shift and share

A lot continues to be said about Web 2/3/4.0, and as always, it’s fascinating to see what the various conceptions, definitions and understandings of it seem to be. From a very technical perspective, Google’s Eric Schmidt recently gave an explanation of what he believes it to be, and predictably, he looks at it from the standpoint of architecture:

It’s an interesting perspective, and is clearly at the heart of Google’s approach to computing.But what’s of greater interest to me is what WebX.0 means socially. (more…)

It’s very easy to get into a pattern of how things are done, and I’ve found that especially applies to graphic facilitation. It’s easy to get spoiled by our six-foot-tall whiteboards everywhere…what happens if you need to give a “scribing experience” in a boardroom?

While I’ve used butcher paper in the past, I’ve settled on a pretty simple kit which I’ve now used twice over the past couple of weeks.

First thing is the 3M Post-it Easel Pads…these things are great, and stick to anything. They also don’t let the marker bleed through. I stick them up in a strip along the wall, so I can do a continuous scribe. A key point is to make the strip two layers deep. This helps, because a.) if, by some freak chance, the marker does bleed through, you haven’t messed up the client’s walls, and b.) if there ends up being a lot of content, you can move the first layer down, and you already have a fresh layer set up and ready.

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A quick tip – which Donna showed me – for making scribing “pop” in Photoshop; after you’ve cleaned the image, switch to the brush tool, enlarge your brush (300+ pixels) and change your foreground color to black.

Change the “mode” to “Overlay”, set the opacity to around 35%, and paint over everything…zammo! All of the colors pop a little more, and the scribing looks more vibrant and crisp.

The English version of Wikipedia reached it’s two-millionth article today. Compare that to the latest print edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which contains about 65,000 articles.

Interestingly, when I Googled Encyclopedia Britannica to see how many entries it had, the first thing that came up was – you guessed it – the Wikipedia entry about…the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Oh, how the times change.

I’ve been reading Jeff Hawkins’ book On Intelligence, and have been itching to put up a post about it…trouble is, that a quick review really wouldn’t do justice to all that’s in there and all the touchpoints the book has with our process.

One of the concepts in the book that has gotten me thinking is the idea of feedback, and how it affects perception. Hawkins points out that for all of the senses, there is as much as ten times more information flowing back to the sensor as there is coming in to the brain. Put another way, our brain is telling our eyes, ears and nose more about the world around us than the other way around.

What is happening is the brain is creating a mental model of the world around it in real time, based on what information is coming in and what experience it has had in similar situations in the past. What it looks for is any time the senses pass back information that is inconsistent with the model. If you want an example, think of the sensation of walking down a set of stairs, then finding one more step at the bottom than you had thought; you are jolted to attention as you compensate for the difference from your model.

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Wired did a feature a few months back on radical transparency; the concept of making a company open and interactive versus closed and proprietary. The examples given were, themselves, quite interesting. In particular, Microsoft’s “Channel 9” was a fascinating look at the struggle between the usual corporate cultural imperative of keeping internal projects, processes and politics secret and someone’s idea of being open and accessible to their customers. While the idea of opening up the inside story of Microsoft’s development process seemed heretical at first, the reaction of the wider developer community was so overwhelmingly positive that Microsoft eventually embraced the approach.

I found the example fascinating. We have faced similar debates within our organization, where the desire to share ideas and information, methods and models is always in tension with the need to protect intellectual property and privacy. The suggestion that we should put some repository of our knowledge out in the open for all to see strikes some as, well, a very bad idea.

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We were very fortunate to have Anthony Williams from New Paradigm, and co-author of Wikinomics, come to address the group this week.

I, for one, was very excited about this. Anthony gave a presentation on the general ideas behind his book, the trends that have pushed the locus of creativity and creation away from corporate cloisters and into the crowd.

We couldn’t have had a better topic for discussion. While in the ASE we work through our process to help groups collaborate for better results, implicit in the effort is the push to demonstrate that working in a way which prioritizes ideas and facts over hierarchy and opinion enables stronger solutions.

The trends outlined by Anthony show that there is a larger movement towards that model of work, and whether it is the technology driving the shift or the shift driving the technology is immaterial; what matters for us is that broader social and technological trends are aligning with our mission in ways that allow us to demonstrate greater effectiveness and have a deeper impact before, during and after our sessions.

An interesting article in the New York Times today about unconscious reactions to stimuli has a lot of connections with our work. The article talks about a number of fascinating studies which trace the effects of events as insignificant as being passed a hot or cold cup of coffee, which in the end have a measurable impact on people’s conscious impressions and behaviors.

All of this, of course, reinforces our concept that “the environment speaks”, but makes me consider a little more deeply what message our space sends. In some studies, competitiveness increased with the mere presence of a briefcase, versus a control group with a backpack in the room (think: dress code, toys, plants).

It also raises some questions on how “scribing” can be more “graphic facilitation”. The article suggests that even seeing the word “dependable” makes people more cooperative. Now, I’m not saying we write that all over the walls, but could scribes learn techniques like Appreciative Inquiry and incorporate it into their work in order to reinforce certain sentiments within a group?

What other unconscious factors have people seen at play in our sessions?

The clock is ticking for the Global All Hands meeting in August, which will be held here in Toronto, which will have people coming in from France, the UK, the States, the Netherlands, Finland and Australia. What do all these people have in common? They’ll probably want to eat while they’re here.

I’ve already started getting requests for “what should we see, where should we eat?”

For my money, I’d go for a stroll in Chinatown, then head into Kensington market for dinner at La Palette (256 Augusta Avenue, 416-929-4900). But then, I’m not exactly known for being in tune with all the best places in Toronto…so help me out; what is there to see and do in Toronto, and where’s the best meal to be had?

…that you knew what the next big thing was…it wasn’t. This article makes a point about web 2.0 making its way into ‘has-been’ status, with the next revolution being around spatially tagged information. It’s fascinating watching the technology – and more importantly, how we use it – evolve. Where Web 2.0 made information participatory, the key with the next iteration is not necessarily “spatial”, it’s contextual. Geo-tagging is interesting, but the heart of it’s value lies in providing for context, not location.