there's more to amplification than just noise

I sign up this afternoon for the first in the new season of Amplified Leicester events at Phoenix Square Film and Digital Media Centre. This coming Wednesday, Prof. Sue Thomas is speaking on "How to be an Amplified Individual". In today's Leicester Mercury Sue has the "First Person" column. Here's the text from today's paper:

Prof Sue Thomas, of the Institute of Creative Technologies at De Montfort University, goes in search of superheroes

For some, amplifying yourself is just about getting louder, but according to Californian thinktank, The Institute for the Future, there's a lot more to amplification than making noise.

According to The Institute, "New technologies of cooperation are combining to create a generation of 'amplified individuals' - workplace superheroes. In some cases, they will compete with traditional organisational models; in others they will amplify capabilities of organisations where they already work.''

So how do you become a workplace superhero? Or are you one already? It seems that the amplified workers of the future share several important characteristics: They are very social people, who don't just share what they know, but are also not afraid to ask for information, help and advice when they need it. They might do this the modern way, via the people they know on Facebook and Twitter, or perhaps they simply adopt the time-honoured methods of personal networks across businesses and communities.

They work well in groups and collaborate with partners online and offline. And they know how to improvise when necessary, creating relationships and infrastructures quickly and on the fly when the situation demands rapid action.

Lastly, they are not afraid to extend their abilities with tools that help them stay in touch with their networks and sources of knowledge, so that they can quickly access and process information. The Institute for the Future is deeply embedded in Silicon Valley culture and it takes some perseverance to get past some of the West Coast language in its research, but it's worth the effort because there are real insights to be found in the list of skills required of an 'amplified individual'. These are skills you probably already have, but have not recognised in quite this way.

For example, how is your "Cooperation Radar"? Are you one of those people who can sense intuitively which of your colleagues would work together best on a particular task?

And how would you rate your "Ping Quotient'"? Are you quick to respond when people contact you? Are you comfortable in many different kinds of social and business milieus, and do you adopt different communication styles appropriate to differing situations? These different ways to understand what many of us already do well can be useful in the workplace where such skills are increasingly important. Earlier this year, 30 Leicester citizens participated in the Amplified Leicester project at Phoenix Square Film and Digital Media Centre. Involvement in the first stage was by application only, but now Amplified Leicester is hosting a series of talks and conversations which are free and open to the public. The first meeting looks at 'How to be an Amplified Individual'. Its at 7pm this Wednesday, September 22 in the Etc Suite at Phoenix Square. It's free to attend but please register via http://www.amplifiedleicester.com/.

Find out more about Amplified Leicester (and sign up if you like the look of it - you don't need to be in, or anywhere near, Leicester)
http://ampleic.ning.com/

how amplified are you?

Today I've been sorting out some papers that have been piling up over the past few weeks and months (well, it is Bank Holiday Monday) and came across an interesting questionnaire that I picked up at the Amplified Leicester Showcase (see blog entry, 15 Apr). It's a lighthearted test, developed from one used at The Future of Work Perspectives, presented by the Institute for the Future. If you find the jargon off putting, consider it as being somewhat tongue-in-cheek. I've done it; would you like to test yourself, faithful reader? For each topic, grade yourself from 1 (not at all confident) to 3 (highly confident).

MOBBABILITY
The ability to work in large groups, and to organise and collaborate with may people simultaneously.


INFLUENCY
Knowing how to be persuasive in multiple social contexts and media spaces, and demonstrating awareness that each context and space requires a different persuasive strategy and technique.


HIGH PING QUOTIENT
Responsiveness to other people's requests for engagement, propensity to reach out to others in a network.


PROTOVATION
Fearless innovation in rapid, iterative cycles.


OPEN AUTHORSHIP
Ease with creating content for immediate public consumption and modification.


EMERGENSIGHT
The ability to prepare for and handle surprising results and complexity.


MULTI-CAPITALISM
Fluency in working with different capitals (e.g. natural, intellectual, social, financial, virtual).


LONGBROADING
Thinking in terms of higher-level systems, massively multiple cycles, and the very big picture.


