Getting Clever Together » change

Uploading Your Brain

mary — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 01:26:20 +0000

Raymond Kurzweil wants to up load your brain. Is this really the direction we want to be going in? http://bit.ly/YjHfc

Is It Time We ALL Woke Up to What Is Happening?

mary — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 16:07:35 +0000

another couple of great sites – Social Earth

Browsing through these sites I realize I was only half awake and that our planet really IS in an awful lot of trouble. The first task appears to be that we ALL waken up.

Where is our home going ?

mary — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:54:04 +0000

My wife and I just watched the movie ‘Home’ last night and it blew our minds. Not only is this a movie with some of the most spectacular footage of earth’s beauty but it also carries a very serious message. I dare you to watch this movie and not feel that it is definitely time we ‘woke up’ as a a species.

And speaking of waking up – I somehow missed this special day about that very thing :

What is it that we want to make of the world?

Stephen — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 02:21:08 +0000

Choice is at the center of making change. We all intuitively know we have to change the way our species lives. That means making changes to the way we live our own lives. This is getting very personal. And if you are like me – uncomfortable.

I go on and on about collaborative intelligence and one aspect of this form of intelligence is how we coordinate our collective capacity. However there is a deeply personal aspect – the uncomfortable and unpopular decisions we are being called to make.

The ‘Oneness Project’ represents an thoughtful exploration of this important dialogue. Real collaborative intelligence demands ‘glocal’ decisions – choices that are made at a very local intimate level but that honor what we need to do globally to write a new story for our species.

Collaborative Intelligence is an Inside Job

Stephen — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 17:40:41 +0000

Developing CQ inside a team, department or organization is not as complex as it sounds. For a start Collaborative Intelligence is exactly like IQ or for that matter EQ (Emotional Intelligence), in that it was already there all the time. By naming it, as happened with EQ, we bring more attention to it and start to notice where there are examples of it and where it might be lacking.

The team you belong to already has CQ and exercises it on a regular basis – otherwise it wouldn’t be able to achieve anything as a group. The central question becomes ‘How can we further develop / deepen our Collaborative Intelligence?’.

Here are ten ways to further develop CQ in the workplace:

1. Raise awareness of the importance of shared assumptions. Assumptions cause us to run on ‘autopilot’. Individuals are not the only ones who operate this way; teams do it too.

2. Check your own assumptions before and during the project planning phase. Your own assumptions will effect how you interact with others and deal with the inevitable challenges of working with other people.

3. Intention is the keynote. Just as a team’s attention is important – so is your own. Intentions have an eerie way of manifesting into reality.

4. Encourage team members to find out about each others’ roles. The more they know about each others’ perspectives, the more likely they will empathize with them when the going gets tough.

5. Establish a reward system for innovation and creativity. Ensure that rewards are equally available for ideas and innovations that don’t work as for those that do.

6. Plan to use all of the experience in the team. Think of the years of life experience represented in a room of 15 people with an average age of 35. It represents over 500 years of life experience.

7. Celebrate your successes along the way. Celebration acts to reinforce the progress being made. When it done at the team level it empathizes the importance of the team process in reaching desired objectives.

8. Invest resources in your own learning and when possible encourage others to do the same. Continuous improvement is only possible when individuals and the team as a whole are embracing continuous change with continuous learning..

9. Real change only comes when people change how they behave as well as think. This is just as true for the workplace. Never was it truer that we need to be the change we wish to see.

10. Model what you want to see more of. Providing our colleagues and clients real-life demonstrations of collaboration at work is the strongest incentive and inspiration you can provide to others.

We can’t force people to change, if we do the change doesn’t last. We need to show our colleagues and yes even those to whom we report, that it is in their best interests to make a change. That is why # 10 in this list is so important. As Gandhi put it “Be the change you want to see”.

