We know from experience though that people need persuasion. And if you want to persuade with your presentation, remember that storytelling trumps a fact-showcase each time. For some more excellent ideas on how you can tell an memorable story with your presentation, take a look through Scott Schwertly's Storytelling 101slidecast on Slideshare.Design for Visual ClarityPeople who say they "can't think visually" are liars and I don't mean to offend anyone when I say this. We are hardwired to thinking visually and there's enough research from Dan Roam's book that'll help you believe me. If you're one of those people though, think back to when you were a kid. If someone asked you if you could draw, when you were in kindergarten, what would you say? My guess is, you'd say yes. What happened in all these years? Ah! You got an education! And our education has taught us about 1000 word essays, bullet pointed slides and the need for verbose documentation. It's never too late to reach back to the natural, visual thinker amongst us and think of expressing ideas with simple images. And don't do it because I say so on this blog, do it because John Medina in his landmark book Brain Rules says that "vision trumps all other senses". If you hear a piece of information, three days later an average person is likely to remember only 10% of it. Add a relevant image and recall jumps to 65%. Now if that's something you want for your presentation, then you need to design visually -- you have no choice!"Pictures beat text...because reading is so inefficient for us. We have to identify certain features in the letters to be able to read them. That takes time." - Dr MedinaThe good news is that being visual is real easy. You were a kid once (hopefully), so you have the natural tools to be able to visualise things. Stock photography and cheap digital cameras make the availability of high quality imagery a breeze. Add to that tools like Dan Roam's visual thinking codex, and you'll realise how powerful circles, boxes and arrows can be. Take a look at his simple napkin sketches breaking down the US healthcare problem, and you'll see what I'm saying.A word of caution while I say this though -- the computer is only a bicycle for our minds. It can help you polish your idea if you have a good one, but it can't help you come up with the idea itself. Coming up with your ideas at the computer is the biggest presentation smell I can possibly think of. The computer is not only a source of several distractions, when you prepare at your computer you're forcing yourself to multi-task between coming up with your idea and representing it. You're thinking of the kind of image you want, and then you go to search it and then you decide it needs modifications and then you get sucked in and at the same time you're thinking about the order of your slides -- you get the idea, don't you? It's a mental mess. Take time away from your computer. Get some coffee, find a quiet place and plan analog (not digital). Sketch ideas on a notebook, draw out your slide details on index cards or storyboard using stickies. Get involved with your storyline so you have a visual connection with your concept. You'll see that this'll help you design your slides much faster as well! And guess what, by now you'll be so involved with your story that even if there's a catastrophe and your projector stops working you'll be able to tell your story with ease."If the presentation matters, you need time off the grid to prepare." - Garr ReynoldsShowcase an Uncluttered MindWhen I present about presenting or help others craft their presentations, I always mention that what you don't say is far more important than what you do say. When we know something about a topic, we want to say all we can about it. This is natural, and I believe this is a result of a speaker's passion for her topic. The problem is, that human brains aren't hardwired to remember as much in a short timeframe. Do remember that presentations are more about selling and exciting than about educating. If you wanted to teach someone something, you perhaps need to spend some time with that person in a real world context. On the other hand, if you can craft an exciting presentation, you'll encourage people to go out there and explore the topic for themselves. So the decision for you is: do you want overwhelm your audience with all that you've learnt about your topic from a decade's experience OR would you rather sell your topic so well, that you compel them to go learn more? The choice in my opinion, is quite simple - retain the signal, eliminate the noise!I like to take the idea of unclutteredness to a slide level as well. Each slide needs to anchor just one key thought, not more. Don't try to cram everything into one slide! Extra slides don't cost money and depending on your presentation style you could need 10 or 100 slides for a 30 minute talk. Keep your visuals clear, minimise the decoration and focus only on the one message the slide aims for. In fact, I'll go to the extent of suggesting you ditch your corporate template because it gives you the visual clutter you don't want -- the logo, the page numbers, the decoration on top and the bottom. Anything that doesn't add to your message doesn't deserve to be on your slides.I hope some of these ideas help you design a more powerful presentation the next time you're at it. In a subsequent blogpost, I want to deal with presentation stage fright and what you could possibly do to overcome it. I can't promise when that'll come up; you'll just have to wait and watch. If you want it sooner than later, drop a line in the comments section and let me know. Speaking of comments, do remember that your comments are quite valuable to me. So don't be shy to tell me what you thought of this blogpost. I'd love to hear from you.BTW, if you're at DevLearn next week, do make an effort to bump into me. I'm on twitter and if you're around I'd love to catch up with you. I look forward to meeting as many of my small reader base as I can, at what promises to be an awesome conference!© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

It’s hard to believe the last time that I had a chance to drop by over here in this blog to create another entry was a bit over a month ago! My goodness! Where did the time really go over the last few weeks? It looks like the world just decided to spin over and over at double the speed, not allowing us to catch breath and move on nicely with the flow. I bet a bunch of you folks thought I had given up on blogging altogether (once again, after this long hiatus!) and move elsewhere. Well, not really. In fact, if you have been hanging out there on the various social networks that I use on a regular basis you would notice how during that period of time things have been relatively quiet from yours truly. Not because I may be suffering from some kind of social fatigue, but mostly because this time around real life, that parallel world we are all immersed in, decided to make a stand and have a whole lot more prevalence during these last few weeks dictating what yours truly would be doing here and there. The truth is though that things are starting to slow down a bit again, and it is therefore time for me to come back to my usual regular blogging, where I need to do some serious catch-up with what’s been happening in multiple fronts… But, hey, it’s good to come back! Always! Anyway, I am sure at this point in time you may be wondering about what I have been up to in the last few weeks, right? So I thought I would just try to cover some of the things I have been involved with in that time, so you can have a good glimpse as to why it took me so long to come back to the blog and pick up again my blogging mojo. Well, as a starting