The next post in my Introduction to the Enneagram series is up now on Successful Blog - The Head Types.

The series so far:

0. Introduction

1. What is the Enneagram and Why Should You Care?

2. The Heart Types

3. The Head Types

Thanks to Sandy Renshaw for the illustrations.

Have a look at this inspiring interview with Eric Poetschacher, founder of the Shapeshifters network for creative professionals.

Eric is an amazing guy - how many people do you know who have researched the creative industries in Africa, let alone gone there to meet the creatives and connect them up with like-minded professionals across the globe? He has a very unusual vision - there aren’t too many social networking platforms out there deliberately trying to stay small. And he’s got the energy and passion to make things happen - he’s been on the road for over a year, meeting creatives face to face and building his network one person at a time.

Watching this video, I had the same feeling of lightness and vertigo I had when I first read about something called ‘internet’ that was going to connect up all the computers on the planet. Shapeshifters is doing something similar for creative professionals all over the world, not just the fashionable creative hotspots like Paris, New York, Tokyo and (ahem) London.

Last time I spoke to Eric, he told me that the Shapeshifters website was just the tip of the iceberg. Frankly I wouldn’t be surprised if he unveiled a spacecraft he’s been quietly building in a disused warehouse in the middle of nowhere.

The next post in my Introduction to the Enneagram series is up now on Successful Blog - The Heart Types.

The series so far:

Introduction

1. What is the Enneagram and Why Should You Care?

2. The Heart Types

Thanks to Sandy Renshaw for the illustrations.

Liz Strauss has kindly invited me to write a guest series, An Introduction to the Enneagram for Successful Blog. The first of six posts is online now - What is the Enneagram and Why Should You Care?, the rest will appear over the next couple of weeks (schedule here).

Special thanks to Sandy Renshaw who has done some great illustrations for the series.

What’s the Enneagram? That’s what the series is about - go have a look.

Let’s just say it could change your life.

If you’re visiting from Successful Blog I know you’re used to good hospitality from Liz, so I thought I’d take a moment to introduce myself and my blog.

I’m a poet and business coach living in London and specialising in work with professional artists, creatives and companies in the creative industries.

This blog is a place for me to share my enthusiasms about creativity, coaching and creative business. Although it’s aimed primarily at creative professionals, I hope it will appeal to anyone with an interest in people and creativity. Any questions, please feel free to leave a comment or e-mail me.

Excellent panel presentations/discussion at last week’s Wired and Ready event at Channel 4.

Adam Gee was the chair and kicked off with an overview, from his position as Factual New Media Commissioner at C4, of some of the channel’s current online initiatives, such as the Big Art Mob project to create a user-generated map of public art in the UK, and 121 which features paired blog exchanges between the UK and countries including Iran, Russia and Sierra Leone. He also talked about Four Docs, a space for watching, sharing and making documentaries. This dovetailed with Emily Renshaw’s presentation about Current TV, billed as ‘the TV network created by the people who watch it’. Both sites rely heavily on user-generated content, but it was interesting to hear both Adam and Emily distinguish them from YouTube by describing them as ‘editorialized’ spaces. As an editor myself, I was intrigued by this - it seemed to go against the prevailing ‘wisdom of crowds’ ethos of many of the Web 2.0 success stories. So I asked them how they saw the role of the editor in the brave new internet world. Both acknowledged the value of greater interactivity between the editor and readers/users/creators, and saw this as an opportunity for editors. For Emily, the editor’s role will be to “set the tone, take a lead and curate” content in dialogue with users; while Adam emphasised the importance of the editor as a filter of information in a world of overwhelming data, who can become a trusted source of recommendations.

