Here in Washington, DC, two blocks from the White House, Day 2 of Revolutionizing the World of Work commences (twitter #RevWork).
Today’s event is a natural outgrowth of the annual Smithsonian event on Organizational Storytelling, led for the last 10 years by global thought leader on leadership, Steve Denning. After a decade of annual conferences, the vision has expanded beyond story to the transformation of work in the 21st century.
Denning & I organized this year’s event, assisted by five practice partners: Madelyn Blair, Rod Collins, Michelle James, Deb Mills-Scofield , and Peter Stevens. (see yesterday’s article).
Today started with participants using Planning Poker to design their own agenda. Denning placed options on the wall including those identified by participants, and the group voted on the topics. The purpose of the execise was to provide relevant tools while practicing participatory design, one of the key elements of the new work world.
The first session, led by Rod Collins (twitter @collinsrod), asked the group to design three different management architectures that would each support innovation and collaboration – hallmarks of the new paradigm. The designs were evaluated in plenary, common elements were identified, and the results compared to the management architecture of Gore, makers of GORE-TEX®, and featured in Collins’ book, Leadership in a Wiki World: Leveraging Collective Intelligence to Make the Leap to Extraordinary Performance.
Deb Mills-Scofield (@dscofield) shared her story from early days at Bell Lab where she received a patent for what became one of their top revenue-generating services and was instrumental in creating AT&T’s entrance into the Internet and E-commerce marketplace, AT&T WorldNet® Services.
During lunch, Denning (@stevedenning) reviewed the power of his technique, springboard storytelling, to spark change. Details can be found in his book, The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations.