Serendipity is at the heart of today’s emerging society

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Serendipity is for me a deeply meaningful word.

The more than dozen posts discussing serendipity on my blog include how we created “enhanced serendipity” at an event I ran in 2003 in New York, more details on the story of the word serendipity and how to enhance it, the importance of the “serendipity dial” and far more.

One of the reasons I love Twitter so much is that it provides a rich substrate for serendipitous connections. A majority of the worthwhile connections I make these days come from Twitter. One of those connections is @AnaDataGirl. We have followed each other and had some conversations for a good while. So I heard multiple times that she did a gem of a presentation at SwitchConf in Oporto, Portugal last week.

Here are her lovely slides – while I’m sure they don’t do justice to the presentation itself they are well worth going through, as they capture some of the key concepts of serendipity and provide some delightful examples.

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Why high performance organizations will thrive on uncertainty and lack of control

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I recently gave a presentation at an offsite meeting of the leadership team of a global professional services firm. I was asked to speak about the future of business, and to be provocative, which is usually my objective in that kind of situation – it’s not very valuable if you can’t get people to think differently.

I discussed the driving forces of global business, and then gave them three ‘propositions’ of how I saw the future of business. One of the three propositions, which was really the underlying theme of my presentation, was ‘High performance organizations will thrive on uncertainty and lack of control.’

When you look at what has really changed in the best performing organizations of today compared to say those of a couple of decades ago, this is at the heart of the matter. Executives used to be in control, know what was happening, and to direct the company’s activities in detail to achieve success. That doesn’t work any more.
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Future of Retail: 10 powerful trends and 1 meta-trend

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I have just come across this – an excellent resource from PSFK on the Future of Retail.

PSFK presents Future of Retail report

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The report covers 10 major trends:
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Video and notes on the future of the 21st century

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I spoke last night at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, to speak at the last of their GoMA Talks on the 21st century which accompany their current exhibit of 21st century art. The topic was the future of the 21st century, with panellists:

– Antony Funnell, presenter of ABC Radio National’s Future Tense
– Tony Albert, artist
– Ross Dawson, futurist
– Dr Melissa Gregg, Senior Lecturer in Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at Sydney University and author of Work’s Intimacy
– Tim Longhurst, futurist

Here is the video of the full session:

Watch live streaming video from queenslandartgallery at livestream.com

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Digital Sydney is crowdsourcing its visual identity – submissions close soon!

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Since Sydney is my primary home, I have been delighted to see the local digital, creative, social media, and startup worlds explode over the last few years. There have always been pockets of world-class practice here, but we are now getting to the point where Sydney is starting to rank in the top-tier of digital cities around the world on a number of different levels.

The NSW government was long the least active of the states in supporting the digital and creative industries, however that has shifted significantly recently, with the City of Sydney also picking up the ball in a big way over the last few years.

One of the government initiatives is a formal Digital Sydney program which is currently being launched. They are opting to crowdsource their visual identity, though the crowd is just inhabitants of NSW. A prize of A$10,000 is up for grabs – see the video and details below.

There are already lots of other initiatives and activities in this space, and more all the time. It looks like Digital Sydney will contribute to the great momentum building in the creative and digital spaces in this wonderful city.


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What is the future of the Learning & Development department?

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Last Friday I gave the keynote for the first breakfast seminar run by CADRE, a leading elearning design company, for senior executives of its clients. The topic of my presentation was The Future of Learning, giving a big picture view to kick off their series.

This is a brief description of my presentation:

Challenges for organizations are mounting from intense global competition, empowered consumers, and generational shifts. At the same time, building more effective learning is becoming central to achieving organizational success. This session will use a rich array of examples to look at:
• The driving forces shaping learning in organizations
• What the successful organizations of the future will look like
• Learning in a social network world: the new opportunities
• The context of learning: personalized, mobile, relevant
• Creating the future of learning: key action steps

At the conclusion of my presentation I got the audience to break into groups of 5-6 and assigned them discussion questions.

One of the questions I posed was ‘What is the future of the L&D department?’
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Keynote: Building Business in a Connected World

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Tomorrow morning I am giving the keynote at City of Port Phillip’s inaugural Breakfast Briefing session for the year in St Kilda, Melbourne, on the topic of Building Business in a Connected World. Here are event details and registration.

Below are my slides for the presentation, which is almost entirely based on our Success in a Connected World visual framework launched earlier today.

The usual caveats apply – the slides are NOT intended to stand alone but to provide a visual accompaniment to my presentation, so these are shared primarily for those who attended my keynote. However others may still find them useful or interesting.

Note that the presentation is intended primarily for individuals and smaller businesses. It’s a completely different presentation for large enterprise.

Building Business in a Connected World

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List of the 242 most influential publications in the world

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Nate Silver, the political statistician extraordinaire, has turned his attention to publishing. His interest is honed by the fact that his blog is now hosted on the New York Times, which is currently implementing a paywall.

He has done an analysis of the most influential publications, consisting of a simple review of how frequently publications’ names appear in Google News and Google Blogs followed by the word “reported”, to give a representative sample of how often publications are quoted by others.

The full list of the top 242 is below.

A few quick comments:
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11 recommendations to create the future of government

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The Institute of Public Affairs of Australia (IPAA), the professional association supporting senior Australian public service executives, is not prone to rash statements.

Thus it is very encouraging to see its new policy paper, The Future Course of Modern Government, provide some pointed insights and recommendations on how to create the government of the future.

I have put the 11 recommendations provided at the end of the report at the bottom of this post. The full policy paper is absolutely worth a read for anyone interested in the topic.
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Reflections on the early days of social networking as LinkedIn reaches 100 million users

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Last week LinkedIn reached a significant milestone: 100 million users. On the occasion LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman sent out an email to the first 100,000 users thanking them for being early adopters.

The email included the recipient’s member number, which are given in order of signing up. You can look it up yourself in your LinkedIn profile URL; it is the number after “id=”. I had no idea, but it turned out I am member 9,822, in the first 0.01% of users.

While I closely followed the social networking space at the time, I didn’t join many. LinkedIn seemed to me to be one of the most promising newcomers.

When I was writing Living Networks in 2002 there were no true social networking applications in existence. I had eagerly joined SixDegrees.com, the very first social networking application, not long after it was founded in 1997, highly excited by its potential. The basic principle was inviting friends to connect, and using that to find the quickest social path to people you wanted to meet. As it happens this model closer to LinkedIn than any of the other major social networking platforms of today.
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