What are you waiting for?

You hold your breath. You have moments when you are caught in the headlights, a still unmoveable object in the middle of a cacophony of whizzing data. A chip on the motherboard of life, electrical pulses flying, ideas arcing above your head. You are paralysed. Brain still processing, eyes still flickering, other movement stilled.

Tentatively, you step into the edges of the data streams. Blog feeds collected, news streams scanned, conversations sparking and falling away again as fast as the data itself moved, for conversations are only data, care and heart and love colouring some, intrigue and passion and ferocity colouring others. But all of them worthwhile, all of them different colours, a beautiful rainbow created by beautiful minds.

A 10" window on the world. A data world. Pixellated beauty of intelligence and minds coming together in semi public streams, the worlds largest pub, spiderwebbing conversations pulling others in, epiphanies spiralling out of control into the impossible, the speakers resolutely denying that impossible exists. Here is no place for impossibilities, here is for everyone and everything, for the ideas which were ridiculous but now are not, for the lights which have been shaded to shine brighter than anyone thought possible.

The pace is fierce. The intensity of belief is catastrophic in its potential to do something so complicated and yet so simple. Change the world. Change the rules. Don't listen to your parents who told you to never aspire. Don't listen to your friends who told you furiously typing didn't mean anyone was listening. Don't listen to the people who can't understand that inspiration comes only once to some of us and that hard work should be avoided at all costs.

Instead start to believe. Start to ask the questions. The big ones and the small. Go back to the start when we were all innocent and naive and wide eyed with wonder and ask only this? What are you waiting for?

Don't hesitate. Don't pause too long. Stop over thinking, start doing. Stop the noise, stop the statis, stop the paralysis, stop the negative assumptions. Start the future, start the discussion, start the tearing down of the old ways of doing things and lay the building bricks of the buildings other will live in. Move. Get involved. It's not political, it's not dangerous, there is no wrong answer, only the potential to ask the wrong questions but to receive the right answers.

This is a missive to me. To the part of me wants to hide from the tornado of thoughts, ideas, opinions and beliefs. No more hiding. No more furious typing. The point is not in being the person to change the world, it is only to put together the pieces, to suggest and enable the small pieces in the puzzle, so that together we may build a bigger picture which will change the world.

With thanks to @johnpopham, @dominiccampbell and @johnsturgess

If you always do what you always did......

If you always do what you always did, you'll always get what you always got.(Anon)

Thinking digitally and thinking differently. Big ideas and big changes in direction for public sector. But fundamentally, we are at the crossroads, and I'm afraid depending on your area, we're there right now. Not in a few months when you've written a strategy and done some research, but right now. Times aren't changing, they have changed. And if you stick to the same business approaches that you've always used, I think increasingly you'll find your returns dwindling.

Yesterday, through talking to various people, I decided that the phrase social media is one I'm going to try and step away from. Thankfully, it seems I'm not alone. We are communicating digitally, shaping worlds digitally, enabling communication digitally and reconnecting communities digitally. Social media is, in most peoples heads, Facebook and Twitter. It's so much more than that. It's the software my mate's building to allow people to easily self publish. It's sharing your photographs and getting feedback and unexpected praise. It's asking the hive mind what it thinks about x, y and z and getting a quick and sensible answer and it's about philanthropy done on a very small scale but done by people like you and me.

What I'm getting at is, the platform almost doesn't matter any more. The foundation is the web, of course it is, the zeroes and ones that flow beautifully through the system, the packets that fly, the routes that mimic the nodes in the brain. But it's there and it will stay and it will endure. It's what we put on top of it that matters, how we use this and our motivations for doing so to a lesser extent. But to use all this possibility, this massive capability can be boggling and overwhelming.

I owe a confession here. I'm feeling a little overwhelmed too. I'm a geek and I sometimes still struggle to think digitally. I'm not talking about the fact that I still buy papers and books. I'm not talking about my ability to pick up 90% of software programmes and play with them until I understand them......an approach I apply to most of my life these days. What I'm talking about is the ability to incorporate digital communications into everything I do, to weave digital tech into the way I live my life and do my work. It should come naturally to me, and in some ways it does. But in order for you to weave digital into public sector, you first have to understand public sector. And understand it well, from the operations to the politics, from the internal politics to the unions. So, although in some ways I suppose you could say I am a digital citizen (I registered to vote online, I order those books online, I watch and become involve in conferences online, I talk to friends, arrange social activities, get told I've got interviews for jobs online), I am also right back at the beginning in some ways.

So, my conclusion is this. Effective digital engagement and communication has to start with something else the web does well - collaboration and crowd sourcing. Finding the experts in each of your departments who've been there while and know the intricacies, and collaborating with them in order to enable them to make the decision about which channel is the most appropriate to use to give out any specified message. Communications as a Department should be the hub of everything, but the spokes must stretch out into every single other Department, with that communication being two way, otherwise all expertise of one type will sit in the middle, another type at the end of the spoke and never the twain shall meet. Which is pointless, frankly, and does no one any favours.

