I subscribe to the Strachan-Tomlinson Question of the Week email which sends out a provocative question (or form of question). They get me thinking and help me with one of THE most important facilitation/leadership/working skills I know of: asking questions. I’m not great at asking questions and am always seeking to improve my practice.
I have been intrigued by questions that help frame responsibility in a group, rather setting up an expectation that the convenors, facilitators, leaders, whatever — are responsible for everything. That is rubbish. This week’s question does that for me:
Question of the week | January 11, 2012
Ask “What is one thing you do not want to see happen
in this session”
This question enables participants to voice their concerns and contribute to norm setting in a group. Responses may also yield potential insights for the facilitator about previous group process experiences of participants. To bring this discussion to a positive conclusion, ask participants what they need to do to avoid what they don’t want to see happen in a session. This will result in people setting positive norms for working together. See Making Questions Work, Chapter 4, “Questions for Opening a Session”, p 88.
This reminds me of a question Peter Blockasked at the Nexus for Change gathering in 2008. It was something to the effect of “if this meeting (project, etc) were to be a failure, what would your role be in that failure? The guts of these questions all point to the idea of everyone getting “skin in the game.” Owning it. Not simply applauding or rejecting from the side. IN THE GAME. It is too easy to sit back and criticize. It is harder to foster the conditions, to create the invitation and ask the questions that get them to engage and own it. That’s why I like these questions.
For more on questions and methods that encourage ownership and responsibility, see:
Related, but beyond question, from Peter Block’s FlameCenter’s methodologyThis methodology uses powerful questions and changes the conversations to those that confront people with their choice in accountability and commitment. The six conversations are:
I confess, I don’t pay nearly enough attention to all the good things flying past me, including things on my own Communities and Networks Connection. In case this is new to you, this is an aggregation project led by Tony Karrer. He set up a system that lets me curate content from a wide variety of bloggers interested in communities and networks (If you aren’t on the list and want to be, drop me a line!). Tony just let me know that Aggregage, the platform that powers has some new features that are now on the Communities and Networks Connection. Announcing the PERSONALIZATION ENGINE! That means that Communities and Networks Connection now allows you to sign-up and have your content personalized based on their interests. You can sign-up via the “Personalize Your Content” button on the right side of the interface shown on the right side of the picture on the right (right, right?).
Tony has explained it well on his site, so I’m quoting the master. He refers to his own aggregation site, eLearning Learning
Now with personalization it’s even better. The picture below gives a sense of what’s happening:
Curators handle finding the best sources of content. The system then uses social signals such as those coming from Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, delicious as well as clicks and views. These are compared to averages for the source and also looks at who is providing the signal, how often they signal things, how often they signal for that particular source, etc. Those aspects existed before and it does a good job of finding great content. You can read a bit more about these aspects in eLearning Learning Launches New Features.
What’s new now is that the site allows you to sign up and provide your Twitter and LinkedIn information. The site will look at your activity on these sites and the content of what you share. It will use that to find interests as well as to cluster you with other users who are like you based on interests and sharing. You can partially control your interests via the Subscription page as shown below:
This will change over time based on your LinkedIn and twitter activity. You can always visit and manually select interests as well. You can read a bit more here: Personalization Explained.
The system then can combine three pieces of information to figure out what will be most interesting to you:
Social signal score – are people in the audience finding it interesting
Topic match – does it match up with your interests
Like sharing – are individuals who are like you sharing this
The system uses these to both rank things on the site and to generate Daily and Weekly newsletters.
The reason that I’m most exited about this is that I partly use eLearning Learning to make sure I don’t miss things that is good content that is relevant to me. Now with personalization, it is even less likely that something will sneak by.
I also personally like the format of the new newsletter.
Give it a try and let me know what you think.
So I’ll add my pitch – give it a try and let me know what you think. In the mean time, here is the best of Communities and Networks Connection 2011
How do you respond to a negative comment in an online community,on Facebook? Shut the Page down, ban the commenter, suck up to them? How about a bitchy tweet on Twitter? Fight with them? Ignore them? Promise to do better? PS: Your marketing intern may not have that skill! Click for larger size. Ignore the negative social media commenter. MORE >>2945 Tweets
ELSUA | WEDNESDAY, MAY 4, 20115 Reasons Why Activity Streams Will Save You From Information Overload I heart Activity Streams. mean, I * love* them to bits! From the very first beginning that I got exposed to them over at Twitter, over 4 years ago , till today, where I am using a bunch of various different microblogging / microsharing services, both internal and external, I couldn’t work, nor get much done!, without them. live them. Exactly! MORE >>116 Tweets
JENNY CONNECTED | SATURDAY, JUNE 11, 2011 Recording of Etienne Wenger’s talk Here is the link to the talk given by Etienne Wenger to Lancaster University, UK last month Learning in and across landscapes of practice. This is a long talk and there is a lot in it to digest. Theory. Theory in social sciences is a way of talking about the world. Theories that try to explain everything tend to be reductionist. Identity. MORE >>31 Tweets
JOITSKE HULSEBOSCH | MONDAY, MAY 9, 2011 Roles in communities of practice Does a learning community or community of practice need roles to function well? Should you officially assign these roles to people or is it best if people spontaneously fullfil certain roles? What about the self-organising power of communities? We thought it would be nice to share some of our thinking in this blogpost. Starting with ourselves. MORE >>35 Tweets
ALCHEMY OF CHANGE | TUESDAY, APRIL 26, 2011 How “Membranes” Build Great Organizations In this article, you’ll learn about a new way of thinking about organizational boundaries; one that helps connect what’s inside the organization with what’s outside it. You’ll also get a new framework for thinking about the way organizations engage customers, partners, and other organizations. The “Cellular Business”. Tweet. MORE >>101 Tweets
When it comes to 2011 trends, I posted earlier on ” Enterprise 2.0: A Transition From Destination Site to Platform Services “. Rather than publish a short list, I wanted to take some time to explore each trend in more depth. In this post, I want to examine the topic of Activity Streams. Level of insight : Inconvenient truth beneath the hype. effort. MORE >>65 Tweets
Image by moriza via Flickr. To celebrate the second annual Community Manager Appreciation Day , we’ve brought together 15 essential articles for online community managers and social media managers. This collection of articles, resources and thinking should have something for everybody to learn from or to add to. MORE >>356 Tweets
Last week I had the pleasure of doing a webinar with the enterprise 2.0 software firm, Bitrix. We covered “The Business Value of Social Media and Enterprise 2.0” with an emphasis on HR process because of the audience. I want to share with you a bit of my thoughts from that session. Others have taken similar approaches. MORE >>70 Tweets
In response to my post about making SharePoint not look like SharePoint , Mike asked where the figure I quoted came from. He said: ” I would also like to see you cite your source for the statistic you quoted. The problem with statistics is that anyone can toss them out but unless you fully understand the context they are meaningless. My Comments. MORE >>78 Tweets
It has been a while now that I talked about my experience of putting incentives for KM initiatives in place. These thoughts are very valid for global activities, though we are starting in our company to look at a second approach: implement knowledge sharing in people’s daily activities without imposing additional work. MORE >>17 Tweets
OK, there IS a Monday Video after all. Hat tip to Stephen Downes and Mashable. There have been many conversations across my networks about how much time we do/don’t spend “sharing” online. This little mini musical may open a few eyes along with the laughs.
Via a Tweet from John Hagel comes the Enormous forest xylophone plays Bach’s Cantata 147 (Wired UK). A phone handset advert? Yup. But in it beauty, art and music. In our communities and networks, can we use art and music as a way to focus attention, learn and share knowledge? What ideas do you have? Post a comment!
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I subscribe to the Strachan-Tomlinson Question of the Week email which sends out a provocative question (or form of question). They get me thinking and help me with one of THE most important facilitation/leadership/working skills I know of: asking questions. I’m not great at asking questions and am always seeking to improve my practice.
I’m continuing cleaning up and adapting my 
