DISQUS

some keen phrases - will retweet them in Brit twitterville

This is brilliant. I can think of a lot of uses. Tourists, obviously. Students arriving from abroad. New employees in strange cities.

Brill. How much are they I wonder?

Interesting business, the use of public space.

Five C's is good - and the story about your mother-in-law.

Old story about computers and work. Don't design work so that the computer is doing it and the worker is watching the computer. Make sure the computer is helping the worker.

With social media, design the system so the media supports the social and amplifies it. If you take out the human interaction, people get antsy.

I'

What happened here. Para 2 last sentence should be in the last para, last sentence.

Steve, I doubt this will change until an organization changes its basic presumption about who 'owns' the job.

I've researched non-performance in voluntary organizations. Things 'don't get done' just as often. People are embarrassed by their non-performance though and cover it up. What it takes is some wisdom about all the events that lead to non-performance. We often have less wisdom than we need. Hence I would prefer to see a kid out on the beach playing games than stuck passively in a classroom!

To have one wise person who can interpret a fiasco and point out what was out of our control, what we might be able to control in the future, to relieve anxieties about belonging particularly, to focus on the next step.

And we come round the full circle to ownership and control. I suggest to young managers (usually when they have been a bit snotty to a perceived underling) that the manager supported by the most people wins the organization. We have to want this badly enough too!

Do you recall Raymond Katz three facets of management: technical, human and organizational. The last seems to be totally underplayed and yet is so critical. I like to see kids organizing and managing (age-appropriately) from a very young age. The earlier they try to run organizations, the more this wisdom is likely to develop.

My experience of these things is that they are circular. People don't want to entertain new ideas (entertain hope) because they believe their current ideas haven't had a fair audience.

As consultants, our self-efficacy is high. We had 'belongingness' signaled to us massively when we were retained. People within the firm often do not feel the same way.

When we have the energy to dig down and find out why people are holding back (and do something about it), we can often release the generative energy we need to imagine bigger, better, wider, bolder futures. And we need this energy anyway to absorb a new person into the team.

Have a good weekend!

And where is the community thing? Don't see that at all.

I used it OK but I think the first time I commented without realizing theire were comments below, ah let me check again.
Yep done it again. No suggestion that there is anything else to read. So now conversation.

Who annoyed you? :-)

I find models that develop youth confidence very interesting BTW. We get bigger changes when they learn in group settings and the key change we are looking for is reflected in 'language of initiative' which sounds something like this "what would happen if we did this?"

You guys have a long weekend too? What is Memorial Day? Hope it is good.

Mmmm . . . . we live in different worlds. My students, who are a bit older than teenagers, it's true, are very different from each other, and we grade them on similar they are to us.

Good watch! Somewhere, I forget where, I saw that knowledge is replacing itself every 2 years and that interval will drop in our children's lifetime to 15min. Personally, I have stopped regarding 'taking stuff off the internet' as plagiarism. Kids understand that 95% of stuff on the web is recycled with a broken telephone effect - the skill is finding out what is valid and useful with rigor that is relevant to the task in hand. Kids also know about ownership and provenance and respect both. The job of educators is to work out the new rule set and what needs to be communicated.

I thought I should make two important points about schools.

Firstly, don't tar the good schools with the reality of the bad. Many of the schools that have existed are just plain bad. They have plenty of opportunity to provide growth opportunities and community within their current structures. Personally, I suspect a 'class system' operates - the expectation about where the children will 'land up' is being communicated. To abuse David Whyte, any school that does not bring you alive is too small for you. I suspect that deciding which school to retain for our children is one of top 10 most important decisions we make in our lives. Be choosy! Very choosy! Caveat emptor. Buyer beware. This is the only industry in the world where not only do you not get your money back - if you do not like the service, you or your kids rather, have failed!

Secondly, I taught a +850 class and I was often asked why we didn't just go a 100% IT route. The answer is that a lecture hall of 400 is a social experience. It is better than sitting in your room alone. It was an important insight for me that my job was to provide a social experience.

Having said that, off today to an 'unconference' - one of my 'presentations' - managing the community behind social media and the irrelevance of commonly-used metrics!

The quality of service is also staggeringly different. At Changi I lost my passport and only realised when I tried to go through security at the gate. A soldier simply asked my name and handed it to me. Someone had found it, traced it to my flight and it was at my gate waiting for me.

At JFK, I boarded the plane without going through passport control. As I was about to sit down, I realized I still had my little green bus ticket that 'needed' to be entered in the computer to say I had left the USA. American Airlines was most unhappy when I insisted on leaving the aircraft to return it. I might add they didn't seem to do anything with it.

One has real systems and the other has the appearance of systems. It is as simple as that.

Weep? I don't know. Carry on doing what you are doing but also raise it to the faces of the powers that be too. At the website, "they work for you", you can send your MP a link to this article and tell him/her you thought s/he might be interested. This is very topical given the difficulties at T5. You will only get a polite note back. But it takes you a few seconds and if we all do it every time we are surprised by the quality of service, they will get the message eventually.

Hi Nontando,

This is a great summary, but what intervention do you suggest? I think we have to delve more deeply into the "forces" that hold the situation in place.

We need everyone and I mean everyone to put pressure on people who matter. We need all the relatives of people listed as commanding the violence to text them and tell them that relative or not we expect them to their professional duty and say No.

We need every church to send messages into Zimbabwe including to those officers.

We need people to ring up their politicians to ask their Foreign Offices what they are doing.

We must put pressure on the newspapers to ask penetrating questions. Where is George Chiweshe, head of ZEC, for example. Rumours have reached London that he is not safe.

We need the Vatican to ring the old man. And we need the head of your college to ring the Vatican. Put pressure on people who can put pressure on people.

Any more ideas anyone?

My answer is a lot and too much
1. For connectivity and orientation: email, news, local radio
2. Day to day reference: wikipedia and diciionaires
3. Keeping in touch with people around the world: email, skype and occasionally YouTube (we are older so we tend to a functional use)
4. Maps, journey planning, telephone numbers, initial lookups of suppliers, etc
5.Looking up stuff I am interested in: health, cooking, etc.
6. Wikis and blogs for personal notes.
7. Pageflakes for following blogs (never was one for magazines but given up newspapers completely)
8. Stumbleupon for fresh idea (didn't mention google, everyone takes that for granted)
8. Banking and payments
9. Professional stuff - logging CPD etc.
10. Web2.0 - i am head over heels in love with Web2.0. I would work in it if I could figure out how.