point, work has continued to increase quite a bit, as we are approaching year end and I am sure most of you folks would understand what I mean with that. So I have been ramping up a bunch of customer meetings and workshops talking about "The Social Enterprise", and, as usual, learning quite a bit about it from other people’s experiences. I am hoping in upcoming blog posts to talk about those experiences and also perhaps share some of the materials I have been using in those events. Those customer meetings and workshops meant I had to do quite a bit of business travelling during that time as well, to combine it all with a good bunch of conferences that I have participated in the last 3 weeks, where I travelled to 5 different cities in 5 different countries. To name: Paris, Brussels, Frankfurt, Zurich and Madrid. So you can imagine how hectic things have been in that front. But this time around things have been a whole lot worse, because during those business trips I didn’t manage to stay connected for long periods of time or, at least, for as long as I would have hoped for, something that towards the end of it all really started bugging me big time, but that’s perhaps the topic of another blog post later on… For now, suffice to say that it wasn’t a pleasant experience, quite the opposite, so, eventually, I needed to have some time off, to chill out, unwind, recharge my batteries and come back in full force. But, once again, life had a big surprise for yours truly that has surely managed to keep me quiet on the Social Web out there for a while, because I didn’t feel it was the right time, and it’s actually this blog post that I am putting together today the one that marks the time where I feel I need to talk about something that has left a big mark in my personal life and that as soon as I share what it is all about there would be a bunch of you folks who could relate to it as well pretty much. If you have been following this blog for a good while now you would notice how early next year it will be 8 years since I moved to Gran Canaria, where I currently live and work. I cannot believe it’s been that long, to be honest, but I guess that time flies when you are having good fun! Anyway, when I came over here I ended up being part of a family: Fosca’s family. Fosca was a black (with a white patch across her chest) flat-coated retriever that surely managed to receive me really well into her family without making much noise, without barking too much either, not even a single complain of having lost some of the attention from others, but showing, from day one that I met her, an unprecedented affection for yours truly that translated into one of those relationships that you know is going to leave a mark for good. Time and time again I used to tweet that I would be going out for a long walk, or a good run, with the dog… Well, that dog was Fosca. Numerous and countless hours were spent together. I became, indeed, part of her family. She was already 5 years old when I met her and it felt like I knew her forever. Her shiny and attentive brown eyes were something to die for! You could never say "No!" to her with those looks she knew how to use them on your to turn around whatever you were going to say…  That’s how she was! Always having plenty of time to dedicate to you, to take you for a walk or two, to make you run for a while to keep you in shape, to share plenty of that affection without even asking anything in return. Just like being part of the family from the beginning! The thing is that in the last year and half things weren’t that well for her; she had to go through a number of operations to remove a couple of tumours and eventually on October 27th 2011, she decided that enough was enough and she needed to move on. So she left us. I would probably never forget the look in her face the day that we took her to the vet. There she was, as lively, agile, playful, charming and entertaining as ever, jumping back and forth, waving her tail without remedy, just as if nothing really happened and she was ready to go for another long walk. Except that was the last time that we would ever see her alive. A very sad day. A few very sad days eventually ever since. Last thing that we wanted for her would be that she would suffer a rather slow and painful last few weeks of her treasured life. So one of the toughest decisions I have ever come across myself in my life had to be done. There was no way back. But being the amazing creature that she is she managed to have the rest of the family sorted out on her way out. They say that there aren’t any coincidences in life, and probably there aren’t. Things happen for a reason and all of the events from that morning certainly confirmed that she was right all along. She needed to find a way for us to move on with our lives, after the wonderful years we had together, and she managed to make it happen in one of the most natural ways you can ever imagine. Serendipity, once again, doing its magic, but with a purpose this time around. Help us move along from our pain of having lost a dear friend for good, only to realise that she will be in our hearts for the rest of our lives! So you can imagine by now how tough it’s been for yours truly to eventually sit down and write about this stuff. It’s something that I am not used to. You probably even never will get used to it. Not that I would want to either! Days have gone by and I still can’t get used to it. I can’t help but think about all of those little precious moments we enjoyed together with the rest of family and the huge amount of joy and tender love and affection she had for everyone! Experiences like the one we have been going through in the last few days are something that I would probably not wish it to anyone who has got a dear pet sitting right next to them as they read these few words. Please allow me to ask you all to go and give them a big hug and a stroke here and there and think of Fosca. Just like we do every single day. It’s been tough, indeed, even as I write this, I just can’t help stopping every so often to clear my watery eyes. But, like she would have wanted, life goes on and as such we also need to keep moving on. Like I mentioned above, she is a part of us, she will always be in our hearts and our fondest memories; she will be pretty much irreplaceable, but she would have wanted us to carry on knowing that at some point we will probably be meeting up again. For now we know she is in a better place, perhaps playing with other dogs, and enjoying the odd bone here and there, and having a blast, enjoying a new life, whatever and wherever that may well be… Now you know why I have been quiet on the blogging front for a while. Now you know why I found it very hard to sit down, start writing about her and share with you a glimpse of what she was like and what she meant for the rest of the family. She was rather temperamental, always difficult to catch up on a snapshot, whatever the angle, whatever the scenario, but over the course of the last 8 years we did manage to take a few pictures of her and to close off this blog entry I thought I would share some of them over here, just like I did on my Google Plus profile on the day it happened, as a way to treasure and honour her friendship and companionship, her loyalty to the whole family, the numerous precious memories that will remain for a long while with all of us and that we lived together over time. In short, here are some pictures of Fosca, our dear and beloved pet that passed away on October 27th… Rest in peace, our dear Fosca! And thanks ever so much for changing our lives the way you did and for making us better people as a result of it! You will never be forgotten. Not now, not tomorrow, not ever! Fosca (1998 - 2011) - R.I.P.

