From former Vice President of Growth at Facebook.
I shared this via Twitter last month and it became my most clicked / retweeted / liked tweet of 2017:
For anyone who had ‘leaving Facebook’ as their New Years resolution this year, this might help:
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2017 Review | Embracing The Mess
Taking stock and taking bold new paths.
2017 was a good year.
Gloriously messy and varied, but good:
- established and self-financed two new conferences in the capital: Speaking with Purpose and Creative Leadership NZ;
- spoke at several events and gatherings, including: NetSquared Wellington Unconference, Eagle Labs in the UK, TramShed Tech in UK, the Rotary Forum 2017 Wellington Event, Work In Progress, Open Data in NZ meetup talking about wisdom plus two guest lectures at Massey University on public speaking;
- provided speaking coaching to three senior executives (two still on-going), a Dame plus two groups sessions for two different clients;
- did a seven date NZ tour for librarians coaching them social media skills;
- was licensee for two TEDx events: led the TEDxWellington 2017 which was the biggest TEDx event ever for the capital plus created the first ever TEDxWomen event to have gender parity in the audience (oh and got interviewed regarding our 2016 TEDxWellington approach of keeping speakers and venue a secret as well);
- designed, developed and facilitated events for The Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) and Wellington Regional Economic Development Agency (WREDA);
- delivered my fourth year as a mentor for the Digital Marketing Academy, did another social media consulting day with Christchurch Art Gallery, and also had a few months consulting contract with the good humans at Community Research NZ;
- was nominated as a Wellingtonian of the year finalist.
The focus of 2018 will be about building a body of work and new brand relating to my producing and coaching services. These have been the major themes this past decade as well as aligning with my hunger to be more creative and human (less digital).
The aim is to ‘create wealth that matters’, going beyond just financial and into the realm of radical collaborations, crafty collisions of sectors and new experiences, which in turn (I’m hoping), will lead to more speaking gigs.
Here’s to a wonderful end to the year, a messy new year. Be kind to others and gentler with yourself, remember:
“We’re all just walking each other home.”
Ram Dass
Not much blogging (compared to previous years) but here’s what else I offered the world:
- Open Letter To Air New Zealand | Designing For Privacy First—challenging a great airline to put privacy first (and looking like affecting change as well);
- Top Ten Speaking Tips | Revisited And Revised—dusting off some old wisdom and tidying up the edges;
- New Zealand Is Calling | Land Of The Long White Cloud & Opportunity—the different ways to get your bum here;
- Goodbye Facebook | A Failed Social Media Utility That Is Succeeding In Other Ways—finally walking away from a terrible social media platform;
- Improving Eventbrite | Enabling RSS Feeds—a great idea which never got a response;
- Three Little Words Which Spark Creativity | Foundational Thinking Of Creatives—sharing some thinking about the conditions for creativity;
- How You Can Help LinkedIn Not Suck | The Invited Power Of The User—aiding users to assist a social platform to make it useful;
Related post: 2016 Darkens | 2017 Lightens
Creative Leadership NZ 2017 | Reflections & Insights
Starting a creative leadership movement in NZ.
Last week, the (sold out) inaugural Creative Leadership NZ conference brought together 14 speakers / facilitators and 150 attendees for:
Two days of ideas / insights into inspiring and managing the creative process / people which leads to innovation.
The event took about four and half months to organise and featured 6x keynotes, 5x different workshops, 4x idea-bombs, and 1x jazz trio (for the first day), plus 3x two-hour masterclasses which were repeated (for the second day).
In an attempt to learn out loud here are my takeaways:
Stats
As you can see from above we had a healthy gender representation of females. 15% of attendees were from outside of Wellington and overall there was representation from 70 cross-sector organisations (judging by email addresses):
Paying Folks
Just like at Speaking with Purpose 2017 earlier this year, nearly every one of the speakers / facilitators got remunerated in some way (some wouldn’t / couldn’t take payment). Everyone also got a plus one for the event to gift on as they pleased.
Thank you Aithan, CoLiberate (Bop, Jody, Sarah), Elysa, Emilie, Gareth, Gus, Mark, Nick, Pavani, Ruth, Victoria for being so generous in your time and for sharing your wisdom.
Gus Balbontin
Investor – Founder – Advisor
Former Executive Director at Lonely Planet, Co-founder of SneakySurf, Director at Roshambo, Entrepreneur in Residence at Vic Uni.
Bop Murdoch / Sarah Tuck / Jody Burrell
CoLiberate
Creators of Wellington’s first Gym for mental wellbeing, the CoLiberate team are leaders in personal and professional mindhealth.
