(n.b. – these are all people I’ve met at, or via, the Event)

The Backstory

The backstory of all this is, I got given a pair of tickets to Burning Man this year. This became a very valuable gift very suddenly as tickets, for the first time ever, sold out. Most of the people I knew either had their tickets or knew that they should have taken care of it early-like.

So I decided to give them away, posting on my blog (and twittering it out to the world), sending emails out to the Playadust & London’s Burning lists, and posting on my Evil Social network profile. I think that the twit-posting also probably went out to my SchnooglePlus and SchnoogleBuzz and some other places of lower relevance.

The Response

In about a week, I got 20 responses, ranging from “I’ve not got a good reason but really want to go”, to deeply personal and moving stories of their time on the playa, to a desire to share with other friends. I even had several people apply on behalf of other folk in their camp who they knew wouldn’t ask but could really use the help.

So then I had a pretty unenviable choice. I’m not going to name names here, but what I thought I’d use as (completely arbitrary, but hey, they’re my tickets) criteria were:

• How much of an impact would my ticket make to the Cool Thing?
• How much of an impact would their Cool Thing make?
• Was it going to multiply the experience – either making it deeper or reach a wide range of people?

The Winners

The 2 people who get my gift tickets are:

-          A pilot, who’s going to work with the Temple team and give airplane rides. The Temple team had apparently gotten an airplane, but no pilot. Flying around Burning Man has always been a dream of mine—I won’t get to, but someone will (note: I do hope that they get BMFlight virgins)

-          Someone who is going to use the cash saved to cook an EXTRA 500 meals for the early-arriving hardworking artists who build their stuff out there on-Playa. I’ve been out early, and some of these guys are here for a month ahead of time. A hot meal at the end of the day? Beats a Tasty Bite any day.

Congrats to the 2 winners. I wish I had another fair few tickets to give away. Best of luck to everyone going (or trying to get tickets).

Participate. Leave no trace. Be nice. Give people stuff.

On Purpose is run by a very clever group of people, and they help people migrate into the Social Enterprise space. I wish this programme had existed for me 5 years ago, as I’d have jumped on the chance (not that I wish I did things differently!)

They’ve just opened applications for their 12 month intensive programme that helps high-calibre professionals kick-start a career in social enterprise. You get two paid 6-month social enterprise placements, coupled to intensive 1:1 support and world-class training provided by professionals from organisations such as McKinsey, Bain, IDEO, the Big Issue, UnLtd and Venturesome.

They are looking for professionals with a track record of achievement and two or more years’ work experience. To apply, please go fill in our online application form that you can access here.

Questions? Ask on Facebook

Deets:

Application deadline: Wednesday 24 August 2011

Salary: £20,000 pro rata

Start date: mid January (if specific date necessary, use 16 January) 2012

End date:  December 2012

Full time

Contact email: recruitment@onpurpose.uk.com

Interview dates: (first round): first 2 weeks of September

The People Speak bring out “Who wants to be?”

The lovely people behind Social Innovation Camp’s excellent videos (2 3 4) run their own programmes. The People Speak bring as many people as possible into a theatre who pay £5.00 each (the new recession friendly price!) They then spend the evening deciding and voting on how to spend the entire box office takings as a collective. At the last few games, audience members have proposed to gamble the money online, commission a democracy bench for an East London park and to turf the streets of Cardiff.

The audience is in control of the game – they can vote on to spend the money, change the rules of the game and even sack the host.  Please find attached our press release for further information.  You can also see a previous game in action here: http://vimeo.com/4074853

Details:

Who Wants to Be?

Part of Adhocracy, 6 August 2011, 8:00 – 10:00pm

Bar  area, Rich Mix, 35 – 47 Bethnal Green Road, London, E1 6LA

Admission: £5.00

Tickets: http://adhocracy.info/booktickets

More info: http://www.whowantstobe.co.uk

Yep, I’ve still been kind of crazy busy.

What have I been doing? Managing & running Social Innovation Camp in Edinburgh and helping build teams to develop these six ideas.

