Who says you can't be in two places at once?

Dr. David Lomas is finalising the release of QUBE  QUBE2.5 which will include the Come Here command allowing you to "beam up" your colleagues to join you on QUBE.  Last month we added a function which allowed you to invite and issue entry passes for colleagues via email.  We are hoping that by giving you the power of remote teleportation learning and working collaboratively will become seamless.

We will be very interested in your stories and experiences - you can comment here or email admin@PentacleTheVBS.com

Don't Change Anything!

Just seen that it's live.  My mini-TEDx talk in Geneva.  It was fun.  The energy and enthusiasm of the young organisers.  The story they told me of how it had all started with them meeting at a friend's house to watch TED Talks. Then the idea: "How about if we run a  TEDx?'.

I was honoured to be part of it and readily accepted their invitation. 

I decided to 'drink my own champagne'.  But also to use as many World After Midnight jokes and references as I could get away with.   The title is the Tenth Rule:  'Don't Change Anything'   from  New Rules for A New World.

I used a slightly changed version of the introductory paragraph to my book All Change! as the first paragraph of the Talk.  In All Change! it was:  I have been here before.  Well, not exactly in this particular location, but in exactly this situation before.  It’s Monday.  It’s summer.  It’s very, very hot, and I have nothing to do but sit in the shade of a large red and yellow umbrella and try to understand why I am out of a job.  This time it’s the Mediterranean, the last time it was the Great Barrier Reef.

See if you can spot the simliarity - I was trying to 'do nothing of no use'.
I did change the colour of my shirt (from orange to yellow), although it doesn't look like it in the lighting. 

And I did change the talk

I talk about the O-pad maxi   The blog about the O-pad maxi is here ...

So please watch it and see if I've managed to go any slower...
http://youtu.be/1PnWaLJplLQ

And if you find it interesting or useful, tell lots of people about it.

Virtual isn’t working

So Yahoo and BestBuy are questioning working from home. Recently Blessing White have published an Employee Engagement Research Report Update 2013 report suggesting that ‘working remotely’ (with no one else present) makes you less engaged.

I can’t imagine Mozart being less motivated to compose in the absence of Salieri. The Blessing White survey and similar surveys are not about 'remote' working per se, that is "people in different places or at home getting on with work".  Instead they are really investigating what happens when employed (collaborators?) have to work in a different location to where the power centre (where the boss or most of their colleagues are located) is.

In our 21st century ‘world after midnight’ the concept of ‘working remotely’ is quaint. During the machine age, all the workers or employees had to huddle around the capital intensive machine. So we would commute to and from home to a factory or an office (which was where the paper was stored or the computers were kept). So it made sense whilst we were huddled together for us to have social connections. In addition the management could see and ‘oversee’ the work of the employees and so the employees could rightly demand to know ‘how they were doing’ in order to reassure themselves that their jobs were safe and also to give them a sense of pride. In the late 20th century, mostly as a result of trying to reduce office costs, employers encouraged the employees to work from home. This idea of working remotely (remotely from who?) was called ‘telecommuting’. Mary Ann Maserech of Blessing White describes ten years of telecommuting to a headquarters building. But actually the constraint of the expensive machine is now gone. The boundary of only being able to collaborate and oversee when in close proximity is now gone. The Internet has seen to that. (In reality it is the data which does the ‘commuting’ not the employee). So even through you may describe it as ‘working remotely’ you actually work locally.

Nowadays many employees have a computer at home that is often better than that provided by the employer. I call people who still travel from a home (where they have great 21st century computer) to an office (where they have to use a 20th century disabled, firewalled, machine without flash, YouTube, sound cards etc. etc) time travellers.

At Pentacle we have managed to roll all the best of

the 21st century into our learning and collaboration
platform. QUBE is basically google hangout, webex, skype, adobe connect, gotomeeting, glance, facebook and dropbox all rolled into one...and surprisingly easy and intuitive to use. We use it for delivering our courses, conferences and coaching. It also where we run our business. We huddle on QUBE, our personalities extended into special avatars called qubots, which allow head-to-head video conferencing. We can sit confidentially or stand together at a flip-chart. Supplier meetings are held on QUBE, planning and agreeing course designs with clients happens on QUBE. Because the rooms (called qubicles) are real they persist and stay open 24 hours a day so you can come back to

them when you wish or if you are working across time-zones you can always leave a sticky note on a collaborators desk!

We have open day events once a month. join in and find out how about working without boundaries can make Virtual Work.

... and half a dozen helmets please

Yesterday I was interviewed by People Management Magazine on Innovation.  "What is the difference between innovation and novelty?" came the question.  This allowed me to launch into a long schpeil about the difference, the fact that there are thousands of definitions for innovation and to propose the one I use which is '...the process for turning (new) ideas into money (benefits to society).' 
Today I was sent a image by my old friend Jack Hardie (not so much 'old' as in age. but 'old' as in have known him a long time).  I guess if it's a rental, and people are hiring it, then it's innovation.

Is dead retirement?

Today I received a linked in message asking me to contribute a 300 word piece to a competition on what the world will be like when I retire.  I'm not sure what to reply. Isn't retirement dead? 

The challenge is that I think the concept of 'retirement' is a bit 20th Century and Old World. With healthier eating, stem cell research, bionics, robotics etc. our bodies should last much longer.  And the last financial crash taught all who would listen that it is practically impossible to store up value over a prolonged time to be reclaimed later.  It makes little sense to plan your life in the old linear model - selling your lifetime doing anything, even something you hate, hoping to accumulate enough value to give you the freedom for the rest.

