Why Richard Hillgrove is an idiot

Richard Hillgrove may have the most idiotic opinion on the Twitter and Ryan Giggs story I've read yet. It is one of the worst thought-out and moronic articles I've read in a long time.

First, let me be clear about a number of things:

1. I'm a Man Utd fan, so bashing Ryan Giggs is not something I'm going to get excited about
2. I like the Guardian, in general, I think they've been one of the best adopters of Social Media in the newspaper sector
3. I have absolutely no interest in celebrity gossip, who shags who etc.

Ok, so what's my issue with Hillgrove's article? Well he obviously has no idea about Twitter or the law. Apart from that he's on perfectly solid ground!

He argues that Twitter is operating outside of the law by allowing users to talk about issues that newspapers are not. Pardon my French, but this is bull crap. It is complete loose-stool-water. Arse-gravy of the very worst kind. (Hat-tip to Stephen Fry)

Let us take the issue of whether Twitter is even subject to UK laws. It is based in America. Yes it has just (and I do mean, just, as in the last day or so) hired a UK member of staff, but the company operates out of the US.The US is a country that takes freedom of speech seriously. They even have a law that protects their companies, specifically websites, from being subject to laws in other countries that suppress freedom of speech.

And for those of you unaware, that's what a super-injunction is. A suppression of freedom of speech. Yes it “only” applies to the mainstream media, but why that's deemed to be ok, I'm really not sure.

Ok, so jurisdiction is one issue. The second is that Twitter is not responsible for what people communicate on it. Saying that they are is like saying that mobile phone networks are responsible for what people say in their phone calls. It is nonsense.

Next Hillgrove tries to offset the idea of Freedom of Speech with Privacy. I'm sorry, but the two are not polar opposites and trying to claim that they are is simple scaremongering. This is not an invasion of Ryan Giggs privacy. He is trying to suppress people's voices because he doesn't like what they are saying. Twitter (and whoever first published his name) have not invaded his privacy. His “privacy” was broken by Imogen Thomas, not Twitter. Twitter was just the mechanism for broadcasting this information.

I actually laughed out loud at Hillgrove's next statement - “unless we want an anarchistic society, Facebook and Twitter must be reeled in”. Is he serious? I'm beginning to wonder if this is a comedy piece. Or maybe just trolling for angry comments. Yes, unless we suspend Free Speech, we'll descend into anarchy. It's obvious. Ahem.

Then he wants all comments on Twitter to be time-delayed to allow for “checking”? By whom? Honestly? Maybe we should all employ censors to walk around with us and “check” what we intend to say before we say it? And who gets to decide what can and can't be broadcast? Honestly, this article just gets more and more farcical by the minute.

At this point I'd given up. When I re-read the piece this morning I saw the final paragraph. “We have to get some sort of international arbitration set-up”. Yep, Richard Hillgrove can chair it. Colonel Gaddafi and Kim Jong-Il can be the other members of the first council as they are pioneers in this kind of suppression. We can definitely make use of their expertise (although whether they have a view on Ryan Giggs' extra-marital activities remains to be seen).

Assessing personal qualities in reviews - a good thing?

In my former life I worked for IBM (I'm supposed to go back eventually, so I probably shouldn't use the past tense here....). We have the sort of labour-intensive, rigorous review system beloved by giant corporations. I thought I had seen everything I was ever likely to see in terms of review criteria.

Then I got to India. My organisation is a small NGO. They showed me their previous attempt at a performance evaluation system. I checked my diary, when was April 1st again? Some of the categories I didn't even really understand, let alone comprehend how a score of 1-10 could be applied to them ("transparency" anyone? How about "money mis-management"? - You only steal from the cookie jar - 3; you're using company funds to drain your moat - 10). Others were down-right bizarre - "Reads newspapers"!!!

Even better, there were none that actually applied to someone having done a good job. They were all personal qualities. Timeliness, good manners, respectfulness. Turn up to work, be a good person, don't offend anyone, get a good review!

Cynicism aside, I was intrigued. I spoke to my organisation's founders. They expressed the view that their employees were not "professionals" and so they felt it was unfair to assess them against those kind of attributes. They felt the attributes they used instead were ones where people could succeed and that this was more important.

