Teblog

Frighten the kids, or encourage the grown-ups?

Have you seen the Act On CO2 'bedtime stories' advertisement that our dear government has spent £6M on? Although it's a cartoon, the words are real enough. Fundamentally, it tells children that they're victims of grown-ups' actions and, if the grown-ups change their ways, they may (note: only 'may') be saved. According to the advertisement, over forty percent of the emissions of CO2 are caused by 'ordinary things' that grown-ups do, like warming homes and driving cars.

The Advertising Standards Authority has received hundreds of complaints which it plans to investigate. Good luck to it. According to a BBC report, "An ASA spokeswoman said the watchdog would be investigating whether the claims about climate change could be substantiated and whether the ad complied with taste and decency rules."

The ASA hasn't a hope in hell of validating the climate change science. It should concentrate instead on the taste and decency angle. When Sky News wrote about the ASA complaints, it received masses of contradictory comments (I ploughed through 94 of them). Goodness knows who Lisa is, but she made a good point when she said, "Upsetting children can never be right ... Why worry them so young when they can't do anything right now?!" Quite.

What is clear (if you didn't know already) is that climate change has become a religious debate and, if the Sky News commenters are representative of the population at large, the non-believers greatly outweigh the believers. And the powers-that-be are at their wits' end to turn us into believers.

The stupid thing is that the more rabid they become, the more they will turn off even the most reasonable citizen. Somehow the debate needs to become less accusatory and more inclusive. It might want to take into account that not everyone is the same or driven by the same values.

The latest EcoPinion Survey Report from strategic marketing agency EcoAlign parsed the attitudes of 1250 USA citizens and, in the process, identified five different categories of consumer. In terms of motivation to use new technologies and participate in new energy programs, they were: Cost-Conscious Saver (41%), Value Buyer (20%), Environmentalist/Green Consumer (19%), Traditional Consumer (10%) and Tech Enthusiast (10%).

The same messaging can't work with such a disparate set of people. Judging from that list, only 19 percent look as if they might fit in the 'believer' category in the USA. In Europe it may be different, but you can bet that the different categories exist. And it's therefore clear that a single message is going to fall on largely deaf ears, unless it happens to focus on the needs of the Cost-Conscious Saver.

And maybe this is a clue to the answer. Forget global warming, climate change, CO2 or any of that 'big-brotherish' terminology. Talk about simple financial and environmental sustainability through energy and fuel savings, through the avoidance of waste and other pollution and through the minimisation of raw materials.

In this way, instead of negative, frightening stories from those in power, the environmental tale can become a  positive one put out by everyone who is making an effort to improve our collective lot.

Evangelist: beware

Evangelists. Plenty of them hang out in the sustainability and collaboration fields where I work. Some irritate while others are acceptable. And this isn't because they necessarily reflect my views. (In case you were wondering.) The trick is to spot, early on, which variety you're faced with and make your excuses and leave if they're the 'wrong' kind.

Last week, the Free Software Foundation, wrote to the Fortune 500 companies (well, it didn't bother with Microsoft) essentially telling them they'd be mad to upgrade to Windows 7. The story was widely covered but few publications would have ended up with such a rich discussion as the Register. This is a hugely popular online IT publication which takes no prisoners. It has attitude and a healthy disregard for some of the tripe that emanates from the industry it serves. Readers are encouraged to comment on items and, this particular article quickly attracted 145 comments.

The interesting thing is that the article was about an evangelical organisation and it attracted evangelistic commentators, both pro- and anti-, as well as your everyday commenters. The end result is that anyone with the willingness to work through the comments, evangelistic or otherwise, would end up with an independent point of view, providing they read through with an open mind. If they didn't, they'd end up just strengthening their own prejudices.

The sustainability and collaboration folk are no different. The evangelists are noisy, in your face, on conference platforms, lobbying whoever and wherever possible, frequently on the web with their blogs, Tweets and comments. They exist everywhere, and always have. The big difference today is that they can be more readily heard.

