Our friend and colleague Amanda Horne sent us an e-newsletter with an essay about a brilliant networker called Catherine Fitzgerald. The essay describes some of the ways that Catherine networks by helping others and sharing her knowledge and experience. One of her activities is to to set up 'Collegial Consults' that described as follows:

Catherine has also designed an approach to supporting colleagues during times of intense professional change, such as a new entrepreneurial venture or a new book that is really taking off.

She arranges a day-long "collegial consult," to which she invites six to eight savvy, experienced, creative, and generous colleagues.

During that day, the person who is in transition describes his/her current situation and his/her hopes, concerns, and questions.

The group asks clarifying questions and brainstorms ways to help the transition be as successful as possible.

People who have had collegial consults have found the day-long attention of wise and supportive colleagues to be invaluable.

And, by the way, Catherine doesn't charge for arranging and facilitating collegial consults for her colleagues.

The 'collegial consults' sound like a great idea and I know I could have used them many times in the past. In the knowledge arena we would probably call them Peer Assists (that we regularly use in Anecdote for new projects, ideas and for supporting our clients). One of the great things is that everyone in the 'collegial consult' learns as part of the process, not just the person being assisted.

Well, Daryl’s arrival on the scene at Anecdote has really put the pressure on me now he has published his maiden blog post. Here I’ve been for several months and nothing from me but a deafening silence. For people who have actually met me this is entirely out of character. I have opinions on everything and hardly hesitate to express them. At length. Just ask the two friends who walk with me at 6am in the morning.

So what’s been going on here? Some of it was the steep learning curve inherent in every new job. And you want me to write a blog post too? Sure, just wait until I have a better understanding of how things are done around here, and what exactly is the software I need to use? And how do I put them together? Um, maybe next week. And then a lot of the technical barriers were removed when I maintained a project blog for eight weeks early in the year. But still nothing from me on the Anecdote blog.

It was clear that there was a serious amount of personal effort going into all this blog avoidance. And after some thinking and reflecting about this uncharacteristic coyness I uncovered some deep-seated and entirely irrational beliefs. The first was my late Granny’s exhortation to never put anything in writing that might come back to haunt you. The dear old lady was referring to the quaint old habits of letter writing and journal keeping, where your well chosen and pithy words about Great Aunt Maud’s appalling behaviour at Christmas dinner might be deliberately read by someone only to happy to report them back to Great Aunt M for the sole reason of seeing you cut out of the will. My interpretation of this ancient family wisdom meant that the idea of putting my pronouncements on anything out to the great universe of the internet for comment – well, just don’t go there.

And the second reason was closely aligned with the first. I have spent the last several years in HR roles that have required me to endlessly repeat my Granny’s message in an organisational context. Email privacy is non-existent, even deleted messages can be found, don’t use client or employer provided access to the internet for researching your next car purchase or worse still, surfing inappropriate sites. Then, just as I had finished giving myself a good talking to about the silliness of this particular point of view and committed publicly (well, to Shawn and Daryl at least) that I would get something out there this very week, I found this.

The relationship among data, information and knowledge is often depicted as a pyramid. With data at the base, it’s converted to information and information converted to knowledge. This metaphor of a pyramid or ladder to explain these concepts is unhelpful because you start to believe one is better than the other and there is a tendency to extrapolate to the next level believing that knowledge is simply extrapolated to form wisdom—I have even heard people talk about wisdom management. My two days at the meaning making symposium has helped me see this relationship differently, that is, viewing data, information and knowledge as a system.

Thanks to John Barton at the symposium reminding me of a view of data, information and knowledge first brought to my attention by Dave Snowden which I will extend to include the role of sensemaking and context.

Knowledge acts as an interpretant to turn data into information. The information we notice (we don’t notice all information channelled toward us), might create some level of dissonance (its surprises us or we ask ourselves, “What’s the story here?”) and if we care about resolving this dissonance we create knowledge. Knowledge is created through a sensemaking process.

But data to one person is someone else’s information. A commodities trader might stare at a computer screen of numbers which would look to most people as raw data. To the commodity trader, however, slight changes in the numbers conveys messages which act as information they might convert to knowledge (via sensemaking) and take action. Consequently, context is a key ingredient acting as an underlay to all three concepts of data, information and knowledge.

Originally posted: 30/03/06

I read this lovely quote in the following paper, Petranker, J. (2005) 'The When of Knowing', The Journal of Applied Behavioural Science, vol. 41, no. 2, pp. 241-259.

“When you are in the middle of a story, it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion, a dark roaring, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood, like a house in a whirlwind, crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all, when you are telling it to yourself, or to somebody else.”

Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

Thanks to Keren Winterford for sending it to me.

Technorati Tags: jack petranker, margaret atwood

The 'up or out' policy is well known in consulting firms like McKinsey & Company. If you are not promoted in 5 years to partner then you're out. It has been estimated that up to 5/6ths of people who leave McKinsey leave as a result of this policy. What might be surprising to some is that a similar (mostly tacit) policy exists in Australia's public sector; it's up or assumed you have given up on your career. This mindset of having to keep moving up the hierarchy is not isolated to the public service, the Australia Army has a similar and more overt example with what is informally called POMs—Passed Over Majors. These majors are readily recognisable because they wear a medal representing 10 years of service. Ten years as a major typically means you've been passed over.

To be a career bureaucrat requires a broad experience of policy and programme delivery. It's not unusual for someone to spend as little as 6 months in a job before moving to their next position. If you spend more than 3 years in one position then, according to senior management, you have given up, you've become stale. This expectation creates havoc resulting in what seems to me like excessive churn. One section I'm aware of has had 9 managers in 12 months. Remarkably the team held together and managed themselves, which was a testament to their resilience.

High churn will remain because the senior leaders who've benefited from hopping from one position to the next are now the power group whose every move and utterance is scrutinised by the aspiring leaders of the future. The power group will tell the stories of how they got ahead and expect the aspiring ones to do the same. The culture has been set and reinforced.

The result for knowledge (and in turn, productivity) is both good and bad. Frequent movement creates cross-pollination fostering opportunities for innovation. That's a good thing. People leaving after 2-3 years, however, creates knowledge gaps, especially if the group operates like a group of individuals, which happens a lot. Head down, bum up, getting your particular output out the door.

Knowledge retention has the wrong sound to it. It makes you think about holding on to what you've got. You immediately think of knowledge capture, which is an unhelpful mindset. Knowledge circulation might be a better phrase because the aim, I believe, is to share knowledge among people in the group so that it is resilient to someone leaving.

To become resilient to knowledge lost requires the adoption of a set of knowledge sharing practices that operate all the time, not just when you learn someone is leaving. They might include the following:

• participating in communities of practice
• after action reviews
• lessons learning sessions
• working together (radical concept) rather than as individuals
• pairing expert with novice
• fostering knowledge sharing behaviours
• story listening and telling

Hello Everyone,

By way of introduction - my name is Daryl Cook; I'm the 'new kid' on the block here at Anecdote.

How did I end up here? ... well, I'm passionate about group facilitation and collaboration and it's my purpose to discover more human, more productive, and more creative ways for people to work together. Working as part of the team at Anecdote provides a vehicle for doing this and also an opportunity to do some great things.

A little about me ...

one-line infobytes:
1. proud father to two gorgeous daughters
2. interested in social media and open systems
3. armchair philosopher
4. aspiring genius and entrepreneur
5. 2nd dan blackbelt in taekwondo
6. commuter and recreational cyclist
7. passionate about personal and organisational development

extended bio:
My diverse career includes a mix of IT, business and HR roles for several companies. Academic achievements (for what it's worth) include a Masters of Business Administration and a Bachelor of Arts (Human Geography).

I look forward to learning, discovering and sharing with you all. And most importantly, having some fun along the way!

Nancy White and I have been working on a project to help our client enhance their collaboration practices. In the process we've identified three types of enterprise collaboration. Love to hear what you think of the idea. Nancy is riffing on this topic too and has added a bunch of other cool resources in her post.

Collaboration is the act of working with people to get something done. We can look at collaboration at three levels within the enterprise.

