Stewart Mader blogs atWikiConsulting.com

Over the past few months, I’ve had the good fortune of getting to know Allan Cox, advisor to the senior leadership of major corporations and author of the recently published Your Inner CEO. This is Allan’s 8th business book, and an excellent, inspiring, and practical read for people that want to understand their inner leadership potential.

Here’s what blogger Tom Pick said about this book in his review: “This isn’t a book about tweaking marketing tactics or even setting grand strategy—it’s about changing your life in ways that make you a better leader, whether as a CEO, department manager, community leader or the head of a company of one. Cox…guides the reader to discover and become the leader that he or she truly is by finding the authentic self.”

Allan and I have been conversing over the past few weeks and sharing ideas as he’s launched Your Inner CEO and I’ve launched Wikipatterns, and in the process we’ve talked a lot about the wiki he’s launching today:

• The most value in “Your Inner CEO” will be found in working through the ideas and exercises to discover your own answers. The wiki offers a spot where we’ve collected the exercises where you can work through them at your own pace. It’s also a place where you can choose to share your insights and questions with others engaged in the same process.
• We’re all called upon to exercise leadership in more settings and more circumstances. We hope this site can become a place where you can interact with others who are developing their own leadership capacity and share your discoveries and resources with them.

When you viist the wiki, here are two activites Allan suggests to help you get started:

• Tell us what brought you here and what you hope to gain
• Share your favor leadership quote or leadership story

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A few weeks ago I posted Do you spend too much time in meetings and answering email?, and Sacha Chua replied with this on her blog: “The wiki is very helpful for our weekly update meetings. Before the meeting, we update the list to reflect what we’ve done and what we plan to do. This makes it easy for our manager to keep up with our progress and ensures that all the important points get covered during a short meeting.”

It’s excellent to hear about another organization’s success in keeping meetings short, managers (and peers) up to date, and letting people focus on the really important stuff.

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The following is a guest post from Patrick Berry and Scott Jungling of CSU Chico. Third in a three part series this week: (read parts 1 and 2)
Gaining Momentum: As the first phase grew to a close, we had a bit of trouble finding groups for phase 2. It seemed that part of the problem was that the existing groups had their spaces restricted to only those in their group. That all changed once the WebCT Vista Knowledge Base came along in phase 2 and left their space (mostly) open to the world. All of a sudden the buzz started growing louder. Phase 3, which began in early October, marked the first time we had to turn away groups until January. It was amazing! The momentum was building faster than we had been expecting.

The Townhall Meeting

Another part of our approach came almost accidentally. At the request of a director, we set-up a Townhall Meeting where those who were using Confluence could share what they’d done. Show-and-tell. “What I did in my wiki.” Straight out of elementary school. We invited four spaces to present short demos of their space: the original three groups from Phase 1 and the Vista Knowledge Base guys. The feedback floored us. Everyone seemed to be furiously taking notes on what each of the other groups presenting had done and were eager to implement those features or hacks in their own space.

What was even more exciting was that these groups were a little more open to the idea of letting other Confluence users view their space as a way of collaborating and sharing ideas. Brilliant! The Townhall concept was such a success we decided to make it a quarterly event coinciding with the start of new phases. This would allow new groups to Confluence to get an idea of how others on campus were using Confluence.

Summary

Our approach to introducing Confluence on campus has been fairly successful. Despite only having 9 spaces, we’re finding that the number of people using Confluence is rapidly growing as more and more people get invited into spaces (thanks to the Custom Space User Management plugin) to collaborate. For us, success will not be measured in the number of spaces we create or the number of pages there are or people who edit them. Success will be measured by whether or not Confluence continues to be a useful tool to those who are using it.

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The following is a guest post from Patrick Berry and Scott Jungling of CSU Chico. Second in a three part series this week: (read part one)
Our Approach: The 3 in 3 Method Our plan was simple: create three spaces every three months. Spaces would be granted to those who applied and interviewed for a space. If a department was granted a space, they would be given three groups where they could provision and/or de-provision as many users as they wished.

