Reflecting on Lift France 2011: Key Themes

A couple of weeks ago I attended the Lift France 2011 conference. For me this was different than my usual conference experience. I have written before how Anglo-Saxon my perspective is, so to be at a conference where the majority of the audience is French was refreshing.

Although there was a track about learning, most of the conference approached the effects of digital technology on society from angles that were relatively new to me. In a pure learning conference, I am usually able to contextualize what I see immediately and do some real time reflecting. This time I had to stick to reporting on what I saw (all my #lift11 posts are listed here) and was forced to take a few days and reflect on what I had seen.

Below, in random order, an overview of what I would consider to be the big themes of the conference. Occasionally I will try to speculate on what these themes might mean for learning and for innovation.

Utilization of excess capacity empowered by collaborative platforms

Robin Chase gave the clearest explanation of this theme that many speakers kept referring back to:

Economic Logic of Using Access Capacity by Robin Chase

This world has large amounts of excess capacity that isn’t used. In the past, the transaction costs of sharing (or renting out) this capacity was too high to make it worthwhile. The Internet has facilitated the creation of collaborative platforms that lower these transaction costs and make trust explicit. Chase’s most simple example is the couch surfing idea and her Zipcar and Buzzcar businesses are examples of this too.

Entangled with the idea of sharing capacity is the idea of access being more important than ownership. This will likely come with a change in the models for consumption: from owning a product to consuming a service. The importance of access shows why it is important to pay attention to the (legal) battles being fought on patents, copyrights, trademarks and licenses.

I had some good discussions with colleagues about this topic. Many facilities, like desks in offices, are underused and it would be good to try and find ways of getting the percentage of utilization up. One problem we saw is how to deal with peak demand. Rick Marriner made the valid suggestion that transparency about the demand (e.g. knowing how many cars are booked in the near future) will actually feed back into the demand and thus flatten the peaks.

A quick question that any (part of an) organization should ask itself is which assets and resources have excess capacity because in the past transaction costs for sharing them across the organization were too high. Would it now be possible to create platforms that allow the use of this extra capacity?

Another question to which I currently do not have an answer is whether we can translate this story to cognitive capacity. Do we have excess cognitive capacity and would there be a way of sharing this? Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus and the Wikipedia project seem to suggest we do. Can organizations capture this value?

Disintermediation

The idea of the Internet getting rid of intermediaries is very much related to the point above. Intermediaries were a big part of the transaction costs and they are disappearing everywhere. Travel agents are the canonical example, but at the conference, Paul Wicks talked about PatientsLikeMe, a site that partially tries to disintermediate doctors out of the patient-medicine relationship.

What candidates for disintermediation exist in learning? Is the Learning Management System the intermediary or the disintermediator? I think the former. What about the learning function itself? In the last years I have seen a shift where the learning function is moving away from designing learning programs into becoming a curator of content and service providers and a manager of logistics. These are exactly the type of activities that are not needed anymore in the networked world. Is this why the learning profession is in crisis? I certainly think so.

The primacy (and urgency) of design

Maybe it was the fact that the conference was full of French designeurs (with the characteristic Philippe Starck-ish eccentricities that I enjoy so much), but it really did put the urgency of design to the forefront once again for me. I would argue that design means you think about the effects that you would like to have in this world. As a creator it is your responsibility to think deeply and holistically. I will not say that you can always know the results of your design (product, service, building, city, organization, etc.), there will be externalities, but it is important that you leave nothing to chance (accident) or to convenience (laziness).

There is a wealth of productivity to be gained here. I am bombarded by bad (non-)design every single day. Large corporations are the worst offenders. The only design parameter that seems to be relevant for processes is whether they reduce risk enough, not whether they are usable for somebody trying to get something done. Most templates focus on completeness and not on aesthetics or ease of use. When last did you receive a PowerPoint deck that wasn’t full of superfluous elements that the author couldn’t be bothered to remove?

Ivo Wenzler reminded me of Checkhov’s gun (no unnecessary elements in a story). What percentage of the learning events that you have attended in the last couple of years adhered to this?