You can get positive evangelists who show how life could be better. I have a lot of time for them, even if they turn out to be wrong. At least they're trying to help. Then you have the negative ones who are more intent on tearing down than building up. "This is wrong" or "you shouldn't do that" rather than "try this alternative" or "why not do this?". In pop psychology, the former are the I'm OK, you're not OK brigade - the same mentality, incidentally, as criminals.

A lot of evangelists are so immersed in their blinkered view of the world, that they forget (or ignore) the fact that, if adopted, their wheezes might cause more problems than they solve. We're shutting down coal and nuclear power stations to cheers from the acid rain and nuclear waste storage evangelists. But how deeply have they considered where the energy is going to come from? Or, alternatively, what impact on our lives a profound cut in consumption will cause? I venture to suggest, 'not a lot'. Out here in the real world, we have to find solutions, not just state problems.

In a way, the easiest ones to deal with are those that have 'Evangelist' printed on their business cards. They're being paid by someone to persuade others of the folly of their ways. You'll find these folk in many major IT companies. Others are not so obvious. Perhaps a company has plied them with gifts or other, more subtle, bribes. Recently I was talking with a Toyota (non-employee) iQ evangelist. Turns out she'd 'won' the car for a six month trial, in exchange for blogs and other social media outreach. Others are just total believers in 'the cause' simply because it makes sense to them within their own frame of reference.

The answer has to be to filter them as quickly as possible. Find out who pays for their evangelism in money or in other ways. Ask them what alternatives they know about in detail. And get them to tell you what the long term implications of their advocacy are likely to be. Some will slink away from the interrogation. Some will bluster, so you can take your leave of them. Those that will remain probably have a good and well thought out story to tell.

A most important string to ICT's bow

In crude terms, the computer industry sees itself as the saviour of the planet and all who inhabit it. Take a briefing from any major ICT company and it will tell you a) how it's cleaning up its own act and b) how, by buying more ICT stuff, we and the developing world can create a bright and sustainable future for ourselves. The mathematics are fairly simple, if a computer system can run more efficiently and help companies optimise their manufacturing, mining, transport, power generation, power consumption etc, then it's a win all round. This is built on the assumption that the developing world is doing exactly that (developing) and that the west should help it, providing there's a buck to be turned in the long term.

God, that sounds depressing. But it's certainly the case that ICT can help. Problems start when trying to make things happen. Politicians waver this way and that, according to whether they're trying to be statesmen or representatives of their communities. (Think about wind farms and NIMBYs.) As a long-time sounding board for my rants and self-confessed 'Eco Worrier' (sic) Al Tepper says, "The political layer is where things won't happen." Indeed, individuals also waver hither and thither, according to what authority they've most recently read/heard from. It's hard for them to know which way to turn because of messages emanating from the proliferation of vested interests and fanatics. Exhortation and fanatical evangelism take the place of reason for many of them.

We've been here before, many times. The early days of PCs and the web are good examples. Those who could see value then were a tiny minority trying to persuade a slightly larger minority of the revolution that would affect everyone's lives. In the mid to late seventies, the editor of Computing didn't want to know about 'microcomputers'. Eventually, PCs and the web went mainstream, but the evangelists were at their most shrill five to ten years before everyone else cottoned on.

Greens go back 30 years, sustainability 22 years and the public web about 16 years and, related to this, social networking has been growing rapidly over the past six years. We ought to know what's going on in the sustainability/green space and we ought to have the means to share our discoveries (especially for websites and for bloggers that make sense) with others. In this way, we could create a momentum for change based on genuine understanding. It would be based on us as individuals pursuing what we feel to be right, quite independently of the organisations to which we are beholden (like our employers). Through social software, independent and informed communities could coalesce around relevant topics: energy, pollution, water, food or whatever.

