Need for Nature

I’m lap-topping from beautiful Bowen Island in BC – a three week respite from the usual routine of board meetings, project research, interviews and constant responses to people’s questions and concerns. It has taken at least three days to get used to a time change and unwind. There are spectacular views in all directions on top of Cates Hill – one vista faces Horseshoe Bay, a twenty minute ferry ride away; another, an island lake; still others look to nearby hills and mountains with a variety of evergreens and a constantly changing scene as valleys fill with clouds and light filters through in a magical way.

How different from downtown Toronto, my normal abode where trains run close by both on the surface and underground. The silence here is palpable – and the eye is always drawn to natural delights.

We need these pauses. I’ve been reviewing and condensing notebooks written over the last five years. Some ideas are now integrated; some are reminders; some are newly important for new contexts. It’s a luxury to do this. But it’s also a reminder that one can do it without necessarily travelling three thousand kilometres in the process.

Best wishes for a peaceful and restful holiday of your own.

So What do YOU Want to Create?

If anything shows why we need artists, this video does. And pay special attention to the ending and how this creator actually responds to criticism from the outside world.

Social Media Realities

I found this one on the Herrmann International Blog with a reminder that we have to change our way of thinking about social media – and we also have to think about how it affects us personally. The growth rate portrayed here is interesting, but the presentation doesn’t even begin to think about what to do about it and its implications for education, society, economics and culture. Those aren’t part of the numbers game but they are the real challenges. If we let them simply wash over us we will have only ourselves to blame in terms of the consequences.

Back from Power Point World

I was surprised to see how long it has been since I posted last. Three trips in a few weeks will do that to you – and since they involved traveling coast to coast to do presentations at three major conferences, I have been preoccupied with getting there, being there, and catching up in between.

What happened? While these are governing bodies, the majority of their time was taken up with presentations from a national level like my own rather than decision making. And all of them relied heavily on Microsoft’s ubiquitous product. One of the things that amuses me is that these offerings are always called “Power Point Presentations” or even “Power Points” – never just “presentations”. They actually assume that the viewers are illiterate because a presenter virtually always reads the entire contents of each slide. Let’s imagine the same thing happening with documents or spreadsheets. The new scenario is “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I am now going to proceed to read aloud to you an entire Word document of 20 pages which you already have on the screen in front of you”. Or even better, “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, I am now going to read aloud an Excel spreadsheet,line by line, which you can also follow along on the screen”. Still awake?

Another thing was curious. About 100 people flew or drove to Cochrane, – a northern Ontario town with a population of 5,200 people in Northern Ontario – home of the Polar Bear Museum and some wonderful conference volunteers. The first morning watched an hour long video and viewed the talking heads of several people – nearly all of whom were already in the room. This was supposed to be background on some of the issues to be addressed. But if it were background, why didn’t it get sent out to watch in advance on You Tube? The conference planners were adamant that this was to be a green conference where they would not send any printed documentation and instead they put everything on the website. But just about everyone present had printed it out themselves. Great cost savings but poor end results. We’re still in our infancy in thinking through the use of technology.

ROI -where I=intelligence

Here’s something to watch from Herrmann International Asia – originally posted in earlier in the year, but still relevant.

Innovation score

I came upon an article about a firm specializing in innovation for large companies which offered a diagnostic for innovation. Future Think offers this to anyone – though it is a bit daunting that when I put in the number of employees for the lowest category, I was deficient by 499. It is fun to pretend that one is talking about others, when one is really talking about one’s self. At any rate my scores were as follows out of a possible 5: Strategy: 3.5; Ideas 5.0; Process 2.5; Climate 2.5. The one that surprised me the most was the last. I probably need to get out more! Returning from a recent conference in Newfoundland confirmed the value of meeting new people and exchanging ideas.

