How Animation … Animates

There’s a great series of animations available on the Royal Society of the Arts website that show how powerful cartooning can be in getting messages across. Here’s one example on intrinsic motivation but there are many more.

Organisational learning and paper engineering

You what? OK, its an unusual combination and perhaps the term ‘paper engineering’ needs an introduction. Since I was a child, I have been fascinated by ‘pop-up’ books and cards. In fact I have a big collection of them. Pop up books began as a way of animating stories but pretty soon people began to see their potential for explaining complex ideas. The technical term for pop-ups and similar types of paper objects is ‘paper engineering’. For me, the most wonderful examples of paper engineering are made by Ingrid Siliakus (actually Ingrid is a paper architect, making three dimesional objects out of a single cut and folded sheet). Robert Sabuda has also made some amazing pop-up books (his trilogy of books on dinosaurs, sharks and mega-beasts are, in my opinion, the best ever produced), and his cards for the Museum of Modern Art in New York are works of art in their own right.

I got into paper engineering a few years ago and I have been fascinated with the truly ingenious ways in which paper engineers use such a simple medium to make complex objects. Sometimes the objects are the message and sometimes the objects carry the message.

A couple of weeks ago I attended a three day retreat with my consultant colleagues in Framework. Framework has been holding retreats twice a year for 25 years and I have been to the most recent 24 events. We try to surprise each other with the sessions we organise and one of the most popular opportunities to do this is the ‘check in’ session held at the beginning of the retreat. This time, Catherine used the theme of ‘creativity’ to get us started. She asked us to come along prepared to talk about (and show) something creative that we did outside of work. We were encouraged to tell each other about how long we have been doing our creative activity, why we started it, what it means to us and where we want to take it in the future. Then we were asked to discuss how we think the creative activity relates to and influences our capacity for creativity in our work. I chose paper engineering and it was Catherine’s final question that got me thinking hard. How could I relate paper engineering to my organisational development consultancy work? The result of that thinking are the two objects in these photos.

The first object is a simple pyramid that sits on my desk as an aide-memoire. This one is a reminder of a conceptual model I developed a few years back concerning organisational learning. The model is abbreviated as MMO – motive, means and opportunity – and provides a way of thinking about what we all need in order to learn effectively in organisations. Each is represented on one side of the pyramid. In the photo you can see the opportunity and motive sides.

The second paper engineering object I took to the retreat was inspired by the model that Donald Rumsfeld (George Bush’s Secretary of State) famously quoted at a press conference during the Iraq war that had the journalists present hooting with laughter. However funny his attempt at an explanation, the model he was trying to describe not only makes sense – it is a useful way of thinking about knowledge management in organisations. The model is rather like the JoHari window so I decided to represent it as a four-box matrix that opens to provide some little insights within each box.

My colleagues really liked the models and I enjoyed making them so now I am thinking about other ways to link two of my passions – paper engineering and organisational learning. My next challenge is to work out a way of creating a paper engineering object that represents my ‘eight function model‘ for organisational learning.

What’s Mine Is Yours

I have just finished reading ‘What’s Mine Is Yours‘ and it has helped to strengthen my faith in human nature. Using examples from the UK and US (its a pity there are not many international examples) it shows how some people have harnessed the power of the internet to build trust, create communities around shared needs, and generate social capital. The book was full of revelations for me about the ingenuity behind web phenomena such as Zopa (the social lending community) and Landshare (the garden use website) that focus on shared use rather than individual ownership. Last week in Oslo I had some time to sight-see and joined the city-wide bicycle rental scheme so that I could visit the sculpture park, the Nobel Peace Centre, the new opera house and get a feel for the city in just a few hours. ‘What’s Mine Is Yours’ explains how schemes such as Oslo’s bike rental scheme works and how riding the bike is only part of the benefit that helps users to connect with one another and feel part of something meaningful. When you know that the electric drill you’re about to buy in the hardware shop is only likely to be used for 12 minutes in its whole lifetime, you begin to wonder whether there’s a better way to buy ‘holes’! What’s Mine Is Yours provides plenty of practical ideas for an alternative to ownership of more stuff – namely, Collaborative Consumption.

