ISPI Europe Conference

Last week I was in Prague where, with my colleague Sarah Ward of ALTER Inc., I was speaking at the European Conference of ISPI (the International Society for Performance Improvement). The September edition of ISPI’s journal Performance Improvement published an article that I co-authored with Sarah and our friend and collaborator Dr. Karen Medsker on the processes required for large organisations to create a strategic approach to learning evaluation, and we were in Prague to see how those ideas fit with European business cultures.

The theme of this year’s conference was building performance into organizational culture in Europe. Presentations covered various case studies or approaches dealing with the need to increase competitiveness in the face of continued global economic pressure, and how best to improve existing job design, work processes, and organizational systems. For a small conference, there was amazing diversity in the participants – more than 40 nationalities were present. It was a little disappointing to see US speakers getting half of the air-time, though there was a concerted effort to work the lessons from existing American models into evolving European models rather than just advocate US-centric approaches. America is, after all, only America, and despite what most Americans may believe, its business culture is as unique and un-exportable as any other culture.

That said, there were many fascinating inputs from American and Canadian speakers that fuelled much discussion both in session and later over large glasses of Pilsner Urquell. Bob Evans, Director of IT Operations at France Telecom did a keynote on how he was brought in to build performance into the organizational culture of the France Telecom Group, demonstrating that often it takes someone perceived as a “crazy outsider” to shake up a calcified culture that is so habituated to its own stagnation it cannot see the advantages of change. In similar vein, Bill Daniels (author of Change-ABLE Organisation, one of the most useful books on change agentry I have ever read) talked about overcoming cultural resistance to performance improvement. His emphasis, which resonates with my ongoing focus on large-scale strategy, was on looking beyond individual performers to the system as a whole.

Other presentations covered a surprisingly broad canvas, with case studies from several eastern European countries providing a lot of practical insight into the performance challenges and solutions in developing nations.

Among the luminaries that I was delighted to get to know during the Prague meeting were Roger Kaufman, who has published an impressive 38 books on various aspects of performance improvement and is one of the most fun people I have ever spent time with at a conference; Tony Marker and Linda Huglin from Boise State, who had done some interesting work on the state of research in the performance improvement field; Mary Norris Thomas of the Fleming Group, who could be the next Celebrity Researcher; Bob Carleton who is probably the practitioners’ practitioner but shares my concern that research is moving too much toward cookery book replication and too far from rigorous case-specific craftwork; and John O’Connor of O’Connor Consulting in the UK, who spent many years earlier in his career where I grew up in Zambia (small worlds getting ever smaller). What impressed me about every conference participant that I talked with was their candour and their grounding in reality – the last thing you would expect from an organisation whose publications set very high standards and often read like doctoral theses.


Bob Carleton, Bill Daniels, and Timm Esque and his wife enjoying dinner in Prague.

I can recommend unreservedly ISPI’s European conference to anyone involved in performance improvement in their own organisations. It is a really intimate meeting where you can easily know who’s who and get to hang out and share experiences with anyone of interest – and everyone was of interest. You know you have been at a well-managed event when you look back at it and can’t quite work out how you had so many worthwhile conversations with so many people in so few days. Perhaps a key factor was that there were no vendors there, or at least none that made themselves conspicuous.

I have pretty much had it with the vast 8,000 plus conferences that I used to find so stimulating, and now prefer much smaller more focused events where you are more likely to find yourself among peers and “conferring” is more likely to happen. ISPI Europe is definitely on my calendar for next year.

Montreux and the ISWC Mothers of Invention

I have always liked Montreux. It is an idyllic lakeside town that would ooze class and opulence were oozing not just too tackily post-19th century. Its olde-worlde feel is overlayed with a general bearing of grace, politeness, and pleasure in service which is neither too obsequious nor too begrudging. When I lived in Switzerland in the 80’s and 90’s, I visited Montreux often en route to or from the neighbouring town of Vevy (home to the international headquarters of Nestlé and Philip Morris), and, as in the rest of the country, not a lot seems to have changed. Tipping is still considered vulgar; people still don’t walk on red at pedestrian crossings; the stores still close for lunch; and the trains still run on time.

Lounging below vine-covered hillsides at the eastern end of Lac Léman (that’s Lake Geneva to the non-Vaudoise), Montreux is the kind of resort town that Merchant Ivory would set movies in, had E. M. Forster ever written stories based there, and, of course, had Ismail Merchant not recently gone to join the choir invisible. As has Freddy Mercury, who loved the town and apparently lived out his last years there, his loyalty being rewarded by an appropriately larger-than-life statue of him jutting out his butt and punching the air in triumph as he glares across the lake at France.

