After four trips to the land of the morning calm, I finally started to get a feeling for how we should adapt the LIFT concept to this continent. I must admit I was getting a bit nervous and felt like the LIFT Asia project was not moving much. The main reason is that it is extremely hard to get feedback from the locals on the different questions I had. Can we do a three days conference here? Can people convince their boss to pay for the ticket? Can we hold open sessions managed by the communities? Will Asians travel to attend a conference?

^{My pictures of Seoul and Korea are on Flickr.}

I had - and still have - tons of questions I needed to find out about, but the local culture - which basically consists in never contradicting anyone - did not make my life easy and forced me to reformulate every question. The only way to get a true answer is to allow from the start the possibility of a diplomatic no.

For example, three days ago I visited the Raemian gallery to see a housing of the future exhibition created by Samsung and Microsoft. My friend Jean Morin was driving, and when we approached the gallery we quickly called our host to inquire about parking possibilities. We asked if we could leave the car in front of the building (because both of us are lazy and French). The answer was “yes of course no problem, but maybe the Police will take the car. The other solution is to use the parking lot further down the road”. Very elegant way of avoiding a negative answer.

So it takes time to get a strong intuition about anything in this country because relations are very subtle and different from the loud and clear feedback we get in Europe. Four 20′000km trips later, I finally have a strong feeling for what LIFT should be here. We will not replicate the Swiss event, but use the lessons learned over the past three editions to grow the Asian project.

We will start slow, with a two days conference featuring simple social events (i.e. fondue might be for next year), reduced community activities (I am thinking about keeping only open stage and discussions) and boasting a clear, interesting and easy-to-sell-to-your-boss theme. We will rely on strong local partners for all logistical, editorial and financial aspects. This should allow us to work around the various constraints we have (LIFT brand not yet known, lower salaries, less participatory culture, etc) and achieve our main goal: give lifters access to all the innovation and trends that are flourishing all around Asia. I got a demo of Naver (Korea’s leading portal) a few days ago, and it looked like Yahoo in 5 years, both from a service design and business model perspective. There are tons of ideas to be exchanged between Asia and the rest of the world, and this is what we’ll do.

Further data on email interpretation (see previous post here).

Link (via Alceste)

It would be interesting to compare with face to face conversation.

I am heading to Seoul and Jeju Island for ten day to work on LIFT Asia. The BBC reports a tensed political situation but I hope it will be business as usual out there. This trip should be an occasion to try to pass level three in local food tasting. After octopus sashimi and rotten fish I was promised there was something even more… original waiting me for. Keep an eye on my YouTube account ;)

^{Taking off from Seoul Incheon airport}

If you are around Seoul send me an email! My phone works when I am at my hotel so sms if also fine.

I have been interviewed by Germany based think tank Trendbuero - organizers of the Trend Days - on digital identity, social advertising and privacy. I hope this time my concept of tupperware economy will be picked up by bloggers ;) I think it’s a nicely ironic summary of what Facebook and the other social networks are trying to achieve. Technology takes us back to the basics almost all the time. Different means, same results.

[…] Identity is increasingly becoming digital, and is therefore managed not only by ourselves but also by others. Are we losing control of who we are?

I am not sure we lost more control. I wonder if it is not simply that we now have more feedback than before. Take a village a 100 years ago. Everybody had an opinion on everybody. One could go to a person in the street and ask “what do you think about him or her?” and get tons of information. Before new technologies, we had very little possibility to know what others were thinking about us. Now we have Facebook compare, hot or not, comments, ratings, we suddenly feel like we are losing control. I wonder if it isn’t simply an old process that has scaled to the global level. And that’s why it suddenly looks out of control.

Link (german version here)

Running notes from the recent Dave Gray workshop at Arvetica.

Dave Gray, founder of Xplane, gave a great workshop on how to use visual techniques to organize ideas and share them more effectively with others. Here are my notes:

• Drawing allows to agree more easily on things and is a more effective way to present and share ideas. Pictures allow to communicate with short term memory via the visuospatial sketchpad, and to reach long term memory.
• A picture is worth 84.1 words ;) which is not bad even if it is below what conventional wisdom teaches us.
• Every 5 years old can draw. We have all been 5 years old. We can all draw ;) and it proved right for
• With a basic set of shapes one can draw everything. It is a sort of visual alphabet (line, arc, circle, square, angle, etc…) that can be combined to draw anything. Dave offers a few tricks, like the fact that we tend to draw large heads and small bodies while the opposite makes it more simple to show attitudes.
• Now to the core of the process Xplane works with:
  
  Clarity leads to Understanding, which leads to Decisions that turn into Actions who produce a result. Dave advocates a process that allows to work on all the steps of this process and produce better results. The idea is to start from the end and work back to finally create 5 or 6 drawings which will create clarity, and all the steps afterwards.
• Results
  What are the expected results? For example: convince my boss our team needs a new office. That’s the easy part.
• Actions & Decisions
  The goal of this step is to identify the actions that will have to be made to achieve the goals. To do this, Dave suggests to start identifying the “ministries of no” - i.e. those who can prevent you from achieving your result (a boss, a colleague, a client) - and list the decisions they will have to make.After that, impersonate each ministry of no and draw the following on a poster:
  
  • What is the decision that person needs to make for you?
  • What is that person thinking about what you are asking?
  • What is that person seeing? (in our example, could be “sees the Google offices pictures in Wired)
  • What is that person hearing (from peers, boss, etc…)?
  • What is that person saying

  Do this for each “ministry of no” and you will be able to come up with the most common questions, which allows to decide on which ones it is crucial to communicate.

