I do have a prior engagement – well a committment actually, which is why I shan’t be at the LPFC. Whether you can or can’t – just make sure you follow THE RULES.
All posts by Lloyd
Sales, sales and more sales
Sat and listened to the rock-and-roll sales training spectacular that is Mike Southon‘s Sales on a Beermat. Well worth the time and effort to get to Ludgate Circus for 08:45. Great fun and extremely useful – if you have to do sales and you haven’t had this experience then get onto ecademy and do it, as soon as you can.
Luckily, I already had a coffee booked in with my favourite customer, Stuart Dickenson of DfES. The time in Victoria St *$s flew by, catching up on how the rest of the 5-year-strategy launch went and what’s going on now.
On the way back I jumped off the bus in Trafalgar Sq and walked up to the office – snapping for the photoblog as I went.
Perfect Path Creed Redux
Thinking about elevator pitches this morning – of which more later.
OK – I sell knowledge management consulting. That means I do workshops, awaydays, mentoring, interim management, public speaking and some poor clients occasionally commission me to write them a report.
But what differentiates me from other KM consultants who do those things? Well I am a bit different, personally – I don’t know how to describe it but you get a flavour of that from reading what I write here. And I think a bit differently (I swing wildly along the techno-fetishist fluffy bunny spectrum).
I also mainly help public sector clients – and the things they need are sometimes very different from commercial folk (though often frighteningly similar).
The creed is getting refined and this is how I wrote it today as the elevator doors squeak to a close behind me:
I believe that much of the pain we feel as managers in modern organisations comes from trying to apply management thinking and methods that are 100 years out of date and which were developed to solve a very different set of problems.
My understanding is that nobody has worked out a one-size-fits-all set of techniques for managing people in knowledge-based organisations and that it’s possible (probable?) that no such o-s-f-a set exists.
What I do is help people work out what are the right techniques for them and their colleagues to use today and to see how they can really use them for organisational benefit – however they may perceive that.
My experience has been that this usually requires them to find ways of being comfortable with their own creativity, and to nurture the creativity of others around them, while at the same time coming to feel at home with technology that is evolving very very quickly.
“ding”
interactiveknowhow
A sunny trip on the No 19 to Upper Street to meet with Jemima Gibbons of Interactive KnowHow (or however it is, or isn’t capitalised). We sat and chatted in Tinderbox, which has a weird retro-modern feel with natural (bright day in London in October)light at the back from skylights.
We chatted about workshops, conversation spaces, training and awayday styles, the difficulty of making money from ideas and the greying of copyright (interestingly after the Creative Commons session earlier) and intellectual property rights. We also strayed into nurturing personal creativity (for business types) and the future of broadcasting – the effect that lowering of barriers to entry might have. V pleasant.
Creative Commons UK-style
Just back from the “launch” (well a great opportunity to listen to Larry Lessig in the flesh for an hour anyway) of Creative Commons licences for the UK at UCL. Thanks to Louise for publicising the event.
Interesting to hear the various reactions to Remix Culture and what to do about it.
Useful fact: The licences will be released on the website for use on 1st November 2004, but in the meantime feel free to comment and contribute however you can.
Most persuasive argument: actually it was when asked what was the most persuasive argument. Larry said “People aren’t persuaded by arguments. They’re persuaded by examples.” So go give examples.
Biggest Laugh: the atmo lip-synch of George & Tony – when Tony starts singing.
Old Ghosts and Happy Memories
To the Audit Commission‘s new offices in Millbank Tower for lunch today with Megan Meredith. Waiting in the space age reception I managed to say hello to Cathy Coyle and Bryn Morris, both of whom were relieved to be this side of the huge office move. Megan and I chatted over lunch about knowledge management at the Commission and how much has (and hasn’t) changed since I was there.
In the cafe we went to, bumped into Lisa Newton so popped upstairs to see her after lunch – the Taxonomy project lives on and has been implemented in the intranet, but is now being reviewed to make even more usable. Dropped by John Sandhu’s desk who revealed that he’s and avid (comparatively speaking) Perfect Path reader and had been particularly enamoured of my “100 posts I’ve never really written, but will when I get time”. I urged him to comment on the post which one he’d most like to hear.
I sneaked into the Tate on my way back to the office and found a room to sit in that wasn’t full of excited schoolchildren. Before I knew it, my sketchbook was in my hand and the following scene emerged so I had a longer stay than originally planned.
Btw, the bird trying on the crown is my murky reproduction of John Singer Sargent’s Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth
The olden days
Nostalgia lovers – and those new to my world, can now see the old LloydDavis.co.uk pages on this server. Yes, that’s still the mobile number, the e-mail is at perfectpath.co.uk
Egogooglebombing – now that’s a mouthful
I’m pleased to announce that Perfect Path will not be donating one single drop of it’s precious Googlejuice to Suw‘s continued ramblings on Simon Pegg & Shaun of the Dead.
