(This is Part Two of the series … Part One can be found over here) And on that spirit of what the real impact of Social Computing is, we are going to move onwards on to the second keynote speaker session that I would want to share with you all and talk for a bit about it. Again it took place at the State of the Net 2012 event, the same one where Euan was also one of the keynote speakers. This time around though by one of my favourite thought leaders and KM / Complexity mentors, the always insightful and incredibly knowledgeable Dave Snowden, whose blog, along with Euan’s, are two of my most essential, critical reads of the day, every day. Couple of the main online resources on KM, the Social Web, Collaboration, Narrative and Complexity that keep feeding my brain into the bursts that you folks get to read over here and in other social networking sites over the course of time. 

Thus when I bumped into Dave’s recording of his keynote “Tacit Knowledge“ I just couldn’t help finding some time and watch through it. It lasts for a little bit over 35 minutes, but it’s one of those essential recordings of the year you just can’t miss out on and I am not too sure I’m going to be doing proper justice to it by sharing along some of the golden gems and insightful glimpses that Dave himself shared throughout all of that time. However, I’m going to try it, encouraging you all though to not miss out on the video clip itself, because it’s one of the most essential resources on The Social Web, KM, Narrative and Storytelling, Complexity, Collaboration, etc. etc. that you would find out there. Yes, indeed, that inspirational altogether and here’s why.

As a starting point, Dave gets to talk about tacit knowledge, about the differences between knowing and knowledge and where we should be focusing on. Knowledge is basically collective in nature. And as groups who get to share and exchange that knowledge he brings up a superb point of encouraging, within organizations, the setup of crews (In the military sense) to replace teams, as the latter have got to go through a process of formation and knowing the capability of other people, whereas crews themselves can immediately perform since they are ready to go, trained on role and their role expectations well defined. Brilliant point as well to focus on exaptation, not adaption citing Apple as being the prime example. Truly enjoyed his definition of such concept as well as that other notion that we all live in a state of messy-coherence, although I won’t be saying much more on it, other than encouraging those folks in favour of management, and managing things and people, in general, to go and have a watch. It will help change, or snape, your prospecting on managing things and people.

However, the main starting point from Dave’s keynote, and which I got as a key takeaway is how organizations, as we know them today, need to switch from robustness, i.e. organizations preventing failure, to resilience, that is, organizations no longer risk averse, but very capable of learning, adapting, in an agile manner, and recovering quickly from those failures. And how if we would want to make our businesses successful we need to starting thinking about architecting on the assumption of failure and not on the assumption of success, and we would all be much much better off! Truly fascinating!  

“Best practice is a bad idea. Full stop“ Dave’s words, not mine, not much to do with the flow of this article, I know, but I just loved it when he mentioned it, because, as plenty of folks out there who know me would tell you, for a long while “best practices” still remains as one of my pet peeves, specially, when dealing with knowledge work. They just don’t exist and I am surely glad Dave was so categorically when stating that quote! Loved it! Ok, moving on … 

One of the interesting things that you may not know about Dave, but that I have learned from him over the course of the years that I have known him is how when you talk to him, or watch him speak on a keynote, he gets to talk about a whole bunch of different things that initially don’t probably make much sense together, but when you look into it as a whole and you muse about those conversations or presentations you would see how it just makes perfect sense. That’s the full impression you will get as well from this keynote and it’s all probably down to his perception of how we are all Irrational creatures, pattern based intelligences, and not information processing devices. And the best part of that is that we make lots of decisions along the way under these circumstances! Wait till you see his short dissertation on sensemaking and how he describes it as see, attend and act model, three completely different processes altogether. 

He also talked about singularity, how and why it’s not going to happen any time soon, not just from a cognitive perspective alone, but drawn from plenty of research around the implications of our physical bodies in constant contact with the world and how we make decisions and choices based on the combination of both of them. Mind-blowing, is the only word that I can think of to describe his insights in this space. 

He also discussed how human knowledge requires mediation. We don’t trust something just because it’s published, we trust it because we link through a human network of some type. He ditches the whole concept, notion of Web 3.0, and instead advocates, big time, about how the Web is turning itself into a distributed App environment, where we would get to use multiple specific Apps which embody human knowledge and facilitate us to create composite, allowing to create massively coherent systems. And funny enough if I look into my own Social Web consumption and production of content, he’s absolutely spot on! 

