Have a story to tell that will help 20 somethings transition into professional communicators?

Class of 2019

From January to March I teach a course entitled Professional Practice, which is part of the Advertising and Marketing Communications Management Program at Algonquin College. This is a program that I graduated from when typewriters were the norm, and which I eventually led in the nineties—until the internet lured me away. Now I feed my teaching addiction part-time.

The course is for students about to graduate from the three-year program and is intended to help with the transition from school to the workplace, the course outline reads:

“Attitude, communication, and human relations are the key to surviving in the ever-changing world of advertising. This course helps you prepare for workplace success by providing practical expectations and useful tools to make a successful transition from school to workplace. The course discusses self-management, workplace politics and etiquette, building relationships, and tools for the future.”

A key part of the course is the speaker’s program where professionals like you share their wisdom and insights into the real world.

The main themes of the course are a personal brand, networking, and finance with an emphasis on the first two.  I try to bring in a variety of people from recent graduates to experienced mavens and not every speaker is from the communications industry. Some speakers dive deep into relevant topics while others simply tell their career story and engage in conversation.  Self-awareness and career success are two common themes we explore, usually within a marketing context.

If you have some insight to share or an interesting (and motivating) story to tell, I would like to hear from you. Some of the topics that students have said they would like to hear about include:

  • SEO and advanced digital marketing
  • Habits for success

This year there are potentially 13, 45-minute speaking spots available on Thursday afternoons from January 9 to February 20.  The detailed schedule and other information is available in this google document.

Thanks, I hope the new year is good to you and yours.

Thom

So what’s with the ducks?

 

Several different colors of rubber ducks. Could be a symbol of diversity or cooperation

Those of you that have been to my office know that I seem to have an obsession with ducks, particularly the bathtub kind. My collection of rubber, plastic, glass and paper ducks was mostly accumulated a few years ago when I was working to sell the concept of enterprise architecture. Many of the ducks in my collection are gifts from that period. This post explains the story behind the ducks.

Problem: How to communicate the benefits of Enterprise Architecture.

In the summer of 2007 the Enterprise Architecture and Standards Division, of CIOB TBS GC, faced a dilemma. Over the previous three years they had invested heavily in creating a robust and comprehensive approach to business transformation. Called BTEP for Business Transformation Enablement Program, this approach integrated business architecture and project management concepts into a disciplined method for horizontal change. After several successful implementations it had begun to attract attention and communications with potential adopters became important.

Unfortunately, the brilliant scientists that created the method responded to this interest using the sometimes arcane language of the discipline and simply overwhelmed business people with detailed descriptions of what they had done. A few like-minded individuals got the message and were enthusiastic, however, most business people simply didn’t get it.

In early 2008 the most senior levels of management in the Public Service began to ask questions around alignment. They wanted to know if projects they were being asked to fund were aligned, that is did they follow strategy, use compatible technology, comply with policy, and not duplicate one another? Alignment is a key goal for Enterprise Architecture and the division had been working on ways to measure (and create) alignment as part of its efforts to stimulate coherence. What interests our bosses, fascinates us, so naturally the division wanted to bring its alignment work to the forefront.

The division knew it had important knowledge and useful tools that could help. But they also had learned that selling Enterprise Architecture using the language of the discipline only worked with other architects. Strategically they understood that they needed to change their approach to communications and had hired myself as a senior communications person. I was a recent convert to the idea of Enterprise Architecture and was not steeped in the language of the discipline. Knowing the power of images and metaphor I stumbled upon the idea of ducks in a row and added it to the spider web, gear images, and railroad metaphors as things to try out.

Having previously worked in advertising, I sought to obtain a visual to go along with the words coherent government by design. In order to cut through the visual clutter and get noticed, the image had to be different than what people were used to seeing. The concept of ducks in a row seemed to resonate. The brightly colored ducks were nothing like the complex diagrams and charts that populated most of the decks in the division. There was no question they got attention.

We added the slide to an executive presentation the CIO was giving and while talking to the slide he associated the different color of each duck with the unique personalities of the departments in the federation that makes up the Government of Canada. The argument being that they did not have to give up their autonomy to move in the same direction.