I am with Mark Oelhert this morning in his all day workshop about the tools of the Social Learning Landscape. Mark's focus is to look at social media tools, their impact on an organisation's culture. When Tim Orielly coined the term Web 2.0, he talked about a break in the way we do business. The catch is that you can use social media and Web 2.0 (or 3.0 or X.0 for that matter) in a very Web 1.0 fashion. Mark's in a world of huge scale and classrooms don't scale for him. When Mark came up with the idea of ACQipedia - their community wiki, the first questions that come up are hilarious, "What's the management and approval process for the articles that come up on this system?". The end result of this was that the process they wanted to have became just too heavy for them to manage. So it's quite pointless to use new tools in an old fashion.We're looking at Mark's social media implementation at Defense Acquisition University and while the tools don't look like they're the best designed from a visual standpoint - they definitely look quite awesome from a utility perspective. There's a stackoverflow style Ask a Professor app that allows people to ask questions, get answers and then give people ways to vote on answers and comment on them. Someone in the room also mentioned chacha as a social QnA app. Mark's also deploying SocialText, an enterprise grade social media platform and now that starts to look like what I'd like to see in the enterprise social media space. A cool thing Mark mentions -- social media is not about the tools, it's about the people. The tools are a really small part of the entire big picture and wikis, blogs, microsharing only enable the humans involved. I've written about this - do check it out! "Do you hear that sound ....? That is the sound of inevitability..." That's a Matrix slide Mark has talking about the fact that social media is defining the inevitable capatibilities that enterprise tools will need to have in the next year or so. "We tend to overestimate the effect of technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run." - Roy Amara. I'm stunned to see a Department of Defense portal (screenshot above) which is a social media hub that faces out to Flickr, Facebook and what not. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mullens has a social media strategy. The words at the heart of this strategy are Engage, Align, Drive, Expand. It's about time the enterprise woke up and smelt the coffee.What is social media"Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as a a platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform" - Tim OriellyHere are some characteristics you're likely to notice with social media implementations in the enterprise:They largely use existing technology.Web 2.0 technology is not culturally new when we introduce it.This generation of enterprise software is driven by a consumerisation of the enterprise. These products come to the commercial public for testing and refinement before entering the enterprise.I like Mark's quote - very similar to mine "Think big, start small and move fast!".Image from Kathy SierraThe main barriers for social media implementations are around Fear, Control and Trust, not cost, technology or anything else you'll imagine. Fear takes a fantastic idea, tacks on risk management and makes it an awful product at the end. There's an opportunity cost attached to not doing it though. What's the cost of not collaborating, not finding new business, not knowing what your customers are saying or not knowing how your people really feel? At some point incremental change will only take you so far and you need to make revolutionary change.Control is a strange thing. You're already toast if you have email and phones. The wikileaks fiasco happened just because of a little CD writer. Control is an illusion, because regardless of what you do, bad people will do bad things. What you want is an opportunity to see this in the open so you can actually do something about it. We need to move from control to influence using conversations, storytelling, retrospection and integration. Remember, more eyeballs looking means that you have a greater opportunity to engage and monitor what's going on. "The opposite of imposed structure is not chaos... the opposite of an imposed structure is an emergent structure, one that forms over a time based on the interactions of a lot of people" - Andrew McAfeeTrust - the question is simple. If you've hired people, why wouldn't you trust them? And the fact is that if you trust people, they'll do what they can to keep your brand and to make your efforts a success. And btw, you'll know who the assholes are quite soon as well! Just because you can't see what people are saying that doesn't necessarily mean that they aren't actually saying it. Once it's out there, you'll know how to manage it - the USAF has thought it out, so should you.People resist change when it's insufficiently explained to them. "We participate, therefore we are." - John Seely Brown. Mark advises us to think about wrapping context around your people, not just content - that' why he desists giving contact information and instead gives out social information about himself!Post Tea Break SectionFirst things first - Mark's Social Learning Camp linoit board is your guide to all the resources and case studies that we shared here. I'll catalogue what I like under the social learning tag on my Delicious bookmarks. At this point Mark's showing a SocialText demo from the DAU, which isn't very interesting to me because I've seen it before, but I understand that it maybe cool for the group here. Mark does mention that people's time is a zero-sum game. If you're adding social media, it's got to make something else easier. Does it cut down email by 50%? We also need to remember that a vibrant subject matter network eliminates the bottleneck of individual subject matter experts. It's about the connections not the collections.Mark also mentions that it's not information overload, it's filter failure! Social media needs to integrate into work and build context around people's work so it doesn't become the EXTRA thing to do.Mark's also mentions Kongregate - 35000 people actively engaging on the site at 11:15 on a Tuesday morning seems like an awesome community! It's a site to just play and make games, and there's mystery and curiosity that drives the participation. The problem with traditional course design is that it gives away the mystery right at the beginning! We need to think about social contexts to courses. The Kongregate games have competition built in, a chat that's in the context of the game and pulls people into participating because they want to achieve something by the end of it. This is what goes into the realm of reputation systems on your Enterprise 2.0 implementation. This is a way to drive people's behaviour, just as I'm proud to be #3 at this point on the DevLearn Dr. StrangeLearn game! So for example, if you could put your product or maybe your course into the open and if there was an incentive for people to provide feedback, how quickly would you think your product will improve? In fact, that's the basis on which products like Rypple can change your company's feedback culture if you create the right reasons for people to participate. Now the incentives (this is a bad word in many places), will vary across places -- you've got to find what works for your organisation. That said, you need to find the reasons why people will want to engage and will be interested. We need to think about the social context around learning content!All this said, you can't learn to swim by sitting on the shore. You need to be in social media to understand the phenomenon. I can say this for a fact that after some years of blogging and my presence on twitter I now have acquaintances and people I can lean on all across the world. I've had people saying hello to me just because they follow my blog! Speaking of twitter, Mark introduces the oneforty.com website that gives you all the cool tools that work with this wonderful service.Post Lunch - How do you Get Started?We need to understand that Web 2.0 is a set of tools, social media is a different way of working. There are several ways to get started and Mark seems to be aiming at a checklist for this:You could work on improving your knowledge, skills, etc.You could work on filtering the huge amount of content that we see on the web everyday - curation or filtering is the word.You could work on establishing, building your authenticity and identity.On an organisational level you could look at several different goals:Increasing sales.Breaking down silos.It's not a bad idea to start by just defining what social media, web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 really mean. Outlining the benefits is a good idea!There are a bunch of strategies to consider:How are you going drive this. Bottom up? Top Down?How are your permissions going to work?How are you going to increase awareness and educate people? How will you manage change?How are you going to avoid walled gardens?Last Segment - Wrapping up the LandscapeDuring this segment, we had Kelly Young from Humana showcase their Social Text implementation (they call it Buzz), which has rich profiles, microsharing, wikis and all of the coolness going on. What is really cool is Hive -- an app they've built to indicate individual reputation on the system. This is cool because it's an interesting visual representation of an individual's community. The visual