6 thoughts from watching my 4 y/o climb

Yesterday my 4 year old daughter climbed a 12m climbing wall. A couple of weeks ago we were watching other kids on the wall and she was transfixed; she was wary but wanted a go. At the top of the wall there's a bell ringer; anyone who's around (and there's always people around when a little kid goes for it) can't help but applaud. The photo below shows her at the top of the wall, reaching for the bell pull.

Here are a few thoughts that occurred after she was back on terra firma.

1. Occasionally look down.

Ok, I'd be the first to admit I was saying, "Don't look down," but sometimes you need to appreciate what you've done and that although you're 12m in the air, you're actually safer than everyone else thinks you are.

2. Everyone goes first.

Sometimes you're genuinely breaking new ground; most of the time someone has done something similar before and you just have to find them and learn. The way you incorporate your experiences and learning to that point produces a unique experience; yours.

Of course, when others see you pursuing your unique experience they are moved to find their own; lead by example. 

3. To be brave you have to be scared first.

Fearlessness isn't particularly admirable. Not being scared is stupid - as is incorrectly assessing risks so as never to do anything. Respect the size of the task, respect the risks, then do it anyway. 

4. Focus on the very next thing.

The best bit of advice I felt I could offer was, "One step at a time", or some variant. By simply finding the next good hand/foot hold and stepping up, you can make surprisingly good progress. There are many ways to the top of the wall and all of them are achieved in the same way.

5. Getting above head-height is the tough bit.

That bit where you leave ground is easy; the point where you leave the comfort zone and the risk sharply increases is hard. Mental strength is required to realistically assess the safety provision and analyse the risks. It's equal parts discipline and trust. 

6. Only those on the wall know what's going on.

From 12m away you can't know what the hand-holds are like, whether the rope is holding, whether some clothing has been snagged. All you can do is talk in generalisations; direction, energy, progress. Only those who actually have their nose, feet and hands on the wall can make the tactical decisions.

Of course, I had a go and it was great. But as a 4 y/o it would have been something more than that.

It's not Email vs Social Media, it's tools for jobs

This post http://t.co/pTgTLA79 got me thinking and talking to a couple of customers this morning. In it:

• Mark Zuckerberg talks about replacing email with something more immediate and clearly, for him, Facebook's new messaging service is it. 
• The Microsoft guy then pours cold water on it - understandable given the amount of revenue Microsoft get from licensing Outlook, Exchange and the servers that power corporate mail all over the world. 
• The (ex IBM) guy who invented MIME points to (IBM's) LotusLive, which is lovely and largely irrelevant to most corporates for whom Notes is a tainted if not poisonous chalice of end user computing proliferation.

I totally buy a few things in this article. I think the move towards conversations in a shared, protected environment is going to continue as users see the benefits of being passive participants in conversations; the 'ambient information transfer' argument. Users will also become more comfortable in such an environment, meaning they'll contribute more.

The argumemt, "email vs social media" strikes me as a bit bizarre. It's like saying, "Is a letter better than going to the pub with your mates? Or having a meeting?". 

Well, it just depends what you want to achieve.

For a start, the idea that email is somehow going away doesn't fly - but there are plenty of things done with email today which it isn't that great at. Products will come along that replace things users currently do with email.

This is already happening; before Twitter, how else would you share an interesting link? Blog it? Email out your blog?

And it will happen in other areas.

For example, it gives users control of their workflow; often users will create filing structures within email to allow them to rapidly locate information. I did it myself until around 2008, at which point search and filtering got good enough for me to find what I wanted without filing it. Normally, if I can remember the context of an email then it can be retrieved, even if if means searching on a name, then spinning through a couple of pages. Better than being a filing clerk.

Another example: email is a singularly terrible way to talk about anything to any volume of people. If you're not on the list, you don't know it's happening. If it's in your inbox and nowhere else, it's impossible to share the knowledge. Replies get crossed all the time ("with respect to Dave's point in his third para"). 

A decent collaborative enterprise platform kills both of these uses of email. But it will have to ensure that:

• Collaboration has to be based around work; it has to be in shared data & communication environment rather than simply a messaging environment - it has to be real-time, capable of dealing with multiple conversation threads
• Communities of users are able to freely form and create new knowledge from existing data, so the user community becomes the filing system
• Enterprise search is powerful enough to render filing a waste of time

Email remains pretty good for private communications - personal or enterprise confidential items you don't want to broadcast. (Of course, it's sensible to assume that everything gets leaked eventually.)

