I’d like to look at the hypothesis that Podshows (and any other schemes like it that may come along) are more likely to restrict and reduce creativity than they are to increase it.

There are a number of factors involved here:

1. Power – the delivery mechanism that podcasts use can be entirely decentralised – I am responsible for the distribution and delivery of my podcasts. The distribution system is available to many people for relatively low cost. Some intermediaries have provided added-value hosting services, but essentially the model remains the same. This means I have greater power – I can decide when to create, what to create, what to include and what to exclude. I can choose to work with other people or to work alone. I can choose to re-use and add value to existing material or strike out and create entirely new material. Compared to an environment where I am entirely dependent on a corporation that has to continue to invest in an expensive distribution infrastructure, I am set free, my creativity flourishes, the only critics I listen to are those I choose to.

2. Courage – the freedom and unstructured nature of podcasting literally encourages me to have a go. It doesn’t matter if I screw up. A radio station or music company that has overheads to cover and shareholders to satisfy is likely to be more risk averse than I am purely as an individual – I have much less to lose. If I depend on the corporation I have to take on some of their fear of failure. Creativity thrives on the courage that comes from having nothing to lose.

3. Good buddies – Podcasting has generated a sense of camaraderie, we’re all in it together, we share ideas and formats – we comment on what works and what doesn’t – we forgive eachother’s mistakes, we snigger at some, but we also build each other up. We share hints and tips on equipment and software. Some naughty people even share software that they’re not allowed to share by law. We collaborate more than we compete. I don’t create podcasts to stop you listening to someone else’s, I create them to express my voice and my voice gets richer when I know I’m talking to people who appreciate what I’m doing and are doing the same thing. Greater creativity comes from a confident enriched voice.

4. This stuff flows quickly and easily. I podcast from London in the UK. I have listeners in London, I also have listeners in Continental Europe and across North America. They all have equally fast access to what I create and I have equally fast access to what they create (as long as we’re awake at the same time). So we hear each other faster, we feed back on each others work faster, we learn from each other faster – what works, what doesn’t, what’s been tried before, what hasn’t. And if I want to make something quick and dirty and get it out NOW, I can – I don’t have to wait for someone else to greenlight me.

5. Diversity – you can make a podcast about anything you like – you cannot make a radio show or sell CDs in Woolworths about anything you like. Anyone with access to modern computing equipment and the internet can make a podcast – a much smaller number of people can create a radio show or sell CDs in Woolworths. Podcasting can be done by atheists, buddhists, muslims, jews, christians, hindus, daoists and slightly worried agnostics. Podcasting can be done by english speakers, dutch speakers, french speakers, swahili speakers – heck, Suw even did one in Welsh! Podcasting can be done by incredibly bright people and incredibly stupid people. It can be done by Sid in the postroom or by the CEO. Your skin can be any shade between Ronald McDonald and Laurence Olivier as Othello. You can podcast regardless of any disability (except one that precludes you from making any sounds at all). In fact it’s better if we are different, if we’re all the same, if we all think the same, we all do the same and we continue to do the same again and again – creativity thrives on diversity and on people who are allowed to be themselves.

These I see as steps forward along a path. That’s how I see things, it just is, that’s why I called my company and my blog Perfect Path – it’s the path we tread between chaos, disorder and stagnation.

I’m not saying that this new model will take us back to where we started, but I think what I’ve heard so far is sufficient to show that the Podshow model pushes us back towards the position that we used to be in before we had podcasts. So what do you think?

• Does the Podshow model further de-centralise power or does it concentrate it in fewer hands?
• Does the Podshow model encourage new talent to have a go or does it introduce the need to manage risk and fear of failure?
• Does the Podshow model create richer human relationships between podcasters or does it foster separation and competition?
• Does the Podshow model make it easier and quicker for everyone to make podcasts or does it introduce stalling mechanisms?
• Does the Podshow model celebrate difference and let people be themselves or does it value sameness in the name of, say, brand recognition?

I don’t think there are simple answers to these questions (except perhaps the first) but I think they’re good questions to ask and we should keep talking about them.

PS I don’t think I’ve ever published anything this long on this weblog. It’s not generally the way I like to write these days, but it kind of needed to all be said and I didn’t want to stretch it out over a number of posts. I know I don’t generally read all the way through posts that are this long, but if you have, thank you very much.

podshow & creativity

People coming to live in the UK from elsewhere, particularly Americans, are often astounded by the TV Licence, which is how we fund the BBC. For some it confirms their idea that we’re all submissive, unimaginative and just a bit dim when it comes to commercial opportunities, for others it looks like yet another communistic bit of state-sponsored theft.

