ideas – Agile Elephant making sense of digital transformation

February 12, 2020 By David Terrar

#GLH2020 launches the GLH Inclusivity Challenge

We just yesterday blogged the details and opened registration for the London edition of this year’s Global Legal Hackathon, which might be the largest hackathon ever! To add to an already great event, The Global Legal Hackathon have just a short while ago announced a worldwide collaboration with with She Breaks the Law, RSG Consulting, and global law firm BCLP to launch the GLH Inclusivity Challenge and you’ll know inclusivity, diversity and LGBTQ issues are always high on our agenda. In any case the GLH weekend coincides with International Women’s Day (March 8), so the idea is a natural fit!

GLH2020 adds the GLH Inclusivity Challenge

The 2020 Global Legal Hackathon will be held between March 6-8 simultaneously in more than 50 cities and 25 countries around the world. This year is the third year Agile Elephant has co-hosted London with our friends at Cambridge Strategy Group, and our the second year that the venue is kindly provided by the University of Westminster, although this year we are moving to a bigger space at their Marylebone Campus.

As we’ve described, our goal is to get legal brains, marketers, business analysts and coders in to teams over a weekend creating apps and services that improve the practice and business of law, or provide better access to law for the public. We’ll be fuelling their creativity with beer and pizza, although other food and beverages (including wine) will be available too, thanks to our sponsors – this is a not for profit exercise, and free to enter for all participants (so somebody has to cover our costs please!). But this year, the Global organisers are setting this extra challenge:

“Participants and teams around the world, in every Global Legal Hackathon city, are challenged to invent new ways to increase equity, diversity, and inclusion in the legal industry.”

At the conclusion of GLH weekend, a local winner of the GLH Inclusivity Challenge will be selected by each city alongside the main winner, and will progress to a global semi-finals too. This will be an extra stream and, like the main stream, finalists will be invited to the GLH Finals & Gala, to be held in London in mid-May. On top of that, the overall winner of the GLH Inclusivity Challenge will be invited to present its solution during a diversity and inclusion summit that BCLP is planning to host in September, where leading figures from the industry will be asked to commit to ensuring the idea is brought to life and scaled up to deliver a lasting impact on the legal industry as a whole.

Kearra Markowich, Executive Director of the Global Legal Hackathon, and who is based here in London told us:

“the Global Legal Hackathon is remarkable for the fact that it is a global technology event that is majority women-led around the world. Women lead the event in Brazil, Israel, Romania, Singapore, the United States, and many other countries. On the occasion of International Women’s Day overlapping with the Global Legal Hackathon, we are thrilled to be joined by women-owned RSG Consulting, She Breaks the Law, and the diversity and inclusion team of BCLP to challenge the world to invent new and novel approaches to increasing equity, diversity, and inclusion in the legal industry.”

We think this is a fantastic addition to what is always a great fun weekend. Follow these links to find out more about:

We look forward to seeing you in Marylebone!

July 5, 2019 By David Terrar

My head’s SPINning with storytelling acronyms

A few days ago I was the latest victim on Sam Sethi’s Marlow FM 97.5 radio show and podcast – Sam Talks Technology (and there’s a Facebook group here). Sam and I go way back to the start of the London social media scene in the mid 2000s and it was a delight to be a guest on his show. His format is to mix technology and personal history, with a smidgen of “Desert Island Disks” thrown in. He splits an hour and a half of chat in to what’s happening now, some history and then the future. The time flew by. He only had a chance to play one of my chosen tunes (the Mary Black with Emmylou Harris, Transatlantic Sessions version of my favourite Sandy Denny song “By The Time it Gets Dark“), and we didn’t get to half the topics we had planned, but it was great. For some reason Sam asked me about SPIN and that got me thinking about useful acronyms and formulae I’ve picked up over the years to help with talking business, presenting and storytelling.

SPIN

What’s SPIN? Well, way back when I came in to the technology industry, straight from University, I was being trained to be a Systems Engineer by IBM. I was lucky enough to be on the first course on SPIN® Selling that they had commissioned from the Huthwaite Research Group. My course was actually taught by Neil Rackham, the founder of Huthwaite and the researcher who had devised the technique. Actually he had analysed the questioning techniques in thousands of sales calls and distilled the ingredients that were most successful in to a model process. It’s an acronym for:

Situation Questions – to understand the customer’s current situation
Problem Questions – to identify current problems, issues and difficulties
Implication Questions – where you tease out the consequences of what those problems cause
Need-Payoff Questions – where you set up the value and importance of a potential solution

You might iterate around these questions to properly quantify the need and build up the value before you come in with the potential benefits of your solution. As a model it works in all sorts of circumstances. I’ve been using it ever since and I still carry the laminated card (see above and left) that I was given on the course in my wallet to this day (40 years on, but don’t tell anyone)!

So what about those other acronyms and formulae? Whether it’s a long form article, a presentation, an email marketing piece, your next 250 word post on LinkedIn, or 280 characters on Twitter, these will help you be more effective.

The 4 Cs

Clear
Concise
Compelling
Credible

In your writing, presenting or explaining keep things clear and concise, and make sure your arguments are compelling, with evidence or examples to ensure it’s credible.

The 4 Us

Useful – Make sure it’s useful to the reader or audience
Urgent – Provide them with a sense of urgency
Unique – Focus on your main benefit and convey the idea that it is somehow unique
Ultra-specific – Do all of the above in an ultra-specific way for this audience or reader

The Us are universal, but if you’ve got to get your message across quickly, like on social media, maybe this is where you start.

AIDA (Attention – Interest – Desire – Action)

Attention – Grab their attention
Interest – Make sure what you are saying is interesting, fresh and appealing
Desire – Make them want the idea or service with proof that it does what you say
Action – You must have a call to action – make sure they know what you want them to do next

This has been a staple approach of copywriting, advertising and marketing for a long time, in fact since it was developed by the American businessman, E. St. Elmo Lewis, in 1898!

FAB (Features – Advantages – Benefits)

Features – Explain what your product or idea can do
Advantages – Explain how it helps them
Benefits – Translate what that really means for the audience or reader

This is deceptively simple, should be obvious. However, it amazes me how many people in our technology space spend so much time explaining the features and ingredients of their products, and not enough time on the benefits and business outcomes that their solution, concept, or idea could achieve.

BAB (Before – After – Bridge)

Before – Show them the world before your idea or solution
After– Help them imagine what the world would be like after your solution
Bridge – Present your solution as a bridge between the two worlds

Describe a problem, describe a world where that problem doesn’t exist, and then take them on the journey to get them to the new place. People are motivated to take action to avoid pain, or look for pleasure. Psychologists like Sigmund Freud have explained how we tick, and you can use that. The added benefit of this approach is the shift in focus to benefits and outcomes, not products and features.