It's an interesting idea - fit the evaluation to the skills of your employees. Of course, it completely misses the point of performance evaluation - to help the employee to develop. That has to be the number one priority. To help identify the things they are doing well and build on those, whilst identifying areas for improvements and discussing strategies for progressing them.

We've ended up compromising on the final evaluation. There is a lot more focus on development needs and actually assessing performance (I don't subscribe to the idea that NGOs can't be performance-focussed), while we have retained some of the personal attribute assessments. I personally hope to show them that these items should simply become part of a person's overall review, not specifically detailed as areas for assessment, but we'll see how it goes.

I think it's an interesting idea though - how much should personal qualities be included in reviews. Can you possibly leave them out? Is this just an attempt to quantify what those personal qualities are? Interested to know peoples thoughts - get involved....

Forget templates and schedules - understanding is the key

I'm out here in India with a very small charity. The founders have a bit of background in large corporates (or large charity organisations, which can basically be seen to operate in a similar way) but the majority of the rest of their staff have no such background. They all have training in social development, but that's it. The problem is that they're being asked to be project managers.

Project Management is a skill. It's not something that comes naturally to everyone (some would probably say anyone!). You need training and experience. I'm not claiming to be the perfect project manager by the way, far from it, but I've learnt a lot from some very good people over the years.

So where do you start when you are literally beginning from scratch. These people are already running projects, they are (nominally) planning, creating status reports and budgets - but it's all so ad-hoc and disorganised that most of it appears fairly worthless. It's a house of cards, all four corners are shaking and you've got to pick one to strengthen first!

The approach I'm taking is to not ask them to change anything. Yet. I want to get them starting to think like project managers a bit more. We're starting regular review meetings with each Project Co-ordinator to discuss the state of the project. These meetings will be asking them the sort of questions I would expect to see answered by default in status reports, project plans etc. "Are you on track to finish in time?", "What issues are you facing at the moment?", "What is your plan for next month?", "What is the reason for this difference in the budget?". The problem is that at the moment they don't see the benefit in answering those questions, so there is no thought given to them at all. These artefacts are produced because they have to, not because they are seen as useful.

You need to understand why you're performing a task before you can commit to it. Asking someone to produce a report in another template, or update their budget more regularly doesn't achieve anything if they don't know why they're being asked to do it.So that's what we're focussing on first - understanding the why. We'll get to the how and the what later.

Doing the right thing vs. doing what's required

I'm stuck in a bit of a strange position at the moment. My organisation are required to submit regular reports to funding organisations - and I don't think they're even close to up to scratch! If a junior PM submitted one of them to me for a programme I was running, I'd read the riot act!

Basically, it's simply a rehash of the project schedule (I said I'd do this, I did this)....and nothing else. No analysis of results, no qualitative review of the situation - pure stats. And the wrong stats at that. I remember reviewing one of these "reports" back in December and thinking - really? I'm sure this is going to get sent back with a load of questions. Apparently not....

And this brings us to my problem. I know it's wrong. We need to be able to do proper reporting, by which I mean we need to be able to measure our impact through the projects. At the moment, we can't do that - not even close. But (and it's a big but.....) the funding organisations don't seem to care. We say we're going to hold "12 sensitisation meetings" this month, we hold 12 meetings and they say "OK! Good! Well done! Carry on....."

I think I can change the behaviour here - it's a big challenge, but I'm up for it. At the same time, there are plenty of other challenges to be faced. I'm only one person and I've only got 9 months to make the maximum impact I can.

What's a volunteer to do? Answers on a postcard to the usual address.....


P.s. please don't send answers on postcards - none of the 3 letters I've been sent so far have actually turned up, so you'd waste the cost of a stamp. And a postcard.

Intellectual Capital – Use it or lose it

What makes an organisation valuable? In the world of consultancy it's the people it employs. Very little distinguishes one organisation from another. They all have access to the same systems, processes and resources. What enables one organisation to outbid the other is the people behind a bid. What makes one project succeed where another fails is the people.

Ok, that's pretty obvious. But what makes the big companies so powerful is the way they harness that. At IBM I have access to a huge back-catalogue of experience on Complex Systems Integration projects. That gives me a massive starting advantage when I come to work on a project.

Younger and smaller companies aren't always so good at this. The charity I'm working with at the moment has absolutely no processes to harness this at all. They have more pressing issues to resolve first, but further down the line it's something they can look to address.

