Superkskills

Learning to learn, thinking about thinking

Image: my niece, Boudicca, being amazing, as babies are wont to do…

How our brains work is something that I’m reading and thinking about a lot this week, connecting neuroscience with how we work and manage our everyday lives.*

A happy moment of serendipity this morning, as I happened to hear The Life Scientific on Radio 4, an interview with Annette Karmiloff-Smith, a renowned psychologist.

Her answer to her first question about what was amazing about babies has stuck with me all day.

Business in Networks: Internet World Kongress, Munich – notes and links

These are the notes and slides for my talk at Internet World Kongress & Fachmesse, given today in Munich. I believe a livestream of the talk is available on the website and there may also be an archive with slides.

Business in networks by Antony Mayfield at Internet World Kongress Munich

View more presentations from Antony Mayfield

This talk is about how business is being disrupted by the web and the things we can do to adapt successfully, both at the organisational and personal level.

It combines some of the elements from two talks I gave earlier in the year: the web Super Skills I discussed at TEDx Brighton and the ideas about disruption, change management and Glasnost moments I talked about at CityCamp Brighton.

Here are the key points and relevant links:

Digital marketing at the edge of business transformation

We’re having some fun here, but just a bit. So obviously, I am talking to a room of digital marketers, so the idea of being at the leading edge is attractive, so is the idea that they have the stuff that is required to be the leaders of their wider organsiations.
The point is that they are closest in some ways to the web’s disruption of business. They have the tools and the need to adapt fastest, so the insights they gain may be what business as whole needs.

Business as usual to revolution as usual

The context is that we are living and will be living in a time of constant change, of permanent revolution.
Marc Andreesen explain this particularly well – as I’ve mentioned before. The web is pure software, we can keep reinventing it.

The Everywhere Web

Buzzwords are the hamster wheel of digital media and thinking clearly. We spend a lot of energy getting nowhere.
Two or three years ago, after a talks about Twitter people were asking what’s the next big thing after Twitter?
Better to udnerstand the big trends and call them what they are. I think about the social web, the data deluge and the everywhere web as the big meta trends.

Networks Thinking

We need to level up our thinking to deal with complexity. A friend of mine studying creativity at Goldsmiths introduced me to “threshold concepts”. they are ideas you really have to grasp before you can understand a whole lot of other things.
Networks are one of these, perhaps the most important for our age. We think we understand networks, but we really don’t a lot of the time.
When you are a German learning English you realise there are “false friends”, (“falsche Freunde“) words which sound or look the same in both languages but mean different things, e.g. “Gift” in German means “poison” rather than a present.
We don’t grasp how magnificently, terrifyingly complex networks are. We like to draw pictures of them and then think we’ve captured their meaning, when they are more like the weather – always changing, hyper-complex. Predictable if you are smart and have a huge amount of data and training, but only to a point and only some of the time. (There’s mileage in that weather forecasting analogy – I’d like to come up with it.

Platform-ism

One of the traps we fall into when we are thinking about networks is “platform-ism”.
We see Facebook as a proxy for the web, as a our new TV channel, we see Likes or Fans or Followers on Twitter as the gauge of our success without taking the time to understand our networks.

Accidental influencers

Another mistake we make is to think that influence is something fairly straightforward in networks.
To be sure there is a celebrity effect – when someone with a huge amount of followers on Twitter plugs a charity or website it gets a lot of traffic (sometimes). But influence is not as predictable or as straightforward as we think.
We fall prey to what psychologists call “narrative bias” – we think we see how things work, think it is obvious after the facts. Duncan Watts’s new book will deal with this subject in some detail.
Duncan Watts coined the lovely phrase “accidental influencers” to describe how unpredictable influence in networks can be…
Talking about networks with some mathematicians last week one remarked that place, location in a network might be the thing that best predicts influence, rather than popularity.