just shows how healthy someone's beehive is given how many people they're connected to, how they're contributing, etc.Mark's now just showing some interesting tools - Quora for example is a cool social QnA tool like stackoverflow. Moving onto other tools such as Mindmeister for collaborative mindmapping and Netvibes for personalisation. What I really found interesting is this diagram on designing social interfaces and this infographic on social media in business and the market share of different tools. Mark is quite upset (understandably so) about the lack of focus on personalisation given how much progress has happened with this concept on the public internet. The elearning debate for example is a place where the industry is getting together to discuss a whole bunch of issues. I would have been disappointed if Mark didn't mention delicious - it's my favourite social bookmarking tool and part of my PKM approach. Mark didn't disappoint me by the way! I'm all for the democratisation of content creation and tools like Rome can help you do that. A tool like hotseat , enables collaborative discussion in and out of the classroom. It's a great way of making the classroom social where computers and mobile phones are encouraged and fits the mindset I updated about some days back. Bloomfire's an awesome social LMS. Curatr's another tool on similar lines, as is Simversity and Schoology. Academic Earth gives you the opportunity to listen to world class lectures online, comment on them and rate them. It's been an interesting day with Mark, he's truly knowledgeable in this space and knows heaps more than most people and has the credibility of doing this in a very very large organisation. He also thinks beyond the surface of the tools, so he's thinking and guiding people in the right direction. I do think this day could have been heaps better as a workshop because that's what I expected. But then again, I think I soaked in a lot just by virtue of his presence, so thank you. None of the material was new, but Mark's affirmations helped me realise that I think right about this.© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

If someone would have told me at the beginning of 2011 that the last three months of the year would have been sheer madness without me no longer of control of things and trying, barely, to keep up with it all, including a massive round of business travelling, I would have told them they would be just plain crazy. No way it was going to happen! No way I would go ahead and tolerate such run-over of one’s work and personal life without trying to do something about it. Ha! Guess life has always been having its own agenda and the only thing we can ever do is probably to try to adjust, be flexible enough, react on time, and take things as they come, hoping the damage would be somewhat limited. Well, that’s probably what I have been doing all of this time lately. And I seem to have survived. Barely. Today it’s my last working day of the year, before I embark on a massive detox, unwinding, relaxing and chilling couple of weeks of a much deserved vacation, if I may add, where I just basically don’t even know where and how to start!! Seriously. Just crazy! Did you notice the last time I created a blog post over here was on 11/11/11 to treasure the living memory of one of those loving creatures one learns to love, appreciate and live with in unconditional terms over the course of the years? By the way, many thanks to all of those folks who have kindly shared their comments and experiences. Even today it’s still helping a lot! Thanks for that, everyone! And did you notice the last time I put together another article before that one? Yes, it was another month in between! See what I meant when I talked about losing control of everything around you and put together the automatic pilot just to try to catch up with things hoping it won’t hurt too much?!? Gosh, exactly! I know some folks out there would relate to that feeling as well… Not enjoyable at all, for certain, but what an adrenaline rush, eh? Anyway, I am back to my usual, regular blogging activities. You may be wondering I may be a bit too insane attempting to pick up my blogging mojo again, while on vacation, but the true thing is that I have missed it. I really have! Yes, you are probably not going to believe it, but not having blogged on a regular basis, like I usually do, over the last couple of months has certainly had an impact on something I never thought I would miss so much till I eventually bumped into it again: writing! I have gone rusty with my own writing. I hardly recognise my blogging style anymore; putting together these few words in much longer sentences than 140 characters, or a couple of paragraphs here and there, is proving to be a challenge. A good one, for sure, but it just feels weird! That’s why I need to come back to the blog and write and pick up my blogging mojo once again, before I decide to give up on it and move on to other things. I just owe it so much to it that I feel is part of me, an integral part, actually, so you can imagine how tough it’s been in the last couple of months to be exposed to hundreds and hundreds of ideas, thoughts, experiences, very interesting readings and many other wonderful conversations and not being able to prioritise good enough to talk and blog about them. I need to get started again. It’s probably going to be like a re-birth. A new beginning. A new start where I may also need to work a bit extra hard to recover my Google juice, as well, because it’s almost gone and I guess I just can’t neglect my business card any longer. And while I thought it was going to be a tougher challenge for me to pick up my blogging again, I must confess that it hasn’t been the case. More than anything else, because of a good number of rather inspiring blog posts that I have bumped into as of late, offering plenty of really good advice and additional reflections and helpful insights as to why blogging still is one of the most powerful personal branding tools out there. Check out, for instance, the blog entries put together by Om Malik, Brain Clark, Dan Frommer, Tracy Gold, Arkarthick, Garth O’Brien, Lisa Barone, and, of course, the always inspiring Darren Rowse for some great articles that would surely help you convince anyone that blogging is here to stay as it is thriving nowadays more than ever! So, I am back! And talking about new beginnings, somewhat new fresh starts, I thought I would get back to blogging today giving folks an opportunity to learn what happened after Fosca’s passing away. There have been many many reasons that have prevented me from blogging in the recent weeks and over the course of time I will be sharing further insights on each and everyone of those, but one that, for sure, has had an impact for yours truly during the course of November and beginning of December was that rather painful experience of seeing a tender, loving and caring pet moving on. Till something else happens… Allow me to introduce you folks to Boira ("Fog" in catalan); the latest addition to the family! A male belgian shepherd dog (Groenendael) that has quickly captured the hearts and minds of the entire household and to no remedy. He is a bit over a year old now, so you can imagine what that entails. Indeed, lots and lots of physical activity all around! In fact, he’s been one of those other reasons why not just blogging, but also being online has had a bit of a hit in my own social presence out there. And I can imagine you know why. Having such an energetic pet in the house can be quite demanding and rather exhausting, and, even more so, lots of great fun! It’s taking me a bit over a month to eventually manage to take some good, decent pictures that I could share along over here, despite taking him out for long walks day in day out. He’s just as temperamental as Fosca was, but equally charming and amazingly smart. So much so, it’s scary some times what he gets to learn doing by just observing and performing once! It’s been lots of good fun. You folks should see the state of our roof; I probably should take a picture or two and share it across, but right now it looks, literally, like a war zone. The plants we used to have there, the sprinkler and hose to water them, and a bunch of other things are now history. All destroyed, all bitten to no end, all gone! So imagine what he’s done inside the house! Like I said, it’s been lots of good fun. And still having a blast with him. A few folks who cared to comment privately on the loss of Fosca mentioning how getting another pet relatively soon to heal the pain gradually were just spot on. She is still very much missed every single day that goes by, but Boira quickly comes up to remind everyone that what matters now is the present, right that moment he wants to live with each and everyone of us. To remind me, as well, in this case, that as wonderful as the Social Web is, it doesn’t help him get out for a walk, of getting fed, of getting lots of attention and playful moments. He just cares about now and if you don’t pay enough attention, he will just move on. So excuse me for a second, while I get the leash, and we go out for a lovely walk to enjoy the beginning of, I am sure, a wonderful holiday! (Thanks much, everyone, for sticking around throughout all of this time, too, and stay tuned for more blog posts to come along in the next few hours … I am not going anywhere and I surely plan to catch up! But with a twist … or two … You will see shortly. It’s good to be back!)

