Failure to Account for Jars of Raspberry Jam (in a Sandstorm)

Clerks and Copy-Boys or Winning the War? You can’t have both. A friend recently sent me a copy of a letter from the Duke to Wellington, August 1812, to the British Foreign Office, London. Just to put the letter in context. At the time, Wellington was on the way to Madrid, ‘dragging an army over […]

Getting Excited About Governance

Governance isn’t one of those words you’d typically associate with ‘enthusiasm’ or dare we say it ‘excitement’. Strange as it may seem, governance is something that we (Kate and Chris) do get excited and enthusiastic about. We probably spend more time talking about it than might be considered reasonable. There are good reasons for this. […]

The Rule of 1% is Dead….. well not quite round these parts.

After wondering in previous posts about how many people actually participate in online communities of practice, my son helpfully pointed me in the direction of the 1% rule of Internet culture. Fantastic, this felt like the world of 90% lurkers I recognise. Then the BBC goes and burst my bubble. In their online spring briefing […]

Crowdsourcing, could this be the groovy new name for staff ideas schemes?

Recently someone important told me that Crowdsourcing was “old hat, and we’ve moved on from that”. What they had moved on to wasn’t explained but I don’t think we’ve even scratched the surface of Crowdsourcing in the world I occupy. Fortunately I went to an IdeasUK event last week which was focussed on how social media […]

X Factor (not quite) Public Review as an Improvement Technique

Well, last week I got a taste of what I think it might be like to be an X-Factor contestant: Stand up in front of some highly experienced people; Deliver your best amateur effort; Listen carefully to what they have got to say about it; Then: laugh/cry/high-five/run away/smile graciously (delete as appropriate). No, it wasn’t […]

Will things look different in the morning?

The next time you see this blog it will be better it is now (hopefully). Tonight is going to be a bit of a watershed for me: It’s been five months since I started blogging; I’ve managed to produce 40 posts in that time; and Tonight I’m up for public review. I’ll be at the […]

“poxy communities of practice…” another reason for slow progess with social media?

A while back I wrote about why I thought lots of public servants  don’t use social media at work. I’ve also met people from the private sector who are prevented from using it for similar reasons, explained as ‘lost productivity’ or ‘security issues’.  Not a great position to take when  this infographic of Cisco research (via stoweboyd.com) suggests that 56%of young professionals […]

Off Island, IdeasUK Conference 2011

This week I’ve been spending some time ‘off island’ at the IdeasUK 25th annual conference.  It has been brilliant. IdeasUK is an unusual organisation. It was set up 25 years ago as a not for profit, membership led association, for organisations interested in staff suggestion schemes. Their original focus is still hugely relevant, particularly when […]

Can a Malcolm Gladwell ‘Tipping Point’ help our Movement?

Last week was about the difficulties of creating a movement, the mission impossible community of practice. Here is some hope in the form of Malcolm Gadwell’s book The Tipping Point. This has lots of useful information that could help our movement flourish. Malcolm Gladwell To get an idea of what I’m talking about have a look […]