Wearing the company colours

It is our work's Christmas Party today and I bought a new shirt for the occasion. I bought it several months ago.

It is, like most of the shirts that I have bought in recent years, from 1 like no other because they make exceedingly good shirts and I can now afford to buy them. Most are kept back for special occasions, like the BCSA Garden Party, but a few are in general use and get worn to work about once a month.

As soon as I saw the one I am wearing today I had to buy it because it is very like our company branding. This is the home page of our website.

About a year ago we refreshed our brand and part of that is an image of a network of dots and lines on a dark blue background.

This is the shirt I had to wear today.

As this is a company shirt it will now go into the work section of my wardrobe (just right of centre) and will make regular appearances in the office from now on. Normally 1 like no other shirts go into the best section of my wardrobe, higher even than my Liberty shirts, which is on the left and is separated from my common work shirts by my trousers.

I am an ESTP

I had to do a Myers-Briggs test for work and while I am extremely sceptical of such things I took it seriously and answered honestly. As when I did a Belbin test ten years ago, I found the simplicity of the questions difficult given the complexity of real life and in many questions the correct answer would have been, "It depends on the situation", but I had to give one simple numerical score. I tried to answer for an "average" situation but I am not sure that I succeeded.

The end result is that I came out as an ESTP.

As with the Belbin, I recognise some of this but less so. Thinking and Perceiving I have no quarrel with. Sensing is not bad but the word "traditional" surprises me a little. Extraverted I do not get. Some of that is true some of the time but I do not see that as a fair summary.

It did not help that the evaluation tool helpfully listed some famous ESTP people that I could compare myself to.

This was not a good day to be linked to Kevin Spacey.

My first day at sparesFinder

Today I started my new job as a Project Manager for sparesFinder. We can help solve your company's materials data challenges and provide the tools you need to deliver significant savings to take you beyond data cleaning.

Materials Data Management (MDM) is not quite a completely new area for me as I had some exposure at both Dwr Cymru Welsh Water I managed a small project that maintained asset details in a GIS and at EDF Energy where I worked at a coal-fired power station for a few months and everything they did was about managing assets. I see MDM as an excuse to learn something new which I will both enjoy and expect to be good at.

One of the attractions of the job is that is is based in Teddington. I mapped my walk to work this morning and it came out at 2.33 km and took 22:24 minutes walking at an unhurried pace. I plan to walk to/from work every day and will be experimenting with longer routes, though I will probably always have to cross the river using the Teddington Footbridge, so that I can get more steps in and can spend more time listening to podcasts.

For the first time in quite a while I am genuinely looking forward to coming in to work and I hope to be here for a good few years until the lure of doing nothing finally pulls me into retirement.

Leaving CGI after nine years

Just over nine years after rejoining I have left CGI (they bought Logica in August 2012). That is the longest time that I have spent at one company and while I could have been thinking about retiring I have chosen to go for a new challenge instead.

I have enjoyed much of my time at Logica/CGI and I look back fondly at my time at Nokia Siemens Network where I was able to combine interesting work with travel to some interesting places like Moscow, Kiev, Dubai and Rabat, being a project manager at EDF Energy in two challenging spells and spending a couple of years in Cardiff in a decent hotel close to a great curry house.

There were less good times and in the end that is why I left. When I rejoined Logica it was as a member of the UK Consulting team and it was the consulting role that had brought me back. I went through several reorganisations after that, spending time in teams with names like Professional and Technical Services (PTS), before drifting into internal roles first as an expert on the financial side of preparing bids and finally as an internal consultant on Continuous Improvement where I had no power or influence and nobody was really interested in making improvements.

When asked in job interviews why I was looking to leave CGI I came up with the boiled frog analogy, I had joined as a business consultant and through gradual changes had ended up in a job that I would not have applied for when looking for a job nine years ago. There were some specific pushes too, I was in almost continual conflict with my manager (insufferable micro-manager and patronising with it) and I had another concern that I cannot mention here.

Having come to the conclusion that I was in a job that I did not want, and did not need, I decided to leave. My final day was 30 April 16.

As it happens, I got another job soon after I resigned but there is a two week gap between me leaving CGI and starting there and I will wait until I have actually started before telling you about the new job.

Why I am not working for the London Borough of Hackney

There was enough going for the Senior Business Analyst / PM position at London Borough of Hackney for me to take a shot at it. I liked the idea of being based in one location in Central London, it was a job I had done before at Lambeth and so I knew that I could do it well in my sleep, the London Overground goes directly there from Richmond, it would put me in walking distance of Arcola Theatre and Hackney is a part of London that I fancied learning more about.

The application process was not that painful (unlike LB Merton) and so I went for it and was not in the least surprised to be called to an interview. The email invited me to Hackney on 13/03/2015 09:30 at Robert House, 6-15 Florfield Road, Hackney, London, E8 1DT for a morning that would consist of a presentation (full brief and preparation time will be given on the day), a face to face interview followed by a technical test. The entire process will last approximately 3 hours.