I'm sitting here at the keynote by John Seely Brown (JSB) and am I excited to hear him speak this morning. I picked up his recent book, the Power of Pull for my Kindle and each time I've picked it up for a reading burst, I've struggled to put it down. This is a packed house at this point and we haven't even gotten close to being started. We'll have to go through good old Brent Schlenker's conference kick off and then we have the opportunity to hear the man himself. JSB's keynote is about small moves, smartly made can set big things in motion. John wants to talk about a derivative of the power of pull - a new culture of training in a world of constant change. The ideas are around learning on demand, pull not push and the arc of life learning.The PreambleJohn believes that the old institutions aren't hacking it very well and nor are schools. Something has to give. For a long time the 20th century infrastructure was about scalable efficiency. The idea was to be predictable, hierarchical, controlling, process centric and variance free. This factory model made it's way into education with a predictable curriculum and a one size fits all approach. The 21st century has changed the game completely. The infrastructure is driven by the continual advances in computing, storage and bandwidth. There's no stability in sight. The S curve of the 20th century is now evolving into a rapidly punctuated exponential curve, with little blips that are s-curves in themselves. In a world of increasingly rapid change, the half life of a given skill is constantly shrinking and the predictability of future needs is increasingly less certain. We're having to move from stocks to flows. This means we move from protecting knowledge assets to participating in knowledge flows. This means that our learning strategy moves to having a strong tacit component as against a hoarding mindset of stocking knowledge.We have a crisis of imagination. We need to embrace change, not fear it. We have an explosion of data that's almost incomprehensible. We're creating a lot of information everyday more in every two days than we did from the dawn of man to 2003. In a world of constant change we need to prepare our workorce to deal with this chance. We need to rethink how we learn and deal with the tacit knowledge. We need to think about what we need to learn and how new media is changing the came in fundamental ways. This is where we build a resilient mindset, with an ability to change, adapt, reconceptualise and engage in deep listening with humility. The mantra is - "If I aint learning, it aint fun." We have to create a context where people thrive on change and learning instead of fleeing from it. The Stories - Hard EvidenceJSB is going to tell us about an encounter that helped him shape his thinking. These are stories that have helped him see amazing learning with the help of new media. I love these stories because they're straight from the book. The first story is about a bunch of surfing kids in Maui. No champion surfers ever came from Maui. This story is about Dusty Payne, a kid who wanted to be a hardcore professional surfer. Despite his dad dissuading him, Dusty wanted to put Maui on the surfing map. Dusty found four peers in the same age group and decided to build a scheme of collaboration - the likes of which the world has never seen. Dusty was the first junior champion ever in Maui and came up with a new genre - aerial surfing. Dusty's video of his surfing exploits is pretty darn awesome. This guy is the real deal, as JSB illustrates. Anywhere Dusty goes these days, there are professionals shooting videos of him or getting photographers. He is so incredible that in one of his shots he makes more than what his dad makes in a year. He deals with real estate, and is hugely successful. The serendipity of this is that Dusty is JSB's neighbour when he stays in Maui. The learning community is so strong that all five kids in the group are now world champion level atheletes in the surfing arena. Here are some things they did in their learning community:They are willing to keep failing because they knew they could learn from failure.They collectively analysed each frame of videos of the best surfers across the world.The used video camera to capture and analyse their own moves. They deconstruct their own technique by watching each frame of their work on the beach.They pulled ideas from various sports - windsurfing, skateboarding, mountain biking, motorcross, etc. The cool stuff is they've taken ideas from different domains and applied them to their own domain. They've understood the idea of 'spikes', where they've travelled to the expertise hotspots for surfing across the world to learn their trade. Now they're a bit of a spike in themselves.This is an example of deep collaborative learning with each other. They are people that are passionate about a trade and they chase extreme performance with a deep questing disposition. They learn themselves from the things that others are doing around them. They have a commitment to indwelling -- they soak up the world around them.The second story JSB has is about WOW - The World of Warcraft. It's a massively multi-player online role-playing game (MMORPG). There's a reason we need to care. This is the first domain where we've discovered a place where we don't have diminishing returns, we have exponentially increasing returns. The sense of joint collective activity is pretty awesome as one of the TWU students pointed as well. The core of the game is really more the social life on the edge of the game. The edge is often called a knowledge economy. WOW is way too complicated to play without complex analysis tools and dashboards, but these dashboards are tailored to each player to measure their own performance and are a key to their mastery at the game. This is quite curious -- don't managers develop dashboards to look at their people? This is obviously a game changing way to self-reflect. The cool thing that goes is after action reviews -- this is very in tune with the Agile Retrospectives idea. This is an example of blending the tacit and the cognitive. This is collective indwelling and reflection. While they marinate and learn in a social context, they also reflect together when they're done, so they can learn from each other. This is the way grandmasters learn -- they practice with peers and then reflect on what they did. This is the way hackers practice their trade.There's an incredibly rich knowledge economy around this game. On a typical night there are about 10-15000 new ideas coming up about the game. There are blizzard forums, databases, blogs, wikis, videos and what not. The way people absorb all of this is that guilds (player teams) self-organise into being a knowledge refining community to work together, curate content and then collectively learn amongst themselves. This is the idea of a personal learning network (PLN) IMO.The Levels of PullWe need to think about three ways of pulling learning:Access: The ability to find, learn and connect with people, products and knowledge to address unanticipated needs that hit us in the face! I have a problem, I search, I find, I learn, I'm happy.Attract: This is where we need to find something that we don't even know that we need to know. This is where Google fails and that's why I don't like it much for social learning in the enterprise, because it doesn't support serendipitous learning. This is where we get out of our comfort zone and get to expose ourselves to weird but interesting ideas.Achieve: This is where we pull out of each of us and our institutions our full potential. We need to harnessing network effects where the more people that participate, the more the global returns."Accessing and attracting have little value unless they are coupled with a third set of practices that focus on driving performance rapidly to new levels. These practices involve participation in, and sometimes orchestration of, something we call "creation spaces"—environments that effectively integrate teams within a broader learning ecology so that performance improvement accelerates as more participants join." - John Seely BrownThe purpose of the 21st century firm is to build talent. As we learn from others, they learn from us -- this accelerates bootstrapping in an ecosystem. The reason we join a firm today is because we get to learn faster than we would learn by ourselves. This is why people join Google or ThoughtWorks for that matter. HR/ Training shouldn't be an add on - we need to get a seat a the table and find a way to influence business through learning. Otherwise we and our organisations don't stand a fighting chance.© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