We can’t afford not to design. The company I work for is full of brilliant engineers. Where are the brilliant designers?

Distributed, federated and networked systems

Robin Chase used the image below and explicitly said that we now finally realize that distributed networks are the right model to overcome the problems of centralized and decentralized systems.

From "On Distributed Communication Networks", Baran, 1962

I have to admit that the distinction between decentralized and distributed eludes me for now (I guess I should read Baran’s paper), but I did notice at Fosdem earlier this year that the open source world is urgently trying to create alternatives to big centralized services like Twitter and Facebook. Moglen talked about the Freedombox as a small local computer that would do all the tasks that the cloud would normally do, there is StatusNet, unhosted and even talk of distributed redundant file systems and wireless mesh networking.

Can large organizations learn from this? I always see a tension between the need for central governance, standardization and uniformity on the one hand and the local and specific requirements on the other hand. More and more systems are now designed to allow for central governance and the advantages of interoperability and integration, while at the same time providing configurability away from the center. Call it organized customization or maybe even federation. I truly believe you should think deeply about this whenever you are implementing (or designing!) large scale information systems.

Blurring the distinction between the real and the virtual worlds

Lift also had an exhibitors section titled “the lift experience“, mostly a place for multimedia art (imagine a goldfish in a bowl sat atop an electric wheelchair, a camera captured the direction the fish swam in and the wheelchair would then move in the same direction). There were quite a few projects using the Arduino and even more that used “hacked” Kinects to enable new types of interaction languages.

Most projects tried, in some way, to negotiate a new way of working between the virtual and the real (or should I call it the visceral). As soon as those boundaries disappear designers will have an increased ability to shape reality. One of the projects that I engaged with the most was the UrbanMusicalGame: a set of gyroscopes and accelerometers hidden in soft balls. By playing with these balls you could make beautiful music while using an iPhone app to change the settings (unfortunately the algorithms were not yet optimized for my juggling). This type of project is the vanguard of what we will see in the near term.

Discomfort with the dehumanizing aspects of technology

A surprising theme for me was the well articulated discomfort with the dehumanizing aspects of some of the emerging digital technologies. As Benkler says: technology creates feasibility spaces for social practice and not all practices that are becoming feasible now have positive societal impact.

One artist, Emmanuel Germond, seemed to be very much in touch with these feeling. His project, Exposition au Danger Psychologique, made fun of people’s inability to deal with all this information and provided some coy solutions. Alex Peng talked about contemplative computing, Chris de Decker showed examples of low-tech solutions from the past that can help solve our current problems and projects in the Lift Experience showed things like analog wooden interfaces for manipulating digital music.

This leads me to believe that both physical reality and being disconnected will come at a premium in the near future. People will be willing to pay for having real experiences versus the ubiquitous virtual experiences. Not being connected to the virtual world will become more expensive as it becomes more difficult. Imagine a retreat which markets itself as having no wifi and a giving you a free physical newspaper in the morning (places like this are starting to pop up, see this unplugged conference or this reporter’s unconnected weekend).

There will be consequences for Learning and HR at large. For the last couple of years we have been moving more and more of our learning interventions into the virtual space. Companies have set up virtual universities with virtual classrooms, thousands and thousands of hours of e-learning are produced every year and the virtual worlds that are used in serious games are getting more like reality every month.

Thinking about the premium of reality it is then only logical that allowing your staff to connect with each other in the real world and collaborate in face to face meetings will be a differentiator for acquiring and retaining talent.

Big data for innovation

I’ve done a lot of thinking about big data this year (see for example these learning analytics posts) and this was a tangential topic at the conference. The clearest example came from a carpool site which can use it’s data about future reservation to clearly predict how busy traffic will be on a particular day. PatientsLikeMe is of course another example of a company that uses data as a valuable asset.

Supercrunchers is full of examples of data-driven solutions to business problems. The ease of capturing data, combined with the increase in computing power and data storage has made doing randomized trials and regression analysis feasible where before it was impossible.

This means that the following question is now relevant for any business: How can we use the data that we capture to make our products, services and processes better? Any answers?

