Ashoka's approach to Twitter

This was written as a guest post for Beth Kanter's blog, exploring how Ashoka is fulfilling our mission on Twitter:

Ashoka: Innovators for the Public is relatively new to Twitter, having launched our main account, @AshokaTweets only in January. However in that time we’ve worked hard to build a community nearing 6,000 connections, sharing our news and stories in new ways and convening conversations that matter. This post will explain how we have approached Twitter and what we have learned.

But first, some back story:

Ashoka was founded on the belief that social entrepreneurs are the most powerful force changing the world. For almost 30 years Ashoka has been seeking out and supporting the best innovators working to create systemic change to join the Ashoka Fellowship. Supporting these visionary leaders, raising the profile of their work and facilitating collaborations and sharing has allowed many to pursue a life of changemaking, scaling their impact and, in many instances, affecting national policy in addition to thousands of members of their communities.

After 29 years of electing over 2,000 incredible social entrepreneurs as Fellows we have been able to observe some powerful themes in their work. And the most significant is this: great social entrepreneurs empower their communities, and invite and inspire those around them to become changemakers themselves.

With this insight we gained a deeper appreciation for the fact that innovation happens at many levels and we saw more clearly the kind of world we were working to create, a world many of our Fellows are leading towards, one in which every person has the opportunity to create positive change in their community, and where our collective intelligence and initiative will allow solutions to outrun the challenges we face. This led to our new tagline and mission, creating an Everyone a Changemaker™ world.

It was this mission that drew me to Ashoka, and which drew Ashoka to me. Building an Everyone a Changemaker™ world is a very different mission from simply looking for the world’s elite social entrepreneurs, it involves using the stories and examples of these entrepreneurs to inspire people to action, sharing lessons learned across our networks and opening up the innovation process to more people. This called for a new approach to outreach and communications and led to me joining Ashoka last year in a new position of Digital Marketing Strategist.

Our recently re-launched Changemakers.com website is to most high-profile example of Ashoka’s new approach to building community and fostering innovation, but so too is the work we are doing in social media and, in particularly Twitter.

The question we asked ourselves when we were planning to launch a Twitter account was: how could we use Twitter to help build an Everyone A Changemaker™ world? In thinking about this question we realized that one of Ashoka’s most important roles as the oldest and largest organization focused on Social Entrepreneurship was as convener, that we have the opportunity to bring together diverse insights and experiences to help map the most effective way forward in tackling many of the world’s most pressing challenges. We wanted to continue to play this role on Twitter.

In addition I felt it was important that we be as human as possible, highlighting not only our Fellows but our staff, and empowering them to be more effective advocates. This was also the chance to share news in a more timely fashion, as well as to proactively reach out and form connections, answer questions, and spark conversations.

Our goals, therefore, where to:

-be timely;

-be human;

-be proactive;

-convene.

Timely means sharing our news rapidly, as it came in, rather than simply crafting careful news stories for our website at a rate of no more than one a week. It means monitoring the online conversations about social entrepreneurship and issues we care about (we now use M|Buzz from Meltwater to help us do this) and directing attention to news hits and interesting blog posts. It means responding to questions rapidly and directing people to where they can find the information they are looking for.

The goal of being human has led me to run several Introduction to Twitter seminars and webinars for our staff. We currently have over 45 of my colleagues on Twitter where they are sharing their passion for our work and growing our reach and connections exponentially. The next step will be to integrate this onto our website where soon you will be able to see a list and live stream of all our staff on Twitter, along with one for our Fellows. Ashoka does such a diversity of work, from eHealth projects to new social change financing models, it’s impossible for a single person like me to accurately represent it. Now those with the knowledge and passion for these topics can participate themselves, in their own words, in the conversations of relevance to them, bringing new ideas back into the organization and better informing the wider sector on what we’re up to.

Being human also means acknowledging who the person behind an organizational Twitter handle is. The bio of AshokaTweets says “Tweets by @tomjd and friends”.

