As simple (and as complex) as 1-2-3

Recently I had the great pleasure to present at a "Friday Session" organized by Cleverwood. The format is great because it's time boxed to 1.5 to 2 hours during which people who know something that could be useful to the others run the session. Usually the topics are focused on the Internet, social media, mobile technologies...etc However, because the challenge of dealing with people is a great one, I'm trying to contribute content that comes from my interest in NLP and coaching.

For many people, dealing with people is one of the most challenging things in professional life. For consultants, dealing with people is critical to the success of their projects. That's why I focused my Friday Session on two key concepts that can be used in a variety of contexts: personal relationships, sales, business development, negotiation...etc. These two concepts are:

1. the tao of engagement, which is based on the idea that if you want to achieve lasting results with a customer or as part of a project team, you must nurture relationship with people while striving to achieve challenging goals. That's easier said than done and it's easy to become either an inefficient socialized or a competent jerk 
   
    


2. the perceptual positions which are the different points of view that often emerge in work contexts. Becoming aware of the different positions that exist and starting to consciously process information from three angles is perhaps the single most valuable asset to be able to handle situations that may become "stuck" or enter never-ending loops in terms of patterns of relationship. The purpose of the tool is to deal with situations of conflict, disagreement, negotiation, sales and people management.

 
The way to use this is simple, but you have to accept the principle of immersing yourself in each of the roles without any attachment whatsoever for your "Me" position:

1. start by describing the situation you'd like to deconstruct, understand and improve. Descriptions should be with as many details as you possibly can;


2. define three distinct spots in the room and allocate them to you for the "Me" position, to your alter ego for the "Other" position and to a neutral "Observer". Using different spots is really important because of anchoring, i.e. the unconscious connexion we make between things that happen in the physical space and concepts, ideas, emotions...etc Thus we want to maximise our ability to really play the role of the "Other" without "contaminating" it with elements, judgment, rejection or confusion between thoughts, feelings of "Me" and thoughts, feelings of the "Other"


3. firstly sit at the "1" (or "Me") position and examine the scene; identify clearly how the person sitting in that position thinks and feels, what she says or does during the scene that is being player;


4. then "leave" your Self at position 1 and explore position 2 as though you were the "Other": what does he think, feel, say and do? What values are involved in the scene (as far as you can tell with the info you have, which is incomplete, but enough to start working;


5. having expressed what 1 and 2 think, feel, say and do, you must now go and observe the scene from a neutral position of the "Observer", position 3. The Observer is full of curiosity, openness, positive intentions and has no judgment whatsoever. From that position you can assess the quality of the exchange between 1 and 2, identify good aspects as well as areas that can be improved. Then from position 3 you suggest behavioral changes for position 1 and replay the amended scene to examine what changes have occurred to the way 1 and 2 think, feel, say and do.

This can be used to understand conflict, develop negotiating positions, work on a sales pitch...etc It's a great way to explore the "Other" position and understand the way the whole system made of "Me" and "Other" actually works.

So, overall it's "as simple as 1-2-3" and no, business cannot be about me, myself and I.

The Tao of Engagement

Perceptual positions

Aspects of web design

There's some excellent no-nonsense stuff in this presentation about web design. I like the way the author shows concrete examples of differences in how web assets look when specific design work is done to enhance them in a targeted way. 

Simple Steps to Great Web Design

View more presentations from Matthew Smith.

Of Google Wave, bots and complex adaptive systems

The launch of Google Wave has generated various reviews and left many with a feeling of perplexity or outright rejection because what they saw seemed so little compared to what had been promised (a lesson for every marketer out there IMO). In fact people who've accessed the platform reported several important issues summarized here.

However GoogleWave is indeed completely revolutionary and could well transform the way we deal with information, interactions, collaboration and value creation... perhaps even transactions some day.

This wiki (kindly provided on Wave by my friend David Dossot) is proof of  the revolutionary aspect of Wave as it deals with bots, each of which has a special function within the Wave ecosystem allowing it to connect and interact with other formats, platforms, logical spaces, communities and online properties. What's still very much unclear in what I've read so far (not nearly enough)  is the security model and the degree to which bots can be configured with standard behaviors but if secure and with extensive ability to configure and string together (with some of these objects providing flexibility analogous to Yahoo Pipes), then Wave could well be the equivalent of the "one ring to rule them all" and probably also "an offer we can't refuse" as the Godfather would say. 