PAS (Problem – Agitate – Solve)

Identify a problem
Agitate the problem
Solve the problem

Here’s a formula that I’ve seen on Copyblogger, which is another great resource for writing ideas. Identify the reader or the audiences’s pain point. Go round the loop a few times to increase the discomfort. Deliver a solution.

Storytelling

The core issue here is storytelling. Whether it’s 280 characters on Twitter, 1,200 words in a blog post, 50,000 words for that book you are going to write, or the outline of your next podcast, we have to get better at it. All of these formula will help you get your message across more effectively, whatever job you do. It will also help you to think in terms of the basics of any story. Christopher Booker wrote The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories in 2004. It contains a Jungian-influenced analysis of stories and their psychological meaning and the key thesis of the book is that all literature, scripts and stories are structured in terms of 7 archetypal plots:

Overcoming the Monster
Rags to Riches
The Quest
Voyage and Return
Comedy
Tragedy
Rebirth

I’d recommend you learn more about the art of storytelling, and of how to be a better writer and communicator. My own writing mentor is my friend David Tebbutt. He’s the best writer and editor that I know. I won’t steal his thunder here. You can download his writing tips from his website, and you should definitely watch this playlist of 9 videos he did with Alison O’Leary called Develop your Business Writing Skills. Like so many things these days, you can learn it free on YouTube!

I’ll leave you with David’s own 3 Bs maxim on writing:

Be clear. Be credible. Be read.

If you want help with telling your technology story, or finding your way through current business landscape, please contact us, or join the conversation below.

May 22, 2019 By David Terrar

Sig taught me about Barely Repeatable Processes and how work flows

Earlier this month we lost a friend and the world lost a super-smart, clear thinker and business innovator. Our friend Sigurd Rinde, business partner, fellow Enterprise Irregular and founder of Thingamy, died peacefully at home with his family on 9th May 2019. This post isn’t intended to be a eulogy or an obituary, but a reminder of some of the important ideas that Sig taught us, and which will continue to influence our thinking on how business is done and the future of work.

Sigurd Rinde – photo by Tom Raftery at SAP TechEd

One of the phrases you would often hear Sig say was:

“Management isn’t working!”

He was scathing about the “business as usual” attitude of all levels of management in our enterprises, the rigidity of the business systems that most organisations use, and the amount of time the average knowledge worker spends in meetings, dealing with their inbox and looking for answers. Sig was, like me, a big fan of Gapingvoid cartoonist Hugh Macleod:

Sig was always critical of the concept of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning). In fact, he redefined the term as Easily Repeatable Processes describing them on his blog as:

“Processes that handles resources, from human (hiring, firing, payroll and more) to parts and products through supply chains, distribution and production. The IT systems go under catchy names like ERP, SCM, PLM, SRM, CRM and the biggest players are as we know SAP and Oracle plus a long roster of smaller firms.”

So most organisations large, medium or small may have a company wide IT system which is either an integrated package, or assembled from best of breed components covering the very structured processes and data models required by their particular industry sector for order processing, finance, corporate planning, manufacturing or project management, procurement, sales and various forms of relationship management. The problem is that these systems almost certainly don’t cover all of the processes needed and they certainly don’t cover the way things actually happen day to day. For that reality, Sig coined the term Barely Repeatable Processes (BRP).

Barely Repeatable Processes (BRP)

There are plenty of ad-hoc processes in any company. They might cover the unplanned issues that happen every day, or they are the company specific things that aren’t covered by the standard package. They might have no system to help at all, or are often supported by data in an Excel spreadsheet being e-mailed around a group of people. These are what Sig calls Barely Repeatable Processes (BRP). They have some rules, but they often need to adapt and change as new circumstances arise. They need information, but it’s often unstructured notes and facts captured on paper or buried in e-mails sitting in someone’s inbox on their PC, tablet or smartphone.

Sig founded his company and product, Thingamy, to address that business challenge. His business philosophy was rooted in value creation, and a desire to shift the balance of work to effectiveness (doing the right things) over efficiency (doing things right). He recognised that the big opportunity to do better was with our knowledge workers:

“This is the big but forgotten area of opportunity. Knowledge work happens mostly in non-linear, unpredictable processes/flows, a kind of process where about 63% of the world’s value creation happens. At the same time these kind of processes have only manual support – organisational hierarchies and management – that costs approximately 2/3rd of a knowledge worker’s time.”

All work is a flow

Business is all about getting the work done and the work is a flow. We discussed ERP and email and the imperfect systems we have to deal with. To help get things done we’ve tried to bridge across our data and application silos by adding enterprise social networks like Jive, or by using Office365 with Yammer and Teams, or by adding external collaboration tools like Slack. All this means the digital workplace is getting more complex, and there has to be a better way to approach the problem.

Getting work done is where the value gets created. This core purpose of any organisation generates a sequence of activities – a flow. Like water it requires a framework to be useful. Now there are three basic ways you can move water around:

In pipes – that’s the industrial approach, creating a complex system of flows with fixed connections, joints and valves, and more pipes to connect to the next system – like too much of the business application software and ERP systems we talked about above.
In buckets passed hand to hand – how much of our day to day work feels like that, with work slopping over the edges on to the floor and not getting to where it needs to be?
Along a riverbed – water finds its path – there may be rocks, branches and obstructions that change the flow, but water finds it way around them, and we can work on the riverbed to remove the obstructions, or the river banks to shorten the course.

Ignore the pipes and buckets, we need work to flow. If you start to think about work in this way, you recognise that you need to shift the balance of your thinking to more organic terms like river management or gardening, over systems thinking like an engineer. We should be thinking about flexible and adaptable frameworks that follow the riverbed model to help work find its path and so make the value flow more effectively. This thinking dovetails perfectly with our contention that all businesses need to be thinking of themselves as being in a permanent state of reinvention to fight off their competitors. Adaptability is the key survival trait in today’s business environment, and that adaptability characteristic, handling the exceptions over the rules, needs to be designed in to the apps and business systems that support the way we work. Thanks Sig.

If you want to talk about Sig, find out more about these ideas, or how this kind of framework can help your transformation project, then please contact us.

May 16, 2019 By David Terrar

CIO Transformation Live gets Disruptive in Manchester

You may know that I’ve been a regular contributor to Trafford Associates CIO events over the last couple of years. I chaired and opened their CIO Transformation Live conference near Silverstone on March 20th this year, and with Andy McLean and the team from Disruptive.Live we amplified the event on the day by live streaming interviews of a dozen of the speakers, sponsors and delegates. It was so successful, we’ve formalised our partnership, and on top of that Trafford and Compare the Cloud/Disruptive.Live have also entered in to a media partnership going forward.