Victoria Spackman
Director Te Auaha
Making safe spaces for creative types to flourish at Te Auaha – New Zealand Institute of Creativity.
Pavani Rao Boddapati
CG Supervisor at Weta Digital
Pavani has over 12 years of experience in visual effects for film and has worked on numerous projects including Avatar, Planet of the Apes and The Hobbit trilogy.
Emilie Fetscher
MC / Design Strategist
Collaborator in residence for design-focused leaders and currently consumed as an accidental entrepreneur at StrataMap.
Aithan Shapira, MFA PhD
Founder + Leadership Strategist
Founder @ Making to Think. Lecturer @ MIT Sloan. Aithan builds leaders’ creative instincts using time- and science-tested techniques from the arts to expand perceptions and accelerate solutions.
Elysa Fenenbock
Designer-in-residence at Google
At Google she facilitates human-centered design processes & spearheads social impact programs. In Creative Nomad Project, she leads global organizations to foster creativity in education & sustainable impact. Also lectures at Stanford d.school.
DK
Producer / Speaker / Advisor
TEDxWellington licensee. Producer of many events. Speaker coach. Creative Welly founder. Arts Marketing Academy Mentor.
Nick Kapica
Designer
Design Lead at Wellington City Council. Passionate about people, design and the urban environment. Looks after brand and pushes design deep into council.
Gareth Parry
Designer
Gareth Parry is a partner in PwC’s Experience Centre. Gareth has experience in architecture, learning design, digital advertising, infography, human centered design, and event creation.
Ruth Keiry
Designer
Ruth Keiry runs PwC’s Wellington Sandbox. She’s framed, designed, and facilitated dozens of collaborative spaces.
Mark Bradford
BeWeDō® practitioner
Founder of BeWeDō® + Senior Lecturer at Massey University, School of Design. #BeWeDō is a unique motion-led creative leadership experience.
Finances
This was privately funded venture (even though many were approached for sponsorship / support) and delivered under the Creative Welly initiative.
The only external financial support came from the US Embassy and Australian High Commission who provided funds to cover most of the overseas expenses for Aithan, Elysa and Gus.
Other support came from Wellington Chocolate Factory who offered some gift packs for the speakers / facilitators plus our wonderful venue hosts The Roxy Cinema for a little discount for returning and booking the whole place out for two days.
The event cost $55k to run although I achieved the goal of just about doubling the profit of the Speaking with Purpose 2017 event.
Extra Costs
The ‘Creative Care Packs’ included: a printed brochure / agenda (with poster of creative leadership quotes on back), name badge, post-it notes, spare paper, Airline 210 medium black pen plus a bar of custom made chocolate for sustenance. These were given out to all attendees upon arrival and cost approx $3k.
There were items which wasn’t first budgeted for including fees for the jazz trio and the extra chairs to ensure preferred execution of the workshop experience, plus added material costs for the masterclasses / workshops.
Additional extras included nearly $2.5k on external lighting and sound / mics (to improve the experience) as well as paying my pal Emilie Fetscher for her MCing duties.
DIY (Kind Of) Rules
A few services were traded and registrations swapped against programme / brochure design plus the photos and main video on the top of this post.
Again, I didn’t use a ticketing service and invoiced everyone individually to both save on ticketing fees (as every ticketing provider holds on to the monies until after the event) whilst also creating the working capital needed for pay for venues and other costs.
The other things I personally undertook were:
- design, content and copy for the website
- all email newsletters and attendees communication
- venue discussions, deliberations, decisions etc
- all speaker and event curation
- badge design (see below)
I also crafted extra content for promotion. These little ‘visual pearls’ were insights into what each speaker / facilitator will be bringing to the conference (example):
Here are all the Twitter versions: Aithan, Coliberate, DK, Elysa, Gareth, Gus, Mark, Nick, Ruth, Victoria.
Marketing & Sales
I tried to engage support in this area and spoke to half a dozen people in Wellington. Two didn’t respond, another three were busy and one agency priced themselves way above what was briefed.
Had some lovely support from several organisations in featuring the event and opportunity through their social channels.
One thing I did this time was spend time talking to gatekeepers within of organisations: business development, head of marketing, team leaders, CEOs etc. Those who are considering the larger impact of their brand plus who have direct access to monies.
From this I gained there’s not a lot of consideration given to leadership development and / or budgets set aside for professional development. Maybe something to remedy by highlighting the opportunity earlier in the year for future budgetary considerations.