On the even more interesting side of things, once adopted Wave becomes a real Complex Adaptive System with a greater potential for structure emergence than the open web because of the existence of rules and constraints that are neither too many (as in collaborative systems like blueKiwi or SharePoint) nor too few (as in the open web). The concept of wave being so open and so flexible provides for an ideal combination of rules and flexibility, which is necessary for CAS dynamics to really operate.

Now this is a first impression and I have not tested this stuff a lot, but if it is what I understand it to be and if it becomes what I imagine it can become, then this thing is not simply big, it's huge.

The wise learn from other people's experience

"The wise learn from other people's mistakes and fools from their own." So goes an ancient proverb that some say was first written in Aramaic. As far as I'm concerned, I have been more often a fool than a wise person. That may be because I prefer experimentation to inertia, feeling that Randy Pausch was so right when he said in the Last Lecture that in life "experience is what you get when you you didn't get what you wanted". This post is about experience sharing and it was prompted by a visit to Genaro Bardy's recent post on a presentation made by Kevin Rose.

Few things are more valuable for entrepreneurs and venture investors than getting the account of some real-life experience, whether it speaks of "success" or "failure" is completely irrelevant so long as the content is genuine and the analysis honest. When speaking to customers during workshops, trainings or coaching sessions I often encourage them to examine cases of other entrepreneurs they might know. I also advise them to cut through the crap of accounts entrepreneurial successes and  failures:

• in the former crap is neat logical explanations of how the successful entrepreneurs identified and captured an opportunity (i.e. they knew what they were doing from day one, had a definite plan and eventually ended up exactly where they'd wanted to be) and 


• in the latter crap is justifications and excuses pertaining to everything but the entrepreneurs themselves (i.e. they did everything right but someone else messed everything up or the circumstances caused them to fail despite their "perfect" plan).

In this post, I'd like to comment a bit further on this matter of sharing experience and use a presentation made by Kevin Rose as an example of the practice of honest and factual sharing of experience gained through different entrepreneurial initiatives.

Accounts of how entrepreneurial ventures unfolded are interesting insofar as they allow us to see how a given entrepreneur acted, both successfully and unsuccessfully, through expected results and unexpected twists and turns of the economy, in the context of a specific industry.

In such accounts there are elements that are very peculiar to the industry or to the entrepreneur and could not possibly be replicated. For example, Steve Jobs has very peculiar ways of doing things and much of his ways cannot be replicated even if we try to immerse ourselves Inside Steve's Brain (very interesting book) and in the business of social marketing there are practices that work very well but could not possibly be applied to financial services where regulatory constraints set clear limits on the nature of open community driven interactions. On the other hand, entrepreneurs' account offer elements that can be replicated and can be used in other contexts, in other industries, by different people. Very often these elements are good practices, activities, initiatives and sets of assumptions about the business. For example, Jamendo's founders could teach volumes about their initial assumption that open sharing of content under Creative Commons licensing would pave the way for new forms of distribution of and interaction on music. Their input would be valid for other forms of content and could be used to examine the impact of social media on traditional media or to carry out an analysis of the current war between Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp, Google and Bing.

One great example of such account is Kevin Rose's presentation in which he shares his experience of practices that worked well at Digg, Twitter or WeFollow. His low key approach is great as he is giving us a perspective on what worked and what did not, to tell us how to go with the flow and listen to users in shaping a service and to honestly state he is on constant experimentation. Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect in Kevin Rose's presentation lies in his relentless drive to speak of practice and not to preach for a theory or abstract construct. Practices can be replicated elsewhere giving due consideration to the peculiar aspects of a given business or industry.

Taking your Site from One to One Million Users by Kevin Rose

View more presentations from Carsonified Team.

