The Bamboo Project Blog

An "Admirable Use" Policy

Will Richardson has an excellent post, Don't, Don't, Don't vs. Do, Do, Do, in which he muses on "acceptable use" policies of social media in schools and how restrictive and anti-learning they can be. Having spent the past several months working with clients on integrating social media into their organizations, this post really resonated with me. I'm finding that while a few places embrace social media as an exciting opportunity, many more are worried about defining and restricting every possible misuse of social media they can imagine. And I have to say that I'm consistently amazed at how imaginative people are in identifying potential problems. Where's that creativity when they're thinking about using this stuff?

Anyway, Will suggests that instead of a 10-page list of "dont's," we need an "Admirable Use" policy that positively describes the ways in which we'd like to see people using social media for learning. The items he would include are:

“Do use our network to connect to other students and adults who share your passions with whom you can learn.”

“Do use our network to help your teachers find experts and other teachers from around the world.”

“Do use our network to publish your best work in text and multimedia for a global audience.”

“Do use our network to explore your own creativity and passions, to ask questions and seek answers from other teachers online.”

“Do use our network to download resources that you can use to remix and republish your own learning online.”

“Do use our network to collaborate with others to change the world in meaningful, positive ways.”

For companies and organizations, I'd modify this list and add a few other items, as follows:

• Do use our network to connect to colleagues and peers with whom you can share your passions and learn together.

• Do use our network to find experts both within and outside of our organization to gain knowledge, information and perspectives from around the world. Use our network to reach outside of your normal geographic and interest groups to connect with people in a variety of disciplines and from a range of cultures. 

• Do use our network to publish and share your best thinking and ideas. Seek out feedback and opportunities to refine your thinking. Use multimedia (visualizations, video, audio) to further explore and process your thinking.

• Do use our network to explore your own creativity and passions, to ask questions and seek answers from other peers and colleagues online. We know that creativity at work results from exploring a variety of questions and answers across disciplines and we support your ability to do this.

• Do use our network to download resources that you can re-use and remix or that will improve your productivity and ability to collaborate with others.

• Do use our network to track trends and to listen to what people are saying about our industry, your profession, our customers and key problems and issues facing the people with whom we work.

• Do use our network to identify problems and to respond to customer issues and complaints using the same standards of professionalism and courtesy you bring to your daily work. We trust you to use phones and email and to conduct yourself professionally in face-to-face meetings, so we know you will do the same in your social networking contacts.

• Do use our network to collaborate with others--both within and outside of our organization--to change the world in meaningful and positive ways.

What do you think? Would you add others to the list?

Flickr photo via Luc Legay

In a Panic

I have a confession to make. I can spend a lot of time in panic mode. In most cases I manage to downgrade my panic to more of a low-level anxiety, but whenever I embark on new projects or know that something major is on the line, panic can be a close companion of mine.

My first inclination when I feel the panic rise is to stuff it back down, like an inappropriate relative who pops up at a gathering to say embarrassing things in front of the guests. I keep smiling and nodding and speaking over my panic, as though by pretending that it's not there, it will decide to go away. Sometimes it does. Usually, though, it's simply biding it's time, waiting for the moment when my attention is turned elsewhere.

Panic particularly likes to visit me at night. It waits until I'm asleep and then when the cat jumps on the bed and wakes me a little, or my husband elbows me in the side and I start to emerge from dreams, Panic is waiting there, ready to pounce.

Lately, instead of trying to send the panic away, I've been trying to make friends with it. I will say to myself, "Ah-this is a GOOD thing. When panic visits, this means I'm going outside of my comfort zone." Then I will try to talk to it, to learn more about where the panic is coming from. Is it because I haven't prepared enough for something? Or maybe it's because I'm allowing a project to evolve in a way that isn't going to work well and I need to revisit what I'm doing?

Sometimes the arrival of panic is merely a reminder that I'm a perfectionist and a control freak and that I need to let go of both of those aspects of my personality if I want something really great and creative to evolve. The clutch in my chest and the frisson of anxiety that courses through my body aren't really indicative of any problems with what I'm doing. Instead, they are remnants of self-doubt and worry that need to be dealt with firmly, as you would an unruly child who insists on interrupting the party.