The need to overcome the open/closed dichotomy

In my circles, I usually only encounter people who believe that most things should be open. Geoff Mulgan spoke of ways to synthesize the open/closed dichotomy. I am not completely sure how he foresees doing this, but I do know that both sides have a lot to learn from each other.

Disruptive software innovations currently don’t seem to happen int the open source world, but open source does manage to innovate when it comes to their own processes. They manage to scale projects to thousands of participants, have figured out ways of pragmatically dealing with issues of intellectual property (in a way that doesn’t inhibit development) and have created their own tool sets to make them successful at working in dispersed teams (Git being my favorite example).

When we want to change the way we do innovation in a networked world, then we shouldn’t look at the open source world for the content of innovation or the thought leadership, instead we should look at their process.

Your thoughts

A lot of the above is still very immature and incoherent thinking. I would therefore love to have a dialog with anybody who could help me deepen my thoughts on these topics.

Finally, to give a quick flavour of all my other posts about Lift 11, the following word cloud based on those posts:

Lift11 Word Cloud — My Lift 11 wordcloud, made with Wordle

Reflecting on the “Narrating Your Work” Experiment

A few months back I posted a design for an experiment on my blog. The goal of the experiment was to find out whether it would be possible to use a microblogging tool to narrate our work with the intention of making better performing virtual teams.

Over the last two months, the direct team that I work in (consisting of 18 people) basically participated in the experiment in the way that it was designed: They posted constant, daily or weekly updates on our Yammer network. Each update would describe things like what they had done, who they had spoken to or what issues they had encountered. Occasionally the updates were peppered with personal notes about things had happened or were going to happen after work.

Methodology of the experiment

There was no formal (or academic) research methodology for this working experiment. I decided to use a well-considered survey to get people’s thoughts at the end of it. Out of the 18 team members 17 decided to fill it in (in the rest of the post you can assume that n=17). The one person that didn’t, has taken up another role. This means there is zero bias in who answered and didn’t answer the survey.

I find it more interesting to zoom out and look at the methodology of this experiment as a whole. To me doing things like this is a very good approach to change in the workplace: a grassroots shared experiment with commitment from everybody working towards solutions for complex situations. This is something that I will definitely replicate in the future.

Didn’t this take a lot of time?

One concern that people had about the experiment was whether it would take a lot of time to write these updates and read what others have written. I’ve asked everybody how much time on average they spent writing status updates and reading the updates of others. This turned out to be a little bit less than 5 minutes a day for writing the posts and slightly over 5 minutes a day for reading them. The standard deviations where around 4.5 for both of these things, so there was quite a big spread. All in all it seems that narrating their work is something that most people can comfortably do in the margins of their day.

Barriers to narrating your work

Designing the experiment I imagined three barriers to narrating your work that people might stumble over and I tried to mitigate these barriers:

Lack of time and/or priority. I made sure people could choose their own frequency of updates. Even though it didn’t take people long to write the updates, just over 50% of the participants said that lack of time/priority was a limiting factor for how often they posted.
Not feeling comfortable about sharing in a (semi-)public space. I made sure that people could either post to the whole company, or just to a private group which only included the 18 participants. Out of the 18, there were two people who said that this was a limiting factor in narrating your work (and three people were neutral). This is less than I had expected, but it is still something to take into account going forward as 12 of the participants decided to mostly post in the private group.
Lack of understanding of the tool (in this case Yammer). I made sure to have an open session with the team in which they could ask any question they had about how to use the tool. In the end only three people said that this was a limiting factor for how often they posted.

The qualitative answers did not identify any other limiting factors.

Connectedness and ambient team awareness as the key values

Looking at all the answers in the questionnaire you can clearly see that the experiment has helped in giving people an understanding of what other people in their team are doing and has widened people’s perspectives:

The "Narrating your work" experiment has given me more insight into the work my peers are doing

The "Narrating your work" experiment has given me a better idea of the scope/breadth of the work that our team is doing and the stakeholders surrounding us

A quote:

I enjoyed it! I learned so much more about what my colleagues are doing than I would have during a webcast or team meeting. It helped me understand the day-to-day challenges and accomplishments within our team.

and:

The experiment was very valuable as it has proven that [narrating your work] contributes to a better understanding of how we work and what we are doing as a team.