The facilitation boost for teamwork

A very interesting post was published recently in a blog dealing with the point of confluence of marketing and neuroscience. It shows that bringing an outsider in any team endeavor actually improves the performance of the team effort. The post focuses particularly on decisions made in team contexts and on problem solving. This is very much in line with the kind of experience I have with workshops organized for customers on specific issues they want to deal with. In most cases we end-up achieving significant progress in an amazingly short time and with work that feel effortless although it's actually very demanding. The following are the top factors of success in my opinion:

1. focus on a specific issue: each workshop has a very specific focus area and my job as facilitator is to make sure everybody remains focused on the issue at hand or jointly agree to tackle another issue, but the point is to guarantee everybody is on the same page and all decisions about the topic to handle are made explicitly not by the usual "agenda drift" many meetings have


2. supporting process: during a workshop there is always a "backbone" in the form of a process that we follow and that process comprises specific sequences of work involving techniques borrowed from The Fifth Discipline, IDEO's method cards, NLP or Edward De Bono's Six Thinking Hats


3. external facilitation: as an outsider I have considerable freedom to ask stupid questions and approach the issues under discussion from original angles something perhaps an insider might not dare do or think doing as it's not easy to escape from established ways of doing inside an organization

So the effect of external facilitation seems to be visible in scientifically controlled experiments, something I find really interesting. The article clearly states that you don't need to bring in expensive consultants to get the "outsider effect" and that's rather good news because it's a great argument for enlightened entrepreneurs and managers who want to mix people from different functional areas. Now I believe there is much more to it than "just" importing an outsider in a team process if we want maximum impact. The effect is most likely much greater if the outsider has developed an expertise in this type of services.

Power of time-off

Some interesting inspiration at a time when it's so "normal" to always be reachable and connected and active and "oh-my-Gosh" so busy...

Fallacies, illusions and dogmas of social media

Having spent the best part of the past twelve years operating on the treaterous frontier of progress defined by the combination 'business + innovation + technology' the phenomenon of stubbornly odd pursuits of generally accepted truths makes me wonder sometimes. It does seem to remain valid with each wave of innovation imposing fads as reality for as long as it takes for deception to sink in thus leaving room for people who actually deal with the nuts and bolts of new practices to create forms that can be adopted. In this article we'll identify what I consider to be the top 5 fallacious propositions in today's social media environment.

A couple of stories with 5 major and often iritating common points:

story# 1: about 6-9 months ago I came across a most ridiculous Facebook group that was designed to gather the people who had more than 500 "friends". The group's communication essentially said that it was a way of selecting "really influential" people from "regular folks" using the platform... Parisian pseudo elitism or just plain idiocy you think?

story# 2: a couple of weeks ago, someone I've known for years, an alumni of my B-School told me very seriously: "I've created my profile on this great professional networking tool... you know? It's called LinkedIn. Now I need to get past the 250 contacts mark because I've been told it's what you need to be in the big league in this space. I'm glad we're speaking about it so I can add you too..."

story# 3: early 2008 a friend of mine who's running a training and human development company told me about the latest disaster that had struck them as a highly creative chap recast their website, but forgot to make necessary redirects and pages to provide for continuity in search positonning and PageRank. The complaint was that the site no longer showed up in the so-called "golden triangle" and the traffic had gone down. So they went on to use an SEO company that promised lots of traffic and a return to the top spots of page 1 of search results

So what's are the common points in those stories:

1. the fallacy of 500+ contacts in platforms like Facebook, which are primarily for personal use, consumer to consumer and business to consumer interactions... which leads me to wonder how many of those contacts are actually active, alive, vibrant and what the point of having 300, 500 or 700 contacts is beyond inflating already bloated egoes


2. the pseudo-scientific prescriptions behind very precise quantitative limits like my friend's 250 contacts on LinkedIn, which makes me wonder what the point is with having contacts with people one has met only once or one is "rediscovering" after years of absence (e.g. university alumni lost from the radar since graduation)? At the end of the day, some of the most intense and productive business contacts some of us have are not at all on LinkedIn and make a point of not being there, although they are present in more secretive circles and directories accessible by invitation only


3. the illusion of power, of being able to drive quantifiable results when in fact whatever emerges emerges as a result of substance which someone is working on. I mean, I've been doing work for companies and people in different places and despite the fact that I'm based in Brussels my network statistics on LinkedIn show strong bias for regions like California, New York, India... and of course part of it can be explained by the earlier or stronger adoption of the tool in those areas compared to Belgium, Luxembourg and France