Being proactive certainly rules out using RSS feeds to populate our Twitter feed (with one exception, set up purely for that purpose and soon to be phased out). Each tweet is hand-crafted and relevant to our audience, something we checked by asking our followers want sort of information they wanted from us in a poll. We also participated in conversations with organizations such as Skoll Foundation, Social Actions and Change.org to agree on some shared hashtags to denote our areas of work, which led to widespread adoption of #socent for Social Entrepreneurship. We also use Twitter to proactively reach out and respond to comments about Ashoka, social entrepreneurship and social change

Finally, in considering how to use Twitter to convene conversations that matter we came up with the ideas of a monthly real-time discussion on Twitter, #SocEntChat, short for Social Entrepreneurship Chat. #SocEntChat takes place on the first Wednesday of every month from 4-6pm US EST (although the recent chat on Rural Innovation in Africa and India was moved to a more Africa and India-friendly time of 12-2 US EST) focused on a specific topic. Recent chats have looked at green entrepreneurship, mobile innovation and building cultures of social entrepreneurship on university campuses. We have had contributors from North America, Asia, Africa, Europe, South America and Australia, representing entrepreneurs, staff from large non-profits, activists, enthusiasts, bloggers and more. Conversations focus on next steps and areas for further exploration. All the transcripts can be accessed from our Squidoo Lense.

The next #SocEntChat is being held on Wednesday September 2 on the topic of Rethinking Mental Health. We would love you to join us.

We still have a lot to learn about Twitter and the microblogging medium will continue to evolve in interesting ways. What is clear is that a platform that allows people to connect with one another and talk about the things they care about is a platform made for social change, a place where we can build constituencies and communities capable of collaboratively creating a better future. In other words, a place for changemakers.

Attitudinal barriers to social media success

I was on a panel at a Social Media for Social Good event recently and a question posted was: what are mistakes people make with social media? I didn't have any spectacular "misses" to relate, as Ashoka is relatively new to Social Media and progressing carefully, not trying anything too radical that would constitute a "miss". But thinking about the question I realized that the main misses from social media are not from trying things that go spectacularly wrong but from not trying things at all. The miss is missed opportunity, a squandering of the chance social media provides to speak with your supporters, partners and friends in new ways, collaborate with and involve them to an extent previously impossible.

This echos what was discussed towards the end of the last #4change chat, that most non-profits are not there yet when it comes to social media, a number of barriers from the attitudional to capacity to connectivity standing in the way. I've been thinking more about these issues and want to outline further some of the attitudional barriers that were mentioned. I think it's these attitudinal, or cultural, barriers which are the most interesting. Resource scarcity and skills shortages are always a challenge for non-profits but, ultimately, are simply a matter of prioritization. Connectivity is obviously essential and very unevenly provided across the globe and, once these other elements are in place a coherent strategy is fundamental to your success. But even with everything else lined up unless your organization has a culture which supports social media it will much less effective at it than hoped for.

Several of these attitudinal barriers were mentioned during the #4Change chat: Fear, passivity and a desire for control.

Fear:

of the unknown, of not doing it right, of missing the mark. Non-profits spend a lot of time worrying about their public perception, and often caring deeply about a wealthier and, often, more conservative cohort (those able to donate substantively to charity and social change) than the population at large. A fear with offending this group can cramp an organization's style online. You must obviously but mindful of public perception, and be deeply attuned to your brand and values, but social media does requires strategic fearlessness. You'll make mistakes, you'll misspell and misspeak occasionally, but learn from these mistakes and get better at social media through practice, it's the only way.

Passivity:

Passivity is never a recipe for success. While it is possible to automate much of your social media, updating your Twitter feed and Facebook page via RSS when a press release or blog post is uploaded, people can tell when you're not really present on these platforms and will be much less likely to engage with you. If you're going to make social media a meaningful part of your outreach strategy you need to give it the time and human resources to succeed. You see this repeatedly in Facebook - seemingly every organization in the Western world has a Facebook group but most are clearly never checked, with questions and offers of help unanswered on their wall, projecting the opposite of what you'd want: disinterest. There's nothing magic about having a Facebook group, the not-so-secret sauce is in actually using it as a space to share information and engage with people. In other words: being proactive. This is equally true for Twitter, MySpace and other social media platforms.