So, just putting aside for a moment the fact that I hear a lot of Americans saying that they’d do anything to have TV and Radio without pushy advertising (but presumably, like Meatloaf, they wouldn’t do *that*) and the huge cultural benefit and joy I’ve had from BBC productions all through my life, here’s one example of why I don’t mind paying for my TV licence one bit; and here’s another

Tags: BBC & podcasting & Creative Archive

I’ve been looking back at some work I did a couple of years ago on customer focus for a large government department to try to explain how a simple Pinpoint workshop works – I’m having trouble writing a case study (soooo boring) so I just thought I’d write it out here and see where that got me.

I’d forgotten that the original brief was to find some different communication form for talking to as many people as possible within this department about “customer focus”. The perception (in grossly generalised terms) was that people were more focused on their given functional tasks and rarely questioned what value they were adding for the end users or customers or did anything to find out whether the service they provided was useful or met a customer need.

So first of all I designed a Pinpoint workshop to run with a selection of senior managers from across the organisation (people who pretty much already got customer focus) to talk about this and what should be done.

This workshop asked the following questions:

• What does Customer Focus mean to us?
• What does Customer Focus mean to customers?
• How good is the Department at Customer Focus?
• What are the characteristics of excellent internal communication that would improve our Customer Focus?
• What communication products would improve the Customer Focus of the Department?

I wish I could say I entirely planned it this way, but the way it turned out was that as well as understanding better what customer focus meant in this organisation, everyone said: “This is great, we should make this workshop into something that everyone can do”.

So we came up with this amended version:

Who are your customers? This warmed people up and got some of the stuff out of the way about differences of opinion on this subject – in government departments some civil servants still see ministers as their key customers!

What does Customer Focus mean to you? People talked about feedback, communication, building relationships, responsive action.

How well do you involve customers in what you do? Naturally some people felt better about this than others – depending on personal experience and the nature of their jobs.

What does Customer Focus mean to your customers? Here people thought more about quality, responsiveness and meeting expectations.

What more could we do to involve customers in what we do? This varied between teams depending on what their level of interaction with customers but it generally brought out high-level ideas about improving the quality and quantity of communication.

Then depending on what ideas had come out of that, the group was split into two or three sub-groups to look in detail at what ideas they had about improving how they involved customers. This involved an ideas gallery session asking them to come up with Ideas, Barriers and Resources required.

After creating these and discussing them, the team came up with an action plan for themselves (what to do, who would do it, by when, with help from whom). The team also had to come up with a contact to liaise with the customer focus team to let them know how they were getting on and where they needed further help.

So the outcomes were:

• A better and shared understanding among the participants of what customer focus really meant.
• Some broad ideas for improvement that might be picked up later
• An action plan for specific things to do in the short-term
• A link with the centre to help make sure things got done, or at least moved forward

Tags: Customer focus & workshops & Pinpoint

I was initially puzzled by what Dave Winer meant by me believing in the insiders and giving them the power (I wouldn’t have put it that way) but his explanation of what happens when the drugs wear off helps.

And what he says about tools puts into focus my dissatisfaction with Sparks! as I wrote about it earlier. It doesn’t actually do anything more that I want to do as a podcaster except bring together cut down versions of the tools in a single package and bung in some free (for now) hosting. I’d much rather learn to use the existing separate tools (my minidisc, audacity, RSS 2.0 and associated software, ftp, ipodder, MT) which I might one day use for other things too, than put the effort into learning how to use a needlessly over-complicated interface which just sews together the bits that someone else thinks are important.

The whole notion of insiders and outsiders kind of dissolves when I remember that to me Dave appears to be an insider – he plainly doesn’t feel like one. To anyone who discovered blogging yesterday I might look like an insider – well I just ain’t, but I have experienced the buzz of people considering me an insider in other areas and I don’t deny it is a powerful drug.

This leads me to refine what I said about power on Doc’s site – I left out those who don’t accept the popular view of where power lies and point out that (as usual) those who style themselves as “kings” are in the altogether.

