Tribes & leading vs managing

Over Christmas I finally got around to using up a couple of Amazon vouchers that I have had for a while... OK, it was well over €500, which means that I have got enough in the way of business reading material to keep me going for most of the year (I try to balance my reading by cycling through 1x professional book, 1x non-fiction, non-business, 1x fiction and back to 1x professional book etc., but now have far too many in the professional category to make this work this year!). As such, you should expect to see a few reviews, or at the very least references to books worth checking out.

The first two books on my backlog this year were "Tribes" (by Seth Godin) and "Building great customer experiences" (by Colin Shaw & John Ivens) and I have to admit I was slightly disappointed with both:

Having seen a few talks by Seth Godin, following his (unbelievably popular) blog and enjoyed "Permission Marketing" immensely, I was really looking forward to Tribes. The underlying premise (that in the "new world" organisations need leaders of "tribes" of interest to innovate, make changes happen and to create new value and that these leaders are not the managers of old, but rather thought leaders) is potent and attractive - especially for someone working in a professional services organisation that lives from subject matter expertise alongside management competence ;-), but the book failed to deliver any "meat" to back this up.

That said, the book is a quick and easy read. Its appeal to individuals to be passionate about things that they believe in - and to channel this passion into a community to effect change - resonates.

"Building great customer experiences" has the same informal journalistic style as "Tribes", and lays out a set of "philosophies" for delivering customer experiences across channels. To be fair, the book is several years old and may at the time have been innovative, but today it seems to reflect the received wisdom - the power and importance of emotions in customer experience, designing processes "outside in" (rather than "inside out") etc.

The authors are clearly very experienced (and the case-studies within the book are certainly interesting and varied), but the frameworks that they provide are rather generic.

Nevertheless, there were definitely a couple of points that they really hammered home -

1. that brand and customer experience must be aligned to be effective and
2. only by seeing customer experience as a central part of one's overall strategy (complete with a gimmicky, but helpful "customer experience statement" a pinnacle of a "customer experience pyramid" (TM), will it be possible to truly deliver a customer-centric service
   

In summary, two reasonable, but certainly not outstanding books.

User Experience of Reality

I am an enthusiastic proponent of online gaming and its value in the development of children and adults alike, but I have to say that this presentation by Jane McGonigal even frightened me a little bit.. "the user experience of reality is broken". Hilfe!

User Experience of Reality

View more presentations from avantgame.

Fantastic complex information visualisations

I just stumbled across a wonderful collection of images showing complex data/information sets in a easily understandable way. Check them out here.

Anyone can draw apparently - effective visualisation

Not being the greatest at drawing, but having an acute awareness at how useful visualisation is for communicating ideas, I am always interested in learning useful techniques that can be applied easily (see also my review of "The Back of the Napkin"). Over the last year I have had the opportunity to work with some very bright and creative people to create conceptual imagery to and have been impressed on how effective it can be.

As such, I was pleased when I stumbled across this nice set of video guides to drawing on VizThink (a favourite website of mine). Ultimately this is the same material that comes up in every 101-type book and course that I have seen, but it is succinct and easy to remember (my favourite kind of method!).

Having said this, I was a little disappointed that the post did not go beyond how to visualise particular elements to how to really use them effectively in presentations, meetings and workshops and simply to guide one's own thinking. On this front, I have been much more taken by the simple approach:

1. Start with identifying the elements that are relevant to the problem or issue to be visualised
2. Then decide upon the relationships between the elements (which are important and what flavour are the relationships)
3. Once you have the block diagram in place, start playing with "visual metaphors" that can transport the key message best.

Coming from a traditional business analysis background I was struck by how similar this approach is to the simple domain modelling approaches (OK, UML doesn't really allow for much in the way of visual metaphor, but the process is much the same!), but the results are so much more effective in transporting the ideas than such dry (if intellectually satisfying) diagrams.