A desire for control:

Social Media allows your supports and staff to be more effective advocates for you, and nothing is more effective than people talking in their own words about something they care passionately about. But allowing people to talk in their own words risks your marketing becoming diluted, your finely-crafted messaging forgotten. This can't be helped but can be mitigated by actively engaging with your supporters and providing them with the tools to better promote you. But if you aren't comfortable with misspelt words and colloquialisms you're going to find social media, and the real, human, non-pr language that comes with it, very difficult. If you're running every draft tweet past senior executives for approval you're not going to get anywhere.

You can see an example of this with copyright. Does your organization use Creative Commons licenses for your online media? If not, how can you expect people to help you share your content and your message?

As Clay Shirky said in his recent TED talk (which I was lucky enough to be present for): social media is about convening your supporters, not controlling them.

Attitudinal factors are only one of the barriers between non-profits and social media success, but they're an often-overlooked one I believe, less obvious than resourcing issues or inadequate internal processes. I'd love to hear of any others you might have encountered. Being cognizant of these barriers allows us to more effectively lead our organizations through them, creating not only successful social media outreach strategies but more transparent, responsive and adaptive organizations in the process.

Ashoka's first eBook - Stories of Change: Fellows and their Journeys

I just hit upload on the first of a new series of eBooks I've been working on at Ashoka. I've wanted for some time to profile the amazing stories in the Ashoka network in new and shareable ways and eBooks are a fun and stylish way to do that. Using Scribd as our primary platform the document can be embedded and read anywhere, as below, kinda like a YouTube for documents and publications. Ashoka has been getting more social lately but this project is about putting the media in our social media strategy. If we want other people to generate content about us on social media platforms we need to generate more content ourselves, and let people interact with that content. I hope you enjoy this first attempt and I'd love any feedback you have!

[scribd id=18984420 key=key-10d36bmg9zcm2qiukzs4]

#4change wrap-up: collaboration and social media

I've been meaning to write a wrap-up of the #4change chat on collaboration for the week since it happened. My apologies for the delay, I'm still getting into the routine of blogging and Burning Man preparation has completely taken over ever available hour outside of work and a necessary minimum of socializing. I'll tell you all about it before I depart – in a week! Anyway....

Thank you to @lethalsheethal for her excellent and vastly more timely reflection on the chat. Having just discovered it I'd like to recommend www.printyourtwitter.com as creating by far the most digestible (and printable, naturally) twitter transcript (ht @writerpollock).

The topic of the most recent #4change chat was “How does social media open new doors for collaboration?” It was a vibrant and thought-provoking conversation, in my opinion the best #4change chat we've had so far.

There is no question that social media has created enormous new collaborative possibilities. Some of these are in the sharing of data, such as the Social Entrepreneurship API being developed by Social Actions and the merging of the North American green business databases of Gen Green (@gengreen) and 3^rd Whale (@3rdwhale), which was announced at the start of the chat. This was interesting and welcome news, but business alliances of this type are not uncommon. What, we wondered, where the unique collaborative capacities of social media?

@engagejoe summed up some of these possibilities as “exposing overlap, sharing resources, connecting communities, forging partnerships.” These things are not unique to social media but they are native to it – social media makes overlap and waste more transparent, speeds up information sharing and relationship-building and can increase the impact of collaborations. Messages can be shared between communities and networks both real-time and ad-hoc. And as #4change itself demonstrates conversations can be convened that were never possible before.

But how much of this is happening? And if these possibilities are not being realized what are the barriers standing in the way?

The conversation part seems easiest. It is, by definition, what social media facilitates. Making this conversations intentional, productive and constructive is harder, but we still see examples of this all around us, on forums and wiki's, blogs and microblogs, communities closed and open. These conversations can create new insights, understanding and relationships. And these conversations can lead to concrete action, from protests to petitions, fundraising to collaborative databases.

There was a real skepticism felt by some in the conversation about whether real work was being done online. This, of course, depends on what real work is to you, but most would agree that hearts and minds are a key part of most forms of social change and so anything that brings us into contact with each other in new ways has the ability to move us in new ways. As Michael Wesch said in his presentation at Personal Democracy Forum this year, “We know ourselves through our relationships with others. New media is creating new ways to relate.”