References / further reading

Howard Rheingold talking about digital literacies.
The visual for the social web slide is an inforgraphic by iCrossing UK – read more about it on the Connected blog.
Kevin Kelly – The Next 5,000 days of the Web (I also recommend his more recent presentation about the future of publishing Better Than Free)
John Hagel in interview with O’Reilly Media. His book The Power of Pull expands on things like serendipity and the speeding up of edge-to-core.
Gartner’s hype cycles. If you haven’t come across them before they are fascinating and the model is a useful one even if it is being subverted by the web on occasion.
An account of Glasnost, Perestroika and the fall of the USSR which I found useful from Prospect magazine.
Connected by Christakis and Fowler is about the best (and most accessible) book on human social networks I’ve read.
The Pomodoro Technique website.
“Havana complex” was an idea recounted in Eric Beinhocker’s The Origin of Wealth, a book on complexity, evolution and economics.
Tweetstats can be found at Tweetstats.com

And as I mentioned, for more on Superskills see my notes from my TEDx presentation and for more on Glasnost moments and LOOP take a look at the notes from my City Camp presentation

Lastly, my book Me and My Web Shadow is available from your local Amazon (in Germany it is here) and other good retailers (well ones with large inventories) :)

If you saw the talk at Internet World Kongress or on the livestream and have any questions or feedback please do let me know.

Business in Networks: Internet World Kongress, Munich – notes and links

Business in networks by Antony Mayfield at Internet World Kongress Munich

View more presentations from Antony Mayfield

This talk is about how business is being disrupted by the web and the things we can do to adapt successfully, both at the organisational and personal level.

Here are the key points and relevant links:

Digital marketing at the edge of business transformation

We’re having some fun here, but just a bit. So obviously, I am talking to a room of digital marketers, so the idea of being at the leading edge is attractive, so is the idea that they have the stuff that is required to be the leaders of their wider organsiations.
The point is that they are closest in some ways to the web’s disruption of business. They have the tools and the need to adapt fastest, so the insights they gain may be what business as whole needs.

Business as usual to revolution as usual

The context is that we are living and will be living in a time of constant change, of permanent revolution.
Marc Andreesen explain this particularly well – as I’ve mentioned before. The web is pure software, we can keep reinventing it.

The Everywhere Web

Buzzwords are the hamster wheel of digital media and thinking clearly. We spend a lot of energy getting nowhere.
Two or three years ago, after a talks about Twitter people were asking what’s the next big thing after Twitter?
Better to udnerstand the big trends and call them what they are. I think about the social web, the data deluge and the everywhere web as the big meta trends.

Networks Thinking

We need to level up our thinking to deal with complexity. A friend of mine studying creativity at Goldsmiths introduced me to “threshold concepts”. they are ideas you really have to grasp before you can understand a whole lot of other things.
Networks are one of these, perhaps the most important for our age. We think we understand networks, but we really don’t a lot of the time.
When you are a German learning English you realise there are “false friends”, (“falsche Freunde“) words which sound or look the same in both languages but mean different things, e.g. “Gift” in German means “poison” rather than a present.
We don’t grasp how magnificently, terrifyingly complex networks are. We like to draw pictures of them and then think we’ve captured their meaning, when they are more like the weather – always changing, hyper-complex. Predictable if you are smart and have a huge amount of data and training, but only to a point and only some of the time. (There’s mileage in that weather forecasting analogy – I’d like to come up with it.

Platform-ism

One of the traps we fall into when we are thinking about networks is “platform-ism”.
We see Facebook as a proxy for the web, as a our new TV channel, we see Likes or Fans or Followers on Twitter as the gauge of our success without taking the time to understand our networks.

Accidental influencers

Another mistake we make is to think that influence is something fairly straightforward in networks.
To be sure there is a celebrity effect – when someone with a huge amount of followers on Twitter plugs a charity or website it gets a lot of traffic (sometimes). But influence is not as predictable or as straightforward as we think.
We fall prey to what psychologists call “narrative bias” – we think we see how things work, think it is obvious after the facts. Duncan Watts’s new book will deal with this subject in some detail.
Duncan Watts coined the lovely phrase “accidental influencers” to describe how unpredictable influence in networks can be…
Talking about networks with some mathematicians last week one remarked that place, location in a network might be the thing that best predicts influence, rather than popularity.

References / further reading

Howard Rheingold talking about digital literacies.
The visual for the social web slide is an inforgraphic by iCrossing UK – read more about it on the Connected blog.
Kevin Kelly – The Next 5,000 days of the Web (I also recommend his more recent presentation about the future of publishing Better Than Free)
John Hagel in interview with O’Reilly Media. His book The Power of Pull expands on things like serendipity and the speeding up of edge-to-core.
Gartner’s hype cycles. If you haven’t come across them before they are fascinating and the model is a useful one even if it is being subverted by the web on occasion.
An account of Glasnost, Perestroika and the fall of the USSR which I found useful from Prospect magazine.
Connected by Christakis and Fowler is about the best (and most accessible) book on human social networks I’ve read.
The Pomodoro Technique website.
“Havana complex” was an idea recounted in Eric Beinhocker’s The Origin of Wealth, a book on complexity, evolution and economics.
Tweetstats can be found at Tweetstats.com

And as I mentioned, for more on Superskills see my notes from my TEDx presentation and for more on Glasnost moments and LOOP take a look at the notes from my City Camp presentation

Lastly, my book Me and My Web Shadow is available from your local Amazon (in Germany it is here) and other good retailers (well ones with large inventories) :)

If you saw the talk at Internet World Kongress or on the livestream and have any questions or feedback please do let me know.