In Team Collaboration, the members of the group are known, there are clear task interdependencies, expected reciprocity, and explicit timelines and goals. To achieve the goal, members must fulfil their tasks within the stated time. Team Collaboration often suggests that while there is often explicit leadership, the participants cooperate on an equal footing and will receive equal recognition. An example is a research project to develop a prototype for X in five months with six team members and a set of resources.

In Community Collaboration, there is a shared domain or area of interest, but the goal is more often learning, rather than task. People share and build knowledge, rather than complete projects. Membership may be bounded and explicit, but periods are often open or ongoing. Membership is often on an equal footing, but more experienced practitioners may have more status or power in the community. Reciprocity is within the group, but not always one-to-one ('I did this for you, now you do this for me“) An example might be a community of practice that is interested in the type of research mentioned in the team example above. A member of that team may come to her community and ask for examples of past projects.

Network Collaboration steps beyond the relationship centric nature of team and community collaboration. It is collaboration that starts in individual action and self interest and accrues to the network. Membership and timelines are open and unbounded. There are no explicit roles. Members most likely do not know all the other members. Power is distributed. This form of collaboration is driven by the advent of social software, a response to the overwhelming volume of information we are creating. It's impossible for an individual to cope on their own.

An example of network collaboration might be members of the team in the first example above bookmarking web sites as they find them. This benefits their team, possibly their related communities of practice but it also benefits the wider network of people interested in the topic. At the same time, they may find other bookmarks left by network members relevant to their team work. This sort of network activity benefits the individual and a network of people reciprocally over time. The reciprocity connection is remote and undefined. You act in self-interest but provide a network-wide benefit.

Originally posted on 29/11/06

Technorati Tags: nancy white, social software

I wont say much at all here except go read this post by Les Posen (and definitely watch the YouTube video). It features a Welshman and I think you'll be blown away.

Scientific American.com has an amusing piece by Steve Mirsky that highlights one of the reasons why experts shouldn't attempt to interpret stories—there are many truths in a story (in fact plausibility is more important than truth) and you will tell the one that suits your purpose.

For this reason we often work with many stories and help our clients to see the (sometime contradictory) patterns within them. Most importantly the stories act as a trigger for new conversations, sensemaking and agreement among a group of decision makers on the way forward. It's this common purpose that's powerful when there are no clear rights or wrongs.

Here is Mirsky's example of two ways to tell the story of how a Jack Russell saved the day.

Consider this story, reported by the Associated Press in early May, carrying the headline “Tiny Terrier Saved Kids from Pit Bulls.” The story, filed from Wellington, New Zealand, includes these details:

“A plucky Jack Russell terrier named George saved five children from two marauding pit bulls.... George was playing with the group of children as they returned home from buying sweets.” So far we have an anthropomorphized terrier—plucky, and he was playing with them, mind you—and the Little Rascals returning from the candy store, when:

“Two pit bulls appeared and lunged toward them.” Next comes a quote from one of the kids, an 11-year-old animal behaviorist: “‘George tried to protect us by barking and rushing at them, but they started to bite him.’” Note that she goes beyond description to narrative herself—George’s primary interest was her safety. Now comes the resolution of the situation, according to the 11-year-old: “‘We ran off crying, and some people saw what was happening and rescued George.’”

The headline and the article thus conspire to portray a brave little dog that tried to rescue human children. And that may indeed be what happened. Based solely on the facts reported in this piece, however, we may construct a somewhat different narrative. The pit bulls appeared and moved in on the group; the terrier rushed at them; the pit bulls focused their attention on the terrier; the kids ran away. In other words, the same reported facts could have led to a story that carried the headline “Five Frightened Kids Flee as Tiny Dog Is Attacked.”

Thanks to Les Posen for the link to the Scientific American article.

Lynda Gratton at MITSloan has written a short article of some factors that might affect the performance of a distributed team. I'm a little sceptical of what Gratton calls “10 golden rules for making virtual teams more productive” because there are so many factors that influence how well a virtual team will work and I thought we had done away with rules when dealing with complexity.