Three: The recurring theme

Why the number 3 for everything? Support. The Confluence Pilot Project was given only enough money to purchase a license and expected to have zero to minimal impact on staff time. We felt that it would be easy enough to support three groups at a time with the hope that by the end of the three months, those groups would be self-supported by the power-users of each space.

The Interview: Why do you need a wiki?

The interview process was very informal. We’d invite the heads of the groups to sit down for a short chat about why they felt needed a wiki. What other solutions had they tried? How would they use it? Were they concerned about privacy? For us, it was a chance to understand how to support their needs. For the interviewees, it was an opportunity for introspection and really think about what a wiki would do for them. The best use of a wiki comes from a better understanding of your own business processes.

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The following is a guest post from Patrick Berry and Scott Jungling of CSU Chico. First in a three part series this week:
Axiom: People want what they cannot have.
It was a familiar story: a new technology arrives on campus, everyone wants to take part, many sign-up, few actually do anything. We’d seen it time and time again. Determined to see Confluence survive and flourish, we devised a plan. Create an artificial demand by limiting the supply. This wasn’t all attitude, as you’ll see we had some valid technical reasons as well.

Sounds crazy, right? “Wouldn’t you want as many people to use Confluence as possible?”, you might be wondering. In short, “NO!” We’re from the pragmatic school of thought: right tool for the right job. It all began eight months ago… /begin flashback sequence

Background

In planning our approach for a Confluence pilot project, we decided to only allow a few spaces to be created at a time for a couple of reasons.

1. We were running on old hardware which featured a dazzling Intel PIII and 512MB of RAM. We later upgraded to 2GB of RAM as we quickly hit performance issues with Java.
2. We wanted to be able to observe and nurture the initial spaces we created. We realized that the success of these groups would be paramount in generating buzz on campus as well as proof that there was a need that Confluence could fill better than any other software solution we had.
3. We wanted people to think about why they needed a wiki. Wiki is a powerful buzzword right now and we didn’t want to dole out our incredibly limited resources to those that were not in it for the long haul.

Our plan was heavily influenced by Stewart, who was kind enough to make a day trip to Chico from San Francisco to talk to us. He detailed his experience with a previous higher education wiki rollout and definitely gave us a good idea where a lot of potential road blocks would be. As with any higher education institution, we each have unique areas where blockages can happen, so we tried our best to craft the plan with these in mind.

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In my new book, I reference several wiki patterns and anti-patterns from Wikipatterns.com to illustrate different use cases and scenarios. In each case, the pattern reference includes a direct link to the website for more information, and a list of people who have contributed to the pattern page on the wiki. Each of these people has played an important role in building the information about each pattern, and this is my way of acknowledging both their individual contributions, and the larger role Wikipatterns.com plays in this book.

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Just flew from Sydney to New York. Spending 20 hours at 35,000 feet gave me a chance to reflect on how rapidly the world is changing. It’s nothing short of amazing that I can get on a plane in Sydney and be pretty well guaranteed to be halfway around the world at a defined time that lets me keep up with whatever I’m doing next.

Its equally amzing that with a wiki, I can work with my mates in Australia, colleagues in Europe, and collaborators in the US - all without trading tons of emails and spending hours in meetings. Instead, I email only when necessary (say, to let someone know the address of a wiki space or page I’ve set up for a project).

When we do have a meeting, it’s short and focused on discussing something that truly needs to be discussed in person, rather than a long series of updates that people can just as well get by watching the wiki pages where we’re collaborating.

And that makes my work amazing. As amazing as that ability to reliably fly halfway around the world. Whoever thought a technology tool would be that amazing?

I do, and I hope you do too. If you’re already using a wiki, excellent! If not, give it a try, and I think you’ll see how immediately useful it is, and how quickly it transforms how you think about - and do - work.