The Cost of Stupidity

Stephen — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 23:06:25 +0000

Robert Anton Wilson states that ‘stupidity has killed more people than all known diseases known to medicine or psychiatry’. Food for thought. When are we going to start to get smarter?-and I don’t mean academically or technologically. We all know that a scalpel can be used to save a life or to end it. The difference is in the intention and intelligence of the hand that is holding it. It would appear that the hands holding a lot of the ‘scalpels’ in our society do not have sufficient intelligence to use the power they have for the betterment of everyone.

Lately we have experienced the effects of trusting those hands to run our economy – that hasn’t worked out too well. In all of the televised debates and interviews that I have seen I have hardly ever heard the term ‘greed’ mentioned. In fact everyone ran for cover and no one has taken responsibility for their actions. In a litigious society it is dangerous to admit fault or complacency. A law suite might not be far behind. So the game of ‘pass the parcel’ goes on. The ‘Tao Te Ching‘ states:

Failure is an opportunity.

If you blame someone else,

there is no end to the blame.

Therefore the Master

fulfils her own obligations

and corrects her own mistakes.

She does what she needs to do

and demands nothing of others.

Sage advice and I wonder when all the blaming has settled down will the mistakes really get corrected by those who made them. One of the saddest things about this ‘stupidity’ is that the crisis has taken the focus away from a number of even more pressing issues, such as environmental sustainability and global economic inequality. Another way to look at the ‘meltdown’ is as ‘creative destruction‘ ( a term coined by the economists Joseph Schumpter). Schumpter went on to explain that at such points in society’s evolution, innovation and creativity get released.

Apart from the release of creativity and innovation let’s hope that we can become collaboratively smarter and realize that our challenge is not economic – the question we should be posing is ‘How can we get collectively smarter?’

A book review : Peter Block’s ‘The Answer to How is Yes’

Stephen — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 00:05:46 +0000

Collaborative Leadership : The All-Terrain Skill

Stephen — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 21:15:06 +0000

We live in two worlds – the world we have lived in and the new emerging world. Adapting to the differences between these worlds enables us to accommodate to the rapid level of change that is occurring in business. It will also allow us to play an active part in that change. Emerging, is an increasingly interdependent and collaborative world. In fact collaboration plays a central role in the management of change.

Greater levels of collaboration require Collaborative Leadership. The alternative is not pretty – we are dinosaurs waiting for the meteor. Collaborative leadership is the application of a few basic principles. By embracing these principles we can harness the energy and attention of the people around us.

The core principles of Collaborative Leadership are:

Presence: The idea of ‘Presence’ is taken from the work of Peter Senge et al. in the book of the same name. Presence is defined as the ability to be present. In a world that is engineered to grab as much of our attention as possible, being present is more difficult than it may sound. It is a significant challenge to focus our attention on the people we are with. Being present means that when we are with someone (or a group of people) our conscious mind is focused on them. This enables us to practice deep listening to what is being said. So many day-to-day challenges result from people misunderstanding each other. One of the prime causes of those misunderstandings is that most of the time we do not listen deeply enough.

An important part of practicing presence is being aware of the difference between curiosity and certainty. The former opens us up to all sorts of new possibilities and learnings, whilst the latter keeps us chained to old thoughts and old maladapted ways of doing things. It is easy to talk about but often tricky to let go of our need for certainty. In a world with increasing levels of chaos the desire to have certainty increases proportionally. Paradoxically, the best way to deal with chaos is to let go of the desire to know the right answer in advance and learn to improvise as circumstances emerge.

Another distinction that further enables us to practice our ‘presence’ is the one between ego size and ego strength. Everyone knows that a large ego can be a big problem in an organization or team environment. Yet we all have egos – it’s how we manage them that makes the difference.

Ego size refers to how much of the world that we want to control. Ego strength refers to the self assurance we have about our place in the world. Both aspects of the ego need to be active and in balance. That can only be assured when the individual has developed a good level of self-knowledge. The quality of the outer journey in this world is highly dependent on the quality of the inner journey, something each person has to make for themselves.

