Adventures in Knowledge

Future of Volunteering - mid project update

On Friday last week, I had the pleasure of hosting Dave Snowden at Deloitte in Sydney to give a mid project update on the Future of Volunteering project. It was interesting to see an independant report on the session by Brad Hinton in his blog "Plain Speaking". I will let you read his report on the session as it effectively sums up the proceedings.

One thing I will say is that whilst we do have an unbalanced survey set - the majority from the 17 - 59 yr age group (little from the under 17 age group, some from the over 60 and manager of volunteers groups) already some of the insights are beginning to challenge traditionally held assumptions about volunteers - for example, we are seeing a significant number of the stories being told by people who work full time, are degree educated, volunteer weekly and volunteer because it is their passion.

We are currently working on strategies to redress this imbalance and get more stories from the under represented groups with tweaks to the survey language and a phone-in to a call centre being held on 31 Jan - 2 Feb (more details early next year). We also will have a release of the Sensemaker package in January that will allow us to get stories through Facebook - an exciting development and one which will hopefully extend the reach of this project.

The Future of Volunteering - a real experience

As you would have seen in previous posts, I am involved in a project called the "Future of Volunteering" where we are looking to uncover the drivers of volunteering in Australia.

A key tool we are using in this process is the Cognitive-Edge Sensemaker suite. Now this is NOT a plug for Sensemaker, but rather me voicing an opinion on how powerful this tool is. We are now at the midpoint of the project and are assessing the initial data collected. We now have over 800 stories, but require LOTS more. In doing the initial analysis of the anecdotes that we do have, it is impressive to read the views and heart felt sentiment of people involved in volunteering. No where else have I been able to immediately start to spot patterns and trends emerging and understand REAL insights behind them. It has also been refreshing to be able to undertake some statistic analysis around issues correlation.

What is already apparent is that we have more work to do on getting a representative cross section of the community as we have had no responses from the indigenous community or other language groups. It is also interesting to see the minimal response we have had from under 17 years demographic, pointing to the need to develop a specific programme to target this group.

Next Friday, Dave Snowden will be in Sydney to present a mid-project review to the Stakeholder group for the project. After this meeting I will post some more detail on some of the initial findings, issues and feedback we are getting on the project.

Change this.....

I recently came across a site in my web travels called "ChangeThis". I found the content presented in a range of formats to be refreshing both in the viewpoints presented and the way in which they are tabled. I always am willing to view different perspectives with an open mind as it broadens the way I think and injects new thoughts.

ChangeThis is creating a new kind of media. A form of media that uses existing tools (like PDFs, blogs and the web) to challenge the way ideas are created and spread. The authors state that they are on a mission to spread important ideas and change minds. In the same vein as TED they are certainly on an exciting journey.

I encourage you to have a look!

A Leaders framework for Decision Making

I would like to draw your attention to the leading article in the November edition of the Harvard Business Review. The article is called A Leader's Framework for Decision Making. It covers the Cynefin framework, complexity, with a focus on the importance of context in decision making.

It is great to see the work of Dave Snowden get mainstream recognition, as the whole area of complexity and use of narrative to make sense of the world so we can act in it, is beginning to get noticed in government and business. Being an accredited practitioner, this certainly will help me get leadership to consider its application in my business.

As also mentioned in earlier postings, we are also using the Cognitive Edge framework in the Future of Volunteering project which uses these tools in a public policy context.

Congratulations David and Mary for your contribution!

Interesting who you meet - on a plane

I am always amazed by the interesting people you meet on planes. On the Sydney to Auckland leg of my current trip, I struck up a conversation with "Bob from Austin". Bob has retired and is spending his time seeing the world. A quiet spoken gentleman, but one with a wealth of knowledge and insight. We spent three hours talking about the world, how complex it is getting and about my view of a networked world. Bob certainly was well read and indeed versed in Web 2.0. What I found rewarding from this conversation was to see a gentleman who had seen major change in his lifetime able to provide perspectives I had not considered and indeed add new trains of thought to my thinking. One "gem" that I picked up was in our discussion about narrative and story telling. Bob is greatly concerned about the the use of narrative by the media as a thinly veiled way to project the opinion of certain interest groups. He rightly pointed out that narrative is only as good as the experiences being shared. Many people are more willing to provide their opinion rather than tell a story about an experience which will significantly skew interpretation.