But to really scale-up the collaborative possibilities of social media we need to empower and lead our organizations to work together in new ways. As @ChristinasWorld said: “if we could get orgs and passionate people to start working together at a sector/issue level things will start to get exciting.” One key challenge to doing this, as @edwardharran pointed out, is that “social media is pocketed in silos.” While we might wish that this wasn't the case it is simply a fact of human existence that we build groups at all sizes, but that our closest communities are smaller and more digestible, whether on or offline (although the scale of what's digestible varies widely between these two states). With these distributed, frustratingly uncoordinated conversations also comes enormous space for innovation and creative thinking. However better search, aggregation and distribution is needed to reveal these conversations to each other in ways that support collaboration. We can see steps in this direction with WiserEarth groups showing related groups and Zanby which allows groups to connect while retaining their independence.

A schema began to emerge from the conversation which identified three distinct types of collaboration:

1. organization-to-organization

2. organization-to-individuals

3. individuals-to-individuals.

Again and again the majority of the examples brought up where the later two. For 2. you have organizations like the Sunlight Foundation who are harnessing the contributions of hundreds of coders to create their transparency tools and OneYoungWorld who are using social media to find 1500 leaders of tomorrow. You also have new tools which facilitate this form of collaboration in exciting new ways like The Extraordinaries. For 3. there are grassroots political fundraising campaigns and the entire open source movement.

(4. was also later suggested by @engagejoe: people-within-organizations. Any more?)

For 1. there is the previously-cited Social Actions-style data aggregation and sharing and some great examples of organizations collaborating around a social media-enabled campaign, such as the just-launched climate change campaign tcktcktck (@tcktcktc) but there was a clear feeling that much of this landscape remains to be filled out.

In discussing the barriers to better social media collaboration between non-profits people nominated time intensity vs staffing resources, fear, lack of connectivity in many parts of the world, desire to tightly control their message, geography and time zones and lack of skills as prime candidates. The need for clear strategy so as to not waste precious staff resources was also mentioned, along with the observation that many non-profits do not have the knowledge or experience to develop this strategy.

To close people were asked for their key takeaways from the conversation:

• “There is a desire to evolve toward more collaborative outputs; SM [social media] may not be enough to get there” - @ChristinasWorld
• “It's given me ideas about the barriers NP [non-profits] face with SM” - @chilli07
• “I think #4change in itself is a great example of international collaboration” - @tashjudd
• “Main takeaway: a sense of optimism. SM is not going anywhere and collaboration is only going to continue to get bigger and better” - @edwardharran
• “SM can be chaotic but still work” - @zerostrategist
• “I now see more kinds of collaboration: people-within-org, org-to-community, community-to-community, org-to-org” - @engagejoe

And if I could be so bold as to end on my own takeaway:

• “We must learn to collaborate as individuals first, then teach our organizations how.”

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Please let us know what topics you'd like to cover in future chats!

Introduction to Twitter for non-profits

Took me awhile but I finally stuck my Introduction to Twitter for Non-Profits presentation, delivered at a OneWorld.net Workshop recently, up on SlideShare. I hope you find it interesting and useful. [slideshare id=1863942&doc=oneworldtwitterpresentation-090814171532-phpapp01]

#4Change Twitter chat tomorrow

#4Change is a twitter-based real-time conversation about how social media can be used for change. It was an idea which bounced around for a bit before a group of friends and contacts from three countries kicked it off a couple of months ago. Tomorrow will be our third chat.

Rather than introduce the next chat I'm going to use my friend Amy's overview for the 4Change group blog, of which I am a part, as I couldn't possibly do a better job.

The next #4change chat is this Thursday – I hope you can join us!

Details:

• Date: August, 13th
• Where: Twitter (search for #4Change)
• When: 5 – 7 pm US Eastern Time
• Topic: How do social media open new doors for collaboration (especially internationally)?

Starting the Conversations

Unfortunately for me, I will unable to join the chat this Thursday; so, I’d like to offer some conversation starters now to get you thinking of questions, ideas, and stories you want to share!

Here are some questions to consider:

• has your organization found new collaborators (other organizations, companies, networks, etc.) for your work via social media use/presence?
• have you reached out, either as an individual or an organization, with opportunities to collaborate to others you only connected with via social media? why?
• what issues are unique to collaborations of this type?
• what kind of reassurances (and what are the mechanisms for providing them) are unique to parties entering collaborations via social media?
• how could collaborations enabled or maintained via social media be more or less sustainable than traditional tools/outlets?

