Leading Change – Ironies of Change (Week 9)

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Change is a serious business or is it?

This week teaches us that we need to maintain an ironic sensibility to be an effective change leader. The concept is that we all experience irony in how organisations tackle change. The image that all directed change is for the better and will add value to our lives, is conducted by rational, inclusive leaders in a rational inclusive way is set against what we all know to be true that change projects can and often do go off the rails, are not always for the better and change leaders can be irrational and selective in a curious juxtaposition of fantasy and reality. This folks, is irony.

So how can irony help? Well, it always pays to have a sense of humour in embarking on any change initiative. But beyond that is this notion of being enthusiastic whilst maintaining a healthy distance and not being too caught up in the imperfect outcomes of the change process or a step in it, and being able to accept and communicate the ironies of change to the  right audience at the right time to the right level. In other words, as David Forster Wallace points out it is the ability to see and use the flaws, the hypocrisies and duplicates and not rally against them. This is part of the Ironic Performance.

Irony as the Snorkel of Sanity – the Ironic Perspective

We were introduced to irony being seen as a snorkel of sanity as a way of keeping and understanding the ironic perspective. Way back in week 1 and 2 we talked about the organizational iceberg. It looks like this (borrowed, with thanks Torben Rick – www.Torbenrick.eu):

http://www.torbenrick.eu

Above the water is the visible culture of the organisation driven by the instruments of rationality – strategy, vision, goals, polices and procedures. Below the water line is the way things are really done in the organisation through the irrational drivers of perceptions, traditions, cultural norms and storytelling.

What irony lets us do is swim along the top of the water with our head down to the below the surface whilst providing a funnel through which we can breathe.  It allows for fluidity to navigate both above the line and below the line and allows for a seriously playful view of the organisation, change process and how we act in it.

I really love this image of the snorkel and it really resonated with me. I have always tried to use humour in my work. It is wonderful way of sharing what could be controversial thoughts in a non-confronting way. Done in the right way and in the right time it can act as a bonding agent and can diffuse tension and stress. I am also a big fan of sarcasm and irony; I love the cleverness of it and banter makes the work go round. How wonderful to realise that irony can be a constructive tool and outlook in the world of work, rather than a destructive one. I have practiced it subtly my whole career. Often, the deadlines I am running to are tight with resources thin on the ground.

Instead of complaining about it which will get me nowhere I have put up this sign behind my desk as a way of saying worried, not worried about the work load. It’s a wonderful saying from Alice in Wonderland and to me embodies this ironic perspective. It far better than lashing out at the next person who adds to my work pile and an acknowledgement that its OK if I never get to the end. As I learned this week, this ironic perspective helps plug the gap between what I do accomplish and what I set out to accomplish and helps me deal with the notion of how little I can actually control. I will be using this tool a lot more in the future now that I understand it has a rightful place in the world of work.

Ironic Performance – masks and the art of the cosmopolitan performance

Earlier in the course we learned about the need for performance and the use of masks to aid that performance in leading change. We have to know when to perform on the front stage and when on the back and which mask to wear, if any at all, at any one time. The ironic mask is one of the and helps to alleviate the tension of change and allows solutions to be formed for problems that arise. We need to be able to admit that the change process is imperfect to be able to bring people along for the ride.

We learned that it takes a cosmopolitan performance that communicates the tension of unrealistic expectations of change and the ability of working though the tension in collaboration with others who may have diverse viewpoints. Such a performance requires five viewpoints:

  • Diversity – the need to find common ground in recognising difference
  • Toggling – standing inside and outside your view of change, both acting in change and looking at the performance from the audience
  • Duality – double part- being able to laugh at ourselves and others, double plots – recognising the multi-layered aspects of performance
  • Humour – ability to use wit and parody to bring about desired outcomes
  • Humility – create identification with others whilst acknowledging your own limited perspective

We viewed ironic performance through the actions of Mahtma Gandhi who lead India to independence from British rule. He used compassion, non-violent resistance and civil disobedience to avoid armed struggle, largely through symbolism, humility and verbal irony. Ghandi played the long game, reflecting and adjusting his performance along the way.

He understood and used the duality, such as in verbal irony:

British: “Do you expect the British to just walk out?”

 Ghandi: “Yes, that’s exactly what the British will do”

He also understood the art of what I call screaming subtlety, a subtlety that was non aggressive but pointed in its message. An example of this is how Ghandi dressed in a knee-length toga whilst visiting Britain on a cold, rainy day. He displayed all of the five traits listed above and was ultimately effective in bringing about monumental change.

Ironic Temperament – a discipline one can master

We learned that maintaining an ironic performance and perspective requires an ironic temperament of poise and balance. This is a discipline we can leant qualities of an ironic temperament include:

  • Tolerance
  • Humility
  • Liberal
  • Reflective.

Prior organisational studies have labelled those with ironic temperament in various ways. We looked at the following three:

  1. Tempered radical – trying to bring about change but working within the system
  2. Principled infidel – crafting out ways to maintain autonomy whilst being seen to follow the rules to achieve for the client
  3. Insider/outsider – as an insider they work the culture and system to mobilise and build credibility whilst at the same time they can see where these get in the way of performance and use ideas and connections from outside to question assumptions and change frames and perceptions. Blended distance and commitment.

We also learned that it pays to have a playful outlook and to not hesitate to engage in playfulness even in an organisational setting when the need arises. This, I can understand as it has saved me many times from various work situations. However, it generally is a backstage tool I use and given it’s a discipline that should be built, I feel there is now room for it in frontstage performance as well. The trick is to use that snorkel of sanity to know when it is useful.

Looking at the above list of labels, I think I have been all of these at one time or another in my career, but in response to a situation. I think right now, I’m more principled infidel than the other two. That said, I need to be much more focussed on what’s happening emotionally than I have in the past to become more effective. One of the metaphors we learned that I think is really helpful here is that of the movie.

Each of us have an inbuilt editor’s suite – a disciplined reflection mechanism – where we stand outside of ourselves and replay the video of our action and critically analyse.  The more we do this, the better ability we have to actually see the movie as it is being played out in the moment and correct.