While everyone else out there on the Internet Blogosphere gets busy blogging away their predictions for 2012 around the world of Social (And whatever other word you would want to insert right after!), Technology, the Internet and whatever else you can think of, like it seems to be happening in a rampant fashion year after year even to the point of getting people a bit tired of it all, I think I am going to spare you folks with this blog entry on my own predictions for next year and I am going to concentrate instead, perhaps, on putting together a blog post where I could reflect on what’s happened in 2011 and how that will shape up my overall personal experience for everything social. Like I have mentioned in a previous blog post, the last 3 months have been perhaps a bit too hectic both at work and on a personal level, but that doesn’t mean that I haven’t had enough time to go and reflect on a few things and, most importantly, on how I feel about the overall Social Web and the Internet / Technology in general. Now, originally, I thought about putting together a massively long entry over here, but then I realise it may have well been a bit too tiring and exhausting going through it in a single go. So I have decided to split it up in a number of articles where I will also try to hint along how I will be re-shaping up my own Social Web strategy, specially, after the last few months where I have been more away from it than attached to it and somehow it’s helped me get a clearer vision of where I would want to go and where I feel things will go. Will there be convergent paths, you think? Hummm. Maybe. May be not. Let’s see. During the course of 2011 I have embarked on a whole bunch of business travelling. A lot more than in 2010, for sure! And not just to present, attend or participate in various different conference events, but also, the vast majority to go and visit IBM customers to share the experiences of what a socially integrated enterprise is all about. You could say that my favourite topic du jour all along has been The Social Enterprise. And still going strong, if I look into what lies ahead for 2012 where that travelling agenda is going to be even more hectic! But more on that shortly… A couple of folks though from my closer social networks keep wondering how I do it. Where do I get all of that energy and extra effort to never get tired of it and continue to move along. To be honest with you, I hate travelling. I have been travelling for most of my life, and, definitely, for most of my business life and biz travelling is no longer what it used to be. Quite the opposite! It’s no longer a pleasure, but a big drain on everyone. And perhaps on a separate blog post I will share how I really feel about business travelling altogether and what I would like to see change for upcoming years to bring back that pleasurable experience. I know a few of you would consider that impossible to achieve, but may be not. We shall see. I don’t think it’d be that difficult to just change a few things and make a big difference … Anyway, the main reason why I never get tired of travelling is because it gives me an opportunity to do two things on a more or less regular basis; two things I was not aware of till I eventually fully experienced them this year plentiful. First, I love people! I have met so many wonderful folks this year, good old friends, and plenty new ones, who have surely make up for all of that hassle and burden of travelling, that it’s become an entire new experience where constant learning, collaboration and open knowledge sharing has happened at such deep levels that some of those conversations are still spinning in my head shaping up a lot of what I use to take the world for. Human beings were designed to be around other human beings, to socialise face to face, to learn by simply being around one another, to be challenged in healthy dialogue by those folks who always want to improve things, who want to make things better, who want to work smarter, who want to really create and leave behind an impact for which they would be remembered. It’s their legacy. Our legacy. They are the optimists, the outrageous, the heretics, the free radicals, the rebels at work who are constantly looking up for each other wanting to create and spark that energy, that brilliant idea, that can certainly change the world as we know it. And throughout 2011 I had the huge opportunity to meet, and learn!, from a whole bunch of them! And big time! So much so that plenty of those conversations have certainly changed the way I view things, both at work, and in my private life. The best part of it is that they have also helped me learn about something very important; the second thing I mentioned above earlier on. The Social Web. Yes, we all know it from before. We all realise how critical and paramount the world of the Social Web has become not just for businesses, but also for all of our societies. For ourselves. If anything, because of a single, and rather simple, reason: the amplifying effect of our physical relationships and mutual bonds. The Social Web is a wonderful thing! It’s changed my life and probably the lives of millions of people out there as well, but the main reason why that’s happening is not because of the unprecedented penetration and broadband reach it’s been enjoying in our society, touching every single aspect of our lives, but more because it’s helped us become even more connected than ever before. It’s helped amplify our relationships, our friendships, our reach, our connectedness, our common conscious (and unconscious) knowledge to such deeper levels that there is no way back. And probably there shouldn’t be, because all of this interconnectedness is helping us out to become better humans to our own abilities and expertise. Throughout 2011 I have had the great opportunity to experience that; to realise that while the Web is there, there are many many more important things, specially, when that Internet access is patchy and you have got that unique opportunity to meet up, face to face, that huge amount of talent, and smart people, who you could never get tired of learning from. In the past I used to neglect that to a certain level and in the last few months, definitely, the last three, that being disconnected from the online world on a rather regular basis has helped me scratch that urge of meeting up people face to face and start a conversation and converse no matter for how long. And, boy, has that made a difference?!?!  The amplifying effect from the Social Web kicks in fully after you have met those people and exchanged a few ideas, you come back home and you realise you want to keep the dialogue going. And with all of these social tools at our fingertips, it’s never been easier. Quite the opposite. There used to be a time, in my last 10 years of having been exposed to and involved with social networking and social software, where every time I would go and meet new people, specially, at customer events, workshops, seminars and whatever else, to talk about The Social Enterprise, I used to resort to those lovely, rather informative, perhaps a bit overwhelming short video clips that tried to explain the impact of Social Media in our world. Pretty much like a la Did You Know? fashion. The latest one I have bumped into is this fantastic 2 minute and 45 seconds YouTube video clip under the suggestive heading of "The World of Social Media 2011": For those folks who are rather familiar with Social Media, they probably wouldn’t learn much about it from just watching it. However, it’s worth while. It will help provide you with an opportunity to discover how the Social Web has moved way and beyond the tech world and dived in, big time, in every person’s life, whether tech savvy or not. It’s become so pervasive throughout the world that in all of my biz travelling this year I didn’t have a need to use these sort of videos any longer. The conversation has stepped up. Everyone knows about the Social Web. Even folks who not so long ago were technophobes and who, right now, are in full discovery mode trying to figure out how to best make use of it for their work, as well as their personal lives. What’s my conclusion from all of this? Well, as a starting point, one gets to realise that social networking has been there  way before the Internet came into existence a few decades back. That personal (business) relationships, when carried out, nurtured and cultivated face to face, are as good as it gets. That the Social Web is not a substitute for those physical relationships but an augmentation factor that no-one can, or should, ignore to make them even better and more trustworthy. That eventually, the Social Web is unstoppable at this point in time and that those businesses that are still blocking the access to social networking sites, or the whole conversation around Social, are just missing a huge and an unprecedented opportunity to shape-up and redefine themselves to become even profitable, sustainable, caring, nurturing, purposeful and meaningful businesses. The Workplace of the Future. Our future. Now, who dares to ignore and neglect that in 2012? Any takers? I hope not, but if you are let me share a couple of final words with you: Good Luck! (You are going to need it … )   PS. I am sure you may have noticed how at the beginning of this blog post I have included a whole bunch of links to blog entries and articles about some of the most interesting readings I have bumped into around those 2012 predictions and for some of them I may be touching base on them and for some others I think they would be relevant to see how far they may have set the stage into what lies ahead … Hope you folks enjoy reading them just as much as I did while putting together this blog entry.

