Black Belt Dojo

What about the workers - is it changing?

Sue mentioned that we've just come back from running one of our corporate Black Belt sessions in Europe. 

For a Brit, it's always interesting to meet communicators from the rest of Europe where the role of the worker representative and the works council is so much stronger.  As an old leftie (I might have even joined a trotskyite group at university except they expected you to get up early to sell newspapers outside factories) it's particularly noteworthy.

And in the UK, on one of our recent Black Belts, we had someone who's life was dominated by union relations and in Europe workers are having ever greater formal role in the planning of a business.  I generally think this is a GOOD THING.  In recent years the markets have not really done much to restrain some of the worst corporate excesses and the supremacy of the shareholder in most corporate thinking may not always lend itself to the most responsible or accountable decision-making.

But the challenge comes to internal communicators.  A union communication is always going to be quicker, blunter and more trustworthy than anything that comes from the employer.  When I did some work a few years back for a trade union it was amazing how swifty they could react - well before the management side had decided what to say, had it watered down by the legal team and filtered through corporate-speak.

Which all makes me wonder how British internal communicators will cope with the growing implementation of an European model of industrial relations.  In the UK, the 1980's and 90's saw the gradual disappearance of union influence except in a few notable places - but is the growing role of employee representatives changing the Internal Communicator's job?

About a year ago you couldn't move in the UK for dire warnings that the much delayed roll-out of the European DIrective on Consultation and Information was going to bring the end of the world as we knew it.  It would be interesting to know what really changed????

Liam

Communic8te redesign

Comms blog site Communic8te has remodelled himself...  for those of you who know Tony, you won't need any introduction, but he's always happy to dish out tips and hints on all sorts of issues - I've found his commonsense step by step tech advice invaluable!  Try posting a IC tech question.... (that doesn't apply to Sue as she is behond help on anything involving technology!)

Liam

news reading

Three things in the news caught my eye today - thought I'd share them ...

So THAT'S why so many women work in comms ...

In today's London Lite, a new study has confirmed women have brains that make us talk three times as much as men. In an average day, we speak 20,000 words compared to 7,000 for men. Apparently it's down to a 'natural high' females get from communicating. So now you know!

Why??

Also from London Lite, check out wikidumper.blogspot.com. It's a compilation of items the Wikipedia editors rejected, and a quick glance reveals why pretty quickly...

And why again ...!

BBC On Line lists the most downloaded viral videos on the internet. Top of the list is a 2 minute video of a teenage boy pretending to weild a Star Wars light sabre. It's been viewed 900 million times.  Huh??  I really must be getting old ....

Sue

On reflection

We're just back from running an in-house Black Belt for a corporate client.  The reflection notes & reflection time we now include after each section proved really popular.  We introduced this fairly recently following feedback that people wanted a bit of time to think about what they'd just learned in each session before we hared off onto another subject.

Our binders now include a reflection sheet at the end of the slide set for each session. The sheets are split into four quadrants:

• STOP - what do you want to stop doing?
• START - what do you want to start doing?
• REDUCE - what do you want to do less of?
• INCREASE - what do you want to do more of?

There's a notes section at the bottom to jot down any other thoughts or ideas.  We allow five minutes at the start of the next session to fill in a reflection sheet about the previous one. That way, people have had chance to ponder and talk about the previous subject in the break (we know everyone is so dilligent that they DO talk about important strategic internal comms matters in the breaks, of course!)

After seeing how useful people found these this week, I've decided to block out 30 minutes at the end of each week in my schedule to fill out my own reflection notes from the week that's just passed.  Who says you have to wait for a training course to reflect on what you could be doing differently?

When you think about it, there are quite often times in your day to day work that you notice things that worked really well and wonder if you could use it more often or try a variation of it in other situations.  And there are times when things don't go as well as you wanted them to and you make a mental note to do things differently next time.  But if your schedule is anything like mine, reality bites and you end up running on to the next thing and forgetting about the things you intended to take forward.