Business in Networks: Internet World Kongress, Munich – notes and links

Business in networks by Antony Mayfield at Internet World Kongress Munich

View more presentations from Antony Mayfield

This talk is about how business is being disrupted by the web and the things we can do to adapt successfully, both at the organisational and personal level.

Here are the key points and relevant links:

Digital marketing at the edge of business transformation

We’re having some fun here, but just a bit. So obviously, I am talking to a room of digital marketers, so the idea of being at the leading edge is attractive, so is the idea that they have the stuff that is required to be the leaders of their wider organsiations.
The point is that they are closest in some ways to the web’s disruption of business. They have the tools and the need to adapt fastest, so the insights they gain may be what business as whole needs.

Business as usual to revolution as usual

The context is that we are living and will be living in a time of constant change, of permanent revolution.
Marc Andreesen explain this particularly well – as I’ve mentioned before. The web is pure software, we can keep reinventing it.

The Everywhere Web

Buzzwords are the hamster wheel of digital media and thinking clearly. We spend a lot of energy getting nowhere.
Two or three years ago, after a talks about Twitter people were asking what’s the next big thing after Twitter?
Better to udnerstand the big trends and call them what they are. I think about the social web, the data deluge and the everywhere web as the big meta trends.

Networks Thinking

We need to level up our thinking to deal with complexity. A friend of mine studying creativity at Goldsmiths introduced me to “threshold concepts”. they are ideas you really have to grasp before you can understand a whole lot of other things.
Networks are one of these, perhaps the most important for our age. We think we understand networks, but we really don’t a lot of the time.
When you are a German learning English you realise there are “false friends”, (“falsche Freunde“) words which sound or look the same in both languages but mean different things, e.g. “Gift” in German means “poison” rather than a present.
We don’t grasp how magnificently, terrifyingly complex networks are. We like to draw pictures of them and then think we’ve captured their meaning, when they are more like the weather – always changing, hyper-complex. Predictable if you are smart and have a huge amount of data and training, but only to a point and only some of the time. (There’s mileage in that weather forecasting analogy – I’d like to come up with it.

Platform-ism

One of the traps we fall into when we are thinking about networks is “platform-ism”.
We see Facebook as a proxy for the web, as a our new TV channel, we see Likes or Fans or Followers on Twitter as the gauge of our success without taking the time to understand our networks.

Accidental influencers

Another mistake we make is to think that influence is something fairly straightforward in networks.
To be sure there is a celebrity effect – when someone with a huge amount of followers on Twitter plugs a charity or website it gets a lot of traffic (sometimes). But influence is not as predictable or as straightforward as we think.
We fall prey to what psychologists call “narrative bias” – we think we see how things work, think it is obvious after the facts. Duncan Watts’s new book will deal with this subject in some detail.
Duncan Watts coined the lovely phrase “accidental influencers” to describe how unpredictable influence in networks can be…
Talking about networks with some mathematicians last week one remarked that place, location in a network might be the thing that best predicts influence, rather than popularity.

References / further reading

Howard Rheingold talking about digital literacies.
The visual for the social web slide is an inforgraphic by iCrossing UK – read more about it on the Connected blog.
Kevin Kelly – The Next 5,000 days of the Web (I also recommend his more recent presentation about the future of publishing Better Than Free)
John Hagel in interview with O’Reilly Media. His book The Power of Pull expands on things like serendipity and the speeding up of edge-to-core.
Gartner’s hype cycles. If you haven’t come across them before they are fascinating and the model is a useful one even if it is being subverted by the web on occasion.
An account of Glasnost, Perestroika and the fall of the USSR which I found useful from Prospect magazine.
Connected by Christakis and Fowler is about the best (and most accessible) book on human social networks I’ve read.
The Pomodoro Technique website.
“Havana complex” was an idea recounted in Eric Beinhocker’s The Origin of Wealth, a book on complexity, evolution and economics.
Tweetstats can be found at Tweetstats.com

And as I mentioned, for more on Superskills see my notes from my TEDx presentation and for more on Glasnost moments and LOOP take a look at the notes from my City Camp presentation

Lastly, my book Me and My Web Shadow is available from your local Amazon (in Germany it is here) and other good retailers (well ones with large inventories) :)

If you saw the talk at Internet World Kongress or on the livestream and have any questions or feedback please do let me know.