4. a confusion of ends and means: being positioned on a search engine or having an online network or Twitter following of a given size is not an end in itself, but rather a consequence of something else one is doing, like for example exchanging useful tips and data with other people on Twitter, now a major source of intelligence for me. Under very specific circumstances, the network that emerges may become a means like for example when someone had the brilliant idea of launching the Twestival, however that does not mean that social media can be used for justa bout anything and that's a word of caution to marketers whose professional world is abuzz with the "social media opportunity". So far, I understand that purely commercial or sales initiatives are not very well received because social media are not transactional and because people want to keep some control over their attention


5. something necessary is not always sufficient: being positioned ona  search engine is nice and having "lots of traffic" as some SEO companies promise is whatever you want it to be, but at the end of the day optimizing a site for search is only a necessary step and not necessarily a sufficient step because content is increasingly important and a longer term bet. What's the use of having a boost in traffic and an increase in the bounce rate? What's the point in having traffic even with a "reasonable" bounce rate (whatever that is for your line of business) if that does not translate into actual profitable business? This comes back to what we were doing in math classes when learning about the subbtle distinctions between logical implications and logical equivalence...

I'm quite certain you have your own stories that resonate with the five points above. We need to speak some basic no-nonsense truths in this space, else bubbles inflate and explode in often painful way.

SaaS not a panacea

Over the past year or so, I came across a number of young and less young entrepreneurs who seemed completely infatuated with the concepts revolving around or arguing for a "software as a service" (SaaS) model, as though SaaS would solve all of their business challenges in a miraculous way.

So you thought all you had to do was offer software online and that's an easy way to remove all friction, increase your profitability by having customers do all or part of the work and never have to go visit users? Many people I meet seem to be under the charm of the SaaS fad. Many see it as an enabler for them to be a viable business. While there are merits to SaaS, its benefits are exagerated and in some cases the invocation of SaaS comes at the expense of rigorous business design.

So here's my take:

1. SaaS is not a panacea that will address all the issues revolving around your business model, your pricing, your distribution and your support to real customers


2. as a business buyer you'd better assess carefully how much of your stuff you actually want to entrust to online resources whose viability is yet to be demonstrated and which can be discontinued or frozen without notice (see Google's recent announcements, e.g. on Jaiku or their Notebook). Actually the consequence of this is that you do need trustworthy and financially sound partners who operate such tools like for example Salesforce with AppExchange


3. if you're going down the SaaS path as a business (which makes a lot of sense in many cases), you're likely to need a hybrid approach with at least some of the functionality residing on the user's machine, very much like Evernote does, and that has to be factored into your model because you're likely not going to get away with the assumption that you won't need any support or releases of updates to end users...etc.


4. irrespective of the form of implementation of your idea, you still need to put yourself in the shoes of your customers, to understand their needs, think as they think, feel as they feel, do as they do and be compassionnate about their current frustrations to be able to design a better experience. SaaS is not necessarily your answer and in any event, if you seriously design your customer experience, you'll have to take into account new kinds of needs such as online training, online support, remote sales...etc


5. legal issues are often disregarded in a very strange manifestation of carelessness: if you offer or use a SaaS solution, you do need to care about the jurisdiction and the legal constraints pertaining to data ownership, privacy, copyright, service level, authorised usage...etc. And in fact legal matters could be a serious friction in our sales efforts especially if you're targeting industries that have a tradition of discretion, secrecy and prudence like private banks, retail banks, investment banks, fiduciary and domiciliation companies, family offices, accounting firms, law firms...etc.

SaaS is all fine and good. Permanent beta is great. The network becoming the computer is brilliant. All the new stuff going on in the field of computing services is just very exciting. However none of it is panacea and it is by no means a license not to design, structure and manage your business in a careful and diligent manner. There's no free lunch.

As an aside, this latest wave makes me feel the passage of time given
that this is my first direct personal experience of an old concept
making a comeback under a different name: a few years ago the fad was
called Service Bureau, ASP (for application service provider), grid
computing and Software On-Demand (with Salesforce, Google Apps, Amazon
and and IBM leading the way). Interestingly, the big guys are still
around with relevant offerings irrespective of the way they're
presented (ASP, On-Demand, SaaS or the next fashionable acronym).