I had to take a day's holiday to go but that seemed a fair investment and, besides, it would give me the afternoon do so something useful, like go and look at the wedding dresses exhibition at the V&A.

The travel worked as well as expected and I was there in good time. Time enough to find the place and maybe to have a coffee too.

The problems started with finding the venue. This was clearly the address though there was nothing to say that this was Robert House or that the ICT department had offices there.

I went around the other side of the building looking for the main door. I did not find that though I did find a couple of smokers who explained that this was indeed the front door and they told me that if I looked carefully at the small hand-written labels on the door bells that one did say "ICT".

It would have taken just one person with a little pride in working there to have printed an A4 sheet and to laminated it.

Once inside I was greeted nicely and given a cup of coffee while I waited. While waiting I had a look at the notices around the entrance. One promoted some rather bland corporate aspirations. The poster was dated 2005.

I was tempted to leave at that point but I had nothing else to do that morning so I thought that I would go along with it.

For the first hour I was left in a dark room with some flip-chart paper and pens to prepare a presentation. I know how to do presentations so that held no fear for me but the case study that I had to work on did because it reminded me too much of the mistakes that we made at Lambeth almost ten years previously, the mistake of thinking that using CRM and Biztalk gives you business transformation. The project was to move one specific type of call, missed waste collection, from the department to a contact centre. Nothing wrong with that, as far as it goes, but to call it business transformation was fanciful, not least because missed waste collection is not a business process itself, it is dealing with the failure in the business process of waste collection. What Hackney should be doing is looking to eliminate missed waste collection calls, not to handle them better - doing something wasteful efficiently is still wasteful.

Hackney's lack of understanding on real transformation, and change management which is a key part of it, became more obvious during the interview. I decided to take an arrogant and slightly aggressive approach because if I was going to work there then I had to be sure that I would be allowed to make the changes required. I was slightly surprised that the person attempting to interview me on change management had such a little grasp of the subject and I had to lecture him on continual process improvement at one point, much to the amusement of his colleague. I also had to remind the interviewers more than once that I had published papers on business transformation on slideshare.

The interviewers also made the common mistake of forgetting that they were being interviewed too and they had a job to do to convince me to come and work at Hackney. They did not even try.

The last hour was the most bizarre.

I was left alone in another room, this time with an A4 pad, some biros and a set of questions that seemed deliberately designed to have nothing to do with the job whatsoever.

If there was ever a set of questions drawn up by a committee then this was it. The questions ranged all over the place and varied from the simple yes/no type to those that required a longer answer.

I was applying for the position of Business Analyst / Project Manager and was being asked questions on EU procurement rules, ITIL and technical architecture.

Funnier still, some of the questions had simple factual answers, e.g. ITIL definitions, and I was alone in the room with an iPhone. Cheating would have been all too easy. My final comment on my answer sheet was to point this out.

There is no way that these questions could have had a meaningful impact on the recruitment processes and it worried me greatly that Hackney thought that it could.

Apart from the courtesy of the smokers and the lady who looked after me during the morning, nothing about Hackney suggested professionalism. I had not quite finally decided to let them sink on their own as I thought that, given a chance and some support, that I could help them to get things moving in the right direction.

Then I got home and saw the email that they sent me during the morning which I have presented as it was sent to me.

The next stage in the process is Occupational Assessment on Wednesday 18^th March 2015. 

I attach…

·         An invitation letter

·         Venue details

·         Guidance sheets for the assessments you will be taking

·         Practice Leaflets for the tests you will be taking (electronic copies released under licence from SHL April 2013) Please see information in Invitation Letter and in 'speech bubble' on each Practice Leaflet as to which tests apply

 If you have any special needs, which might affect your performance in an assessment or interview, please contact the Assessment Team before the day so we can agree what might be done to support you. Please do NOT assume that we will have been given any information about special needs that you have explained on your application

Please confirm that you have received this message and that you will be attending

I look forward to seeing you on the 18^th  

The summary of all this was that I was being asked to resit the 11+ by somebody who thinks that using three colours, two forms of highlighting and no fullstops is the way to write an email.

I had a quick look at the test questions and they were as simple as I feared, they were very much at the 11+ level, an exam I passed almost fifty years previously before going to pass exams at O Level and higher in English and getting a degree in Mathematics. I had also been work at Principle Officer level for thirty years.

In my application I had mentioned things like being Chair of Governors of a school for several years and having articles published in several journals so I had already given them the evidence of my capabilities by giving them facts that were in the public domain and easily verifiable.