People definitely feel more connected to the rest of their team:

The "Narrating your work" experiment has made me feel more connected to the rest of my team

There was practical and social value in the posts:

The value of "Narrating your work" is practical: the content is helpful and it is easy to ask questions/get replies

The value of "Narrating your work is intangible and social: it creates an ambient awareness of each other

A lot of people would recommend “Narrating your work” as a methodology to other virtual teams:

I would recommend "Narrating your work" as a methodology for other virtual teams

What kind of status updates work best?

I asked what “Narrating your work” type of update was their favourite to read (thinking about content, length and timeliness). There was a clear preference for short messages (i.e. one paragraph). People also prefered messages to be as close as possible to when it happened (i.e. no message on Friday afternoon about what you did on the Monday). One final thing that was much appreciated was wittiness and a bit fun. We shouldn’t be afraid to put things in our messages that reveal a bit of our personality. Sharing excitement or disappointment humanizes us and that can be important in virtual teams (especially in large corporations).

Personally I liked this well-thought out response to the question:

The best posts were more than simply summing up what one did or accomplished; good narrations also showed some of the lines of thinking of the narrator, or issues that he/she encountered. This often drew helpful responses from others on Yammer, and this is where some some additional value (besides connectedness) lies.

It made me realize that another value of the narrations is that they can lead to good discussions or to unexpected connections to other people in the company. This brings us to the next question:

Public or private posts?

The posts in the private group were only visible to the 18 participants in the experiment. Sometimes these posts could be very valuable to people outside of the team. One of the key things that makes microblogging interesting is the asymmetry (I can follow you, but you don’t have to follow me). This means that posts can be read by people you don’t know, who get value out of it beyond what you could have imagined when posting. What to you might sound like a boring depiction of your morning, might give some stakeholders good insight in what you are doing.

So on the one hand it would be very beneficial to widen the audience of the posts, however it might inhibit people from writing slightly more sociable posts. We need to find a way to resolve this seeming paradox.

A way forward

Based on the experiments results I would like to recommend the following way forward (for my team, but likely for any team):

Don’t formalize narrating your work and don’t make it mandatory. Many people commented that this is one aspect that they didn’t like about the experiment.
Focus on helping each other to turn narrating your work into a habit. I think it is important to set behavioural expectations about the amount of narrating that somebody does. I imagine a future in which it is considered out of the norm if you don’t share what you are up to. The formal documentation and stream of private emails that is the current output of most knowledge workers in virtual teams is not going to cut it going forward. We need to think about how we can move towards that culture.
We should have both a private group for the intimate team (in which we can be ourselves as much as possible) as well as have a set of open topic based groups that we can share our work in. So if I want to post about an interesting meeting I had with some learning technology provider with a new product I should post that in a group about “Learning Innovation”. If have worked on a further rationalization of our learning portfolio I should post this in a group about the “Learning Application Portfolio” and so on.

I liked what one of the participants wrote:

I would like our team to continue as we have, but the important steps to take now are 1) ensuring that we stay in the habit of narrating regularly, 2) showing the value of what we achieved to other teams and team leads, and 3) ensure that there is enough support (best practises etc) for teams that decide to implement [narrating your work].

I have now taken this as far as I have the energy and the interest to take it to. I would really love for somebody to come along and make this into a replicable method for improving virtual teams. Any interns or students interested?

Transforming the Way We Work, Innovate and Learn

The WORK/LEARN track at Lift 11 is subtitled: Transforming the way we work, innovate and learn. From the introduction:

What will the XXIst-century organization look like: A network, a nebula, or a process-based system where everything is standardized and measured? How can these two cultures, these two ways of producing and of innovating, work together? And, since education seems to have changed far less than most of society, how can we prepare for a world where we all learn continuously and ubiquitously?

Geoff Mulgan is Chief Executive at Nesta, a funding body for science, and talks about Openness and collective intelligence, its prospects and its challenges.

