It was another great actKM conference of course, with Cory Banks blogging highlights (and others I suspect but not yet or not on my radar) and tweets found here.

On the evening of Day 1, with the help of quite a few friends (some of whom weren’t even coming to the conference), we staged a terrific and entertaining cabaret (if I do say so myself) that had audience and participants laughing, thinking, singing and even “dancing” (well arm waving anyway).

With a format similar to the popular Australian TV shows Spicks & Specks and Good News Week, we pitted the Wild Wombat Warriors (Cory Banks, Nerida Hart and Michelle Lambert) against the Cuddly Koala Kings and Queens (Matt Moore, Arthur Shelley and Catherine Rodgers). The teams put in a valiant effort to solve riddles and meet the challenges thrown down. The brave but ultimately hopeless attempts by Catherine and Cory to mime complex scenarios were a particular highlight – what great sports!

And the winners were ……. both teams in a tie! (Seriously this was not rigged.) The prize of $100 donation to the charity of choice will be split between Breast Cancer Research for the WWWs, and SANE and Kiva.org for the CKKQs.

It wasn’t all talk as we were lucky enough to have Ukuleles Canberra come along as our guest performers for the night – and they were fabulous! They opened with KM is Rising (Bad Moon Rising), did a great job with “Name that tune” and got everyone singing with the closing number KM Hocus Pocus (to the Hokey Pokey).

Special mention must go to KMer Keith De La Rue for his brilliant rendition of “Clancy of the Knowledge Flow”. Pointing out Australia’s long history of pioneering knowledge managers, Keith sang of the lament of an office-bound KMer who aspires to the creativity and freedom of the web 2.0 enabled Clancy who’s “Gone collaboratin’ “.

Being heavily involved with organising and hosting the Cabaret, I’m not a disinterested observer. But based on the laughs, the faces of the audience and teams, and the comments to me afterwards, the night was very well received and a whole lot of fun.

A HUGE thank you goes out to all who helped with organising and staging the Collaboration Cabaret – you made it happen.

Credits:
Keith De La Rue – early participant, collaborator on whole show, staging and PA, “Clancy”
Dave Williams – Conference Convenor and score keeper
Nerida Hart – Co-convenor, early participant, photos and member of Wild Wombat Warriors
Michelle Lambert – early participant and member of Wild Wombat Warriors
Cory Banks – early participant and team leader of Wild Wombat Warriors
Matt Moore – team leader of Cuddly Koala Kings and Queens
Arthur Shelley – poster contributor and member of Cuddly Koala Kings and Queens
Catherine Rodgers – innocent bystander who bravely agreed to join the Cuddly Koala Kings and Queens
Steve Matheson – Ukuleles Canberra organiser and enthusiastic participant
Tim Keeble – Ukuleles Canberra and master lyricist (KM Rising and KM Hocus Pocus)
Charlie Chan – Bass Guitar, sound and Ukuleles Canberra
Keith Ogborn – Ukuleles Canberra
Annette – Ukuleles Canberra
Serena Joyner – Act I Facilitator, Act II Host
Patrick Lambe – early support and Dr Vaine’s address
Andrew Mitchell – mug shot for KMer or serial killer?
Luke Naismith – mug shot for KMer or serial killer?
Peter DeHaan – particpant, collaborator on show
Chandni Kapur – early participant, score keeper, photos, video
Tania Soler – early participant, poster contributor and photos
Mark Schenk – early participant and technical assistance (powerpoint)
ActKM 2008 Conference delegates – The Audience
My family – for putting up with me stuck in my laptop for weeks on end (sounds like the Oscars doesn’t it?)
… and I hope I haven’t left anyone out. Remind me if I have.

1. How to apologise
2. How to advocate your point of view without harming your collaborator’s feelings
3. How to spot when a conversation gets emotional and then make it safe again to continue meaningful dialogue
4. How to listen and get into the shoes of your collaborator
5. How to define a mutual intent that will inspire action
6. How to tell and elicit stories
7. How to get things done so you have something to show for your collaboration

I think these are spot on, but the list also reminds me of skills advocated for good project management, good partnering, negotiation skills, relationship counselling and so many other people focused activities. The fact is the our increasing ability to connect and communicate, leaves us in more and more situations where our personal people skills are put to the test. In a sense our humanness is becoming the rate-limiting factor to getting more things – and better things – done (my very plain english attempt at defining “greater collaboration”).