I was deeply insulted. It was rather like asking a seasoned F1 driver to take take the standard driving test to prove that they can handle a car. If you do that then then good drivers will recognise the insult and walk away and only those that find driving a little difficult will be prepared to take the test. Hackney has a recruitment process that is designed to deter the best and appoint the mediocre.

I immediately decided to give up on Hackney as a lost cause and I let them know that I would not be taking the tests. We had spent some time in my interview talking about identifying waste in processes while they were oblivious to the considerable waste in the recruitment process that they were using.

Even if I had taken the tests (and more holiday to do so) then that would have told Hackney nothing. Obviously I would have passed impressively but so should everybody else who had been shortlisted. They would have spent time and money to learn nothing, a clear example of waste.

And this was the worst type of waste as it actually destroyed value. The point of the recruitment process is to find good people so doing something that pisses them off is beyond silly.

Finally, at no point during the process was I asked what I thought about it and, as I had had to explain to them during my interview, feedback is vital in making processes better (explanation here). Their recruitment process is remarkably awful but if they do no ask candidates about it then they will never find out.

Hackney said that they wanted to transform but nothing in their behaviour suggested that they have the slightest idea what business transformation is or what they need to do to make it happen. That is why I am not working for them.

Why I am not working for the London Borough of Merton

I briefly toyed with the idea of applying for the position of Business Improvement Advisor at the London Borough of Merton but the recruitment process was so tortuous that I only completed enough of it so that I could tell them that.

As is generally the case these days, the application form was all online and I sat down one evening to give it a go with my LinkedIn profile and CV at hand to remind me when and where I had done things.

I was first worried when the system asked for details of all the exams I had ever taken and the grades that I had got. I did my O and A Levels forty years so the results then are hardly relevant to what I can do now and, besides, I cannot remember which ones I took much less the grades that I got in them. I was not prepared to spend the time finding out or to enter all the details so I bent the rules a little and under "other" just wrote that I took 9 O Levels and 3 A Levels.

My breaking point came in the next section, my employment history. Again the structured form was over engineered, which meant that it took a long time to complete, and it asked for irrelevant information that I did not know, things like my salary at all of my previous jobs. I only have a rough idea of what my current salary is and there is no chance of me remembering or being able to find out what I was earning at, say, IBM fifteen years ago.

Not surprisingly my application was rejected. I wanted to be sure that they knew that it was a deliberately incomplete application and  why this was so I wrote and told them.

I would have been a very good Business Improvement Advisor for Merton but, as my feedback on the application process said, I lost interest in applying for the post as the application process was truly dreadful. If I was put off by this then it is quite possible that others were too and so you may well have missed other excellent candidates. You might want to try and fix that.

I do not know if Merton will change anything (I doubt it) but at least I made them aware of the problem.

My CV as a word cloud

I had generated a word cloud from my CV using Wordle before and I thought that it would be interesting to do so again to see if the changes that I had made to it, particularly the addition of my recent projects, would make much difference. It did.

The work that I do does not vary that much between assignments but the job titles that I am given do, and so I am pleased to see that the new Wordle shouts out "Business Consultant". It is also clear that I usually work in projects.

What is missing is my interest in Knowledge Management. That is because I do most of that that out of hours with the likes of LIKE, TFPL and Gurteen and so it is not in my CV which just covers what I am paid to do in the office. I must work on that.

TFPL Connect: What a difference a web makes

I had various reasons for wanting to go to this TFPL Connect meeting.

I had missed some TFPL Connect events for various reasons, the subject matter interested me and the speaker Dame Wendy Hall and I studied Maths at Southampton University around the same time, we were not in the same year but I think we overlapped.

At first I was wait-listed, as were lots of other people, but I was saved when the high demand caused TFPL to move the event to a bigger venue so that more people, people like me, could attend.

We were in the Grand Connaught Rooms which made it an easy walk for me down from Kings Cross. That's my excuse for being the first person there. That also meant that I was the first to tuck in to the sparkling wine and nibbles that I was not expecting to see until after the talk.

The pre-talk drinks included the usual networking and I spoke to several people that I knew. Some of them claimed that this was their first TFPL event, this surprised me as I had known them for so long and I had assumed that everybody in the LIKE and Gurteen circles also went to TFPL events.

After the small talk we were politely ushered in to the conference room for the main talk.

Wendy Hall took us through a brief history of the internet, which has only had a brief history. She spent a bit of time, understandably on the start of the story. Understandably because she has worked with Tim Berners-Lee for some years (not quite from the beginning) and understandably because getting the initial architecture right was key to its rapid adoption and growth.

For the mid-life of the internet, Wendy used this familiar chart and teased out some key points from it, especially the relationships between the developments.

For example, Google could only exist once there were sufficient pages on the internet and enough people reading them to warrant a search engine and for there to be enough links between the pages for their algorithm to work. Similarly the (relatively) recent rise of applications like Facebook and Twitter has needed the increased bandwidth and mobile capabilities.