The Story of Stuff

Mistakes and how to make them

I have been working on a paper for INTRAC on jazz improvisation and learning in teams. Reading round the subject, I found myself thinking about the oft-quoted claim that we learn best from our mistakes rather than our successes. But do we? And what do we actually mean by the word ‘mistake’? It’s a word that comes laden with negative associations. So much so that I rarely feel comfortable using it.
So what is needed for some action to be identified as a mistake? First there needs to be an action that didn’t go according to someone’s expectations – often based on a plan for what was supposed to happen. Alternatively the action is measured against a standard and found wanting. If the ‘someone’ with the expectations is me or the criteria for making the judgment are clear to me from the outset, does making a mistake have greater potential for learning?
In Free Play, Stephen Nachmanovitch’s great book on improvisation, there is a chapter on ‘The Power of Mistakes’ that encourages us to embrace fully the idea of mistakes. He quotes Tom Watson, the one time CEO of IBM who said “Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.” Jazz musicians have a slightly different take on mistakes. As musician Don Byas has said “There is no such thing as hitting a wrong note. It’s just that when you hit that wrong note, you’ve got to know how to make it right … you just keep weaving and there’s no way in the world you can get lost. You hit one. It’s not right, you hit another … As long as you keep going you’re all right, but don’t stop, because if you stop you are in trouble.”
Just recently I have come across two interesting references to mistakes. The first is a book entitled The Logic of Failure. I have just ordered it and judging by the ‘look inside’ seems to have some really fascinating things to say about the nature (and inevitability) of failure in complex systems. The other, somewhat serendipitously, arrived via an email list. It is a new website set up by Canadian Engineers Without Borders called Admitting Failure.
Their website is based on the premise that given the sheer complexity of development work, mistakes are not only inevitable, they should be seen as desirable learning experiences and shared widely. Since mistakes (or unintended consequences) are an inevitable part of life, we need to factor them in to our plans in some way. In the world of development projects, the almost ubiquitous planning tool is the logframe. The logframe has many critics, and justifiably so. It is pointed out by many critics that the logframe creates a planning straightjacket, stifling creativity and constraining the possibility of adaptation to address the unexpected. Logframes do have a component entitled ‘assumptions’ which is intended to encourage us to consider what might go wrong. In my experience the assumptions box is a missed opportunity. Often it is used for unhelpful lists of general factors that have to go right for the project to achieve its goals – such as ‘stable government’, ‘no civil war’, ‘community support’, and similar. But what if we used the assumptions section of the logframe to be creative about anticipating possible ‘mistakes’ and the reasons they might occur? This might liberate our thinking and help change our attitude to mistakes. We know that mistakes, in the sense of unanticipated outcomes, will always be made. What we need are ways of making them well. Engineers Without Borders, Canada encourages us to do so in their courageous website.

The Learning NGO Questionnaire

I have been very intrigued to see a recent flurry of interest in my Learning NGO Qnr through the KM4DEV community. Those who are interested in some suggested ways of using the questionnaire may wish to download the INTRAC paper The Learning NGO.

Advanced Organisational Development Course

Every year I run a five-day course for INTRAC on organisational development. The course is invariably well-received and recently in my discussions with Paula Haddock from INTRAC we thought there might be a market for an ‘Advanced Organisational Development’ course. I have outlined a course that will be advertised soon and will be based on in-depth case studies along the lines of those found in the Harvard Business Review. In these case studies, three prominent practitioners are asked to comment on the case and outline what they think should happen. These case studies will, of course, be developed well in advance but other cases will be written by participants based on their recent or current organisational challenges and will be brought along for discussion during the course. I also plan to have some time for sharing tools and models and, partly as a result of attending with my daughter an inspiring session at the Scottish Dance Theatre called ‘Meet the Choreographer’, build in some structured interviews with and between course participants.

I’m looking forward to using new and challenging methodologies and to writing the case studies. The main areas I intend to cover are developing new organisational business models; decentralisation and ‘nationalisation’; managing mergers and takeovers; growing strategic partnerships and strengthening learning. I’d be very interested to hear from anyone who has some ideas for the cases or who would be willing to provide a written commentary.

