When I heard that Dave Pollard (Authour of the “Sweet Spot”) was chatting with Dave Snowden (Mr Complexity) … a metaphor jumped to mind that brings the 2 together. Forgive the simplicity of this metaphor. Some background and context … In the real world of ‘behaviour change’ projects, project coordinators are often funded by government agencies. These agencies are usually hierarchical and therefor demand a degree of certainty … a plan thought out in advance that delivers on milestones and performance targets. It’s tax payer’s money, so you need to show (ahead of time) how you ‘think’ you might achieve …

The crew at slideshare have just announced the winners of the World Best Presentation Competition. The judges include Garr Reynolds and Nancy Durate, 2 of the best. So if you do not even read Garr and Nancy’s books … at least take the time to click through these presentations and figure out for yourself why they are so good. I have added some points at the bottom of this post. Remember, that if these were to be delivered to an audience, the presenter may even remove more words from the few that exist now. THIRST View SlideShare presentation or Upload …

So what do Google, Scott McLeod and comics have in common? They have just collaborated to launch Google’s Chrome Web Browser. Why comics? They are visual … they tell a story (which are hardwired to understand) … they turn the ‘complex’ into the ‘simple’ AND they are FUN! When Clay Shirky talks about the fall of tradition organizational structures (Institutions) in the “collaboration” space that is Web 2.0, he also points out that traditional institutions resist the new (often creative right brained) approaches to business and marketing. Here is a classic quote from CNN’s article “Google unveils free browser Chrome” …

In this National Geographic article, Thomas Malone of MIT’s new Center for Collective Intelligence says, “No single person knows everything that’s needed to deal with problems we face as a society, such as health care or climate change, but collectively we know far more than we’ve been able to tap so far.” He draws on the success of Google and Wikipedia who simply allow people to ‘think together’ in ways that we never imagined a few decades ago. The article goes on to say … “Such thoughts underline an important truth about collective intelligence: Crowds tend to be wise only …

Thanks to Paul Z Jackson at Solutions Focus, my approach to workshop facilitation has changed (and I think improved) throughout 2008. I have read his book and attended Solutions Focus training in Melbourne this year (thanks to Andrew Rixon for bringing it together). I wrote a post called ‘Which Conversation Do You Choose” about my observations of groups who take a solutions focused view in a workshop. Here is the picture to capture the essence of this observation … Here is a message I sent to Paul Jackson, reflecting on solutions focus and my work … Hi Paul. How are …