The growth in the internet is now driven by individuals. It is ordinary people who are uploading photos, swapping links and writing comments.

Wendy then told us something about her current work and her expectations for the future.

The next step is linked data, rather than linked pages and while corporates led on publishing documents it is government agencies that are leading on open data.

In the UK, these initiatives are spearheaded by the Open Data Institute founded by, that man again, Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt, also of Southampton University. I saw him talk on the semantic web at the Royal Society and was not convinced then. I'm still not convinced.

Massive Open On-line Courses (MOOCS) have the possibility to reform education by making good quality courses widely available at low cost.

Wendy would like to build a Web Observatory to explore and map the web. We have built it but we do not know much about how it behaves.

Wendy spoke for the best part of an hour and then took several questions. It was a good talk and the questions took us in to some interesting areas of speculation, such as what might happen with the increasing amount of personal data that is being collected on us all.

I would have preferred to have spent more time talking about the future but the background is important and not everybody there had lived through it.

After the talk there was more networking and more drinks to go with it, possibly more than was strictly necessary, and some very nice canapés too. I spoke to lots of people including several that I had not met before. As always, these conversations were an important part of the evening.

Having been the first to arrive I was among the last to leave which is proof enough of how much I loved the event.

TFPL has gone though several changes in the years that I have known them, including three owners and more offices than that, but they have kept the KM community that started, for me, with the Bath Club going all that time. Long may they do so.

LIKE 50: The Business Case for Collaboration

LIKE meetings have had a few homes in the organisation's short life and in November it moved again, this time to The Queen's Arms in Victoria. This was chosen to be convenient for our speaker, Jacob Morgan author of The Collaborative Organisation, who was a keynote speaker at the Online Information 2013 conference that was happening nearby.

The venue may have been different but everything else about the evening was the same, which meant that it was another good evening. I was sat at the risotto table at one end of the room with a good view of my fellow diners and the speaker.

LIKE meetings are always interactive, though the means of interaction varies, and Jacob kept to this rule by asking us for examples and questions as he told us his story arguing the case for collaboration at work. This was familiar territory for most LIKErs but Jacob introduced some new perspectives which kept the familiar fresh and interesting.

As usual, I tried to keep notes of what the speaker said, comments made by other people and my own thoughts. I was also trying to tweet some of the highlights and to take some photos of the event. And they say men cannot multi-task.

This is what I captured during our conversation on conversations.

The Millennials bring new ways of working into companies.

Older staff are leaving taking their knowledge with them.

Networks now break outside of the company which used to be the natural boundary of employees' interactions. Now it is often as easy to communicate with somebody in another company as in your own.

The Work/Life balance rules changed. The company used to set the rules, now employees do, e.g. deciding on when and where to work.

Work is still structured in some ways, e.g. need to check work emails etc.

Some organisation just don't get it, e.g. banning Facebook at work. Millennials would rather earn less and and work the way that they want to than work for dinosaur companies. The balance of power has shifted towards employees with the right skills.

Zombie workers is an issue. Companies make employees work at home to save accommodation costs and then leave them alone. They become disengaged employees with little loyalty to the company.

Paying for education is not an obvious benefit especially if the job is boring. Job security is a myth, so why do a boring job? Portfolio working is a new option.

Big companies are relatively new phenomenon (created by industrialisation and globalisation) and are inherently inefficient and/or leaderless, e.g. a leader cannot possibly direct 200k people.

Yammer works as a business tool but is not a social network. Face to a Face is still is important.

It may have been familiar territory but it was fertile territory and it produced some new insights, particularly with respect to the diminishing role of companies.

CGI Walk Around the World 2013

Today was the annual CGI Walk Around the World where we were all encouraged to go out for a walk lunchtime in groups at each of our locations. The aim was health, team building and fun. I am not working at a CGI location but we had a team meeting arranged for lunchtime and I managed to persuade the boss to move this from an office to the path running through St Mellons Business Park.

It worked well as a bit of team building and some fun but was much less walking than I would normally do on a warm and sunny lunchtime so the health aspect lacked a little.

We stopped for a team photo by one of the little bridges for no other reason than they are painted red which is the colour of the CGI logo.

Just for the record, I am the only person wearing both a jacket and a tie.

I'll miss Cottam Power Station

My current assignment ends later this month, and I'll miss it.

For the last six months I have been travelling up to Cottam Power Station near Retford in Nottingham for a few days every week, staying in Ye Olde Bell in Barnby Moor where I've got very familiar with the menu.

The travel has been a pain, it takes me almost four hours door-to-door, and so has being away from home during the week, but there have been some compensations.

After years of working in nondescript offices it has been good to work somewhere that has a clear purpose. Power stations are designed solely with function in mind and things like office space are definitely a secondary consideration. The office I normally work in is a clutch of portakabin, and that's fine.