Reflecting on my journey this year, I have become better at entering the editor’s suite and reflecting on my performance. I find myself on occasion switching gears whilst in the interaction as a result of looking down at my actions. It’s the knack of being aware of what I am saying, how I am sounding and recognising the need to pivot if I have to. Understanding that I am the producer of this movie, at least as to how I say my lines and turn up and being able to improvise will help me increase my proficiency in this.

The Bottom Line

I love that irony has a legitimate part to play in leading change and that it can be seen as a snorkel of sanity. This is a really useful metaphor not least because having a snorkel can be a life saver! I think the analogy of the movie is also helpful in understanding you need to be actor and audience all at the same time and that trips to the editing suit should be frequent. To me this week can be summed up by caring, not caring – being committed, but not a zealot whilst holding some nonchalance at the outcome. As Frederick Douglas said: “At a time like this, scorching irony not convincing argument is needed.” Sounds like sound advice to me.

Leading Change – Paradoxes of Change (Week 8)

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Quotefancy-paradox

Change is full of paradoxes and that’s OK, no really!

The Cambridge Dictionary defines paradox as “a situation or statement that seems impossible or is difficult to understand because it contains two opposite facts or characteristics.” In organizational change there are plenty of these and as change leaders we ignore them at our peril. This week we heard about three of these:

  • Paradox of rationality  – this recognizes that organisations are made up of humans who are often guided by intuition, emotion, prejudice and unthinking habit. The fact of humans’ irrationality runs against the current of perception that organisations are rational systems in the pursuit of strategic goals. In fact, organisations have lots of competing goals and attention and energy for these goals shifts over time.

In my last blog on gaps within change, I mentioned Rosabeth Moss-Alice in Wonderland croquet gameKanter and the work she has done on innovation within organisations. Rosabeth likens organisations to the Alice in Wonderland croquet game, with flamingo clubs, guinea pig croquet balls, Queen’s guards in the place of gates and goals all changing shape and direction on their own whilst keeping an eye on the Queen and her performance in the game. To survive Alice needs to navigate this irrational environment, just like the change leader. We need to be aware of and adapt to all of the changes in the game and understand the interplay of rationality and irrationality. We need to do so whilst also recognising the inherent limitations of the myth that organisations are rational.

To do this we need to accept what complexity, ambiguity, disagreement and uncertainty create and appreciate the ensuing tension between Big R rationality and little r rationality. The former is the authoritarian view of rationality that systems, logic and evidence provide the one true solution, whilst the latter uses logic and evidence to challenge the notion that there is one universal truth. This requires us to be self critical, experimental and exploratory to adapt to situations in practice to get things done.

  • Paradox of performance – this is the tension that exists in communicating the myth of the rational organisation and dealing with the duality of performance  required to bring about change.  Success generally comes in that space between thinking and acting with complete knowledge and certainty and total improvisation. Change leaders need to embrace both and appear to be confident in their directives whilst still feeling conflicted and uncertain. Can you embrace this hypocrisy?

This is a real tricky one for me. My own attitude in seeing hypocrisy in others’ actions makes me recoil at the notion of deliberately being hypocritical to achieve an outcome. I don’t want to think about myself being hypocritical and yet….

I see this play out in my organisation a lot as I have been granted the privilege of earning a place in some of our senior leaders’ backrooms. I also see them drawing strength from each other – at least those that they trust –  and swapping out their masks depending on the situation with various degrees of effectiveness.  The best analogy I have on this is being a parent. How often do we as parents, make things appear smooth and easy for our children when below the surface we are frantic and worrying about health, finances and handling job stress? Like it to or not, we all filter information to drive outcomes. But in dealing with this paradox we have to understand that others will judge us not by our intentions, but by our actions, so there is a delicate balance here.

I still think hypocrisy is too strong a term for this. I would prefer to view it as a duality to drive nuance.

  • Paradox of meaning  – can we find meaning in change activities and projects when we know careful thought and action do not guarantee success? Can we learn to live with the gap between what we hope to accomplish and what we can achieve?

stoxoi-stoxos-goal-target-500x330One interesting thought is this concept of synthesis. Reflecting back on my experience of change that I have driven, I think I have been doing this without having a term it. I am a change journeyman, it seems. I really enjoy the strategy, complexity and uncertainty that comes from the process. If I could do nothing all day other than to experiment and solve complex problems, I would would be supremely happy – the magic being in the exploration not in the destination. I am insatiably curious and courageous within bounds in exploring this game of change. The trick is to fire a dart of change without it going ballistic and moving on to the next target if it misses whilst taking out the learning.

Not all qualities are created equal when it comes to change 

So having outlined the main paradoxes of changes, we explored some ways to deal with them. My main take away here is it starts with me and developing certain metaqualities. As Buckley and Monks (2004) point out, these are qualities that drive other skills and abilities and determine how and when knowledge, skills and competencies  are used. They include the following and provide a means to restructure information and shift perspectives on problems rather than just come up with a quick fix:

  • self-knowledge
  • emotional resilience
  • personal drive
  • creativity
  • mental agility
  • critical reflection
  • balanced learning habits and skills
  • cognitive skills
  • self directed pro activity.

Learning by doing and experimenting here is key. Therefore it starts with some confidence and moving knowledge into action which then translates to increasing self confidence in dealing with ambiguity and influencing others. In other words becoming a deviant innovator.

I really like this concept of a deviant innovator. I guess I have always seen myself as one. But, looking back, I realise that I have focused far too heavily on the Big R rationality andcreative-class have not spent enough time probing and sensing. I am just now tentatively dipping my toe in the water of dealing with little r rationality and becoming more experimental in seeing if I can learn to deal with the rationality paradox. This comes in the form of learning to understand emotional agility and looking for emotional cues in myself and others and viewing emotion as data rather than as something scary to be avoided in business. It requires a lot of self knowledge, seeking feedback and reflecting. Its scary and often times feels uneasy, but since making a conscious effort in doing so, I feel I am now seeing the world in multi-colour, whereas before it was in muted hues. Doing this course at this time in my own personal development is surely not a coincidence.