Time will tell if I'm disciplined enough to use the reflection time that's blocked out each week, but if nothing else, having it popping up as an appointment in my diary every Friday will make me think ...

Sue

I spy ...

I've just got back from staying at my best friend's for the weekend. Huge mirth between she and her other half about her parents' latest theory about 'what Sue actually does for a living'.

Yes, Tracy's mum & dad share that sense of bemusement about what it means to work in internal comms that we all encounter amongst family and friends. Apparently after she told them about my latest bout of jet-setting (aka mantaining polite facade whilst inwardly steaming about HOW LONG it takes to get from the plane to my car at Heathrow!!!  Aaaargh!), they've now decided that I am, in fact .... (wait for it) ... an international spy!

Yep, they've decided that my inability to park/reverse a car, hopeless sense of direction, screaming fits in the presence of spiders and general girly dippiness are all careful ploys to disguise the fact that I am in fact a highly intelligent & glamorous MI6 agent. I quite like that idea actually. It beats their former theory that I spend all my time organising Christmas parties. ..

Anyway, whilst out shopping/eating/more shopping/more eating as is only right and traditional on weekend with best friend, I came across a natty little book by Allan & Barbara Pease called Why Men Can Only Do One Thing at a Time and Women Never Stop Talking.  I was tempted to wrap it up and give it to Liam for Christmas, but found myself getting quite fascinated by it, so he's not having it - it's mine! Little facts like the ones you get in these books are great to drop into comms workshops for managers to generate some humorous banter in the room.

For instance, on the subject of multi-tasking ... something, shall we say, that we females are better known for than the male population.  Apparently a woman's brain has a 10% thicker connecting cord between the left and right lobes and up to 30% more connections. Men's brains are more compartmentalised. So a woman can do several unrelated things at the same time, but a man generally needs to concentrate on one thing at a time. So he can either read or listen, but he can't do both. (That's just what the book says, OK? Just in case any male persons reading this are ready to start beating me up!).

It's a fascinating little book, anyway, and I shall add it to our new recommended books section that you'll find on the bottom right hand corner of the blog. Please let us know about any books you've found helpful - we're always being asked for recommendations - and if you can give us a personal review, so much the better.

Sue

When bloggers turn bad

Did anyone catch this story about Edelman and Wal-Mart?  Apparently, in an attempt to get publicity for their client, Edelman (publishers of the Edelman Trust index) set up a fake blog about a couple who were touring the States and just happening to camp out in Wal-Mart parking lots.

Red faces all round when they were rumbled and howls of protest. 

I fear that the public is coming to expect this sort of behaviour from a profession that brought us lies to the US congress, fake TV news and 101 other scandals.  Looking at the writings of the US Center for Media and Democracy will make your hair curl.  As will this article from US PR newsline BullDog.

I guess one of the risks of running a large consulting business is that it's very hard to legislate for the errors of judgement of individual practioners in your firm.

Yet, the reputation of professional communicators as a whole is in need of some TLC or some tough love.  In the UK, the Chartered Institute of PR (of which I've been a proud member for well over a decade) has just announced a more tough stance on professional misconduct .  Interestingly CIPR President Tony Bradley touches on the issue of promoting higher ethical standards in his blog (which is always highly readable).  At the same time he mentions the potential for growth of communications as a profession in China (where attitudes to freedom of information are little different).

Which brings me to the point of my ramblings... who is defining ethical standards for internal communicators?  And would we benefit from having a clear professional code which we can call upon to shield us when we're asked to do things at work which make us uncomfortable.

There is an IABC code, and most national PR associations have something in place.  However, as many IC people struggle to see a connection between themselves and PR, these might not always resonate.  Maybe we could look to HR associations for guidance but I suspect that wouldn't be a perfect fit either.

Even so, I wonder how many of us are either aware of the codes that might apply to us or know of instances where they have been enforced. 

Liam

More photos

As promised to the guys who came on the latest Black Belt - here are some scary pictures...I'll have to ask Alex Manchester from Melcrum how to add these to the side toolbar!