All the ideas seem to be moving forward—but I’ll have more details about that in a couple of weeks. There are a few that I think will really help out people.

I also made a visit out to San Francisco and New York, and didn’t get to see enough of you, despite trying to drink all the American microbrews that exist.

Burning Man ticket

I have 2 tickets to this year’s Burn that were given to me. I’m going to give them away. Why? ‘cos you’re going to do something extra-cool on the Playa this year. What are you going to do? You tell me. Coolest thing gets the ticket. In a pair or individually.

(n.b. – “I’ll get to go ‘cos I can’t afford it otherwise” doesn’t count.)

Email glen_mehn@yahoo.com with what cool-arse thing you’re gonna do.

That’s all for now.

Launch a site based on search, keywords, and no banner ads.

OK, sure, zag when they zig
The thing is, you might go for it. Get off your lazy bum and stop scribbling on beer mats and start up your company. Optimism is what you need. Frameworks. Business models. Adaptability. Entrepreneurial mindset. Zagging vs. zigging. Optimism.

Optimism is great, critical, important. But it’s not just what you need.

Healthy skepticism
This is your ability to look at yourself, your business, your product, with the outside perspective of the skeptic, and see it clearly. Then to turn to the market and proceed with healthy optimism. It’s the difference between blind faith and reasonable optimism. Cultivate it. Then proceed forward as though you’ve already succeeded.

Current status: I’ve stopped consulting… and have a job
I’ve been working the past few months with the lovely and talented team at Social Innovation Camp around growing the business that they’ve started and bootstrapped over the past three years. A few things we’ve worked on together have come together, so I’m joining as a full-time member of the team.

Which is, actually, pretty bloody awesome. What’s SICamp? It is:

A Launchpad for tech-based social ventures

An accellerator for tech-based social ventures which are sligthly further along

An innovation consultancy around technology and innovation for the social enterprise, public, and third sector

A trainer and enabler of global launchpads & accellerators

This is pretty much what I’d do if I had £20M in the bank and didn’t have to work. So that’s not so bad.

Cross-posting with SICamp stuff
I’ll be writing, hopefully much more often, for SICamp’s blog and most likely cross-posting here, on things like entrepreneurship, social enterprise, innovation, and musings and findings of each. I look forward to getting back into the swing of writing again… In fact, I feel a musing coming on.

(Sorry for being not around—I’ve been very busy with several interesting—but unfortunately confidential—projects. I can say, though, that I’ve been investigating strategies for exploring new business opportunities in developing countries rather a lot)

Those of you who know me know me on my bike. I’ve had nice ones, crappy ones, and funky ones. It’s my default mode of transportation, particularly if you have nice employers who provide a shower and/or a locker for your suits (or who put up with you be hot & sweaty in the morning).

Sure, I get wet sometimes. I get sweaty. Sometimes I get shouted at, occasionally I have to cycle home after dark without lights (if I’ve forgotten mine) but overall it’s a pretty good way to get around, particularly if you live in London.

Some drivers who listen to too much Jeremy Clarkson can be rude, but overall London’s a pretty great place to cycle.

Then, occasionally, you get the nasty HGV drivers.

Now, I’m an assertive cyclist. I was hit by a car in about 1996, and am pretty careful these days.

I don’t pass on the inside coming up to lights. I (OK, generally) don’t jump lights (certainly never if there’s anything coming at all). I treat my bicycle as though it’s deadly to humans, and treat anything bigger than me as a big lump of stone.

I’ve occasionally shouted at drivers who have over taken too closely or nearly run me down, but at the end of the day, I figure it’s my job as a small, fragile thing to be visible.

So I do get very cross when a cement truck overtakes in a short narrow lane on a busy highway. But I’ve pretty much stopped shouting. I (hope) I can just get even. And maybe make a bit of difference.

The ubiquitous camera phone is the great equaliser here. I snapped the plate and the driver’s logo,

and then spent two minutes navigating the phone tree at hanson.biz to see if I couldn’t get in touch with a transportation supervisor. Voila! Not too difficult.