Two types of graduates

It’s the wrong time of year, but I am reminded of the college graduation ceremony, where the president took a minute or two to talk to the graduates as they were admitted.  He asked each one, “What will you do next?”  One young man said, “I’m going to become the world’s best brain surgeon”.  The next young woman said, “I’m going to move to left, go down three steps and leave the stage”.

Both of course are absolutely right.  The first was working in the HBDI quadrant D. The second was working in Quadrant B. I’ve just come back from a conference where both the big picture and the processes were heavily discussed.  Since the focus was on governance, we tended to get more involved with the latter.  My own presentation focused on a bigger picture where we were trying to deal with the future role of the organization’s leader.

Between meetings I happened upon a really interesting article in a New Yorker issue at the end of August. It observed that we are all prone to the “endowment”  factor, – we put a higher value on things that we already have, as opposed to something that we might have in the future.  Examples included the gift of college mugs to one group of students – and a question to another group that were not given them.  The first group was asked what they would sell them for – and the second what they would pay to buy them.  The sellers named a price that was twice as high as the buyers.

In other words, we value what we have more than what might be. So if we want to move forward, we often have to buy into Einstein’s contention that “Imagination is stronger than knowledge”.

The HBDI Picnic

As children head back to school, outdoor picnics are going to be a thing of the past – even though the early fall weather here in Toronto is the summer we never had.

My own back-to-school involves reviewing and re-reading to consolidate what I already know about the HBDI – and I enjoyed re-reading Ned Herrmann’s account of a picnic attended by four quadrant families with extreme preferences for particular styles of thinking.

The A family – Mr. and Mrs Rational, and their kids, Logical, Analytic, Quantitative and Factual left their upper right apartment in the complex and brought their stainless steel high tech barbecue grill. Mr. and Mrs. Organized insisted the a strict time schedule would be necessary for their children, Sequential, Structured, Detailed and Linear – and they were extremely wary when Mr. and Mrs. Feeling thought they might invite relatives to come along with their offspring, Interpersonal, Emotional, Musical and Spiritual. How were they going to assess costs fairly?

Mr. and Mrs. Experimental essentially ignored the others and put their children, Imaginative, Synthesizing, Artistic and Conceptualizing to creating seafood stuffed sausages. 

Well you get the picture. We all bring our preferences to everything we do. Let’s hope that the kids enjoyed the picnic in their own way – and that they now have teachers who will respect their differences.  Teachers as a group generally have less tolerance for the kids in the Experimental family – and yet these are our best hope for true innovation and creativity – so long as they can learn to respect and cooperate with all the other kids.

Thinking Accelerator is award winning finalist

thinking_accelerator

Herrmann International has been selected as a finalist for the prestigious 2009 Learning In Practice awards, sponsored by Chief Learning Officer magazine. The selection recognizes Herrmann’s newest program, The Thinking Accelerator™ featuring HBDIinteractive™, as a finalist in the Excellence in Content category.

We received a record number of nominations this year,” says Mike Prokopeak, Vice President and Editorial Director of MediaTec Publishing. CLO’s panel of judges, which is composed of industry experts and executives from some of the world’s largest and most-respected companies, determined that The Thinking Accelerator™ featuring HBDIinteractive™ was one of the top entries in the Excellence in Content category.

The official announcement will be made at the Fall Chief Learning Officer Symposium, scheduled for Sept. 28-30, 2009 at the Broadmoor, in Colorado Springs, Colorado. As a finalist, Herrmann International will receive either the gold, silver or bronze award during a presentation ceremony on Tuesday, Sept. 29.

Mind Map Art – Part 2

Being naturally competive I had to make a hand drawn map of my own, – and what better person to choose than Twyla Tharp and her book, The Creative Habit. My daughter-in-law asked to borrow it the other night and I didn’t want to loan it an lose the wisdom it contains.  As I mentioned in the previous post, maps are highly personal. It might not make much sense to any other eyes but mine – but the main points of the book are there, and I can review them regularly to see how I may be succeeding in my own creative objectives, – or not!  It the answer is negative, at least there are ways presented here to remedy it.