TV as we know it is dying, but most people don’t perceive yet the dramatic change that is bubbling below the surface. In a stunning report released at CES, Accenture points to a wholesale collapse of traditional TV viewing. The study found that “the percentage of consumer watching broadcast or cable TV shows, movies, or [...]

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“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” ~ Mark Twain

There are advantages to being an outsider. Being outside allows you to look in. You can retain an independence from the mainstream and have the privilege of noticing things hidden from those closer to the action.

In business it is easy to get locked into things being the way they are. To be too much in the flow. To become too mainstream and feel stuck. It is easy to think that things are inevitable and that change is too difficult to even consider.

Blogging inside a business has the potential to alter this. Writing a blog helps you step outside. It helps you to observe what is happening around you in a more detached way. It enables you to interpret and comment. Being even slightly outside the mainstream helps you to see the way forward, to see things as less inevitable. To see clearly how things are now and to imagine how they might be otherwise.

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I found myself reciting the following lines from Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here the other day in my head:

And did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?

It reminded me of the many, many hours I spent as a teenager listening to Dark Side Of The Moon and other Floyd albums. I would listen intently, often with my eyes shut or in the dark, almost forcing the words into my psyche, etching them in my memory. It is little wonder that several decades later the ideas contained in those lyrics form such a fundamental part of my world view. It’s as if I was deliberately indoctrinating myself. It worked!

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I was asked in an interview today if I thought that technology, namely social technology, could bring about change. I was tempted to quote the old psychiatrist joke about people having to want to change but resisted. I do think though that whether it is the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, or your staff talking about your business with other staff online, the technology is not causing people to change their attitudes but it sure is speeding the process up.

I believe what we are seeing is the morphing from the industrial, corporate mindset to something new and potentially very different. We happen to have the Internet as a platform on which to conduct our conversations about these changes. It enables more people to learn faster from each other, to work out what is happening, and to gain support and strength from each other as they muster the energy and courage to fundamentally change how they see the world.

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I have just watched Kathy Sierra’s video on how to deal with aggressive or abusive behaviour online. I totally agree with her main point that we all have a role to play in what is deemed normal or acceptable online behaviour. It brought back my own intervention in a spat between two well known bloggers back in the early days of blogging. Adopting my best disapproving Scottish presbyterian accent, I told them that being in the public eye they should be more aware of the signals they were sending to the still forming online community. I also remembered the famous occasion at the first “Le Web” when Mena Trott lectured the audience of bloggers on good behaviour and ended up picking a fight with Ben Metcalfe. I guess what these remembered occasions made me aware of is the need not to preach or moralise. Yes act in ways that cultivate positive behaviours and yes, be prepared to stand up and say when someone is “behaving badly”, but stop short of telling other people what they should or shouldn’t be doing – it just tends to wind them up!

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Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. – Howard Thurman

This line was quoted by Flemming Funch this morning in Facebook and it got me thinking about the nature of change. How much we all try to change other people – whether our family, our colleagues or our staff. But we never, ever succeed. No one has ever made anyone else change. They always have to decide to change themselves at some stage. And why do we change? Because we have seen the possibility of being better. Happier, more effective, more successful. Whatever it is we have seen something in someone else we want to emulate.

The more someone berates us, finds fault with us and attempts to bring about a change in us the more we dig our heels in. And yet seeing someone being the way we want to be can make us change in an instant.

The prevailing business culture in most organisations – mature, restrained, un-selfaware and often aloof – is the last sort of thing that is going to make any of us want to change.

We need more people alive, awake and going for it – whatever it is!

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I have never really been bothered about my age, and to be honest it is still not something I worry about, but there has been an interesting change as I approached my fiftieth birthday today. I guess it is what they call a mid life crisis. I have become much more aware of how finite things are. Things aren’t going to last forever.

This unavoidable fact may be obvious to the rest of you but it wasn’t to me. I kind of took things for granted – another cuddle from my kids, another sunset, another hike up a hill. But recently I have begun to be much more aware of the fact that I don’t have an unlimited supply of these things to enjoy. Who knows, I may even see a second half century, but in the meantime I am getting much better at taking the time to really be here while I still am!

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Yesterday evening in the company of a few people (who hold opinions I respect greatly), I asked a truly ho-hum topical question, “So, does the COP15 lot have the climate science thing settled – are they in posession of the truth, are they working with the unreasonable openness and candour that is the hallmark of truth?”. I asked this knowing full well, I would probably recieve a lot of opinion (because the science bit seems to be worded in such obtuse terms that very few understand it – by ‘it’, I mean the scientific peer reviewed facts (i.e. the truth)’).   In a way that is uncustomary for me, I decided to shut up and listen. Here’s what was said . . . .

Everyone – bar none, seemed to conclude along the lines of the following statement, or words to the effect :- “one of the biggest frustrations we have is that there seems to be a distinct lack of emphasis and motivation toward telling the public (and business) the whole truth on climate change”,  followed by – “the biggest frustration we have today posing as truth and information is a constant stream of ‘balanced’ rhetoric. What the world needs today is truth around climate change, . . . .  truth not balance.”

Most people agreed that the distorted need to ‘balance’ the truth is by far the biggest hurdle in understanding the issues. Fox News owns the ‘fair and balanced’ term, even the BBC news site abounds with a nonsensical ‘balance’ where we are constantly expected to side with the skeptic or the counter – how is one ever to know what is the truth – see here  http://bit.ly/6cGtTL
Until we have the truth, the unplugged, unmitigated and wholly unreasonable truth I suppose we’ll never agree about what true trouble is and what to do about it.

I suppose that poses another query,  “Does balancing the truth lead to a pack of lies, and how can we tell?”

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Yesterday evening in the company of a few people (who hold opinions I respect greatly), I asked a truly ho-hum topical question, “So, does the COP15 lot have the climate science thing settled – are they in posession of the truth, are they working with the unreasonable openness and candour that is the hallmark of truth?”. I asked this knowing full well, I would probably recieve a lot of opinion (because the science bit seems to be worded in such obtuse terms that very few understand it – by ‘it’, I mean the scientific peer reviewed facts (i.e. the truth)’).   In a way that is uncustomary for me, I decided to shut up and listen. Here’s what was said . . . .

Everyone – bar none, seemed to conclude along the lines of the following statement, or words to the effect :- “one of the biggest frustrations we have is that there seems to be a distinct lack of emphasis and motivation toward telling the public (and business) the whole truth on climate change”,  followed by – “the biggest frustration we have today posing as truth and information is a constant stream of ‘balanced’ rhetoric. What the world needs today is truth around climate change, . . . .  truth not balance.”

Most people agreed that the distorted need to ‘balance’ the truth is by far the biggest hurdle in understanding the issues. Fox News owns the ‘fair and balanced’ term, even the BBC news site abounds with a nonsensical ‘balance’ where we are constantly expected to side with the skeptic or the counter – how is one ever to know what is the truth – see here  http://bit.ly/6cGtTL
Until we have the truth, the unplugged, unmitigated and wholly unreasonable truth I suppose we’ll never agree about what true trouble is and what to do about it.

I suppose that poses another query,  “Does balancing the truth lead to a pack of lies, and how can we tell?”

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I was one of six live bloggers at the Munk Debate on climate change on Tuesday. The topic, “Climate change is humankind’s defining crisis and demands a commensurate response,” pitted Elizabeth May and George Monbiot on the pro side v. Bjørn Lomborg and Lord Nigel Lawson on the con side.
Read more:  http://bit.ly/6xX5NY
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