But in all other areas, it just needs the right product to topple it.

Lessons from teaching myself to run again

I've been running on and off for nearly 30 years - but more off than on. My whole family have had been runners at some point, undoubtedly due to Dad who's still a dedicated runner now as he gets towards 70. In my teens I was quite into it and could do an 11 mile run over pretty serious terrain at the drop of a hat.

So I've always been working off a base of assumed competence - like a lot of organisations. No-one ever taught me to run - certainly not Dad, who could 'just do it'. As so often seen in other disciplines, if it comes easy to you, you've probably not gone through a learning process to become expert in it, and so you're not best placed to teach excellence in it.

But my running has been more off than on. Allowing for a mis-spent late adolescence and early adulthood, it's been off and on for two reasons; lack of pace and recurrent injuries.

Over the last few months we've finally nailed the right asthma medication for me. Of course, my asthma was fine; I was running every other day, usually comfortably. But the nurse said, 'all very well but you're running to your limits', i.e., without the right meds there was no knowing what my potential was.

The other breakthrough was finally teaching myself to be a forefront striker; I now land and push off on the balls of my feet rather than being a heavy heel striker. Heel striking is all very well but you have to roll forward onto your forefoot to push off which increases the risk of pronation/supination, but also seems to massively increase the shock to your system with every step. Every time you land on your heel it's like a car crash; the force travels straight up your leg.

So forefront striking has really reduced the injuries. I've been running for a couple of months now without injury.

The final key is not to overdo it. Instead of thinking, 'yeah, 11 miles used to be no problem…', the right way for me has been to limit it to half an hour every other day of walk/run, building up to complete sessions of running. The aim is to get the muscles and mental capability developed gently. 

I think these lessons have relevance for organisations too.

1. What medication does the organisation need? Is there a tool or process that will delimit the capacity of a process?
   
2. Can we make simple changes to reduce friction and risk at the point where work is actually done?
   
3. Can we make lots of small steps to increase capacity, rather than a single, high-risk change?

How we made the 'minimum viable product approach' work

Seth Godin describes why the minimum viable product approach doesn't always work; you can't go through the try/fail loop without support of a community of users.

This is borne out by our experience at Sabisu. In our case, what we had to do was build the community before the product; find something that meets a community's needs, pitch the idea and perhaps a prototype and construct a community to support you.

That community is essential for a few reasons:

1. It's validation - plenty of people will tell you your crazy, so it's nice to have some people around of a different opinion.
2. It's a feedback network - so you can be sure 
1. You start by addressing a real problem rather than something vague and perceived.
2. You continue to address real problems instead of going off at a tangent.
3. If it's a great idea then users may support you in other ways (expertise, for example) in return for early adopter benefit.
4. You get case study opportunities very early, as opposed to launching then waiting a year.

Why call the blog 'One Less Cut in a Thousand' ?

Is there anything more dully self important than writing a post on why you called your blog a certain thing?

However, I was asked, so here's the answer.

You may have heard the expression 'death by a thousand cuts'; it derives from a barbaric method of execution used until 1905 in China but generally the phrase is used to describe 'creeping normalcy', or negative change which happens slowly in unnoticed increments.

My career so far has been spent on the inside of enterprises of all size. In my experience the most inspiring visions, innovative ideas and game changing technology fails to be adopted not because of a considered architectural or strategic decision to reject it but because of 'creeping normalcy'; the organisation fails to improve because there is inertia and apathy. Great ideas simply fail to find fertile ground - or, worse, we drift, apathetic, into creating terrible, unethical organisations.

Likewise, improvement projects fail not because of a considered decision to close them down - in fact, this is a successful scenario - but because lots of small negative actions chip away at the business case, or reduce uptake, or invalidate assumptions.

There are thousands of negative actions that reduce an organisations capacity to change, to improve. When I started the blog, my aim was simple; every post should have something positive a reader can take away that helps them to change their organisation; something positive to counteract the thousands of possible negatives.

Every post should be one less cut in a thousand. Perhaps one day we'll never make the first cut at all.

