Yay! The Monkeys Tweetup gets under way...
Posted from Hackney, United Kingdom
About
Monkeys with typewriters is a book on social media and work, especially the future of business leadership. It's been lovingly put together by Jemima Gibbons. And Triarchy Press have made the book a reality. You can buy it here.
A walk on the wild side
It's tough getting decent work done on a Friday, so what better way to spend the last day of Social Media Week hanging out with interesting people: collaborating, networking, drinking, eating, philosophizing or whatever else takes your fancy?
Tuttle Club will be taking place from 10am – midday at The Centre for Creative Collaboration near Kings Cross. If you’ve never been, you really should: this week will be a good ‘un. Lloyd Davis, Tuttle’s lovely founder, is now working as Social Artist in Residence at the CCC, and I’m sure he’ll be talking a bit about that new role, as well as doing his usual – meeting and greeting the Tuttle newbies and generally ensuring everyone who attends has a good time and at least one cup of decent coffee.
Whether you fancy a bite of lunch after Tuttle or whether you’ve worked hard all morning and reckon it’s time for a break, on Friday afternoon, from 1pm – 4 (ish), there’ll be a Monkeys Tweetup at The Drunken Monkey in Shoreditch. With free beer for the early birds. And delicious Dim Sum for everyone who wants it. The aim is to chat about the anthropology of social media: I see this as a kind of holistic look at the long-term social and cultural impact of social media (if any!), but please bring your own ideas and input.
Linking the two events, a 40 minute walk through the wondrous zone that is (or was?) Silicon Roundabout. [Update: just saw this Wired article indicating that Silicon Roundabout is very much alive and kicking] Why tube it when you can take your time and marvel at the myriad offices of so many tech start-ups? Last FM, Poke, IDEO, Moo, Trampoline, Dopplr and many more have all made their homes between Goswell Road and Brick Lane. Maybe some of these brilliant people will even join us for a drink :)
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Going underground
London’s Social Media Week got off to a roaring start on Monday night with a drinks reception deep in the bowels of Adam Street, just off The Strand. Sponsors Meebo kindly bought the beer, wine and snacks and then kept a low profile, which is how everyone likes it.
As far as I know, no-one made a speech, but then I was so late I could have missed it. By the time I arrived people were a bit merry. It was nice to get a bear hug from @jonbains who told me I was a deeply empathetic person, before disappearing to the Adam Street members bar – chances are it’ll be another three years and possibly more children (on his side) before I see him again.
Another blast from the past was @Williamhigham who has also just written a book so we had a cosy chat about how useless publishers are at promoting anything. Then I felt for William so I went onto Amazon and bought his book.
It was good to see lots of other friendly and familiar faces, including @robingrant (above, with friends) @anniemole @freecloud @andrewgerrard @utku @whatleydude @kathryncorrick and of course Mr London Social Media Week himself @toodlepip.
It was also nice to hook up with a smattering of new people. I’ve never met @donaghkebab before but I liked his attitude and his hair (especially the way it matched the art), plus @havefundogood (aka Jack) who was confusingly wearing an @tweetminster t-shirt but confessed to have nothing at all to do with them. He said he wore @tweetminster to get attention, which is weird as @havefundogood sounds more sexy, doesn’t it?
Congrats to the Chinwag crew for organising a fantastic-looking week at incredibly short notice. There’s a whole heap of events: check out the Social Media Week London schedule. There’ll even be a Monkeys Tweetup on Friday with free drinks for early birds – watch this space for more info!
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SOL-UK seminar at One Alfred Place
Thanks to social reporter David Wilcox for recording this interview after the SOL-UK seminar last week (and for uploading clips from the talk itself onto his Qik page).
When I did an MBA ten years ago, Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline was a popular set text. It is probably that book, along with Arie de Geus’ The Living Company, that most inspired my interest in why organisations behave the way they do, and how they can either be designed and managed in a way that makes them vital and energized, or over-managed and over-designed to death.
So, it was a real pleasure to be invited to speak to members of SOL-UK, the UK chapter of the organisation that Senge himself founded in the late 1990s. I was looking forward to meeting a crowd of people who’d been equally excited by the ideas of Senge, de Geus and other champions of what is loosely termed distributed leadership – and who were equally interested in the significance of these ideas in relation to Web 2.0.
The seminar took place last Wednesday at One Alfred Place and lived up to its promise. The event was sold out, and the conference room packed. We also had a virtual audience, thanks to the handful of attendees who were tweeting and blogging through the event – special thanks to Stephen Cribbett and David Wilcox for their comprehensive updates. We even had a tweet from Craig Newmark in San Francisco, just seconds after his leadership style was being discussed – and I’d been talking about what a good listener he was!