The World After Midnight rule is 'folding'.  Folding work and enjoyment into each other, relationships and travel and so on.  I hope that I am now fully retired and active at life.  And as my good friend Ken Dore says "If you find a job you love… you never have to work a day in your life!"

Advice from the Red Queen…

Don’t listen to the Red Queen…

Last month I did something I have never done before. It was late. I was tired. I was so engrossed in planning the next day in my mind and walking back along the endless corridors in Heathrow I stepped on to a travelator. You'd think that’s nothing to write home about, let alone to write a blog about, and you’d be right. Except I had absent-mindedly stepped on to a travelator which was moving in the opposite direction to me. I only noticed because it was taking quite a while to move past a poster offering me excellent investment opportunities in Nigeria. I smiled inwardly - this was fun, an unexpected input to my life, a mini adventure. As I was making little progress, I had two choices, slow down and get off, or speed up and beat the thing. I leant forward, pulled my wheelie to my right-hand side and sped up, leaving behind my now familiar poster.

Decades ago, as I studied for my MBA, I learnt about S curves and how as enterprises grew they had to go through crises and breakthroughs in order to find new and bigger opportunities. The assumption was that the enterprise could change itself faster than the world around it, and indeed would do so to achieve growth. The reason for the crisis I understood was that, for months or years before, the organisation would have settled into a nice successful pattern where more of the same guaranteed additional success, and so as a result all the processes, systems, leadership approaches and rewards would be locked in to deliver more of the same – but growth demanded that at least one of these be reset. The Interlocking S curves of the models we studied suggested that each of these factors be reset in turn. Each stage of this resetting was governed by a strategic drive, logically derived from SWOTs and PESTs and justified by a business case in which the cost of doing something different was a fraction of the returns of doing something different.

That was me on the travelator first changing my posture to gain a head start and then putting my wheelie on my stronger side… By making these changes, I moved from the familiar surroundings of my investment poster to new horizons (also describes as the next poster). The models of my MBA had hidden deep inside them an assumption which they didn’t need to make explicit. That assumption was that the pace of the travelator was fixed and I could move forwards faster than the travelator moved me forwards.

But what if as I sped up the travelator had increased its speed also? After my initial surge forwards, although I was making use of my new forward leaning posture and sidecar wheelie, the surroundings would again become familiar. In fact, if the travelator speed matched my own I would find, as the Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland explained, that “...it takes all the running you can do to stay in the same place...” Under these conditions, the models of my MBA made no sense at all.

But I think that the travelator speed has continued to increase, and it increases exponentially. In our man-made business-sphere, the pace of change, connections and complexity far outstrip our ability to learn. Doing ‘more of the same’ means your enterprise will constantly be surprised by new challenges and a new environment.

What MBA model should we now turn to? If you don’t understand your environment how can you use your SWOT and PEST to develop your strategic drive? In a world where doing nothing different still meant change, your business case would have to not only include the benefits of doing something new but the dis-benefits of not doing anything, and judge the costs and investment against the value at stake – the difference between the two.

And just to remind you of the entire quote:  "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

So there's your challenge, figuring out how you can run twice as fast as you're capable of. In our world of change we don't need more resources, funding, or goals, we need ideas!

Just because the future has happened doesn't mean we can't live in the past....

Yesterday one of the Pentacle crew sent me an image called ‘progress’ which made me laugh out loud. Some people might say good design wins out in the end but I fear it goes deeper than that

In the 90's I recall being really 'angry' and upset as I watched the world, in my eyes, miss an opportunity. The original opportunity and concept of hyperlinking was to enable links from any object to any other object. Availability of software such as FrontPage gave us the possibility of redefining each person as a website and therefore allowing an organsation to have true connected access to all its information easily and in a more human way. But the old ideas of 'structure’ persisted. ‘Experts’ looked at the unfolding interdependent complex connections with a mind looking for things it recognised and understood and concluded that the new way was wrong. From then on there was a movement to reinforce the Old World (see World before Midnight) strict hierarchy in software menus which got longer and longer (and had to be programmed to hide less frequently used commands). And then these Old World ideas spread to websites. Early websites were fluid. Many were designed along a question answer basis - a bit like FAQ's are today, so if you knew the question you could retrieve the data which would provide the answer and from this information you could act. My definition of information is that it is the answer to the question asked; data on the other hand is the sea from which you select the answer. But the Old World intervened. Today most mainstream websites are structured linearly with hierarchical menus, and even though we have search engines (or perhaps because of their structures we need search engines) you are channeled down a route irrespective of the questions you want answered.  I have tried, in spite of lots of pressure to "build a proper website like everybody else", to keep the Pentacle website a maze- see our sitemap, best navigated by tile icons - rather like AOL 1996 :-).  Word-to-word hyperlinks only stay popular on sites like Wikipedia. So what could have enabled direct connections was submerged below a hierarchical classification structure. In websites, this quickly became the norm and now we have to turn to Big Data to crunch through the sea of data not in search of answers to questions but in search of patterns Which might lead to insights which might lead to questions which then lead to more data crunching.  < Click here for link to XKCD cartoon>

And with this spirit of progress and change I share with you a picture of me and my brand new o-pad maxi.