The paradox of reducing complexity into simplicity

In class we learned about the Stacey Matrix as a tool to assist with the paradox of rationality. The matrix was designed by Richard Stacey in 1996 to assist with decision making in complex environments based on the degree of certainty and level of agreement on the issue. It is reproduced here.

stacey

Zone 1 in the matrix is ordinary management decision making and operates in simple environments.

Zones 2 and 3  are complex decision making zones operating where there is more uncertainty and less alignment.

Zone 4 is chaos where no conclusions are drawn. The system is not ready to tackle the issue and discussions are circular without resolution.

Zone 5 is the extraordinary zone where more probing and sensing is required and intuition plays a part before a decision can be made.

The tool is quite neat and has been adopted widely. Stacey, however, has distanced himself from the matrix as he felt it invoked the very opposite of what he was trying to show by it. The matrix did the very thing that its existence was trying to discourage, namely  making complexity seem simple. The matrix could be used to reason that we just have to plan and prepare more in more complex environments, when clearly new ways of thinking are required. Another paradox!

An alternative to the above matrix is the Cynefin Framework developed by David Snowden. It outlines the different path to decision making in each of the various environments. Only in the Obvious quadrant is the traditional path of plan, evaluate, do relevant. In the middle is disorder and David Snowden points out that it is where we mostly operate until we have figured out which environment we are in. In that place we have a tendency to interpret the situation according to our preference for action. In practice it certainly feels that way, so it is somewhat gratifying to have this confirmed pictorially.

Cynefin-Framework-Diagram-for-Problem-Solving-300x240

Cynefin Framework for Problem Solving

Snowden also points out that between each quadrant there is a transition point, but the boundary between Obvious and Chaos is a sharp cliff from which it is very hard to recover. To get to the edge, one has to pass through the zone of complacency. Most decision making should therefore be in the Complex or Chaotic quadrants.

These frameworks reinforce the myriad of factors which can determine the outcome of change, most of which have nothing to do with logic and rationality and the need for different ways of thinking in different phases and environments. Apart from degree of agreement and certainty, communication, skill and capability, culture and pure chance all play a part in change. As change agents we need to be constantly scanning the environment to understand what really is at play.

The bottom line 

I can really relate to the paradox of rationality. I had already figured out that I needed to broaden my organizational inter-relationship tool box beyond just logic and evidence alone. I had been trying some techniques in my conversations with others, listening more closely and being able to observe myself in these interactions whilst they were occurring. It feels like real positive step forward in understanding that others might be butting up against the same paradox and it is inherent in organisational structure. Whereas I was a bit tentative in my approach, after reading about metaqualities and the need for experiential learning, I plan to be more confident in my approach. The achievement of reaching deviant innovator will be my guiding star. Naming something can make all the difference! I also see that it is impossible to remove uncertainty from the organisational environment and understand that I need to make peace with it.

DilbertInnovation-1

 

Leading Change – Knowing/Doing Gaps (Week 7)

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Do you ever feel that there is never enough knowledge or resources (including time) to do what needs to be done in life, or work?

I feel this is a Captain Obvious question given the copious quantities of captain-obvious-strikes-againleadership/management/self development literature around and because, well, I feel like this often.  In our personal and business lives we spend a lot of time figuring out what needs to be done and assume that once we have figured it out, implementation will be easy. Recalling how many times I have started on a journey to eat more healthy and exercise more and not being able to sustain it long term, implementation is certainly not the easy part! This failure can’t all be down to lack of willpower or motivation, can it?

This is where the knowing/doing gap comes in – knowing what should be done but not being able to get it done. It’s a relief to be able to acknowledge that getting things done to bring about change is genuinely difficult because we have to jump this gap. We need to approach change knowing that it will take energy and resources to overcome the gap, get through the messy middle as noted by Rosebeth Moss-Kanter and embed this new way of being. 

Minding the Gaps

In the world of work there are three sub-gaps which feed into the knowing/doing gap and we need to be mindful of them. These are:

  • the Leadership gap – change should be 80% lead and 20% managed. Instead its usually the opposite. The focus tends to be on the short term fix, tasks, details, procedures and trying to smash the unpredictable into the predictable and increasing control. These are levers of management which sacrifice bigger picture, inspirational and transformative thinking indicative of leadership.

How this plays out in our organisation is the constant starting of new projects before the old ones are bedded down. You can almost hear groans of “here we go again”  from the team, as we watch our leaders roll up their sleeves for about 5 minutes, hand it over for implementation and then prospect for the next shiny thing. Implementation reports are never as “sexy” as new shiny thing prospects. As leaders we need to have the courage to prioritise and face up to the prospect that there will be prospective projects that we will have to consign to the “one that got away” category and be at peace with that.

  • the Practice gap – this is the gap between the knowledge, tools, policies and mike tyson imagechecklists we have and applying these to make things happen in complex and challenging environments and situations. I see this as a theory vs practice gap because between theory and practice exists uncertainty, limits of prescription and unpredictability. As Mike Tyson says “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face“. We need to accept as Mike Tyson did that we will get punched in the face with change. The idea is that it doesn’t have to end as a Knock Out! 

I have to admit relief in acknowledging the existence of this gap. I think back to the energy I have spent in making implementation look easy – peddling furiously under that lake whilst gliding serenely over its glassy surface. There is a real light bulb  moment for me here  – understanding I need to be less hard on myself in viewing  my own performance in change – no matter how thoroughly I prepare my tools and checklists, they are only one part of the script and the performance gap is inevitable. It is only by accepting this that I can be free to experiment, question myself and others, recognise the possibility of error and build resilience to overcome the gap. Getting creative is what it is about.

