Black Belt Dojo

Kentucky Fried Donuts

So, I AM still here, it's just been an odd two weeks and I've not really been in blogging mood. Last week brought difficult family news, which was ironic as I was writing the commentary for Melcrum's research report into change communication. Writing about emotional reactions to endings whilst being in a weepy heap felt a bit surreal.

This week, my laptop has totally gave up the ghost. It had been sending ominous signals, so I'd already ordered a new one. But I've lost all my e-mails and e-mail addresses until they get recovered this weekend. So to anyone who's mailed me, I promise I'm not deliberately ignoring you.

Here's something amusing from a course I ran this week for leaders. Talking through action points at the end, one person said 'I'm focusing on my Kentucky Fried Donuts - the KFDs'. I got as far as thinking 'Do KFC actually MAKE donuts?  When did I talk about donuts?' before he explained it was his way of remembering to start by thinking about what he wanted people to Know, Feel and Do as a result of communication. What's more, he's putting photos of donuts around the office to remind himself to do it!

Big laughs all round, everyone loved the idea and promptly adopted the term. Whatever else they forget, they'll all remember the first step in planning their communication is to think about Kentucky Fried Donuts. A good reminder that people best remember things that are out of the ordinary, conjure up visual pictures and connect with their emotions. And good story telling fodder too - you can bet I'll be telling the story when I'm running sessions in the rest of the organisation.

Sue

Babylon

According to a linguistics professor at the Free University of Berlin, the German language is becoming more and more influenced by Turkish and Arabic. For anybody living in a German-speaking country, this won't come as news: The tendency to mash up languages has been prevalent for many years in children of immigrants. What is new, however, is that grammar and vocabulary seems to be permanently altered in non-immigrant children as well. The German language is being changed for good.

For years, scholars have tried to reform German spelling - with cumbersome, alienating consequences, as the changes were neither strong, clear nor memorable enough to have a simplifying influence on the language; on the contrary: A camel is a horse designed by a committee, and the reform was a perfect example for it. It really is ironic that German is now being fundamentally changed through uncontrolled, decentralized bottom-up language vectors - which some will call a hostile takeover.

To be honest: I'm not worried at all. Of course language is changing - it's a social construct, molded by its use and users. Of course some elements of the original languages are lost in babylonial turmoil. And of course there is going to be resistance: Anyone who thinks that the Romans accepted the Greeks' or Barbarian's influence on their language without ranting against it constructs an overly glorified version of the Antique. If you are worried about the influence of Turkish on German, Arabic on French, or African on US-English now, you will be in for a harsh shock in a couple of years when Mandarin comes along.

Languages, as both Ludwig Wittgenstein and Frank Herbert would agree, shape the mind of their speakers: Every language constructs different realities through the use of grammar. Spanish (as I just learned last week) uses two different verbs for "being" - one (ser) signifying "to be permanently", and one (estar) "to be temporarily". The differentiation between permanent and temporary states will have a fundamental yet unconscious influence on how Spanish-speaking people view the world, just as the differentiation of three different genders of nouns in German (der, die, das) or the use of seven different forms of address in Japanese (san, kun, chan, senpai, sensei, sama, shi) will have a fundamental yet unconscious influence on their speakers' world views.

In consequence, mixing languages will lead to changed world views, with significant impact on culture and society. It probably also means that in the beginning phases of language clashes, the level of sophistication evolved in the original languages will be reduced by the chaos of new words and grammar. What it does not mean is that the intellectual level of a society will be reduced permanently - yet that is what many xenophobes imply by criticizing the "damage done" to "their language" by "the foreigners". I don't believe that a society become less intelligent because its language changes. On the contrary: If you learn a language - even if it's a dialect of your own - you need to internalize a new world view, which is very intellectually stimulating.

In the end, if you allow me this little transhumanist twist, the days of language as we know it are counted anyhow. In a couple of decades, artificial languages based on semantic networks will become the interfaces between traditional languages and allow us to translate any language into another. Depending on the communication means we use (neural-to-neural), this purely semantic language might become our main one, as it is most efficient. Binary poetry, anyone?