According to him people have different perspectives on networks. People predicted networks would lead to big brother states and corporations and fascistic organizations, whereas other said it would flatten hierarchies. The truth is, networks do both. We need to learn how to navigate the balance of openness and closure.

He thinks we will need to develop three different strategies to do the following:

Stop the abuses of networked technology
Infect and embrace the hierarchies
Grow the new

Who shows the example of Who Owns My Neighbourhood and Sutton Bookshare. He is interested in depth rather than breadth in relationships. Another project he is involved with is the Action for Happiness website, giving people science based advice on how to be happy:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bc6WW1GGjbk]

Next he focuses on some methodological solutions to make progress in solving the problems mentioned above. One is social innovation camps, another is I do ideas where you people can get a grant not by filling in a grant request form, but by posting a video.

He uses some Hegelian thinking to frame the problem. If “Hierarchy” is the “Thesis” and “Open Networks” are the “Antithesis”, then what is the “Synthesis”? There are testing out the model by means of a Global Innovation Academy with pilots in many countries.

He leaves us with his advice on what we need. We need fast and slow, we need always on, but also often off and we need open as well as closed. He doesn’t have the answer on how to do these things and realizes we are in a time of heavy experimentation.

Edial Dekker is the CEO of Gidsy a marketplace for authentic experiences. He is of Hack de Overheid (Hack the government) fame. His talk is titled Trusted networks and the rise of the micro-entrepreneur.

According to Edial we are in trouble: we are in the slowest economic recovery since the 30s, we will run out of natural resources and we are at peak globalization. He sees all kinds of initiatives that are trying to tackle these problems from the bottom up and are getting a lot of traction. Examples are The School of Life or How to Homestead, a community that tries to help you become self-sufficient, or the Betahaus a very successful makers-lab in Berlin. He could give endless examples of empowering technologies allowing people to share resources in a different way.

He aligns his argument with Robin Chase, where these new collaborative platform are very scalable and capable of making use of the excess capacity. He quotes Kevin Kelly who says that “Access is better than ownership”:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grKn_xzu-5M]

Currently he is raising money for his start up. The question that always comes up from investors is: “How big is your market?”. He didn’t really know how to answer that question. So he asked his advisers at Etsy who told him that when they started there was no market for handmade items. They created a market that wasn’t there before. Jyri Engeström invented the concept of “Social objects” to describe this.

He finished by giving some tips:

Make your product as human as possible (Rob Kalin of Etsy)
It start with chips and end with trust (Kevin Kelly)
Unmute the web (Alex & Eric from Soundcloud)
Don’t solve problems, pursue opportunities

The final speaker in this track is the Finnish Ville Keränen, a “geek and learning designer” at Monkey Business (check out their site, the tag line is “More action. More chaos. More mistakes. More learning.”). He must be the best branded speaker of the event, taking his sun-glassed banana everywhere and wearing yellow pants. His talk has the title: From Team Academy to the future: Building organizations for humans.

He first asks us to get up and give each other a “tender and dynamic greeting”.

For Ville it is all about people, courage and fun and well-being. He feels we are sometimes a bit too serious in the way we work. He quotes Tom Peters who said “I would have done some real cool stuff, but my boss didn’t allow me”. He then shows a quite incredible youtube video in which a Finnish ice hockey player show exactly the right behaviors you need:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1E3dSCf23A]

Some key concepts from the team academy: you enter the academy and start a company with a team of people on day one (even without a business idea). There are no simulations, only real projects. There are no lectures, but there is lots of dialog. There are no teachers, but team coaches instead. There are no exams, only team companies. There are no grades, but real clients. One of the goals is to make a trip around the world with the money you have made (if you made enough money).

There are few learning principles behind the team academy. Learners learn what they want to learn (constructivism). Learning is always situational and contextual. Learning is social and happens in a community. I believe that in my company we are relatively good at the second principle, but have a lot to learn about the first and third principles.

Team Academy is now expanding rapidly. Their challenges are currently how to lead a global network, how to think big and how to expand to domains outside of business? One thing that they are doing well is capturing the excess capacity of their students.