Creative types have always been attracted to Montreux. Lord Byron was inspired by the nearby lakeside castle to write The Prisoner of Chillon whose opening line “Eternal spirit of the chainless mind!” could be the T-shirt slogan of the blognoscenti. Queen owns a recording studio in the Montreux. Deep Purple burned down the casino while recording there some 35 years ago (actually, it was a fire that broke out during a concert by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention), inspiring Smoke on the Water, the guitar riff from which is also commemorated in a lakeside sculpture. David Bowie has a home in Montreux, though nobody in the town would be so indiscrete as to tell you where. Every summer a horde of jazz musicians and fans descends on the town for the amazingly wonderful Montreux Jazz Festival. Where else, as I was lucky to do one year, can you see onstage in one evening Deedee Bridgewater, Van Morrison, Georgie Fame, Santana, and John McClaughlin each playing their own sets and then jamming till the early hours with many other musical legends who are in town to listen and play?


Freddy does Montreux

This year another black-clad crowd of unconventional but somewhat geekier Mothers of Invention descended on the town to enjoy the engineering equivalent of jazz. While the inventors of the air guitar T-shirt were missing from the Montreux symposium, a few hundred other engineering students, professors, policy makers, industrialists, and techno-hucksters from all over the globe converged for a few days of future-gazing, presenting the improvisations, concepts and experiments that must surely be at one of the bloodier edges of bleeding-edge thinking.

The International Symposium on Wearable Computing melded out-of-this-world engineering, ergonomics, and human-computer interfaces with some of the more intense needs for performance improvement that exist in the real world: The GPS-linked head-up-display on fire-fighters’ visors that guides them out of smoke-filled buildings; the doctor’s hospital note taking system that works on arm gestures so as not to take attention away from the patient (pity the unfortunate patient seeing a doctor repeatedly making a sign of the cross at his bedside); the scary guy who uses his skin as a conductor to send 2 Megabits per second of data across his body, eliminating the need for iPod headphone cables; the see-through eyeglass displays and motion-sensing wrist bands that train auto-workers to install headlamps. The theory sessions, covering topics like “Humans – A Tutorial,” were even more mind-bending than the practice sessions.

For someone like me who is engaged at the application and performance impact end of technology, it was fascinating and a little humbling to spend a couple of days in the company of the brilliant minds that actually have to conceive, design, and build the revolutionary tools in the first place.

International Symposium on Wearable Computing (ISWC)

A couple of days ago I was a guest at IEEE’s annual International Symposium on Wearable Computing (ISWC), held this year in Montreux, Switzerland. I was there to judge entries for the annual ISWC Design Competition, and to award the check and prestigious IEEE trophy.

As the sponsor of this year’s competition, I chose to set a challenge that took the thinking away from designing ultra-expensive cyborgian machines for ultra-niche purposes and instead focused on designing ultra-cheap solutions for ultra-mass markets. I wanted to see if anyone could come up with a design for using already existing devices and infrastructures to facilitate education and training in developing countries where computers (and even electricity) are simply unavailable and where a month of web access costs typically more than the annual per capita income.

Though I did not say so in the brief, for some time I have been advocating the idea of using mobile phones (that most ubiquitous of wearable computers) and the extensive wireless phone infrastructures for core literacy and basic business education. While MIT and others are making great strides toward the $100 computer, that’s an idea whose usefulness is severely undermined by the difficulty of distributing the device and the general lack of electrical power or conventional internet access in those areas where such a machine might be most desirable. The cell phone, on the other hand, is everywhere already and it’s already connected.


Jose Gonzales explains his team's entry to Paul Lukowicz, ISWC Chair.

The winning entry was submitted by a team of graduate engineering students from Florida headed by Jose Gonzales, whose day-job is designing data-acquisition systems for aircraft in the US military. If a sign of true creative genius is the ability to dramatically reverse your perspective and still stay clear and focused, Jose is a very impressive intellect. I’d be a little concerned that I liked his design simply because it aligned rather well with my own vision, but the other judges concurred unanimously that the entry was streets ahead of the competitors. The conceptual technical design approach was well-researched, elegant, cheap, and pretty much ready to roll. Now we need the content, instructional design, a little political will, and some kind of sponsorship for both the development and the running of the phone-based learning service.



In essence, the design takes advantage of the ubiquity of GPRS (its coverage around the world is remarkably comprehensive) and its data rate of 115kbps, which is more than adequate for sending text and speech in various configurations. This is complemented by the ubiquity of devices – in places like Kebira in Kenya, more than 8 out of ten people have access to a mobile phone, though they may not have electricity or running water. Hand cranks can provide charges, or for a few cents people recharge their phones from someone running a small street-corner generator. Put your content through a free open-source Java tool that configures it so it will work and look good on any of more than 500 different phone models, and you are (at least in theory) ready to teach.

But what is the economic model? It should be possible, given the low entry cost, to get large corporations, NGOs, or even governments to front the cash for development of the content, and to subsidise the delivery. Large corporations have a vested interest in getting involved in such projects, in part because they believe in good corporate citizenship, and in part because it’s a great marketing opportunity. In fact I had a brief conversation with a Nokia representative after I had made the award announcement, and he was keen to take the discussion further. Watch this space