I urge you to not.. to do.. to not do.. that thing… either
New Workshop Idea
A workshop/course/event/need-that-I-could-fill thing is forming in my brain.
The potential punters are – anyone who struggles with the difficulty of working in an organisation, anyone who feels that they haven’t quite got what they need, and no matter how many times they try to do what they know is the right thing to do, they hit a brick wall (a cultural one usually)
The basic ingredients are:
1. Coming to accept and understand how the world has changed, but business hasn’t caught up yet. That brain has replaced brawn and that looking after your brain, using it to make new stuff and connecting it to other brains is the name of the game. That while we continue to manage organisations in the same way that we learned to manage coal mines, steel mills, and automobile production lines, we will continue to hurt inside.
2. Celebrating and nurturing your own creative ability and that of others as the number one neglected bit of knowledge work. Exploring how to do this in whatever medium rings your bell.
3. Learning to be comfortable with the new tools (the old-new tools of browsers, websites and search engines, the new-new tools of blogs, wikis and social networking and whatever is coming just around the corner)
Any takers? How long would you like to spend on this – is it a day, a week, a lifetime? How much would you pay for a day of it?
Ideal Government Project
The Ideal Government Project says:
“The UK is spending a lot of money and effort computerising government. Let’s get a clear idea what we want it to look like when it’s done. Dream a little, and help set out the wish list. Otherwise we might end up with something we did not want.”
Louise helpfully points out that it would be a good start if the public sector learned a little, and made use of the clever people in other sectors who’ve already been there, and I agree, though I do (naturally ) have some sympathy for the managers (as opposed to the politicians) who are implementing e-government.
It’s a bit annoying with the site as it stands that there’s a hurdle to contributions – it maybe is just my perception and it may be really simple, but it’s simpler for me to blog here and link than to request the ability to post something longer and broader than a comment on something someone else has said.
William Heath tells an interesting story about data use in Finland. My take on government’s use of data about me is this: the problem is not in initial capture and first use, it’s about what happens to it then, how secure it is, how I get to know what it is, how I get to change it if it’s wrong, how I get to change it if it changes, whether I get a choice about whether it’s stored or not, whether I have any control over who else sees it and whether I have any control over what use they put it too – and then the chain of people who might pull it out of the place I put it and so on and so on and so on. My life is too short for me to be carrying out that sort of information management for the benefit of government – and I don’t want to pay for an army of civil servants who will manage it, imperfectly, on my behalf.
Even if this were fixable, I then come to the fact that I know that judgements will be made about me based on an abstraction (some data or combined information drawn from data about me) and that no matter how well managed it is, that sooner or later that judgement will be wrong, and that the wrongness of that judgement may have a wide range of implications for my personal life, by business, my career and my financial security. It matters not whether the judgement is wrong because the data’s wrong or the process for making the judgement is wrong – I want to be judged for who I really am, today, rather than the part of the story that I happened to hand over four years ago, while I was hungover.
So that’s one point!! I don’t want the sort of customer service from Government that I get from NTL, Northern Rock and anyone else who makes business decisions about me based on the numbers, rather than on a personal contact with me.
NEXT. (You shouldn’t have asked, you really shouldn’t)
I want less of a reliance on data to judge organisations (yes, those who know what I’ve done in a previous life will find this hypocritical), I think we had to go too far in order to know we’d gone too far – now it’s time to pull back a bit.
I want e-gov projects to be right-sized and not doing stuff that could be better done by a private concern, with a good balance of bottom-up-ness and top-down-ness – I don’t want everything to be one-size-fits-all and I don’t want it to be entirely “customised” to me (see above) – can we spell “intelligent” and “diverse”?
I want projects to be grown up about risk and unafraid to be imperfect.
I want projects to be open and accountable and I want some assurance that the money is being spent wisely, without auditors sitting on the shoulder of every project manager who then has to jump through a hundred hoops.
And then I want every single project and every single public servant to understand that installing the technology won’t make the change all by itself – you will have to do the job of government differently, you will have to accept that times have changed and what really open government really means – it’s scary and unpredictable, but much more worthwhile than hiding behind those bomb-proof curtains.
Yes we will moan, yes we will groan, yes we will say you’re wasting our money, yes we will point out the obvious solution that you’ve entirely missed. And yes, we will be wrong too and sometimes rant without good reason – but that’s what people who are paying for a service are entitled to do.
So I guess I’d better stop here and get on with my tax return.
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