And here are some examples to consider:

• SocialActions – a great example of social media powering the sharing and aggregation (and thus the collaboration and partnership) of social action opportunity portals all over the world
• Amnesty International, Red Cross, and others – organizers working globally/locally have changed the way they campaign or operate now that they are really in the same space (online)
• Journalism – writers are now using their social media platforms (whether it’s Twitter or Facebook, or even the newspaper’s comment-enabled websites) to collaborate with witnesses, locals, and experts for their contributions to the story

Join the Conversation

1. If you want to contribute to the conversation, you’ll need to have a twitter account (it’s free).
2. To follow the conversation (whether you are planning to contribute or not), use http://search.twitter.com or another application to search on Twitter for “#4Change”
3. Jump in to the conversation by adding “#4Change” (without the “”) to your Twitter message

Rules for #Change Chats

1. #4Change will be structured around a series of questions which all participants can respond to. Send your questions to @tomjd without the hash tag (to keep them out of the stream) to have them considered.
2. Introduce yourself in 1 tweet at the start or when you join.
3. Stay on topic!
4. Stay cool.

Join us for the chat this Thursday – looking forward to discussing the role social media play in collaboration!

How late is too late?

Last night The Day After Tomorrow was on cable. It was one of the spate of big-budget Hollywood disaster porn films which came out in the late-nineties and early noughties which I had not seen before. The disaster in this film is a sudden and catastrophic ice age, triggered by the melting of the Artic and Greeland ice sheets, stopping the North Atlantic Current which keeps most of Europe and North America habitable and which, over the course of just a few days, freezes half the Northern Hemisphere, setting the scene for the heroic "struggle to survive" scenes always featured in movies of this ilk. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnvqsWVluCE]

So the film is, obviously, a bit over the top, and riddled with scientific inaccuracies as these things always are. But the general premise of government's refusing to take action on global warming until it's way, way too late is something that it's becoming increasingly hard to believe won't happen. Being in America is filling me with despair about our capacity to respond in time to avoid catastrophe and never more-so than when I saw this poll conducted by the University of Maryland, which asked people in 19 countries to rank on a scale of 1-10 how high a priority their government should place on addressing climate change:

America stands out as being, of the countries polled, uniquely disinterested in government action to address climate change. And whereas the Iraqi's and Palestinians justifiably have other things they think their government should be focusing on, in America the blame can only be placed on the presence of a well-funded denialist lobby, replaying exactly the delaying tactics of the tobacco industry. Their goal is not to prove that climate change is not happening, but to sow enough doubt about the science to forstall real action. So far they've been extremely successful, especially in the US and, sadly, Australia. The above poll shows just how successful, and what a steep hill we have to climb to get real action here in the world's greatest carbon emitter, without whom no strategy to address climate change can be successful.

This reminded me of a letter I read years ago, by Paul Gilding, former CEO of Greenpeace International, on the 10th anniversary of the founding of Ecos Corporation, which he has since left. The letter was entitled Scream, Crash, Boom. In it he declared that environmentalists had lost, that despite thirty years of concerted efforts, the development of huge global NGOs and contribution of millions of hours of activism, the chance to avert catastrophic climate change had passed. The forces resisting this change were just too big, or the tactics used had been insufficient, whatever the reason all the shouting for change (the "Scream" of the title) had failed to  move enough people to force the world's governments to take action. "We tried. We failed. It is what it is."

Therefore the Crash is coming, where we will see the impact of climate change in very real and terrible ways, whether through a Day After Tomorrow-style snap ice age, pandemic bird flu, peak oil or drought for decades without end (which seems to have already arrived in much of Australia). Millions will be displaced or, potentially, killed. "However it unfolds, it is certainly in my judgement going to be ugly, probably very ugly. You can’t keep messing with the system that feeds you, eating away at your capital without bad stuff happening in response."

However then would come the "Boom", the explosion of human ingenuity possible when we are mobilized around an immediate problem.  Humans are unique in our ability to adapt and change, we are just not very good at doing so until we absolutely have to (and sometimes not even then). When we are confronted with problems we experience first-hand, when people start dying (in the Western World) we will respond. "When we do, it’s going to be really interesting. We’ll reinvent cars that make today’s technology look as primitive and stupid as it is. We’ll have energy created everywhere as our roofs and cars become generators rather than consumers of power. Water will just go around and around our houses and we’ll use it on the way through."

