Ward Shelley: Hand- Painted Visualizations (via Brain Pickings)

How to visualize complex information has always been difficult - and today, with ever more information, it gets harder and harder. Given that communication is a critical skill (and asset) of leaders, this work seems to me be helpful and indeed at the leading edge.

Ward Shelley (who I discovered through Brain Pickings) is a leading exponent of how to visualize the complex. He works over time (Who invented the Avant-Garde, The influences and impact of Frank Zappa, The story of the Beat Poets etc).

It is far more than sketchy mind mapping - it is art in its own right, and has levels of detail which are both informative and astounding.

To quote Ward:

"It is the mutually formative effects of subject/mind and object/world that gives shape to the space that exists between them. These paintings are a record of this shaping process. They are about the struggle of form to express content in the cognitive space that exists between the Subject (us) and the Object (the world). If that cognitive space is a territory, these paintings are landscapes of that territory." 

Here's a painting that tracks "Who invented the Avant-Garde ...

 

 

Please fully respect the copyright of Ward's work - I only post it here to help other people discover.

Posted via web from mick's posterous

Turn off and tune in

From Jackie Cameron's blog ....

"I read this post over at the All Things Workplace blog written by my good friend Steve Roesler on the theme of taking time to notice . He includes a video of Daniel Goleman talking about compassion and connecting with other people. The video is well worth the 14 minutes time out of your busy day that it would take to watch.

As is so often the case when I read a post that touches me I take a while to mull it over and reflect. I also mindmap when I am listening to a speaker if I want to capture important comments and quotes and I noticed in the map of Goleman’s talk I had written down

“Turn off - and tune in…to the other person”

Why..well here’s my thoughts for what they are worth

So many of us are wired to our technology - either really with the white i-pod earphones or by some Pavlovian reaction to the ping from a text or e-mail arriving. I travel by bus a lot and regularly see people paying their fares as they board without removing the earphones - therefore ensuring they have no connection with the driver. I also noticed a woman conduct a conversation on her mobile phone whilst loading up her grocery shopping onto the conveyor belt, packing the bag and paying - never once connecting with the checkout guy. How hard would it be to turn off and tune in for just a few moments?

And I always feel slightly put out when I am with someone who dives to read a text or take a call. They may be waiting for something important and I am absolutely fine if that if I know up front but when a conversation is interrupted so that one party can check what has arrived it breaks the flow - the thread of the conversation itself and the rapport that the parties have built up. The body language changes and the connection is lost. …and I can’t help feeling that my companion would rather be somewhere else."

Read the rest of Jackie's post ...

Bosses 'should embrace Facebook'

From the BBC website ....

Companies should not dismiss staff who use social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo at work as merely time-wasters, a Demos study suggests.

Attempts to control employees' use of such software could damage firms in the long run by limiting the way staff communicate, the think tank said.

Social networking can encourage employees to build relationships with colleagues across a firm, it added.

However, businesses are warned to be strict with those who abuse access.

'Intuitive interaction'

Firms are increasingly using networking software to share documents and collaborate in ideas, the research found.

And while more work-specific systems, such as LinkedIn or bespoke in-house software tended to be used for work matters, the likes of Facebook, Bebo and MySpace still had a place.

Read the rest of the article ...

You Can Still Lie, Even Without Saying A Word

From the Slow Leadership blog ...

Authentic communication, the cornerstone of all trusting relationships, requires far more than speaking the truth.

Amidst all the articles and advice on being authentic, one area that isn’t looked at as often as it should be is how communication that isn’t authentic destroys trust. I don’t just mean lying — deliberately setting out to mislead or twist the facts. Communication can be just as inauthentic when every word and sentence is correct (factually at least), yet the overall impression left with the other person is derived from a false image of who you are, what you believe and where you are coming from.

In the words of the old song: “It’s not what you say, it’s the way that you say it.” The words you use, the tone of voice, the circumstances in which the ‘message’ is passed — even your facial expressions and body language — can all be used to create a false picture in the other person’s mind; one that will give your words a different meaning from their face value. When this happens, your hearers (or readers) are as thoroughly mislead as they would be if every word of what you said or wrote were untrue.

We are surrounded by people who deliberately use words in ways that conceal their true meaning. They add a gloss that changes the message, conceals a hidden agenda, or is designed to evoke specific emotions. All the time, they are calculating what will make what they say convey something other than the plain words express.

Advertisers, copywriters, PR people, spokespeople for special interests, lawyers, politicians: all are adept at using their words to conceal and manipulate. The authenticity of their communication is low because they are striving to create a specific impact, without revealing anything of themselves or what they truly believe. They show little, if any, empathy for those they are dealing with either. They care next to nothing about them, just so long as they react as required and buy, vote or believe in whatever way they are being told to do.

Once people understand what has been going on, they feel cheated and abused — even if the message passed was factually correct. These people — The Manipulators — cannot be trusted because they always have hidden agendas.

Read the rest of the article ....

Interesting sessions on the future of life and the Net

From Jerry Michalski's Sociate blog ... interesting to think about how mass communication is about the approaches we take to it rather than the "segments" of people we are trying to reach.

"I’m at the Stanford Legal Futures Conference, which today adopted a FOO Camp approach that, in truth, isn’t that FOOish. Last night they posted the schedule, which has multiple panels with five or six smart people on each. OK.

But that doesn’t mean the sessions aren’t full of great stuff.

One small snippet: Jay Rosen quoted Raymond Williams saying “There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses.” Then he proceeded to draw a distinction between inferring consumer behavior and following people’s actions, where action is what people do when they exercise their freedom.

It’ll take me a while to digest this, but it gives me a useful way to explain a trend I’m seeing, which is the slow death of traditional market segment analysis and the inference of behaviors in order to run marketing campaigns.

What replaces it? Good listening, fast following, smart adaptation. Segments vanish because their assumptions break all the time. Micro-niches emerge as people from different segments act in similar ways. Some grow really large; most stay small."

Mick's response?

Jerry - nice quote from Raymond Williams. In my experience, the “marketer’s trick” is to use the understanding of behaviors to create manageable segements. The aim is to create some form of critical mass of understanding to take action on.

Micro-niches are interesting but not very useful to act upon. Traditional socio-economic segmentations are virtually useless. Actual behaviors (”you are what you buy”) are more useful.