The scale of the place is impressive. The pink (!) building is the turbine hall where four parallel systems produce a shade over 2Gw when running at full capacity; market conditions and engineering considerations dictate just how much is actually produced.

The large complex on the left is what National Grid uses to manage the high voltage network, and I have no idea what it does.

The power station I understand better as I have been taken around all the main component, that took over three hours and was one of the best days at work that I have ever had.

It has also been good working with and alongside engineers and fitters who understand the power station and what it needs to keep going. This is so very different from the common office life that is divorced from any reality and pushes paper just because that is what the job is.

I won't miss the travelling or the hotel living but I will miss the people and the fantastic machine that they work in.

Team photo at Cottam

I normally avoid having my photograph taken as assiduously as I avoid taking pictures of other people but sometimes there is no escape and sometimes the results are fine.

This is me (far right in a suit!) with the rest of the project team that I was working with at Cottam Power Station. In the background you can see the bases of some of the cooling towers and the conveyor belt that takes the coal into the station.

They were a good team to work with and an interesting one too. Most of them were based at the station permanently, and some had been there for a while, and so they had a completely different, and vital, perspective of the way that things should and could work.

Getting lost in and around Barnby Moor

Spending months away from home is part of the life of the Consultant for Hire and since March I have been spending a lot of time at two coal-fired power stations on the Trent in Nottinghamshire.

That means spending two to four nights a week in a hotel and with not many to choose from I find myself encamped in Ye Olde Bell in Barnby Moor, jut outside of Retford.

The hotel is charming and to a high standard, it caters for the events market, e.g. weddings, as much as it does us corporate regulars.

The big down-side is the location. Barnby Moor is just a hamlet and there is nothing there apart from Ye Olde Bell. There is another pub but that looks a mess from outside so I have not been tempted in.

I have managed to get out for a few early evening walks, rain permitting, and these have all have a familiar theme. West Barnby is bounded by the A1 on one side and the main East Coast railway line on the other. This severely restricts the walking options, but I have managed to find some.

On my usual route the railway line has to be crossed twice and there are not many places to do this. I was hoping for a footbridge, or even a foot level-crossing, but I have to settle for the two traffic crossings that are a couple of miles apart.

Once off the roads and away from the railway I am plunged in to rural walks like this.

And this is exactly what I am looking for in a rural walk. The path is well defined so there is little risk of being stuck in the corner of a field looking for a way out (it happens), there is no physical construction in sight and no people either.

One route takes me in to the Daneshill Lakes built from old gravel pits.

Here I have got lost but only because you cannot head in your preferred direction when there is a lake in the way.

The views can be quite spectacular and I do not mind walking around in circles to see them.

The lakes are good but the fields are better. Which is just as well as I spend most of my time in fields following the yellow arrows and wondering if some of the other unmarked paths might be other ways back.

Not that long ago these fields were bare and ugly, now a touch of Spring and a hint of Summer have teased the crops in to healthy colourful growth.

The reward is obvious. The solitude and the absence of buildings are still there only now they are complimented by the beauty of flowing grasses and bright red poppies.

I always walk late in the day, the target return time is usually 7;30 and I usually miss it, so the shadows are another important part of the experience. I like contrasts and the natural world is full of them.

Perhaps I should be a little bit more honest and explain that these walks start with a 2km yomp up the Great North Road which is busy, straight, boring and has a "pavement" that is so overgrown in places that I prefer to walk on the road towards the speeding traffic.

Barnby Moor may not be the best place to be stationed for a few months but it is not without its merits and I intend to do more walking there to see if I can find some more.

LIKE 45: Strictly Open

LIKE (London Information and Knowledge Exchange) always has interesting talks so my simple rule of thumb is to go to all that I can get to and not to worry too much what the actual subject.

And that's how I found myself at a talk on open data in academic research, which I found interesting.

We had three guides to take us through the topic, Ross Mounce of the Open Knowledge Foundation, Velichka Dimitrova, OpenEconomics coordinator, and John Murtagh a Project Officer whoo is Training in Data Management at the University of East London. Together they gave us a broad and consistent view of the subject.

As always I struggled to mix paying attention with taking notes and tweeting, so what follows is somewhat chaotic and I've applied some post-event clean-ups and analysis to try and make sense of it all. The mistakes are mine, not the speakers'.


Publishers have a monopoly on the academic papers they publish, irrespective of academics' wishes.

Academic material is non substitutable, there is only one source.

Research literature has a wider use beyond academia but they have no access to it. This is a block on further research and, hence, progress.

A lot of research is publicly funded but then hidden behind pay walls. Downloaded PDFs are not allowed to be mined electronically.

There is a basic conflict of interest at the heart of this debate; profit (for publishers etc.) v shared knowledge leading to new discoveries. Open Data helps us to stand on the shoulder of giants.