I wish I was as optimistic as Paul. I think the Crash is inevitable, we are doing pitifully little to prevent it, and most Americans think we should be doing little more. Where leadership is needed we instead have denial, obfuscation and confusion. So long as there are dollars to be made. But the Crash is coming, and there are dollars to be made in helping us respond to this challenge as well. So how late will we wait, how bad will it need to be before denial turns into action?

Even if we have lost the opportunity to prevent destruction and displacement there is still so much to fight for, every day we lose to inaction will make the Crash worst, the correction harder, the loss of life greater. Every day is another chance to turn it around, before it is truly too late.

While looking up the link to Paul's original Scream, Crash, Boom letter from 2005 I discovered he wrote an updated, Scream, Crash, Boom II letter last year, where he claimed that the "Great Disruption" has already begun:

I want to be clear though that this is not the “end of the world”. It does, however herald an unparalleled era of system stress, economic stagnation and social tension – a global emergency during which we’ll evolve a new economic model and then rebuild. I call it The Great Disruption because it is most likely to be a disruption in society’s evolutionary process, rather than the collapse of civilisation.

It's worth reading in full. And then it's worth considering what you can do, to change both your lifestyle and the minds of your fellow citizens, to help bring about the change we need.

Related: the Pentagon has begun studying the national security implications of Climate Change, which may require military intervention to "deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics".

20 Random Tracks

This is another Facebook meme, to whit:

(1) Turn on your MP3 player (or  iTunes). (2) Go to SHUFFLE songs mode. (3) Write down the first 20 songs that come up--song title and artist--NO editing/cheating.

I don't normally bother with these sorts of things but this one was right up my alley so I couldn't resist. I wanted to post the list here so I could add links to tracks and video clips for your listening and viewing pleasure. Also I'm pretty proud of this list, it's a great cross-section of what's on my MP3 player and all pretty damn fine if I do say so myself. Not a single track I'm ashamed of.

1. Jagiya – Shen

2. Wide Open - The Crystal Method

3. Nice Weather - Lemon Jelly (great filmclip)

4. Scientific Reality – Astrix

5. Forever and Ever – Fatali

6. Dail an Error - akin

7. Magg Daan – Daara-J

8. Born on Mars - Mr Peculiar

9. Open Up – Leftfield

10. Hydropoetry Cathedra - Aural Planet

11. Booster – Fatali

12. Rocking Horse – Coda (great filmclip)

13. Strivin' – bluejuice

14. The Mayans, Incas and Aztecs - 1200 Mics

15. We Came Along This Road - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (live video)

16. Retro Inversion – Capsula

17. Feelin' Electro - Rob Mooney

18. The Slow Way To Go Down - My Friend the Chocolate Cake

19. Night Vibe (Outbeat) - Mushroom Lab

20. Morning Bell – Radiohead (live video)

Statistics:

Tracks from Australian artists: 6

Tracks from Senegalese artists: 1

Psytrance: 6

Chill: 5

Folky: 3

Hip Hop: 2

Radiohead: 1.

Tour de France reflections

On Sunday the Tour de France finished for another year. I love the Tour so its ending is a bit like Christmas for me: filled with excitement but also with the knowledge that it's a long year until it comes again. Given the time zone I'm currently in I couldn't watch it as avidly as I have done on previous occasions but I managed to catch most of the major mountain stages, including the epic battles on Mont Vontoux (with it's 23 kms of continuous uphill) and Le Grand-Bornand. It was amazing to watch the young and brilliant Alberto Contador and Andy Schleck fight it out over the mountains, a sight I'm sure we'll see for many Tour's to come, and it was inspirational to see Lance Armstrong return to the hardest race in the world after a four year break and finish third overall. It was fantastic to see the greatest riders of their respective generations ride together and I can't wait for them to go head-to-head on opposing teams in 2010. I like the Tour de France because it is so absurdly brutal that it becomes a race of the heart as well as the head; because it demands such manic strength of will and determination to keep going when the body is screaming for you to stop, to keep accelerating even as the gradient increases and mere mortals must bend to the will of the mountain. I love it because it also takes smarts; because it is much more than simply riding from A to B as quickly as possible but is rather a complex strategic and tactical game of knowing when to preserve and when to spend your energy; because while the honors are mostly individual it is still clearly a team sport and many riders sacrifice individual glory for the good of their teammates.