I think we all deal with panic in its various guises and each of us has to find our own way. Panic seems particularly prone to arrive when we're learning new things or when the stakes seem really high (notice I say "seem"--our brains have a way of making everything seem "high-stake"). The challenge is to find ways to channel and use our anxiety.

How do you deal with panic? How do you use it for good in your life?

Photo via Phoney Nickle

If You Do Not Work On Important Problems, You Will Not Do Important Work

Why do you go to work in the morning? More importantly, what makes you WANT to go to work in the morning?

Yes, it might be that pesky thing called a paycheck, but I'm guessing that those of us who bound out of bed, ready to hit the day, do so because we believe that the work we're doing has meaning, that we're contributing to something important. A lot of us, though, have lost that meaning and that sense of doing something important and I wonder if it isn't because we've lost track of working on important problems.

I thought about this while reading Brad Neuberg's little gem of a blog post on Creating a Personal Research Agenda. In it, he quotes a speech by Richard Hamming in which Hamming observes:

"If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely that you'll do important work."

That bears repeating:

"If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely that you'll do important work."

For many of us, feeling like our work has lost its meaning is a result of working on unimportant problems. We've become lost in the minutia of life and have lost sight of the big picture.  We can wait for our companies or organizations to do something for us (enjoy that) or we can do something about it for ourselves. That's where constructing a personal research agenda--a series of important questions, problems and issues we want to explore--can re-ignite our passion for work and our desire to continue learning.

Asking Important Questions
Brad comes from a coding/scientific background, so he uses the term "personal research agenda." In a broader sense,though, a personal research agenda is really just a list of the "big issues" that you think deserve your attention and towards which you want to direct your learning and experimentation. But how do you identify these questions? A few things to think about:

• What makes you passionate? Not long ago, I went on a tangent about homophily, born of my ongoing interest in the digital divide and my observations of parallel activities going on in online communities with similar interests who are largely disconnected from each other. As a theme in my life, issues of inclusion/exclusion and creating community have loomed large, so it's no surprise that some of the big questions I tend to explore always come back to those themes.

To find your "big questions," think about the themes that make you passionate on a regular basis. What issues seem to always draw your attention and how do they signify a larger theme or problem?

• What are the anomalies in your world? What things don't make sense?    Last night I watched the HBO documentary, Resolved (HIGHLY recommended!) It's about the world of high school debate, which has evolved from our traditional notion of a discussion of two sides of an issue, to a complicated and bizarre place where the winners of a debate are those who can marshal the largest set of facts presented at a level of speed auctioneers would envy.

Two young African-American men, disciples of Paulo Freire, see a major problem with this, noting that the new framework for debate excludes large swaths of the community from discussing real-life issues. How does this relate to you finding your "big question?" These kids are a tremendous example of looking at the assumptions and issues within an existing system and beginning to ask important questions about why things are the way the are. They saw things that didn't make sense and then tried to explore why and how they could be changed.

• What things bother you about your profession or your sector? Think big here--what seem to be systemic issues with no easy answers? What have you observed in your personal experiences or through reading, research, etc.? What do you see as being the "big issues" your profession or sector needs to grapple with in order to be successful? Defining and addressing work literacy is one of the things I'm seeing. What about you?

Working with Your Important Questions
Once you have your important questions identified, this opens up a variety of learning opportunities for you:

• What research can you conduct to get a handle on the question?

• What experiences have you had that could help you explore your questions?

• What personal learning experiments could you develop to test your assumptions and ideas?

Use these important questions to drive a learning agenda for yourself. They can keep you fresh and excited about your work. They can remind you of why you do what you do and give purpose to your on and off-line learning activities.

Remember: "If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely that you'll do important work." So how can you find your "Big Questions"? What can you do to work on them?

Flickr photo via wok.

Some Readings on Leadership and Finding Your Passions

Good Monday morning from Philadelphia, where the sun is just starting to peek through the clouds and we're preparing for yet another muggy day. A few quick reads for you:

• Rosetta Thurman of Perspectives from the Pipeline is hosting this week's Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants. She's pulled together seven great posts on becoming a better leader, so wander on over and check them out.