The ducks turned out to be an excellent metaphor, not only because they communicate the central message of alignment, but because they are well suited to an extension into the physical world. The division even gave out rubber ducks as instant achievement awards. These ducks sit on desks and bookcases, as a means of drawing attention and reminding us of the importance of alignment.

As the program rolled out and ducks began to propagate, people started to give me ducks that they collected from their travels. I now have ducks from all around the world, drop by my office sometime and I will show you a few.

The book chapter can be found on the Enterprise Architecture Marketing page.

This post is an excerpt from the marketing communications chapter of Coherency Management: Architecting the Enterprise for  Alignment, Agility and Assurance Edited by: Gary Doucet, John Gøtze, Pallab Saha, and Scott Bernard

You can change culture now: 3 essential truths for public service leaders

stick man on stairs squareThe Canadian federal public service has been trying to change its culture for a few years with initiatives like Blueprint 2020 and the Innovation Hubs. Now we have a new federal leadership that wants to adopt a new and more collaborative approach to governing. One might wonder what is keeping us from our goal…

I am not a millennial, but I am a pretty hip, late baby boomer who has been part of the interweb since close to the beginning. My career has been a little eclectic and I have had the opportunity to observe and participate in a wide range of transformational activities. I am telling you this, because it is that experience that has provided the fodder for the observations that follow.

A few years ago I was deep into an analysis of how governments could realize the potential of collaboration and social technologies. As I was mulling over how to synthesise all of the data into a sound bite that could be easily consumed by a busy executive, I was also thinking about how it connected with what I had learned from working in advertising and teaching consumer behaviour. In a rare moment of clarity while waiting for a red light I scribbled down three truths that seem to me to be both obvious and profound.

1. Sharing is good

Sharing is the activity that fuels successful collaboration, knowledge management and communication, which in turn are fundamental to a “capable and high performing” organization. By sharing we become authentic to those around us, sharing preserves hard earned knowledge and makes us more productive, telling stories makes us real, and helps to build the common purpose which is so important to successful change.

Most of the major research firms agree that the biggest challenge organizations face in implementation of social technologies within the enterprise is creating a culture that supports information sharing. Having been involved with over a dozen enterprise collaboration efforts I can say that my personal experience supports those findings. Culture, as the saying goes eats strategy for breakfast, apparently it also eats technology, and probably has a taste for deliverology as well.

Many people don’t share because they are afraid of making a Career Limiting Move (CLM), while others, (kudos if you are one), consider sharing part of their responsibility. Unfortunately too many seem to equate sharing with a CLM, and ultimately we need to institutionalize ways of rewarding sharing and punishing information hoarding. Maybe we can make sharing part of management accountability accords, it is pretty easy to count contributions to sharing platforms like GCpedia and GCconnex…

2. Ego gets in the way

By ego I mean an unhealthy focus on self. We have all come across individuals that try and withhold information, and manipulate those around them for personal gain or promotion. When combined with a lack of emotional intelligence I believe this is one of the most destructive forces in the public service today. We need to get our self-worth from something other than the size of our empire, we need to get emotional and career points for collaborating. We need to recognize the common purpose, (serving Canadians anyone?), as more important than our personal gain. Not only is the, “I only do what is good for me” attitude, bad for the organization, its beginning to look like it may be bad for your career as well.

I have worked on enough horizontal files to have come across this issue more than once. No matter how you structure a collaboration, the people involved can always sabotage it. While researching the horizontal governance issue sometime in the early 2000’s, I came across an Auditor General’s report examining the lack of progress on the climate change file. Without much reading between the lines it was obvious that the real problem was that the primary departments involved could not find a way to collaborate, mostly because the Deputy Ministers did not like each other. Now I am not pointing fingers at the senior ranks, you see this kind of behaviour at all levels. I suppose we should not be surprised, given the competitive, individualistic socialization most of us have grown up with. But humanity’s greatest capacity is to learn, and I like to think that we can learn to work together despite personal differences—if we set aside our ego once in awhile in favour of the common goal.

3. You can’t communicate too much

“You can’t communicate too much”,  I posted this comment on twitter during  a conference  once and it quickly became one of the most re-tweeted updates, so it seems the sentiment hit a nerve.