Awesome innovation at WideTag and sr labs

One thing is certain: my current trip to Milan is most interesting. That's mainly because I had working sessions and discussions with three exceptional persons, the founders of WideTag, Leandro Agrò (blog - profile - a conference he co-founded - idearium and leading designed at sr labs until a couple of years back), Roberto Ostinelli (profile - a multi-talented individual who's a beautiful artist as well as an accomplished technologist and business person) and David Orban (blog - profile). The achievements of that little bunch of determined persons have been very significant indeed over the course of the past 10 months and they create a foundation on which to create more.
As a coincidence of sorts I also got a great opportunity to learn about a fascinating Italian company called sr labs and to actually try their amazing i-able product which makes it possible to control and command a computer solely with one's eyes. It's quite an extraordinary experience because of the incredible precision of the device, its ease of use and the speed at which one gets acquainted with the way the product works. Aside from obvious applications to help disabled people access and control a computer, there is a range of other fields in which the eye tracking technology could be applied. Definitely worth a closer look...   

Randy Pausch's Time management lecture

Or why time and money cannot possibly be considered as merely interchangeable... "You can always earn more money later, but you can't get your last two years back"

Thalys experiments: WiFi inside, idiot design?

Writing while in the train getting back to Brussels after a couple of days in Paris for Ad:Tech. Yes while in the train. That is really cool. What's less cool is the amount of over-engineering Thalys seems to have put in designing this service: resources like Gmail, Google documents, Network solutions webmail and Google Apps are simply not usable because some stupid piece of junkware that runs on the Thalys WiFi network considers those to be forbidden resources. Even the sites of Le Monde and CNN are not accessible. So what gives? Is Thalys developing a new concept of a hyperlocal web? Are they trying to revolutionize the web by severly limiting connectivity? Is this a censorship experiment for the Chinese government?
None of these exciting avenues I'm afraid. It only seems that somebody felt it important to implement an extremely stringent security policy, which, in the end, voids of most of its value the great promise of WiFi aboard high-speed trains. I'm sure they'll fix this someday, but what does it say about cost of opportunity in terms of revenue to the company? What untellable stories of wasted service design resources does this case convey? Is there anyone to doubt that product / service design will be a strategic competency for companies in the coming years?

In the end, it all boils down to common sense and a structured albeit flexible approach to product ownership. Something that does seem to be a common thread to methods like scrum, agile development, permanent beta, Toyota's continuous improvement through the kaizen approach or NLP... They all accept a degree of chaos that characterizes the real world. Realism, common sense, perseverance, patience, continuous and relentless improvement, continuous quest for evolution, no nonsense and a thirst for  feedback are some of the characteristics of approaches that work.

Now on the positive side of things the idiot design does not prevent Thalys travelers from accessing Wikipedia, Barack Obama's web site or the Business Quests blog :-) as you will see in the screen-shots.

Kick starting product management with scrum

The recent training on scrum has been an interesting inspiration for me. Even more importantly, it opened up new perspectives on the best way to carry out product management work and provided a framework that helps me understand a bit better things that went particularly well in past projects and by contrast why other projects were such drags.

Thinking about the pains of getting customers to feel happy with a product, I realized that product management is one of the most critical areas that is broken in many companies. In fact in many cases it's stalled and needs kick starting. So, I structured a workshop using scrum artifacts to run it in combination with other tools and disciplines. The purpose is to have participants exposed to scrum artifacts while working to get product management moving again so as to create a positive exposure and to generate motivation to use scrum once product development is reorganized to be agile. In the workshop there is a short introduction to scrum focusing mainly on the way scrum works rather than on the origins and history of it and to run that section of the workshop the excellent introduction slides by Black Marble will be used.

The structure of the workshop is in the following slides. Feel free to use this stuff: it's under BY-SA-NC Creative Commons license... In fact, I will likely run such a workshop pretty soon in one of my projects, but given the nature of the exercise I won't disclose anything about it and it will be yet another situation about which blogging is not an option... Anyway, I hope this will be useful to you and as ever I am really eager to get some feedback about this stuff, especially if there are "stories from the field" :-)

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Done!

Well, I guess it's done in the fullest sense of the word: the scrum master training is over and it's been an exciting couple of days with Jeff Sutherland and great participants. There was theory, there were facts (many) and there was also practice, where I got an opportunity to play with nice fun people like Nicolas and to benefit from the creative ideas of Denis, two team mates in a practice sequence that we blew away. One of the missions was to build a four story house of cards (that's where Denis creative use of post-its came in). Great fun. Here are the pictures.

