CommunicAction

To be fair, Ms. Clark's post doesn't just talk about transparency. As a matter of fact, I'd argue that the title is a bit of a misnomer. What she's really talking about is leadership engagement. Leadership engagement includes transparency, but it also includes listening.

Here's a true story to illustrate the subtle difference.

At Prospero & Partners, we work with a lot of trade associations. We recently carried out some member research for one of them at a time when the board was looking at ways to streamline how the association works. The board proposed significant changes to the bylaws that would require approval by the general assembly. Given the full agenda of the short general assembly, that basically meant putting a yes/no proposition to the membership. Take it or leave it. The board had acted in all transparency, respecting delays for informing the members of the vote, etc.

At the same time, our research revealed a strong call from the members for a more consultative decision-making process. They weren't asking for just transparency; they wanted greater and broader participation in setting the association's agenda and making decisions.

Our suggestion to the client? Use technology to allow the members to have a voice before they arrive at the general assembly. That way if there is a general feeling of discontent, the board will know and be able to reconsider the proposal before the day of the vote. If the change proves contentious, this could potentially prevent a rift in the organization.

That suggestion is, of course, just a stop-gap measure, not the entire solution. The wider issue of participation and consultation needs to be addressed (without, of course, falling into the extreme opposite of total inaction because of endless consultations).

With all of the inexpensive, accessible and high-performing information and communications technology available today, there is little excuse for not being more consultative. However, just having the latest, shiny toys does not guarantee that they will produce the desired outcome.

Can Prospero & Partners help you achieve leadership based on engagement? Talk to us about diagnostic research to identify organizational needs and possible solutions. We also act as trusted advisors to leaders during the transitions to greater participation and engagement. Contact us today for more information about our research, training and advising services.

Photo credit: iStock

Yes, a philanthropic campaign should support a good cause. But it should also clearly support your business strategy. That's harder than it sounds. This case study shows how some simple tweaks can increase impact.

"Answer a simple question and Planète Végétal will give two kilos of vegetables to Restos du Coeur (a charity offering food relief in France)". This message was waiting in my inbox this morning, forwared by a friend, so I duly went to the site, told them what the sum of 10 and 4 is, and presto! They've agreed to donate 2 kg of produce to a worthy cause that is struggling to meet people's needs in these hard economic times.

On the surface, this seems like everyone should be happy now. But from a professional perspective, I feel unsatisfied. 

Planète Végétal has clearly budgeted a food gift of up to 40,000 tonnes of produce because they "limit" the number of eligible clicks to 20,000. So why not just give the veggies and be done with it?

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The Secret of My Suce$s may not be Michael J. Fox's best-remembered film, but it contains a critical message for doing business in today's uncertain environment. Released in 1987, when the US economy was slowing and the year of the Black Monday stock market crash, the movie is set in a major corporation that has begun retrenching and firing people. Our young hero takes advantage of the situation: officially working in the mailroom, he occupies a recently vacated corner office and begins taking daring initiatives on behalf of the company on the authority of his bravado alone.

As expected, the masquerade is discovered, and everything he has built begins to unravel...until he convinces a few critical people to believe in his counterintuitive plan for recovery. Rather than cutting costs and retrenching, he argues that the company should be expanding aggressively and investing. Competitors are retrenching, and he argues that this leaves a lot of empty terrain to be occupied.

According to the dominant economic orthodoxy, this is madness. And yet, it just might work.

One of the important features of the modern economy is that it is built on confidence. The value of currencies, stocks and even physical capital is not limited to tangible features. It also depends on demand and, ultimately, desirability. The less people believe in the potential of the current situation, the more they retrench, and their pessimism literally destroys economic value. Conversely, high levels of confidence foster investment, expansion and creation of value.

Telling ourselves a new story about the economy

In "Cognitive Biases in Times of Uncertainty", John Hagel explains why this is so. The narratives we tell ourselves influence our vision. If we focus on a risk-averse narrative, we will see threat everywhere and focus on short-term gain. On the other hand, if we focus less on risk and more on opportunities and reward, the world looks very different. Here are just a few examples:

• Social entrepreneurs are often just people who have stopped looking at human underdevelopment as a problem and have started looking at it as opportunities for entrepreneurship. From M-pesa mobile-phone-based cash payments to promoting products by sparking debates about how women's bodies are portrayed, social entrepreneurship takes many creative forms.
• We've all received the e-mail listing the bad predictions made about a long list of success products and people, from the personal computer and telephone to the Beatles. The people who made those predictions had the wrong mindset to properly evaluate the situation.
• The creation of the Economic European Community in 1957 was a daring reframing of a devastating problem: recurrent wars between France and Germany (1870-1, 1914-1918, 1939-1945). Robert Schuman, Jean Monnet and Konrad Adenauer and others had the vision -- and political courage -- to argue for a rapprochement of France and Germany based on the joint administration of the raw materials of war (coal and steel). In this era of short-term politics, it is easy to forget how precious the past 67 years of peace in Europe are.
• Regardless of how you rate Barack Obama's presidency, it is difficult to deny that his hopeful "Yes, We Can" narrative was a major factor in his 2008 election. His politics directly confronted the fearful, risk-averse attitude that had been pervasive in US politics since September 11, 2001 and his personal history was symbolic of the capacity to overcome the fragmentation of American society. Barack Obama was much more than a man or a politician: he was a positive narrative that helped millions of Americans imagine a different and better future.

So what are you doing to use the economic crisis as a springboard for success? At Prospero, we help organizations cultivate change as a source of value creation and innovation. We can help you improve your stakeholder relations to move from conflict to collaboration. We can help you reframe your mindset to see how to unlock the energy and enthusiam of your employees. We can help you think differently about your strategy to identify untapped opportunities. Contact us today about speaking at a conference, conducting a workshop or serving you in another way customized to your specific needs.

We agree with Albert Einstein that "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." 

Part of the difficulties of managing and measuring sustainability is the totalness of the issue. In its purist form, sustainability is nothing left less than the total functioning of all of the biological, physical, chemical and other systems on our planet (and beyond since the atmosphere and sun are critical elements). Therefore, any model or science will only be able to deal with some part of that total system. The more isolated and specialized the focus, the less successful the outcome.

Again, the same article is revealing when one of the speakers refers to "environmental sustainability", which is already much more restricted than the traditional 3-pillar definition of sustainability, which has environmental, economic and social dimensions.

With regard to sustainable agriculture, the best data sets and models in the world are bound to fail if the role of human beings is not taken into account. So I would argue that the social sciences are just as important, if not more important than the natural sciences in achieving sustainable agriculture. Policy makers need to understand the human dynamics of any agricultural system, both to understand potential impacts on the people concerned and to understand how people affect what is poosible within any given agricultural system.

A few days ago, the Financial Times reported on a study of how attached consumers are to brands, conducted by Havas Media. According to the article (I've not seen the original research), "The research shows far stronger faith in brands in faster-growing markets, with respondents in Latin America saying 30 per cent of brands made a notable positive contribution to their lives, compared with 5 per cent in the US and 8 per cent in Europe."

The FT then quotes Umair Haque, director of the Havas Media Lab as saying that the fact that only 20% of brands "have notable positive impact" should be worrying boards.

I'm not so sure.

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This is the story of my social media wedding, otherwise known as My Wedding 2.0.

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UPDATE: Less than 24 hours after I drafted this, Scoop-it announced the move from beta to public release.

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I hope I'll be forgiven for how long it has taken me to write Part 2 of this article. I know, I know, everyone says they're really busy.  But I have been, including getting married! (Which will be another blog post). So forgive me. Now on to the second part of my two-part series on using Scoop-it.

1. The first thing you need to do is to create an account. You have to request an invitation since Scoop-it is still in beta. Or contact me. I still have 9 invitations that I'm happy to share. I'll need your e-mail address, so drop me a line via DM on Twitter, LinkedIn or at one of the other options listed at http://ksukalac.posterous.com/pages/about-kristen-sukalac.

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Last week I had the immense pleasure to give the keynote address at the IABC Africa Regional Conference. The theme of the conference was the "Communication Revolution". The organizers were a little worried that some people might feel the conference was too specialized on social media and similar themes, so I offered to talk about some of the social science behind the revoluation, and to give tips on how to apply some key principles and ideas, regardless of what technology you have in your organization.

   View more presentations from KSukalac 

The multitude of social networks and tools available today can be daunting. It feels like the world is fragmenting more and more. But there are tools that make it possible to connect these dots, to find people with shared interests and to zero in on the information that is most relevant to you. 

One of my favorite new examples is Scoop.it! A tool that allows you to boookmark items of interest on the web and display them in a visually attractive "newsletter" that is easy to scan. Scoop-it! is still in an by-invitation beta phase*, but when I searched the terms agriculture and food today, I already found 26 existing topics related to agriculture and 188 related to food. So how can you use this tool and how do you link it up with your presence elsewhere on line?

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Because I recently purchased a digital recording with Dragon Naturally Speaking voice recognition software, I am currently on the mailing list of their e-mail newsletter. About halfway down today's long and text-heavy (even after I enabled the pictures which are automatically disabled by my e-mail reader) issue I found the following item:

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