On two recent occasions I have been confronted with the realities of the information and population explosion. Sharing a meal with a well informed professional person, we have mentioned leaders in our respective fields of work, only to be faced with completely blank looks. These are social trials …. either trying to hide our shock at another’s ignorance, or even worse pretending to know who is being discussed. It can be really quite embarrassing if we don’t openly understand and acknowledge the reality of the situation. It has always happened to a certain extent, but it is getting increasingly difficult to keep up. And there is little authenticity in pretending.

In the revised Shift Happens film (below) it quotes that the amount of technical information is doubling every 2 years, there were 3000 books published today, 2.7 billion searches performed on google this month…

Which is why computers are no longer optional… and why social network sites have literally exploded. We need to manage all the connections and all the information. The truth is really quite profound. We cannot manage without people networks, where we have connections with lots and lots of other people. And with those connections can come a measure of confidence. Perhaps we don’t need to be trying desperately to absorb so much information, perhaps it is OK to let others know lots of other things we don’t . . . but are only a click or a call away?

We need people, and we need to build trusting relationships with those people in order to collaborate.

I think that that this is a truly wonderful thing.

There is certainly no doubt in my mind that self-organisation has already happened with regard social networking sites. The challenge is to design systems evolutionary enough and quickly enough to ensure their relevance . . . next week.

One of the most intriguing youtubes I’ve seen this year - students at Kansas State University and Mike Wesch (presumably the prof) put together this piece sharing some data about a group of 200 students. The result is a compelling “story” that traditional instruction is not going to cut it. Wearing my “EQ guy hat” I look at this as a cry for emotional intelligence — the need for educators and educational systems to get better at connecting w students at a deeper level and helping them capture not just facts, but also meaning! This reinforces Tessy’s post about multitasking (below).

I’m in Italy, outside Bologna in a town called Sasso Marconi. Apparently it used to be called Sasso, but after Marconi invented the radio here they changed the name to honor him.

Marconi didn’t do well in school and his father saw him as a failure. He worked for years to figure out how to send sound through radio waves — before people even really knew what radio waves are! He ended up discovering how an antenna works by accident!

So was Marconi crazy and obsessed — or brilliant and determined?

I’m enjoying working with another wonderful international group attending the emotional intelligence training certification. Mostly people from Italy, and 5 from beyond. Today we’re working on the “Give Yourself” part of our EQ model and considering how to align our daily choices with a larger sense of purpose.

Did Marconi have a Noble Goal, or was he working on the radio for some other reason? Was he Giving himself, or indulging himself? No idea! But intriguing. What does it take to change the world?