This being the first time I’d presented ideas from Monkeys with Typewriters, I was feeling my way a bit. I tried to keep the slides as simple as possible, so they were basically an overview of the six key behaviours I'd identified in my 12-18 months of dedicated research. These six behaviours (or attributes) are the ones that seemed most present/ obvious in both people’s approaches to social media and in the organisations which were embracing what we can term a "Web 2.0" ethos, or approach. The six behaviours are: co-creation, passion, learning, openness, listening and generosity.
It was great to be in a room where people seemed to pick up on ideas eagerly and in a critical but constructive way. The audience was diverse in terms of technological knowhow – some people confessed to avoiding social networks like the plague, or simply coming along because they were curious about social media but had never used it at work, others were ICT careerists with backgrounds at companies like IBM and HP.The chapter entitled “Co-creation” had started out as "Metanoia" (Peter Senge's term for the heightened state of creativity achieved by a group or team working together in an effective, efficient, intellectually-charged manner). When I mentioned that I eventually ditched that title as it turned out that Senge’s interpretation of metanoia was rather different to the standard definition, which has overly-religious connotations of salvation and repentance, it was good to see a couple of heads at the back nodding sagely.
Not surprisingly, it was the chapter on “Learning” that caused the most contention, with one attendee observing that the organisational adoption of social tools such as wikis, tagging and social bookmarking enabled not so much “learning” as simple communication – surely the term “learning” should be reserved for a deeper kind of understanding, one which involved some kind of significant psychological realisation, acknowledgement and development? Another attendee referred to Otto Scharmer’s work around “presencing” as an illustration of this type of process.
Of course, I firmly believe that social media can help encourage learning on a deep level throughout organisations. However, adoption of these technologies is just one part of the process. It is only when these new digital tools are combined with a distributed approach to leadership, enlightened management and flexible structure that we can really make a breakthrough.
Thanks SOL-UK for inviting me along - I'm enjoying the conversation!
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The unbearable lite-ness of being
Loved this feature on the post-bureaucratic age which Alberto Nardelli pointed out via Twitter. Apparently Stephan Shakespeare, co-founder of YouGov, recently gave a talk on the theory of 'post bureaucracy' that has been developed by Conservative party strategist Steve Hilton.
The facts that the Internet enables us all to have access to information that used to be privileged, that we are seeing a democratisation of influence (bloggers and Twitter, for example), forcing increased transparency and accountability in business, combined with a grudging acceptance that centralisation and globalisation no longer hold the answers...all these things mean that the world of work is going to change.
This was something I realised while writing Monkeys with Typewriters, and I can still see it clearly now in pockets of discussion and activity happening all over the place. Life really doesn't have to be as complicated as we have made it.
Nearly two years back, David Wilcox and I sat down at One Alfred Place to discuss what David was then calling Organisation Lite. Soon after, I interviewed Lloyd Davis, whose Tuttle Club was inspired by Harry Tuttle, the engineer in the film Brazil who wages war against the over-bureaucratic machine. Tessy Britton, new Chair of the RSA Fellowship Council, has set up a project called Social Spaces - looking to find a flexible rather than prescriptive approach to social change. There's also the ground-breaking work of the people at consultancy ThinkPublic who had the revolutionary idea of improving public services by simply, erm, asking users what they want.
I'm looking forward to giving a seminar next Wednesday at One Alfred Place for SOL-UK - the Society for Organisational Learning. The session kicks off at 6.45pm with a short talk about the conclusions of Monkeys with Typewriters and some background to the key behaviours and trends that emerged from the 50+ interviews I carried out for the book.
Afterwards, there'll be a discussion about how - and if - social tools have the power to change our business world for the better - and we'll try to come up with some positive calls to action: what can we do now to help ensure that change actually starts to happen?
I hope the discussion will join some of the dots in the quest to improve the way we work and live. If you'd like to join in, please let me know. I've a handful of tickets available at the SOL-UK members rate of £10. Just add a comment below or drop me a line via iKnowHow or Twitter.
Photo credit: Frank Peters
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Latest live blog of RSA Fellowship Council
Now available over on the iKnowHow blog.
The second meeting of the RSA Fellowship Council took place yesterday at RSA House and I was able to blog the meeting as it happened. The Fellowship Council is made up of elected and co-opted RSA members (known as "Fellows") and marks a concerted effort by the RSA, a 255 year old body, to open up its governance to all stakeholders within the organisation. I was elected to the Council in July.