Do you know what your rate-limiting factor is? And don’t say time – that’s cheating. We can all say that :)

Well I have excuses…. Finished maternity leave. New job (involving a 2 hour commute). Three birthday parties to organise and hold (and I only have 2 children!!).

The new job – Senior Consultant with Step Two Designs – is shaping up to be a lot of fun. I’ll get to put a lot of my knowledge management, web and intranet experience to work, as well as exploring some newish areas such as “collaboration” (sidestepping definitions for now). (NB if you’ve seen the photo of me on the Step Two website – I feel the need to assure you that I am actually thrilled to join the company and not nearly as apprehensive as the photo would suggest :-) Will rectify soon.)

The actKM Collaboration Cabaret is due to start very soon, so getting that set up as we speak!

Perhaps it was a symptom of being “cooped up” in the gorgeous but sleepy Blue Mountains on 12 months maternity leave, watching one too many Wiggles videos with the kids, or just being starved of adult company….? Whatever it was, I got the crazy idea in my head of a fun event for the actKM conference this year – created by actKMers, performed by actKMers. Was it possible? We’re literally all over the globe, and putting together anything of this kind is nearly always a time consuming, face-to-face process.

I did have a precedent. A number of years ago I had the privilege of working my way through a truly engaging and challenging management development program with about a dozen remarkable people. We’d built up the kind of bond that you do with those whom you’ve struggled on the tough projects, worked through the conflicts and experienced a taste of truly great teamwork. As we got started on the final 2 day workshop we shared a desire to celebrate our time together and mark its conclusion with a “revue”. Having no time to prepare didn’t put us off. By adopting a version of the Good News Week TV show, we hived off the content development, called for volunteers, threw in a couple of songs and Hey Presto! .. by evening we had a show! (Seriously – we did all this during our breaks).

One of the nice aspects was while our fantastic trainers, John, Wendy and Ralph had initially been a little “wary” of being the butt of some of our jokes, by putting them on the GNW teams they had a ball, and happily sent themselves up before we got around too :-D The night was a raging success, and a whole lot of fun to boot.

And so I thought……. with the tools we have freely available to us today – what is stopping a clever bunch of people like us (actKM and anyone who even loosely associates with this community) from doing that on a larger scale?

Not much I think!

And so the “Collaboration Cabaret!” was born.

What’s the most memorable and fun learning exercise you’ve ever experienced? What made it “stick”? What made it fun?

Dave posts and Euan reposts a quote from Machiavelli:

It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out nor more doubtful of success nor more dangerous to handle than to initiate a new order of things; for the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order; this lukewarmness arising partly from the incredulity of mankind who does not truly believe in anything new until they actually have experience of it

Well, that sounds like a real barrel of laughs.

Taking a topical look at the same subject, Rob Paterson unearthed the inspiring and somewhat funny story (well funny now) of how a guy called Dick Fosbury scandalised the athletics establishment in 1968 by daring to innovate – flying over a high jump backwards. He wasn’t breaking the rules – he was innovating. And he won the Gold Medal.

Fosbury himself has said:

“The problem with something revolutionary like that was that most of the elite athletes had invested so much time in their technique and movements that they didn’t want to give it up, so they stuck with what they knew,”

Rob draws the analogy between the Fosbury Flop and the reception in today’s organisations to a “2.0 culture” as he puts it. Whatever you call it (social media/computing, Web 2.0, Participatory Culture, etc), change will happen, it is not being universally embraced and we can do nothing to stop (or possibly even steer) it.

Clay Shirky writes (in his fabulous book “Here Comes Everybody”):

“Arguments about whether new forms of sharing or collaboration are, on balance, good or bad reveal more about the speaker than the subject.”

and

“The mistakes that novices make come from a lack of experience. They overestimate mere fads, seeing revolution everywhere, and they make this kind of mistake a thousand times before they learn better. But in times of revolution, the experienced among us make the opposite mistake. When a real once-in-a-lifetime change comes along, we are at risk of regarding it as a fad.”

Re-reading that last quote, I have to smile – with selective emphasis it could be used as ammunition by both the novices and the experienced, the “believers” and the “non-believers”!

So as I hear all the Web 2.0 and social media nuts enthusiasts cheering, I want to remind you and remind myself, that along with all that revolutionary capability comes lots and lots failure. Shirky says “new social systems have to tolerate enormous amounts of failure”. Its the capacity for large amounts of cheap or safe-fail enterprises/experiments that allows fabulously successful examples emerge.

So…, that means most of us will fail. At some stage – perhaps regularly! And the “old order” will helpfully point that out, and the “lukewarmers” will drift away. And we learn from the experience and move on quickly and adapt and innovate. We learn from it, and we may even learn to love it.

