Tweet While You Meet!

Posted on January 15, 2010 by John

Want to add an element of collective intelligence to your next meeting or conference? Incorporate inputs from the global community on Twitter!

How often in a meeting or conference have you been participating in a conversation, listening to a presentation or in the midst of the decision making process and thought to yourself “I wish I knew someone with experience to ask or consult”? Well, simply tweet you inquiry and you will be surprised how many experts you’ll know in a very short period of time! This approach is also effective as an accuracy barometer for content – information at the speed of DSL! A perfect example of this can be found here, where a conference participant tells of one experience where twitter was a more accurate and engaging source for information than the conference presenters.

In addition to sourcing information and consulting with experts, Twitter is also a great way to gauge the effectiveness of your meeting strategies – as you are executing them. Imagine, you have prepared a learning activity for your group that you believe is very clear and engaging but as you watch the tweets roll in from your participants you can quickly gauge whether a course correction is in order. This far surpasses the traditional meeting evaluation that occurs at the meetings conclusion when the comments will be less candid and conscise because they are no longer in the moment.

Meeting Planners have begun to use Web 2.o applications such as online surveys to engage meeting delegates in the planning and evaluation process, they now need to forge forward and embrace microblogging as a means to continue the process of delegate interaction during the event. This article “Twitter for Event Planners” is a basic orientation to the application and how to use it effectively for meetings and conferences.

Whether you choose to utilize Twitter to harness information and heighten engagement in your conferences or not, the conversation is happening!

Blio

Posted on January 8, 2010 by John

We’ve heard it before with the advent of the Kindle but this time it could be true – the end of the paper book could very well be upon us.

November 2007, we were told that the Kindle would revolutionize reading and end production of the paper book. In reality however, this generation of e-readers are not as popular as anticipated due mostly to the aesthetics of the reading experience. These devices use E Ink, a black and white display which is fine for text but incompatible with images, and other display options.

Enter Blio, a new e-reading software entirely unlike the others. Created by Ray Kurzweil prolific inventor and author of The Singularity is Near, Blio isn’t a device it is a ‘platform’ designed to run on any device from your home PC to your moblie – eliminating the need for additional devices. Blio sports some impressive features including with full colour graphical display, 2 page view, 3D page turning and web interface, making it a compatible interface for any kind of book from instructional text to childrens illustrated stories vs. it’s text onlycompetitors. The application is free to download and the books can be downloaded directly from either the Blio website or the application itself.

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Not surprisingly this advancement in technology has come about as a result of a collaborative venture. Ray Kurzweil and his enterprise Kurzweil Technologies has a joint venture with the National Federation of the Blind called knfb Reading Technology to create reading products for people with disabilities. knfb Reading is the company that has created Blio and most certainly done so with every possible user in mind.

To learn more about Blio visit http://blioreader.com/

Learning 2009 – Innovation with Elliott Maise

Posted on November 18, 2009 by John

I had the pleasure and privilege recently of participating in Elliott Masie’s innovative Learning 2009 meeting in Orlando, Florida. This was a gathering of over 1300 corporate education professionals whose job is to make sure that every employee is up to date in everything from corporate policy, new technologies, new products, regulatory requirements and the latest leadership strategies. Given these times of exponential change and tightened budgets, these learning leaders have challenging tasks to accomplish.

And it wasn’t just corporations. There were folks from professional societies and universities looking for new ideas. Many government agencies from the Veterans Administration to the CIA (The CIA has its own University) to representatives from each of the military services were present. Like many organizations today the theme was how to do more, better, for less.

The entire conference is loaded with innovative strategies that help participants learn faster and more productively. Some examples:

1. During plenary sessions everyone sat at 6 or 7 person round tables. It’s a huge room, but it is more friendly and encourages discussion.

2. Occasional 2 minute breaks were provided to encourage within-table discussions.

3. A Twitter feed was posted on a huge screen behind the speakers. The MC (Elliott) periodically resteered the conversation to address a question or comment.

4. An audience response system was employed periodically for assessing audience understanding and opinions, and occasionally to have fun.