Lego and organisational development

Earlier this week I was invited to a seminar at the University of Edinburgh Business School. I have been invited to other evening events and usually decline to make the journey but two things made me decide to go this time. The first was the venue – the Business School has moved to new premises and I was interested to see the new setting for my alma mater. The second was the subject – playing with Lego for business purposes. Who could refuse? The seminar was organised by Invenzyme and used a trademarked approach called Lego Serious Play. I’m not a believer in people packaging old ideas in new clothes so I admit to being very skeptical at the outset. However, because I regularly ask people to draw ‘rich pictures’ of their organisational dilemmas (a technique I learned from Soft Systems Methodology) in my consultancy work I was interested to see how much difference adding a third dimension would make.
I think the answer is “a significant amount”. Though I have yet to use Lego in this way I am now planning to try out some model building on the course on organisational development I will be running in Oxford in a couple of weeks’ time.
Back to the Business School seminar. I was won over by the fact that we were each given a little plastic pot of Lego before the presentation. (But why did we all have to have identical pieces, I wondered.) Actually, it was just as well we had the Lego at the beginning because I found the presentation somewhat, how can I put it, lacking in energy. So I found I could easily listen to the speaker (15%), watch his rather good powerpoint (20%) AND doodle with my Lego at the same time (65%). Looking around the room at the fifty or so other participants, it was interesting to see the different reactions. There seemed to be two groups – those who didn’t open up their pots until told to do so and the rest of us who were already on our third construction before we were given the first assignment.
So, somewhat inadvertently, the speaker proved his point. That we learn better by using our hands as we listen and talk. All good Piagetian stuff.
The conditions were not the best for creative thinking. Ranked seating in a lecture theatre doesn’t make communication easy but the exercises were fun “Build a model of yourself as a leader”, “Build a model of a challenge you are facing in your work” each followed by a period of talking to the person next to you.
Before I attended I had looked at some of the background literature on Lego Serious Play and have since found other material explaining that LSP (as it is called) has gone Open Source. Well done Lego!
By an interesting coincidence (if there are such things), I found that one of the theoretical sources for Lego Serious Play is the book ‘Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience’ by Csikszenmihaliyi which I picked up recently and had started reading with great interest.
So what did I learn from the seminar? That playing while listening and problem-solving really does tap into interesting areas of creative thinking. That, as with all techniques, it is the quality of the facilitation that really makes the difference between a successful session and a flop. That I will try using Lego instead of rich picture methodology and see what difference it makes especially for those who say “But I can’t draw!” Perhaps most of all I learned that I still love playing with Lego almost fifty years after receiving my first set.

‘Capacity Development in Practice’ Book

Some time ago I contributed a chapter to a forthcoming book entitled Capacity Development in Practice, commissioned by SNV and edited by Jan Ubels, Naa Aku Acquaye Baddoo and Alan Fowler. I have just heard that the book is due out very soon – in August 2010 – and you can find out about it here. I’m really looking forward to reading the other contributions and excited to be in the esteemed company of such great colleagues. It is also pretty special to find that Peter Senge has added a comment to the cover.

Jazz groups, string quartets and organisational learning

I have had some time recently to follow through my earlier blog post on the links between jazz and organisational learning and have tried to distil some of the points raised in Frank Barrett’s wonderful paper (see my earlier post). I have prepared a handout Jazz and OD with a few ideas about how jazz musicians work together and what organisational teams could learn from them. The handout forms part of an exercise I will be facilitating in a forthcoming training course. In the process of looking up some material on teams and teamwork I came across a reference to an article by Keith Murnighan and Donald Conlon in Administrative Science Quarterly (1991) 36 pp165-186 which examines classical music’s nearest thing to a jazz group – the string quartet. Although working from a score and definitely not improvising the leadership in the string quartet resides in the group itself and not with an external conductor so the musicians must be closely attuned to each other – rather like a jazz group. The article identifies three paradoxes in the way they operate (leadership versus democracy; the paradox of the second fiddle and confrontation versus compromise) which show just how different string quartets are from jazz groups but how equally worthy of study they are as a source of insights concerning teamwork and learning in organisations.

I have always thought that orchestras, of necessity, demonstrate a very ‘old school’ model of leadership and organising but I recently came across an example of a chamber orchestra without a conductor which has developed some fascinating and challenging principles about self-organisation. Olivier Serrat, a colleague at the Asian Development Bank, has written about the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra in an interesting piece on Distributing Leadership.

It seems that nothing is ever as straight-forward as it first appears. Even widely-used metaphors!