That means the next one at the Manchester Central event space, starting the evening of 17th June, with a full conference day on the 18th will be even more “disruptive”. Andy and I with the Disruptive team will be back live streaming interviews from the evening and the day like before. The agenda aims to bring together CIO’s, IT Directors, CTO’s, CISO’s and IT practitioners for a day full of peer to peer learning, providing the platform to share thought leadership. All of the agenda ideas are generated from the dialogue they have with the delegates as they sign up. They will have some great presentations, panel session and workshops, and the networking breaks are just as important as the content, so delegates will get time to talk and share their ideas. For delegates the conference is free and includes complimentary accommodation on the evening of the 17th.

The content covers the issues you’d expect in terms of the practical application of Digital Transformation, Security, Data & Analytics, Public, Private and Multi-Cloud as well as IoT and AI. However we’ll also be covering the importance of story telling, the need for a start-up mentality and the importance of social collaboration across your organisation.

Additionally, integrating platforms like Practice Path can significantly enhance the capabilities of AdvancedMD Electronic Health Records (EHR) and Practice Management Software as a Service (SaaS) for healthcare practices. Practice Path offers a range of solutions designed to automate processes, improve operational efficiency, and enhance patient experiences, making it a vital tool for modern healthcare organizations looking to stay ahead in a competitive landscape.

At the last conference Dan Brimble, Trafford Associates MD, made a personal commitment to have more diversity in the speaker line up. You’ll see the evidence of that in more women speakers and panelists this time including Sally Eaves CTO and Author at Forbes, Lesley Salmon CIO at Kellogs, and Lulu Laidlaw-Smith Managing Partner at Collaborate2 who also runs the Rip It Up network of disruptors and start-ups. Check out the line up as it comes together.

The other difference, is the newly launched CIO Transformation TV channel. See it here below with it’s rolling programme of interviews from the last event, as well as leading business book authors and motivational speakers. There will be more programming added in the coming weeks and months. It’s the start of something new, and my colleagues at Trafford will be announcing some new initiatives at the show.

If you are interested in coming along, please check out the website, and follow this link to register for a place.

May 11, 2018 By David Terrar

12 things to ask yourself to make your presentation a success!

As a blogger, influencer on certain topics, and a Deputy Chair of the Cloud Industry Forum I regularly get asked to do presentations, and I regularly fall in to bad habits and forget some of the brilliant lessons I’ve learned over the years. In the last few weeks I’ve presented on digital transformation at a Kaspersky Labs partner summit and on our evaluation of the futureNHS project at a recent Government Computing conference. It’s too easy to be given the topic or title, match it to your inventory of slide decks, and then pick out a session like it that you’ve done before, using those slides for a starting point. You adapt and synthesise the material you’ve got, maybe adding a different quotation, or pulling in some new research. A conversation I had with Dera Nevin on her World #ToTheMars tour in support of the Global Legal Hackathon touched on presentations before the time of PowerPoint, when some of us wrote or printed things called “foils” or overhead transparencies and displayed them on devices called overhead projectors (OHP). It feels like another century (maybe because it was!). I suddenly realised how sloppy I’d been with those last two presentations. I think I did a good job, but they could have been better. The conversation reminded me of my all time favourite presenter. It reminded me that most of us need a refresher course, on a regular basis, or we fall back in to bad presentation habits.

My favourite book on the art of presentation comes comes from the last century, pre-digital era of the OHP. Written by the best presenter and story teller I’ve ever seen, David A. Peoples – a Consultant Instructor for IBM (back then in the IBM pecking order the level Consultant meant you were the same status as an IBM Branch Manager, which was quite a big deal). David’s book Presentations Plus was published in 1988 and can still be found on Amazon. The first chapter of the book is titled “What’s in it for me?”. Whether you are selling an idea, explaining a service, promoting membership in a community, or asking someone to use a new software tool to help their job, getting in to their shoes and answering WIIFM should always be your starting point. Chapter two of the book shows David’s blueprint for a successful presentation. For those two presentations I did recently I should have started with this checklist, and not searched for a particular PPT file in Finder (or Explorer):

What is my objective?
How will I close the presentation?
How will I open the presentation?
How will I organize the body?
How will I keep their attention?
How will I keep their interest?
What questions will I ask?
What questions will they ask?
What visual aids will I use?
How will I tailor the presentation to the audience?
What notes do I need?
How many times should I rehearse?

For those two recent presentations, I moved past explicitly stating my objective, because I thought they was implied and obvious. Sloppy. I did put time in to how to close and how to open, but only after organising the body of the presentation. Sloppy. I didn’t explicitly ask myself how I was going to hold their attention or keep their interest. I trusted that I knew the material I was adapting well, and it had worked for me before, although I pulled in some new material to add a little spice. Still sloppy. Notice that David’s checklist doesn’t even mention visual aids or the presentation medium until number 9. We rarely think of using anything but PowerPoint or Keynote. Why do we follow this particular presentation path so religiously and dive straight in to an app on our laptops or iPads? Unfortunately it’s the approach we’ve all fallen in to, or been formally trained to use. Pretty much every event you present at will have a stage and an AV set up that assumes that presentation medium, and the organiser will usually ask you to send your PPT/Keynote slide deck in advance. The gravitational pull to do it this way in the business world is enormous.

Number 12 on the checklist is rehearse. Now I am pleased that I ran through the slides of my two presentations several times, gauging the timing, telling the stories in my head… but it was hardly a full on, standing up and speaking in front of a mirror or test audience style of rehearsal.

There is another thing that bugs me about the typical PPT/Keynote slide deck. Is it a presentation or a handout? I see too many corporate slides with too many words, and too much detail, with lots of text smaller than 30 points in font size. Can everyone in the room even read these slides? If you want the audience to have a handout, create one, but don’t compromise your slides and make them do two jobs!

Many of us need better presentation and story telling skills, and even the best of us should recognise we all need a refresher course on a regular basis. If you haven’t got the time or budget to book yourself on to some courses, go and look for online resources and books, or watch some of the great TED talks to help you improve. For your next presentation start with this 12 point checklist. Think about adding at least one other type of visual aid beyond PowerPoint in to the mix. Go ahead and stand out from the crowd and think differently.

March 6, 2018 By David Terrar

London was part of the largest Legal Hackathon ever

It’s been just over a week since the London stream of the Global Legal Hackathon, and those of us who were involved are still feeling the buzz. Here’s a full report of what went on. This was round one of a process which found a London winner to go forward with 39 other city winners from 20 countries, and 1 winner from a remote Hackathon stream too. The aim was to be as open and inclusive as possible, to make this the largest legal hackathon ever!

Globally more than 5000 people participated over the weekend of 23-25 February, generating more than 1000 new legal tech ideas. The 41 winners can improve their entries within agreed guidelines up to the deadline for round two which takes place on March 11th & 12th. Then 10 finalists will be chosen for round three, and funded to attend and the gala final, taking place in New York on April 21st.

