I’m just returning from an inspirational three days in Pilsen (Plzen) in the Czech Republic after taking part in a British Council project called the Urban Ideas Bakery.

First, some photos:

The idea behind these ‘bakeries’ is that it is an opportunity for a group of interesting people with a wide background and range of experiences to come to a city, and come up with ideas for ways to tackle particular issues that city might be facing and work with local people to see the ideas realised.

Pilsen is a city of 165,000 people and sits as the first major town on the Berounka river. It’s a beautiful place in many areas – there are well renovated 15th century buildings and the area by the river reminded me of the Norfolk Broads, even though it’s in a semi urban environment.

But one of the main issues that the city faces according to the local people we met is that while the city has these fantastic assets, the people who live there take them for granted and don’t make use of the public spaces as much as they could do. And with the city having the title of European City of Culture 2015 within its grasp ( it’s down to the last three ) we were asked to look at some short, medium and long term solutions to freeing up these amazing spaces and inspiring or encouraging them to be used.

So on day one we experienced the city at its best, arriving as we did during the Czech equivalent of Birmingham’s Arts Fest – a community organised free event of performance, art, theatre, music and so on.  Many roads were closed and the city was full of surreal and surprising culture clashes round every corner.

One minute it’s Gypsy beatboxing, the next a choral rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody… in the capital of Bohemia… by Bohemians. One minute breakdancing to nineties Ice T played not on vinyl but on latest laptop DJ software, the next Norwegian-inspired black metallist lookalikes playing what sounded like Reggae.

But it all seemed to be perfectly normal, so we accepted it at face value and the newly arrived “international bakers” got to know each other over an equally surreal dinner at a restaurant that was channelling the famous Meaning of Life Mr. Creosote restaurant scene mixed with faded-glory photographs from the thirties.

We had a diverse group – artists, designers, architects, academics, political policy experts, teachers, planners, trouble makers, students… and the following day we were set the challenge of how we might go about addressing this issue of the public space of the city.

In Czech language.

In retrospect it marks a lot of sense – despite English bring spoken by most of the people there, it would be quite rude to arrive in a city and expect the event to be run in a foreign language. So we had translators, earpieces and we had to navigate difficult and complex conversations with a certain level of mutual misunderstanding. I was impressed we didn’t get frustrated with it, and worked with the limitations.

We came up with some great ideas, many of which I’m sure won’t see the light of day, but here are a few of my favourites from my group. I was the only international baker round the table, so I put myself in the role of “hey, how about…” and trying to get everyone having ‘yes and…’ conversations. I fact – We had a few rules, but a ‘yes and…’ rule would probably trump the lot.

Here are a few of my favourites:

Skoda Drive-In

Pilsen is dominated by a large Skoda manufacturing plant. They don’t make cars, but parts for trams. It employed 20,000 people, many of whom are migrant workers from the countries. Pilsen also has a long love affair with American culture after the liberation by Patten, even naming one of it’s main steets after the USA.

So, we suggest organising a Drive In Movie night with a twist. All of the cars are examples of all of the different models of Skoda that have been made by the company and they are parked in rows in one of the main squares in front of a screen. People can walk up, buy a ticket, popcorn and a drink and watch one of the recent Oscar-winning Czech films from the comfort of the car. Simple, fun, and a talking point for years to come.

Rabbit Hutch Lights

I was sad to hear that the nickname for some of the housing areas on the outskirts of the city is “the rabbit hutches” – people living there work all day, just go home to sleep and many don’t have a feeling of pride about their local area.

Inspired by larger scale artworks some of us had seen in Berlin (?), we wanted to do something interesting using these stark brutalist tower blocks and create an animation in light of one of the disused ones. Space invaders, Tetris, the numbers 2015 being made up out of the pixellated grid of the windows… we were quite sure it would make for something interesting.