Back in my advertising days we used to spend a lot of money on media buys and printing, and one of the worst things that could happen was for a print run or advertisement be published with a mistake. When it did happen it was an expensive and embarrassing lesson. After the first time we began to repeat instructions, in different languages if necessary, we would draw pictures, leave notes on the artwork, call the publisher, even attend press runs to make sure all was understood. Later in my career I worked with a Product Line Manager at a major telecom who told me that for an idea to get traction you had to say the same thing over and over again in as many different ways as you could think of —when you are sick of saying the same thing, it’s time to say it again— you can’t communicate too much.

In today’s information intense and dynamic workplace, trying to get the attention of information inundated executive ranks will take more than a little repetition. Going the other way, management can’t communicate too much with staff, especially during times of change. The mushroom school of management (keep them in the dark, and feed them sh*t), simply has no place in an agile and high performing organization— you can’t communicate too much.

In dynamic times, perfection is the enemy of communication, waiting for a complete and crafted message simply leads to speculation and fear, while communicating often and openly, even admitting you don’t know everything, leads to trust and understanding. Having a clear and common purpose is more important than knowing the details of how you are going to get there— you can’t communicate too much.

Conclusion

Changing the culture of something as big as the public service is a daunting task, sometimes compared to turning a supertanker. But the public service is not a ship, it is an organization made up of people, and it’s people who make the culture. The three truths that I have shared can and should be applied from the top down, but more importantly they can be applied by individuals regardless of rank, when you think about that, it means you have the power to change culture.

What are you going to do with that power?

Image Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Triskele-Symbol-spiral-five-thirds-turns.png

Editorial Note:

This post is adapted from one of two posts that was written for a GTEC 2013 blog series exploring what it means to be an Agile, Open, Collaborative and Mobile Government. The original post was entitled “Three truths to help you change the culture of the Public Service.” My focus in the series was on the Cultural, Organizational and Policy Infrastructure that provides the foundation for public service culture.

Licence to innovate

This slide has proven to be popular with clients so I thought I would share it in case you need to sell Web 2.0 or innovation inside the Government of Canada.

One client made a small license size version, maybe #w2p could print some up?

Let me know if you find it useful. I have posted a jpg and the ppt. No attribution expected on this cause its all stuff the Clerk said.

Here is a PowerPoint version Licence to Innovate

And here is the French version

Votre permis fédéral pour innover.ppt

A friend of a friend of a friend

I was part of an interesting information chain the other day and wanted to share it.

No surprise to those of you that know me, I was walking the dogs and received an email on my phone from a colleague who was looking for a freelance contractor with experience with a particular, somewhat eclectic community platform.  While enjoying the sun I read the message and responded that I would see if there was anyone in my network.  First I quickly checked out the site using the mobile browser on my phone.  Then I posted the following twitter message at 3:50 pm

anyone have xp using world cafe? http://www.theworldcafe.com/. might have a business opportunity if you do

I received the first response at 3:56 PM. It was from someone I know and respect immensely and I would have had no reservation recommending him, I had no idea that he had the experience in question. Unfortunately for me, he is also a public servant and unable to take contracts.  A little later, 4:46 PM to be precise,  as I was drying two wet golden retrievers, I received a Direct Message from someone in Ottawa that I follow. He knew of the platform and I offered to introduce him to my colleague. He passed on the coordinates of an expert within his firm. I copied those and emailed them to my colleague, at 5:05 PM, my colleague replied he replied with his thanks at 7:05 PM.

Yesterday, (11 days after the original exchange) I ran into my colleague at the gym and he updated me. The contact I gave him could not do the project but knew someone who could. That individual could not do the project either, but knew someone who could. That individual is now lined up to do the work. I thought this whole thing was kind of interesting and created a little drawing of it.

A diagram of communications related to finding someone with particular experience.

A diagram of communications related to finding someone with particular experience.

There are a couple of things that stuck me about this.