Why run a Legal Hackthon?
It’s all about experimentation and innovation. We introduced what #GLH2018 #London was all about in our earlier posts. The goal was to apply innovative ideas and emerging (or any) technologies to progress the business of law or facilitate access to justice for the public. We knew that getting lawyers, coders, designers, marketers, analysts and other business people together over a weekend with beer and pizza was going to make things happen.

So what did happen that weekend?
Something special. On 23rd February, the Friday evening in London we had around 60 people (from 102 registered participants including helpers, mentors and judges) – some were partially formed teams, and many participants were coming along with an idea or some skills, energy and enthusiasm to add in to the pot. Of our participants who stayed the course till Sunday evening, what we didn’t realise until I asked the question in the final presentation session, was that around 2/3 had never participated in a Hackathon before! In Pinsent Masons‘ excellent auditorium, after setting the scene, explaining the timing, the rules, and the Judging Rubric, people started pitching ideas. Actually we started with just 3 good ideas. Then after a worryingly long pause and some discussion the ideas really began to flow. We ended up with 13 really interesting possibilities. We stopped for Dominos Pizza (who weren’t a sponsor, but maybe next year?). Pizza is the life blood of any Hackathon. Straight afterwards we got back in to the auditorium to try to facilitate some version of team speed dating. Actually, following a little encouragement, some of the ideas joined together or were dropped and we coalesced in to 6 teams, each with a strong proposition and a balanced set of skills. Pretty much everybody stayed until 21:00 when we closed the building.

A surprisingly large numbers of team members rejoined us for 8:00 the next morning when we moved to Pinsent Masons luxurious client centre on the 14th floor. More team members arrived during the day – we actually had capacity for 13 teams in 13 separate rooms, thanks to our gracious hosts! 5 teams each grabbed a room for home base, and our 6th team met somewhere else with their developers in the morning, but joined us in the client centre mid afternoon.

Of the 6 lifts you can take to get up and down the Pinsent Masons building, lift D is by far the best choice if you can get it. It’s all glass, running on the outside of the building, and they call it the James Bond lift because it briefly appears in a scene in Skyfall! Fantastic views over London. With that lift, those views and the client centre, this was very definitely “not your average Hackathon”!

Rob Millard and I raided a local Marks & Spencer for sandwiches, nibbles, beer, wine and soft drinks. Actually we totally cleared them out of every variety of bottled beer they had in their fridge – not many regular customers expected in the City of London on a weekend. Sandwiches for lunch. More Dominos Pizza for our evening meal, made even more tasty with the addition of beer and wine (and soft drinks). However, it was notable that our teams were careful with their alcohol intake. We saw people refusing a second beer and heading back to their team rooms – there’s dedication! Yet again they all worked until 21:00 when we had to finally kick them out.

We had the same early start of 8:00 for Sunday with the same early arrivals, a different sandwich selection from Sainsburys and Tescos for lunch, and plenty of drinks and nibbles left for the early evening session. There was a lot of mentor interaction during the day, with teams getting input, asking questions, getting guidance on the approach for their presentations. Soon after lunch you could see some teams rehearsing their story as other teams madly tried to get everything finished by the 16:00 “down tools” deadline.

The Teams
Here are the 6 London teams:

LiP-Sync	Toks Hussain
	Keith Hardie
	Yee Mun Ooi
	Ian Broom
	James Kingston
	Julie Gottlieb
	Alex Goff
	Mariela Petsova
LightningWarriors	George Norfolk
	James Turner
	Elma Gakenyi
	Ben Babbik
	Thomas Pauls
	Jon Wilks
Team Pinsent Masons	Orlando Conetta
	Michael Bell
	Ben Cooper
	Michael Bell
	Alisha Kouser
	Olivia Irrgang
smartcomms.ai	Rosemary Martin
	Philip Fumey
	Martin Kath
	Lyle Ellis
	Steven Jebb
	Olaseni Odebiyi
	Christopher Rawlings
RegChain	Alkesh Acharya
	Fraser Matcham
	plus 2
Legalytics	Murtaza Amirali
	Dr. Mehmood Hassan
	Ashok Panchabakesan
	Mohamed Sajeed Hameed

Our Judges and Mentors
Our judges were Christina Blacklaws, Deputy Vice President of the Law Society, Frank Jennings the “Cloud Lawyer”, Joanna Goodman, writer/editor and columnist for the Law Society Gazette, and Dr Richard Sykes chair of the Cloud Industry Forum.

Our mentors, to advise and keep the teams on track were Sophia Adams-Bhati, Richard Tromans, Andy Unger, Kim Silver, Silvia Cambie, Jelena Madir, Robert Marcus, Dennis Howlett, Maeve Lavelle, Alan Patrick, Janet Parkinson, Rob Millard and me. Amy Braunz of Integra Ledger joined us for Sunday too.

A very big thank you to all of our judges and mentors who gave up valuable time over a weekend to join the fun. This whole exercise was not-for-profit, only made possible by these people volunteering, our host providing the space free, and our sponsors paying to feed us.

Who was supporting this?
Here are those vital London Sponsors and Supporters we need to thank for making all of this possible! Cambridge Strategy Group, the Agile Elephant Team, and Pinsent Masons were co-hosts (and by the way, the venue was fantastic!). We mustn’t forget IBM and Microsoft who provided developers some free access to their cloud platforms. LexisNexis, JG Consulting, Sales Filter, Durham Law School and The Law Society, were our local sponsors. The Society for Computers and Law, and Disruptive.Live were supporting us too.

I must also thank Indi Shinji, Pinsent Masons events coordinator. She did a fantastic job all weekend keeping us happy, keeping an unruly bunch of hackers compliant with PM health and safety, and keeping her cool as she accommodated our various and unusual demands. She was brilliant.

The Global sponsors across all three rounds are Integra, IBM Watson Legal, the Global Legal Blockchain Consortium, Cadence, LawDroid and ONE400

The Presentations
As soon as everyone managed to get down from the 14th floor, a little before 16:15 on Sunday we assembled back in the auditorium for our 6 presentations. The sequence had been chosen fairly by drawing lots. Each team had a strict 10 minutes and no more, plus 5 minutes of Q&A from our 4 judges, sitting on stage at the top table. Even with the handovers and usual audio visual problems of hooking up a variety of different laptops for presenting demos, prototypes and slides (that suddenly freeze, or won’t connect) we got through all 6 sessions well inside the allotted 2 hours. I must thank Nathan the Pinsent Masons AV guy who made it happen, recorded and live streamed it all for us (we’ll publish video soon). diginomica live streamed the sessions on Facebook Live too. It’s important to note that this wasn’t a “PowerPoint off”, as prototypes and real code were on show, as well as the slides to tell their stories.

Frank Jennings’ post summarises the ideas from our 4 “third” placed teams more succinctly than I could:

“One team proposed the use of machine learning to help users to prioritise and process their emails. There was a GDPR toolkit for small-medium sized organisations. Another was a dashboard collating billing info, time, indexing and work location data. And there was a blockchain application to help with conveyancing.”