SuperSkills at 3 Monkeys – some more thoughts and writing a second book

Early start today to talk about the SuperSkills idea, at 3 Monkeys Communications in Soho.

If you attended – thanks very much and here are the slides (which strictly speaking I should have posted beforehand). For more detailed notes about the detail of the talk, take a look at the post from TEDx last week.

Super skills at 3 monkeys

View more presentations from Antony Mayfield.

The main change from this presentation’s debut at TEDx Brighton last week was to add a little about the business or management context for thinking about SuperSkills. Moving on from some ways of describing this I’ve used in the past, I talked about analysing the impact of social web on a business across four areas, with the acronym LOOP:

Long term: What are the strategic implications of the web for the next 5 – 10 years. How will it affect the classic PEST elements (Political, Economic, Social and Technological) in the organisation’s environment.
Operational: Here and now in the next 12 months where can social/web tools support operations such as marketing, customer service, sales, research, product development, HR etc.
Organisation: How will different teams be able to work together on social web related projects? How will information and insights be communicated quickly around the company?
People: What are the issues that the social web raises for our people? The line between public and private is blurring,

The feedback from both this talk and the TEDx one has been very positive (please do let me know if you have any criticisms, constructive or otherwise) and I’m going to start developing some of the ideas in a book now. Watch this space for more new son that front.

The main things that people have been positive about (other than the Gotham font) are:

The idea of investing time in learning tools like Twitter, to develop literacy.
How effective the Pomodoro technique can be.
Thinking about social networks as productivity tools at work.
Developing different approaches to work habits and workflow.
The importance of always-on sharing

Thanks to everyone who has shared their thoughts on the subject – it ‘s really useful in working out how a book about this might work.

The ROI of personal networks (especially LinkedIn)

Image: An email from LinkedIn prompting me to tell my network what I’m up to…

Yesterday I had a conversation with someone who told me that over the past year that had learned how to use LinkedIn and that they reckoned that they could directly attribute several hundred thousand pounds of profit to it. Not vaguely, not hypothetically – they knew exactly which items on their balance sheet were the result of doing things because of and through that social network tool.

They were a fiftysomething avowedly non-techie businessperson in a service industry and I found their account of their experience very useful, as it had the fresh perspective of someone outside of the connected world I most live in.

They were of course highly successful in their field already, and implicitly understood the importance of personal networks in business.

Their nightmare scenario in business was missing out on an opportunity because they weren’t in the right place at the right time, that they weren’t front of mind when someone in their sector was pulling together a short-list for a contract or similar. What Twitter was doing was helping them to increase both their presence and profile in their personal network and their ability to listen to the needs of their connections and contacts.

These were some of the points they related which stuck with me…

Paying attention to what is happening: They weren’t a compulsive checker of what was happening on their LinkedIn account, they used a weekly email update to see who was doing new things, connecting with someone else, saying interesting things or asking for help on status updates.
Light-touch presence: They update their status every now and again, but had grasped that in LinkedIn less can often be more. I agree with this, which is why I don’t connect Linkedin to Twitter. In Twitter I am much more chatty, and when the mood takes me update several times a day or even hour. In LinkedIn that’s not useful – I leave status updates there only when something significant has happened, or I am travelling somewhere that I think I might meet others from my network or I am looking for input on a particular project or issue. They also mentioned that changing their photograph or updating their profile details every few months was a useful way of keeping (sociologists would call that a phatic expression – the online equivalent of waving as you pass or saying “hi” briefly).
Being useful to their network: As well as answering obvious business opportunities, they stressed the importance of connecting others who would be useful to one another, when they spotted an opportunity. This connecting behaviour is a classic networking approach, and one that leaves everyone feeling positive toward one another. Often it can also result in direct or indirect commercial benefits for the connector.

LinkedIn is a productivity, networking super-charger: It’s not just about LinkedIn, of course – it is about understanding your personal networks and how to behave, to be useful in them. Tools like Linkedin accelerate and augment our ability to successfully work with our networks, in them, through them. But the real, underlying superskill as I’m calling it at the moment, is all about networks.