[This is a cross-post from my other blog, The Honeyjar]

Here's a thought...

Richard Bailey has an excellent blog - PR Studies - he teaches PR at Leeds Metropolitan University (which is one of the longest established centres for the teaching of PR in the UK and very well regarded).

His latest posting caught my eye because he's talking about avoiding Bloggers Block (a condition I would have thought would be welcome in my case).  And his advice? Know when to shut up and get out more (so you've got something interesting to talk about!).

It's an interesting blog site to go and have a nose around! I found a link through to this collection of blogging policies.

Liam

Tipping the Kool-Aid

One of the most insightful and rewarding books I have read in recent years is The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. The book sets up a theory of how ideas travel through populations, and what role the idea's attributes as well as the various kinds of idea communicators play to make an idea into a trend. The "tipping point" is the point where an idea achieves critical mass to spread exponentially and become widely known. Gladwell examines trends from fashion to TV shows, smoking, and suicide epidemics and made the concept of viral marketing widely known.

The Tipping Point is an important book to read for internal communicators, because it is closely related to the topic of employee engagement and offers a valuable guidelines on how to spread a message successfully. Many of you will have read the book, and this summary won't be anything new to you. However, I recently remembered a short blog quote in Wired Magazine, which introduced a great addition to the tipping point concept: The Kool-Aid point.

For non-native English speakers, "drinking the Kool-Aid" will be sound quite obscure. It stems from the 1978 Jonestown, Guyana mass suicide, in which almost a thousand cult members drank an instant beverage called "Kool-Aid" poisoned with cyanide. "Drinking the Kool-Aid" has become since an saying signifying "becoming indoctrinated to do something really stupid".

In the lifecycle of an idea, the "Kool-Aid point" is then reached when an idea has received enough exposure that some people start to oppose it: They criticize adopters of the ideas to be "drinking the Kool-Aid", i.e. to be trusting a concept that doesn't have much value. To quote the original author:

"You don't really have passionate users until someone starts accusing them of 'drinking the Kool-Aid.' If you create passionate users, you have to expect passionate detractors. You should welcome their appearance in blogs, forums, and user groups. It means you've arrived. Forget the tipping point - if you want to measure passion, look for the Kool-Aid point." (posted on headrush.typepad.com)

I agree with this observation: Resistance is a sign that that your message reaches audiences and has begun to convince them. For internal communicators, the Kool-Aid point is one that should be closely watched - especially in change management projects. On the engagement ladder, the Kool-Aid point signifies that some audiences not only have started to resist a change, but to ridicule others who adapt to it.

What about you - do you recall any Tipping or Kool-Aid experiences from your campaigns?

A funny old week...

I thought I'd break my silence because it's been an interesting week

Yesterday Sue and I had the novel experience of doing a Webinar for Melcrum talking about the competencies project.  With a webinar you do a presentation to yourself sitting at your desk and talking into the phone and hoping that someone is laughing at your very hilarious jokes.  Luckily Sue and I were sharing it so I got the occasional polite laugh.

We were talking about competencies (stand by chums and we'll send you a link when we post some interim findings next week on Competent Communicators.Com).

I have to say I'll be glad when we finally get this report written - we're getting close now.  Don't get me wrong - it's been fun talking to people about the findings and their careers (this week I've interviewed an ex copper, journalists and an expert in Germanic Philology).  It's just such a slog getting it down on paper and then turning it into some form of English anyone might want to read!  Well I've got next week blocked out to kill it off once and for all (I'm having my knees done again so I'm not going anywhere in a hurry).

But writing something like this is a great excuse to get involved in debates on obscure blogs - and I'm worried that I'm turning into someone who spends their lives posting comments on blogs.  You see I've got past form.

There are any number of forums on Cycling websites where my advice on saddle height could leave me open to litigation in at least four member states of the European Union.  And you don't want to risk taking my advice on long-distance touring in Spain...