I do agree, however, how important it is to consider time zone issues. I'm three weeks into a new virtual team and I'm surprised by the lack of awareness of team member time zones. For example, when calling for people's available time for the next meeting my colleagues in the USA often volunteer to have meetings between 10am and 3pm which generally equates to midnight to 5am Melbourne time. I think if you work in a global virtual team you need to become mindful of your colleague's time zones and avoid suggesting meetings at 2 in the morning.

Appreciating time zones comes with experience and one of the organisations that seem to really understand this is CPSquare—John Smith and the other community practitioners who run a plethora of online events.

Here are Lynda's 10 golden rules.

1. Invest in an online resource where members can learn quickly about one another
2. Choose a few team members who already know each other.
3. Identify “boundary spanners” and ensure that they make up at least 15% of the team.
4. Cultivate boundary spanners as a regular part of companywide practices and processes.
5. Break the team's work up into modules so that progress in one location is not overly dependent on progress in another.
6. Create an online site where a team can collaborate, exchange ideas and inspire one another.
7. Encourage frequent communication. But don't try to force social gatherings.
8. Assign only tasks that are challenging and interesting.
9. Ensure the task is meaningful to the team and the company.
10. When building a virtual team, solicit volunteers as much as possible.

I heard this anecdote last week.

John Kennedy was meeting the Premier of China and during some initial small talk Kennedy asked the Premier what he thought of the French Revolution. The Premier replied, “it's probably too early to say.”

David Pollard offered for anyone on the net to join him is a joint collaboration project using Writely. The topic: Why are conversation and collaboration tools so underused?

Dave lists 8 reasons and I jumped in with a number of other points answering a set of questions Dave posed. Interestingly only a few people got involved and the discussion hasn't progressed much over the last few weeks. Hmmm, perhaps collaboration requires a strong need to work together.

Here's Dave's list:

1. Most people are still unfamiliar with the tools in the middle and right columns.
2. Many of these tools are unintuitive and hence not easy to learn to use.
3. The way you have to use these tools is not the way most people converse and collaborate, i.e. they're awkward.
4. Most people have poor listening, communication and collaboration skills, and these tools don't solve (and can exacerbate) this underlying problem of ineffective interpersonal skills.
5. The training materials for these tools don't match the way most of us learn and discover (i.e. by doing, by watching others, and iteratively by trial and error).
6. Often the people we most want to converse or collaborate with aren't online.
7. Often we don't even know who the right people are to converse or collaborate with, so we need to go through a process of discovering who those people are first, which these tools cannot yet effectively help us with; once we've discovered who the right people are, we're likely already talking with them using the ubiquitous tools in the left column above.
8. We are not accustomed to learning with others. Traditional schooling rewards individual effort (e.g. you take the test by yourself).

Here are my additions and some answers to specific questions posed by Dave:

When faced with the choice of learning new technology and chatting to colleagues on the phone and email to get a job done, if it can be done with what they already know they will go with that.

Collaboration tools work best when your collaborators are geographically distributed and in other time zones and I wonder how many teams have that as a situation? Sure, globalisation is spreading and small, nimble operators are connecting using these tools, but how many large corporations are active users? I know IBM is and I would imagine technology firms would be at the vanguard. I was surprised however when PriceWaterhouseCoopers consultants arrived in IBM because there were unfamiliar with collaboration tools and disinterested in using them.

It works best when all the collaborators are equally enthusiastic and capable in using the tool. It just takes a handful of influential members of a team to stop using the tool for the tool to be abandoned.

The majority of people in organisations are baby boomers (I'm not sure this is true) and haven't been brought up in environment using collaboration tools. I was in a pub the other day meeting our complexity group and I overheard a small group of people in their 20s and 30s talking about their MySpace interactions. These people already know how to use the tools and will expect them in the workplace.

To answer to Dave's question: Is the answer making the tools better? If so, how? If not, what is the answer?

I think we need to make tools that operate in ways we are familiar using. People are all learning to use browsers so our tools should be browser based. I think we should stop encouraging people to use a new tool and just send them a URL and say, we are going to share our documents here, feel free to update the calendar and let people go for it. By saying “it's a new tool that will make your life better” people respond by putting up the shutters; “I'm too busy to learn something new.” Yet learning something new is fun.