Learnings
Three big takeaways from this event are:
- Variety is key—the mix of 20min keynotes interlaces with 5min ‘idea-bombs’ ensured the event had pace and diversity of subjects / voice. More choice was available through the workshops which were a mix of physical, hands-on plus in-depth and participatory. A strategy which paid off and which was reflected in the positive feedback received;
- Sales support is needed—as a builder and curator I want to continue to craft incredible events. The deficit I have is in my interest in pursuing sales. The need to find a sales partner with ethical core values (get in touch if that’s you and can prove it) will be something to develop;
- Sponsorship—additional funding would grow the conference and reach of participants (from outside the region). Some of this funding would go into the marketing plus fund the sales support and the rest into sharpening up other elements.
Future
Encouraging and nurturing creative literacies plus leadership talent here in Wellington is part of the larger Creative Welly initiative, however, conversations are already starting with other regions in the country who have expressed an interest in hosting future events.
Connections are also already being made with potential sponsors for next years event as this is definitely something I’d like to replicate if the city and attendee base is willing.
Related post: Speaking with Purpose 2017 | Reflections On Running A Successful Conference
How You Can Help LinkedIn Not Suck | The Invited Power Of The User
Don’t let the algorithms decide what’s important.
Over the past year or so LinkedIn has been dwindling in its usefulness in regards to showing me what people are posting / sharing / writing about. My feed has become littered with stuff from days ago and from folks I’m not connected to (although which others in my network have commented on or liked):
The only option users have to control their feed is ‘top’ (which are suggested posts based on algorithms) and ‘recent’ (which is new posts plus more featured things again someone in your respected network has commented on which you probably won’t care about etc.). UPDATE 25.2.25 : this option is gone now and from what I can make out only the ‘top’ algorithmic chosen content is now available, at least for me.
As the top image shows, I contacted LinkedIn recently and then got invited to complete a form (because for some reason asking on Twitter is not the same?). I finally got a response back saying the solution would be to hide a person to stop seeing the things they comment on or like. This obviously would also hide anything else they will post which was the opposite point of the whole exercise.
In the same response though was also this:
When many of our members ask for the same improvement, we try our best to get it done.
And what followed was the suggestion to do this “by clicking any “Feedback” link on the right side of your homepage. This will send your comments directly to the appropriate team.”
Unfortunately it’s not that simple as LinkedIn hide this away. After a little searching though here’s how to do it (see gif below—you have to click ‘more’):
If you use this platform I invite you to join me in submitting the suggestion to have granular control of your feed (even though it says they will not get back to you regarding your feedback which is a little dismissive). To aid the effort, just cut and paste the following (don’t forget to add your name though and a little line to personalise it to ensure it goes through and is not marked as spam):
Hello LinkedIn – I’d like to have control over what I see in my feed please. The current functionality doesn’t increase engagement although this simple addition would clean up the feed, foster goodwill whilst also provide a differentiator to FaceBook. It would also show trust in us as users to understand what we want to see.
Thanks for playing and realising again these platforms do want to hear from us the users on how to not make their services suck. Help LinkedIn!
TEDxWellingtonWomen 2017 | Building On Wellingtons Diversity
Championing difference through spaces for understanding and extending the gender discourse.
Having attended TEDxWomen events in the past I was keen to explore how we could create a broader audience to ensure the ideas worth spreading did just that, spread. Pitching the TEDxWellingtonWomen volunteer team our event should aim to have a gender balance (which nobody in the world has ever done before) was audacious—as shown above, we did it!
Work In Progress | Why Everything And Nothing Has Changed
24 hours out got invited to add my voice to the Work In Progress conference.
I followed my friend Kaila Colbin as she wonderfully made heads spin about the exponential growth in technologies using the Singularity University lens (and her role as Ambassador). My part was to continue the discussion with (another pal) and MC, Sarb Johal on stage for the 300+ attendees.
The main thrust of this section of the conference was digital disruption, something which for over a decade I’ve been delivering services around relating to social and digital media. And even with the newer concepts of AI, automation, big data etc. already shared, I mainly focused on the need for understanding the importance of creating work cultures which amplify curiosity, celebrate learning, plus cultivate audacity and exploration:
“The feedback we had about DK’s “Reflections” component was all extremely positive and people were talking about the Digital Disruption Topic late into the night whilst referring to the ideas he brought up, along with Sarb and the video presentation from Kaila as well – DK’s contribution certainly hit the mark.”
John Dow, Director of “Work in Progress – Wellington’s New Collar Future” Conference
Three Little Words Which Spark Creativity | Foundational Thinking Of Creatives
Every creative act starts with an act of vulnerability evidenced by three little words:
I.
Don’t.
Know.
Many state the above as line in the sand, a closing down of conversation, a refusal to explore further.
Others get excited, and lean forwards, hungry for adventure, ready to fail forwards.