And as this habit develops into a full blown syndrome you start posting bombastic comments in different places without realising that you're contradicting yourself continually!

I'm not referring to the erudite and witty contributors we attract on here.  Nothing wrong with being a regular comentator if you've got something interesting to say... 

But what I don't get is the fact that people still post palpable rubbish about internal communications and it doesn't get challenged? Are internal communicators too nice to wade in with our views?  Is 'Englishness' the natural state for internal communicators?

I still smile at the suggested torture proposed for me by fellow cyclists who disagreed on my radical approach to greasing brakeblocks and I have fond memories of the debate that followed my posting on shorts rash.

Yet no one does it much in our world - are we resigned to having to listen to idiots drone on?  Have we all got better things to do?  Or do we think it doesn't count?

Actually I think it does count.  A few months back I picked up a copy of PR Week - the UK's weekly magazine for the PR profession (why I explained that I don't know - the title says it all doesn't it?) and found a load of drivel reproduced uncritically from a blog site.  And a couple of times I've found myself chatting to PR's whose understanding of IC is very laregely shaped by snippets they've read saying that IC is all about courage and telling the Startegy Director he's a twit. Er, where did you say you'd heard that?

Earlier this week I was at The College of St Mark and St John to talk to their PR Students about IC as the guest of Alison Theaker.  They were a very impressive bunch of students! But for the first time I resisted giving them a long list of websites to visit simple because I thought most of them are too misleading if you're a beginner in IC.

Anywhere, here's the pretentious bit coming up.

On the drive back from Plymouth I passed Buckfast - a Benedictine Monastry on the edge of Dartmoor and I nipped in.  I went there 30 years ago on a youth club holiday so I thought I'd look and see if it had changed (including the pub where I was the only guy who could get served but they weren't remotely puzzled that I bought about 40 pints in ones and twos that night).

So I had a look around and a chat to a monk (these guys must have a very high boredom threashold) who spookily knew the name of the headmaster of the Catholic School I'd attended all those years ago. 

And I had a wander around the bookshop and bought a very interesting booklet called "The Rule of St Benedict".

St Benedict was the founder of the Benedictine Order of monks early in the 6th Centrury at a time when monastries were not noted for adhering to the higher principles of poverty, celebacy and obedience.  Benedict set down a rule book for the running of a monastry - the Rule that is stll followed today by monks and nuns around the world.

The Rule includes the things you'd expect about the relationship of a monk to his God and the times for saying Alleluia.  But it also includes advice to an abbott on how he should conduct himself - leading by example, being held to account for the performace of his monks, varying his style to achieve results and working within avaibale constraints. 

And in Chater 3 of the rule, Benedict explains that when "anything important is to be done" all the monks should be called together because "the Lord often reveals what is better to the younger".  And although the brothers should do as they are told by the Abbott "it is becoming for the master on his part to settle everything with foresight and fairness".

I doubt if we'll be seeing "St Benedict and the Art of management " anytime soon (it's probably already available on Amazon) but it was an interesting find - in an interesting week.

And my interesting quotation from the whole book?

"...because it is written: 'in a flood of words you will not avoid sin'; and elsewhere, 'the tongue holds the key to life and death'. " maybe advice to bloggers?

I'm off on my bike this weekend- I can kid myself I'm thinking about writing some more ( hope Mandy Thatcher's not reading this!).  I'm doing a 200k ride whilst my knees still work!

Liam

Elevator Pitches

To compensate for my rather long entry last time, here is a short one: If you need help with defining your own elevator pitch, try the PitchWizard - it will help you build one. For another line of business, such a pitch could sound as follows:

My name is Batman and I am a masked avenger specializing in saving the city from crime. With a keen sense of adventure and a host of gadgets, I fight the underworld during the night. The key feature that sets me apart from other superheroes is my perfectly branded appearance. Nobody is safe nowadays; just call for help, and I'll be there.

Have fun!