Other ones that emerged:

• A ferris wheel with a twist
• Barbigloo – barbecues in an igloo in winter

Maplzen

The bakery is always structured to offer short, medium an long- term solutions. And one idea that popped up in all four of the groups was “how about an interactive map?” – We were thinking of it as a psychogeographic online artwork collecting ideas, thoughts, emotions about the place. Others wanted a map that could visualize the potential of the river side, others still wanted to make a map that would store everyone’s opinions on how to regenerate the city or report problems a-la fixmystreet, and there was a more ambitious aim to somehow geolocate pretty much anything that anyone might want – kids activities, things to borrow, art closers.

Whilst I’m not sure that a map is going to solve all ills or to really help people find things they are looking for specifically (a blog does a good job here – hint!) I volunteered to create a quick web mashup of Google Maps with a simple database to store “stuff”.

That idea became mapilzn and we had it online in about 8hrs worth of work.

The source code, as usual is on github.

As @mikesten pointed out, what we’ve put together is a lightweight “locative notes” app that any city could now use for similar things. There were requests for videos/photos and so on which would be easy to add. But the issue here is – will people use it? For that it’s up to our local “bakers” and if they can keep up the momentum….

It sounds like cash won’t be the issue – the local council just committed to a nine percent annual spend on ‘culture’, but I’m not sure what that includes.

The Riverside

In the medium term a team of more planning-oriented people decided to put a plan together to demonstrate the possibility of what the city’s riverside areas could be. There’re lots of similarities to Newcastle – iron bridges, brownfield sites to reclaim and the potential here is huge go create amazing public areas by the river.

We presented all of our ideas in public in the evening of the second day and again al lunch on the third. The deputy mayor particularly liked our ideas about the riverside but it looks like there some long running issues behind it that will take time to resolve.  The map idea went well and it looks like our prototype might lead to something in future too.

There are more ideas that I haven’t added – I just want to get this up online, and I’m very tired after all the mental exercise!

For me this was a really inspiring few days that was hard work and good fun in equal measure but best of all I now have a handful of new friends from all over Europe.

I hope that in time we will see one or two of our ideas turn into real things and good luck to Pilsen in the Capital of Culture bid.

Thank you to everyone who helped me decide my Clore Leadership Programme research topic. I’ve settled on looking at the idea of ‘accelerated serendipity’, which I think actually encompasses the other topic I was considering: ‘conversational leadership’.

So, things have been progressing and I now have an academic supervisor (does this make him by boss?) in Russell Beale, a man I have a lot of time for and who shares many similar (and many more dissimilar) ideas to me around digital culture.

It’s taken a while to get going, mainly because of the disruption associated with the arrival of my son. Never start anything ambitious and new when you’ve just had a baby arrive is the advice I would give but unfortunately could never follow myself.

So, to kick this thing off I’ve spent the last few months on Google, setting up feeds on the subject and generally getting my bearings. What I’ve learnt already is that it’s a hugely interesting, devisive, diverse and (I’m hoping) relevant topic to research.

But I wanted to get some initial open ideas and discussions going on, so I’ve had a series of conversations with people, initially at Futuresonic 09 on the subject, and I’m going to post notes from each of the conversations here, as I’ll be doing with everything to do with my research – in the spirit of open innovation.

Let’s do this in an open way – I think it’s only appropriate.

I’d like your help helping me to decide what I should be looking at, so here are the two ideas with a 350 word explanation of each.

I will be producing a 20,000 word paper (or equivalent – blogs, wikis, video interviews count).

Idea 1: “Conversational Leadership”

Over the last decade the term ‘thought leadership’ has become commonly used to label a particular style of leadership that involves distilling influential ideas into easily understandable and sharable concepts and then disseminating them through a variety of means to bring about some kind of change in those outside of one’s immediate organisational leadership structure.

With the sudden growth of social media technologies over recent years, is there something new emerging from this style of leadership? A new style where individuals are applying social media technologies to reach and influence a large number of people, but engaging in two-way conversations with many people in a highly public way, and in so doing acting as ‘conversational leaders’?