Well three hours certainly flew by (pardon the pun). I am looking forward to seeing if there are any other interesting characters to be met in my travels - I will let you know!

Future of Volunteering - update

It has been a while since I updated you on what is happening with the Future of Volunteering project I have been working on.

To date we have collected approximately 700 stories about volunteering. However, this number is well short of the 000's of stories we are wanting to collect. Our biggest challenge has been to get the word out in the community about the project and garnering participation. This can partly be attributed to the fact that the nature of volunteering is such that not all people have this as their highest priority - after all we all have to make a living and meet other obligations! In order to give this project the greatest opportunity for success, we have delayed holding the sensemaking workshops planned for last month until early February when we will have significantly more stories and have had a greater opportunity to engage community support.

We will not be resting on what we have achieved to date - the next several months will entail  a significant marketing effort to raise awareness and collect more stories. We are planning on holding a volunteer story "phone-in" over a week in mid November - the idea being to get people to call in with their stories to the call centre we have been able to secure. I will let you know how this goes in a future post.

Working on this project has certainly been interesting with many lessons already being learnt - especially as this is the first time the Cognitive Edge tools and processes are being used in a public policy setting.

On the Road.....

It's been a little while since my last decent post - life's been rather hectic since KM Australia! I just have been on a whirlwind visit to Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur which has put me out of contact more often than not.

I previously mentioned an ONA project that I was doing for an organisation in China. Since then I have been invited to talk about ONA and how Enterprise 2.0 can be used for collaboration, at their annual conference in September where all senior execs from across the country attend. This certainly continues to validate my belief in organisations becoming more network centric. I will post the presentation on slideshare if I can get permission.

On anther note, I have recently been involved in a Cognitive-Edge project called "The Future of Volunteering" where we are looking to uncover the drivers of people volunteering, the policy implications of such and provide recommendations to government. This is a milestone project in that it will be the first time that the Cognitive Edge tools and processes have been applied to explore an issue of critical public policy. We will be using the Cognitive Edge Sensemaker suite as part of the process. I intend to blog more on this as we get further into the programme of activities. This is a really exciting project to be involved in!

Finally :) I will be speaking at a conference Public Relations Summit 2007 in Melbourne (21/22 August) with the MD of Dow Jones Asia - Bruce Macfarlane. The topic we are talking on is The rise of "Turbo Capitalism" and the impact on decision making. This should be an interesting presentation as it really is focussing on the implications for decison making by changes in the way information and knowledge transfer is occuring today. We are intending to make this more of a discussion between us, and try to involve the audience in the discussion.

Did you know?

You would have seen from some of my previous posts that I see some fundamental changes in the way knowledge is shared on the horizon, and there are a wide range of factors that are driving the paradigm shifts that are beginning to occur.

I came across this video on You Tube that really encapsulates some of the forces at work and makes one pause for thought. Take a look - it is called "Did you know"

Story telling at school

My eight year old son this term is studying the family tree at school. Last night when I arrived home from the office, he met me at the front door very excited - "Dad - the teacher has asked that we get our parents, and grand parents to write a story about what it was like when you were growing up - and it has to be done by tomorrow!" Initially I grumbled, having had a full day at the office, but then I realised that this was what it was all about! We talk about the power of story telling in business, but forget (at least I forgot) that this was an important element of learning at school. It was really amazing to see the gleam in my son's eye as he read the stories both me and my wife wrote for him - it brought to life a whole new world and I can guarantee that he will absorb and remember so much more, being able to see the world of growing up through our eyes.

The downside - one hundred and one questions in the car this morning - an older child's version of our four year old's standard question - "but why?"........