First, the ease, speed and location independence of the initial email/twitter exchanges far surpasses what was possible just a few years ago.  In 30 seconds I shared an opportunity with potentially 100’s of people. Without the ability to instantly access that network, I would have briefly racked my brain and said “sorry, no one comes to mind, if run across anyone I will let you know”, a response that very rarely leads to anything productive. As it turned out a couple of minutes of my time gave him a lead and kicked off a chain of events that led to success.

The second thing that strikes me is the value of loose ties and serendipity. I am not sure what the business case is for serendipity but I do think that the ability of social media to enable eclectic groups of people to connect increases the likelihood of it happening, and I think that is a good thing, what do you think?

To stimulate adoption, just say no.

This post originally appeared on the Senior Fellows and Friends blog in June, 2010.

Word No, underlined by red pencil

©iStockPhoto/Kanstantsin Shcharbinski

About mid way into the pilot phase of the open collaborative workplace project, we added Karl to the team.  This is the story of his adoption of a wiki approach to preparing a large document. Karl had joined the Canadian Revenue Agency , (CRA) 6 years before, coming from the Nortel Networks meltdown. He had a background in large-scale learning, development and management and he knew this web 2. stuff was probably a good thing, he just did not know exactly how. This is the story of his initiation to a wiki, specifically the MediWiki install known as GCPEDIA. It is a story you may be able to repeat.

One of Karl’s first tasks was to prepare a formal project charter that would begin the process of taking us from pilot to enterprise solution. As you can imagine preparing a project charter in a government central agency is a significant task. There was a prescribed outline to follow, four primary authors and an executive  level steering committee of 20 or so to be consulted. In addition to the immediate circle there were perhaps 100 or so interested parties.

After obtaining the requisite word processing template from the project management office, Karl came to me to discuss the approach for developing the charter. We had a tight deadline and I told Karl that we should use the wiki to create the document.

Two days later Karl showed up with a draft. As a word processing document. He was in a hurry he said and did not have time to learn how to use a new tool. He would put it on the wiki later he said.  I was keen to see the document, but refused to look at it, telling him to “do it on the wiki”.  Apparently he did not believe me because a day later he was back with another word processed document, this time printed!  I rejected it outright. He left in a bit of a huff, probably thinking I was being unreasonable.

After a few minutes of instruction he was working away in the new tool. Some copy and paste and a little formatting and he had a rough wiki version. Commenting that maybe that was not so bad he sent a link to the small group of original authors.

Over the next few days we all contributed to the document and Karl began to smile as the benefits of writing on the wiki became obvious. No  emails with attachments.  No confusion over what version was the most recent.  A consolidated revision history and immediate notification of changes. We worked on it when we could, in the early morning or late at night, from the office or from home, I even made an edit from my BlackBerry.

In a few days we had created a version that we were happy with as a first draft and invited the larger group of executives to take part. A couple of them did, and we also had comments from interested bystanders.  By the time we got to the committee meeting everyone had had their opportunity to contribute and the document was quickly approved.

Lessons:
Most people will naturally resist change, even when they know it good for them. If there is a familiar alternative they will use it, particularly when they are under pressure. By removing the familiar, users have no choice but to try the new way.

If it is possible to make your collaboration space the only way to do something important, make it so. It will force that critical first step.

What do you think?

Do you have any adoption stories you would like to share?

Persuasion presentation using Prezi

I thought I would share my first experience with Prezi , the zooming presentation editor. Last Sunday I create a presentation for the class in Persuasion that I am teaching. From download to packaging up on my USB took about five hours.  This is my report of the experience.

I first learned about Prezi through a twitter post by Nick Charney who you may know as someone that  schemes virtuously. I am writing the first draft of this post using Dragon speech to text software on my iPhone while stuck in traffic.

This particular course has a text book, and the process I followed was one of reviewing the chapters, identifying the relevant concepts and essentially throwing key words and images down on a single large canvas. Prezi makes it real easy to reduce, enlarge and rotate elements and I found the authoring process strangely liberating because I was not restricted by the normal linear presentation format.

Prezi allows you to select some pre-formatted styles which I found to include some very nice font selections. The ultra simple text editing is fast to use but unfortunately lacks any Spell Check which is a serious issue for creative spellers like yours truly.