Need to share research data to understand/challenge the research, hence the new topic of Research Data Management.

Access to the data is required but it must also be controlled, i.e. used properly.

Need access to the publish data alongside the article that comes to conclusions from it. The data and data collection are separately citable. The data may even be more valuable than the report summarising it and the collection of data is a skill in its own right.

Data are information, and librarians know how to manage information.

My summary of the summary is that we have been used to KM being at the top of a Data > Information > Knowledge pyramid and that means that the importance of Data has sometimes been overlooked.

After the talks LIKE does what it always does and the conversations continued over food and drinks as the social element of the evening came to the fore.

Collaboration at the Gurteen Knowledge Cafe

The Gurteen Knowledge Community returned to the Westminster Business School to discuss collaboration.

This was my second time there and that last was with Gurteen too. Unfortunately that was a few years BB (Before Blog) so I do not know exactly when that was or what we discussed.

I do remember enough of the venue though to notice some of the changes that had been made in the intervening years. This time we were in a large room of the main reception area with glass wall on two sides. That made us very visible and apparently that had taken some getting used to by some of the staff but I have worked in open plan offices for many years so the visibility did not matter to me.

Our host for the evening was Gurteen Cafe stalwart Keith Patrick, as it had been the last time that we were there.

Keith opened by saying a little about Westminster University and I was surprised to hear that it was celebrating its 175th birthday.

We were then given our topic for the evening - collaboration.

Keith made the point that in recent years new technologies have brought us more tools to collaborate with but these had not made collaboration more natural or more common.

We were asked to consider how we could encourage collaboration, and to do this with our own organisations in mind rather than treating this as an academic exercise.

As is usual at Gurteen Cafes, we discussed this in small groups of 4 to 6 people for about fifteen minutes or so then we moved tables to mix the conversations for another fifteen minutes and then swapped again to mix some more for a further fifteen minutes. This cross-fertilisation of ideas by moving people around is a key element of the evenings and is instrumental to their success.

These are some of the notes that I took during these conversations.

The new technologies can be useful but they are not a prerequisite. Old technologies can work too, e.g. email. We should use what is available and what people are comfortable with.

Whatever tools we use we need to be prepared to seed and moderate conversations until momentum builds and the conversations become self-sustaining.

Two motivators for collaboration are learning and boasting.

There needs to be a purpose for collaboration and this needs to be understood by everybody in the conversation. This could be as simple and specific as saying what information is required (e.g. examples of good practise) or as broad as a framework for contribution explaining the scope of the conversations and the rules that apply, e.g. it must be work related and behaviour must be professional.

One approach is to create a place to share, e.g. a group of experts. There is prestige of being seen to be an expert.

It is not always down to the facilitator, we could all Invite people to participate, e.g. by asking, "Why don't you blog?", or by asking questions to get somebody to answer.

Must be realistic about what you can achieve, even with a lot of pushing not everybody will join in.

If collaboration is seen as an important part of corporate culture then companies should explain the ground rules during recruitment.

Should also be prepare to criticise bad behaviour, e.g. knowledge hoarding, use sticks as well as carrots.

Seeking is as important as sharing, receive as well as give.

We make sharing and collaboration decisions all the time, but we do not always recognise them as such.

The value of sharing can come from the connections that are made. Connections make conversations that build trust.

Collaboration is a selfish activity. All parties have personal motivations for asking for and giving information.Why are we all collaborating at the Knowledge Cafe tonight?

Sharing is the same as learning. It helps us to understand what we know.

We must be a really nice group of people. Almost all our ideas for encouraging collaboration are carrots, there are few sticks.

In a slight change from the usual we collected our ideas on post-it-notes which we then clustered on one of the walls. I am not sure that this step added much value from the table conversations but most people seemed to get involved in this so I may have been in a minority in thinking this.

The evening ended with a whole group session where we exchanged our main learnings from the evening. This part was facilitated by David himself.

That ended the Cafe as such though a few of us went to the Wetherspoons across the road to have some more conversations, they are addictive.

This was another highly interesting Gurteen Knowledge Cafe and it managed to shed some new light on an old topic. There were real lessons learnt that each of us could take back to our organisations.

A new career in a new town

OK, so that is a slightly misleading title but I am not going to miss the opportunity to use a Bowie track when I am given the chance (it's from Low).

After eighteen months or so working on a project based in Cardiff I am now working back in Central London (Victoria) and at a coal-fired power station in the Midlands.

The cooling towers are familiar to me from the train journeys north and, more recently, from Didcott which I passed through on the way to and from Cardiff but I had never been this close to one before.

Actually I had to get pretty close to one to even know that it was there as the Midlands were cloaked in fog on my first visit there. The sun did its best all day and still it failed to shift it.