Memory Feed: Reclaiming a Sense of Place through Mobile AR

Introduction

Jie-Eun Hwang and Yasmine Abbas are leading a workshop titled: Memory Feed: Reclaiming a Sense of Place through Mobile Augmented Reality. From their introduction:

With Mobile technologies, Augmented Reality (AR) entered a whole new phase. Mobile AR promises to enable in-situ activities and kinds of communications that allow people to solicit memories of places. Nevertheless, a series of mobile apps that simply overlay bubble icons on the camera viewfinder rather limit our imagination for what we could do with this (possibly) innovative, necessary, and if not useful channel of communication.

This session is held in a small sweaty square room in a building that has the boring non-appeal that only municipal buildings can have. After a struggle with both the beamer and the Internet connection (for security reasons nobody can go on the network…) we manage to get going.

The group of participants is diverse: there are some people who consult around social media or around innovation (e.g. Merkapt), there is somebody working in the research department of an office furniture manufacturer and thinking about the future of work and the workspace, there is a student who is building a web platform for managing student events, there is the CTO of Evenium, the app that is used at the conference and there is somebody who has started an organisation focused on urban memory as a way to improve the perception of the suburbs.

Jie-Eun is teaching in the department of architecture in the university in Seoul. Yasmine is also an architect, writing a book a neo-nomadism. They both focus on how to integrate digital technologies in the urban fabric. They are currently focused on mobile technologies, mainly augmented reality. How we translate our memories into digital media. Can these technologies be used to regain a sense of space when travelling through the city as a nomad.

Mobile Augmented Reality

Jie-Eun is part of a team developing an AR management platform for the web titled Cellophane funded by the culture/tourism ministry. One part of the project is mapping cultural expressions (like movies, drama, pictures, drawings and advertising) onto the city. Imagine being able to watch a movie and seeing a place you are interested in. You would then be able to visit the place either virtually or in real life. It can also work in the other direction: what movies are shot in the area? The tool comes with a nice admin interface allowing you to match the cultural expression to the physical space with a simple point and click interface.

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/22556755]

They have the ambition to push beyond the current capabilities of apps like Layar. They overlay some icons and text on the camera view. For some reason it is quite difficult to use and doesn’t have a very good user experience.

Use cases

What invisible elements can we reveal through this medium? What types of data would we like to get (that go beyond the obvious things like gaming and tourism). In small groups we prototyped a couple of ideas using a use-case template.

I worked with Catherine Gall, Director of Workspace Futures at Steelcase. We first thought about the potential for mobile augmented technology to help in never making the same mistake twice. This could be at the level of the individual, the organisation or maybe even larger concepts like cities. How come you make the same mistake on that tax form every year? Why do you go a second time to a restaurant that you don’t like. We reflected on how a sense of space could help you in memorize things. We finally settled on an idea titled Location based well-being analytics. Certain places (in the sense of locations, but also spaces), events and situations affect our well-being in a consistent matter (be it positively or negatively) without us necessarily being aware of that. Many companies our now designing little monitors that measure your body for things like activity/movement, calorie intake, blood pressure, temperature, sugar levels and more. In the future these devices might even measure some form of quantified emotional state. Some mobile technology could combine your (intended) location with the historical data of these devices to predict how the location will affect your well-being and give out recommendations. This could be useful for people with fragile health or people who are rehabilitating. Alternatively it could just help people become more aware of their own well-being and how the environment affects this.

Other groups had ideas like:

Moody community: in a community you would have a wall where you would be able to see the mood of the community as it is aggregated by individual “mood” statements by the residents of the community. This could actually help build a community. Who would use this data?
An augmented mirror that you can use to try on clothes in which you can easily change the colour or fit etc.
Supporting professional teams during crisis with incredibly relevant and targeted information.
Maintenance: the system would recognise the part you are working on and it would recognize the context of what you are trying to do. The system would then be able to overlay extra information on reality, including maintenance history, particular advice or the gesture that you need to do.