• If you checked out the post I did last week for Pick the Brain on three exercises for exploring your ideal career, you may want to look at this week's post with more activities to find your passions. These are all strategies that I've used myself and that I've also used with many staff to help them get refocused on their career and learning goals. I really recommend the passions collage. I've had some stunning results from the process.
  

Note to the Next Generation of Leaders: Don't Wait for Baby Boomers to Hand Over the Reins

Last week, Rosetta Thurman reported from the front-lines of nonprofit leadership about her experiences at Nonprofit 2020: Issues and Answers from the Next Generation, where much of the talk centered around how to transition leadership from the Baby Boomers to Gen X and the Millenials. You can also read more on the conference here from the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

As a Gen X-er myself, I long ago gave up on the idea that Baby Boomers were going to help me make the transition from front-line worker to leader. Nothing against Boomers, but they have their own issues to worry about, and helping me with my professional development has been pretty low on the list. In fact, I've observed that most Boomers are quite happy where they are and have no intention of moving anytime soon.

Turns out I'm not alone in my evaluation of the situation, as Brazen Careerist Penelope Trunk notes here talking about the "gray ceiling," which is rapidly replacing the glass one we've heard so much about.

So what's an X-er or Millenial to Do?

• Assess your leadership skills--Penelope's article  includes some links to some great resources from Jo Miller who coaches people on how to move into executive positions. Check out Jo's leadership assessment tool (PDF), which she uses to help people figure out where to start in addressing leadership development.

• Have a career plan--If you want to go forward, you have to have a plan. This article will give you some resources to get started. You might also want to take a look at these three exercises for exploring what you want in a career and this post on exploring your passions.
  

• Take charge of your own learning--I've written before about my belief that in a knowledge worker world, the only person who should be in charge of learning is YOU. This is a code that I've lived by for the last 10 years and as a result, I have tripled my income, work from home most of the time and get to work on projects where I can really have some impact. To do this, you might start by getting serious about creating a personal learning environment. As Tom Haskins points out, they're great tools for empowerment. 

• Start a portfolio, preferably an online version--I wrote a few days ago on why I think everyone needs a portfolio. If you go this route, check out Helen Barrett's instructions for using a variety of Web 2.0 tools to create a portfolio. You can also check out the eportfolio presentation I just put together (it's in draft, but still some helpful info, I think)
  

• Get better at self-promotion--A lot of people are uncomfortable selling themselves, but if you want to get anywhere, you have to be willing to do a little self-promotion. Penelope has some good tips for getting started.

• Start blogging--My blog has been a great platform for personal learning, connecting to other people and building my network. Having your own blog helps you develop your voice and a point of view that will be very powerful in developing your leadership skills.

• Get disruptive--If you're not able to assume the mantle of leadership in your current organization, think about starting your own. Disruptive innovations are one way in which you can change the rules of the game and start bringing your own leadership voice to the table. Disruptive strategies bring  to the market a more affordable product that is simpler to use. Another way to look at it is to evaluate  your current organization or field and think about finding the "blue ocean"--where is there a need that no one is meeting and how can you come up with a tool, resource, process, etc. that helps people get what they want. Sometimes it's good to try to keep playing the game. But sometimes the only way you'll move is if you start a new one.

These are my suggestions for developing your leadership capacities in a world where no one will be doing it for you.  What strategies have you used?

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How Much Hidden Talent is In Your Staff?

Paul Potts is a cell phone salesman in the UK. He's completely unassuming--bad teeth, a little overweight, not much of a dresser. The last person you'd imagine taking the stage as a serious contestant on Britain's Got Talent, the UK version of American Idol. But beneath that quiet exterior is a most amazing voice. It literally gave me chills to listen to him. And it made me wonder how much hidden talent is around us? How many people do we see on a daily basis--co-workers, supervisors, teammates--with hidden strengths we never see? How many people do we judge based on how they look or on our own preconceptions of what they should be doing? How many great talents do we miss in the process?