This model of how one can potentially influence another’s thinking given appropriate tools and access has caused widespread debate. Is the term ‘thought leadership’ jargon or is it a useful term to use when discussing how highly influential individuals are able to instigate change outside of what would historically have been considered their control? Are there any fundamental differences that are emerging in leadership styles of those who use social media platforms to communicate? Do MPs on Twitter have a different way of leading than those who are not?

I intend to find out what the truth is about these ‘conversational leaders’, and try to get an understanding, first hand, of what it means to be one. What issues does this mode of leadership bring up? What tools and techniques play a part? What are the aims of the people following this method of leading others? Do they even perceive their activities as ‘leadership’? Is there a perception that this is not a leadership role in the classic sense? Are we seeing something new emerging in terms of how leaders are expected to behave? Is this purely a technological trend or is this pointing to something longer-term and a fundamental shift in how leaders will lead in the 21st century?

Idea 2: “Leading by Accelerating Serendipty”

We live in exponential times. The instant availability to large amounts of information on an individual level is now at arguably the highest level we have ever seen.

Breaking news has migrated to online social networks as the place to ‘hear it first’ to the point where social technologies like Twitter are now more swift at reporting world events than any other network.

But that availability of information leads to a number of problems. We suffer from increasing ‘choice paralysis’ and information overload. Finding valuable nuggets of information in this sea of data can be hard.

Conversely, it is increasingly difficult for leaders to be able to know how to structure their organisations to enable them to react quickly to changes in the marketplace.

It is common for leaders to look to research and development departments to investigate new technologies, and to marketing and PR departments to investigate how to use these new channels for communication in effective ways.

But with such rapid changes occuring as a background, how should leaders structure their organisations? How should staff be enabled to be ‘listeners’ and to engage in using social media tools to bring about measurable benefits? If it is unclear what benefits come about through using these tools, how do organisations justify their use? How should organisations be physically structured and laid out in terms of location, architecture and interior design? What factors enable rapid collaboration and innovation?

I propose that at the heart of many of these issues lies the concept of ‘accelerating serendipity’. The idea that it is possible to lead an organisation in such a way that whilst not being aware of the intended ‘destination’ for where that organisation might be headed, it is possible to put in place management structures, policies, physical layouts, working methods, business practices and communications strategies that enable for a higher incidence of the ‘happy accident’. These ‘happy accidents’ could be potential business opportunities emerging from enouraging more collaborations with partners, enabling staff to mingle and discuss ideas in open plan environments, or encouraging staff to use ‘open innovation’ models for research.

I intend to research this theme and to discover if what I understand as ‘accelerated serendipity’ is a real factor that leaders think about, or if some of their behavioural trends could be labelled and made more meaningful when brought under such an umbrella.

What do you think?

These are drafts – hence blogging it before approaching people about it, but both of these areas are close to my heart and I could see myself spending the next year researching them. But which one? Which is most realistic given my already insane workload? Which would be most useful to you? Let me know!

As part of my Clore fellowship I have agreed to produce a Masters-equivalent piece of research around a particular area of ‘leadership’ that interests me.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking since our first residential course, and with our next one coming up this weekend, I thought I would post what I’ve come up with so far.

Anyone following my lifestream or my Delicious feed will have noticed a lot of links to things around ’serendipity’ appearing.

I’m scoping out a possible subject for research: Does successful innovation work by enabling serendipity to occur? Can you lead by enabling more, and more valuable serendipitous encounters and events to happen within the organisation or network you are part of?

So this is a mind-map of some of my thinking, and here are a bunch of links on serendipity I’ve found so far. It seems like there’s been very little or nothing done in this area so far – is there a reason for that?

This last fortnight I was away on the first two week residential/retreat as part of my Clore fellowship. I thought that the start of my being a Clore fellow would be a blog-powered experience. It turns out that I’ve been so overloaded by what was an amazing and thought-provoking experience that I haven’t published a word. And I’ve been back for a week!