From here onwards Dave moved on to what I thought was the best bits in his inspiring repertoire, because he talked about how we need to humanise the Web, how we need to actually recognise that we are humans and we live in a human system. How we have had three decades of a so-called techno fetichism where we needed to adapt to the tools and that implied that we didn’t do much of a good job at it, and how if we pick up a tool it will need fit our hands, and that way we no longer need to re-engineer them, i.e. our hands, to fit the tools, but adapt technology and tools to our hands themselves, which is what we have been doing for thousands of years already. Ha! Taking the whole concept of mobile and HCI into a new level altogether! 

“Extrinsic rewards destroy intrinsic motivation“. Another one of those priceless quotes that I just have to jot down somewhere on this blog post to remind me every time that someone brings up either intrinsic or extrinsic rewards to motivate your employee workforce. Perhaps one of the biggest issues within the corporate world at the moment, don’t you think? 

Incredibly inspiring his words as well on being proactive, on not focusing on measuring networks or the use they make of the social tools at their disposal, but instead stimulate the formation of networks around purposes. Distributed cognition, as we he calls it, giving them freedom within constraints to make decisions. Apparently, the key here is to have those constraints. That’s how we seem to operate better, as human beings. Goodness, who would have thought about that, eh?  

Fascinating commentary as well when he describes how we are really homo narrans, vs. homo sapiens. How we are the storytelling apes. Even to take things one step further how the primary mechanism for human knowledge transfer and meaning is through stories. Stories determine our culture. We live in a narrative flow which constrains and directs the way we think, clearly reminding us all the power of storytelling, even for business purposes, like I have recently blogged over here as well. 

His final words during his keynote were very motivational and moving altogether, because he kept encouraging us all to, once and for all, leave behind that techno fetichism that has been with us for decades, even on the Web, and how we need to embrace the fact that we have a need for constraints and human interaction. How, used properly, technology can augment human memory and experience. How, used improperly, it can destroy human capability. His final words: “We live in a time of choice between those two alternatives“… And it’s our choice to go for the right one. And somehow I think we all know, deep inside our heads and our hearts, which one we would need to go and aim for, don’t you think?

Whoahh! What an adrenaline rush! Head spinning wildly, eh? Well, that and so much more is what you will be getting yourself exposed to if you just hit play, on the embedded YouTube video link shared above, but I would just want to leave you now with what is my favourite quote not just from his keynote session, but perhaps from the last few years that I have been involved with Social Computing myself. It’s just so close to some of the recent stuff that I have been blogging about, that’s just perhaps a bit too scary, if not hopeful, that we are on track on to greater, better, bigger, more meaningful things. If not, judge yourself from this quote:

“98% of our genetic history is as clearly seen as hunting gatherers; our brains and social processes evolve for small, family clan-type groups and tribes. A model of an organisation all for that matter and economic model of society which is based on personal self-interest is fundamentally inauthentic to the nature of human evolution. We evolve as social entities, able to act and know things socially, not individually, and you can start seeing that happening on the Web”.

Colour me excited and rather privileged for having the great pleasure of thanking both Euan and Dave for their truly inspiring keynote sessions that surely have helped me overcome, big time, those moments of weakness that we all know we face every now and then. Whenever I would have the next one, I will just start reading that quote from Dave and remember both these two articles and their presentations. And I know I’ll be just fine. And I’ll know things will be all right eventually, too!, getting back in business with all of that excitement and joy of continuing to make a difference.

Our difference. Yours and mine.

You may remember how in previous articles that I have put together over here in this blog I have mentioned how, lately, I am going through one of those stages, where instead of participating rather actively in a good number of various different social networking sites, I’m now more inclined towards plenty of reading and listening what’s happening out there, then do a bunch of more reading (books, articles, white papers, etc. etc.), followed by lots of additional self-reflection and learning on the sides from watching video clips, mainly of conference event recordings available on YouTube and, eventually, come back to the blog to reflect on some of the stuff I have learned in the process.