  • the Power gap – the gap between what managers are expected, requested or required to do and the time, people and resources that are available to them to get the job done. There are 4 reasons for the gap:
    • diversity and inclusion – change initiatives may depend on actions and support of people holding divergent views whom we have no control over. This increases the complexity of change
    • power and powerlessness  – both of these can act against change where the powerful and the powerless oppose the change. The less autonomy and discretion people have in their jobs the more desperately they will cling to the status quo
    • structural inequalities – readiness to change means the change is relevant to you. Are people ready to change? Do they have faith that leaders will live up to their promise?
    • over-promising and under-delivering – leaders being committed to the aspirations of change but being uninterested in the problems that need to be addressed to see them through. This is so common in my organisation and I confess I have been guilty of it on occasion and I now understand more the impact this can have on a team.

Navigating the Gaps – Act Like an Entrepreneur

Knowing that the gaps are inevitable what can we do about them? My key take away here is to approach these problems like an entrepreneur – with all the energy, vision, creativity, tenacity and resilience you can muster. As Rosabeth Moss-Kanter says entrepreneurs are dissatisfied and feel restless about a problem, but have a firm belief they can do something about it. Rosebeth also reminds us that answers to problems can be found from anywhere, at any level and reinforces that not all who wander are lost. Wandering is in fact required to bring new ideas to add to the organisational  kaleidoscope to foster creativity. Often innovation comes from putting fragments of existing ideas together in different ways, just like a kaleidoscope. For more on this, have a look at Rosebeth’s video:

So what does entrepreneurship  look like? Here’s a check list, but remember the limits of prescription from the discussion on the Practice Gap above!

  1. Learn to deal not just with the rational, but also the emotional  – in yourself and others
  2. Influence yourself as well as others – leadership
  3. Overcome your fear of failure
  4. Create safe spaces for learning (play) and failure in the process
  5. Be mindful and considered in your approach and others’ reactions to change
  6. Maintain adaptability
  7. Be a do-er and not a complainer
  8. Network and build a power base
  9. Understand the politics and environment – work the grain with the grain and use the politics and environment against the politics and environment to bring about the right conditions for change
  10. Expect criticism and push through the messy middle, but keep the rose coloured glasses in the back pocket so you can call a spade  failure a spade failure when you need to.

Navigating the Gaps – Act Your Way to Being a Leader

What really resonated with me this week was Hermina Ibbara’s work on the authenticity paradox and on acting and thinking like a leader. You can find the videos on her work below:

Hermina provides us with her own personal example of knowing what to do, seeing others do it to achieve success, but not doing it because “it is not who we are”. So how can we be the leaders we want to be, ie. be more effective and still be who we are? I have been grappling with this question for some time in my own role within my current organisation and not coming up with any clear answers, so hearing Hermina articulate her experience and learning was transformative.

Before starting with my current organisation, I worked in private legal practice for over 20 years. I was good it it, solving complex legal problems, implementing legal strategy and coming up with innovative solutions. In that environment it helped to be the smartest person in the room. In the not for profit sector where I now work, that is not the currency for effectiveness. In this environment, heart is important, social factors are critical and emotional connection is vital. Having a logical solution alone just doesn’t cut it anymore. Knowing this, I had no idea on how to move in the right direction, to let go of having everything steeped in logic or how to grapple with the discomfort of working it out.

But Herminia’s idea of redfining our job and acting our way into leadership thinking makes sense. What I have been doing (unknowingly) over the past couple of years is redefining my job and expanding my network to better align with my leadership aspirations and to make me more effective in the environment in which I now find myself. After hearing Herminia, I now understand that I have been too tentative in my approach and feeling like I would be “found out”. This hasn’t happened yet and in fact, I have had moments where I have come up with the very idea that has moved a problem forward even though the subject matter is not totally in my patch. The leader to which I aspire to become is not afraid to throw in an idea that may be outside of her core area of technical expertise.

Herminia also gave me clarity in her discussion of the authenticity paradox. Is there a way to be effective and still be yourself? Focusing on the emotional and not the rational goes against how I see myself. I tell myself that emotions are fickle and have no role to play in a being competent lawyer analysing a complex legal problem and coming up with a solution. After all, the lawyer is the one that everyone looks at to be calm in the time of crisis and complexity.

However, what I am trying to be here is a leader with legal skills rather than just a lawyer, so it is not serving me. Taking on board what Herminia says, I now realise the better we are at something the harder it is to want to feel discomfort in something in which we are a novice. I also realise that there is more than one self at play in a transformation moment  – the self you are now and the self you are aspiring to be. This means that taking on new ways of being effective that don’t feel right (yet) does not have to be alienating of self. You can be you and take on board new ways of being.

This allows me to experiment more with confidence, know that it won’t feel comfortable and understand this is OK. Knowing that these feelings are not uncommon will also make me a better coach and mentor.

The Bottom Line

The knowing/ doing gap will always be there. As a leader of change, I need to acknowledge it and factor it into any change plan. Tackling this gaps with an entrepreneurial spirit whilst not being afraid to experiment and fail, but maintaining vision and influence is a challenge. Knowing that the discomfort in transformation is likely coming from experimentation and shedding old perceptions of self , rather than lack of ability will fuel action, where hesitation once lived.

dilbert project plan

 

Upwardly Mobile Photography: Changing Our Window to the World

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Today I spent the afternoon looking through family photo albums with my mother. This is something that makes her happy and gives both of us an opportunity to reflect on our individual journeys and collective memories.

A couple of thoughts struck me as my mother and I made our journey down memory lane together. Firstly, these photos were actually printed on paper, some creased and yellowing with age, others as sharp and vivid as they day they were taken. This was a somewhat different and nostalgic experience for me, given that most of photos I browse these days are digital. Secondly, it seemed a lot of the photos centred around family celebrations generally involving food. Birthdays, anniversaries, weddings and graduations all involving beautifully set tables and a whole lot of cake. All of which made my mother remark that we sure ate a lot. Thirdly, the only selfies were those taken with a camera timer and usually did not show one’s best pose. If you have ever stared at the flashing light of the camera timer afraid to move as a result of the impending ‘cheese’ moment only to give up the ghost at the very minute the shutter clicks, you’ll know what I mean. Lastly, the only nude or semi nude photos to be seen were of humans under the age of two. And not a single duck face in the bunch.