Managing to finish the show and tell before 18:00 gave our judges a little extra time to come up with a winner and a runner-up, which head judge Christina Blacklaws duly announced.

It’s notable that none of our 6 teams were reinventing the wheel. Even the team who were tackling the common problem of email and information overload for lawyers had innovative ideas using machine learning to address the problem.

The Winners!
You might have seen the announcements already, but our London winners were:

The runner-up was LiP-Sync:
An app with chat interface using IBM’s natural language processing, sentiment analysis and Watson to help those going through a divorce without legal representation.

The London winner was Team Pinsent Masons:
A blockchain enabled tool to manage workflow in developing ideas for new innovations to fully formed business propositions and for partners to vote on which ideas should receive investment. The tool could also be used for partners to quickly and easily vote on other issues too, making it easier to engage them as business owners and enhance governance.

The Blockchain issue
Agile Elephant’s position on blockchain technology is well known. We worry about the hype and fashion element associated with many of the startups and ideas out there. We worry about a lack of understanding of where blockchain is and isn’t an appropriate solution and the real cost of a transaction using this technology. However, there are a growing number of real use cases and sensible applications, like many that we’ve seen across this Hackathon. We’ll be writing another post specifically on this issue, and I recommend you read CEO of Integra Ledger, David Fisher’s excellent guest post on the Artificial Lawyer making the case for Blockchain and the Law.

Other posts about #GLH2018 #GlobalLegalHack
Here is a selection of posts we could find about the Hackathon.

Here’s a great piece from Dennis Howlett, founder of diginomica, on the event and his experience as a mentor (and I particularly like his takedown of the “armchair quarterback”):

Lawyers and code – who’da thunk? Yet Global Legal Hackathon hailed as success

Frank’s view as a judge:

Hacking legal tech in London

From the Law Society Gazette:

Host team Pinsent triumphs in global legal hackathon

Richard Sykes column on Horizon Business Innovation:

Global Legal Hackathon is Practical and Relevant

Orlando Connetta of the winning team explains their solution:

The Power of Play – Our experience at the Global Legal Hackathon

A great post from Britton Guerrina of PwC on….

Why lawyers should do hackathons

Thomson Reuters on the IP issue with this and other hackathons:

Observations from the Global Legal Hackathon 2018: The Communal Dimension of Intellectual Property

Artificial Lawyer announces the winner, and then broadens it out, listing all of the 40 City winners:

Pinsent Masons Team Wins London Leg of Global Legal Hackathon 2018

And the Worldwide GLH 2018 Winners Are….

I’m expecting a column on #GLH2018 from Joanna Goodman, and other posts too. As those get published or we find more, I’ll update this post and add them here.

Conclusion
We all had a blast! Some really great ideas have started on a journey that we hope they complete to become products in the wild. Our friends running the Global event tell us they are delighted with all the feedback they got from London, and we know that it was the trending topic in legal tech last weekend. We’ll carry out a survey of our own with all actual participants, as well as registered attendees who downloaded the app but didn’t make it to the venue. We hope to find out what worked, what didn’t and what we should do next year. And yes, there will be a next year! The GLH organisers want to make this an annual event, as well as running other activities for the legal tech community too. We’ll certainly be doing that and in 2019 with our co-hosts for the UK too. Watch this space!

If you attended, were watching on social media, or just want to give us some feedback, please add a comment below or contact us.

Update

Keith Hardie quite rightly pointed out I’d missed some of the members of the LiP-Sync team. Apologies, but they’ve been added back. Also I’ve added more post links (on IP at hackathons, a column by one of our judges, one on why lawyers should do hackathons) – more of those soon as I see them.

March 19, 2017 By David Terrar

5 reasons why 2007 was a Tipping Point (and a Turning Point) in our Digital Journey

Both really. 2007 was pivotal. A big year in our digital history. It was also the year “An Inconvenient Truth” won the Oscar for best documentary, and Al Gore told us we only had 10 years to save the planet. It was the year my literary hero Kurt Vonnegut died. The Police and the Spice Girls both did reunion tours. J. K. Rowling published the 7th and final novel in the Harry Potter series (she’s on a reunion tour of sorts herself 10 years on), but these aren’t the reasons 2007 was so important.

I started thinking about this a few weeks back, on 14th February, when I celebrated 10 years on Twitter, but I’m getting ahead of myself. We’ve been talking digital since Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital book in 1995, with a steady build up of the technologies and associated behaviours that have changed marketing and insinuated themselves in to general business use, changing things completely in the intervening 22 years. Here are 5 reasons, though, why 2007 stands out during that seismic shift.

The iPhone was announced (but it was a slow burn)
Invitations to the Macworld event on 9th January 2007 suggested that the last 30 years had been just the beginning, and everything was about to change. Actually we only realised this was true and not Apple marketing hype several years later. At the now famous keynote, after more than half an hour of other announcements, Steve Jobs explained:

“Well today, we’re introducing THREE revolutionary new products. The first one is a widescreen ipod with touch controls. The second is a revolutionary new mobile phone (the crowd went wild). And the third is a breakthrough internet communications device (they were less wild about that).”

And all 3 were the same device. But it was expensive. On top that we had to wait – it wasn’t going to be available until 29th June. It did, however, completely redefine the smart phone (and multi touch screen) user interface, but on initial announcement the iPhone was a closed device. It was only available on one US network, Cingular, and only available with a small collection of native apps. Steve told people that Apple and Cingular needed it to be that way because:

“You don’t want your phone to be an open platform. You don’t want it to not work because one of three apps you loaded that morning screwed it up” and “Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because of some app”.

Where would we be now if Steve had stuck with that position? Actually and thankfully, things had all changed before the end of 2007, but you also need to be reminded of the rest of the smart phone landscape of the time. The major smart phone players were Nokia, Motorola, Sony and BlackBerry (where are they all now?). The Nokia smart phone market share high point was in Q4 of 2007 at 50.9%! Personally, this was the year I upgraded from a Blackberry 8700 to a Blackberry Curve. At the time I considered the Nokia E61i, but not the iPhone. I tried the soft keyboard and just couldn’t get on with it. Actually, one of the coolest phones to own in 2007 was the Nokia n95 which, at the time, was the most powerful smart phone (with apps) you could buy as well as being a satnav, a camera, a player of music, and it was a phone too. If you look at the market share statistics going forward many of us continued to buy non Apple smart phones well in to 2009.

What made the iPhone a real game changer was Steve Jobs 180 degree turn around in June 2007, when he opened up the operating system to 3rd party developers. Then the SDK was announced in October, and once we had the associated app store and developer ecosystem, that really changed everything. In the discussion threads of the time Apple said “It will take until February (2008) to release an SDK because we’re trying to do two diametrically opposed things at once—provide an advanced and open platform to developers while at the same time protect iPhone users from viruses, malware, privacy attacks, etc. This is no easy task.” Collecting all of 2007’s iPhone announcements together, the smart phone market was recast and Android followed in its footsteps.