And I suppose what all that means is, rather than needing to be courageous, I just need to be aware, adaptive, resilient and persistent.

If you would like fewer emails but can’t be the revolutionary that Luis is, you could try this ingenious technique I heard about on ABC radio recently (sadly I can’t recall who does this – may have been a journalist).

Next time you go on leave, set up your Out of Office message to say:

“Hi. I am on leave until xx/xx/xx. When I return I will delete all emails in my Inbox. If your email is important, ring me when I return.”

OK, I can’t see that working too well with some clients, but its a brilliant, albeit cheeky approach to internal mail.

The difference for me has been social media. And I’m clearly no early adopter – this post is kind of my 3rd attempt in 2 years to get my blog running <blushes>. Apart from the pressing desire/need/expectation to just get on with it, I was also inspired by wonderwebby’s post “Making Connections. Making a difference.” about how she benefits from online social networking.

So what’s different? To be honest I’ve really only paid attention for the last six months and half of that was just toe-dabbling. However I’ve still benefited. To follow Jasmin’s lead I’d say it comes down to:

1. Personal development. Just through reading a quarter of the blogs I should read and listening to about a tenth of the podcasts I’d like to, I’ve kept up to date and broadened my thinking. It doesn’t matter that’s its 6am or 10pm and I’m in my dressing gown, if my brain is up to it I can learn something (although the fact that my baby girl now demands to watch Dr Vaine IS a worry). Podcasts didn’t always win out over Oprah (yes I do watch Oprah), but they usually did.

2. Virtual watercooler. One of the aspects of working life that I missed most while on leave is the old “watercooler” chitchat with work pals. When I gave Twitter a try I found something of that amongst my looser network of peers and a handful of thought leaders already well established in the twitterverse. (There is something to be said for feeling like I had the time and “permission” to experiment with these tools. I was working when I first heard about Twitter, and I dismissed it almost immediately as an unnecessary drain on my already limited time. I can see now how it can be “tamed” and used to benefit my work.) In contrast, an older listserve I am still a member of often proved to be (with a number of exceptions) a cold and unforgiving place, almost completely devoid of human warmth (although you can warm yourself by the searing heat of the flame wars when they periodically flare up)*.

3. Network consciousness – tool transparency. My LinkedIn is (very) slowly growing, I have 17 followers on Twitter (gee whiz), and I am a member of 5 Ning social networks, one of which I started 3 months ago. That’s all nice, but what is more interesting is that I am beginning to get a sense of actually being in the networks, as opposed to using a tool or being on a platform. I’ve caught myself thinking about operating in my networks without thinking about which tool – ie achieving tool/media transparency. Today I contributed a small amount to a Google Document that has been shared with a couple of dozen people who have expressed interest in a collaborative event that was proposed by a friend on his blog, that I was alerted to on twitter. I sense this is becoming the new normal. Which does make the actual networks more important that the tools or platform. More important, more visible (within the network), more powerful and really quite nimble. Wow!

After six years working only 30 minutes from home, I now return to commuting 2 hours each way into Sydney. It will take a very understanding family, a wonderfully flexible employer and lots of planning/effort to make that work. And I suspect social media and my networks will play no small role.

*P.S. You know who you are :-) I have exaggerated for effect of course. And my affection for this community prevents me from removing myself from the list, despite its orneriness.

In the spirit of Nobel Prize winner Muhammah Yunus, Kiva.org is

the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending website, empowering individuals to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs in the developing world.

Illustrating what can happen when you empower the givers as well as the receivers, Kiva has loaned nearly $US35 million (to date) to entrepreneurs across the developing world, from over 300,000 individual lenders. They partner with micro-finance lenders around the world to provide small business loans of an average of about $500. They currently boast a better than 98% payback rate. Of course the other beautiful aspect of it is that the “givers” are actually “lenders” who once their original investment is repaid, are free to lend it again to another recipient.

I’m stunned by the simplicity this concept, and how obvious its success seems now that I know about it. They are aggregating supply and demand at a truly granular level; matching the extraordinarily successful micro-finance concept to the powerful desire of individuals to give and see their giving make a difference. Distributed philanthropy perhaps? There is no doubt that the experience of selecting an individual person to sponsor and then following their progress is highly rewarding and motivating force.

I must explore further….

I am not an expert in anything, but I don’t have to be. I am (re)joining the human experiment in distributed cognition.

Finally dusting off the blog I started in 2006.

Hooray!