I can’t really believe that we ate that much more than the average European immigrant based family or were any more prudish. In fact I’m pretty sure we were fairly average in that regard. What the experience started me thinking about was the evolution of photography and the impact of the mobile phone camera on that evolution.

We now carry our cameras wherever we go. Social media networks are ever ready to receive our photos and publish them to our audience. Has the urge to publish and receive an acknowledgement of our presence through comments and likes and the immediacy of the process made our personal photography more mundane or simply more realistic?

Facebook and working outAccording to Daniel Palmer*, having our cameras constantly with us has led to more spontaneous photo taking and a more informal way of taking and consuming images. Photos have moved from forming the basis of one’s highlight reel to now forming the basis of one’s communication catalogue. Clicking on that piece of furniture in the store and seeking our friend’s second opinion, sending a missing you photo to a lover or snapping a flower arrangement for later inspiration all serve as part of a pictorial conversation. And given the convergent nature of technology, the conversation is immediate.

So, if you go and work out in the gym and don’t post a photo on Facebook did the workout really happen?

Thankfully, whilst mobile cameras have provided us with a mirror to our own world and a window into that of others, they have also provided a means of partaking in one of the most interactive and social art forms. You can get a flavour of the impact of mobile photography what it means for photographic App development from the following video:

And what about how we store and view the end product of our mobile photography? Not so long ago, we would eagerly await a postcard from our friends holidaying overseas to give us a glimpse into their experience or enjoy a slide or photo night of the highlights upon their return. Now all of this is immediate and we follow our friends’ overseas jaunts in real time and have all but seen their overseas highlight reel by the time they have returned home. Have we therefore lost something in the midst of the gains of immediacy and convenience? I can’t help but think we have. The sense of anticipation and wonder at reviewing the captured moments have given way to instant gratification and a sense of loss over old-fashioned and more collegiate forms of social sharing. With more than 350 million photos being uploaded daily to Facebook according to Digital Trends, and approximately 55million photos uploaded daily to Instagram these platforms are fast becoming our photo albums of the future.

And finally, our mobile cameras offer a gateway to be an exhibitor. On 15 May 2012, I took part in a worldwide photography experience through A.DAY.org, which asked the world’s citizens to capture and upload photos of their day. The curators have turned the site into a permanent photographic exhibition, giving an interesting glimpse into humanity.

Mobile cameras have changed the way we look at the world and each other and brought us ever closer whilst keeping us further apart.

Are you and avid mobile photographer? Do you enjoy browsing through photo albums? Do you still print photos on paper?

* Palmer, D (2012) “iPhone Photography: mediating visions of social space” in L. Hjorth, J. Burgess and I. Richardson (eds) Studying Mobile Media; Cultural technologies, mobile communication and the iPhone, New York and London, Routledge pp85-97.

Green Tags and Hash: We Must Like Them Sam I Am #Tagging

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How much thought do you put into the tags you assign to your posts?

If you’re like me, the answer is probably not much. I reach the end of the post and then come up with four or five keywords which relate to my post and add a couple of WordPress category tags and that’s about it. Occasionally I might add a trending keyword or two to try to tap into popular culture, but search engine optimisation or SEO comes very much a distant second to my creative process.

That said, I do however find the whole world of SEO and tagging quite fascinating. There is a rhythm to it, once you take the time to observe the patterns and get your head into the technology (which I don’t claim to have done, but I do read a fair bit about the theory). In the rich world of the continually woven Web tapestry, the tie that binds our individual creativity is metadata. Metadata is essentially the tool that gives us information about information or knowledge about knowledge and its principal forms for the Web are tags and links. These are the signposts that lead others to our work, our entry to the Web directory.

One thing I never considered until now is that by tagging and linking we all shape the look and feel of the Web directory. This ability is like a wonderful gift. At school you probably learned about several formal classification systems, such as the Dewey Decimal System for books or the animal taxonomy system in biology. Remember how you had to learn the rules, imposed by others in these formal systems and sometimes the results lead you down a path you thought illogical? Ordered but rigid and reflecting the value systems and judgements of others.

Contrast this to the system operating for the Web, a system so vast and rapidly changing that the human and financial resources required to maintain a formal classification system for its content would be greater than a small nation. Instead we have an informal, ever changing and continually evolving non hierarchical classification system composed of links and tags to which we all contribute. This is known as a folksonomy. Unlike a taxonomy it functions on few formal rules, is produced out of self-interest, is valuable because of its aggregation and continues to function even when data is incomplete. Sounds like a recipe for chaos, right? But it works.

Everything ok quoteWhich takes me back to when I first started using the Web. I remember logging onto a page and thinking how do I know I have started at the very beginning (which according to the Sound of Music is a very good place to start) and not missed something. It felt very foreign and quite ad hoc and not very systematic or logical. Up until that point my sole point of reference for finding information was the library, this was a whole new world. Now it has become second nature to just start somewhere on the Web and see where it leads. Rather than knowing its the end because you have reached the last classification point, it’s now the end when it feels like the end.

The other interesting thing about tagging is that it can give you instant feedback in relation to your work. Most posts start out by the producers allocating their own tags. However as the work is disseminated, others may tag the same work differently, bringing their own perspectives to it. Have you ever tagged something as “humour” only to find that it is tagged as something quite  serious by your readers? Tagging also creates its own language and social norms throughout the communities that use them. “Freshly Pressed” is an example of this in the WordPress community. What to some might connote a laundry service, to this community it means the best of the best, posts judged as quality by WordPress and worthy of promotion and a prize to be achieved. And we contribute to this evolution, every one of us by the tags we create and by the value we assign to tags created by others.

Tagging should therefore be a considered and deliberate choice for creators. It is the modern day equivalent to the shingle and deserves to be more than just an afterthought. We are judged by the metadata we send out and we should create it with as much zeal as we do the main body of our content.

