Red and Yellow Threads

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Gail Taylor likes to talk about the need for The Red Thread and Yellow Threads in groups. The Red Thread is a concept from filmmaking. It’s the tie that binds, an element found in every aspect of a project that helps create a unified whole. Alicia Bramlett, an artist and filmmaker who often works with MGTaylor, has written a beautiful description of The Red Thread and its role in filmmaking.    (GFZ)

Gail first described Yellow Threads to me a few weeks ago as we were discussing the participants of an upcoming Blue Oxen Associates event. If you look carefully, you will find Yellow Threads woven throughout oriental carpets. They themselves are not apparent, but their presence makes the surrounding colors more vivid.    (GG0)

Wikis And Face-To-Face Events

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Face-to-face gatherings are very good at generating a large amount of enthusiasm and momentum. Unfortunately, that energy usually dissipates soon afterwards.    (204)

Here’s what generally happens: Folks leave the event exhilirated, but exhausted, and return only to discover a daunting pile of work. By the time they’ve made their pile manageable, the only artifact of their gathering is a lingering feeling of, “Oh yeah, that was fun.” The work that was done and the work that was to be done is mostly forgotten.    (205)

For the past two years, I’ve been designing a set of processes that use online tools to maintain and even increase that energy after an event. I’ve had the opportunity to experiment with bits and pieces of the methodology at the past two Planetwork conferences and the recent AdvocacyDev convergence to varying degrees of success. At the MGTaylor 7-Domains Workshop last month, I finally had a chance to test the methodology in its purest form, and I was extremely pleased with the results.    (206)

The Process    (207)

The process is based on two principles:    (208)

  • The event itself must result in a living Group Memory, not just an event memory.    (209)
  • Participants must be literate in the tools used to collaborate afterwards. Otherwise, the tools become an impediment.    (20A)

The process addresses both of these principles simultaneously by using the online tools for developing that Group Memory during the event itself. This gives people — especially non-techies — the opportunity to orient themselves around the tool in a comfortable environment. The better integrated the tool is into the event process, the more accelerated the learning.    (20B)

What makes a Group Memory alive?    (20C)

  • Group ownership. The problem with after-the-fact proceedings or journals is that participants aren’t necessarily invested in the results. Hence, they’re likely to ignore them. How many participants read event proceedings after the fact? One corrollary to this is that Group Memory does not have to be polished. A rough diagram developed by the group as it worked is more valuable than an edited summary of the event written by a third-party observer and published several days afterwards.    (20D)
  • Dynamic. You have to be able to add to a repository and refactor existing content.    (20E)

Tools    (20F)

Wikis are an outstanding tool for Group Memory. However, simply making the tool available during an event will not automatically result in Group Memory. The end product of Wikis at most conferences is not usually representative of the attendees at large. The main reason for this is that the percentage of participants who use them is usually fairly low.    (20G)

Wikis also tend to be underutilized because they are advertised as conference space and not community space. Organizers don’t expect them to be living spaces for continuous discussion and collaboration, and hence, they aren’t.    (20H)

(A quick aside on Mailing Lists and Group Memory. Contrary to what one might think, Mailing Lists can be very effective as a Group Memory. It’s possible to refactor existing discussions by posting summaries, a common practice in many effective online communities. However, Mailing Lists alone tend to be much more useful for participants as a Knowledge Repository than for outsiders. I think Mailing Lists are far more powerful as a complement to other tools, such as Wikis.)    (20I)

7-Domains Workshop    (20J)

I always felt that the best people with which to do this experiment were the good folks at MGTaylor, because their events:    (20K)

  • Are action-oriented and highly interactive.    (20L)
  • Consist of large, eclectic crowds, often technological newbies.    (20M)
  • Emphasize face-to-face, multimodal interaction. This presents interesting design challenges, because they usually discourage laptops at their events.    (20N)
  • Place great importance in documentation and assembling knowledge.    (20O)

How did this differ from some of the previous events Blue Oxen Associates has worked?    (20P)