So. Thinking digitally. Turns out it's not as simple as I first thought. Neither is communicating effectively and efficiently. Turns out, in order to communicate effectively externally, you must first be an absolute master at communicating internally. And that being a perceived 'expert' in one thing can be the most humbling experience of all, because it reveals in glaring technicolour exactly how much you don't know about absolutely everything else. So, this is where I become unpopular. Because I am in public sector and I'm working hard to try to join the dots. How is outsourcing to private sector with no experience of public sector going to work? Maybe the right question is, where are all the private sector consultancies and advisors who have experience of public sector?

And yet. Here is where I lie my hat.

Information overloads

A number of blogs have been linked to in the past few weeks which have, in effect, been about information overload.

It's made me think about how I use social media, and how I use my iPhone specifically. It's also made me realise that for some people, social media is becoming an albatross around their neck. It shouldn't be this way.

Take the social out of social media for a second, and what have you got? Media. Communication. Data. News. Information. The social side is almost irrelevant when you think of it in these terms - you are the end receptor of a massive amount of information on Facebook, Twitter et al and it really can be as simple as that. You can sit and watch, you can sit and read, there is no necessity to sit and interact. It could be argued that perhaps you are only getting half the intended outcome if you only watch and read and never respond, but the choice is ultimately yours.

If the weight of expected interaction is weighing you down, then perhaps you need to step back from things for a bit and become an observer. Watch the data streams scrolling down, learn from them whatever you can, and leave it at that. Step away. Take the information, use it, budget with it, plan with it, use it to inform your decisions, but don't respond, don't get involved and don't become drained. Social media is not supposed to be a problem. It is supposed to be a tool in a box, among many other tools.

I come at things from a slightly different angle. I am a geek. I suspect quite a large amount of Twitters userbase, for example, are. And so because we are geeks, there is a very large liklihood that we have been using what has now been niftily coined as social media for years. Very many years. Somewhere in the region of 20 years for some of us, though I was a late starter and only started communicating with random people on the internet about 15 years ago. But it is as much an intrinsic part of my life as picking up the phone to communicate with someone. In fact I must confess, I am far more likely to communicate via text than telephone and there are a number of reasons for that.

The biggest one, ironically, is information overload. If I call you on the telephone, there is an expectation that if you are in you will answer it. It might be something important, afterall, and once you have answered the phone, it is very difficult to then explain you're tired and only answered in case it was important. It's a socially awkward situation imposed on someone else, putting the other person on the other end of the phone in the position of 'answer and carry on speaking' or 'ignore and possibly miss really quite important news'.

Dropping an email in an inbox is different. There is no expectation on turnaround time. There is no awkwardness. There is just a little marker in someones inbox which says 'Hi, could use some interaction/date for an event sorting/just to say hi/nothing important' and it can be left to a time when the receiver has a spare moment in their day when it is appropriate for them to answer. There is no forced expectation.

Now take that concept a little further. Imagine a world where everyone operated on their own timescales if something wasn't 'important'. Imagine a world, for example, where you could email your GP and explain you needed an appointment for something not urgent. A refill of a prescription which needs an appointment perhaps, or a vaccination for a trip abroad, or just for some advice on a non urgent twinge in your arm. No hanging on the phone for 30 minutes listening to the endless 'you are now x in the queue'. No tired over worked harassed receptionist. Just a marker in someones inbox which says 'Hi, I need some help when you've got a bit of time'.

The sender is free to wander off and do something else. Like look after their new born child, or look after their elderly relative, or indeed even go off to work. Meanwhile, the marker sits in the inbox, waiting for someone else to finish with the early morning rush when things are mad, to grab a brew, and to sit down and wade through all those markers, firing off replies and updating the appointment database at their leisure. It doesn't matter if a crisis happens and they get interupted and have to dash off - the marker remains until it's dealt with. No one is put on hold, no one is charged any money for wanting to use a free service, everyone wins. They win in time, energy, patience and the ability to not be tied physically to the end of a phone.

The same usage works right the way across using social media as a communication tool. The onus is not on you to respond immediately. Just because someone can send a Tweet in real time does not mean you must respond in real time. As long as you have clearly stated turnaround times and manage peoples expectations, why exactly does it have to be instant? Yes there may be communications coming into you which do need an immediate response - fine. Scan down the list every hour and farm the important ones off, deal with them, forward them to the right person, retweet them to the right account and you've spent 10 seconds dealing with something urgent.

Data doesn't have to be drowned in. It doesn't have to be an albatross. If managed properly, with the right frameworks set up, data is merely another asset to be managed, something to be learned from, and ultimately something to be won with. Knowledge is power. Negative or positive, it is still power.

It's time to stop talking about social media, and to start using social media, media, communication, data, whatever you want to call it, to make peoples lives easier, gentler, less stressful and more centred around the increasingly time poor way people live their lives. It can be done.