The second half featured James Kirkham of digital agency Holler and James Fabricant, Head of Marketing and Content for MySpace UK & Ireland. Both were enthusiastic advocates of online communities, exemplified in their recent collaboration on the groundbreaking campaign for Channel 4’s Skins, which fostered a massive community of fans on the Skins MySpace page before a single episode had been broadcast. Though understandably vigorous advocates of the possibilities of technology, they emphasised the primacy of human interaction and creativity. James K summed it up by saying that for all the technological wizardry, you still need a “blinding idea” to cut through. James F provided an example of one such idea, with Foureyedmonsters, who overcame the barriers to distribution of their film by using MySpace to get people to sign petitions to have the film shown in their local cinema, then took the numbers to the cinema owners and arranged the screenings.

Overall, a very stimulating evening that for me reinforced the sense that human creativity and relationships rather than technology per se is the real powerhouse behind the social media revolution. As James K put it, “technology facilitates, the audience creates”.

Thanks to Channel 4 for hosting and to Steve Moore of Policy Unplugged for organising yet another absorbing event.

Technorati Tags: Channel 4, Policy Unplugged

I was delighted to receive an e-mail from David Parrish this week, telling me he’s releasing his book T-Shirts and Suits as a free e-book.

T-Shirts and Suits is a ‘guide to the business of creativity’ and does an excellent job of making business advice ‘user-friendly’ for creative entrepreneurs. For a start, the eye-catching design means it doesn’t look like a business book. Inside, David addresses the basic subjects at the core of any creative business - marketing, intellectual property, accounting, business feasibility, leadership and management - in a way that makes them accessible and relevant to people who are creatives by choice and business people by necessity. It’s also one of the very few books on creative business to use the word ‘coaching’ in a management context - for which it receives an honourable mention in my forthcoming research paper.

I asked David what had prompted him to write the book:

“I’ve been designing and delivering training workshops for creative entrepreneurs for some years now and the book grew out of my training material. T-Shirts and Suits is a condensation of what I’ve picked up from my own experience, great ideas from creative enterprises I have worked with, combined with some business techniques I learnt at business school and from other research. I want to share my experience and knowledge with creative people who want to learn more about business to make their creative enterprises even more successful. The book has proved to be a great way to do this.”

Having gone to all the trouble of writing the book and getting it published, I wondered why he was prepared to give it away for free?

“There has been an interesting debate in the publisher’s offices about releasing a free e-book version. Some people believe that giving away a free e-book could kill book sales, whereas others see the e-book as a way to actually increase sales of the paperback. My own view is that it will help sales, but even if it doesn’t, it’s not my main concern. The bottom line for me is to share what I’ve experienced and learnt with as many creative people as possible - and to continue to learn from successful creative enterprises and feed it back into the world-wide network through my website, training, consultancy, and further publishing projects.”

As Seth Godin puts it, “ideas that spread, win”. And Seth has done a pretty good job of spreading ideas and selling books by giving them away for free. I hope it works for David as his ideas are much-needed for anyone trying to run a business fuelled by creativity. So if that’s you, I would download the e-book for free before you get stuck into today’s spreadsheets.

More good news - David is also sharing his ideas on his excellent blog.

Here’s my contribution to the Interesting2007 presentations - lined up next to Russell and Johnnie as one of Deb Khan’s little helpers. Deb did an excellent session - I won’t call it a ‘talk’ as she involved everyone in the audience, getting us to talk and listen to each other and then notice what we naturally find memorable. She’s blogged it as Why Do We Listen?, a subject near to every coach’s heart.

Elsewhere Andrew has blogged his great presentation on the theme what makes you useless also makes you good. There are also roundups of the day from fellow creative coach Emily, a ‘director’s cut’ version from Ben, and the heavyweight analysis from Grant. And here’s Charles on the moment we both realised Blogging is the New Tamagotchi.

Photo courtesy Mrs WT.

Having looked at the big picture of Coaching and Leadership, I’m now going to focus on the small picture of the key skills involved in coaching.

Most of these appear on any standard list of coaching skills, with one or two additions of my own. Some of them, such as goal-setting or giving feedback, are to some extent susceptible to being broken down into discrete steps and taught; others, such as empathising and intuiting, are abilities that a coach naturally possesses, or which emerge over time as a result of practising the other skills.