This personal mobilisation is in no way a replacement of the predominant top-down systems. Energy suppliers, governments, the United Nations, newspapers and so on, will continue to exert their influence, but upon an increasingly knowledgeable constituency. Change will increasingly start at the bottom and work up, just as some of it will continue to start at the top and work down. As individuals, we each have the potential to separate the good from the bad and the authentic from the greenwash, through our online community connections. This isn't about exploiting the herd instinct (as much of social media does), it's about reason and establishing or finding 'reasonable' social venues to hang out and sharing your discoveries with similarly motivated others.

None of this could happen without the ICT industry. In fact, this could end up being one of the best strings it could add to its collective bow.

Dan Bricklin (inventor of PC spreadsheet) on technology

A couple of weeks ago, Wiley asked if I'd like a review copy of Dan Bricklin's 'Bricklin on Technology' book. Normally, I'd say "not on your Nelly" because I know what a chore book reviewing can be. However, I was at the West Coast Computer Faire in March 1980 when Bricklin collected his first award for VisiCalc - the pioneering spreadsheet for the PC. I was also a fairly avid user of his 'Demo' program a few years later. Even though I don't think we met, (unless it was in Zaragoza a couple of years ago), I felt connected, not least because I also developed and published PC software for many years, but without his degree of visibility or success.
When the book arrived, I winced because it's more or less 500 pages long. Unless you're a commuter or you don't get much sleep, how do you find time to read that much?
Anyway, the book was enjoyable at a couple of levels and a disappointment at another. Enjoyable because it peeled off and examined the layers of thinking that went into various products and issues. Bricklin leaves no stone unturned in his pursuit of insight. The transcript of an 85-minute interview with wiki inventor Ward Cunningham is a classic in this respect. (It was 37 pages.) I'd rather Bricklin had identified and pulled out the key elements but then, I suspect, this would have been an editorial step too far for him. He would have had to impose his own interpretations on the conversation, rather than laying it out in full in front of his audience.
You will get insight if you read this book. Insight into what brought us to where we are and a few glimmers into how we might get to where we're going.
The other enjoyable bit for me, which you won't all share, is that I've met (albeit fleetingly) many of the people mentioned in the book, worked with many of the products and written about many of the issues. Bricklin and I even started programming at the same time - early 1966, and we've both tried to take the user perspective in our work. The book triggered many long-dormant memories and reawakened many old feelings, especially in the late 70's/early 80's as we all groped our way through the chaos of the emerging microcomputer/PC business. This is not really a reason for buying the book because Bricklin's chosen subjects seem, in the main, to be serendipitous. A comprehensive history book it is not, although it is a useful addition to the history of the IT world of the late 20th century.
The book is a compilation of old blog posts, essays and transcripts of recordings, loosely arranged around topics which Bricklin finds important, all topped and tailed with narrative from the perspective of 2007/8. As he says in the conclusion, "On any topic you can explore deeply and find nuance", which more or less sets the tone for the book. He does dig deep, he records faithfully and, at times you want him to make his point more quickly. But maybe that's not what he's trying to do. Perhaps he's trying to help the reader understand the nuances, so that they can move forward with their own thinking. I don't know.
Most of his topics have some resonance today, although much of the writing has been overtaken by events or absorbed into the mainstream. The chapters will give you a clue: What Will People Pay For?; The Recording Industry and Copying; Leveraging the Crowd; Cooperation; Blogging and Podcasting; What Tools We Should Be Developing?; Tablet and Gestural Computing; The long term; Historical Information about the PC; Interview with the Inventor of the Wiki; and VisiCalc. It's a ramble round the industry and round the inside of Bricklin's head. His invention of VisiCalc gave him a passport to go where he likes when he likes and meet who he likes. And that's what he's done and, in this book, shared it with us.
My approach, if you're thinking of buying it, would be to say "I'm getting a good 300-page book, I'll just need to pick which 300 of the 500 pages are of most relevance to me." It's a bit like his approach to software - give the user the tools and let them choose how best to use them.