Purpose: The second principle of Collaborative Leadership. All effective leaders have a strong sense of purpose. Evolving a sense of it enables us to focus our energy and resources toward what really matters. This definition of purpose is more closely aligned with Viktor Frankle’s concept of ‘meaning’. According to Frankle we ‘are the meaning makers’. We are responsible for deciding what life means to us. This includes “What does our work mean?” If we are the meaning makers we are also the purpose makers. Co- creating a strong sense of purpose models that attribute to others and enables a team to take ‘purpose’ more seriously. The collaborative leader has a sense of purpose and enables the team(s) they work to evolve a ‘team purpose’ which acts as a guidance system through the good times and bad.

Path: The third principle of Collaborative Leadership. There is a First Nations expression that goes “all paths lead nowhere, so it is better to follow a path with heart”. Once the collaborative leader has Presence and Purpose, they need to begin to choose a Path, a way forward for themselves and the team(s) they work with. Businesses have objectives their teams need to achieve. Frequently the path to those objectives is ours to choose. Collaborative Leadership involves the co-creation of that path with the entire team. By doing so we have created the ‘buy-in’ that makes the difference between compliance and commitment.

Taken together Presence, Purpose and Path enable the Collaborative Leader to leverage the energy, engagement and enthusiasm of the entire team. The result, a team that is adapting to and embracing the opportunities in an exciting emergent world.

Collaborative Intelligence: Organizational Teams Just Became Extinct

Stephen — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 23:21:14 +0000

‘Organizational Teams are not delivering

Over the last ten years organizational teams have become more distributed and very complex. Despite the number of technologies available to assist teams and groups, it is still exceedingly difficult to manage teams.

I use the term ‘organizational’ very loosely. By “organizational teams,” I mean teams working within organizations that could be solid, vertically integrated corporate entities, government departments, networked business clusters, ‘not for profit’ communities, informal “task forces,” social groupings and special interest groups.

Individual team members may belong to many of these teams on a part-time and ad hoc basis – they may see each other frequently, or never ever meet physically – conducting all communications electronically or via the web.

And contrary to popular belief, the introduction of all real-time conferencing and collaboration technologies can actually make things worse. It may distract team members from their real business objectives and drive them into ongoing loops of technology experimentations. In these situations, the focus on the work mission is often lost in favor of mastering and attempting to extract ever increasing benefits from the technology itself.

So why is it so difficult to successfully manage teams today? I believe there are two main reasons:

Teams are using the wrong model to organize themselves
Teams are not keeping pace with the rapid changes in their business environments’

So says Ken Thompson the author of ‘Bioteams‘. Ken’s book provides a convincing argument that to survive and thrive in to-days rapidly changing environment, teams need to mimic the structure of nature’s most successful designs. For example those found in beehives, anthills, and viruses. This book is a fascinating read for anyone curious about what its going to take to move teams and organizations into the hyper-linked, knowledge economy of the mid-21st century.

Collaborative Intelligence: Patterned Integrity

Stephen — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 13:48:08 +0000

The inventor Buckminster Fuller was fond of holding up his hand and asking people, “What is this?” Invariably, they would respond, “It’s a hand.” He would then point out that the cells that made up that hand were continually dying and regenerating themselves. What seems tangible is continually changing: in fact, a had is completely re-created within a year or so. So when we see a hand – or an entire body or any living system – as a static “thing,” we are mistaken. “What you see is not a hand,” said Fuller. “It is a ‘patterned integrity,’ the universe’s capability to create hands.”

Extract from ‘Presense – Human Purpose and the Field of the Future’ (Peter Senge, Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski and Betty Sue Flowers)

‘What seems tangible is continually changing: in fact, a hand is completely re-created within a year or so.’ This same observation could be made of business and organizations. When we look at teams we are tempted to think of them as concrete stable things – when in fact they are constantly changing. Even the bodies making up the team are being continually replaced. Trying to keep a team in fixed state is like a person rowing a boat furiously in an attempt to stay in the one place in a river. Eventuly they tire and have to allow the flow to carry the boat. We should remember that although we can’t hold the boat in the same place – we CAN steer the boat – and that is what collaborative leadership is.