The final word about tagging must go to Justin Timberlake and Jimmy Fallon. So you think the use of hash tags on Twitter, Instagram and now Facebook is pervasive? You’re not alone as this fun YouTube clip shows:

We could all take a leaf out of Jimmy Fallon’s book about the power of tagging. He shows us nightly how to harness the comedic creativity of his audience through the use of hash tags.

Do you put much thought into your tags? Do you use hash tags in your social media? Do you find them annoying?

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Do No Harm: Revisiting Intellectual Property Rights In The Digital World

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The system of intellectual property has developed into a huge machine, largely out of control, and ever more aggressive as it fails to stop the floodwater of information from breaking through the barriers it tries to erect

Aigrain, P 2005 “Positive Intellectual Rights and Information Exchanges” in R A Ghosh (ed), CODE: collaborative ownership and the digital economy, pp 287-315. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press at page 289.

For many who create, these are fighting words.

Undoubtedly, by empowering the user to create the new digital environment has placed the subject of the ambit of copyright protection squarely in the spotlight. Governments around the globe are grappling with finding the right balance between copyright protection and encouraging innovation that builds on previous works. In this country, the Australian Reform Law Commission is currently finalising its review, entitled Copyright and the Digital Economy, into the effectiveness and reform of Australia’s copyright laws in the Internet age. The ALRC released its discussion paper in June 2013 after receiving more than 300 submissions, including from Google and eBay to its issues paper and the same number of submissions again to its discussion paper.

The Australian review follows on the heels of similar reviews held in the United Kingdom, with the main findings summarised in the Hargreaves Report released in 2011, Ireland in 2012 and Canada. In April 2013, the US Government announced it was also reviewing US copyright laws in this press release.

The importance of this inquiry is highlighted by the following statement from Professor Lawrence Lessig, in his article In Defense of Piracy:

The return of the “remix culture” could drive extraordinary economic growth, if encouraged and properly balanced. It could return our culture to a practice that has marked every culture in human history—save a few in the developed world for much of the 20th century – where many create as well as consume.

Or if you prefer the visual, you can see Professor Lessig’s TED talk on this topic here.

At the time of writing this post, Canada leads the way in innovating its approach to copyright laws particularly in the context of user-generated content (UGC). After conducting a review into copyright law in that country, Canada enacted the Copyright Modernization Act which came into force in November 2012. It inserted, what is now widely known as the ‘YouTube clause”, permitting the creation and publication of mashup videos and other UGC without infringing copyright in the works used. The clause, number 29-21, provides that it is not an infringement of copyright for an individual to use an existing work which has been published or made available to the public in the creation of a new work or to disseminate it if:

  • the use is done solely for non-commercial purposes
  • the source of the original is mentioned in the new work if reasonable in the circumstances
  • the individual has reason to believe that the existing work is not infringing copyright
  • the use does not a have a substantial adverse effect, financial or otherwise on the actual or potential exploitation of the existing work or on an existing or potential market for it, including that the new work is not a substitute for the existing one.

At this stage, the ALRC is not recommending that Australia follow the Canadian example believing that determining the issue of whether a work is created solely for non-commercial purposes is problematic. That issue, the ALRC argues is made more difficult by the interaction of UGC and social media platforms where the creator of the UGC may not use the work for commercial purposes, but the platform operator may.

The way forward must balance the needs of new creators with the old and should focus on the concept of harm to the original copyright holder.

It is said that copyright as a form of property was implemented to ensure that original creators could maximise the return for their creations thereby encouraging innovation. However, In practice, creativity never occurs in isolation and works generally borrow from
what has come earlier. Transformative works make a beneficial contribution to modern culture and should be permitted particularly when they cause no harm to the incentives to creation for the original copyright holder.

220px-Barack_Obama_Hope_posterWhilst no direct empirical study exists on the economic consequences of transformative works on the rights of the original, some indicative principles can be drawn from a recent study undertaken in the context of the proposed introduction of a parody fair dealing exemption in the United Kingdom. The study reviewed a sample of more than eight thousand YouTube musical videos which were stated to be parody and viewer behaviour in response to those videos. The study found that the activities of the parody creators had little or no direct impact on the audiences of the original creators and if any impact was observed it was positive in that it appeared to be more advantageous for a commercial video to be parodied than not parodied at all. The addition of creative labour to the original made the work potentially transformative and diminished the possibility of confusion in the minds of viewers between the parody and the original. The study went further to note that even if the parody is produced for commercial purposes, it may well increase demand for the original or be sold in a different market. Contrary to popular belief, there is not necessarily any direct relationship between profitability to the copyright owner and the matter of exploitation by others.

We are at a point in history where we have an opportunity to recalibrate our thinking on copyright. Permitting the use of copyright material where no harm is caused to the original copyright holder strikes the right balance between the present and the future and avoids our children being unnecessarily labelled as copyright criminals.

And keeps things like the Hope poster coming.

Got A Mac Attack? Would You Like Some Publicity With That?

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I am a Maccas girl from way back. During my formative years, I spent more than a decade working under the Golden Arches. McDonald’s or Maccas as we Aussies refer to it, was a fun place to work. It Big MAcprovided an education that supplmented my book learning through school. It taught me about processes, structure and team work, suggestive selling and the six steps to great customer service.

During my stint at Maccas I was regularly called upon to do “window”. This was the name that we gave to the job of serving customers. At various points in my fast food career, Maccas ran a promotion

where the customer would have to recite the Big Mac Chant in 30 seconds or less to receive a free soft drink. As a window girl I would have to listen to endless customers chanting about the ingredients in a Big Mac. What people will do for for a free drink! For those of you who don’t know the Big Mac Chant goes something like this:

Two All Beef Patties Special Sauce Lettuce Cheese Pickles Onions On A Sesame Seed Bun

except if you say it fast it sounds more like:

twoallbeefpattiesspecialsaucelettucecheesepicklesonionsonasesameseedbun

You might be asking what this has to do with social media. Glad you asked.