A power station means pylons and the area id thick with them. I trust that all the scare stories about high voltage cables are untrue as they pass directly over the office I work in. While the fog served only to hide the cooling towers (there are several) it had a more impressive impact on the pylons giving them a well-deserved sense of grandeur.

On the second day the fog did lift a little before darkness fell and I could see enough of the towers to see the smoke coming out of them, grey smoke disappearing in to a grey sky.

I like industrial architecture and I find working in a power station interesting. I'm hoping that the weather is better next time I go and I can see more of the industry, more of things like the pools of water that the towers sit in.

Despite being in the middle of nowhere (for a good reason) getting to the station is not that difficult, in fact it is much the same as going to Cardiff, even the rail fare is more or less the same.

It is too early to say how the project itself is going to go but I like being back in London for part of the time and am quite happy to go to the station for a couple of days every week or so. It looks like I made the right move.

LIKE 42: How to do an Elevator Pitch

The prospect of an evening discussing Elevator Pitches did not really appeal to me that much but it had been some months since I had managed to get to a LIKE meeting that I made the effort anyway.

It proved to be a very wise decision.

Our guide for the evening was Suzanne Wheatley of Sue Hill Recruitment. And a good guide she was too as she took us on a well-prepared journey. She is standing at the right end of the bar while we are all sat eagerly at our tables.

One of the philosophies behind LIKE is that the sessions are interactive and Suzanne's session was more interactive than most. She peppered her talk with activities for us to do that reinforced the points she was making.

There are two parts to the Elevator Pitch, the message and the messenger. Both must be right to make the required impact.

The message should contain one decent fact and one insightful question. It should be something simple and something memorable. The messenger needs to convey the message well and to inspire confidence.

You are more important than your ideas so presentation really matters. Start with a good handshake and positive eye-contact, but do that without being oppressive. That was our first exercise of the evening and we practised handshaking and maintaining eye-contact. I think that I lost the staring competition.

Next we considered our voices. This means being conscious of the volume, length and pace. We may have a lot to say but if we say too much too quickly then the main message will get lost.

In particular, we need to pause to allow time for the words to sink in.

Our exercise for this was tongue-twisters which are easy to say if you get the pace right but which breakdown if we try to say them too quickly and sound dull if we say them too slowly. It is not an easy balancing act and practise helps.

The message needs to be concise and compelling. Think about the objective? Are you selling you, the bid, the company? How do you/your company solve problems/provide value? What is the key point? What do you want to happen next?

Be excited about your main message. If you are not excited then you cannot expect your target to be.

End with a question with a yes/no answer so that you have to get a definitive response, e.g. Can I call you next week to arrange a meeting?

For our final exercise we had to invent an elevator situation and write a pitch for it. Mine was meeting our new CEO and this is what I came up with. "Hi, I'm Matthew Rees. I am in the Business Consulting division currently working on the Weymouth Water account. They are spending $10m on a new customer billing system. I have 15 years experience of implementing billing systems in utilities and telcos world-wide. Is there a role for me on this project?"

The pitch is far from ideal, and that is part of the point. It shows that you need to spend time and effort in getting them right.

Suzanne's session was excellent. It delivered good information and real value while engaging us totally in the experience.

After the formalities came the food, drink and conversations that make LIKE sessions so enjoyable. I lingered for another couple of hours just mixing and being sociable. It was a great evening, and a useful one too.

Utility Industry Achievement Awards 2012

It is about ten years since i last went to a Utility Week Dinner and then I got the dress code completely wrong.

The last one came on the back of a two day conference (normal business dress) and I assumed that the dinner would be black tie so that is all that I packed. I then discovered that we would have free reign over all the amusements at the end of Brighton Pier for which neither suit was appropriate so I made an emergency trip to Next to buy some casual clothing.

This time it was a traditional formal dinner in one of the many Park Lane hotels that specialise in large events like this.

The "black tie" bit worried me a little as while I have thirty or forty bow ties they are mostly floral ones from Liberty.

I assumed that I had a plain black tie but when I came to dress I discovered that was not the case. I settled for the nearest that I have, which is also one of my very favourites, and that is the grey on black Crash design hand-made by Cyberoptix in Detroit.

The evening started with a drinks reception and I was careful to only drink three glasses of bubbly.

We were then called to dinner and finding the table was something of a challenge as tables filled the enormous ballroom and spread out to the mezzanine floor above. There were over 1,300 people there!

Dinner was excellent and was served with great efficiency, if not always strict adherence to the silver-service code, e.g. give from the left, take from the right. I can forgive them for that though as the closeness of the tables meant that it was hard to manoeuvre between them.

Dinner over we had a short cabaret from Siren an energetic all-female string quartet who entertained well enough with some classic tunes played over a loud backing track. They also tried to be a little sultry but were less successful at this.

Then came the awards themselves with Miles Jupp doing the compère role. He made it clear that he know little about utilities or their achievements and managed to be very funny in doing so.