Since the race finished I've been thinking about how many of the themes of the Tour de France, and the reasons I so love to watch it unfold, are true in other parts of life also, and how we can take lessons from this the Tour as we can from almost any arena of human accomplishment.

Here, then, is my list of what we learn from the Tour de France:

It takes a team

While the sports reports only talk of individual placings and accomplishments (and, if you're in America, mostly of Lance's relative placing) the Tour de France is unquestionably a team sport, governed by team tactics and reliant on diverse contributions for success. The Team Manager is the primary strategist, deciding who the team will ride for and who will sacrifice themselves along the way. But to work everyone must play their part, from the 'domestique's' who destroy themselves leading their star rider as far as they can to the lead-out guy who aims to set up their sprinter in a bunch finish. And the guys behind-the-scenes are crucial too, from the masseurs to team drivers to chefs.

The dynamic of individual glory built on team competencies is one we see regularly in the business and non-profit words. We glorify CEO's and founders but the good ones always foster and build a team of individual and complementary talents around them. It is only through diverse contributions well-coordinated that change happens at scale. The last Presidential election is a great example of this. Undoubtedly Barack Obama is a once-a-generation candidate but he also built the best campaign organization, a team of rockstars who managed to work together without drama, out-strategizing, out-hustling and out-smarting his opponents. Obama was the leader but without David Plouffe, Robert Gibbs, David Axelrod, Joe Rospars, Chris Hughes and so many others Team Obama would not have had the success that it did.

It's all about heart

Of course a unique physique and relentless training are necessary preconditions for success in the Tour but over the course of a three-week stage race heart becomes just as important as muscle. Those who succeed are those who refuse to give up, who have the mental fortitude to ignore their screaming body and push themselves past the brink of exhaustion. Sometimes this can go too far. British cyclist Tom Simpson literally died on his bike pushing himself too hard up a mountain, his final words were 'Put  me back on my bike.' That's an extreme case, but all successful road cyclists, or any endurance athlete, must will themselves forward past the point when most of us would simply give up, our legs and our hearts drained of strength, our spirit broken. In other words it's not enough to be a brilliant rider, you need to have a spirit which transcends physicality.

Issues come and go in prominence and as an issue becomes trendy thousands of new activists will jump in and get involved. This is wonderful and necessary but the true hero's of any cause are those who stick with it, through thick and thin, shrugging off disappointment to continue forward, never waving in their determination to get to their goals.

I also see this as a reminder that spirit and intention matter in all that we do. In our dealings with others it is never simply about how well you write, how clever you are or how brilliant your idea is (okay, sometimes it is just about how brilliant our idea is, but it has to be pretty brilliant) it is about the heart and intention you put into your relationships. Social media embodies this. Those who are best at it are not simply clever, productive and forward-thinking, although all those things help enormously, they are usually also warm, open and generous. For social entrepreneurs and changemakers of all types empathy might be the single most important quality you can possess, as it allows you to understand the experience of others, which forms a platform for the collaboration, collective understanding and community so necessary to bring about social change.

When the going gets toughest real champions emerge

The leading contenders of the Tour almost never attack each other on flat or less intensively steep stages. It is on the mountains, and especially on stages which end with a mountain-top finish, where the real sorting out happens. In this year's Tour it was the mountain top finish at Verbier which Contador won to leap into Yellow and then the incredible battle on the slopes of Le Grand-Bornand which solidified Contador in first and catapulted Andy Schleck to second which determined the results.  Similarly last year's Tour came down to the legendary mountaintop Alp d'Huez where Sastre took enough time off Australia's Cadel Evans to claim overall victory.

In life it is when things are hard that you often find the true quality of a person, and the true quality of your relationships. It's easy to maintain friendships during good times, but in times of need you can often be surprised by who steps up, by who really cares.