A couple of days ago, McDonald’s launched its Big Mac Chant promotion. The idea of the promotion is to have Big Mac lovers make a video of the Big Mac Chant and upload it to the website. Visitors to the website then vote on the videos. The mysterious McDonald’s panel then determines the best video to award the grand prize of an overseas trip for 7 people and of course, a Big Mac.

This week in our course material we studied the habits of audiences in the online world. And Big Mac Chant campaign embodies much of what we talked about.

Phot courtesy of freedigitalphots.net

Phot courtesy of freedigitalphots.net

Audiences are not the passive recipients they used to be. Shock horror, we now want to participate, engage and be part of the discussion. Brands and news organisations have recognised and leveraged off this desire to various degrees. Some welcome audience participation, others do not. In what to me is a clever move, McDonald’s is playing the social media audience at its own game in what should be a win/win situation for both. The reward for a great Big Mac Chant is no longer just a soft drink and let’s face it, that just would not cut it in today’s world. The prize is now free publicity, validation and fifteen minutes of fame. The potential for likes and comments and possible retweets and linkages is huge. So, not only is McDonald’s harnessing the creative power of its Big Mac fans at little or no cost, it also feeds into their desire to show off and delivers to them a ready-made audience of fellow Big Mac lovers. Not to mention the odd video producer or advertising agency or two.

The cost of all of this involvement will be the need to moderate its community. The issue for McDonald’s will be that videos and comments left on its website by others will become in effect owned by it. This leads to issues both from a reputation or brand standpoint and a legal standpoint.

I want to focus on the later for the balance of this post.

Over the last few years, the Australian legal system has provided some guidance on responsibility for the activities of others in the online space.

Through a series of Court decisions and decisions of the Advertising Standards Bureau * it is now clear in Australia that:

  • a page or wall owner can be responsible for publication of content on its pages by others when it knows of that publication and does nothing to remove it
  • the Facebook page of a business is a marketing communication tool over which the owner has a reasonable degree of control, and therefore an advertising or marketing communication on that page is covered by the Australian Advertising Code. This is because Facebook provides the tools to effectively moderate the page
  • The Code not only covers material published by the brand, but also to comments and material published on the page by friends or fans of the brand
  • whilst the tone and the audience of the page and brand will be taken into account, it will not be fully determinative of the standards that will apply in that community. Comments which are offensive, such as anti-women or anti-homosexual even for a brand whose marketing is tongue in cheek and full of larrikinism, will still be considered offensive and the brand responsible for them
  • brands need to monitor and moderate their online spaces regularly and remove any offensive material within a reasonable time.

The lesson for brands and businesses is that they must manage the user generated content (UGC) that appears on their pages as actively as they manage their own. Traditionally, big corporates have compliance teams vetting their content before publication. The rise of UGC adds a whole different dimension as the brands don’t know about it until after publication. Vigilance and pro activity is the key to staying on the right side of the legal and reputational line. Online moderation is now a profession and is not for the faint hearted or those short of time.

Now, all this talk of legal liability has made me hungry. Surely, it’s time for a Big Mac.

* See Australian Consumer and Competition Commission v Allergy Pathway Pty Limited (No.2) [2011] FCA 74 and

Advertising Standards Bureau Case Report, Case Number 0271/12, Advertiser: Foster’s Australia, Asia  & Pacific (11 July 2012)

This blog post is for discussion purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Please see a legal professional to obtain specific advice in relation to your individual circumstances.
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Print Media – A Matter of Life And Death

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This week’s course materials sent us down the rabbit hole of how the digital environment is changing the delivery of news. It was a timely journey with word that Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, was to purchase the Washington Post and related mastheads for a cool US$250million. As reported by the Post, the vendor initially approached the sale as unthinkable but went on to justify the deal as being necessary to ensure continued growth for the Post as opposed to merely survival. Bezos was apparently chosen as the anointed buyer due to his technical brilliance.

It is not beyond the realm to suggest that other high profile newspapers will go the same way in the shorter to medium term. The financial troubles of print or “old school media” (OSM) in grappling with unsuccessful paywalls, fragmentation of audiences across multiple platforms and the pressures to retain quality in their journalistic endeavours are well chronicled. The fact that these topics make for interesting reading is highlighted by the recent release of two books providing commentary on the decline of the Fairfax empire *. Perhaps if readers are reluctant to pay to go behind Fairfax’s paywall, they will be less reluctant to pay to get perspectives on how a once robust and powerful media empire now finds itself losing relevance. The books, Fairfax: The Rise And Fall by Colleen Ryan and Killing Fairfax: Packer, Murdoch & the Ultimate Revenge by Pamela Williams , both of which have shades of the ’80s TV series, Dallas, are ironically being heralded as examples of professional independent journalism.

Image courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net

Image courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net

The demise of Fairfax is being played out against the backdrop of convergence and divergence. Convergence generally refers to the notion of integration between different platforms. For example, your computer is no longer just a computer, it can also double as a television, newspaper and a telecommunications device. Translated into the media space, this means that the same news story can be delivered through multiple platforms and people are tending to rely more and more on online news sources. Online news is generally categorized by the notions of automation, personalisation and participation and news production, once the sole province of big business is being shared with cottage industry players. OSM has generally been seen to be slow to respond to the new converged environment, losing their main sources of advertising revenue, namely classified advertising, to online players and initially providing online news for free as a supplement to their mainstream print activities. All of this leads to a fragmentation, if not a complete erosion, of audiences who are generally now reluctant to pay for news content that they can obtain free from other sources. This is where divergence becomes relevant, because in the new digital world, news production has now become decentralized and instead of the one to many news dissementation model, we have moved to the many to many or many to few model, leading to financial impacts for OSM stables and their journalists.

It is certainly an interesting time to be watching the news media space as the latest newspaper circulation figures released today attest. Should this be a time of fear or a time of opportunity? Will traditional journalists be able to rise to the challenge of the digital media world and share their public writing space with all of us?

