Lifehack Live Interview
Recently, I was interviewed by Dustin Wax of the popular Lifehack Live podcast on Blogtalkradio.com about Fired Up or Burned Out and how Connection Cultures increase employee engagement. To hear the interview click here. Lifehack.org is the premier personal development site on the web, with daily content on productivity, organization, communication, technology, and more. Lifehack live features interviews with leading personal development experts, roundtable chats on topics related to productivity, and an assortment of tips, tricks and hacks to help you make the most out of your life.
Michael Lee Stallard is the President of
Really nice interview Michael - very inspiring
Hey Michael. Haven’t read your book yet but devoured your Connection Culture PDF download. Loved it, as a lot of what was said solidified the beliefs I’ve felt I’ve always had but I guess I just took for granted until the dot com bomb period (where this disconnect from these values seemed to be more prevalent and noticeable). Since then I’m been trying to identify these values that make me “feel connected” and books like The Cluetrain Manifesto, What Should I Do With My Life? (Po Bronson), Finding Our Way (Margaret J Wheatley), and interestingly enough even Permaculture: Principles And Pathways Beyond Sustainability (David Holmgren) have all helped in this regard.
As a web developer who has built many community sites over the years (primarily within the computer video game industry), I guess I wasn’t too surprised when I realized these values and beliefs are also critical to healthy communities both on and off the Web (which is why they relate so well to permaculture since the Web is itself an ecosystem of people). I mean even playing computer games online with my friends (i.e. first person shooters or massively multiplayer games), I’ve found these values also worked amazingly well in our effectiveness as a team.
I also agree with you that simplicity is of critical importance in relaying these values or this culture as I prefer to call it. Often the simpler the message, the easier is it to remember and implement. For example, when I played first person shooters, we had what we called a 10 second rule. That being if people needed assistance from someone, others would have to reply within 10 seconds assuming they were within range to support that person within 10 seconds of their reply. We found the idea worked amazingly well and almost created a symbiotic relationship amongst each of us with very little words needing to be communicated (i.e. instead of orders, we just relayed events that were going on in short two or three words phrases, so as to create a mental 3D model of the battlefield in our head).
Researching this later, I found out this experience / cooperation is called “situational awareness” and it’s something used extensively within military organizations for effective teamwork. Once I realized this though and was able to define it, I realized this was the same type of “feeling” I wanted in my work environments. That being a feeling of such connectedness between individuals that relaying awareness of what was going on within the organization or group was almost effortless. But of course for this to be achieved, you need all of the other necessary values to bring it about (i.e. open, sharing, caring).
In reviewing your Connection Culture PDF, I tried to find this word “awareness” within it but couldn’t find it specifically. However I’m assuming it’s encapsulated in many of your other words such as trust, voice, engagement, recognition, and voice which all together help to create this social awareness / intelligence (which you defined under Value).
All said and done, I’m thoroughly impressed with your research and work, as it’s nice to connect with someone else who believes in the same deeper values of life that I do (i.e. respects and values diversity which actually can benefit and strengthen a group not hinder it, values family over work, and so on).
Keep up the excellent work!
Nollind,
Thank you for your encouragement. As a first time author laboring to raise awareness of my work, comments like yours sustain me.
Thanks for telling me about Permaculture.
Your use of the word “awareness” in a group context reminded me that the word “corporation” is based on the Latin root “corpus” which means “body” in English. Internal competition in corporations holds many people back from sharing information and keeping other parts of the corporate body aware of relevant developments. In my work, I use the terms Knowledge Flow to describe what I believe you are referring to as awareness. When Knowledge Flow is high in an organization, so is the awareness of members.
Hey Michael. Don’t get discouraged if it’s taking a while to raise awareness. Change takes time (but you’re definitely changing the world nonetheless). I mean I remember reading The Cluetrain Manifesto a few years after it had been initially released and I was surprised I hadn’t heard about the book earlier. It was just by chance that I was flipping through Fast Company magazine in a store and saw an article on David Weinberger which led me to the book. And I still tell people about The Cluetrain Manifesto today and many still haven’t heard about it.
I mean it was just by chance that I even stumbled across your article on Change This. I was reviewing a profile of one of the founders of Change This and saw the link to the site, so I decided to check it out. And low and behold I found your article which I was pretty excited about.
More often than not on the Web, I find it’s not so much how many people you try to connect with but instead who you connect with. By finding the right people (”hyperlinked people” as the Cluetrain Manifesto calls them), they’ll get the word out to the right influential people and help spread the word for you.
Therefore you might find conversations on the following people’s sites interesting, as it’s a great way to engage in a conversation you’re interested in and also for a people to find you in turn (since if they find your comments interesting on these sites, they’ll probably want to read more about you and come to your site here, assuming that’s what you use for your website link when commenting elsewhere).
Anyways here’s are the people I was referring to above (as they often talk about things related to culture and/or communities).
Anil Dash (Blog About Making Culture)
Tara Hunt (HorsePigCow Blog)
David Weinberger (Joho The Blog)
37 Signals (Signal vs Noise Blog)
Oh and a couple of other books you might be interested in are as follows.
Small Giants (Bo Burlingham)
Getting Real (37 Signals)
Other than that, I’ll spread the word about your book and PDF whenever I’m in a conversation that would relate to it.
All the best!
PS. Wow funny how you talked about the corporation as a “body”. That’s kind of what I see an “aware organization” like, a body. And each person in that corporation are like cells within the body. When something attacks the body, the cells relay the event to other cells and they all respond automatically and appropriately without the need for a central control and command.
And yes Knowledge Flow sounds exactly like what I would call awareness. BTW bringing this awareness to communities on the Web is something I’ve been researching for a while as well (ever since the Katrina disaster). In effect, the idea is to utilize RSS to relay small events between many decentralized communities so that they remain aware of what is going on within each. A proprietary centralized approach to this would be something like Everyblock.com (which is bad in a disaster event since it’s centralized and would probably get overloaded).
Nollind,
Thank you for the suggestions. I posted on the blogs you mentioned. I appreciate that you are helping me raise awareness of connection.
All the best,
Michael