CONIECTO

On Monday and Tuesday (April 10-11) I attended the Contactivity event organised by KnowledgeBoard and London Knowledge Network at University of Greenwich Business School.
I was looking forward to it, but until the last moment I wasn't sure if I will really make it, both budgets (time and money) being very tight.

And there I was, on a beautiful and fresh Monday morning in London, heading to Greenwich - Queen Anne's Building. Of course I forgot the printed indications on how to get there at home and had to find an Internet connection first!
I was there early, and I was happy to meet again some old friends, and to make the acquintance of some other people I had read about on the Contactivity wiki: Martin Roell, Peter Troxler, John Curran, Ron Dvir, Julie Fenwick.

We were invited in a big room with tables and I watched Martin trying to pick up a table - where he could learn the most, I assume. I sat down at an empty table because I found its label - Gamma- appealing. I found out later that a whole group of tables where labelled the same way, to give the chance of consolidating the results of the simulation. Soon, I was surrounded by 6 people I didn't meet before. It took less than 2 min when prompted to tell them all about myself. We had labels with our first names, but it was still difficult to figure out who was who. In another 2 min I found out that one of my neighbours was Dan Dixon from Headshift, and of course I had to show my enthusiasm about their concept and their work (I had the chance to meet and to listen to Lee Bryant at BlogTalk2). The other 2 guys in my team were Gary Bruton and Alan McKinnon. The other team at our table was formed of Corinne Floeck, Markus Lehne, and Mike Yeomans. We were to find out later that we were quite an interesting mix of academics, practitioners and consultants.

The simulation we were invited to participate in was a simulation on a project named Cayenne, designed by Celemi. Martyn Laycock made the introduction, mentioning the well-known study of Standish Group that made me so happy many years before, and explaining the rules of the simulation (I was ready to call it game, but it would be wrong to name it this way, we were explained). Why in particular I was happy that so many projects fail? Because I found out that mine was not the only one, and felt much more comfortable;-)

The guys in my team were very sharp, and they came up very quickly with a way to prioritise the decisions. We seemed to agree on most decisions. The thing I didn't agree with where the scoring cards - who can decide a decision is better than the other in a simulation?! It's all based on statistics, and statistics and real life do not get on well together. My mates seemed very interested, because the problems were the ones they were encountering in real life, and were very keen on seeing the results. Our scores looked incredibly well, but after aggregation with the other Gamma teams, we were average. It was good, because it made us think and talk and argue. Amazing how problem solving can bring complete strangers together in such a short time!

The next slot of time was dedicated to networking. Dr.T (Peter Troxler) and dr.W (Patricia Wolf) proposed a networking exercise. People were invited to find a peer they never met before, to find out everything about him/her in 2 min, and then each of the two was supposed to walk around the panels and, with their partner's needs in mind, to find presentations of people he/she should meet (and write down their partner's name next to it). The exercise was interesting, because it involved empathy, and it gave each person 2 pairs of eyes when looking for interesting people. You were there to find matches for your partner, but you couldn't avoid noticing interesting contacts for yourself.
Quite a couple of late birds (like me) didn't send their presentations to Ed Mitchell on time, so we had to spend time on re-writing our presentations. I was lucky to have my printed one in my bag. I talked to Peter Heisig from eureki, but probably because we were late and a bit stressed, we didn't succeed to do a good work - at least I had problems with finding people Peter should have met. Instead, I found quite a bunch of people I didn't want to miss, so I made my own list and even said hello to these folks, with the promise to talk more later. These were the names on my list: Lale Eidal (DNV) who's company is into GSD, Yvonne Buma, Anne Braithwaite, Corinna Floeck, Celso Flores, Sabine Gary, Jozefa Fawcett, Lawrence Clark (hm...I never met Lawrence though!).

I managed to identify most of these people, introduce myself and tell them we had to talk (sometimes also mentioning the topic). It worked almost perfect, because I found time to talk to almost each of them during the breaks or group activities.
I was thinking of a possible way to improve the exercise, and suggested that next time, we could find our pair online, exchange a few mails, start searching for contacts on the wiki, and come up with a 3-5 names list (and photos!) before the event. Some of the titles suggested for the presentation were a bit awkward: I am an expert in... I'm looking for expertise in... What should people know about me... They might work well for consultants, who learned to "sell" themselves...