What surprises me more is the lack of some system for storing the knowledge of all the volunteers in the country. There are hundreds of thousands of man-hours that is going missing here.

Let me put this into context. I'm here as an IT consultant. That's my primary role, but I'm already getting into general project management consultancy, that's fine as my role in IBM had progressed down that route. I'm pretty comfortable with the work I'm being asked to do there.

But I'm also being asked to think about putting a HR manual together. And help with writing funding requests. Now I'm out of my comfort zone. I have zero experience here. Now, I'm not completely incompetent, so I reckon I could come up with something that's not completely terrible here. It might even be better than something Srijan would have come up with on their own, but there's no guarantee.

However, I know for a fact that at the moment in India there are people with a huge range of experience in these matters. HR Consultants, people with a background in NGOs and raising funding. BUT I CAN'T FIND THEM. There is no official system for me to make contact with my fellow volunteers and get their advice. There's nowhere for me to upload my new IT strategy document, get people's thoughts on it, or download a sample HR document myself.

Every single volunteer out here is re-inventing the wheel on every single project. And that's a sad state of affairs. Luckily, the volunteers recognise this themselves. There was a Google Group set-up, which unfortunately Google is now phasing out, so I've created a Google Sites repository. It will have a document store, discussion board, contact list and useful links list. The sad thing is that this isn't provided for us. It's also country specific – I have no idea if the volunteers in the other countries have something they can use.

What does your company do about storing and, more importantly, making accessible it's intellectual capital? Can you easily get to the thoughts and deliverables of your companies top people? If not, you're probably letting a huge asset slip through your fingers and you aren't even aware of it....

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I've just had probably the most depressing experience of my time in India. It's really upset me and I just need to get my thoughts out there. I'm cross-posting this as it applies to both my VSO work and my professional life.

The social development sector is growing. There is a definite move to a “more professional” way of working, with knowledge and skills from the private sector coming over the fence all the time. I'm a pretty obvious example of that. I'm trying to instil better project management and MIS processes into a tiny Indian NGO!

I think most of the time this can be seen as a good thing. Better rigour and transparency in these organisations should lead to benefits further down the line. Unfortunately not everything from the corporate sector is necessarily worth bringing across, and sometimes it is absolutely the wrong thing to do.

I met a man today, he works for another NGO. They appear to be very professional and passionate about the work they do (I won't be naming them, obviously). He wanted to talk to me about my background, then suddenly he asks me about Intellectual Capital. Now, first of all, my views on this are not mainstream. I recognise this. But one of the things he said I just flat out had to disagree with....he said “we have to protect our IC (intellectual capital).”

Sit back and think about this for a moment. This is a organisation who's vision statement (according to his business card) stands for “hope, tolerance and social justice” and over-coming poverty. He's talking about using intellectual property to prevent other organisations from using his ideas. Other organisations, i.e. competitors = other Not-For-Profit organisations. Other aid agencies. Other NGOs.

Now maybe I'm being a bit idealistic here, but I want my NGO to work with others. If they have a good idea, I want them to share it with as many people as possible. Not to do an Apple or a Sony and try to build a closed eco-system where no-one else has access to the market. First of all, I hate the idea of using IC to protect a business model in the first place. MySpace vs. Facebook shows you all you need to know about idea vs. implementation. But surely that principle goes completely out of the window in the development sector?

If I (as an NGO) come up with a great way of improving people's lives in India, surely I want as many organisations to know and to copy it all over India as possible? I don't want to patent the idea and force everyone to pay me for the idea or not use it at all! Surely that defeats the entire point of a development agency – we're working for the people we're trying to save, not the profits of shareholders!

I'm going to have to go to lunch with this man in 10 minutes. I just hope that I can get through the meal without offending him – he's from the funding agency of one of our projects! Hopefully he doesn't say anything ridiculous again – otherwise I'm in trouble!

The Importance of Strategy

Why do we do anything? Generally we've got an end result in mind. It's pretty unusual to do something just for the sake of it, right? Well, that's what I thought before I got here!

The organisation I work for have some really talented individuals. They're passionate about their raison d'etre and they know what they're doing once they get out there into the field. So why am I here? Well, let's just say that planning isn't exactly their speciality!