My personal open questions after the session

All of the solutions assume that you are connected to the net for them to work. Can we afford to make this assumption or should we still explore ways of having the data that augments locally? Might there be other models? Mesh networked? Where the device would get the data from the environment on demand?
Imagine a future in which everything you do is recorded in many dimensions (solving the problem of needing to capture your learned lessons). Would this help you in not making the same mistake twice? What kind of interfaces and experiences would be necessary to not only learn from your own mistakes, but learn from other people’s mistakes? How would you now a “lesson from a mistake” would exist? Would it need to be pushed to you?
For current mobile performance support technology we usually think about location, direction, and maybe some RFID technology as “cues” to match the virtual content to reality. What other cues can be used sensibly? Light? Sound? Temperature?
A recurring question for me in the last couple of years is whether we start lusting for a non-technology mediated experience of reality. Will we put a premium on experiencing something for “real”? Can you see a future where you have “Augmented Reality Retreat Zones”?

The “Narrating Your Work” Experiment

I have just finished writing a small proposal to the rest of my team. I thought it would be interesting to share here:

Introduction

We work in a virtual team. Even though there aren’t many of us, we often have few ideas about what the other people in our team are working on, which people they have met recently and what they are struggling with. The time difference between our main offices make our occasional feelings of being disconnected worse.

This “Narrating Your Work” experiment is an attempt to help overcome these problems.

If you are interested in some background reading, you should probably start with Luis Suarez’ blog post about narrating your work (”it’s all about the easiest way of keeping up with, and nurturing, your working relationships by constantly improving your social capital skills”) and then follow his links to Dave Winer, ambient intimacy and declarative living.

The experiment

“Narrating Your Work” should really be approached as an experiment. When it was first suggested, some people showed some hesitation or worries. We just don’t know whether and how it will work yet. The best way to find out is by trying. In Dutch: “niet geschoten, altijd mis”.

The experiment will have a clear-cut start and will last for two months. After running the experiment we will do a small survey to see what people thought of it: Did it deliver any benefits? If any to whom? Was it a lot of work to write updates? Did it create too much reading to do? Do we want to continue with narrating our work? Etc.

Three ways of participating

It needs to be clear who is participating in the experiment. If you decide to join, you commit to doing one of the following three things (you are allowed to switch between them and you will be “policed”):

Constant flow of updates: Every time you meet somebody who is not in the team, every time you create a new document or every time you do something that is different from just answering your emails, you will write a very short status update to say what you are doing or what you have done. This will create a true “activity stream” around the things you do at work.
Daily updates: At the end of your day you give a one paragraph recap of what you have done, again focusing on the people you have met, the places you have visited or the things you have created.
Weekly updates: On Friday afternoon or on Monday morning you write an update about the week that has just passed. To give this update some structure, it is suggested that you write about two things that went very well, two things that went less well and two things that are worrying to you (or at least will require attention in the next week).

The first option requires the most guts, whereas the last option requires the most diligence: it is not easy to take the time every week to look back at what happened over the last five working days. Are you the type of person who likes to clean the dishes as the day progresses, or are you the type who likes to leave them till there is nothing clean left? Choosing one of the first two options (rather than the third) will give the experiment the greatest chance of success.

Participation only requires the commitment for writing the updates. You are not expected to read all updates of the others, although you might very well be tempted!

How to do it: making it work

To make the work updates easily accessible we will use Yammer. You can do this in two ways:

You can post the work update with the tag #nywlob to your followers. People will see this message when they are following you, when they are watching the company feed or when they follow the nywlob topic.
If you don’t feel comfortable posting publicly to the whole company (or want to say something that needs to stay in the team) then you can post in an unlisted and private group. People will only see this message if they are members of the group and we will only let people in who work in the HRIT LoB and have agreed to join the experiment. Posting in this group will limit your chances of serendipity, so the first method is preferred.

When you are posting an update, please think about the people who might be reading it, so:

When you refer to a person that is already on Yammer, use the @mention technique to turn their name into a link (and notify them of you mentioning them)
If you refer to a person outside of Shell, link to their public LinkedIn profile.
If you mention any document or web page, make sure to add the link to the document so that people can take a look at it.

I am very interested in any comments you might have. Does anybody have any experience with this?