Let’s see if we can’t get Hanson.biz to sign up for Cycle Awareness Training or perhaps at least the No Lethal Lorries campaign.

Perhaps even a google-mappy-mashup a la Fix My Street is in order, where we route complaints and publish the results.

Jo from Hanson, I’m waiting for your response.

I tweeted about it.

Here’s the funny thing
Potential Fire in a library? One of the world’s greatest? With three of the four courtyard exits closed tue to improvement works? Surely there should be some panic? Some worry?

Nope. Mostly eye-rolling, looks of disbelief, checking of watches to make sure it’s not just time for a drill.

Our modern life has made us feel incredibly safe. Usually.
I experienced much the same thing about ten years ago in Victoria station. This was before Sept 11th, but after London bombings had pretty much faded away. The IRA and ETA had gone fairly quiet. But still.

The odd thing, to me, is that act irrationally in these sorts of cases, where we may be in actual danger, but we personalise false dangers.

Most people are convinced that crime, and in particular, violent crime, is on the rise in Britain, but it’s been falling steadily.

The chances of an American being killed (or even endangered) by a terrorist attack are approximately the same as being eaten by a shark whilst simultaneously hit by lightning, but we still ran out of duct tape that one time.

The “best experts” provide a good image that they’re providing airport security, but fail to deliver improved security, again and again.

Why is this?
We seem to be rational in the face of danger– no fire, no smoke, no fear. But we’re irrational when facing the unknown. We rely on questionable expert opinion rather than analysing the problems ourselves and coming up with workable solutions, we give in to FUD, which, far from solving problems, creates hidden problems.

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9th-10th Oct, 2009.

I’ll be speaking about, in general, the challenges that investors and entrepreneurs face in Africa, with a specific focus on my partner organisation Appfrica Labs. Come out if you can.

Details at Africa Gathering and on the EventBrite page.

I’m on at 11 AM on Saturday– and to be quite honest, the lineup of speakers puts me in pretty esteemed company.

Sorry this is late– I’ve just been indundated by the types of things that inundate your life at the end of five months on the road: I hadn’t slept in the same place (and mostly in the same country) for more than three weeks between April and September. A lot of laundry, email management, and general decompressing time needed to happen.

Metrics
MBA-ism is filled with metrics. In fact, there is some research on the impact of metric-heavy MBA thinking on entrepreneurship, and the basic idea is that the two schools of thought are are diametrically opposed.

Dr. Saras Sarasvathy from the Darden School of Business posts her findings at effectuation.org, which broadly suggest that for a certain type of entrepreneur, the whole idea of finding markets, estimating market sizes, and attempting to essentially pre-plan the value of a business is opposite to disruptive models of innovation where marekts are created– i.e., no MBA would have invested in an ice machine because the value of the harvested ice market was too big.

Metrics, Development-style
Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) is a tricky, hard thing. It’s a nightmare for lots of international NGOs as the data collection is done from far away, sometimes by people who don’t understand the value of the information they are gathering (Appfrica may be on to something with their new approach to this…).

Now, add to the difficulty of collecting metrics the ability to compare several projects:

- A clean water project
- A new ICT training centre
- A new delivery system for vaccines
- A new collective agriculture scheme

All of these may cost the same, and have variable outputs– some will have smaller effects on more people, others might be drastically transformational for the lives of a very few. How do you compare them? How you choose between them? How do you decide which was more successful after they’ve run?

Measurement metrics
There are a few different approaches to this, many of the latest (ish) are in things like Blended Value and SROI. These attempt to monetise the outputs, so if you increase someone’s productivity (training), then their increased productivity can be measured, turned into dollars, and compared against the increased sales prices that the agriculture scheme generates for its members, and then you report them along with your financial statements. You can add them so that you achieve “profit” in “social returns”. It’s crude but it’s something.