Here's the challenge for today. Try to find a Paul Potts in your organization. And then do something to nurture that talent.

More People Isn't Always the Answer

Just back from a conference where I had an interesting exchange during a session I was conducting on providing services in a global economy.

I was presenting to a state-wide group of government and nonprofit workers who help people access education and find jobs. We were discussing how business has changed the ways in which it operates and how these organizations could utilize some of the new principles for operating in a flat world to run their own organizations. As inevitably occurs, the topic of staffing came up. "We need more people if we're really going to get this job done," one participant informed the group. Nodding heads all around. Yes, of course, throwing people at the problems will take care of everything.

Here's the thing, though. In my experience, these organizations--like many organizations--need to look at how they're operating before they start thinking that they need more people. Hiring more people is like the age-old belief that when you have a performance problem, training is the the answer.

So I challenged the group to first think about a few questions:

• Are you making the best uses of technology to share information and provide services? Are there processes that could be automated? Are there ways you could use technology to enhance self-service opportunities or to help staff better manage their work?

• Have you mapped your work processes to find and eliminate redundancies and processes that no longer serve a purpose?

• Have you developed an effective customer flow? For example, in many of these organizations, there's a tendency to provide one-on-one, face-to-face services in situations where self-service and/or group processes would work just as well if not better, allowing them to serve more customers, more effectively in less time.

• Have you identified and eliminated all unnecessary paperwork? Have you looked at how to automate paperwork or how to combine several forms into one?

• Does the way you've defined job descriptions and activities make sense or are there opportunities to redefine job functions and activities to provide more efficient and effective services?

• Are you duplicating work being done by another organization or department and would you be better off partnering with them to provide services?

Once you've addressed these issues, then I think you can start talking about the need for more staff. But adding more people to run a creaky, inefficient organization isn't going to cut it.

The other problem with this viewpoint is that it often stops organizations from doing what they should to address inefficiencies. They say "We need more people to really get the job done, but we don't have the funding for it, so we'll just have to settle for how things are now." I roundly reject this kind of thinking and frankly, get REALLY frustrated when I encounter people who operate this way. The way to think about these issues is to say "We're not operating as well as we should and we need to take a look at how we can do better, given our constraints." In fact, it's often the constraints of limited resources that lead to the most creative solutions!

So before we start thinking that if only we had more staff we could do so much better, I think we need to take a look around at our operations and decide if we're doing everything we can to run "lean and mean" with our current resources. Adding more people to a poorly-run organization only means you have more people doing poor work.

Clearing My Feeds: Facebook, Change Management, & Personal Learning

Once again, some things in my feedreader that I wanted to get to . .

Facebook
Awhile ago I wrote a post on using Facebook in nonprofits. I haven't had a lot of time to get back into it, but fortunately for you, Soha El-Borno at Wild Apricot has been hard at work. Her most recent contribution is on using the Causes widget to promote your nonprofit. Also check out her Beginner's Guide to Facebook.

Change Management
Scott McLeod at Dangerously Irrelevant is running a fabulous series of change management resources this week. I haven't had a chance to thoroughly read and digest his posts, but my quick skim tells me that this is some great stuff for organizations looking to facilitate the change process. Which I would assume means ALL organizations, since dealing with change is pretty much what we do in this world anymore. Some of my favorites:

• Resistance to Change--Reviews the 10 key reasons people resist change and the three things that motivate people.
• Agreement and Trust--Helps leaders analyze their relationships with essential people in terms of the levels of agreement and trust that exist and then offers suggestions on how to create more of both.
• Getting to Consensus--This is a great post on which tools of consensus to use, depending on the extent to which there is organizational agreement on how the world works and the organization's goals.

Scott also has some great quotes and suggestions on books to read. While his primary focus is on change in schools, these are resources that are applicable to all change efforts.

Personal Learning Environments
You KNOW I couldn't have a post like this without going back to PLEs. . . First, Beth Kanter has an interesting post on why she loves Slideshare.  She says,  "I use Slide Share everyday to increase my personal knowledge about social media and consume whatever I can find related to nonprofits."  I use Slideshare, too, but have tended to do so when I needed a way to put a Powerpoint slideshow on line for a project or training. Beth's post made me see Slideshare as a potential addition to my personal learning environment.