  • There were many non-techies at Planetwork, and the Inter Active sessions took center stage. However, despite Jim Fournier and Elizabeth Thompson‘s best efforts, Planetwork was still a talking-heads conference (and a good one at that). Planetwork gets a special mention, though, because that’s where I first met and worked with Gail Taylor.    (20Q)
  • AdvocacyDev was highly interactive, it was fairly large (40 people), and the Wiki played a central role in the design. However, the group was already very familiar with Wikis, and those who weren’t were technical enough and motivated enough to figure them out quickly.    (20R)

The 7-Domains Workshop is a semiregular gathering of the folks in the MGTaylor network, practitioners of the process. There were about 60 participants representing a number of organizations, including Vanderbilt Center For Better Health (our host), Cap Gemini, and the VA. The purpose of the gathering was self-evaluation and collaboration on improving both individually and collectively.    (20S)

My primary role was to help integrate the Wiki into the design of the event and to support Wiki usage during the event. I also assisted in other Krew duties. In addition to being a somewhat ideal audience for my experiment, I had a few other advantages:    (20T)

  • By nature, the participants were interested in collaboration, experimentation, and learning.    (20U)
  • Most of the participants owned and brought (at the urging of the organizers) laptops. The center had wireless ethernet, ethernet jacks, and several kiosks for those who did not have computers.    (20V)
  • We had outstanding facilitators and a great Krew. These folks quickly oriented themselves to Wikis before the workshop and naturally assumed the roles of Wiki gardeners during.    (20W)

Workshop Design    (20X)

I played a very small role in the design of the event itself. Of the four facilitators — Matt Taylor, Gail Taylor, Rob Evans, and Bryan Coffman — Matt and Gail understood Wikis quite well. In fact, their conceptual understanding of Wikis was much more advanced than their proficiency with the tool, which I think is quite unusual and impressive. They had insights into the tool’s potential that many people who are quite skillful with the tool never see. Gail had also worked with me at both Planetwork conferences, so she had some experience with what did and did not work.    (20Y)

On Gail’s suggestion, the primary group exercise at the event was to write a book. The exact topic and format was not specified — that would evolve as the workshop unfolded. The only thing that was understood was that everybody would participate — participants, facilitators, and Krew.    (20Z)

The book exercise solved many problems. Like most MGTaylor events, it built knowledge assembly into the workshop process. More importantly, it made the participants responsible for that assembly, which kept them invested in the content. Traditionally, the Krew is responsible for documenting the event and assembling that knowledge afterwards into a journal. At this event, the participants documented the workshop themselves using the Wiki. This not only sliced two days off of the Krew‘s normal responsibilities, it also freed them up to take more of an assembler role, and it allowed both Krew and facilitators to contribute to the discussion in ways not previously possible.    (210)

There was no training. On the second day of the five day workshop, I spent about forty-five minutes talking to the entire group about the philosophical underpinnings of Wikis and about ten minutes demonstrating the Wiki itself. With other groups, I would have skipped the philosophical discussion entirely. Beyond that and a one-page Wiki formatting cheat-sheet, there was no training. I was on-hand to help, as were the Krew and facilitators, and participants were encouraged to help each other.    (211)

As an initial exercise, we precreated pages for every participant. We then asked people to add some information about themselves, then to go through the Wiki and comment on another page that interested them. Having people write in their own pages allowed us to avoid a massive edit conflict problem. It also gave people a fallback if they were unsure of where to add content, and it populated the Wiki with a lot of useful and interesting information. People are social animals. We like to read about other people.    (212)

The Results    (213)

As expected, a bunch of people were skeptical about the Wiki at first. By the end of the week, the Wiki had over 400 pages of rich and interesting content, and a month later, people are still using it. Several people gushed about the tool — Holly Meyers, one of the Krew, loved it so much, she wrote a manifesto entitled, “Wonderful Wiki.” Many asked me afterwards about setting up Wikis in their own organizations.    (214)

