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!

Hypercube by Ecyrd

“It’s Mr Neologism again” was the first reaction to another of my on-the-spur-of-the-moment word-coinings.

I’m not claiming the word “hypercontext” is completely without precedent, but I think there’s a new use for it after I brought it up at a media training day that I went on as part of the Clore Leadership Programme last week at Ashridge (the UK’s top ranking management training centre dontchaknow).

Public speaking is now without context

When you’re standing up in front of an audience, and talking about whatever it is that you’ve been asked to talk about the advice you’re given is to look around the room, make eye contact, watch the body language, don’t ‘err’, drop in a gag or two, keep it relevant, and so on.

What’s become clear to me in the public speaking I’ve been doing over the last couple of years is that you can no longer just rely on the audience an your personal delivery to get the message across. There’s a whole other audience to consider. The people watching the recording/webcast of what you’re saying, after an edit or two, via the web.

And those people watching will more often than not be dropping in via ‘deep linking‘ so will probably not have the background info on what you’re talking about, or know what the story is behind it.

They are viewing ‘without context’, and potentially a much larger audience than the people in the room.

Self-editing

With web broadcast comes some interesting issues. If what you say is edited (as in the famous George Bush mashups) the entire meaning of what you were saying can be changed. YouTube has now enabled timeline linking, which means that people can deep-link directly to the moment in a video where you said that, missing out the context of the words.

This is dangerous stuff, as well as being amazingly powerful.

What it means is that you have to self-edit for that audience, to make sure that if you refer to something out of context that you give a quick explanation of what it is, perhaps, not use jargon or acronyms and so on. Should you imagine everything you say without the context of the previous paragraph of speech?

Hypercontext

“the multitude of contexts that the transmission or recording of an event gains when experienced via the Internet” (can you do better?)

For me, this means that whatever people say in a video-recorded public moment means that they are now part of a hypercontext – the physical context of the environment in which you find yourself, as well as the environment of the online deep-linked video world where potentially people will be directly commenting on the timeline of the video of you saying something, remixing it, pulling it apart and changing the way it could be interpreted.

But it’s not just in public speaking ‘on stage’ environments. In the mobile-enabled world, we’ve got cameras and recording devices everywhere, so potentially we could soon reach a time when people just accept that their words are part of that hypercontext as soon as they are out of their mouths.

What does that do to political transparency? What does it do to the psyche? How will it feel if you’re constantly worried about saying the wrong thing at the wrong time?

I spoke at ContentLab a few years back, and put forward the idea that we could be looking at new startups in the future where ‘content’ is banned from a semi-public environment. No cameras, no mobile, no wifi. The complete opposite of internet cafes where people feel they can talk freely in a semi-public environment.

I think that’s probably a few years off, but seriously – what happens when we all start getting sick of the always-on, people twittering about something you did without asking you, Barack Obama’s speech writer getting humiliated for a light-hearted drunken moment, and so on.

Personally, I hadn’t realised that I’d been taking all of this into account whenever I stand up and speak. Incorporating an awareness of the hypercontext of what you’re saying is really important, and I think is something that everyone should be thinking about if they’re standing up in front of an audience.

I’ve been obsessed with a TV show called The Wire for the last few months. It’s not been on general TV release in the UK as far as I know, but you can get hold of DVDs of each series quite cheaply from Amazon.

What’s amazing me is that this russian novel of a TV show gets under my skin and I keep randomly connecting things that happen in my every day life with events from the show.

Being on the Clore Leadership Programme, I’ve had lots of discussions and been in a fair few training sessions and workshops all around the theme of ‘leadership’, which is a term that is as meaningful to many as it is difficult to tie down for others.

But through all of that (and I’ve only just realised) I’ve been almost using The Wire as a way to bounce all that thinking back into how the real world works. I know it’s a fiction, but I swear that watching this series while going through what is so far one of the best things that’s happened to me in my professional career (getting some training!) has been a really interesting thing to do so far.

It’s got so much in it (aside from murder, drug crime and dense dialogue): leadership, challenges to overcome, organisation structure, distribution, pitching, management, supply and demand, entrepreneurship, politics, networking, collaboration…

But more than anything The Wire says to me – you’re only as good as what you do today and what you plan to do tomorrow, what you did yesterday is meaningless.

As Michael Wolff said to me last week – “You are not your portfolio”, and when you see huge characters suddenly and dramatically exiting the storyline that suddenly makes a lot of sense.

Anyway – it makes you think: sometimes the learning you gain doesn’t have to be structured in some sort of MBA style format, it can come from unexpected places.

Mine’s a TV show, what’s yours?

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?

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.