SIGNAL/NOISE MANAGEMENT
Filtering meaningful information, patterns and commonalities from the massively multiple streams of data and advice.


COOPERATION RADAR
The ability to sense, almost intuitively, who would make the best collaborators on a particular task.

What's your score?
21-30 Congratulations, workplace superhero! Your colleagues don't always understand what you're talking about, but never mind. William Shakespeare was right when he wrote, "We are advertis'd by our loving friends." Keep on amplifying. If you're not in demand in the job market yet, you soon will be.


11-20 You're a workplace semi-hero! What's stopping you from reaching the pinnacle? As Clay Shirky said, "When we change the way we communicate, we change society." You're not afraid to experiment but some of the above qualities make you uncomfortable. Identify those weak spots and take more risks.


0-10 How to improve your score: 1. Hang out with amplified people to watch, learn and ask questions; 2. Experiment and don't be afraid to fail; 3. Spend time messing about online; 4. Don't be Thomas Watson, IBM Chairman, who said in 1943, "I think that there is a world market for maybe five computers."


Find out more about Amplified Leicester:
http://ampleic.ning.com/


Find out more about the Institute for the Future:
http://www.iftf.org/about

Amplified Leicester Showcase

To Phoenix Square this morning (I should live in this place!), for the Amplified Leicester Showcase event. Amplified Leicester is a city-wide experiment designed to boost the innovation capacity of Leicester and share new skills which are fast becoming essential in 21st century workplaces and communities. In 2009/10 Amplified Leicester offered a small group of participants from across the city the chance to:

• benefit from Leicester's huge diversity of people and cultures;
• generate new ideas quickly;
• think like a futurist and see the bigger picture;
• organise and collaborate better;
• be persuasive in different social situations;
• share and develop creative ideas;
• manage the stream of information bombarding us every day;
• choose the best people with whom to collaborate;
• make the most of different kinds of resources – social, economic, creative.

Every fortnight participants attended lectures and workshops and in between meetings worked together via Twitter, Facebook and other social media applications. They filmed interviews in their communities and shared the videos online.

The project has been inspired by (and is based on) research done by The Institute for the Future at Palo Alto, California. The amplified individual is (consciously):

• highly social;
• highly collective;
• highly improvisational;
• highly augmented.

At the end of (this part of) the project the participants are showcasing their work and expanding the conversation to include more people from the city of Leicester and beyond. This one day event at Phoenix Square Digital Media Centre includes practical workshops run by the participants themselves, presentations of their experimental projects, and talks by the project team. Keynote speaker, Andrea Saveri, an independent foresight and strategy consultant based in Berkeley, California, was unable to travel here for the event for medical reasons. However, she still delivered her speech via skype. The theme of her talk was locating the Amplified Leicester experience within a global context. Leicester is ther first and only amplified city in the world!

I missed out on the chance to participate in Amplified Leicester. I believe I was the first person to apply to be considered for the project, but withdrew my name almost immediately when I realised that work commitments would have proevented me from attending the fortnightly sessions. but I've been a camp follower of the project all along and have lent whatever assistance I could to it, even just by "bigging it up" (especially in this blog).

This is undoubtedly an excellent project and I have many good things to say about it. If you can sense a "but" coming, it's not a new one or that different from one that I have to raise with many of the events and activities, groups and organisations with which I've been involved over the past few years. There tends to be something of a "disconnect" between Leicester's faith communities at large and what we might call the "mainstream" cultural life of the city. Now, no doubt that some of those involved with a project such as Amplified Leicester are people of faith or strong beliefs. And there are individuals who would appear to be easily identified as members of the faith communities themselves. I'm talking about something different and (I believe) deeper.

As part of my ongoing efforts to overcome that "disconnect", I invited Ramila and Ravi from the "Get Inspired 2010" team to come along today so that I could put them in touch with a few people who might be able to help them promote their event coing up in August. I'm pleased to see that they appear to benefit from this, as I had hoped.

Find out more about Amplified Leicester:
http://www.amplifiedleicester.com/