Yes, indeed, in short, I am spending now more time blogging than in the usual social networking sites, the so-called message boards. And today has been no different. Specially, since I have been catching up on a couple of recent keynote speaker sessions that have totally blown my mind, since my head is still spinning with dozens of ideas and I just can’t help thinking about them. And all thanks to the State of the Net 2012 conference event, hosted in Trieste, Italy, by late June. And all thanks to having watched, in much anticipation, two of my favourite mentors and thought leaders in the space of the Social Web, Knowledge Management, Collaboration, Narrative and Sensemaking: Euan Semple and Dave Snowden.

This is the first part of two blog posts that I will be putting together to summarise some of the findings of what I learned from having watched both presentations over the last few days, starting with Euan’s “People Tweet” and then the second article on Dave’s “Tacit Knowledge“, since I was originally putting together a single blog entry and it was just getting a bit too long, so I eventually decided to split it up in two to help digest it better, since there is just far too much good stuff in both of their keynotes that I wanted to touch base on as my key learnings. So here is Part One and stay tuned for Part Two coming up shortly already!

In “People Tweet” Euan gets to talk for a little bit over 25 minutes on the state of Social Media in general and how, in a way, he misses the good old Social Web, where really good conversations were taking place, as opposed to today when it looks like broadcasting short bursts with your own messages along seems to be the rage of the so-called social tools, specially, those bursts that are no longer shared across by people, but by corporate drones or bots just wanting to get the message across, without an opportunity to engage in meaningful dialogue. Indeed, the good old known sense of belonging, of connectedness, that we seem to have lost at a rampant pace nowadays, apparently.

Euan comes to state that part of the reason why we are heading that way and why we should question it eventually is how much we have ending up industrialising our lives to the point that for a society that tries to move on from the industrial revolution into the digital revolution, we seem to be going in the wrong direction, and perhaps even without not noticing. How we may have sold our souls in the name of security, of safety, of our own jobs, essentially, even though that’s no longer anything else than a myth. Job security, that is, specially, in today’s current financial econoclypse. He worryingly states how the vast majority of the Social efforts out there done by businesses are now down to outsourcing it to agencies, and put a check on Social, and move on, without realising their decision making / power almost disappears from the entire equation for something so important as collaboration amongst knowledge workers and their customers and business partners. 

It’s been fascinating watching him talk about how much of the business world today is rather paternalistic, to the point that strong hierarchies are still in place making most of the decision making process as an outsourced activity, reminding me, big time, of the recent TEDx Talk from Isaac Getz on the issues and concerns of doing so. Truly loved his quote on how “we have sub-contracted storytelling to broadcasters” to the point where they are no longer our stories, but someone else’s, in most cases losing the context of what we wanted to transfer and share across in the first place! Goodness, not sure what you would think, but that, right there!, is a massive wake-up call for all businesses out there thinking they are living social this way thinking they will be all right. No, they won’t. Never will. Bound for failure sooner rather than later. 

One of the things that Euan thinks we have gone ashtray with when talking about the huge potential of the Social Web and that we have started to miss big time on is having grown-up conversations, for us to start using these social tools for serious things, for things that matter. And how we keep failing about finding our voice because of how fearful we may well be about tasting the lovely waters of writing, of blogging, for instance. From there onwards he starts advocating for how we need to revert that worrisome trend and encourage knowledge workers to not be afraid about writing what we think, what we know, what we say in face to face interactions about things that matter, because there is a great chance that in doing so we will have a good opportunity to change things that may work relatively well, or not. And improve them for the better. But it needs to start somewhere. And Euan thinks that blogging may well be a great starting point and I must say, while putting together this article, that I couldn’t have agreed more with him, having followed that approach myself for over the last 9 years with thousands of blog posts shared both internally and externally and realising how much blogging has meant for yours truly not only on my own personal career, but on sharing across ideas with other folks who may be interested in and helping improve them engaging in those same conversations that Euan mentions on his pitch. 