Amazon is selling it in the UK for £10.99

Hoard or share? Your call.

A long time ago, when I was a wage slave in a computer company, I figured out two things.

1) People will always be around and therefore I should work in a field that involved communication and people. (Teaching and writing became important parts of my life subsequently.)

2) I should, as much as possible, do things once and get paid lots of times. (I subsequently entered the publishing world - magazines first, then software.)

These activities have, to varying degrees, determined the trajectory of my life for the past 33 years. And a jolly fine life it's been, thank you for asking.

But, somewhere along the way, things changed. I found myself giving more and more of my stuff away. I (wrongly) bombed the price of my niche software too far. I found myself cheerfully handing out information and opportunity leads to others. At some point I moved from hoarding and dribbling out my knowledge in exchange for largish sums of money to giving away more and receiving something else in return, friendships and business relationships based on trust and transparency.

I'm not totally stupid, I realise I have to sell something and that something tends to be what's between my ears, my native talents or what I can lay my hands on and package more skilfully than others. It makes for a good life in which all the bits join up rather harmoniously. People, fortunately, know about me and are happy to pay me when they think they can get some value out of me.

I was prompted to write this by a tiny, three-minute, interview conducted in a noisy restaurant by one Suw Charman. She, incidentally, was partly responsible - along with Adriana Lukas and Jackie Danicki - for acting as midwives as I entered the world of blogging at the end of 2004. Her interview was with JP Rangaswami, a man who is a paragon of knowledge sharing. He gets hardly any sleep so has a ton of time to do his job (a very important one at BT), to keep up, to engage with all the 'greats' of the social computing world, and to reflect very deeply on our world, much of which ends up in his blog.

To paraphrase the (short) interview, he pointed out that capturing and keeping knowledge is part of the incentive system in many organisations. But the new generations coming through (and the more enlightened of the older generations) have a more sharing attitude. The core question is: do people want to share? And, by implication, he believes the the answer is, increasingly, "yes". It shows in his behaviour. The benefits show in his reach and influence. And little of this could have happened without him deciding to reach out and share.

And, as I've written many times before, inside an organisation, the benefits are potentially huge. Rangaswami believes that the decision (should we implement social software?) that organisations need to make  is akin to deciding whether or not a company should have a telephone exchange. In time, it will become obvious. Like email and mobile phones before, it will take a while to bite (he thinks the transition could be ten years or more) but it will happen without question.

Dodging Stockholm Syndrome at Lotusphere

Someone was talking today about the Stockholm Syndrome in which hostages empathise with their abductors. Having just come back from Lotusphere I can understand that feeling.

You're surrounded by hordes of 'yellow blooded' delegates and IBM/Lotus folk who applaud and cheer at the drop of a hat. Sometimes to small nuances that totally escape the uninitiated, like me. I could cheerfully sit there sneering from my analysts' special seating area in the auditorium. But, when it came to talking to these genuinely enthusiastic souls, it was hard to remember that this was an organisation that had a particular job to do: to keep the faithful on board and to secure the interest of the rest of the world.

That it did the former, I have no doubt. The announcements came thick and fast. Given that Lotusphere happens once a year, it will be a while until all of the products and services are on general release. But the overall effect of the event was to persuade the faithful that Domino/Notes is a cracking platform, that it has a future, that it will simplify programming (did I hear by "500 percent"? I think I did) and that it will be possible to integrate all of the social software offerings into existing and future applications, making them a one-stop-shop for work, communication and collaboration.

What of the outsiders? Well, some deals have been put together to increase Lotus' reach and increase the customer's convenience. Salesforce.com, RIM - the BlackBerry folk, SAP, LinkedIn and others are all happily welding themselves to different parts of the Lotus infrastructure. There were others, of course and you can read about them on the IBM website.

But what about the size of organisations that can participate in the Lotus experience, and would they want to? This is where things get a little murkier.