We were staying on a lovely organic farm in Kent called Bore Place, and the combination of the environment there and the inspirational people I met while I was there inspired a photographic response instead. 

Several hundred photographs later, I’ve put the best of them up on Flickr and as slideshows on a new site (ours being the fifth year of the programme) at clore5.com

Who knows what the site will become – I’m thinking of pulling together anything we tag ‘clore5′ on various services. For now, it’s just my photos.

Once I’ve managed to filter through all of the amazing stuff we talked about and experienced I’ll publish some of the best ideas here. There’s just too much to post! I’m hoping that some of the other people who are also following this path with me will be writing about their experiences online. If they do I’ll link them up (hint hint).

Here are a few of my favourite photos from the two weeks:

Paul

Asma

Ahmed

Kate

View all of them.

The Fellowship starts with a two week residential ‘course’ which consists of a very exciting programme of high profile speakers, training, and personal development thinking. I’ve been told that the content is non-blog-safe for the most part but I’ll be posting some personal reactions and thoughts I expect.

However that’s not what’s worrying me. Even with trying to cut down on commitments I’m still incredibily busy and I’m not sure how I’m going to manage to take two weeks out with little or no internet/phone access.

So my approach these last few months is just to get used to not having those things around and not relying on them. It’s quite difficult, but it’s certainly made me put failsafes in place for anything serious that might need attention. And I’m feeling quite confident that it might just be possible for me to not be around for that time and for nobody to actually notice.

However – the thing I am busy on is my new web startup. The work on Odadeo is absolutely on a roll at the moment. I suddenly realised this week that we were ‘polishing’ rather than doing solid development. Tasks have now come down to the ‘can be completed in under a day’ level, which is fantastic. In fact I’d probably be confident in opening the site up as a public beta today. But I’ve decided that that would be unwise without me being around, so it will have to wait a short while.

Meanwhile, Tom, our new community manager, who takes over from Jason now that he’s finished as Graduate Apprentice, will be taking care of the site. He’s been a member of the site since early on, and is the most active user on the site so far. He’s also something of an expert on fatherhood (if all dads aren’t of course) so it’s fantastic to have him to bounce ideas off. We had a great ‘mashup’ meeting this week where we pretty much thought about any API we knew of and whether we could apply it to dads. “Oh hang on. Is that featureland?” was our catchphrase for turning down non-immediate ideas.

So with suddenly being away for two weeks as of next week I’m making sure that anything that I am involved in is going to be handled. As always I have a backlog of correspondence to go through (nothing changes, even with Dubber’s help), but in the main I’m confident that the sky won’t fall in on anything I’m responsible for.

However, what about my little girl? I’m going to miss her, especially seeing her pick up new words and behaviours. And I’m guessing it’ll be strange for her too.

So, I’m going to spend a few evenings before I go, with a video camera, recording me reading some of my favourite kids’ stories so she can watch them for bedtime. I’m actually considering just putting them on Youtube and seeing what reaction I get. I think it’s a nice idea for any dad to do for their kids when they are away for long periods, and with iMovie you can burn simple videos to DVD very easily.

I’ve also suddenly rediscovered an interest in PlayDoh, which is great fun to mess around with before the day starts. I can now make a pretty realistic looking cow in about thirty seconds, and Imogen seems to love planes, cats, pigs and today’s chicken that I created. Good fun – another potential YouTube hit?!

Pete Ashton always says ‘a blog is not a diary’ but it seems to me that that’s what my blog is becoming, and is potentially going to become even more with starting Clore. I guess a blog needs to move and change over time, and now that I have Twitter my posting rate has reduced it’s nice for me to put together more prosaic ramblings once in a while. So continued apologies if you were expecting useful insights into Clore in this post.