Ha! Who would have thought that blogging would be so powerful in the era of social tools, errr, I mean messaging board systems like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so forth? Not too bad, eh? Thus, where is your blog in all of this? Think about it as Euan pretty much nails with his commentary about how most of the corporate communications out there are nowadays de-personalised to the point where they are mimicking management speak, where they lack the passion and the emotion of the messages you would want to convey across… 

From there onwards he comes to question everyone about when was the last time that we sat down to think about work, to seriously think about why do we do what we do, about the consequences of what we do, about the huge potential of introducing networks behind the firewall, exchanging ideas, sharing with one another, to help democratise how information and knowledge at the same time flow throughout the organisation altogether. What Euan, quoting David Weinberger, mentioned as “Writing ourselves into existence“, which is definitely the perfect introduction to the next section of his presentation where he talked about the perfect blend of hierarchy (Which have now worryingly institutionalise far too much altogether!) and wirearchy in businesses where there would need to be a combination of both in order to get the best outcomes from both of them. Where managers need to shake off that flavour of command and control, suit-and-tie, within their organisations and instead realise you are just one node of the network, one of the leaders, who just basically needs to lead by example, lead with an attitude, not your title, or diploma altogether but through ephemeral meritocracies. Just brilliant! Long live all of those trojan mice! 

Now, there are a few other things that Euan gets to talk about on that keynote speaker session that I will leave it down to you to watch and enjoy further. Perhaps, I would just want to leave things over here embedding the code of the video, so you can play it right away, and by including as well what’s my absolute favourite quote from his entire dissertation and which is just worth it on its own. Again quoting David Weinberger, and nicely captured as well by my good friend Samuel Driessen: 

“Love is what makes the Internet hang together, the basis human desire to want connect to each other“

Demonstrating, once again, how the Social Web, as we know it, is a whole lot more than just a bunch of social technologies and tools that we have got out there at our disposal for fun and play and whatever other trivial stuff we are just too used to. We need to be able to re-find our focus, our purpose and our meaning, without fear taking over our actions and interactions, and keep thriving on that journey to become a successful social organisation, whatever that may well be. Essentially, the one we have all envisioned from the very beginning, back in the day. And it looks like writing out loud our way there has never been more powerful to achieve that goal. Even today, more than never…

Over at StrategyFocusedHR, Ron Thomas put together, just recently, a rather interesting and intriguing blog post, under the suggestive heading “Once Upon a Time: Remember When We Could Tell a Story Without Slides?“, that I can certainly recommend everyone reading through it, specially, if you are a public speaker, and, more importantly, if you like storytelling with a business purpose. But perhaps even much more highly recommended if you feel that slides have taken over your public speaking world and, eventually, they may have become the “crutches” for your narrative. It’s a rather thought provoking read, because, in a way, it’s going to help you challenge the way you use slides for your public speaking gigs to the point where he questions whether we should be using them rather heavily, or, instead, use them as a simple guide, but no more. 

I guess at this point in time, we are all sensing what he really means and we probably have got an affirmative answer to his reflections; the fact that, whether we like it or not, we pretty much rely on telling stories by using PowerPoint presentations. And perhaps we shouldn’t. At least, we shouldn’t depend on them as much as we do nowadays. Ron is essentially launching a call for action to stop relying so much on slides and instead focus on sharing some good stories to get your messages across. 

I can see his point. In fact, I have probably abused myself that Death by PowerPoint a few times already, far too many, perhaps, that I would care to remember, as I have blogged about in the past, but if there is anything that I have learned in the last 6 months or so, after having been a (keynote) speaker in multiple events, is that sooner rather than later, even you, the public speaker, will burn out from PowerPoint Overload and eventually tune out. And that’s exactly the stage that I am at at the moment. And so far, although I didn’t expect it this soon, I am enjoying it quite a bit!

More than anything because, as Ron mentions on his blog post, it’s allowed me to discover a new facet as to why I’m enjoying it so much more doing all of this public speaking at various different events that I never thought I would be able to experience again anymore. Probably because of how much automation and industrialisation we have incorporated into the overall process altogether when we do presentations that we hardly leave any room, nor space, for something that we are all, human beings, really good at: telling good stories.

That’s why, back in May, I reflected on my Google Plus profile on a new experiment that I thought would be worth while going for to explore how much further along I could bring forward my own creativity when doing presentations, so knowing how buzzing my travelling schedule would be for the following couple of months I thought it would be the perfect ground to take on that new experiment: go and present in a number of various different public events without using any slides, and just delivering my speech trying to capture my main points of interest for the audience in the shape of stories, and see how far creativity would take me along without any of those “crutches for my narrative” (i.e. Slides). 

Little did I know that what eventually turned out to be quite an interesting experiment it developed into something I didn’t expect at all, to the point where it managed to break up my addiction of using slides as a way of protecting my self, my overall presence, my messages, my stories. And it was something so relatively simple, yet so powerful, that it blew off my mind when I realised about it, just as much as it does today: A new learning experience (in real time).