Without question, Lotus is at its happiest with organisations that periodically write large cheques. And who can blame it? But it has ambitions to charge downmarket to hit organisations as small as, depending who you speak with, 1000, 500, 100 or 5 employees. That's quite a spread. But it becomes clearer when you look at the channels to market.

Again, IBM's comfort zones are selling direct or selling through systems integrators. The one thing that you can't miss at Lotusphere is what a massive industry owes its existence to the company's products. Consultants, integrators, third party software suppliers, even hardware makers, are only too happy to drink the Lotus Kool Aid and make money while providing valued services to their medium to large enterprise customers.

But Lotus needs to find a convincing route to the smaller organisations. It has, or soon will have, a bunch of offerings, in the shape of LotusLive Engage (Bluehouse as was) and various other versions of the software - Connections, Meetings and Events. These are variously abbreviated versions of the full blown equivalent on-premise offerings. And, in case you didn't know, all will run in the cloud. IBM's cloud. Again, there's more but that will do for now. The route to market is through intermediaries. Anyone with a bespoke requirement or an integration requirement will probably turn to their local reseller and a deal will be made. But the hoi polloi, assuming they realise the value of communication and collaboration, will go where exactly?

Lotus talks about being in discussion with telcos but we've seen many attempts over the past ten years for these to engage profitably at the low end. They have the relationship with clients through the telephone business but it's a big jump from selling lines and equipment to selling stuff with an intellectual content to a small business. I'm told that selling off the page has been a dismal experience so far. So either the customers will have to mature at their own pace and come knocking when they understand this stuff. Or someone has to get out there and engage with them effectively.

Enter stage left the hosting companies. The good ones are already used to providing high levels of advice and support online. They sell to small businesses. Perhaps this is where Lotus should be looking for salvation. SIs for people prepared to dig deep in their pockets and a lightweight semi-automated service provision for those with short arms.

Or, in the blizzard of information last week, did I go snowblind? Please correct me, if you feel so moved. At least I don't feel I'm suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.

The knowledge worker and Enterprise 2.0

Always good to hear Andrew McAfee in action. He's the guy who coined the Enterprise 2.0 moniker a couple of years ago. He's an associate professor at Harvard Business School and, yesterday, he ran a lunchtime presentation and Q&A on "Enterprise 2.0: How Organizations are Exploiting Web 2.0 Technologies and Philosophies." The audience was a mix of students, faculty, journalists, analysts, bloggers, business folk and venture capitalists.

The subject matter was of particular interest to me this week, having already done a press interview, worked with some potential research clients/partners and prepared for a conference, all on a closely-related topic. It struck me as a good idea to listen in. Not least to get a reality check for my own thoughts. The tip-off, by the way, came through Elsua - an online pal who works for IBM - through Twitter, an increasingly popular web 2.0 micro-blogging tool.

The presentation, with minor adjustments, wasn't so different from what he was saying a couple of years ago. In fact, if this stuff is new to you, you will find value in his How to Hit the Enterprise 2.0 Bullseye blog post (November 2007). The bullseye in the headline means targeting the organisation but, in the body, it refers to his model of how a knowledge worker inside an organisation sees their connections to others. Because it focuses on people, it is immune to the shifts in technology. New applications can be added to and removed from the model without wrecking the basic insights it provides.

To keep it simple: at the heart are the people with whom we have strong ties - our colleagues, the people we work with, have lunch with and maybe socialise with; The next lots are those people we know - if we saw them in a pub we'd be happy to have a drink with them; beyond that, and this is where it gets interesting, are the people who would make potential colleagues, if only we knew about each other; and, finally, the outer ring contains the world of helpful people out there whose worlds are unlikely to collide with ours.