The team's achievement (OK, the fourth level of the house is minimalistic, but on the other hand that was the description of the requirement in the story point, so why go beyond and take the risk of send everything crumbling down?) with Denis trying to hide behind a bottle of water ;-)

Nicolas, who's given us a great tip to properly achieve estimates: make sure you are absolutely clear about what "done" means... and that makes a world of difference both in terms of quality of estimates and in terms of making the interaction between team members really productive and uplifting:

The team's achievement with Laurent at the right hand side in the background. Laurent works for CRP Henri Tudor, Luxembourg's public research center, which means that Luxembourg had some serious proportion of the audience in this session of scrum master (there were 4 people from Vanksen Group, Laurent and myself - I count at least 50% from Luxembourg given the amount of time I spend there!).

Upgrading my "software"

One of the things that I most love about being a freelance professional is the freedom to choose how I go about upgrading my skills, the software that I have installed between my ears if you will. In fact, following trainings that can help me better coach and help my customers is a priority. That's one criterion for choosing and that's what led me to participate to a two-day training session organized by Xebia with Jeff Sutherland (who I find very impressive with his great combination of expertise, experience and common sense - highly recommended!) on scrum a method that he's helped invent. Scrum does seem to be the kind of methodology that truly binds agile practices of software development teams to agile product management, i.e.exactly what one needs to help customers in fast paced and high-growth business contexts. For more about Scrum this is a good link. No nonsense approach to projects, smart implementation of lessons from complex adaptive systems and action orientation are the characteristics I most appreciate in the approach. I will definitely be looking for projects and environments where to apply this stuff...

Full speed ahead for Linked In

Linked In is evolving big time with the integration of social networking functionality of a new sort and with the extension of its services to cover company profiles, something I consider awesome. A few months back I wrote a piece stating why I did not believe in Facebook for business and how a combination between carefully chosen Facebook-like functionality and Linked In functionality would deliver major value. Now more than ever, Linked In is becoming a real custodian of professional identity, pretty much like Google will increasingly be the authority to ascertain the identity of individuals (in fact they already act as a trusted third party for customer details verification in e-commerce transactions).

Anyway, here's a nice little video of the product manager doing a demo of the new feature, which will help propel Linked In to a position its look-alike competitors will have hard time catching up with. And by the way, this is the sort of stuff I would love to see more product managers do for their products.

Understanding business growth to manage more of it

To many people the very idea that growth can be a problem for a business may sound strange. Yet, growth is the cause of demise of many new ventures and proper management of business growth is one of the most critical tasks for managers to perform. I put together some slides to outline some very important aspects of growth sustainability mainly from the financial perspective. Hopefully it will give entrepreneurs some food for thought. Enjoy and please let me have your feedback.

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How to run a (re)branding workshop

In recent work sessions and discussions with customers and prospective business partners I was asked to provide some input regarding a process that could support a (re)branding exercise. While I have by no means developed anything to generate relevant brands or names for products or services, I have been asked to run workshops aimed at helping teams agree on the (re)branding of one of their products or services. These sessions were structured using several tools coming straight out of NLP as well as methods developed by Dr De Bono and a fantastic design company called IDEO. So I decided to make the process available under Creative Commons license for anyone who may need to use it. Feedback is very welcome as I look forward to the opportunity of improving the way the workshop is structured and the adequacy of the issues tackled. Please note that these slides are "facilitator's training or prep" rather than stuff that can be shown to the participants of the workshop.

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Great User Generated Content in the US Primaries

Here's a piece I think is a shining example of user generated content and a strong indication that open online platforms give real power and influence to the people. Now sure whether that validates Gladwell's tipping point, but it does show that the people can wield some influence. Now the question is whether this influence will be stronger than that of insiders of a system, in this case the US political establishment. Something interesting to watch for marketeers and communication pros.

Matthieu Ricard at Google

Interesting insights with a strong scientific and philosophical basis. Also interesting is the fact that Ricard was invited to speak at Google. What would happen in the economy if we had truly happy people at work? What would the impact be on our societies and on global issues facing mankind?

Confidence can be a double edged sword

In my projects I often work with entrepreneurs who seem to consider it vital to show absolute confidence in their business idea. They should listen to this testimony.