Tag: unconference

The Longest Time

This time tomorrow I’ll be airborne and on my way to Ohio for some useful fun. I’m very excited and a little nervous too, you gotta love the adrenaline rush right 🙂

Carole and I took the time to go for coffee earlier today and we were talking about the fact that we’ve not yet spent more than a couple of nights apart in just over twenty years of marriage. All that is about to change – after tomorrow morning the next time I’ll see Carole and Keira will be Saturday 29th September when they meet me at Heathrow Airport.

The girls are planning all kinds of fun stuff for while I’m away, meals with friends, play dates, you name it – it’s going on. And we’ve had our Skype practice run too – them downstairs, me upstairs – there’s something quite surreal about video conferencing with people you currently share the same house with – lots of fun.

The Ohio State HR conference promises to be a great experience and once I’ve given my talk (conveniently planned in for the first afternoon – thank you to a wonderful team of organisers and schedulers!) I’m sure the first few days of my trip will pass in a blur, before I head towards New York City on Saturday 22nd September.

I’ll then be in The Big Apple until I leave Friday 28th. I’ve some good fun things planned, like the Thomson Reuters unconference on the 26th and I will visit the High Line and take a look at that too. Maybe I’ll take a trip out to a baseball game – both the New York Yankees and the Mets are in action. I won’t have a clue what’s going on – but it could be a fun way to spend an afternoon.

My default position is a social one and I currently have quite a lot of time to myself. So – if you’re based in New York City and you read this, please get in touch – it would be fun to meet up if you can spare the time. And if you’re not in New York City but you’ve got some good tips on stuff to see and do, I’d appreciate that too.

Openings Unlimited

The world of work has a strong tendency to try and narrow options and close things down, too often with undue haste. From my experience, extra time invested in opening up minds and conversations with a broad range of stakeholders (or should that just say….people?) in the exploration phase leads to better decisions and time saved prior to and throughout implementation. For starters, if you take the initial paths that genuine dialogue create for you, subsequent communications are much simpler and clearer because you’ve involved those who have an interest in you and your people from the start – so there’s inherently less need for bullshitting, sorry I mean finessing that stuff later.

As technology increasingly helps us connect more easily, there is a shift in approach and increasingly I’m finding and learning about companies willing to try a more open approach. Thomson Reuters is one such company, and having run a successful unconference for their technology teams earlier this year – it’s now the turn of the Project Management community. Starting tomorrow, Thomson Reuters is creating face to face opportunities for its people to open minds, converse and look for opportunities together. You can read more about the lead up to this project and get a flavour for what is happening here, for the purpose of this blog post I want to focus on one particular thing worthy of note.

The event tomorrow is not only for Thomson Reuters Project Managers. It’s also for their fans, their customers, other colleagues who rely on their service, and people (like me even) who are simply curious about how to make the world of work….better. This inclusive method is something I’ve been fortunate to participate in previously and I’m very excited that such an influential community within Thomson Reuters is now taking up the baton (sorry I couldn’t resist!). So there will be more on this subject as the next few weeks unfold, perhaps once you get a feel for what is beginning to emerge you might like to get involved too?

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Calmly Excited

Today’s the day Stop Doing Dumb Things rolls into town. Well it is if you live in London, and if you have a ticket 😉

I’ve lost count of the number of live events I’ve run and helped to run over the years. They’re great fun, and energising, powerful and experimental, so I suppose that makes them a little dangerous too?

Everyone involved in our event today is an experimenter. I congratulate you all for your willingness to try something different. And quite apart from lots of format tweaks and new ideas, there will be a couple of things I personally will choose to do differently. It’s no secret, because I choose it not to be, that these events, these gatherings, make me nervous. Will I give of my best? Will you be happy? And if you’re not happy will you be comfortable enough to tell me? And if you do, can I help put that right?

I choose  not to bring a musical instrument with me this time. I need a break, and so do you. And as it happens, I’m playing a 1970’s disco set in the New Forest this weekend. I’m happy to give you a sneak peak, and I figure one scary music day in a week is enough 😛

Disco Doug

I choose to take a more participatory role this time. I’m lucky to be working with Jonathan Wilson and Peter Massey again and we’ve taken the time to make sure we all get time and space to play today, as well as facilitate.

If you can’t join us in real life through today, follow our experiment on Twitter using the hashtag #sddt. That way you’ll get a sense of the useful fun we’re having. Sorry though – unless you’re in the room, you won’t get any home made cake. We haven’t figured out how to get that through cyberspace, and to be honest, I hope we never do.

Thanks in advance to Neil, Neil, Peter, Ben, Martin, Tim and his team, and all our guests 😉

Whatever you’re doing, have a great day folks.

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