  Once you have all the key questions, order them by topic without any pre-conceived notion of what the topics should be. Put each question on a post-it, and start organizing them in columns. Naturally you should come up with 5-6 columns, one of them very likely will be all questions related to money (”how much will it cost? why should I spend my budget on this?”). Each column is a topic you will need to address with one drawing, so you just found out how many pictures you will have to draw.

  Now we need to order the drawings. For that rely on simple story telling techniques: your drawings should follow the Situation -> Complication -> Resolution flow used in movies. In our example, “Why the team needs a new office” is the situation, “What is the new office we propose” the complication and “How we will move to the new office” the resolution.

• Understanding & Clarity
  Now is time to draw. Each of your drawing should address one of the topics identified at the previous step. Remember that metaphors are good to express emotions, literal drawings are good to illustrate processes, and schematic drawings the best way to explain logic. A mix of these types of drawings should allow you to clarify your points. Try this, it is much easier than you think.

That’s it! You just used visual thinking. This method, starting from the goal, moving up to the more complex and numerous questions to find the “meta questions” and address them via drawings is quite powerful.

I am now looking forward to Arvetica’s next workshop on may 28 on how to make powerful powerpoint presentations. I will be looking for a few tips to pass to the LIFT speakers.

The Swiss TV (probably one of the country’s most advanced organization when it comes to multimedia, and I don’t say that because they are partners of LIFT but because theirs shows are available online a few minutes after they have been aired) is launching the second edition of the Pacte Multimedia, a national contest to promote the best multimedia projects in the country. Who will succeed Mixin? Maybe you, enroll and you might win 50′000CHF to pursue your vision!

Interesting brand created by Todo (a Torino based design studio) for their “cultural avatar”, an association called Nada. The brand is consistently changing but remains recognizable.

TODO has an interesting manifesto that would make a lot of economist happy (the “we will never retire part”)

we listen
we ask questions
we research
we take risk
we make mistakes
we like busted knees
we solve problems
we are happy
we’ll never retire

Maybe it’s my lifestyle, maybe it’s bad luck, maybe it’s bad quality. Whatever it is the result is the same: 2 months after my last crash my mac went down again, losing one week of data and a day of work in the process.

I am now again faced with the decision to go with better hardware - like a ThinkPad - and realized one thing: I am locked into macs! Not only because I like the interface better, or because I think OSx is safer than XP. I am locked because I have Time Machine backups, and like iTunes files can be played only on iPods, Time Machine backups can only be restored on macs.

Buy a PC, lose all your data. Steve Jobs was - again - a step ahead of me. But now I am warned.

Here is another example of the (amazing) power of the Internet. My grandma diners idea has been found by the groovy people of Spark, a show about new technologies on Canada’s public radio. They loved the idea, called me to ask for a few tips, and now they are launching it on the other side of the pond!

The Internet is really allowing ideas to flow freely around the world, and from my seat here in Geneva I probably contributed to make a canadian grand mother happy and valued at the other side of the planet, fantastic :)

More info on the Spark blog (audio interview here).

Pecha Kucha is certainly one of the trendiest conference format of the moment. Started in 2003 by Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham, this original format (20 slides, 20 seconds per slide, no exceptions) is intended to keep “presentations concise, interest level up, and give more people the chance to show“.Pecha Kucha nights have now been organized in 107 cities around the world, and by the time you read this article the number might have increased.

Being a conference organizer, and having to regularily play with the usual parameters (length of talk, number of presenters, slides or not, questions or not, etc…), I was very eager to see one of these nights. After yesterday’s Pecha Kucha Torino here are a few observations:

• For speakers, Pecha Kucha is a reassuring format as it takes a lot of stress away. There is no risk to speak too long, you have the support of slides without much of the usual negative consequences, and expectations are not set too high as in the public’s mind, you should not expect too much from a short format.
• Constraining the number of slides is a good idea. Constraining the duration is more discussable. The speaker should be able to accelerate a particular slide (without getting any extra time for that) because 20 seconds can be an eternity when you only wanted to show an email address or a boring but needed information like a title. Yesterday at least 3 presenters waited for their slide to pass, creating a huge silence that was a catastrophe for the room’s ambiance.
• A good speaker can turn a bad format into a good time, but a good format can’t turn a bad speaker into a star. Things like charisma and intelligibility can’t be influenced by any format, and are still the most important factors of success. It is not because you are using the Pecha Kucha format that you can put anybody on stage. Event organizers, you won’t escape a little work ;)
• 6 minutes and 40 seconds can’t be considered short, and as soon as a less interesting speaker takes the stage you notice it. 3 minutes is short, and would really give more rhythm to the whole format.
• This trend of creating a soft set of rules and packaging it under a brand is quite fascinating. After barcamp, Pecha Kucha, and at home coworking, it’s time to brand and push my grandma diners (see episodes 1, 2 and 3)!