I've just scrambled into Jane Hart's session about the state of learning in the workplace today. This is a guide in soundbites and images and is a way to summarise the excellent guide on Jane's website that a lot of us have already seen. I'm a self-confessed fan of the incredible thinking that the Internet Time Alliance put out, so I am sitting through the session even though I already comprehend the material.The traditional approach to workplace learning has been about managing and controlling the learning experience, keeping it really top down. There are 10 factors that are shaping the new era of workplace learning.The 10 Factors1. Recognition that informal learning is a key part of workplace learning In Jay's words, it's not all about classes and courses. "Informal learners usually set their own learning objectives. They learn when they feel a need to know. The proof of their learning is their ability to do something they could not do before". As Harold Jarche says, "Work is learning, learning work." The big folly of a lot of thinking is that several people are talking about formalising informal learning and they're just missing the point because then it doesn't remain informal anymore. As you may remember from one of my recent blogposts, Charles Jennings is a big proponent of the 70-20-10 thinking.2. There are deficiencies in the formal learning modelMost formal learning is content heavy and interaction poor. It provides little opportunity for practice in context and for reflection. In other words, a large amount of formal learning is a cost rather than a benefit. There's an inherent inertia in formal learning approaches. It takes time and effort to design, develop and deliver learning content. Speed-to-competence is always a compromise.3. Social media is having a big impact in the workplaceJane runs an activity to evaluate the top 100 tools for learning each year and this year, the top 9 tools are all social tools, which shows a huge impact of social media to drive learning. This is a huge shift which we need to be aware of and catch up with.4. Increasing consumerisation of ITEnterprise systems are lagging behind, so people are using their own tools and devices. L&D isn't quick to respond to people's needs so people just help themselves. Individuals easily use familiar tools and they have their ways to circumvent ways to block their access to such resources.5. Merging of personal, working and learning toolsThe usual criticism of a lot of social media is that these aren't learning tools. This is the coolness of the phenomenon, where work, learning and personal life are converging in a very special way.6. Individuals are doing their own thingPeople are going to Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook to tap into their social network to learn whether you have an LMS or not. Since the L&D department isn't as fast and the knowledge is out their, people are learning outside the learning department. So there is the top down training that exists, but there's the larger share of the pie which is about working and learning where things are really bottom up where people are using social media to learn with each other.The idea is to avoid the word "learning" and to move towards "working smarter". "The only people who can own social learning are the individuals who thmeselves are learning each day from one another, based on the work and in the flow of work." - Marcia Conner7. Autonomy has a powerful effect on individual performance and attitudeThe opposite of autonomy is control. We need to give people autonomy to manage their own learning, because that leads to total engagement. 8. Today's learning systems are not appropriate for the new era of workplace learning. There's a huge problem with the current (or really the past) era of learning systems. The Great LMS Debate has thrown a lot of light on this issue. We need to integrate learning into work instead of putting it away in a system where it becomes nothing more than an information refrigerator. We need to find a way to integrate learning into our collaboration platforms. 9. The changing learning landscape is part of a much wider changing business environmentWe need a new paradigm for getting things done and for empowering a new breed of employee that does not function well in a heirarchal top down, highly controlled environment - Michael Lascette. Clark Quinn has talked about this here. 10. Senior decision makers think there's a need for change in L&DMost leadership respondents have mentioned that their L&D function is slow to respond, that they're stuck in business as usual and that they lack confidence in their L&D strategy. The fact is that if your CEO doesn't believe you make a difference, there will be a time you'll get cut one way or the other.We need a shiftThe ITA has been talking a lot about the shift to collaborative learning in the workplace as you'll notice from the above diagram. Jane is giving out three practical steps towards the new era of workplace learning:We need to encourage people and support individuals and teams to address their own learning and performance problems. We need to let go, give up control and move into creating the context for learning instead of having a huge focus purely on content. An easy way to do this is to ensure that we don't ban social media in the enterprise. Jane has an article about why you shouldn't ban social media - she has 10 reasons for you! People are doing their own thing to learn anyways, so blocking them means blocking their growth.Provide performance consulting services. We need to do training only when we've addressed other barriers to performance. The tools are secondary to the purpose that you're approaching. Harold Jarche has written an awesome article about how you need to approach problems with a consulting mindset than with a training mindset. Only a lack of skills and knowledge warrants training. We need to provide advice on appropriate tools and systems. To move from a point of top down control to a point of bottom up control, we need a way to be able to facilitate it through technology. We need an LMS to do the formal stuff, but we need to focus on the 70% and 20% of the 70-20-10 pie to ensure we're making the biggest impact.This is a pretty cool wrap up of the stuff the ITA often talks about. Liked the summary and the fact that most of the alliance was around. It was fun meeting Jane and Harold in person for the first time.© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

It’s rather interesting to see the kinds of conversations that one gets to embark on in the offline social networking world while on a couple of week vacation break (By the way, hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas time, as well as a Happy, rather Prosperous and very Healthy New Year 2012!!). It’s even more interesting when some of those conversations have been going on around what we have done and learned in 2011 and right off it all turns into personal reflections for what’s happened throughout the year. Just like in the virtual world, I guess, like I am doing with this series of blog posts. So continuing further with that set, just the other day one of my offline good friends asked me what I thought was a rather interesting twist, which would be a good intro for this article as well. He asked me what was the biggest disappointment I experienced in the past year that I could have done without. My short answer: Technology. The long answer: here is why. Technology is a wonderful thing, don’t get me wrong, there is no doubt about it. I am sure we all agree with that statement. It’s helping shape up and change radically all aspects of our society as well as the corporate world. It’s helping us understand how we can keep striving successfully for the ultimate goal for every knowledge worker out there: work smarter, not necessarily harder. It’s essentially helping change who we are and what we do. Yet, some times it’s utterly disappointing to see how far we