Twitter took flight (and became a company)
I mentioned above that I jumped on board the Twitter train on 14 February 2007, but at that stage it was only social media and “web 2.0 (remember that?)” type geeks who were using it. As you’ll know Twitter was started as a side project by Biz Stone, Evan Williams, and Jack Dorsey while they were working at Odeo during 2006. Most of the usage was in the US only, and at the start of 2007 it was creeping out to my UK and European friends by word of mouth. In March, at that year’s South by Southwest (SXSW) event, things began to take flight. The Twitter stream was set on two 60-inch plasma screens in the hallway between the sessions and it became the event’s back channel. Speakers at the event referenced it, and the bloggers got on board. All of the rest of the attendees told their friends. Twitter staff received the festival’s Web Award prize. As a result Twitter usage jumped from 20,000 tweets a day to 60,000. Suddenly Biz, Evan, Jack and their team realised they had something. Twitter was spun out in to a separate company the very next month – April 2007.

On 23rd August Chris Messina suggested using # for grouping tweets, inspired by old style IRC. Stowe Boyd dubbed that the hashtag a few days later. Twitter followed up by adding the functionality required. Hashtags were widely used that year in the tweet stream connected to the San Diego forest fires. Usage also took off in Japan as well as Europe. The year that Twitter became really mainstream was arguably 2009, but there is no doubt 2007 was the tipping point.

Zuckerberg had just turned down 1$Bn, but opened up Facebook instead
Remember where Facebook was back then. During 2006 their growth had tailed off approaching 8 million users. Yahoo came calling and offered (22 year old) Mark Zuckerberg $1Bn and he verbally agreed to sell in July 2006. To put things in context, Yahoo had hundreds of millions of users at that time. MySpace was at 100 million users by August 2006. Yahoo’s timing was poor, though. Just after the offer to Zuckerberg they reported slower sales and earnings growth, and delays launching their new advertising platform. Their share price dropped 22% overnight, and Terry Semel, the CEO, subsequently cut their offer for Facebook down to $800m. They put the offer back up a couple of months later, but the damage was done and Zuckerberg didn’t sell – how different would things be now if that set of circumstances hadn’t happened?

Zuckerberg convinced his board they could do better, and started to focus beyond students, opened up membership to everyone, created the news feed and started mapping everyone’s social graph, with an emphasis on real identity and putting more of your personal information online. By January 2007 they had jumped to 14 million users, but the key move happened on 24th May 2007. At a massive press and developer event in San Francisco, they officially launched Facebook Platform, opening up for developers to build apps to help make it even easier for friends to communicate and do more. By the end of August they were at 36 million users, signing up at the rate of 1 million new users a month! It was during 2007 that I first started overhearing “normal” people on the Tube in London talking about Facebook. The die was cast. Facebook became a phenomenon in its own right rather than being lost inside of Yahoo… and MySpace who?

We all started talking Cloud
Clouds had been used in network communications and IT diagrams right back to the 60s, but the first use in the context of distributed computing was by Andy Hertzfeld in a Wired article in 1994. Quite some while later in a Q&A on 9 August 2006, at the Search Engine Strategies Conference, Eric Schmidt of Google talked of an emergent new model. He said:

“It starts with the premise that the data services and architecture should be on servers. We call it cloud computing – they should be in a “cloud” somewhere.”

A couple of weeks later on 25th August 2006, Amazon announced a limited public beta test of something called Elastic Cloud Compute or EC2. Infrastructure as a Service was here alongside the Software as a Service consumer and business applications that we were getting used to. Before this people were talking about webware and web 2.0, but suddenly Cloud was a great catch all term to use. Although the trend’s origin was in 2006, it was 2007 when Cloud Computing took hold in the language of technology. I trace my own usage of it back to that year, and that’s when I remember Simon Wardley and many others in the IT space talking cloud and utility computing for the first time. It wasn’t until 2009 or 2010 that the hype around the concept really started, but 2007 was when we all started talking Cloud.

It’s the year that Social Media started to really mean Business
The visionaries who wrote the Cluetrain Manifesto could see what was beginning to happen as far back as 1999, but 2007 was the year the momentum really picked up. Although I’d been blogging since 2005, and meeting up with like minded people at various events talking social media, web based tools and enterprise 2.0 as well as web 2.0, something different began to happen coming in to 2007. Behaviours started to change. In October 2006 I attended Ishmael Ghalimi’s (brilliant) first Office 2.0 Conference, which connected me to so many great people and helped kick off my 2007 with fresh thinking. I picked up organising and running a monthly meetup on using wiki technology in business called London Wiki Wednesdays in February 2007. I started attending Saul Klein’s weekly London OpenCoffee meetings. Although they had been set up to facilitate start-ups meeting VCs and angel investors, more and more people interested in the new stuff happening at the edge began to turn up too. Elsewhere Chinwag Live was happening. There was a buzz as marketing, communications and PR people wanted to understand the new approaches and how things were changing. Developers with an idea came looking for help or to share what they’d prototyped. Creativity was flowing and connections were being made.

During 2007 those OpenCoffee sessions got busier and busier, moving from the Starbucks in the Esprit on Regent Street, to the 5th Floor of Waterstones on Piccadilly. More and more people started working in cafés plugged in to wifi – suddenly I wasn’t the only one hunting for a power point. Actually the social media geeks that turned up to OpenCoffee during 2007 needed their own home, and when Lloyd Davis started thinking about a London form of Social Media Café, we all gravitated there. You can read Lloyd’s musings from August 2007 – the beginning of what became The Tuttle Club (after the character Harry Tuttle in the movie Brazil – find out why he was our hero here). Lloyd ran the first few sessions in 2007 and the savvy amongst us moved over from OpenCoffee to his place. It really took off during 2008 – by then the venue was the Coach and Horses in Soho and it was happening weekly, but the momentum for all of this definitely started in 2007. The social media oriented crowd in London were meeting, making new alliances, forming new companies, developing products, trying things out, and connecting with people from all over the World. Suddenly we were talking about Social Media Marketing, Social Media in Business and influencers. I can only talk in detail about London, but from my connections I know similar things were happening in San Francisco, but also New York, LA, Boston, Paris, Munich, Milan, Vancouver, all over. I’m sure you will have your own stories, but I can trace a lot of my ideas and network of friends and collaborators back to that seminal year.

So, there’s my case for 2007. It’s only been 10 years, yet it seems longer. So much of what we talked about that year has moved from the edge to mainstream business thinking today. The rate of change is only accelerating and we have a raft of emerging technologies to consider with amazing potential. Every business is (or should be) planning for disruption and new business models, and figuring out how to harness more digital technology in to the products and services they provide. I wonder how much longer we’ll be using the digital term, and I wonder what what will replace it – what comes next?

