First Tuttle Breakfast
April 23, 2008 by Lloyd Davis
We gathered at OneAlfredPlace this morning for coffee, tea, juice and pastries and lots and lots of conversation. Thanks very much to Steve Moore for making the introduction and to Rob Shreeve for making us so welcome. If anyone’s interested in joining OneAlfredPlace, please let me know and I’ll pass on the details - as it’s been hinted to me that we might secure a small discount if people sign as a result of today. sorry, completely my misunderstanding and misperception - that’s not on the cards after all, but don’t let that stop you signing up 
My regret with it was that I didn’t actually get to take part in any of the larger conversations, though I was grateful to meet a bunch of new people face to face too. I’d love it if people could say something either on the wiki or their own blogs about what they talked about, if only for me to find out
Thanks very much to Dan and Rob for doing last-minute impromptu provocations and I’m sorry (though secretly glad) that I didn’t let them know how exposing that role was going to be beforehand.
From memory I think we had conversations about:
Building a list of interesting folk to talk to BERR (Jane O’Loughlin)
Combining relentless creativity with social media (Steve Lawson)
Turning your passion into something that makes money (Pippa Crawford & Dan McQuillan)
Finding new clients online (Rebecca Caroe)
Business podcasting (Mike O’Hara)
Organisation Lite (David Wilcox & Jemima Gibbons)
but there were lots of little seedling conversations in between and I’m glad to say, a reasonable amount of use of the “law of two feet”.
Just the first - not bad at all, by my “first post always sucks” benchmark
Lloyd - thanks to you, Steve and Rob for another piece of impromptu creativity. You make it look so easy
We did indeed discuss organisation lite. On the one hand we were taking inspiration from the open source movement which has evolved ways of organising without heavy-weight structures … on the other hand recognising that when it comes to taking leases, employing people and so on, the State places on us various responsibilities and regulations that can’t easily be avoided.
In both cases you need leadership, and varying degrees of trust and collaboration. If structure and regulation is lite, trust and collaborative commitment is doubly important.
I thought that Anecdote recently provided us with a useful framework in their white paper on teams, communities and networks - blogged here http://tinyurl.com/5mdh4j at the Membership Project where we are discussing these issues.
The key question for me, is how to make practical progress on this through our voluntary contribution to Tuttle evolution. I think it might be done by blending what someone called primary and secondary purpose and and interest. That is, we’ll do something for Tuttle and the cafe if it also has some spin offs for our businesses, networks, organisations.
How about a workshop where we play through the Tuttle development scenario - taking on property, recruiting members, setting up a company (or something) - in a way that provides useful insights for other organisational development. See if we can interest a social media lawyer and some other professionals interested in connecting with us. It would be another step in prototyping.
Organisation, lite or otherwise, comes after considering context, purpose, stakeholders, and a host of other factors. I think the best way to deal with the complexity is to get some experienced people into the same room and play it through. As well as prototyping organisation we could be fulfilling the learning aims of Tuttle too.
Hope this helps - and that Jemima and others from the group will add/amend.
Big thanks to Lloyd for organising and David for our conversation summary.
It was a great morning and, once over my disappointment that the glamourous Stephanie Powers (sic) wasn’t coming, it was great to have a chat with David, Adriana and others about ‘organisation lite’.
My particular interest is in the ‘zen’ or ‘quiet’ leader who acts as an enabler - working skillfully behind the scenes to bring out the best in others - Lloyd himself is a good example, in fact.
Is this type of personality essential in loosely-structured organisations, and is it possible for more heavy-handed, ego-driven leaders to ‘learn’ the art of zen?
[...] Tuttle Club gathered again yesterday in the rather smart OneAlfredPlace, and a group of us considered the realities of organising [...]
Great event Lloyd. Hoping to get to the Friday morning session this week.
http://steve-dale.net/?p=196
[...] in April 24th, 2008 Posted by Benjamin in productivity Lloyd Davis organised an excellent Tuttle Breakfast at at OneAlfredPlace (which I would recommend looking into, if you are after membership of an [...]