In social change just as in the Tour de France it is great challenges that bring the greatest opportunities. The economist Paul Romer once said that “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” It is when are society is under stress that there is an opportunity to create fundamental change. Otherwise inertia and apathy tend to prevent us from grasping the opportunity to build a better world; the current state of affairs being 'good enough'. It's when they are no longer 'good enough' that the clamour and the opportunity for change grows, when people's appetite for risk and effort increases.

Success is created one day at a time

You don't become a world class cyclist overnight and you don't win the Tour de France in a day; it is through sustained effort that you reach your goals. This is true for all big goals: you need to be dedicated and you need to incrementally approach them, remaining motivated even if it's hard to see the progress you're making.

Chad Fowler, CTO of InfoEther, Inc. wrote about this in a fantastic guest post on Tim Ferriss' blog recently:

You might not be able to see a noticeable difference in the whole with each incremental change, though. When you’re trying to become more respected in your workplace or be healthier, the individual improvements you make each day often won’t lead directly to tangible results. This is, as we saw before, the reason big goals like these become so demotivating. So, for most of the big, difficult goals you’re striving for, it’s important to think not about getting closer each day to the goal, but rather, to think about doing better in your efforts toward that goal than yesterday.

In other words, what did you do today to progress towards your goal(s)? Did you do more today than you did yesterday? Focusing on your effort each day, ensuring that you do something daily to advance your goals, is the key to completely large and complex tasks.

Got any other Tour de France lessons? Let me know in the comments!

[vodpod id=Groupvideo.3078987&w=425&h=350&fv=%26rel%3D0%26border%3D0%26]

more about "Tour de France 2009 Showdown", posted with vodpod

Burning Mushroom

So I was thinking last night about how much I wanted to go up to Desiderata Festival in NY State and see Infected Mushroom but also how I probably can't really afford it and how we'd be pushing it to get there in time to catch their Friday night set. And I thought to myself, "I wonder if they're playing any other shows nearby around that time." So I looked up their tour dates for August and, alas, nothing any closer or any more convenient. Then, while I was there, I figured I'd click on "show all tour dates" just for the hell of it. And then I saw it: "Sept 3, Gerlach NV".

Holy hell, Infected Mushroom are playing at Burning Man this year!

For the uninitiated Gerlach is the tiny town that is the closest civilization to the Black Rock Desert, the site of Burning Man. There's no way IM are playing there, they could only be performing at Burning Man itself. I am, shall we say, quite excited.

IM are one of the most innovative and exciting acts on the planet, emerging from the Israeli psytrance scene and now forging new ground as some sort of hybrid psy/rock electronic band.Their new music is an obliterating blend of psytrance, rock, hip hop and, occasionally, classical. IM were the first psytrance act I really got into - their album Classical Mushroom, released in 2000, defined the genre when I first started listening to it. Their subsequent album, BP Empire, contained the first hints of how unique they would become as they started really busting out of psytrance orthodoxy, and being criticized for it by the purists, as such artists always are. The track "Dancing with Kadafi", in particular, brought in ambient and world influences, and remains one of my favourite tracks of all time. Have a listen. If you haven't heard it before you'll be glad you did.

Their subsequent albums "Converting Vegetarians", "IM The Supervisor" and "Vicious Delicious" (follow links to listen to tracks) continued a trend towards more rock (and sometimes hip hop) elements and use of percussion, instrumentation and vocals, with their current style and live show being an exhilarating blend of psytrance and metal,always maintaining an extraordinary inventiveness and disregard for music boundaries.

I've seen them three times but never outdoors. Never at bloody burning man, with ten thousand of my closest friends, flame throwers accentuating the breakdowns with massive bursts of fire over our heads, the desert stretching away into the darkness behind us, giant ducks with spotlights for eyes and fire for hair watching over us.

NB: My mental image is basically the Carl Cox gig at Opulent Temple at Burning Man last year but with better music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2k_V-57JPDk]

This is what Infected Mushroom do live:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1D9EUgHt1zE]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIMzSsrzMi4]

and, for a rawer vibe:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZV5J-9n6INo]

For those coming to Burning Man: prepare to be infected.

This year's event just get's more and more exciting as we approach the home stretch for preparations. I'll have to run down our full plans in a future post, we're all over it this year, I can't wait.