There's also been a bit of a discussion going on around how personal learning environments fit into organizations. Stephen Downes argues that personal learning is about individuals setting and following their own learning agendas, rather than those set for them by corporations. Needless to say, I agree with this perspective.  Tony Karrer then raises the issue of how organizations will have to wrestle with integrating the notion of personal learning environments into their operations and whether or not employees should set up their PLEs inside or outside the organizational firewall. (I say outside, in case you were wondering).

In my mind, what this comes down to is the purpose of a PLE--is it to serve the organization or the individual? If a PLE is an institutional tool, then it will end up developing along a particular path that includes standards for participation, tighter controls, a greater likelihood of a single "PLE system" and organizational ownership of the contents of the PLE. On the other hand, if PLEs are for the individual, then I think there will be a move toward exploring the idea of different tools, loosely joined and a focus on which tools could be used to engage in which personal learning activities. And most definitely the ownership of the PLE will lie squarely in the individual's lap. Again, I'm clearly advocating the latter, as I believe that this will actually end up not only serving individuals better, but also organizations because there will be greater freedom to create, innovate, collaborate, etc.

On Blogging
Finally, a couple of nice blogging articles:

• 10 Tips to Make Your Blog More Readable--This is part two (which lists five tips), so be sure to check out part one of this series.

• 5 Uncommon Ways to Market Your Blog--From Neil Patel, via ProBlogger Darren Rowse.

Happy Friday!

Blogging and Transparency Build Trust: A Case Study

Relationships between nonprofits and the public are based on trust. I'm not going to give your organization money if I don't trust you to use it well. I won't volunteer for your cause if I don't trust that you are working for it. Trust is an essential relationship ingredient and transparency--making your organizations visible to the public--is a critical component in developing trust.

I was reminded of the importance of trust and the ways in which blogging can help you build public trust this morning when I saw this this post on Live Journal (via Lee LeFever) It's from Six Apart CEO Barak Berkowitz who is addressing a screw-up they made yesterday in suspending several accounts. A few things come to mind here:

• Having a blog gave Six Apart an already-established, up close and personal venue for addressing a community problem. Without the blog, they would have had to resort to things like press releases, etc., which place a layer of disconnection between the organization and the members of their community. If you value the relationships you have with constituents, blogging is an essential way to stay connected, particularly for those times when you need to admit you screwed up.

• Note the title of the post--"Well, we really screwed this one up. . . " There's a very human voice here, not an institutional robot well-versed in organizational jargon. I already have a higher degree of trust in someone who is willing to be human, rather than hiding behind organization-speak.

• Six Apart publicly admitted they made mistakes and went on to detail exactly where and how they screwed up. They don't try to hide the mistake or explain it all away. They just say, this is what happened, this is what we thought, this is where we went wrong. . .

• And--they had their plan to fix it. This is as important as admitting they made a mistake.

• Note the updates, admitting additional mistakes ("It seems that people are very upset that I did a phone call with cNet before posting here.  Probably a mistake but I did make it clear to them that we were still looking in to this and that I would have a better answer by the end of the day.  Sorry but it really took some time to figure out how messed up this was.") In a crisis situation, people want to know how things are evolving and, again, the blog provided a good venue for this.

• Note also that they left the post open for comments so that the community had a voice and could be heard in the discussion. Making the post and then shutting down comments would have been a BIG mistake.

This is a textbook example of how blogging and transparency help you build ongoing relationships built on trust. Sure, some people won't be satisfied with the explanations, some people will still be critical. Nevertheless, most will generally feel better knowing that you're willing to publicly acknowledge and address your mistakes and that you're willing to listen to their thoughts on the issue.

From Managing Transactions to Facilitating Transformations

Today I was in a strategic planning meeting with a number of business people. At one point, we were discussing the changing nature of providing healthcare services to aging baby boomers. The VP of HR for one of the local healthcare organizations was explaining to us that they are moving to more of a concierge approach to meeting healthcare needs, with a focus on relationships and amenities, similar to what you would find in hotels. She explained that baby boomers in particular have come to expect a different quality of experience from organizations with which they interact and that is influencing how her organization thinks about its business. Then she said something that I thought was incredibly profound.