The strong tie group is unlikely to be the source of novel information or links to potential colleagues. They know each other too well. The weak ties are those most likely to lead us to new ideas and new opportunities. Enterprise 2.0 technologies don't cause these things to happen, but they can act as amplifiers of these natural processes. Wikis might be popular among strongly tied individuals while Twitter or Facebook might be used in both areas. The next ring cannot really be exploited without some Enterprise 2.0 technology, blogging in particular. McAfee talks about "narrating your work". Do this and with the help of regular search, tags or links from other sources it acts as a magnet to others who are interested in what you do.

The ring with no ties represents strangers. While having nothing to do with collaboration, it is a source of collective intelligence. McAfee ran us through some examples of prediction markets to show the usefulness of this ring. It boils down to aggregating the individuals' predictions of a particular outcome - presidential results, company performance, whatever. Closely linked to betting and not social at all. But remarkably accurate.

Sticking to the social part of the bullseye, McAfee said that the biggest fear of managers is that information would leak that shouldn't. He noted that email, photocopiers and USB sticks, among others, already provide plenty of ways to leak information. However social tools do increase the number of people who can see leaks, so the participative benefits of the Enterprise 2.0 world have to be weighed up against the risks of disclosure. Related to this, he mentioned that some companies 'close down' too much. Their use of social tools might be restricted to strong tie groups, foreclosing the possibility that someone else in the organisation might have something valuable to offer.

He claims to have begged organisations for horror stories relating to these technologies and says "the collection is empty". People inside organisations don't use this stuff to do nasty things. This is partly to do with the fact that they cannot participate anonymously and people already know how to behave.

I'm not sure that this is universally true, so next week I'll take a closer look at the risks and the remedies, especially when the outside world becomes part of the equation.

What if the lights go out?

We humans have a talent for getting other people and other things to do stuff for us. If we didn't, we'd all be out there scratching a living from the forests and fields and we'd have a pretty rudimentary existence. Would you care to forage or kill for the food on your table?

"A strange way to start an IT-focused blog," you might be thinking, but all will become clear. Yesterday I was listening to Clay Shirky talking about the wonders wrought by the advent of the internet. In particular, he was talking about the tremendous communication leap which has taken place in terms of how we communicate, cooperate, collaborate and act in concert as a result.

Previous communication systems have been predominantly one on one - telegraph, telephone, fax and so on - or they've been one to many, where 'one' has usually been a business: books, radio, television. Even the web started off that way. What's changed over the past few years is our willingness and ability to convene online. We don't need to be gathered together by an organisation - a company, a fan club, or whatever. We do it ourselves. And we're most likely to do it by coalescing around a topic of common interest.

Shirky mentioned the case of HSBC stopping its interest-free overdraft facility for graduates last year. It thought it had the power to do this. (One to many.) But it didn't account for a graduate starting a Facebook group delicately called "Stop The Great HSBC Graduate Rip-Off". Okay, I was kidding about the 'delicate'. Despite it being the summer holiday period, students and graduates joined the group in their thousands to discuss the issue and decide on actions that might need to be taken. Not least sharing information about how to move their accounts to other banks. Newspapers picked up on it. Physical demonstrations were planned in Facebook and HSBC backed off.

A piece of information about HSBC became a gathering point, a cooperation point and a collaborative action point. This sort of thing just couldn't have happened before. People were put together by bosses. Or they joined clubs organised by other people. They didn't self select and self organise, certainly not as quickly and as effectively and in such numbers.

Inside the business, the same thing's happening. People often find each other because of common interest and quite regardless of the hierarchy. If two people in two labs in two parts of the world are coincidentally researching the same materials, there's a good chance that they'll discover each other if there's a topic online around that material. Relationships will form which couldn't have come about through central direction.

As Shirky says, "Every URL is a latent community."

You see it a lot with environmental groups at the moment. A lot of coalescing is going on around different green topics. I see that fellow analyst Tom Raftery has started talking about the 'Tom' instead of the Tonne as a CO2 measure. In fact Gavin Starks has started a ning social network called megatom. It has 15 members as I write and it may be madly successful, or it may die. It cost very little to start. It's not like a conventional media title. If it flies, it flies. If it doesn't, it doesn't. This kind of exercise is being repeated thousands of times a day, all over the world. Some might say the lunatics are in charge of the asylum, but that's not true. Good ideas will gain traction, bad ones won't. Good contributors will gain influence, bad ones will be ignored.