Goal-setting

Coaching is a goal-focused (or solution-focused) approach, so the ability to elicit clear, well-defined and emotionally engaging goals from a coachee is one of the most important skills for a coach to possess. Like many aspects of coaching, there are both formal and informal aspects of this ability. On the formal side, a coach needs to know how and when to introduce goal-setting into the coaching process, and will usually be familiar with models such as SMART goals (a SMART goal is Specific, Measurable, Attractive, Realistic and Timed). On the informal side, a coach will typically have the habit of thinking and asking questions from a goal-focused mindset. For example, “How does doing x help you reach your goal?” helps the coachee to evaluate whether what she is doing will help or hinder her.

Another common habit of a good coach is reframing problems as goals - e.g. if a coachee talks about the problems he his having with a ‘difficult’ colleague, the coach might ask “What needs to be happening for you to have a workable relationship with this person?”.

Looking

A good deal is rightly written about the importance of listening in coaching, but looking is often (ahem) overlooked. When running coaching skills seminars, I often say to the trainee coaches “The answer is right in front of you”. Meaning that the person’s body language tells you a huge amount about her emotional state and level of commitment, yet it’s so easy to ignore that if we are too focused on our own ideas about what needs to happen next. Read the rest of this entry »

Amazing day yesterday at Interesting2007. It did exactly what it said on the tin: over 20 speakers on a hot stuffy day, yet I don’t recall being bored at any stage. Several talks in I realised why - we were basically being treated to a line-up of people enthusing about their passions and obsessions, and it’s hard not to find that interesting, whatever the subject - enthusiasm is contagious, after all.

Then it struck me that it’s a short step from interesting to inspiration. If you’re interested in something, you want to know more about it, or do more of it. And hearing so many people talk about what they find interesting, you start to feel inspired to go out and do stuff yourself - not necessarily the same as them, but more of the things you find interesting. So if we can persuade Russell to do it next year maybe he should call it Inspiring2008.

I’ll probably blog some of the more (ahem) interesting bits later on, but in the meanwhile here are some of the things I learned yesterday:

• In the 1930’s Superman was accompanied by a flying dog called Krypto
• Lady Patricia was the world’s first beertanker
• Cities are slow computers
• Knots were invented in the 19th century by witches
• Bagpuss was originally pitched to the BBC as ‘a stuffed cat in an antique shop’
• If you want to make a really good erotic film, you need to serve a hot meal
• You can change the world for a fiver
• Kermit the frog began his career as a killer
• Short is hard
• For children, learning styles are less important than ‘playability’
• Geography is the next big thing
• Top class swimmers are like albatrosses - ungainly on the land, but in their element elsewhere

A big thank you to Russell and all the speakers for treating us to such a delightful smorgasbord. My brain is now officially full.

There are already 489 photos on Flickr tagged Interesting2007. This page on the wiki has links to video as well. Here’s the Interesting2007 tag on Technorati so you can follow what other bloggers made of it.

Technorati Tags: interesting2007

More bad news - not only is China about to eat our creative industries for breakfast, but according to Discontents, a new report by think-tank Demos argues that the UK Government “doesn’t understand” the creative industries. Which is a bit of poke in the eye for a government that aspires to be a world leader in creative industries policy.

Discontents reports that Branwell Johnson reports that the Demos report reports that the government is “confused” about how to support creative businesses:

Demos argues that the standard approaches designed for traditional industries will not work with the creative sector. It points out that firms in this sector typically have less than 10 workers and rely on freelance activity.

It’s not a new argument, but it will be interesting to see the report itself when it’s published next Tuesday 19th June. There’s a launch event featuring Feargal Sharkey at the British Film Institute - last time I checked there were still free places available. I’ll be there - drop me an e-mail if you’re coming and want to meet up.