are from what we all know we could have at this age in 2011. This year we are about to finish has been an incredibly hectic and exciting year with plenty of amazing happenings and unforgettable events altogether. For me, it’s been one of the busiest and most fruitful, too! With plenty of business travelling and frenzy at work one learns to build a certain level of expectations that you would want to see met, so you can keep up being rather productive and effective, which is what matters at the end of the day. Specially, nowadays: effectiveness continues to beat efficiency any and every time. But it looks like we are another year onwards and we are not there just yet. Let’s see it with the most crippling example I can think of, based on my own first hand experiences … If anything, 2011 has been the Year of Mobile. And, finally, if I may add that, too, myself! But has it really been that way? Well, in my experience, it hasn’t. Another year gone by and another big disappointment, because we keep suffering from the very same problem we have been having for the last 5 years, when we were first commenting on the huge opportunity for the mobile world to disrupt everything around us. We keep seeing a good amount of tremendously powerful reports and insights on why every year we seem to be experiencing the year of mobile and yet, it just doesn’t happen. At least, in 2011 with yours truly. Yes, I do have a smartphone (An iPhone 4S which I love to bits, too!); yes, I do have an iPad (My favourite tablet by far and for a great number of reasons that I have recently picked up, once again, on my Google Plus profile, but more on that shortly…); and yes, I do have a MacBook Air, which is as light as you probably could get nowadays with heavy computing tasks. Yes, in short, you could say that I’m a fully empowered mobile worker. I work from home most of my time; I travel quite a bit to conference events, summits, customer meetings, workshops, seminars, etc. etc. I work quite often at airports, at hotels and various other locations. Work is me, I’m work. I am a road warrior, too, I suppose, with a clear mission: work happens around me. It’s no longer a physical location, but more of a state of mind. So my expectations have become rather high when I want technology to work just like I want it to. Alas, it just doesn’t happen. It keeps failing time and time again, which is rather disappointing, to say the least, if not too frustrating altogether most of the time. Over the course of the year, and as I keep living "A World Without Email", I have had a growing and continued need to stay connected for as long as I possibly could. Living on the Social Web does that to you; you need to be constantly connected. Social networking tools do not understand the concept of working offline, apparently, or so it seems, so you expect that technology will come up to the rescue, yet, it keeps failing. Why?, you may be wondering, right?, since we are just about to finish another "Year of Mobile"? Well, hardware wise I would probably venture we are there and pretty nicely: with smartphones and tablets taking the enterprise by storm it’s no surprise how keen and very much willing knowledge workers are to even bring in their own devices at work. Yet, we keep failing to deliver at one key issue that most people keep ignoring time and time again and not even sure why: Connectivity. Or, better said, lack of reliable, scalable and sustainable connectivity. The telcos. The (mobile) carriers. I am not sure about you, folks, but that has been *THE* major challenge for me for 2011. Trying to stay connected, while on the road, to keep being productive with the Social Web. Time and time again, while attending & presenting at conference events, for instance, access to the Social Web has been rather patchy, whether through free wi-fi hotspots, or even paying for the connection it hasn’t worked the way I would have wanted it to. In fact, while I’m writing this blog entry I am realising one of the various reasons why there have been long periods of silence on this blog, and various other social networking sites, was just, basically, because I was not connected to the Web or because it was just so slow that it was rather unbearable to try to get anything done. Ever tried connecting to the Web from your hotel room, whether on a free wi-fi or paying up to 22€ per day to just reach out to the Web? Yes, exactly!, that is what I mean! A complete waste of time, energy and effort just increasing the levels of frustration more and more by the day. I still find it quite amazing what a huge business opportunity there is out there and yet no-one seems to want to pick it up accordingly. But you may be wondering, hang on for a minute. Both your iPhone 4S and iPad are 3G enabled; and you also have got a 3G modem you can use for the MacBook Air; doesn’t that help out a bit? Well, not really. Yes, I do have that extra kind of connectivity, but, once again, it hasn’t delivered really much. As a starting point, as soon as I leave Spain, which is when most of my business travelling kicks in, I’m out of 3G coverage, as well as good use of the 3G modem, since I don’t want to incur in the ridiculously high costs of international roaming, which, to a certain point, are starting to become a joke, on all of us, poor end-users (even on the literal sense, too!). So that leaves me out to use the 3G and the 3G Modem while in Spain, right? Yes, but the results are equally disastrous. Every month I’m paying about 120€ to 130€ (Yes, I know, very pricey!) just to stay connected and while one expects to be able to make it, the reality is that 3G coverage and broadband penetration in this country has got a lot to be desired for. For many times I have been travelling to mainland Spain, to rather big cities, right in the city center, and yet the 3G connection is incredibly poor. Knowing that the Social Web is just out there, waiting for you, and yet you can no longer reach it as you would have liked can surely be a rather disappointing experience and what a complete turnoff! Yet, it looks like no-one is doing much to try to improve things where I feel should be much improved. Stop us, end-users, to keep being ripped off time and time again by telcos and whatever other mobile carriers, for very poor connectivity, while paying huge costs for it. No wonder I have been rather frustrated throughout the year with regards to how little I have remained hooked up to the Social Web over the course of time. I keep wondering when will the European Union start coming along to protect our rights to information and staying connected without having to pay through our noses and fight the good fight. It’s starting to become a far too frustrating experience altogether, so when I bump into rather interesting and enlightening short video clips like "Mobile Year in Review 2011" one cannot but have a chuckle or two thinking how, unless things change drastically with our current telcos and their abusive policies, we will keep longing for that "Year of Mobile" to kick in at some point in time in the next 5 to 10 years. Right now, it’s not even there, by far! Ohhh, and that’s not all of it, on my next blog post I will share with you folks Part II of why technology has been the biggest disappointment for yours truly for 2011. And this time around social technologies themselves. Then there will be a final follow-up article where I will share further insights on what I plan to do in 2012 and beyond to try to tame that frustration and attempt to get the most of what it is still a rather poor experience of interacting with technology and the Social Web. It’s going to be a revolution, for sure, but one where I am no longer willing to pay through my nose for it, even if that means changing radically what the Social Web experience has been like for yours truly in the last 10 years … I think it’s a good time now to make a stand and take back what has always belonged to us. The Web and the use we make of it.