These are the creatives!
Whether it be composing an orchestral piece in 10minutes from nothing:
Collaborating on a dance piece when you can’t speak each others language:
Drawing blind to spark an abstract drawing piece:
…this is the imaginative mindset at work.
When mixed with curated ideas and experience plus audacity and mad curiousity, its forms the most delicious path to potential.
Whether you’re starting a business, leading a team, beginning at a new organisation, figuring out the next steps in life, or shaping a city-wide initiative to infuse a city with creative literacies…
…saying “I don’t know” more often is a rallying cry to creative action.
Registrations Open For Creative Leadership NZ | Book Your Spot Now!
After many months of development am honoured to announce Creative Leadership NZ:
Two days of ideas / insights into inspiring and managing the creative process / people which leads to innovation.
SOLD OUT
On 27th-28th November, will be heading back to The Roxy Cinema (as they hosted us so well at the beginning of the year for Speaking With Purpose).
The pedigree of the speaker / facilitator line-up is brain-tingling impressive:
Gus BalbontinInvestor – Founder – AdvisorFormer Executive Director at Lonely Planet, Co-founder of SneakySurf, Director at Roshambo, Entrepreneur in Residence at Vic Uni. |
Bop Murdoch / Sarah Tuck / Jody BurrellCoLiberateCreators of Wellington’s first Gym for mental wellbeing, the CoLiberate team are leaders in personal and professional mindhealth. |
Victoria SpackmanDirector Te AuahaMaking safe spaces for creative types to flourish at Te Auaha – New Zealand Institute of Creativity. |
Pavani Rao BoddapatiCG Supervisor at Weta DigitalPavani has over 12 years of experience in visual effects for film and has worked on numerous projects including Avatar, Planet of the Apes and The Hobbit trilogy. |
Emilie FetscherMC / Design StrategistCollaborator in residence for design-focused leaders and currently consumed as an accidental entrepreneur at StrataMap. |
Aithan Shapira, MFA PhDFounder + Leadership StrategistFounder @ Making to Think. Lecturer @ MIT Sloan. Aithan builds leaders’ creative instincts using time- and science-tested techniques from the arts to expand perceptions and accelerate solutions. |
Elysa FenenbockCreative NomadDesigner-in-residence at Google. |
DKProducer / Speaker / Advisor@TEDxWellington licensee. @swpconf creator. @creativewelly founder. @amadigital mentor. |
Nick KapicaDesign LeadDesign, customer insight, and strategy, also interested in collaborating, teaching design and innovation. |
Gareth ParryDesignerGareth Parry is a partner in PwC’s Experience Centre. Gareth has experience in architecture, learning design, digital advertising, infography, human centered design, and event creation. |
Ruth KeiryDesignerRuth Keiry runs PwC’s Wellington Sandbox. She’s framed, designed, and facilitated dozens of collaborative spaces. |
Mark BradfordBeWeDō® practitionerFounder of BeWeDō® + Senior Lecturer at Massey University, School of Design. #BeWeDō is a unique motion-led creative leadership experience. |
SOLD OUT
And here are the cheap-as-chips prices:
[stag_button url=”http://creativeleadership.nz” style=”green” size=”large” type=”normal” target=”_self” icon=”” icon_order=”before” align=”center”]REGISTER NOW[/stag_button]
See you there and please assist in spreading the news to your colleagues / friends / peers / family / communities etc.
We Are All Just Stars That Have People Names | Gif Inspiration
Improving Eventbrite | Enabling RSS Feeds
Bringing back foundational social web standards.
Eventbrite is one of the most popular event listing sites and is a solid platform on all fronts.
Have used it during my time establishing and managing a city-wide activation programme plus also for our TEDxWellingtonSalons (community events).
The one thing you can’t do with Eventbrite is subscribe in any way to an event organisers profile so you’re kept up to date with their listings. There’s an option to “save events you’re interested in” which is not the same, although the issue with that is folks still have to log in to see that one event and it’s only in one place.
During my recent LIANZA social media tour where I was introducing folks to the magnificent wonders of RSS, I jumped into Eventbrite to subscribe to listings. Alas, couldn’t be done.
Now this functionality could be folded in across organisers profiles with a little coding / development time, along with an addition of a little RSS icon (next to the current social icons), then a blog post and email announcement to guarantee awareness. I’d wager doing this would see an increase in click throughs to the site as clever folks would start to utilise this new (old) functionality.
So, what do you say Eventbrite, want to improve your platform for us souls who still want to use a foundational core of the social web? People who could then use these feeds with other platforms like IFTTT or Flipboard etc. as well…?