We are still trying to decide exactly what it *is* that the RSA Fellowship Council should do. And I thought that decision-making process might make interesting reading for anyone aspiring to move towards a distributed, "leadership 2.0" type model in their place of work.
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Wide-eyed monkeys and many-eyed bugs
I really REALLY enjoyed last night's book launch at Cass Business School. Thanks again to everyone who made it down.
Despite the dodgy statements that everyone was forced to agree or disagree on (written by, ahem, yours truly), and the fact that we somehow *lost* £200 of the book takings (which later miraculously re-appeared in Matthew's inside pocket) and the dubious (and hard to get hold of) food at All Bar One afterwards - it was a truly great night!
Thank you Benjamin Ellis for taking some fab pictures. As you can see in the one above, everyone is laughing. This kind of sums up the night for me (and that was even before the bubbly got flowing!)
Thanks again to Matthew Fairtlough, my editor at Triarchy Press (far left, holding the mic) and of course my fellow panelists (from left to right), Suw Charman-Anderson, Euan Semple, Clive Holtham and - on the screen - Luis Suarez.
Luis had the particularly tricky task of joining the debate virtually by phone all the way from Gran Canaria - a challenge which he completed successfully with aplomb! That crazy laugh probably helped. He he.
It was fab to see so many friends, colleagues and family (mum, little sister and brother in law) all in one place - possibly a once-in-a-lifetime experience? My sis was particularly thrown by Suw's remark that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" - what was that about the bug with all those eyes, she asked, a wee bit horrified. (Suw was referring to Linus Torvald's rule that if you get enough developers on board, software problems will be sorted out quickly).
Luckily I don't need to go into too much detail here because Broadstuff's Alan Patrick has done a good round-up of the discussion and voting. And, if you'd like a peak at the action, the rest of Benjamin's photos are here. (Update: if you need more, here are two further launch reviews by Benjamin Ellis and Joanne Jacobs).
For anyone who missed it or would like to re-live the moment again, the debate was recorded and will be streamed online soon - I'll let you know where and when.
Thanks again everyone for taking part, and a very special thanks to Cass Creatives and Cass Business School for hosting.
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Lessons in lightness
I was gutted not to be able to interview Biz Stone for my book. We had an email dialogue going but I think re-funding issues and Twitter's stratospheric rise got in the way of a nice, reflective chat re the future of business.
Biz was in Oxford this week where the FT persuaded him to answer a questionnaire (and yep, each response is under 140 characters). His answers give some great insight into his relaxed leadership style and help explain why Twitter has been such a runaway success. Biz's answers demonstrate passion, generosity and openness, three of the key qualities I've identified in Monkeys with Typewriters.
Admittedly Twitter has yet to make a profit, but that doesn't seem to bother its global fan base. Maybe it's okay for power and influence to come first.
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It's all good
More than 100 people have signed up so far for the book launch on 9 December. If this is the first you've heard, don't worry, there's still space! The event takes place at Cass Business School (near Old Street) from 6pm and you can sign up here.
Suw Charman-Anderson, Euan Semple, Clive Holtham and myself will be taking part in a panel discussion on why social tools are intrinsic to business, and why the last thing any boss should do is worry about shock pieces like this.
In case you're in any doubt about how social media can improve your life, Luis Suarez, IBM's infamous email refusnik, will be joining us live from his office in Gran Canaria to tell us why online collaboration works for him (I'll give you five guesses).
The debate will be followed by cava, canapes and book-signing from 7.45pm. And if you're unable to make it, it'll be recorded and streamed on the Cass website afterwards. Details will be posted here as soon as I know them.
The event is another in the fabulous but irregular Cass Creatives series, produced by Cass Business School in partnership with iKnowHow.
And big thanks to Gorgeoux for the atmospheric pic.
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Great minds think alike
This bird ballet is a great metaphor our own "real life emergent behaviour" - what might be possible if we all start communicating properly and making the right connections. Thanks to @jyri (Google's Jyri Engestrom) on Twitter for the idea!
Watching these starlings reminds me of Arie de Geus' book, The Living Company, in which he talked about birds using "flocking" as a way of passing on information to each other: bird species that flocked, such as starlings, had advantages over the ones that didn't, like robins.
Scientists observed how, in the midst of winter when lakes and even rivers might be iced over, starlings had taught each other to peck open the lids of milk bottles on peoples' doorsteps - the solitary robins didn't appear to have this knowledge.
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