Why I Love Compendium And You Should Too

I just spent two outstanding days at the Compendium Institute workshop in Washington, D.C. Folks, if you are interested in collaboration, you must learn about Compendium.    (JZU)

Compendium is a conversation mapping (or Dialogue Mapping) tool that, simply put, makes meetings better. When paired with a relatively straightforward methodology, Compendium can make a huge difference on the quality of your meetings.    (JZV)

But Compendium is about much, much more than meeting facilitation. If you scratch below the surface, you’ll discover deep thinking about collaboration, hypertext modeling, visual languages, Collective Memory, Shared Understanding, and the art of listening.    (JZW)

Simon Buckingham Shum had a great line at the workshop: “Compendium is like Excel for knowledge.” He’s absolutely right. Just as mortals can build sohisticated number crunching applications with spreadsheets, mortals can easily build useful knowledge applications with Compendium.    (JZX)

But Compendium is about even more than that! Compendium, to me, represents an incredibly rich community of practitioners, deep thinkers, and overall good people. I talk a lot about the importance of bridges — folks who speak the languages of multiple cultures or disciplines. Almost everyone in the Compendium community is a bridge of some sort. To be a Compendium guru, you need to have a knack for facilitation, a brain for visual modeling, and comfort with computers. Everyone in the community has at least two of these traits, and some folks even have all three.    (JZY)

Of course, the best measure of the quality of this community is that several members of the extended Blue Oxen family — Simon, Jeff Conklin, Al Selvin, Mark Aakhus, and Karl Hebenstreit — were at the workshop, and I fully expect others who attended to become part of the family.    (JZZ)

I first learned about all this at a two-day workshop on Dialogue Mapping in 2001 from the supreme guru himself, Jeff Conklin. Since then, I’ve blogged a bit and written a few papers about Dialogue Mapping and Compendium. The workshop this past week has motivated me to dump even more thoughts into the blogosphere. But my writing hasn’t and won’t do proper justice to the topic.    (K00)

The best way to learn about Compendium is to experience it for yourself, and then just do it. Fortunately, there are easy ways you can do this:    (K01)

Al Selvin, who along with Maarten Sierhuis, is responsible for Compendium, likens the art of facilitating with Compendium to playing jazz. A great way to learn how to play is to jam with others. How do you find folks to jam with? There are practitioners all over the world. In the Bay Area, there are lots of practitioners (of course) — myself, Jeff, Maarten (who’s doing crazy stuff with Compendium and the Mars project at NASA), Nick Papadopoulos, and others. In D.C., the good folks at Touchstone Consulting use Compendium every day with their clients, and they’ve built an active Community of Practice there.    (K05)

The best way to find folks is to join the mailing list and ask questions there. One outcome of the workshop is that we will probably convene an online jam session, so that folks anywhere can participate. I’m happy to jam with anyone who wants to learn — either face-to-face in the Bay Area or online. Contact me if interested.    (K06)

Finally, if you’re in the Bay Area, you should register for Jeff Conklin‘s upcoming workshop in Redwood City, November 29-30. If you’re a project manager, facilitator, or consultant, or if you deal with groups regularly (who doesn’t?), don’t wait. Sign up and go.    (K07)

Amber Alert in Action

On Monday, I found myself in the middle of a car chase. More importantly, I saw Amber Alert working first-hand.    (23L)

I was driving south on 101 to Campbell from Redwood City for lunch and a slew of meetings. As I drove through Mountain View, I saw an Amber Alert on an electronic billboard, which said that a girl had been abducted in a blue Land Rover. I noted the first few numbers of the license plate in my head, then thought about how great Amber Alert was, and how interesting it would be to see it in action. I was thinking about how Amber Alert could potentially use Instant Messenging in cell phones when I saw the second notice on the sign at Great America in Santa Clara.    (23M)

In San Jose, I merged onto 17 towards Campbell, and a few minutes later, I saw flashing lights in my mirror. I was running a bit late for my lunch appointment, so I glanced at my speedometer to see if I were in trouble, and to my relief, I discovered that — thanks to traffic — I was right at 65 miles per hour.    (23N)

Checking my mirrors again, I noticed the blue SUV behind me change to the fast lane. I remember thinking, “That’s strange. Makes more sense to switch into the slow lane.” Yes, I can be slow at times. As the SUV zoomed past me, I noticed “Land Rover” on the tire cover and recognized the first few letters of the license plate. The three police cars in pursuit confirmed what had slowly dawned on me. That was the kidnapper.    (23O)

I fully realize that if I were truly cool, I would have captured the chase on my cell phone camera and moblogged it immediately. Folks would have seen the chase snapshot live, rather than having to wait for this account two days later. In my defense, I was calm enough to do it. As I watched all of this unfold, I actually called my friend and told him that I was in the middle of a car chase and would be a few minutes late. Unfortunately, my cell phone is four years old. It doesn’t have a camera, and it won’t connect to the Internet.    (23P)

I can happily report that the police did eventually catch the culprit (in San Luis Obispo, about five hours south of San Francisco), and the girl is safe and sound.    (23Q)