Web 2.0 Galore: Social Tags & Bookmarks

Web 2.0 is everywhere. Nowadays you can't click on a link without stumbling across a blog, wiki, tag, RSS feed, networking site, digg button or AJAX app - even if you have no clue what those terms mean. If you are wondering about the manyfold Web 2.0 goodies out there, you might be interested in two of my recent posts in my own blog (Web 2.0 Essentials: What is it? and Web 2.0 Essentials: How to Get Started).

Today, I will concentrate on two specific Web 2.0 topics that are a little more abstract than blogs and wikis: Social tagging and bookmarking. As a recent Wall Street Journal article has demonstrated, this odd couple just came down from Mount Geek to the Mainstream Valley.

Tags - More Than Meets the Eye

Tags are a good example of metadata - data describing data, giving it structure and meaning. If book in a library contains data, then its reference card contains metadata - for example a book called "Delicious vegetarian dishes from India" might keywords such as "cooking", "lifestyle", "Asia" and "vegetarians". Tags are very similar to such keywords, as they describe web content in simple terms. The Black Belt Dojo site could be tagged "blog", "internal communications", "certification", "community", and so on, while individual blog posts could be described with more specific terms ("Liam's ramblings", "Sue's adventures"). The important point about these tags is that they are visible to readers (which, for those who know HTML a little, meta keywords are not - they are visible only to search engines).

So what? Well, the fact that tags are visible allows them to become a common language for those interested in the content. People writing about the same things will start using the same tags, and search engines will be able to pull these tags together into comprehensive link lists. Individual tags become social tags - a shared nomenclature to describe and find content. That's the secret of the great blog indexing service Technorati: Instead of analyzing content via programmed algorithms (as Google does), Technorati relies primarily on social tags to retrieve blog entries for you.

In other words: Tags allow communities to structure the internet.

Social Bookmarks: Shared Knowledge

Enter social bookmarks. Let's say you are working on several computers throughout your week: A desktop PC in your work office and a laptop at home. The websites you visit are often the same, so you need the same bookmarks on both machines - a cumbersome synchronizing process if done by hand. Luckily enough, there are services that allow you to store your bookmarks online: That way, they are stored on a central server accessible from anywhere in the world.

Once your bookmarks are stored safely online, you may have the desire to share some of them with a friend or colleague; in fact, some of your bookmarks are so great that you would like to share them with whomever you wants to know about them. So you strip your online bookmark repository from its privacy settings, so everyone can look at (most of) them. Furthermore you describe each and every one of them with useful tags - that way, they become clustered into categories and searchable.

Once the bookmarks are free for other people to search and access, a clever online bookmark service can make a ranking of all published bookmarks into a "bookmark hit list". They might even go one step further and allow these users to rate the bookmarks on their quality.

Voilà: Bookmarks + shared online repository + tags + ranking = Social Bookmarking. These services exist, and they are called del.icio.us, digg, reddit, NewsVine or StumbleUpon, and they - or rather: their users - are driving the way news are made newsworthy. That's the way internet buzz is created nowadays (or did you think that the cute video of a cat playing the piano was found by a FT reporter?).

Social Tags/Bookmarks and Internal Comms

Still there? Great, because social tags and bookmarks are relevant for internal communications, especially intranets. If a company gives its employees the possibility to tag intranet (and internet!) content, it will be much easier for them to find relevant news sources. Giving them the option to share their bookmarks will increase knowledge sharing without much effort and increase their productivity. Finance employees can share their links to currency converters, while production managers can post their favorite links to process optimization roadmaps. Intranets don't have to rely on machine-driven search results and can navigate the tags and shared links from their colleagues.

Ergo: Social tags and bookmarks are knowledge management in action.

Our Very Own Link Repository

For the internal communications community, I propose to share our bookmarks. I have set up a del.icio.us account for us blackbelts, to be found under http://del.icio.us/internal_comms. You can share your own bookmarks by including them (contact me for password info), or, if you are a del.icio.us user, you can share your bookmarks network with this group. That way, we can stay updated on great IC links through a simple URL.