To answer to Dave's question: Given time, do you think people will eventually learn to use these tools, despite their shortcomings? Which tools, current or envisioned, will be the winners, the killer apps for online-enabled conversation and collaboration, and why?

Content volume kills collaboration tools. I've used Lotus Teamrooms, Groove, Basecamp and in each case when the volume of the content becomes unwieldy the users stop using it. Considerable effort is required to clean out the material, archive it, highlight what's important and bring to people's attention the key things to notice. At the moment I favour web-based tools like Basecamp because of their keep it simple philosophy and the fact it's browser-based.

To answer to Dave's question: What one simple thing should we do/learn to most effectively enable people to become better conversationalists, and how would we do this?

In addition to listening, I think knowing how to craft and ask good questions that encourage people to converse is essential. I like asking questions that elicit stories such as “What happened?” or “When was the team at its best?” Guy Kawasaki suggests people ask good questions, then shut up. Great advice.

To answer to Dave question: What one simple thing should we do/learn to most effectively enable people to become better collaborators, and how would we do this?

Focus on the practice of collaboration and only introduce tools when the need arises. For example, a research group might think of new ways to harness energy from heat and see the idea as a promising research project. They start off chatting on the phone, sending emails to one another and then someone says: “It would be good if we could track the versions on this document we are creating.” That's the point a tool could be introduced. I would run a poster campaign in an organisation with the title “Avoid using collaboration tools for as long as possible” and then use the rest of the poster to describe the signs the team should look out for to introduce effective tools. Put practice and process before tools.

Originally posted 21/09/06

Technorati Tags: tools

The anecdote below, told by a participant in a recent workshop, really made me stop and think. There are lots of lessons it, not least of which is that seemingly innocuous actions can have a big influence on a person's decision to join an organisation.

A friend of mine had applied for a fantastic new job. Everything went well during the interview and selection process and the organisation sent her a letter of offer. She turned down the opportunity because the letter of offer was sent to her at 11pm on a Friday evening by the person who was to be her new manager.

It also reminds me of dedicated (workaholic) people I have known or worked for who put in long hours but have no expectation that their staff do the same, and tell them that. The only catch is that their behaviour has a lot more impact than their words...

We've been blogging at Anecdote now since 2004. And even before that I had two previous blogging attempts, one using Radio Lands and the other on Blogger. My first blog post was in September 2002. All this mean is that we have accumulated a heap of content and I thought it might be useful to re-post some of the blogs we're fond of and some of the popular posts. We would also like to hear if you have any particular favourites you would like to see back on the front page.

Eric Tsui asked me to let you know he has a couple of jobs going in Hong Kong. Here are the details.

THE HONG KONG POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF INDUSTRIAL AND SYSTEMS ENGINEERING

Post Specification

Project Associate (two posts) (Ref. 95172) [Appointment period: eighteen months]

Duties

The appointees will assist the project leader in the project - “Learning and practicing knowledge harnessing and sharing techniques in the WebCT Vista environment”. Qualifications

For the first post, applicants should:

(a) have a master’s degree in a related discipline;
(b) have prior experience in working with E-learning or Knowledge Management projects;
(c) have an excellent command of both written and spoken English; (d) be a good technical writer; and
(e) be able to work independently as well as in a team.

For the second post, applicants should:

(a) have a master’s degree in Information Technology, Information Systems, Knowledge Management or Multimedia Design;
(b) have knowledge and passion in working with E-Learning and Knowledge Management projects;
(c) have technical skills in evaluating, developing, configuring and deploying simulation, scenario planning or gaming software in an online learning environment;
(d) have good communication skills; and
(e) be able to work independently as well as in a team.

Applicants are invited to contact Prof. Eric Tsui at tel no. 2766 6609, fax no. 2774 9308 or email eric.tsui@polyu.edu.hk for further information.

Remuneration

Salary offered will be commensurate with qualifications and experience. Applicants should state their current and expected salary in the application.