With several UK power stations heading for the knacker's yard courtesy of EU rulings and with our excessive dependence on foreign energy supplies, we face the real prospect of power shortages. But this new world relies, more than anything else, on us each having a supply of electricity. Without it, the doorways to this parallel social universe will be slammed shut.

Am I being paranoid? Does it matter? I happen to think "no" and "yes" respectively. What about you?

Sidestep formal structures for effective change

Many companies like to think they understand all about business processes and change management. They spend fortunes on consultancy, design, structures, processes, training, roll out and management, then wonder why they don't get the results they expected. So they have another go...

Well, maybe things aren't quite that bad, but I bet you can think of plenty of examples of 'change initiatives' that just don't get the buy-in of the grass-roots people who are supposed to implement them. Part of the problem is that they quite often try to appeal to reason. They use PowerPoints with lots of bullet points to try to hook the intellect and forget the emotional dimension. Maybe they think there's no room for emotion in their business.

But why do people go to work generally? Especially so-called 'white collar' workers. It's for the satisfaction of doing a job well and for recognition and this doesn't just mean in the pay packet. Not a good motivator at the best of times.

Part of the problem is that we've become accustomed to treating business as a mechanistic process. And a predictable one at that. Do this, force it through these process pipes, and consistent results will pop out the other end. In truth, many of the most important business processes are chaotic. Think of sales and marketing, for example. Untidy real life gets in the way. Reality has little to do with the org chart and formal processes and much more to do with endless workarounds and informal communications.

Yes, of course some processes or workflows do what they're supposed to. Regulations have to be followed and suchlike. But these are a bit like the unconscious processes of the human body. We can walk down the street while we pump blood, breathe and digest our food. But our attention is on the interesting conversation with the person walking with us.

So it is in business, the interesting stuff and the stuff that is likely to do the business most good in the future is probably the stuff that lies outside the fundamental formal systems of the organisation.

Leandro Herrero has written a most interesting book on how organisations can bring about change by acknowledging that all is not what it seems in the body corporate. He alights on the fact that, alongside the 'organigramme', lives a communication network in which all employees and business partners participate to a greater or lesser degree. Some people are highly connected, others only slightly. These are the strong ties and weak ties beloved of social network analysts. His book is called Viral Change.

It investigates how these social networks can be put to work to bring about transformational change in double quick time - months rather than years - and without any of the complexity of traditional change programmes. Apart from the acknowledgement and exploitation of social networks, the book is heavy on behavioural psychology. In fact, for anyone interested, it contains a 16-page PhD psychology course, which is then summarised in a couple of pages at the end of the chapter.

As someone who's spent several years deep in the social network world and a further thirty plus years as a behavioural psychology advocate, the book resonated rather well with me. But the point that Herrero makes is that behaviour can be observed. It is unequivocal. Bring about behavioural change and the culture will change as a consequence. And you don't need more than five defined behaviour changes to bring about massive transformation. The trick is, of course, in finding and defining those which are most appropriate.

Diving off slightly to one side for a second, why did the iPod catch on the way it did? Apart from it being a neat piece of kit, don't you think the white headphones and leads had something to do with it? People were curious, they enquired, they copied, it became a fashion. But Steve Jobs didn't directed this take up to the nth degree. Apple seeded opinion formers and influencers and let the network do the rest. So why should influence spread any differently in organisations?

Why not seed the movers and shakers - the people who are well connected and, therefore almost certainly respected too - with what needs to be achieved and let them start infecting their closest connections. Then as they and their behaviour change, others will notice and, if they respect or admire the folks who are adopting new ways, they will copy too. Especially if adoption is periodically recognised or reinforced, to use the vernacular. Before you know it, you have an epidemic on your hands and change has permeated. It becomes the norm.