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James Governor recently said of RIM and its ubiquitous BlackBerry: “And who has done more than RIM to change the boundaries of work and play, personal and business communications in this era called 2.0? RIM is the most important company in Office and Enterprise 2.0 in terms of behavioural change, worklife balance and so on. RIM manages you 24 hours a day.” Nick Carr replied with a very insightful comment on the effect of this: “Enterprise 2.0, when seen through the hypnotizing screen of the BlackBerry, does not amount to the liberation of corporate systems by personal systems but rather the colonization of personal systems by corporate systems. Society becomes a social network. My pocket vibrates, therefore I am.”

I’m not sure René Descartes would like this. Why? Because after reading this on a Friday, I was out to dinner the following Saturday night, and directly witnessed the effect of tethering people with BlackBerries. While we were out for dinner, a couple sat down at the table next to us, obviously on a second (or maybe third) date. Throught the next hour, they both proceeded to check their BlackBerries about every 5-10 minutes. On a Saturday night. On a Date. WTF? There were multiple times when one or the other would reach for their BlackBerry while in mid conversation, and just start spining the scroll wheel while the other was still talking.

I shudder to think what might have happened later if the couple decided the date went well and went somewhere “a little quieter” - if you get my drift. In fact, that would be a great Saturday Night Live style spoof TV commercial: imagine a rooftop bar on a starry night, a couple romantically gazing in each other’s eyes…about to kiss…BZZZZZ! “Hang on, I have to check my messages.”

The root of the problem, in my opinion, is that BlackBerries are being used in the wrong way: they are an obvious solution - a band-aid - to deal with the ever-increasing flow of email, but they don’t address the root of the problem and instead quietly encroach on ever more personal time - as evidenced by that couple that couldn’t break away even while on a saturday night date.

If organizations want more productivity from employees, how about making work time more efficient, enabling greater “time on task”, and using a tool that removes a lot of the time-intensive emailing, dealing with attachments, going to meetings, etc. and lets people get right to the real work as quickly as possible? Instead of letting work spill over into personal time, organizations should retool (pun intended!) work time with a wiki so that employees can get real work done, not just appear like they’re working. Then, a BlackBerry could become a notification tool for people to keep up to date on the progress of projects & content on the wiki.

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Since I’m in Australia this week, the Friday Flux will be hitting your feed reader a few hours earlier than usual. This week, a post from September 2006 that looks at how a wiki can streamline group collaboration: “Often groups collaborate on a document by “pushing” it out to each member - emailing a file that each person edits on his or her computer, and some attempt is made to coordinate the edits so everyone’s work is equally represented. But what happens when two people think of the same idea and include it in different ways?” Read the post to find out how a wiki can handle this situation elegantly, and make collaborative work easier.

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Larry Cannell recently wrote a piece for Collaboration Loop called I Hate Files, where he argues that reliance on files makes information harder to find & use: “I don’t even want files. What I want is the information stored in a file…I have been thinking about files and documents lately and I have come to the conclusion that our reliance on the computer file as the primary structure for storing our digital “stuff” is hurting us in ways we cannot see. This is holding us back from realizing truly breakthrough capabilities.”

Breakthrough capabilities like those offered by a wiki.

Unlike the file paradigm where individual documents are pushed out to people, a wiki pulls people in to work on information in a common space. That’s a breakthrough capability because it gets past the “physical” limitations of a file, and lets people directly interact with information. This makes for a more sensible organization system, and better version control - both of which are lacking in the file paradigm.

“I believe one of the reasons why it is easier for a group to manage and share documents using online office suites (rather than with files) is because they use the web rather than tolerate it. (emphasis mine) This is an important concept that was noted by Tim O’Reilly in his original Web 2.0 blog post. He referred to it as using the “web as platform” and is an important design pattern for Enterprise 2.0 too.”

One commonality among blogs, wikis and other social tools is that they respond to patterns of human behavior better then tools like email and traditional knowledge management software. Wikipatterns.com was created specifically to document these patterns and give wiki users a place to share information about the trends they see on their own wikis.

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