"We're trying to move our organization from being transactional to being transformational."

I wrote that down in my notes and thought about it all the way home. Since then, the implications of that idea have been swimming around in my head. Here's what I think it means for nonprofits. (Warning--very ill-formed thoughts ahead)

A transaction occurs when a customer makes a request--for a service, a product, etc. and someone responds to that request. Most of what we do on a day-to-day basis is engage in a series of transactions with various customers, both internal and external. We focus on orders, purchases, changes, additions, transfers and the recordkeeping required to keep track of those transactions. In "well-run" organizations, we are constantly trying to keep these transactions humming along. We try to reduce errors, reduce the amount of time it takes to process a particular transaction, increase the number of transactions we are able to get through in a day and so on.

When we focus on transactions, we are paying attention to particular business processes and activities and how to make them run efficiently. This is a distinctly left-brained, logical approach to the work of an organization. It's not bad to focus on making transactions go smoothly and pleasantly. But the reality is that if we are just about performing various transactions, this is work that could be done by a computer or, eventually, a robot. And it would probably be done better, faster and more accurately. It's also work that is less meaningful to most people. Who wants to do work on a daily basis that could be done just as well by a kiosk?

So what would it mean for us to move from being transactional to being transformational? If we were transformational,

• We would be more holistic, thinking about the entire customer and their experiences with us over time, rather than their experience with us at a particular point in time.
• We would pay more attention to emotional issues and their impact on customers experiences. When we structure transactions to emphasize only efficiency or productivity, then we lose the "human touch" that really connects with people. This isn't to say that the human touch can only occur through face-to-face interactions, though. We can be more "human" even in our use of forms, the ways we communicate on our web sites and so forth.
  
• We would focus on creating particular experiences for customers, evoking new emotions and helping customers to think differently about themselves.  The VP at our meeting today explained that healthcare to this point has been about moving patients through various transactions--doctor's appointments, medical tests, treatments, etc. But now her organization is putting more of a focus on helping patients feel empowered to navigate their way through a menu of services that feel less like moving through an assembly line of healthcare and more like people taking charge of their lives. This is transformational because it helps people to see themselves differently in relation to their own healthcare and their own sense of agency in their lives.
• We would think bigger about what we do. To think about our organizations as being in the business of transformation means that we have to re-envision what we do. We have to think about what transformations we can help people achieve and how we can go about doing that. We have to back away from the day-to-day interactions for a while and think about the larger picture of what we hope to achieve (back to mission). Then we can look at how we structure our transactions and interactions with customers to achieve transformation.

This is one of those posts where I feel like I'm writing around something, rather than straight to it. I know in this very visceral way what I'm trying to say, but I'm not sure that I'm expressing it clearly or in ways that make sense. What I know is that the idea of moving from transactions to transformations is something that really appeals to me on a lot of levels. I think it would appeal to workers, too. When we talk about transformation, we're talking about work that has meaning. I don't think that we feel the same connection and sense of impact on the world when we see our work as a series of transactions. I think that both our customers and our employees want to feel that we're doing something that transforms.

I also see this as related to my thinking lately about ROWE. A results-oriented workplace requires us to have thought carefully about the results we are seeking. We need to consider those results, though, in light of whether or not we're going to be an organization that focuses primarily on transactions or one that focuses on transformations. Interestingly, one of the reasons that Best Buy is looking to implement ROWE in their stores is because they are moving to a more customer-centric, transformational view of the results they are seeking. True ROWE may require us to think far more carefully about results in terms of transformation at least as much as we think about transactions.

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Normally I would save this post in draft and let it marinate for awhile. But this time I'm posting it, raw and unformed, as I think that the only reason I end up saving some of these is because I want to polish them up and make them beautiful before I share them. Kind of stupid, though, when you consider that one of the beauties of working in the blogosphere is that other people will often help you transform that lump of coal into a diamond if you'll only let them.