(if you have any better ideas, then by all means suggest away– I don’t think anyone’s particularly tied to these, although they do yield some kind of apples-to-apples comparisons, although the methodologies for each monetisation vary so they end up being apples-to-pears all to often…)

Operational metrics
These are, generally, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). These should be the sorts of things that tell you what’s going on while you’re working– cost per vaccine delivery, cost per avoided pregnancy, cost per trained person. This lets you know if you’re on- or off-target, and then you can start to adjust your thinking and approach based on what’s happening in the field.

My question
The question I had with all of this was “What does it all tell you?”

Here’s the thing: Saying you trained 100 people to use the Internet is almost meaningless when you’re 5000 miles away. Saying that you created $50,000 worth of increased productivity is even worse. What you’re trying to get to is a deeper understanding about the effect thatyouvé had on people’s lives.

You want to get to people’s stories. You need the context to know exactly what it means to increase someone’s effective wage $100 a month.

There’s an important thing happening at and around SoCap about creating better, more comparable metrics, but it’s important to not just be stuck in the Excel sheet, but to also communicate what it is that you’re trying to change. There are too many “successful” projects on the ground that achieved exactly what they set out to on the Excel sheet, but didn’t create lasting change.

On the way, we had a stopover in Milan. And they had an interesting thing there (as we were transferring from international to internal flights we had to pass through the baggage claim area). And this is what I noticed on the way out

You can see when your flight arrived and when the bags should be out.

This was an incredible revelation to me– sometimes it takes 5 minutes for bags to start rolling out while other times it’s more along the lines of 20 minutes. Someone at the Milan airport noticed this and did something about it. Now you can decide if you want to run to the restroom or queue right at the conveyor belt for your bag. If you want to get a coffee from the vending machine or sit down and wait.

Alitalia bag handling at Heathrow
On the other hand, when I returned to Heathrow, Alitalia’s ground crew (they were handling the bags as well as the flight in this case), notified us the bags would be delayed 15 minutes.

After 15 minutes, they said 20-30 minutes.

After 25 minutes, they said another 20-30 minutes. At which point I went to the counter to inquire. I got the most amazing story.

What had happened was this: The computer indicated that there were about 20 bags missing from the flight. As the baggage barcodes are read automatically in a baggage sort centre, someone was poking at the computer (probably without the appropriate permissions or something) trying to figure out which bags were missing and which weren’t. Meanwhile, no one was taking the bags off of the aircraft– the plane and passengers sat for over an hour before they got the crew together to unload the bags.

Of course, if they’d done this in the first place, then they would have avoided annoying the 120 or so passengers whose bags weren’t lost. And focussed on fixing it for the 20 people whose bags were lost.

Because of this inability to handle the situation at the time, the ground crew was off unloading another flight and they coudln’t unload the bags for the longest time. Me? My bag was fine. The delay, however, made me the last train from Victoria and had to decide to take three buses home or a £25 taxi.

Terrible handling of expectations, Alitalia.

Zeitgeist, biker bar, San Francisco
This is a bar that probably has the worst customer experience ever– if you use typical views of service. There’s a sign saying that regulars (friends of the bar staff) get preferential service. The hamburger counter is open at odd times, and when they have too many orders they shut down– and they’ll shout at you if you hang out waiting for it to reopen.

Why? They pour great vats of beer and cook a damn good $5 burger. It screws them up to have too many orders pile up, get lost, get greasy. The only can make so many burgers, and their back garden ensures that they’re packed 180 days a year.

They provide pitchers of a wide variety of great beer at decent prices, amazing bloody marys, and good burgers and home fries. They provide a great environment to hang out, drink, and meet people. The experience is what matters. If you’re rude or slow, they’ll shout at you.

Experience and expectations and brands
The Zeitgeist experience is what you want, though. They know who they are and provide exactly that.

Alitalia, of course, doesn’t care. Air ticket purchases are based on price. Once you’re receiving your baggage you’re locked in. Still, though, this is the level of screw-up that puts people off of airlines. Almost every frequent traveller I know has one or two airlines they just won’t fly. Alitalia’s on mine until I see how they respond to my note.

*update* To top it off, the customer service emails they gave me three days ago all bounce.

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