After getting most of the content in place and sizing it to create a hierarchy of importance and some visual flow, it was time to create a path though the material. This was simple mater of clicking on objects, when I wanted to it was easy to move nodes from one object to the other, thus changing the order of the presentation.

A couple of run throughs in play mode and some adjustments to the path and sizing of objects, (to control the zoom effects) and I was ready to go.  The application allows you to share and present from the on-line version or you can create a downloadable non-editable executable that plays from the desktop. I saved a file to my memory stick and went to bed.

ADV1616 Students enjoying their Prezi

ADV1616 Students enjoying their Prezi

Next day I presented the Prezi twice and must say it was fun. Although my presentation was almost entirely text, the variety in sizes, font and zooming transitions made the presentation interesting and engaging. After each presentation I polled the class on their thoughts and universally they liked it.

And myself, I liked it too!

You can find the presentation on-line, (start by clicking on the picture of Aristotle).   This is a rather simple example, I know that Nick is using it to come up with something much more amazing…maybe even subversive.

Engagement anyone?

There is a lot of talk about employee engagement these days. In management circles we talk about strategies and best practices for achieving high levels of employee engagement. Perhaps this is in response to reports of a general malaise and historically high absenteeism, or maybe because we are finally waking up to the fact that we really do need to “do better with less” if we hope to leave the world a better place.

So what is this thing called engagement?

For me engagement is a personal thing, it is an organic network of relationships, messages and memes. It is about rallying around some of the common themes and goals in an organization. It is about giving permission to staff to take responsibility for finding new and better ways of doing their jobs.  It is about demanding intellectual accountability and value for every salary dollar we spend. It is about enabling staff to take small risks and implement ideas directly. Most importantly it is about trusting each other to do what we think is best. Accepting some risk and celebrating early failure.

Engagement isn’t something you can outsource. It comes from sincerity about working for improvement and a tolerance for many points of view.

So how do we improve engagement?

Attitude.

The #1 factor that will determine the success of an engagement effort is the attitude of the people involved. This means that:

  • Staff need to take on their leadership responsibility by speaking up and pushing their organizations to improve.
  • Middle Management needs to accept the fact that control is an illusion and be willing to trust their staff. And they need to define themselves in a away that does not require the control of information. They need to listen very carefully to those pushing for change.
  • Senior management needs to promote leadership at all levels and demonstrate that appropriate risk taking is acceptable.
  • We all need to be tolerant and listen to multiple points of view. Perhaps most importantly we need to approach the monumental tasks in front of us with a positive attitude.

Engagement isn’t something you design and build so much is it something that you cultivate in your relationships. Certainly we can design processes, polices and reward systems that create an environment that is engagement friendly, and we must continually work to reduce systematic barriers to engagement, but ultimately it comes down to the attitude of the people in the system.

And that starts with you and me.

Authenticity – how much is enough?

Recently I was part of  an interesting conversation about executives participating in Social Media.

The question that came up was how much of the executive’s posts had to be made by the individual themselves. My first response was that if the post had their name beside it then it should have been the executive at the keyboard. After some discussion however, I began to realize that maybe that is not realistic. After all senior executives frequently have assistants send email under their name, and memos, directives, etc are usually written by a staffer and then distributed under the executive’s name.  So maybe the same rules should apply.

We talked about several scenarios:

  1. Only the executive posts under their name.  Even if most of the posts came from staffers, only the posts actually typed by the executive would carry their name.  Staffers, who would probably make most posts would post under their real  name and their profile would identify them as part of the executive’s staff.
  2. An organizational user would be created to make most posts. For instance the “Office of the Executive” .  In this case the user profile would identify the individuals using that account. Only posts actually made by the exec would carry his or her individual name.
  3. Staffers would be allowed to post as the executive assuming her or she had approved the message. This model is similar to what happens today with email and other correspondence.  Readers would never really know if the post was actually typed by the executive, (does that mater?), but they would know it had been approved by them.  In addition there may be staffers identified as authorized contributors, who would post under their own name.

There are likely variations on the three scenarios above that we did not explore. I would be very interested in hearing your thoughts. What other approaches have you run across? What approach has the best balance of authenticity and practicality given the incredible time pressures on most senior executives?