Real world enterprise social networks; why quality trumps quantity

I think the uptake of social media within the enterprise is really interesting. There are few independent studies (and lots of sponsored ones) so it was interesting to see the adoption of an experimental, completely unsupported and unpublicised enterprise Yammer implementation – it would be inappropriate to say when, where or how.

What happened was that following an initial burst of activity where the recruitment of new users went viral, it then went silent for about 9 months. There were very few messages, very few new users. Then the activity picked up again of its own accord; users would put up more messages and the join activity started to rapidly increase.

I must admit that having read about the Twitter new user ‘9 month bounce’ last year I was expecting it – basically, users go quiet after joining and then come back. This resonated because it’s exactly what I did with Twitter.

Of course, Twitter’s new user activity is obscured by the continuous near vertical (but linear, apparently) user number growth. In a limited environment any slow down in growth is much easier to see.

So why the dip? Why the pickup?

I think the dip was down to a few things;

1. Public nature of posting – people were a bit shy/wary.
2. Users unsure what to post, or why.
3. Insufficient followers – you post more when you have followers. Probably it's something to do with 9mths being the amount of time it takes to get enough followers as a new user in order for it to be worth tweeting.
4. Growth by spam; it was pointed out that on joining the platform spammed you to invite new users. These users might join but weren’t necessarily engaged.

Why the pickup?

Just my thoughts but:

1. It took 9 months to find the right users; a couple of users popped up out of nowhere and began posting on a regular basis, making the community active and therefore:
1. Useful
2. Accepted behaviour (cf.Gladwell’s ‘The Tipping Point’, particularly sections about ‘permission’.)
2. Personal social media penetration; users are relaxing about posting stuff. Without doubt enterprise users will get burned by posting inappropriate comments – and learn from it.
3. Viable network size; one of the reasons that Yammer wants to drive network growth (see 4 above) is that they’re aware that a big network is more likely to be robust and active, hence useful, hence endorsed by the enterprise.

Now, fascinatingly the relationship between the size of a network in the early stages of development and it’s activity was almost (could be?) mathematical: they correlated precisely. It was almost as if every single new post added a user, even though that user wasn’t addressed.

In fact, the number of messages was far below what we might expect; perhaps the quality of the network and network activity didn’t match the growth; perhaps quality drives quality, as growth drives growth.

The take away for me is that to build a quality network is more difficult and rewarding building a big one.

Where I've been going wrong with IT strategy

I love strategy. I love the idea. But it's only recently that I've come to realise where I've been going wrong all these years.

I've yet to see a company who has a non-IT core business define and execute a successful IT strategy.

By 'define' I mean clearly describe the vision, the goals/objectives,

By 'execute', I mean delivery of the strategic platforms and the solutions that sit on them; effective communication; mass adoption; proven benefit; everything defined delivered.
  

Sure, we see organisations deliver components of a successful strategy but never the whole hog.

Why?

Well, I don't think strategies are sufficiently agile. Certainly small, modern, agile enterprises seem to express themselves in terms that make big, mature, static organisations wince. Which is a bit strange seeing as they're both reliant on the same species to function.

Often, strategies don't actually mean anything. As soon as someone says the word, 'strategy', it seems to be the green light for academic techniques that don't actually resolve in anything a user would recognise. It's like even the communication of the strategy is FUD driven and scared of someone deconstructing the buzzwords.

Because they don't mean anything, they don't engage users. The guys on the ground floor don't care. The guys in the middle are busy being squeezed by the guys at the top and the guys on the ground floor. Vague, long range planning is your enemy. It doesn't translate into the real world.

Often, an the people within an organisation doesn't know what it cares about; what it stands for; what it's principles are. Think this is outlandish? Check out John Oliver, Grow Your Own Heroes.

So, strategists:
1. Make your strategy agile.
2. Eliminate buzzwords, be simple.
3. Engage users with tangible objectives.
4. Know what you care about.

As I said at the start, I love strategic thinking and know what a well chosen strategy can do. It's only now  I'm at Sabisu that the importance of it - and the way to make it really work - is becoming a little clearer to me. Here at Sabisu we're working up a bit of a guide on how we think strategy should be done and over the next few weeks we'll get round to putting up some ideas.