Indeed, there is a lot to be learned on How To Do Everything Wrong In A Presentation, as Mitch Joel would say, but there is a whole lot more to learn from doing a presentation just right and that only starts, as far as I am concerned, and based on plenty of recent experience, on how well you engage your audience. Because in most cases we don’t. I mean, how many times have we been attending a masterly presentation from a speaker only to find out that he / she has run out of time and we, the audience, don’t have a chance to engage, ask questions, share our key learnings, perhaps our very own stories, AND interact? Far too often, I would admit, and I would be guilty as charged, because I have suffered from that myself far too many times, far too often even, as a speaker. Till May 2012. 

That’s when I decided that the main reason why I was running out of time in the vast majority of cases was because my stories, my narrative, were solely based on the visual aids that I was making use of, and perhaps that’s the reason why it took that long to deliver them. Yes, I do know and fully realise that relying too heavily on your slides is not a good thing, not even a healthy one, but we have to admit that we all pretty much overdo it time and time again. So the last couple months of running this experiment of not using slides in public speaking events have taught me a couple of things:

1. Not doing slides for your presentation is Ok. No-one is going to complain about it, and if anything, they would love you for it. That’s how far we have gone into PowerPoint Overload so far… What really matters is your message, your narrative, your stories, even your own charisma as an individual; basically, what you would want the audience to walk away with when you are done, and what method you use for that it won’t matter much, as long as you deliver. 

2. Once you engage with your audience it’s adrenaline you just can’t ignore anymore. This was the major takeaway for me for the last few events that I have participated in, including the very last one I hosted, a full day summer course at the University of Pablo de Olavide, in Carmona, Seville, on “La Empresa y La Administración Pública en la Era de Las Redes Sociales” where I, finally, came to realise what I enjoy the most from public speaking. Not being in front of the audience, not being on stage, not enjoying that public flair, but, essentially, and that’s the kicker, learning from your audience. Because in most cases they are much smarter than whatever you could be.

That’s exactly right! That’s the new drug that I have gotten so used to in recent times that I can no longer neglect it, nor ignore it. That’s why whenever I am on my way to provide another speech I hardly ever look into putting together slides, but more I try to find out as much as I possibly can what the audience would be like, to then tame my messages, stories and narrative through plenty of scripting, mindmapping and reflection in order to meet their needs. Yes, I know it takes a whole lot more time, effort and energy, but it is totally worth it every penny you spend on such preparations. Basically, I decided that I would want to, on purpose, learn from the audience, just as much as they can possibly do from me, if not even more! Eventually, those presentations have turned themselves upside down from that masterly delivery of a speech, into something that’s just so rewarding that I can certainly encourage everyone to go and experience: open true dialogue. Utterly refreshing and incredibly reenergising. 

Once upon a time, as Ron would say, I used to remember what it was like doing a presentation with slides… Nowadays, though, I prefer to be there on stage, actively learning from the audience, engaging in meaningful dialogue, sharing some terrific stories that I am sure you would all agree with me that we all have deep inside ourselves, after all, we are all born natural storytellers, and eventually finish up the presentation much more energised than when I started it in the first place. Why? Well, because right there, in the audience, there is always going to be that great leader, or leaders, who “throughout history had the power to move people by telling stories. Success is won by creating compelling stories that have the power to move people“. And it looks like I have decided a couple of months back to be moved by people, as my main method of learning as a public speaker to the point that whenever I go and speak at a public event it’s no longer the audience privileged to have the presence of the speaker, but more the speaker is the privileged one to have the unique opportunity of learning from the audience through those interactions that usually happen before, during and after the session. 

And that’s how I feel, and I may well be way beyond my call of duty, that we need to transform conference events and public speaking events to become truly social events where we all do what we know we can do best: share our knowledge, tell our stories, collaborate with one another, learn from each other through conversations, storytelling, open dialogue. Not sure what you would think, but I sense it’s time to re-define the way we engage as speakers with our corresponding audience(s). I think it’s time we ditch for good our masterly slides and, instead, we put to the test our masterly skills on listening, engaging, and interacting with those who we share a common passion with in the first place. And keep up with the learning curve…

After a long, much anticipated, last, I am way all up for that … and you?