You might be looking at the cover of the last magazine I will ever buy

You might be looking at the cover of the last magazine I will ever buy

In an interesting juxtaposition, the changing way I receive news was recently brought home to me by the birth of Prince George. This was a wonderful feel-good story involving the giving of life and the birth of a new royal generation to a smart looking prince and his beautiful princess. I, along with millions of others around the world eagerly awaited news of the royal birth. And where were we looking for it? It wasn’t in the newspapers or TV, it was where we could get realtime news, the Internet. We marvelled at Kate’s poise and real world post-pregnancy figure and we watched in wonder as Prince William doted on his new son and looked just as awkward carrying him as every first time father. In the following week after the birth, the traditional 10 page magazine spread appeared on newsstands. What was different though was that they now carried the same pictures that we had already seen online days before. In what was probably a slightly nostalgic move, I bought a copy as a keepsake as looking through Internet archives does not have the same feel as flipping through glossies as a reminder of a major world event. Not yet anyway.

But what this signaled to me was that my weekly news entertainment magazine habit had died a sad death. Magazine publication day used to be a highlight of my week, now magazines were reserved for special events or overseas travel. As an asside, there is nothing like catching up on celebrity gossip and leisurely rereading the same article three times on a long haul flight.

The funny thing was, I had not really noticed that my magazine buying habits had changed until these life and death events. I had effortlessly slipped into reading entertainment news online along with most everyone else and was reshaping news culture.

Are you still prepared to pay for news? Are you worried about what will happen to the quality of journalism in the digital world? Do you still buy magazines?

* For my overseas readers, Fairfax is a long standing media group in Australia and is the main competitor of the Murdoch lead News Media group. It controls several of the capital city major newspapers, such as the Sydney Morning Herald and Australian Financial Review (being the Wall Street Journal equivalent). Australia has one of the most concentrated media ownership markets in the world.

Digital Culture: It is All About YOU!

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We hear the term “digital culture” everyday. Usually it is used with a negative connotation, describing a counter-revolution to traditional media delivery and consumption and the death of reading and writing as we know it. But what does the expression really mean and what is our place in this so-called “culture”?

Digital CultureLet me start by outlining what it is not. Digital culture is not the same as being digitally cultured. There is no doubt, our children are growing up more exposed to digital devices than ever before and at an ever earlier age. My children were born before the smartphone/tablet revolution, so it always intrigues me when I see toddlers out with their parents at restaurants with smartphone or tablet in hand. They have replaced books and plastic keys as the distraction devices of the new millennium. And from what I have observed, the practice is almost universal. In fact, just yesterday at the supermarket, a four year old was being pushed around in a trolley playing on his tablet allowing his mother the time to shop. I pass no judgement on this practice other than to use it as an example of children becoming more and more familiar with the use of digital devices, in other words becoming digitally cultured. You can read more about the possible impacts in this UK Telegraph article .

The concept of digitally cultured therefore connotes an ever increasing computerization and digitizatilation of society. It is as a result, that digital culture emerges. In his article, Participation, Remediation, Bricolage: Considering Principal Components of Digital Culture, Mark Deuze notes the main components of a digital culture as:

    • Participation – we have all become active agents in the content creation process
    • Remediation – we build on, modify, amplify and recreate what has come before
    • Bricolage – we assemble and disseminate our version of reality

Whilst to Deuze, this may not be quite so radical as it sounds, to some of us it is a huge change in the way we relate to and engage with news and information. We may never have written a letter to a newspaper editor, done a stint on community radio or complained to the Publications and Media Ombudsmen in the past, but we are now blogging, tweeting and linking. Web 2.0 has brought us an easy and low cost way to do it all. And this not only impacts journalism and the way we consume news, but also impacts on product development, marketing, public relations, corporate communication and many other sectors of the economy.

Let’s have a closer look at blogging and see how that fits in with Deuze’s three components.

Examples of news and political blogs abound in the Australian context. In late 2011, Greg Jericho, the author of the Rise of the Fifth Estate and pro blogger at Grog’s Gamut, compiled this list of Australian political blogs. The 2013 winner of the Best Australian Blogs competition in the commentary section was AusVotes 2013, a compilation blog. Clearly, Australians who are not journalists are participating in political commentary by running and contributing to blogs. However, far from replacing traditional media sources, they act as a supplement to it. Would these bloggers or blogs have survived this long if traditional media sources were giving the public all they want in news delivery? They lend another voice to the debate, sometimes that voice is objective, sometimes not, sometimes that voice is in pursuit of a personal agenda, sometimes not. An Internet connection, a point of view and some very basic technical skill is all that participation requires.

According to Deuze, remediation:

does not necessarily mean different from or in radical opposition to, the mainstream or dominant ways of doing things, but rather an expression of a distinctly private enactment of human agency in the omnipresent computer-mediated reality.

What this means is that blogs sit alongside traditional media where public journalism is still practiced in corporate news groups. Blogs however rely more on Netiquette or a loose consesual way of reader and producer interaction whilst still building on notions of quality journalistic practice, such as credibility and legitimacy. They often address the experiences of people in a more meaningful way, taking the news story and targeting its relevance towards readers rather than to a demographic.

And finally, bricolage. This refers to the act of creating something new out of what is existing. Think remix, think tweaking and reassembly. Because of Netiquette, bloggers understand the interconnectivity of the world in which they operate. Linking to mainstream media stories, other blogs and refashioning blog posts to apply across different sites and platforms so as to reach different audiences are all part of the blogger’s tool box. Bloggers of value always however add their own opinions and analysis and as such appear to be talking to us.

Created through Tagxedo

Created through Tagxedo

Every time we post a blog, pass a comment on a new item, take a story and post a link to it whilst adding our own viewpoints we are engaging in digital culture. Every time we follow a Titter news feed, retweet, video an event and upload a YouTube video or add to a Wiki we shape digital culture. It is all about YOU and it is all about ME.

Digital culture gives us the freedom to create and publish, but requires us to live up to the responsibility of being discerning and ethical readers. It is indeed a brave, new world.

In what ways do you participate in digital culture? Are you a blogger? Do you prefer other ways of participation, such as microblogging on Twitter or news dissemination on Facebook?