For those of you who will be coming to our workshop in Sydney, we will be demonstrating our new Web 2.0 service called Zahmoo as well as Cognitive Edge's Sensemaker.

I was over at Wikipedia today and ended up on the Anecdote article. Here's their definition of an anecdote, which I think is pretty good.

An anecdote is a short tale narrating an interesting or amusing biographical incident. It may be as brief as the setting and provocation of a bon mot. An anecdote is always based on real life, an incident involving actual persons, whether famous or not, in real places. However, over time, modification in reuse may convert a particular anecdote to a fictional piece, one that is retold but is “too good to be true”. Sometimes humorous, anecdotes are not jokes, because their primary purpose is not simply to evoke laughter, but to reveal a truth more general than the brief tale itself, or to delineate a character trait or the workings of an institution in such a light that it strikes in a flash of insight to their very essence. A brief monologue beginning “A man pops in a bar...” will be a joke. A brief monologue beginning “Once J. Edgar Hoover popped in a bar...” will be an anecdote. An anecdote thus is closer to the tradition of the parable than the patently invented fable with its animal characters and generic human figures— but it is distinct from the parable in the historical specificity which it claims. An anecdote is not a metaphor nor does it bear a moral, a necessity in both parable and fable, merely an illustrative incident that is in some way an epitome.

Technorati Tags: wikipedia

I might have mentioned a few posts ago that we are currently helping a government department develop a staff induction program for their Aboriginal employees. One of the suggestions we've made is for new employees to seek out stories from others in the department as a way to create new relationships while also developing an understanding of how things work around here.

I noticed that Dave Snowden has come to similar conclusions. He says,

... one of the methods we created (Open Source and free, but this one is not documented yet so what follows is covered by a creative commons license) is to send people when they join an organisation on a treasure hunt. You give them some categories (A senior engineer with more than ten years experience, someone in accounts who has field experience) and tell them to gather in stories from those people. You don't give them names, they have to develop social networks to find them. Once they have gathered those stories, then, in front of their peers and after some training, they perform their own story, taking their own history, the stories of the elders and the current context to show how they stand in, not apart from the flow of history.

I like Dave's idea for the new staff to create their own story and than retelling it to their peers. It is in this retelling that sensemaking occurs.

While working on this project I've done some searching of the literature to see if others have developed staff induction programs for Aboriginal workers. I couldn't find much as at. Any pointers here would be welcomed.

Technorati Tags: staff induction

It's been over a year since we presented this workshop in Australia, so we are pleased to say we are running our narrative techniques for business workshop in Sydney next month. This workshop has been a tremendous success and we have recently revamped the workshop handbook.

Here is a full description of the workshop.

Here are a couple of screenshots from the manual.

The cost of the workshop is $350 if you register before the end of June and $475 after that.

Please pass on this message to anyone who you think might find this workshop useful and interesting. We have found people in organisational development, learning, human resources, communications, knowledge management and change management get most value from this day.

Technorati Tags: workshop

Luke Naismith sent me the link to this presentation. And after a quick look it's immediately recognisable; it's how we work at Anecdote. If you are interested in working here too, check out this.

Technorati Tags: enterprise 2.0

Nicholas Carr has written a thought provoking piece in Strategy+Business on the limitations of open source approaches. In a nutshell, open source approaches work best when people are refining something that's already been created and where the problem can be divided into chunks so lots of people can work on it at the same time (e.g. fixing bugs in Linux). Creating the idea in the first place is best done by an individual or small group.

Technorati Tags: open source

This week I have been talking to people about foundational stories and how they are important for reinforcing the core vales and direction for everyone in the organisation. HP has a well know foundation story about Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard starting their little electronics company in a garage with a measly $500. Within this story are the basic principles HP was built on.

The foundation story is not the only directional story that people should hear but without good directional stories an organisation can be overwhelmed by whatever stories that well up with each passing day. Here's one example of when things get out of hand. I was at an investment bank and asked the HR Director what stories were prominent in his company. He shook his head in dismay and said, “We have a relatively new CEO and have just finished our vision, mission and values project. Everyone is telling the story that the CEO went home on Friday, pulled out the vision, mission, values from his previous company, came into the office on Sunday, photocopied the statements onto A3 paper and plastered them around level 27. For the life of me I can't dislodge this story.”