In short – I’m worried about the time commitment, worried about how to support my family and lifestyle whilst taking a chunk of time out for personal development, I’m even worried about huge opportunities passing me by, but I’m also very excited about what Clore is going to be.

Tonight I met up with the West Midlands group of Clore alumni, and they set my mind at rest of a few issues, but also pointed out that Clore is going to be a total shock to the system. In one year 20 of 23 people taking part just quit their jobs to concentrate solely on Clore.

I’m not in the position where I want to or could do that, especially with a little baby coming in January. But what does that mean? Is this going to be as big a time commitment as they make out?

I’ve already decided to stretch my time on the programme over a slightly longer period. Maybe it needs to be longer…

Basically it all comes down to what happens in a week’s time. What will I learn? What will I decide? What will I decide I want to do? And with who? And for what?

Some big questions.

But my focus right now is on Odadeo and making it a success – growing the team to build on the beta we’ve been working so hard on, completing this phase of the project to timescale (we’re about a month ahead), and most importantly securing further investment to make the thing fly. I feel a pitch coming on…

Exciting times.

A huge thank you to them for supporting what I’m sure is going to be a significant life-changing year for me and the others who I’ll be sharing it with!

The five CLP supported Clore Fellows are (including me):

• Ariane Koek
• Samenua Sesher
• Asma Shah
• Laura Sillars
• Stef Lewandowski

All 2008-9 Clore Fellows

I’ve been awarded a fellowship with the Clore Leadership Programme, and today I am off to London for a day-long event welcoming the twenty-two people who are this year’s group.

This comes just a few days before I pick up our Webby in New York and launch the new website we’ve been developing, so it’s turning out to be an amazing month!

Clore is a year-long ‘leadership development’ programme aimed at developing ‘leaders’ in the creative and cultural sector.

( I’m writing most of this (with some editing) on the train down to my induction day at the South Bank Centre – I’ve since learnt a lot more).

Clore includes:

Mentoring by someone very interesting, and I’ve already got a few thoughts on people I’d like to approach. The good thing is that Clore is a respected organisation and have great contacts to help find someone that I can connect with and work with. That alone is pretty exciting given that I don’t have a formal ‘mentor’ at the moment, but lots of people I turn to for advice. Perhaps having someone outside of my Birmingham/Creative/Cultural/Web circle could give me some interesting advice on how to achieve what I want to achieve.

Two two-week residentials, where I’ll be learning valuable things about being more effective at making things happen, including fundraising, marketing, business planning, dealing with the media, and so on. Since I started working for myself all of my learning (except the CLP day last year) has been hands-on experience-based learning. This will hopefully give me some time to learn about myself and develop a few things that I’m not too hot on

A tailor-made personal development programme, to develop things that I specifically want to focus on. Along the lines of going on courses that will help me to progress.

A three month placement with an organisation outside of my current area of work undertaking a significant project. This is going to be interesting – I work in a lot of different areas, so picking something that will challenge me and be very different from what I do is the order of the day.

A personal fund for going to conferences and attending workshops, with discounts on (ahem) Common Purpose – who knows, I might even be able to find a way to get to Ted!

Shadowing of people that you find interesting. Basically – think of someone or something you’d like a snapshot of, tell the Clore people and they’ll see if they can get a day or two’s shadowing arranged.

A 20,000 word piece of research on a subject of my choice. I’m already thinking about what my ‘theme’ for Clore will be for me. I don’t want to go into it with too many fixed notions, but I am thinking something along the lines of: “The Culture of Social Media – How can new developments in communications technology be used for social good?” This is an extension of my “Gold Rush / Good Rush” post – about how with the ‘Web 2.0′ (Blah 2.0?) that we have freely available to us, what cultural or social impact are we going to start seeing as a result? Is this as big an opportunity as it seems, and what are people doing around the world using these tools for? Could these tools actually start making the World a better place? Do they already? And then from that – how will our definition of ‘Culture’ start to shift as a result? Lots of questions..