Techno frolics

Well, we're back at Henley for module two, and Amy and I have just returned from a furtive but successful mission to nick all the chocolate eclairs from the Henley sweetie store. 

We're all getting quite excited about technology today. After Liam enthralled the room at the end of module 1 with exciting demonstrations of his new blog about his home town of Rickmansworth (Sal Pigot - in puzzled tone - "but who's the audience for this blog?" me - " he hasn't got one!"), we invited Melcrum's Alex Manchester in to talk to us about all things new media.

Learnt that the internet was 16 years old yesterday.  And all marvelled at Second Life. How can people pay for land and property that's not real??  How much will that site get sold for one day? And why didn't one of us think of it first??!

Alex recommended three more good reads for our bookshelves:

• The Corporate Blogging Book, by Debbie Weil (She's also got a good blog about corporate blogging)
• Naked Conversations, by Robert Scobie and Shel Israel
• The Cluetrain Manifesto by Doc Searles & David Weinberger

So enthusiastic did everyone get about technology that I now get to put my feet up for the rest of the afternoon while Tony from IBM gives everyone a demo of how to set up a blog.

UPDATE

Ten past five, and it appears we're quite a cynical bunch about blogs! One of the main questions this afternoon has been 'but does anybody actually blog about anything useful or interesting?'   

Challenged to find something of interest, Tony picked on Kath and asked her to reveal her passion! Turns out it's pop group Take That. So off we went to Technorati did a search, and lo and behold,  we were treated to a rendition of A Million Love Songs.

We were amused, but still not convinced, it seems. Technorati opens with the phrase "55 million blogs - some of them must be good."  "Yes," said one of the group. "But at those odds, you're probably slightly more likely to win the lottery."

There are some we think are worth a read over on the 'recommended blogs' section. Anyone else have any worth a read - business or IC related or otherwise?

Sue

Resources

I'm just typing up the buy/sell board from the latest masterclass and one of the 'buys' is a list of resources (books, weblinks etc) that people have found useful.

I'm going to suggest that people look at the bibiliography that Lee Smith put on the Inter-comm site.  But it would be great if we could tap into the collective wisdom here....

Can people take a look and we'd love to see any other suggestions that people have (Book reviews most welcome!!!!)

Liam

Fresh Victims!!!!

I'm sitting in the kitchen at home with a gin and tonic having just finished my first Strategy and Planning Masterclass.  What a nice bunch of people!  And there were even blokes there - sorry Sue!

It was good to see JJ and Corrine Bacon again (and they were very kind despite the fact that they have heard me bang on before - some people never learn).  There was a new BB record as well at the Hotel - some people stayed up debating corporate strategy until a quarter to four in the morning!

We had some interesting chats as well over the course of the two days - a lot of discussion about how you get stakeholders on side and I was very interested to hear about what Philips are doing by way of senior team jams (when lots of senior managers join in a collective on-line debate about strategy) and how the company is using the latest web technology to deliver video content to desktops linked to other interactive social media.

I even got a rest as we managed to get Andreas Parchmann (from Philips) to do a short presentation on what they are doing - very different and opening up all sorts of thoughts about possibilites - I was quite snotty a while ago about all this "Web 2.0" stuff but now I'm starting to see some of the possibilities and challenges it presents.

I spent far too much time panicing about time on the workshop - how does Sue manage to plan workshops with just the right amount of content and I always try and stuff far too much in?  The downside was that I cut Andreas short - and I promised to get people to pose questions to Andreas here so that we can get him to respond...if you were there, post a comment and I'll ask Andreas to respond...

Otherwise it sounds like a field trip to Amsterdam is on the cards.

And for those of you who joined us in Cranfield in the Summer you may be interested to know that the curse of the fire alarm struck again!  But because so many people had been debating strategy and evaluation methods, I was only joined in the cold car park by a couple of people -- including a ex-colleage of Sue's (now I have the dirt!!!!!)

And, best of all someone told me that I don't look 55 at all!!!  Always a relief....

Liam