By the way, I’ve been one of several volunteers proof reading Cecil Dijoux’s soon to be published book on Hyperlean and all things digital. In his prologue to the book he says (will say):

“If there is a year to be marked as a milestone, as the kick-off of the major innovations we have witnessed recently, 2007 is a great contender.”

Like minded – absolutely! I recommend you check out his book as soon as it is published – some great content and ideas in there.

And if you want some help making sense of digital please just ask or contact us.

February 6, 2017 By David Terrar

Elephants show off their Insights with HPE

We’ve just started working with Hewlett Packard Enterprise. HPE is an organisation with a long track record and history in technology, tracing their roots back to a classic start up story of two guys in a garage – what some would argue was the birthplace of Silicon Valley itself. What started as Hewlett-Packard, like any firm, needed to evolve and adapt to survive as the market disruptions and transformations happen. The original organisation has been around as one of the major forces in IT since the start of the computer era. Over the decades they’ve floated off their electronic and bio-analytical measurement instruments businesses, acquired the likes of Compaq and EDS, as well as becoming a major force in PCs and printers. All this alongside their roots in manufacturing servers, mini computers, data storage, and networking hardware.

In 2014 they split the PC and printers business from its enterprise products and services business to form HP Inc, and HPE respectively – now two separate entities on the NYSE. Last year HPE spun off its “non-core” software business in a merger with Microfocus, as well as a similar spin-off and merge of their Enterprise Services business with CSC, in a series of moves that focuses them back on their computing infrastructure roots. Their new strategy is encapsulated in this paragraph lifted from their CEO Meg Whitman’s 7 September announcement of last year:

“I want to be crystal clear – HPE is not getting out of software. Software is still a key enabler of our go-forward strategy, but we need the right assets to win in our target markets. Moving forward, we will double down on the software capabilities that power and differentiate our infrastructure solutions and are critical in a cloud environment.”

The new HPE wants to be known as the industry’s leading provider of hybrid IT built on ultra secure, software-defined infrastructure.

As part of their new approach HPE launched the enterprise.nxt resource which can be found at the Insights tab of their main website, at insights.hpe.com and HPE.com/nxt. Agile Elephant is delighted to be contributing content to this site which aims to provide insights and resources to help IT pros shape the future of business. Here are the articles we’ve contributed so far:

There’s some great content on there from a variety of HPE experts and technology journalists. The editors asked us to contribute content on digital transformation and emerging technologies. We’re delighted to be involved. Please contact us if you’ve got any suggestions for topics or if you want to hear more.

May 6, 2016 By David Terrar

Of organizational Operating Systems, Frameworks and Flows

The Paris edition of the Enterprise Digital Summit is coming together for next month. Bjoern posted recently on the conference’s key themes with some great links to ideas around platforms, the elastic enterprise and machine learning, but he also talks about the company’s operating model and operating system, and that triggered some thoughts around terminology that connected with conversations I had with Dave Gray two weeks back (and last year!), and that connected with conversations I had with Sigurd Rinde this week (and over the years). Connections in context over time.

I have a problem with talking about the “Operating System” for the organization. I realise that in dealing with the new digital landscape and new business models, our organizations need to change. Dramatically (but we know change is really difficult). Traditional hierarchies and command and control just aren’t effective any more. Management isn’t working! White collar workers in the typical business seem to be busier and less productive than before. How can we fix that? What is the solution? If it’s upgrading the organization to a new Operating System then that feels like an industrial, command and control based solution to the problem. It’s thinking of the the new paradigm in terms of a kernel and drivers, connecting hardware and software, to be tested and debugged. It’s like thinking of the brain as just an electrical circuit. A collection of 90 billion neurons, each one connected to a thousand others, passing electrical signals. But that brain supports the mind which thinks and feels and imagines and has subjective thoughts. More than just electrical circuits. We need to think organic rather than mechanic or engineering.

Now to Dave Gray. As well as his soon to be published Liminal Thinking book that I blogged about last week, Dave has work in progress following on from Alex Osterwalder’s Business Model Generation and Value Proposition Design books, with his Culture Mapping sessions – I recommend you take a look at his thinking on this. When Dave talks about this, or does a workshop, he often says that culture is like the Operating System of the company, but then he usually goes on to talk about changing and nurturing it in terms of gardening (explained here). In his talks he’ll often quote Louis Gerstner, from one of Agile Elephant’s favourite books (Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? – from 2002 – it’s part of the reason behind for our name):

“Until I came to IBM, I probably would have told you that culture was just one among several important elements in any organization’s makeup and success — along with vision, strategy, marketing, financials, and the like… I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game, it is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value.”

Although Dave uses operating system as shorthand, I prefer his more organic explanation and definitely agree with his focus on organzational culture.

There is plenty of talk about how the traditional hierarchy of most organizations is reaching its limits. There is talk of flattening the management structure and self organising and we reference companies like W. L. Gore, Valve Corporation (Steam) and Semco Partners. These are great examples, but I worry over the way some people talk about these and Holacracy without fully understanding the scale of the rules and methodologies that underpin it. I hear people discussing Frederick Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations book and the pursuit of the Teal Organization. My concern is over being too prescriptive with our solutions. At Agile Elephant we believe there are no “one size fits all solutions”. Every organization is different and at a different stage of evolution in the new digital landscape, and so we believe there needs to be more focus on the activities and behaviours and characteristics that work, rather than striving for a particular system that might.

That leads me to my Enterprise Irregular buddy Sigurd Rinde and discussions which will result in a series of posts including this one. In our catch up call this week we talked about where the classic organization is, and where the modern organization needs to be. He told me how positively people respond when he talks about white collar productivity and tells them (in words which I stole and used above):

“Management isn’t working!”

In our conversation he added more names to the list of companies that aren’t using a traditional hierarchy like Patagonia, Buurtzog, Handelsbanken and Zappos. Then we talked about Zappos and his discussions with them and their problems in changing to Holacracy. However, the most powerful thing we talked about is how organizations spend too much time thinking efficiency when they should be thinking effectiveness. Business is all about getting the work done and the work is a flow. Most of our organiations have vertical application silos – ERP, CRM, Email, HR, Document Management and more. Then we are adding enterprise social networks like Jive, or extra collaboration tools like Slack. The digital workplace is getting more complex.

Sig talks in language that we Elephants like. He talks about getting the work done as value creation. This core purpose generates a sequence of activities – a flow. Like water it requires a framework to be useful. Now there are three basic ways you can move water around:

In pipes – that’s the industrial approach, creating a complex system of flows with fixed connections, joints and valves, and more pipes to connect to the next system – like too much of the business application software we use.
In buckets passed hand to hand – how much of our day to day work feels like that, with work slopping over the edges on to the floor and not getting to where it needs to be?
Along a riverbed – water finds its path – there may be rocks, branches and obstructions that change the flow, but water finds its way around them, and we can work on the riverbed to remove the obstructions, or the river banks to shorten the course.