So please Adam, Evan and all, put some clothes on, quick, I’m finding it difficult to put my mouth right up to the mic with that mental image in my mind.

odeo & podshow &
sparks & podcasting & power

I was initially puzzled by what Dave Winer meant by me believing in the insiders and giving them the power (I wouldn’t have put it that way) but his explanation of what happens when the drugs wear off helps.

And what he says about tools puts into focus my dissatisfaction with Sparks! as I wrote about it earlier. It doesn’t actually do anything more that I want to do as a podcaster except bring together cut down versions of the tools in a single package and bung in some free (for now) hosting. I’d much rather learn to use the existing separate tools (my minidisc, audacity, RSS 2.0 and associated software, ftp, ipodder, MT) which I might one day use for other things too, than put the effort into learning how to use a needlessly over-complicated interface which just sews together the bits that someone else thinks are important.

The whole notion of insiders and outsiders kind of dissolves when I remember that to me Dave appears to be an insider – he plainly doesn’t feel like one. To anyone who discovered blogging yesterday I might look like an insider – well I just ain’t, but I have experienced the buzz of people considering me an insider in other areas and I don’t deny it is a powerful drug.

This leads me to refine what I said about power on Doc’s site – I left out those who don’t accept the popular view of where power lies and point out that (as usual) those who style themselves as “kings” are in the altogether.

So please Adam, Evan and all, put some clothes on, quick, I’m finding it difficult to put my mouth right up to the mic with that mental image in my mind.

odeo & podshow &
sparks & podcasting & power

There’s a dialogue going on, over on the AOK list which has become [my paraphrase] “Is knowledge management dead, dying or actually bursting chock-full of life?” No prizes for which side I’m on and, to be honest, most of the contributors are on too.

My take on this is that Knowledge Management is about as “dead” as Scientific Management was for a great deal of the last century – ie its time as a management fad was finished, but it continued to form the basis of the best thinking about how to run organisations for long after people saw themselves as practitioners of Scientific Management.

For me, the trouble is that we haven’t quite shaken that off – many of the ideas inherent in that approach have become so entrenched in the collective psyche that we still think that management is about control, efficiency and productivity (as in the ratio of outputs to inputs) and that the organisations are actually huge machines, not groups of people at all. There is another way – it’s a bit messy, it doesn’t necessarily conform to our ideas of what a management discipline is, but the ways of working that together we’ve come to call Knowledge Management are the only ways that organisations can continue to thrive as the emphasis of what we do has shifted from industry and manual labour to brain work.

That’s why I started talking here about Kmanagement (the K is silent). It really is just about management of knowledge-based organisations and I do believe that much of the pain we feel at work (anyone not feel pain? – hurrah for you!) is down to us knowing that the old methods don’t work, but not knowing what would.

I think the implications fall into three areas:

and

But social institutions may be for another day’s discussion. Thank goodness there are so many excellent brains working on how to make this all work out for the best.

So just give up on the production line stuff.

She will not do everything you want exactly as you want it. He won’t comply with your processes (ever). They will talk about it behind your back and come up with better ideas between them than you ever could yourself. And it’s OK.

When we were making widgets, it was about control.

“We at Widget Corp have carefully developed the optimum standardised process for widget production. There are 7 key steps in the production procedure. These must be followed by everyone. If you deviate in any way from any of the 7 steps in the widget production procedure there is a significant risk of physical harm to you and your colleagues and an unnacceptably high number of defective widgets. Widgets can only be made on our premises for health and saftey reasons. Our salespeople sell 1,000 widgets a week – we therefore need every employee to produce 5 perfectly formed widgets per day (during their 8 hour shifts between the hours of 6.00am and 10.00pm) in order to meet orders and create reserve stocks. If you cannot produce 5 perfect widgets per day, we can always find someone else who can. Because of the physical strength required in the production process, widgets are traditionally only created by men.”

All perfectly (ahem) reasonable.

Now go back and substitute “idea” for “widget” throughout that paragraph.

That’s why Kmanagement isn’t about control.

The boston square, 2×2 matrix has become a lazy way of representing the fact that anything you want to think about in your organisation has (at least) two dimensions. I don’t think they’re big and I don’t think they’re clever but in all the talk about Personal Knowledge Management I keep coming back to this picture – because it helps me think it through rather than telling me anything startling and it reminds me that it’s “both…and” not “either…or”.

When prompted for a file name, I obviously went for kmatrix (the ‘k’ is still silent). More as this filters through my consciousness.

