ia play

The New Year resolution to write regularly was going great but has noticeably trailed off. I’m in the midst of an exhausting time at work and everything else has suffered. Including thinking about what I’m doing.

Now I enjoy crises at work. They make it clear what the problem is and what needs to be worked on right now. But continuous frenzy doesn’t allow you to observe yourself and what you are doing.

Sometimes life is best contemplated on Sunday morning, sat on top of the rabbit hutch, enjoying coffee and sunshine whilst the chickens, rabbits and cats romp. Zazen, Loasby-style.

There’s a wonderful article in an old Business Week by Diego Rodriguez (of Ideo fame) called Happiness and the art of innovation:

“people who are led with an eye toward flow really don’t need to be “managed” at all”

“So the next time someone says, “We need a strategy to become more innovative,” respond with this question: “How can we make individuals happy in their work?”

In a pleasingly contrary post for a blogger, Tim Clark, author of The Prosperous Peasant, writes that Happiness is Turning off the Computer

“a guy in his late 50s or early 60s, decided his employees were spending too much time staring into computer screens and not enough time interacting face-to-face. He instituted a new rule: No more individual desktop PCs. Henceforth employees wanting to create files would have to get up from their stations, walk over to a special area, and complete digital tasks on shared-use computers. While at their own desks, they would work only with pencil, paper, and other analog tools—or confer with colleagues.”

Tim goes on to express his disatifaction with the Internet era:

“Heck, I really enjoyed computing in the pre-spam days, before the Internet was re-conceived as a marketing “platform” instead of a communications tool. Nevertheless, no one will be happier than me when this “digital” fad finally blows over and we can all go back to talking to each other with our voices and writing with pencils and paper like civilized people ;-)”

Whilst I understand (and agree with) some of the sentiments surely the first step in ending this digital “fad” is to stop blogging?

Froth on the Cappuccino: How Small Pleasures Can Save Your Life is essentially a yummy mummy manifesto, complete with pink ribbon. At times it is inescapably middle-class and insular; small pleasures listed include wearing cashmere, spa days, champagne, pashminas, and fresh pesto. According to Maeve, Spas are no longer ‘prerogative of the very rich’ but are ‘a possibility for most of us’.

I felt particularly out of sorts reading the section on ‘wearing cheap jewellery’ as I had this uneasy suspicion that Maeve’s idea of cheap jewellery might encompass the most expensive things I own. Cheap to me is Claire’s accessories, for Maeve it is asking a little shop in Paris to make her a custom glass tiara.

In the midst of this sweetly but rather obliviously privileged view of ’small’ pleasures there are a host of concepts that can speak to a much wider audience:

• doing something you’ve been putting off
• making satisfying economies
• being met from a journey
• tasks with an echo of the past
• listing 3 good things
• seeing life as a web not a ladder

What is surprising is how invisible work is in this book. Maeve is apparently a ex-TV producer, novelist, and journalist. Her biog says “her hobby is trying to balance work, motherhood and having a good time” but from reading this book you might get the impression that she gets no pleasures at all from her work.

Even when the named pleasure could apply to work, almost invariably the description ties it to a family or domestic situation. ‘Using the five minutes’ is illustrated with examples of the housework that can be done whilst boiling the kettle and the chores that can be combined with the school run. Perhaps work is a world of only big pleasures, or of none at all.

I’ve been reading A List Apart’s Web Design Survey. Only 1.9% of the responses were from information architects but since there were 32831 responses that means around 600 information architects. In contrast the IA Institute’s 2006 salary survey had 319 responses so 600 is a decent number of IAs.

The survey found:

• 16.5% of IAs earn $100,000+, a higher percentage than any other job title
• IAs were the 2nd most satisfied with their job (following project managers!)
• there was a higher percentage of female IAs than either designers or developers
• around 40% of IAs believe they need CSS & mark-up skills that they don’t have
• IAs were less likely than most of the job titles to have a blog or website and yet 69.4% did

More generally on the topic of satisfaction:

• women were more satisfied with their jobs
• job satisfaction increased with age
• satisfaction peaked with salaries around $40000-59999 and then declined
• employees of non-profits companies were less satisfied than for-profit, agencies, government or universities

The BBC’s Innovation Labs are back on. This year’s Labs are aimed at “independent new media & vision companies in … Scotland, North East England, North West England and Wales & West Midlands”.

The labs provide

• Participation in an intensive creative workshop with peers and expert mentors
• An opportunity to pitch a project to BBC New Media commissioners
• Access to business advice, mentoring and development finance from other sources
• Retention of any IP that they develop
• A £5,000 fee for each of the selected teams

We’ve been trying to come up with a new org structure for our website and every plan we’ve come up with so far has included categories that on closer reflection turn out to just be miscellaneous categories re-branded.

Alongside the meaningful stuff like ‘programmes’ and ‘news’ we’ve got ‘about’ which is just a bucket for corporate information and other pages we have to have on the site but the audience isn’t necessarily looking for. At the moment we’ve also got ‘innovation’ which is a bucket of new stuff that doesn’t fit in the current org structure. And then there is ‘products’ which wouldn’t necessarily be a miscellaneous category for another organisation but for us it means things we make that aren’t TV or Radio programmes.

Might need to have a re-think.

Apparently in Germany there is a job title Direktor Grundsatzfragen that translates as “Director of
Fundamental Questions”. If challenged I imagine most organisations would claim to have someone who is considering the questions fundamental to their business - strategists , executives and the like. But for most of these roles the focus is different. After all strategists are primarily being paid to come up with good answers/strategies.

A job where you just focus on working out what the question should be? That’s a new one to try and get on the org chart.

The title of this post is a bit of cheat as it isn’t really work. I’ve been involved in a BBC scheme called ‘Connect & Create’ which aims to join up community projects with BBC staff who have expertise that might help the charities. I’ve been involved in two ways so far.

Firstly in a Media Matching event which was a bit like speed dating for charities. It was evening event that 8 charities and 8 varied members of BBC staff attended and each pairing had 5 minutes to chat and see if there was a way we could work together.

The second project is about releasing members of my team to help the National Trust over a longer period of time. I’m trying to set this up this week.

The things I like about C&C so far:

* reminds you how much you know and how valuable that knowledge can be to others

* gives you the chance to engage in projects that are often simpler and shorter than the complex infrastructure projects I normally end involved with at work

* creates an opportunity to learn or refresh skills that it might be hard for you to do at work

* helps you learn from the charities about the members of the public they work with, either through the charity or directly

Maps encourage boldness. They’re like cryptic love letters. They make anything seem possible.
Mark Jenkins, “To Timbuktu”

Even with the best of maps and instruments, we can never fully chart our journeys.
Gail Pool

So… what does a sitemap have to be like to transform the way people travel the site?