5. Guest speakers were interviewed by Elliott, Meet the Press style, to focus their talk on the learning aspects of whatever they do.

6. Guests included Capt Sully Sullenberger (who had never landed a plane on water before his experience on the Hudson), Malcolm Gladwell (talking about high performance outliers) and Betsy Meyers (COO of Obama’s election campaign). Great learning experiences.

7. A few big names were brought in by low cost, high resolution video for a quick 5 to 10 minute interview. That’s walking the talk on cost effectiveness.
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8. The many vendors were organized in a standardized format equipped with large monitors. The focus was content, application and learning, not hype. Everybody is a learner.

9. The majority of the meeting was spent in many small interactive courses run by experienced learning professionals. This was a great example of harnessing the collective intelligence of the participants.

10. Perhaps the most interesting activity was the presence of 6 students from Champlain College’s Emergent Media Division who were given an assignment at the beginning of the meeting to develop a learning APP for the iPhone (smart phones are an increasingly valuable tool for instant and convenient e-learning. They were told to interview at least 200 attendees, to select a group of advisors from them and to develop an APP that can be used for “On Boarding” new employees to any organization (history, policy, organization, how to do just about anything, who’s who, where everything is with maps and GPS). They completed their task by the last day of the meeting and demonstrated it. It was extraordinary and an incredible example of collaboration effectiveness.

I go to many different types of meetings and conferences all over the world. Like you I want to use my time well…to learn, to be inspired, to make good new connections and have great discussions with old connections.

Elliott passed this test with flying colors.”

Innovation and Collaboration for Social Change: Dean Kamen’s Slingshot

Posted on September 25, 2009 by John

Collaboration is often to innovation what gasoline is to a cars internal combustion engine. Without the gas the engine is still a great technological innovation – it just won’t go anywhere.

Dean Kamen, famous for the invention of the Segway and the portable dialysis machine, makes a point of investing his time and money to create technologies that can improve the quality of people’s lives. His latest revelation the “Slingshot” – a water purification system that can take nearly any polluted water source including urine and toxic waste and distill it into safe, clean drinking water – could very well solve the worlds fresh water shortage and save hundreds of thousands of lives. The power source for this dazzling distiller is perhaps even more impressive. A modified Stirling engine it can generate energy from cow dung to grass clippings and produces enough energy every day to purify enough water for 100 people and light 70 light bulbs. The entire Slingshot system was tested in the field for a full 6 months of operation and went off without a hitch. With no filters, membranes and relatively simple mechanical parts it is estimated that the Slingshot could operate perpetually for 5 years without requiring any maintenance – just deliver and use!

Now for the tricky part – that’s right the 10 years spent perfecting the design was not the tricky part – finding the right collaborator to mass produce the units for distribution. As a technology with almost exclusive benefits to the third world (for now anyway) investors perceive the production of this technology to be financially risky. Until Kamen can find a company that can utilize parts or all of this technology for profit sales of a product in developed nations the Slingshot project is at a stand still. There has been some interest from a small electric car producer, Tata in India to use the Stirling engine technology, however, this small investment is not enough for mass production and distribution of the Slingshot. Evidently, turning a spectacular invention into a commodity has become the major roadblock for Kamen’s humanitarian technology.

Collaborative Culture + Tools + Strategies = Value

Posted on September 3, 2009 by John

Creating value through organizational collaboration is much like baking a cake – forget a key ingredient and it won’t rise.

In today’s economic climate both inter and intra organizational collaborations are increasing, the potential benefits of which are undeniable. The issue of course is finding the right recipe to successfully bake the cake.

In order for collaborations to work there are 3 key ingredients: strategy to follow, tools and technologies with which to execute the strategy and the organizational culture to support it. (Paraphrased from Evan Rosen’s “The Culture of Collaboration“. Follow his blog )

A prime example of a successful (well, there were a few hang ups) foray into organizational collaboration is the creation of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. This futuristic aircraft began with Boeings desire to have only the best of the best working on it’s design. Ordinarily, Boeing would house all the designers and engineers at their site in Washington. However, with several international candidates in mind that was no longer a viable option. So, without comprimising their desire to build the best aircraft with the best people Boeing embarked on a collaborative effort massive in scale and expectation. Rather than simply outsourcing their parts they made several parts designers and manufacturers around the globe ‘partners’ in this venture. With sites spanning several countries and time zones nearly every position was shared with others in opposing time zones thus allowing design and manufacture to occur 24 hours a day equalling a savings of a full year of production time!

Boeing introduced the Global Collaborative Environment (GCE), a set of computer and networking capabilities made available via the Web to every member of the 787 team, no matter what their location. Cutting edge 3D CAD programs were distributed to all participating partners to ensure consistency in design, and regular virtual communication was built into the strategy from the start. Most importantly however, a global culture of collaboration was initiated by having the multipe organizations involved in the 787’s development as co-designers and producers rather than mere suppliers to support the integrity of the process – every participant had a share in the sucess of the Dreamliner.

There were of course road blocks, including material shortages leading to delayed production that had better global monitoring protocols been put in place could have been avoided. But, ultimately that is part of the process. For a first attempt Boeing’s global collaboration effort has become a model for other organizational collaborations.

Gaming for Learning

Posted on July 2, 2009 by John

At Kingbridge we host conversation forums on collaboration topics with global relevance. In 2007 we hosted Game Change a forum focused on immersive and experiential learning through emergent media. We convened a community of interest including leading experts from academia, business and technology to accelerate the convergence of revolutionary technologies with the science of pedagogy. Gaming in particular has proven to be a force of change in the way people learn today. It has already proven effective in many technical and skill building applications such as surgical training, NASA education and even military training.

One of our partners in design and execution of Game Change was Anne DeMarle, Director of the Emergent Media Centre at Champlain College in Vermont. Anne, in collaboration with the United Nations and The Population Media Centre, is now venturing beyond technical applications of gaming, towards gaming for behavioural change with the UNFPA Game to Prevent Violence Against Women project in Cape Town, South Africa (You can follow the project’s research and development through the team’s blog).

This shift in gaming for behavioural and social change will dramatically change the landscape of social learning. Group dynamics training in the workplace and social change orgainzations across the globe will be able to adopt this new avenue for experiential learning. Particularly, with computer based games the reach of the Internet will allow smaller groups to reach a much greater proportion of the global population resulting in a profound shift in awareness.

We will be watching for these advancements and keep you posted!

Building a Collaborative Culture

Posted on April 16, 2009 by John

Early in my career, I had a mentor that I didn’t know very well. I worked in the laboratory equipment business and our companies went to the same trade shows. We met, but I don’t think he ever remembered who I was. His name was Jack Whitehead. He was a mentor because I was fascinated by how he built a business that created a field (lab automation).

The company was called Technicon. It was a small business started by Jack’s Dad that made pathology processing equipment. Jack had come across a physician inventor who had developed an automated process for handling liquid samples. The inventor had tried to interest a number of the big companies in the laboratory field, but had been turned down by all of them. “There’s no market” he was told. Jack liked the guy, and the feeling was mutual…and he made a deal. He didn’t go through the now-familiar due diligence routine, nor did he engage in market research. His company was private so he didn’t have shareholders who were going to sue him if his next quarter’s results were not up to par. It was a classic “gut” decision and, as it turned out, a pretty good one. <a style="color:white"

It was what he did next that fascinated me. There were excellent patents on this novel technology. And despite the fact that “no market” existed, the inventor had a number of enthusiastic “early adopter” friends who were anxious to use the technology for their specific applications. So Jack took some orders for his early products…we’d call them prototypes today. But he had some conditions he insisted on: you had to pay in advance, you had to spend a week at the factory learning the details of your instrument and you had to help build it. As you can imagine, to pull that off Jack had to be a great salesman and a fun guy to be with. The early groups of customers worked like the devil during the day and had a hell of a lot of fun at night. Jack wasn’t just training customers, he was building a family.