Directional stories already exist. You just need to work together with everyone in the organisation to find them and instil their telling throughout the organisation. We use the three journeys process to help clients find and amplify their own directional stories.

Then serendipity strikes. Just as I was thinking about this topic I read this story in a chapter by Karl Weick about how VISA was started. What do you think this foundational story conveys about the values of VISA?

Here's what happened at VISA. In the early 1970s, National BankAmericard Incorporated (NBI) turned around the Bank of America's faltering credit card business in the United States (Hock, 1999, p. 155). Soon thereafter, NBI was pressured by BankAmericard licensees in the rest of the world to do the same thing for them. The problems were formidable. Not only did each licensee also have different marketing, computer, and operational systems, but each licensee also dealt with different language, currency, culture, and legal systems, all of which had to be transcended somehow. A technological fix was out of the question because banks were still using computer punch cards and tape, and there was no Internet. After months of tense negotiations, a meeting of the organizing committee was scheduled late in the second year of organizing. The meeting was to one last attempt to resolve three deal-breaking disagreements. Positions had hardened and the organizers could think of no compromise that had any chance of being accepted.

Shortly before the final meeting, the chairman of the organizing committee, Dee Hock, reflected on how the international group had been able to get as far as they did. It dawned on him that “at critical moments, all participants had felt compelled to succeed. And at those same moments , all had been willing to compromise. They had not thought of winning or losing but of a larger sense of purpose and concept of community that could transcend and enfold them” (1999, p. 245). Hock and his staff hatched a plan for the final meeting. They contacted a local jeweller and asked him to create a die from which he would cast sets of golden cuff links. One cuff link would contain a picture of half of the globe and the phrase, “the will to succeed.” The other link would contain the other half of the globe and the phrase, “the grace to compromise.”

When the final meeting actually convened, as expected it was polarized, contentious. The Canadian banks refused to participate and withdrew, and Hock adjourned the meeting midday and said they would reconvene the next morning on order to plan how to disband. Before adjourning, Hock invited everyone to a grand dinner that evening in Sausalito in recognition of their undeniable efforts to try to make the organization work.

After dinner, there was brief reminiscing about shared experiences and obstacles overcome. The the waiters passed among the diners and placed a small wrapped gift in front of each of them. Hock asked people to open the elegant boxes and examine the contents.

He then said quietly, “We wanted to give you something that you could keep for the remainder of your life as a reminder of this day. On one link is half of the world surrounded with the phrase ”the will to succeed“ and the second link is the other half of the world and the phrase 'the grace to compromise.' We meet tomorrow for the final time to disband the effort after two arduous years. I have one last request. Will you please wear the cuff links to the meeting in the morning? When we part we will take with us a reminder for the rest of our lives that the world can never be united through us because we lack the will to succeed and the grace to compromise. But if by some miracle our differences dissolve before morning, this gift will remind us that the world was united because we did have the will to succeed and the grace to compromise (paraphrased from Hock, 1999, pp. 247-48)

Then Hock sat down. There was a full minute of absolute silence as people examined their gift. And then the silence was shattered by one of Hock's exuberant Canadian friends who exploded, ”You miserable bastard!“ The room erupted in laughter. The next morning everyone was wearing the cuff links. By noon, agreement was reached on every issue and VISA International came into existence.

Weick, K, 2004. Rethinking Organizational Design in Richard J. Boland Jr, and Fred Collopy (eds) Managing as Designing, Stanford Business Books, Stanford.

Hock, D. 1999. Birth of the chaordic age. Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco

Technorati Tags: karl weick, VISA

It's important for businesses to keep an eye on what's happening on the web as so many new business models are emerging every day. Ross Dawson has done some excellent work pulling together a framework for thinking about web 2.0 and also categorised a bunch of existing services. I hope he will include Zahmoo when it makes it debut.

Technorati Tags: ross dawson, web 2.0