Of course it is the third step that is the most challenging (and the one that I certainly struggle with the most), but the good news is that there are literally hundreds of interesting sources for ideas on this front.. but that is something for later post!

What about an effective meeting?

Like so many others, I made some resolutions at New Year and will probably only manage to keep to them until the middle of February, but one of them was - how predictable - to rejoin the gym. In fact it was not just to rejoin the gym, but to actually go to it several times a week too and therein lies the challenge!

To keep my motivation, I am combining the gym attendance with working down my backlog of podcasts (I have about 100 hours of "stuff" that I want to get through). This evening one cast really stuck in my head - "Timely meetings" from the manager-tools team.

Admittedly, I have written about manager-tools' "Effective Meeting Protocol" before (see here for links and a brief overview), but I think it is worth reiterating (at least for myself if not for others!). In this latest cast they focus on the timeliness element of effective meetings - starting on time, having the agenda out in advance (and with time allocations for each discussion item).

18 months ago, when I first wrote about this, I was humble enough to admit that I am not the best at this (humble not necessarily being a trait that I am really known for, I think it worth mentioning). Today, I find I have to admit that I have got worse. It is frustrating to recognise how easy it is to slip on very simple things when under time pressure and when it is seen as nothing unusual.

So it is time to "get back to basics" and that is, in fact, my small business related resolution for the year; be on time to meetings, no meeting without an agenda, define goals upfront, seek to have actionable results leaving the meeting.

I remember well one of my first managers when I started in the consulting industry; a charming man, but ruthless in the workplace and the lesson I learned from him (though I admit, I find myself getting sloppier over time) was that simply keeping meetings running on time has an enormous effect on increasing focus and raising the sense of urgency within a project.

For that I thank him, (though we never did see eye-to-eye on my belief that it is possible to achieve the same effectiveness in meetings with a "light touch" (i.e. without forcing the formality of a meeting structure artificially and cutting off fruitful discussion - do "timeout" and "take that offline" sound familiar?).

Good luck to us all on improving our effectiveness with simple small steps this year!

Another year, another resolution

OK, let's just pretend that my New Year's resolution post from last year, was in fact posted at the weekend and carry on.

The good news is that, although I have not blogged for almost a year, I have been collecting articles, links, blogs, video-casts and topics that I am interested in sharing and commenting on for most of that time, so I have a huge backlog.

I considered posting some headlines now to force myself into writing the entries this year, but I am going to wimp out on that. Instead, let's start with something a little lighter - without doubt my favourite you-tube video from last year: the death star canteen (OK, it has been around for years, but I have only just discovered it).



Eddie Izzard is brilliant.

Use case / user story - who cares?

So much for resolutions. It has been almost a month since my last post and I feel suitably disappointed with myself. And today I only have a short post:

I am repeatedly surprised by the vehemence of different analyst communities on issues of approach (and predictably on the rightness of their approach over all others). One consistent topic that always seems to provoke strong reactions is the question of requirement documentation via use case versus user story.

Personally I suspect that either and/or both approaches can be usefully applied (but then I always was a tiresome moderate) and that ultimately it mostly depends upon the content - I have seen (and written) variants of both that failed to extract what the underlying goal and business need of the user is and the sexiest template in the world was never going to fix them.

That said, I do appreciate that both approaches have value and should be in the analyst's arsenal. So I was delighted to read a posting on John Babcock's blog providing a great overview of thinking on this topic - he has put together a bunch of links to articles and sites that compare and contrast the approaches (of course both Fowler and Cockburn are represented, but there are several other interesting sources).

On reflection, I like the simplicity of user stories and their closeness to real world language, but they do not replace a well constructed use case model (as often as not, it is the model rather than the details that is really valuable) to help make sure that the requirements are complete. So both have value - use what makes sense for a given situation (and that could easily mean both) - how heavyweight do you need to be to ensure that you are capturing all the complexity of your project?

So, no strong reaction on my side. How moderate and boring.

Tough.