Of course, this is a gross simplification of a 400-page book. But the book does strip away a lot of nonsense associated with traditional expensive and long-winded change management programmes. And, yes, the author is undoubtedly pushing the services of his company, The Chalfont Project. You won't agree with many of the things he suggests, but then you're probably not expected to. If he infects you with the fundamental principles, it's up to you to figure out how to make it work in your world.

The book is a useful catalyst to exploiting the power of social networking and behavioural psychology to accelerate needed change in organisations.

If you're happy to provide your details you can download a free eight page overview of the approach from Herrero's website.

Even if this piece has irritated you, I think it's worth a look. You never know what you might be missing.

Microsoft and EEA's environmental early warning system

Confession time: I get a horrible sinking feeling when I hear terms like 'EU', 'human rights' or 'observatory'. When they come at me all at once, my usual temptation is to run away. But, this time I didn't. Perhaps it was curiosity about Microsoft's involvement, perhaps it was the hint of democracy, but I stuck with it. The 'it' being a recent announcement by the European Environmental Agency (EEA from now on) that it had entered into a five-year alliance with Microsoft to create an environmental observatory.

The observatory's purpose, as the name implies, is to gather information about local environmental conditions and share this with any interested party, including members of the public. The data will come from a multitude of sources including data satellites, NGOs, ornithological and wildlife organisations and the hoi polloi. Much of it will be real-time and it will be aggregated, analysed and presented back to enquirers in an appropriate form. That can include data tables for further processing or geo-spatial images in Microsoft's Virtual Earth. The hope is that such information will lead to rapid local action such as when a factory is spotted polluting the air or soil.

Microsoft will be playing its part in each of these elements: collecting, storing, analysing and sharing the results. It has been working with the EEA since the summer of 2007 and has gone public on the five-year agreement which it believes is entirely complementary to the company's own commitment to environmental sustainability.

Suspecting the worst, I investigated Microsoft's environmental credentials. After all, in cahoots with Intel, it did spend a lot of years more or less enticing people into equipment upgrades. My conclusion is that the company is sincere in its intentions and has already made great strides in dealing with its own environmental footprint, especially with regard to cutting travel and single occupant vehicle usage. It even runs a huge bus fleet for its staff which aims to reduce car traffic in the Redmond area by more than 250,000 miles per week. Not to mention saving the Microsoft campus land area needed for parking and garaging facilities. This is one of the sad aspects of environmental actions, they often save the company money so bragging runs the risk of appearing somewhat two-faced.

But, returning to the EEA project, Professor Jacqueline McGlade, its executive director, suggested that, "To sustain the improvements in the environment made over the past few decades, everyone needs to be involved and understand the consequences and impact of their actions." She added, "The only way to do this is by reaching out to the widest audience. This collaboration with Microsoft is a groundbreaking approach to bring environmental information to as many people as possible." This rather assumes they have a) access to a suitably equipped computer and b) the will to look. I would have thought that traditional media will be the best way to reach these people. The other issue with this statement, taken as a whole, is that she refers to improvements made over the past few decades. This suggests that the actions required are already understood and merely need communicating.

It seems to me that although this project is being billed as a citizen information system, it is actually much more of a citizen spying system. Most people would be more interested in snitching on local sources of pollution than in logging in periodically to check local environmental conditions. However, you can be sure that certain powers-that-be will be very keen on this sort of real-time information. It's a chance for them to swiftly crack down on miscreants, for which we should all be grateful, assuming that things don't get too petty.

In the end, I remain puzzled by the publicity exercise around this. I suspect that Microsoft considers the EEA to be a good notch to have in its corporate social responsibility stick. And maybe the EEA wanted a bit of profile and Microsoft provided an ideal delivery vehicle.

But I'd like to think I'm wrong. Perhaps you see it differently...