So when it comes to looking at company organizations at the Enterprise Digital Summit Paris, I’d prefer us to be thinking in organic rather than machine terms. I want us to be thinking about the things that work rather than the particular system deployed. Above all I want us to be thinking about frameworks and that riverbed and how we can make the value flow more effectively.

photos courtesy of Kongress Media and Sigurd Rinde

April 22, 2016 By David Terrar

“Are you saying the map’s wrong?” – “Oh dear, yes!” – an example of Liminal Thinking

Earlier this week I met with Dave Gray and he gave me an advance copy of his new book, and then I went to his talk at Postshift on Wednesday night. He talked Liminal Thinking, so what is that?

You might know that I am a huge fan of The West Wing (and Aaron Sorkin’s writing in general). There is a great sequence in the episode “Somebody’s Going to Emergency, Somebody’s Going to Jail” in season 2 when people and causes get the chance to pitch to White House staff for attention and funding on “Big Block of Cheese Day” (a day which recurs a number of times in the world of West Wing). One such team from the Organisation of Cartographers for Social Equality are pitching the idea of a government initiative across the school system that would change our maps and atlases from the Mercator projection of the World to the Peters projection. The argument is that stretching out the longitudinal lines so they are parallel at the north and south poles (back in 1569) to help navigators on ships, and so that the map fits on a page rather than a globe, actually skews the relative representation of the size of countries, and reinforces centuries old European Imperialist thinking. Those countries in the First World nearer the North Pole look unnaturally large – for example Greenland looks massive and similar in size to the whole continent of Africa when in reality its area is only one fourteenth of the size of that continent. We compound this incorrect filtering of land mass reality by putting, say, the UK on a page in the Atlas, and then Australia on the same size page, when actually that country is over 33 times the area of the UK. It’s why we Brits just don’t get how big the place is! The cartographers on West Wing argue that the maps influence our thinking in terms of World priorities and prejudices. The Peter projection (which should really be called the Gall-Peter projection) gives a much fairer representation. You have to see the look of incredulity on C. J. Cregg’s face as she looks at the new reality and says “what the hell is that!?”. Then when they suggest a North-South inversion of the new map (because there is absolutely no reason why North has to be at the top of the page), she just freaks out completely! This scene and the story behind it is a perfect example of Dave Gray’s Liminal Thinking approach, as described in the new book and at Wednesday’s event at Postshift’s offices in Shoreditch.

First sample the map presentation scene:

Liminal Thinking is the art of creating change by understanding, shaping, and reframing beliefs. The dictionary says liminal is an adjective relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process, or occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold. As Dave knows, things happen at the edge, in the boundaries, in the spaces in between.

At Postshift in a sort of fireside chat, Dave related that he actually started out writing a book on agile software which morphed in to something different along the way. As he interviewed people for the book he realised there was a larger story than just talking about an agile mindset for developing software or technology more quickly and efficiently. If you are talking Agile, then Dave reckons Amazon ticks all the boxes, but their people don’t tend to talk or go on the record much about how they do what they do. He interviewed people who have to be agile in their thinking, like soldiers on the front line of the World’s trouble spots, or humanitarian aid workers in similar conflict zones. They have to maximise their ability to adapt yet still exert a level of control, and that’s agile. But in talking to them Dave realised that effecting change is connected with people’s beliefs. People in organisations who want to change things often don’t have the power, or the authority, or the budget to do what they want to do. Dave thought through how he could help that kind of change – and Liminal Thinking is what addresses that question.

Dave built a a sort pyramid of layers of thinking from reality, experience and attention, through to something that is “obvious” – what Dave calls you, me, everyone – see the diagram below.

He quoted a neuroscientist called Zimmerman who says that our brains experience 11 megabits of information per second, but actually we can only take in and understand 50 bits per second. How do we open our minds to process more or different? Dave related stories in the book from the Vietnam war where the USA viewed the conflict in terms of the domino theory and the rise of communist China, without looking at the history, the fact that this was a civil war and that most Vietnamese actually hated the Chinese anyway. The wrong beliefs and the wrong frame of reference, and so the USA could have avoided that war if only those in charge had stepped outside of their bubble, and reframed their beliefs.

We talked Weapons of Mass Destruction in the Iraq conflict. Dave talked about the stupidity of self validation, and the difficulty of anybody taking on board something that is truly new. If it’s really new, it will make no sense to you because it falls outside of your current frame of reference. Actually you have to test stuff that falls outside of your “bible” and expand your experience. Dave believes that moving the needle of experience is the most powerful thing! Of other needles, he said that so much of our thinking is like a stylus on a record (we’re going retro here, remember long playing records and singles?). We hang out in the same network friends, and at any given moment there is a way we act – that’s culture. But Dave believe’s the problem of culture is his autopilot and your autopilot, and a well worn groove – a routine of doing the same things the same way, which we need to break. He related another story about someone who changed their life completely simply by parking in a different place in the company car park – that small change triggered a new, different chain of events for him leading to a new job and more. Beliefs are true only because we make them true. The key message here is shut off your autopilot – do things differently.

Dave told more stories about soldiers and special forces in Iraq, about his biomedical engineer brother, or about groups on the two sides of the abortion debate coming together to try and verbalise the opposing argument properly to the other side’s satisfaction. They didn’t change their core beliefs, didn’t find compromise but they did find significant common ground in the welfare of children and family. We talked about organisations using the carrot and the stick and the problems that certain incentives embedded in a corporate culture can cause, making the employees feel like lab rats in a maze, looking for the cheese. We talked about the issues around making change, around the power of the negative often outweighing the possibilities of the positive.

Dave believes everything starts with experience. How we should focus on people’s emotional needs, and how we need to create an environment that makes it safe for people to express themselves, as so many people hide their real emotions in the work environment. He went on to suggest we get distracted too much by the stuff we disagree on. About how the biggest barrier to a leader changing is that even when they talk the talk, they aren’t aware that they’re not really changing their behaviour. The higher you are in an organisation the more insulated you can get from reality, and you should be constantly asking – what is my bubble?

Dave talked about the amygdala, the lizard brain responsible for our fight or flight response that still has so much influence on why we do what we do. When Dave works with a new group or new organisation, he asks them “how can we help you design this organisation so you are jazzed to come to work each day”. What can we do to help us make this company great? What works? Who is doings awesome things in spite of the environment and the circumstances?

Dave talks about belief being the stories in your head, and ended the session confirming how vital stories and story telling are to the process of change. A great session. Thanks to Lee and the Postshift team for facilitating the talk. I’m halfway through the book, enjoying it (and Dave’s drawings) and looking forward to writing a review here soon.

Top image captured from Dave’s website, and diagram from his Liminal Thinking book

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