The “book” synthesized a lot of group knowledge, which not surprisingly centered mostly around the MGTaylor facilitation process. There were also several interesting thoughts and stories about collaboration in general. One group of participants chose to tell their story in murder mystery form, a surprisingly effective medium that ended up captivating quite a few people.    (215)

Throughout the week, Alicia Bramlett, another Krew member, evolved the Wiki site design, highlighting content we felt was important. (She also put together a very cool movie of the event, which we showed to the participants on the last day, and which appropriately received a standing ovation.) The other Krew members and the facilitators were actively engaged in contributing to and gardening the Wiki throughout the week. (It should be pretty obvious at this point what I thought about these folks — they were awesome.)    (216)

Watching people use the Wiki was a special treat for me. I learned tons about the tool’s usability, stuff I’ll report on eventually. Most people learned the tool quickly and easily. I had more trouble getting people connected to the wireless than getting people using the Wiki.    (217)

I ended up adding a new feature to PurpleWiki — visited pages — during the event. I realized that several people were having problems navigating the site after editing the pages, and I knew that having a list of recently visited pages would help resolve that. It was already on our list of things to do, and it was an easy feature to add, so I did it.    (218)

Shortly after the event, I was delighted to see a new function evolve from the Wiki. Because people were from all over the globe, one of the participants suggested that people post useful travel information on the Wiki, which several people did.    (219)

I’ll have more to say on all of this at some point, including a more formal report of the results.    (21A)

Learning Dougspeak: The Importance of Shared Language

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

I worked with Doug Engelbart in various capacities from 2000 through 2003, and I often retell lessons and stories from those experiences. My favorite — untold on this blog so far — is how I almost wrote Doug and his ideas off early in my exposure to him. It’s a tale of one of my most significant transformative experiences and of the importance of Shared Language.    (1VF)

I had known of Doug’s inventions for many years because of my interest in Computer History, but my first exposure to his ideas about bootstrapping and organizational improvement occurred in 1998, when I attended a talk he gave at BAYCHI. I was hoping to hear stories about working at SRI in the 1960s and his perspective on usability today. What I got was an abstract lecture on organizational knowledge processes and cognitive frameworks. I walked away very confused.    (1VG)

A year later, Institute for the Future organized a day-long seminar at Stanford to mark the 35th anniversary of the mouse. It consisted largely of testimonial after testimonial from people whose lives and work had been touched by Doug, as well as hints of his larger, more humanistic goals. I was struck by the tremendous intellectual and emotional impact he had had on so many people’s lives, many of whom had gone on to do important work themselves. Both the speakers list and the attendees list read like a who’s who of the history of Silicon Valley.    (1VH)

In 2000, Bootstrap Institute organized a followup colloquium at Stanford. It was a 30-hour (over 10 weeks) seminar on Doug’s ideas, taught by Doug himself and featuring an impressive list of guest speakers. Naturally, I enrolled.    (1VI)

The first week’s session was great. Doug outlined his big picture, which was mind-blowing in and of itself, then marched out several guest speakers who provided some real-world context for Doug’s work.    (1VJ)

The second and third weeks were not as good. Doug began drilling down into some specifics of his framework, and it was starting to feel redundant and irrelevant. I was also getting the feeling that Doug was unaware of what had happened in the world over the past 30 years. “We know all of this already,” I thought. I wasn’t gaining any new insights.    (1VK)

After the fourth session, I had coffee with my friend, Greg Gentschev, who asked me how the colloquium was going. I told him I was going to stop attending, that the content was worthless, and that Doug was a kook. Greg, knowing little of Doug or his work, asked me to explain.    (1VL)

So I did. I started describing Doug’s conceptual universe. I explained his larger motivation regarding the complexity of the world’s problems and mentioned scaling effects and where humans and tools fit in. I translated some of his terminology and threw in some of my own examples.    (1VM)

As I talked, I had an epiphany. I had learned something significant over the past four weeks. I had spent 40 hours mentally processing what I heard, and when I finally had the opportunity to describe this stuff to someone, I realized I had a rich language for describing a powerful conceptual framework at my disposal. Doug wasn’t teaching new facts or force-feeding his opinions. He was rewiring our brains to see the world as he did.    (1VN)