A steady stream of people fought their way to the stage to collect their awards and have their photos taken as proof.

I headed home not long after the awards finished, as I had my alarm set for an early start for Cardiff the next day, but the event was scheduled to run until 2am. Perhaps another year.

TFPL Connect International 2012

The last TFPL Connect event in another good year gave us a personal perspective on the changing balance of power in communication and information delivery.

But first we had an introduction from TFPL supremo Darron Chapman which gave us his view of some current trends. He also reminded us that we lost Angela Abell earlier in the year. She was a regular at TFPL events and I spoke to her many times.

Our guide for the main part of the evening was Jonathan Charles, former BBC reporter and now Director of Communications at the EBRD.

His main message was to compare and contrast his two roles and to explain how in both he tried to be a trusted source of the truth.

What follows is a mix of his comments and my reactions to them.

There used to be very few sources but they were all reliable in 1987 (25 years ago). The only people who provided the news were qualified journalists working for reputable organisations.

Now information is faster and there is more of it, more sources, but reliability is less.

In the news we are reading the first draft of history, but it will change over time when it, and its implications, is understood better. Nobody in Spain has forgotten which side people were on during the Franco regime.

The digital revolution needs trusted guides - such as the BBC. Corporate communications now better funded than journalism and is placed to fill this role, if the job is done properly.

We were shown a video of work done by the EBRD in Slovakia. I felt that we were only being told part of the story, in particular the children looked very white.

Is it really a more complex world than 25 years ago or do we just understand more about the complexity?

Can you only be trusted by being safe? By that I mean sticking to facts that are easily verifiable and lack a complex context. What is the truth about Syria?

Are the BBC really to be trusted? There have been many times when I have found it to be outrageously biased in favour of "the establishment".

Information is always seen through the somebody's biased eyes. Perhaps we should be honest and recognised our own biases, rather looking fr an absolute truth that does not exist? Are trusted guides just myths?

I think we can trust guides by making allowances for their bias when this is obvious but the BBC pretends not to have one.

As usual at TFPL Connect the main session was followed by an long networking session slightly charmed with wine and nibbles. A good group of people go to TFPL Connect and the conversations always flow widely and easily. That is why I go whenever I can.

Passion at the Gurteen Knowledge Cafe

There is so much to like about Gurteen Knowledge Cafes and that includes the different locations that it takes you to.

Our hosts for this evening was Regent's College which is a private university occupying a cosy corned of Regents Park. We were there to take advantage of their wooden floor in the main hall.

After some very welcome refreshments and the usual introductions, including the traditional speed-networking, we were set on our way by Alida Acosta.

In quite a long talk without notes or a presentation, Alida explored the role of emotion and intellect in decision making. The emotional part includes our accumulated experience to date and that is always with us and is always changing.

The tango was used as a metaphor, hence the need for a wooden floor. The Tango was invented in Argentina as a way for people to communicate when they had no common language. To dance the Tango properly you need the intellect to learn the mechanics of the steps and also the passion and confidence to let the music take you.

Given the question of passion in our working lives we formed in to groups of around six to have the conversations that define what these events are about.

As usual, with an open question to answer our conversations went all over the place and I tried to make sense of this in my notes when I was not too busy listening and talking.

We questioned whether the split between intellect and emotion was real or artificial.

I once heard that we make major decisions, like buying a house, with our hearts and then try to justify it with our heads, e.g. we tell ourselves that it is close to good schools. We seem to feel guilty that we let our hearts rules our heads.

We are generally reluctant to show, or share, emotion at work and when we do we seem to find it easier to share a gripe (e.g. bad weather) than success. The later seems a little too much like boasting.

Success is not a zero-sum gain, if we win then several other people lose.

Some people have real passion in their work, e.g. the teacher in our first group. I would stop (paid) work tomorrow if I could afford it whereas my father, also a teacher, worked for as long as he could on in to his seventies.

After three rounds of group discussion we reformed in to a large circle for a final Tango demonstration and some closing comments.

This took us in to the use of passion as a corporate imperative. Someone mentioned a job advertisement that asked for people who were passionate about clean streets. This use of the word risks devaluing it, in much the same way that "team" is now meaningless.

It struck me then that we are asked by corporates to be passionate but they do not feed that passion, if we do well they give us money which has no passion in it at all. I said that it annoyed me that theatres do the same, they keep asking me to join their supporters groups and the first thing they offer is cheaper tickets when my passion is for theatre, not cheap tickets, and the way to feed that passion is to give me access to the creatives.

Then we went to the pub.

The passions were in full flow and I had some more fantastic conversations across a range of topics and with a range of people, none of whom I knew particularly well beforehand.

I headed for home around 11pm, some five hours after the event started, still buzzing and totally invigorated.

And that's the magic of a Gurteen Knowledge Cafe and why passion was such an appropriate topic.