The Orange Chair

Not a good page to hit during the Holiday (shopping) Season. But credit to J. Crew for a) having a fail page and b) providing a backup (in this case, a phone number). Much better than getting a “500″ error or some other error code that would mystify most people.

Let’s up this page, J. Crew Fail Page, is replaced by the real home page soon.

I’m happy to share that one of my favorite Enterprise 2.0 tools within IBM is now available on the Internet. IBM Pass It Along is now available on Alphaworks, a public IBM site for people interested in trying out emerging technologies–all you need is a free ibm.com account. IBM Pass It Along is about sharing what you know and learning from other people. If you have a how-to you’d like to share, create a topic for it. If you’re curious about something, request it. If you’re just curious about the crazy tools we use within the enterprise, check it out! =)

Here’s what I love about Pass It Along, and I think you’ll love it too:

• You can find out who’s learning a topic and see what else they’re interested in. Sharing what I know becomes a lot more fun when I can see who’s learning, because it gives me feedback that what I’m sharing is useful. Lists of people are much better than anonymous hit counts because I can view their profiles to see what else they’re interested in.
• You can learn from other people’s contributions. People can add links, related presentations, discussion topics, and other updates. For example, the “How to Make the Most of Your Commute” topic I started within IBM drew lots of interesting suggestions.
• You can create a place for discussions. I give a lot of presentations, and Pass It Along topics are a terrific place to hold follow-up discussions and reach out to more people. I post my presentation material using the Presentation Wizard and include the URL of the Pass It Along topic on my slides. It’s a great way for learners to connect with each other, too.

I also really like how a newbie like me can create value for other people by sharing what I’m learning. =) Whee! I’m copying some of my public content over, and you can find my topics on Pass It Along.

IBM Pass It Along on Alphaworks is a public site open to everyone. Access controls will follow soon, so you can limit topic access to just your organization if needed. IBM Pass It Along is even better inside your organization, where you can link it up with your employee directory or do all sorts of other cool stuff.

Check it out – it might be a great fit for your organization!

IBM Pass It Along

Here are some of my tips on running an unconference based on my experience running an unconference as part of a 2-day IBM conference.

• Advertise – make sure your participants understand how an unconference is different.  That this is about what the participants want.  The unconference is what the participants make it.  Some participants still didn’t quite understand it until after they attended.  Don’t use only blogs and wikis to advertize, you want to get message out to others too.

• Make sure the sign up board is big, and is in people’s faces, preferrably before the unconference begins (we had 1.5 days for them to sign up before the unconfernece part of blue horizon began).

• Don’t expect too many people to sign up ahead of time.  Actually some unconferences don’t allow any pre-sign-ups anymore.

• Realize that some participants may still try to “present” leaving no time for interaction or questions.  Tell them that no preparation is required.  If they really really want to prepare, then set a maximum on the amount of time they can “present” and the maximum number of slides.

• You might want to specify a theme

• Hardest part is getting participants to realize that there is a topic that they can lead.  All it requires is enough knowledge on a subject to ask the right questions, initiate the discussion, and facilitate it.

• Facilities – we only had one room (a big room) so we put projectors and screens in 3 of the 4 corners.  We put flip charts in all 4 corners.   What worked best was having the chairs in a semi-circle.

• Schedule – we had 4 time slots of 35 minutes, in 4 break-out areas (16 slots total).  Next time I would like to make it longer, or have more break-out areas.

• Schedule board – we used a big white board.  I drew in the schedule and an area for people to request topics.

• Let unconference session leaders have 1-minute to tell all the participants what their topic is about.  Almost like a verbal-abstract.  Keep them to 1 minute (with a buzzer or something) or this could take forever.

• Encourage session leaders and participants to blog about it afterwards all using the same tag

• Advertise some more

Also, check out some great ideas by David Crow on tapping participants brillance.  I especially like the idea of open white boards with questions posed to all the participants.

If you’ve seen any presentations in the last 5 years talking about the multiple generations composing today’s workforce, chances are that you’ve already seen the following table, or one of its multiple variations, all somehow influenced by the book "When Generations Collide: Who They Are. Why They Clash. How to Solve the Generational Puzzle at Work", by Lancaster and Stillman:

If you are wondering where you fall in this division, here are the boundaries:

• Traditionalists, born between 1900 and 1945;
• Baby Boomers, born 1946 to 1964;
• Gen-Xers, 1965-1980;
• Millennials, or NetGens, born after 1980

I liked the way the table above summarized the generational differences the first time I saw it, to the point I asked a colleague to re-use it in my current engagement. But when I proposed to add this table to the material I’m developing – part of a collaboration strategy for a very large government agency – I had an enlightening conversation with the folks I’m working with, both of them boomers and brilliant.

I don’t buy this. When I was 18, I was very much like the NetGen described in this table. The behaviours described here have a lot to do with personal traits and lifecycle. Today’s NetGens, once they get married, start a family and get a mortgage, may become more settled and act pretty much like a boomer. Besides, there are young folks today that are uncomfortable with change, thrive under hierarchical structures and prefer things to be run the "conventional" way.

Disclaimer: The above is my recollection of what 2 people said, which can be very different from what they actually said, so take it with a grain of salt.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot and I’m inclined now to think that the table above is VERY ageist, and it’s not helping us to actually understand the differences between people.

Our brain likes generalizations. It helps us to create a simple model of how life works and simplifies our decision making. But generalizations are typically based on perceived averages. And there is no such a thing as the average person, the average Asian, or the average woman. You probably have seen one of the multiple incarnations of "if the world were a village of 100 people" (see here & here for more details). The hypothetical average human being would be Asian, adult, heterosexual, Christian, always hungry and with no TV at home. I would bet that the vast majority of the human population does not fit that full profile, even though those are the dominant attributes in each category. Those attributes are independent variables, they don’t come in bundles.

There’s a Brazilian song that says something along the lines of "looking from a close range, nobody is normal" ("de perto ninguém é normal", Vaca Profana, Caetano Veloso, if you need to know). That’s so much true! Just imagine the table above trying to do the same with gender, race, or sexual preferences. You would probably think that to be very inappropriate or stereotypical. One of the things that make humanity fascinating is exactly how complex and different we are. Nobody is "one in a million". There was never a person like you, and there will never be. We are all truly unique, each one of us a long tail of our own. So please don’t tell me that you are too old to blog or that you "get" technology just because you are supposed to be a NetGen. There’s nothing like living in exponential times: the only thing you are supposed to be is yourself.

Check out a great post by Steward Mader on organizations with boundaries to collaboration

This is something I have seen so many times.  Clients which are so silo’ed, they are practically a dysfunctional family.  Social networking can help break down these barriers, but it has to start with the people.  I remember asking a client for something (back in Web1.0), and she said, “but that is not my job”.  She had her silo, and was completely comfortable staying there.  It is great to see many of our clients embracing the change, but as always, there are some who don’t see the need to change.

p.s. if you noticed a sudden increase in my blogging tonight (on all my blogs), it is because my baby is having a nice long nap.