That conversation with Greg convinced me to stick out the colloquium, which led to me getting to know Doug, which eventually led to what I’m doing now.    (1VO)

I recount this story here not out of nostalgia but because of the value it reaffirmed. Language is critical to learning, and Shared Language is critical for collaboration.    (1VP)

The first phase of an MGTaylor workshop is known as a Scan phase. It often consists of explorations of themes that have seemingly nothing to do with the topic at hand. Even worse, those explorations are often kinesthetic and quite playful. People don’t feel like they’re doing work at all, much less the work they think they’re there for. Many people get upset after the first third or half of an MGTaylor workshop.    (1VQ)

That usually changes in the end, though. That first phase is all about developing Shared Language. Once that language has been developed, the work (or “Action” phase) is highly accelerated. People are more productive working together than ever before.    (1VR)

Every effective facilitation technique I’ve seen incorporates this Shared Language phase at the beginning. Allen Gunn‘s tends to be more directed. Jeff Conklin‘s is entirely about developing Shared Language — he comes in for a few hours or a day and facilitates Shared Language via Dialogue Mapping. MGTaylor‘s is particularly effective with large, eclectic groups. However, it’s also critical that people stay for the entire event, despite their frustration. Otherwise, they miss out on the epiphany.    (1VS)

People get frustrated with meetings when they’re all talk, no action. The problem is that people then think that meetings are a waste, that they want all action, no talk. This type of thinking gets you nowhere. The problem is that the talk phase is not effective. People are not going through a conscious Shared Language phase. Once you develop Shared Language, you are now capable of acting collaboratively.    (1VT)

Music City, Here I Am

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Arrived in Nashville on Saturday for the MGTaylor Seven Domains Workshop, a meeting of the minds of many of those tied to the MGTaylor community. I’m working the workshop this week, then am spending a week driving in a circle to Cincinnati, St. Louis, and back to Nashville. If you have suggestions for places to visit along the way — especially interesting towns off the main road — let me know. Also drop me an email if you’re in the area and would like to get together.    (1NE)

My flight was largely uneventful, other than a stopover in Charlotte, my first time in North Carolina. I have this ongoing argument with several of my friends over how long you need to be in a state in order to qualify as actually having been there. We generally agree that stopovers don’t count, although after today, I may have to challenge that rule. Walking through the concourse towards my connecting flight, I couldn’t resist stopping for a pulled pork sandwich. Eating the local cuisine has to count for something, even if it’s at the airport.    (1NF)

You can actually get a decent sense of the local culture from airports. Several of the clerks were listening to bluegrass and country music behind their counters. White rocking chairs lined the entire concourse.    (1NG)

In addition to the sandwich, I tasted hush puppies — fried corn bread — and a fried pickle for the first time. It’s commonly acknowledged that everything tastes good deep-fried. Southerners go out of their way to prove this point.    (1NH)

Not only did barbecue feature prominently throughout the airport, there were also a few local fast food joints. I’m not that into fast food, but I like seeing what different places have to offer. Despite the ongoing conglomeration of most restaurants, even chains retain their local feel. I remember visiting D.C. when I was a kid, and being amazed at the fact that they had different fast food places — Roy Rogers in particular — than California. It’s not just childhood nostalgia, though. Thinking about the first time I had White Castle, after hearing my old boss constantly raving about it, makes me laugh. You haven’t truly experienced New York unless you’ve had White Castle at 3am in the middle of Queens.    (1NI)

After arriving in Nashville, I hopped on over to Ted’s Montana Grill to meet the other Knowledge Workers who are also working the workshop this week. Good people, all. I also enjoyed the bison short ribs. Bison is the specialty of the house, and Ted is Ted Turner.    (1NJ)

Afterwards, Jeff Johnston and Kati Thompson took me to the Station Inn for some buds and bluegrass, where we heard a great band — David Peterson and 1946. Definitely enjoyed the night out in Nashville; hoping there’ll be time for more of the same throughout the week.    (1NK)