It was cool to be an early Technicon customer. You were not only a black belt Technicon user, you were an applications engineer, a development engineer, a marketing manager, a salesman and a public relations person. You were tolerant if there was a problem with your early machine. And you helped solve it. This was viral marketing long before the term came into use. But it wasn’t just a gimmick. These people cared: for the technology and the field, for each other, for Jack and for Technicon. Jack was the steward of the process. Sure, he benefitted enormously from the help of his disciples, but he understood his role as he shepherded the process and the higher goal of advancing the field and the benefit it provided scientists and patients. He even organized a scientific forum for the presentation of papers on the applications of his technology. It was heretical at the time for a company sponsored event to earn the credibility and credentials of an academically sponsored meeting, but he did. It’s not what you do, it’s how you do it that counts. And he did it right.nike free run 2 women

Obviously I’ve glossed over some of the things that didn’t work so well, but the lessons to me were powerful and long lasting. I’ve watched other companies create similar cultures, and I tried to do that at Boston Scientific. It’s not so much a specific set of actions as a mind set. <a

Who do you admire who has built a collaborative culture?

John Abele

Cell Phone Education and Collaboration

Posted on March 9, 2009 by John

The New York Times just had an interesting on new ways in which maps are being used on cell phones and their implications. It is another technology driven culture change that certainly influences how people can and do collaborate Air Jordan 11. Ironically, because it enables one to locate another person easily, or even automatically, it can actually increase personal contact. Map thinking can also help people think “bigger” , ie, big picture thinking, since the map metaphor helps put many different factors into context. I’ve met teachers who use the map metaphor as a way of getting students to better understand problems or concepts.
Some years ago I spent time with a researcher at the Stanford Research Institute whose project was to develop more map mechanisms for teaching. Part of the inspiration for that project was the 1977 Powers of Ten” film by Charles and Ray Eames. . This seminal film zoomed in, than out from one spot on earth to show how scale is so important in an image or a map. All of these efforts are designed to help students think “in context” and understand scale. Many organizations are very concerned about the loss of privacy with tools like these, but they can also help people collaborate and be more productive. With better map metaphor thinking they may be better problem solvers as well. In this time of polarizing media and politics, along with oversimplification and single thread reasoning, perhaps a new map metaphor cell phone might help our culture get back on track nike air max 1995.

What’s your view?

John Abele

TED 2009

Posted on February 27, 2009 by John

I’ve just returned from the 25th Anniversary TED Conference (Ideas Worth Spreading) in Long Beach, California. For the non-cognoscenti, TED stands for “Technology, Entertainment, Design” and involves 4 days of presentations from leaders, and I mean leaders, in those fields. Presenters this year included Bill Gates, Al Gore, Daniel Liebskin and lots of giants whose qualification is that they are really good at something, they are eloquent in telling stories or describing it, and they are passionate about their topic. They’re not selling, they’re sharing. This is the big Daddy of a whole genre of meetings it has spawned: Idea City, Aspen Idea Festival, Business Innovation Factory, PopTech, etc. The founder of TED is Richard Saul Wurman, an architect by training who now calls himself an “Information Architect” (he’s authored a book of that name along with 100s of others that focus on creating understanding in many different areas Air Jordan 13 Retro. Google his name). Wurman called it his personal dinner party. The audience is more important than the speakers. And the breaks are nice and long so the participants can really engage.

I’ve gone to quite a few, and the format has changed a bit, but the principle is the same; bringing awesomely knowledgeable, eloquent and passionate people together can stimulate and inspire participants. It can truly raise the bar new balance 642. Many leading companies send some executives to attend (it costs 6 grand, there were 1600 people and it’s mostly sold out for next year). Some innovative companies are creating their own versions internally.

There are some interesting lessons here in this time of great stress and trauma cheap trainers nike air max. We will solve these problems. But we will do it with great and innovative collaboration with people who are stimulated and inspired

Kingbridge Conference Centre and Institute

Open Minds and Expand Thinking "The paradox of real collaboration is that it is not about getting the best minds together – it's about creating a New Mind Set."

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