I was quite shocked at first, but after thinking about it, I can understand how they've gotten to this situation. The organisation is young – 10 years old. They've built themselves up fairly quickly to be running a number of projects at the same time, spread across the state of Jharkhand. As with most organisations, in their early days they will not have been picky about projects – in fact it has probably been a bit of “take whatever you can get”.

Now, some people are probably questioning that approach already. Well, in the UK I'd agree, it can be a dangerous tactic and lead to your organisation taking a direction you don't want. However, in India I can completely understand it. These people left relatively high-paid jobs to start an NGO, they had families and the organisation was created by a group of friends – none of them could afford it to fail. If funding was available, that equated to dinner on the table – not something to be turned down.

Today, it's a different story. The organisation is generally well-funded, certainly compared to its peers. Which leads me (in a rambling way) to my point. Strategy. They don't have one. They're still grabbing at any potential funding they hear about, with little regard to whether it really fits with what they want.

Case in point. An industrial company is running a project locally. They want to do their CSR bit and put out an EOI for bids on a project to promote literacy in the area. Now they want to cut the budget by 80% and the aim is now to enable people to sign their name, not be able to read/write. My opinion – this is a worthless exercise, it's a waste of our time and won't achieve anything sustainable or useful. It's now a small amount of funding and doesn't fit into any sort of long-term strategy for Srijan. In fact, it would probably harm our “brand” to be associated with this project. I'm recommending against the project.

This thought never occurred to them. They were looking at how they could cut costs to meet the new budget. 100% coverage was dropping to 40%. The “educators” were being replaced with cheaper alternatives. Teaching people how to read was being replaced with giving them cards with their name on to learn to copy. My organisation were compromising their principles simply to get some funding that they probably didn't even need.

This is the danger of not having a strategy. You lose track of what you're aiming to do. When you're putting together a proposal you need to ask yourself “does this fit to my strategy?” - if the answer isn't a resounding “Yes!” then this project probably isn't the right thing for your organisation.

Twitter and Trotsky (or why Stalin would have hated the Internet....)

I'm reading a book at the moment that I've been planning to read for a long time – The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver. I don't think I even realised what it was about, but it's just one that I've seen in the shops again and again and thought that I'd enjoy. So when I got some Amazon vouchers for the Kindle, it seemed like an obvious choice!

Anyway, it's a good book so far (get it from Amazon here if you're interested!), documenting the journals of a young boy growing up in Mexico who, through a series of events, ends up working for the group of people who shelter Trotsky in the late 1930's after he is expelled from the Soviet Union.

I studied history at GCSE and A-Level, but the Russian history that we examined tended to look more at Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev than Trotsky. I think there was a reference to him moving to Mexico for a while, before he's ultimately murdered (with a pick-axe if my memory serves me). Obviously I haven't reached that bit in The Lacuna yet ;-)

But what does this have to do with Twitter, I hear you ask? Well, in the section of the story I've just been reading, Trotsky is put on trial in Mexico. Up until this point, the dictatorship in Moscow has been able to fabricate charges and falsely accuse Trotsky of all kinds of crimes, most of them blatantly false (e.g. de-railing trains when he wasn't even in the country). It made me think – could that happen now?

We've just seen the power of Twitter with the Egyptian protests. Suppression of the press may still be possible, but it's now incredibly hard to a create a total blanket on information getting out of a country. Even turning off the Internet didn't help the Egyptian authorities. I firmly believe that this can only be a positive thing.

Here's a statistic for you - In India, 11% of people do not have an indoor toilet, but over 85% have access to a mobile phone. I imagine that figure is pretty representative of a number of other developing countries too – I remember even 5 years ago in Ghana this was the case. This prevalence of access to communications makes it so much easier to get information out of and around a country. All of which makes the suppression of “the press” so much harder. You can't just pay off a couple of people now – someone, somewhere, will call you out on it.

Zola (not the former Chelsea and Italy footballer...) “said that the mendacity of the press could be divided into two groups: the yellow press lies every day without hesitating. But others speak the truth on all inconsequential occasions, so they can deceive the public with the requisite authority when it becomes necessary.” - The Lacuna

I don't think in today's age of information freedom that this is anywhere near as true. Wikileaks, twitter, information finds a way to get out into the public domain and once it is there, no-one can stop it.

That can only be a good thing. Unless you're someone like Stalin....