This part is supported by HSRC, and I will have an academic supervisor to work with me. Funnily enough that means both Emily and I are beneficiaries at the same time.

And loads of other stuff – I’m bewildered by all of the things that are included, including membership of the RSA, an invitation from Nesta to ‘drop us a line and use our address book’, access to libraries, connection with a great network of people… If I get my head around it I’ll be sure to post a follow-up.

I’m going to be spreading it over two years (for reasons that will become obvious in one of my next posts!) so that I’ll be working part time on Clore and part time on my main project which is now gathering a pretty great team of people around it.

I’m surprised

I’ll be honest – the interview for this was definitely the worst interview I have ever given. I was rambling incoherently, not answering the question, going off on tangents, getting myself all tied up in a knot on one particular question and finding myself saying things that I can’t quite believe came out of my mouth! At one point I made the strange decision to describe in detail Franco B’s amazing (I thought) ‘bleeding on a canvas’ performance from a Fierce Festival show a few years ago, which I think probably shocked the panel a little. It must be the only interview I’ve given where one of the panel actually put their fingers in their ears! A classic.

Still – it can’t have been quite as bad as I thought if the panel chose me. Perhaps I’m ‘the wildcard’? I guess we’ll see.

(I since spoke to Chris Smith and he said ‘you breezed it’ so I guess it can’t have been that bad after all).

I’m excited!

This comes at a great time for me. I’ve been looking for some solid training and support in making successes of the things I am involved in, and I have also been looking for a way to spend some time developing my own skills. When you’re working solidly (at the moment from 7am until 11pm most days – yes I know), it is almost impossible to imagine taking some time out to do that.

What Clore will hopefully do is give me a framework to do that – take a step out of my ‘bubble’ as Pete Ashton put it, and start thinking about things with a more strategic view.

I’ve been holding back on Twittering anything about this until the announcement today, which has been unbelievably tempting but I think that Clore like to be the people to break the news on who’s who, so that’s fair.

I’m also a little worried

I’m busy – I’ve got lots going on, so I’ll have to cut down on a few of my voluntary things and perhaps hand them on to other people. I’ve steadily been doing that anyway with a lot of my projects this year and it’s going pretty well.

I’m worried because there’s so much I want to see happen over the next year or two that perhaps I’ll stop being as effective at pushing them forward. Maybe not. Maybe I just need to delegate more of my responsibilities? Who knows – perhaps this means ‘I’m hiring’ over the next few months…

I’ll be blogging it

I can’t seem to find anyone who’s blogged Clore before, and while I’m sure I won’t be able to write up every minute of the experience, my idea here is to take some of the key experiences and ideas and put my notes about them online.

What I’m hoping is that people who read this blog, especially other people in Birmingham might be able to pick up on those ideas and perhaps use them to inform what we’re all doing in the city at the moment. It could also be a good place for other people who are considering Clore for next time, or for people who are just interested in what a leadership development experience is like.

Where to blog?

I’m thinking at the moment I’ll just be blogging here under the ‘Clore’ tag, but with everything that’s going on with the Big City Plan, with my new site that’s launching and with everything else I’m involved in, it could get a bit confusing.

So – should I be setting up another blog? Maybe a group blog for other potential Clore bloggers too? I’m not sure.

Off to London

I’m off to London to find out what all of this is about, and to meet the folks I’ll be spending some pretty great times with over the next couple of years. Let’s hope we get on!

Congratulations also go to Helga Henry who is a co-director of Fierce! Festival and Creative Republic with me. It’s fantastic news that we’ve both been chosen – and it must be quite unique given that we are co-collaborators, although not employed by the same organisation. We’re both hoping that with two of us from Creative Republic taking part in the programme that we’ll be able to continuing to push forward the message that creativity and culture are key to the future success of Birmingham.

So – here’s to an exciting couple of years… who knows where this is going to lead.

But finally – a big “Thank You” to the Cultural Leadership Programme who are funding me to do this. Nice one guys.