Ok some explanations. First, what is this supposed to say? Well it’s a map of the space really and what I hope to convey is that (k)managing a modern organisation involves working in all areas of this space – ie that it’s important to think about both personal and organisational activities and to think about these both as regards dealing with information and dealing with knowledge.

The x-axis is labelled information-ey to knowledge-ey for two reasons: one, I think it’s important not to be too precise about these things, this is not an exact, scientific model – that’s my way of getting out of endless discussions on the definition of knowledge; two, I think these are two separate but intimately interrelated things rather than a spectrum – perhaps it should be a different sort of line, I don’t know.

By Organisational on the y-axis, I mean organisational activities, things that the organisation can do, facilitate, encourage to happen etc; while the Personal is, well, um, personal stuff that people can do for themselves whether anyone else in the organisation gives a monkey’s about it.

By introspective blogging, I mean the activity of developing ideas by expressing them in your blog, regardless of whether they end up being read, understood, or taken up by anyone else. I’m not sure if any of the other things need explanation. Intrabliki is the term we used on Blogwalk 4 to talk about a blog/wiki tool used within the firewall. I realise that I have misspelled del.icio.us

[update – seems McGee is musing in a similar way]

PS – When I worked for the Audit Commission, my best ice-breaking joke when doing presentations was to apologise for the 2×2 matrix slides, but that I was contractually obliged to insert an average of 3.724 such slides per presentation in the year up to 31st March. Well, the people who get to listen to presentations from guys from the Audit Commission thought it was pretty funny.

It has come to the august attention of the Perfect Path Management Board that a couple of myths are circulating around the Perfect Path readership and clientele, relating to the availability of our lead consultant (L Davis, Esq.)
and the fees charged for our services.

Do not be fooled

The maintenance of the Perfect Path blog is a trivial exercise requiring minuscule amounts of Mr Davis’s attention and working time [you’d know this if you had a blog yourself – get one, it’s cool, it’s easy, and it’s fun – if you don’t believe me ask my mate Alison].

The man is available NOW – you could have his world-famous creative juices working for your organisation tomorrow (does not apply if reading this on Friday or Saturday). And forget any ideas about having to employ him for a whole day. If you can get his attention with a shiny cool project or problem – you can have him running around like a maniac for as little as £50 per hour.
Yes that’s

for

(rate is dependent on coolness of project as measured by the Perfect Path coolometer. Rates can go up as well as even further up)

Call him now to see if your project is cool enough to qualify for our special entry-level rates.

It came to me on the tube this morning. We were between Pimlico and Victoria and it made me giggle and snort (to the annoyance of my fellow passengers) which is when I know that it’s good enough to blog.

I’ve been rattling on recently (less so here, more to anyone who will listen to my voice) about the trouble with talking about Knowledge Management – yes it’s true that “so what is knowledge management” is a useful opener to another conversation, say “how can I help you out with your current problems and as the merest by-product you give me a large amount of cash” but it also can end up as an argument about all sorts of other things (explicit & tacit, what’s a knowledge worker, personal or corporate etc. etc.) that take us… forward… very… slowly…

So, Ladies, Gentlemen and those who aren’t sure… I give you Kmanagement (the ‘K’ is silent) I pronounce it ‘ manidjmunt’ but I grew up in Birmingham, so I can’t be trusted – those in the know may like to add a little glottal stop where the ‘K’ is, a little beat to distinguish Kmanagement from Management.

Because IMHO that’s all it is – it’s ()management for today as opposed to management for yesterday. The thing I want to be talking about is not so much “how do you manage tacit knowledge?” or the such like, but rather how do I manage this organisation, or hey, just my team, given that everything I learned on business courses told me to manage this way and every instinct I have tells me that I need to do something different – because I’m not managing manual workers and production lines, I’m managing clever, talented, wild-thinking people who are currently creating the next great version of what this organisation really is.

This is how it’s going to be here for a while – thinking about what Kmanagement is and what it isn’t.

For starters:

• Kmanagement isn’t control
• Kmanagement isn’t either/or
• Kmanagement is about people not machines (and people, even groups of people aren’t machines nor do they behave remotely like machines)
• Kmanagement is about being creative and innovative
• Kmanagement is about nurturing creativity in your group
• Kmanagement isn’t about mine is bigger than yours – it’s about if I put yours together with mine, we get something even better
• Kmanagement is about what works, today, for you