[Read more about Web 2.0: Web 2.0 Essentials: What is it?]
[Read more about Web 2.0: Web 2.0 Essentials: How to Get Started]
[Read a WSJ article about social bookmarking: The Wizards of Buzz ]

Writer's block

I'm trying to write a report. Actually, I'm trying to write two fairly major reports in the same week. Obviously at some point when I was planning my work, I thought this was a good idea. A week writing at home, with cat curled up beside me. I like writing. I like cats. I love my house. Perfect.

Nope. Actually, it's very, very painful. And suddenly there are squillions of fascinating distractions.

I have looked at favourite blogs & friends' websites umpteen times over. They haven't changed since the last time I looked. But at least I'm doing wonders for their hit rates. And I find you really can miss those tiny details the first ten times you read something...

I have sorted out my diary for the next two weeks. I have consumed my entire body weight in sugar.  I have exchanged e-mails with people I haven't seen for years, and shot replies back to new messages at lightening speed. I have thoughtfully sent cards to friends.  I have been totally delighted to hear from anyone who phoned me, hung on their every word and become mildly hysterical when they tried to end the conversation.

If I still worked in an office, I would by now have driven my team to distraction pacing up and down, pleading with them to talk to me and pinching any available food off their desks. Being at home instead, I have at least resisted the enticing call of the pile of ironing in the airing cupboard. So far.

I have re-written the same sentences approximately 25 times. They are now beautifully crafted works of art. I have planned and re-planned. I have read all my research material three times over. One of my IC friends helpfully said 'you just have to wait for inspiration to strike. It'll happen when you least expect it'. I'm waiting. I'M WAITING! Hello?!

I did have this strange idea that I might like to write books. I'm now asking myself whether this is wise. I'm thinking I could end up twice my current size and weight, addicted to Second Life or some such Internet-based diversionary activity, alone and friendless, having sent trusty friends fleeing 'neath a barrage of cards, phone calls and e-mails.  Mind you, I'd probably have a VERY clean house.

Cure for writer's block, anyone??

Sue

Corporate Art

At our corporate headquarters in Basel, the company I work for is currently building a huge campus with many new buildings by well-known architects. Corporate art is part of the overall concept, and we see new artworks popping up all over the site.

One of these artworks is an installation by concept artist Jenny Holzer. Her installation is a large ticker band-type display on one of the new buildings, featuring various proverbs and quotes, which are prominently displayed over one of our main recreational areas.

Interestingly, this work of art caused quite some controversy among our employees: In our intranet speak-up tool, which allows you to post questions to our executive team, the installation has been addressed a surpring number of times - much more than the usual burning questions regarding parking spaces or our HR processes. Some people are offended by the works' content (which include slogans such as "a soldier's duty is to obey" or "only death is just"); other people feel it's disturbing the architectural peace (the ticker tape contrasts with the lush park in front of it); and some think the slogans should be in multiple languages. Our executive team's answer so far was unmistakably clear: It's a work of art, and therefore untouchable.

This prompts me to wonder about corporate art as a communications tool: Art certainly sends messages, albeit with purposeful ambiguity and room for interpretation. Could corporate art be a right-brained comms channel? Is corporate art a beacon for a company's culture, or is it the artwork that reflects upon, challenges the corporate culture?

What role does art play in your company? Do you have any corporate art experiences you would like to share?

Snow and more questions

I spent the last couple of days running a MasterClass at Hendon and, amazingly for an event in the UK, we didn't come to a juddering halt just because there were a few centimetres of snow - although I had to stop organiser Alex Garforth running a snowman competetion.

One issue that was debated a bit was "how do you use on-line planning tools".  A couple of the delegates were considering setting up centralised systems for air traffic control and were wondering what experiences people had with them.  What they wanted to know was what are the potential pitfalls and what are the things you have to do to make sure they work - i.e. what do you only find out with a bit of experience when it's too late!  For example there was a long discussion about how do you get people to lodge plans on a central system when it looks like the benefit of doing so is actually enjoyed by someone else. 

Anyone got any tips and hints?

Liam