While my focus at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre has been on their Knowledge4Policy platform (K4P), I've recently been pulled in to help design their internal communications, community, collaboration & knowledge management strategy as they grapple with migrating from Jive to M365.

people started sharing selfies on Facebook and stories around the office. Participants gained new insight into the workings of other departments. People realized they faced common issues and brought new perspectives to problems. Ideas for future collaborations and projects took root. It was assisted serendipity in action... this evolved...into r…

embracing and sharing the power of communication strategy much more broadly to help drive results and performance... supporting practitioners and clients to rediscover communication strategy as a source of real advantage.... the opportunities available to use targeted, intelligent approaches to getting the right people talking with the right info…

Just one topic in this edition, sparked by Collaborative Overload (Harvard Business Review)... reported “time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50% or more”

becoming a learning organization was nothing like winning a marathon ...cultivating an award-winning orchard... nurturing systems and culture to produce meaningful results... We embarked on a systematic and phased approach to cultivating the organization we all wanted.

as CEO... your power and privilege leave you insulated... from information that might challenge your assumptions and allow you to perceive a looming threat or opportunity. Ironically, to do what your exalted position demands, you must in some way escape your exalted position... at firms that are highly successful innovators, leaders are especiall…

An effective communications strategy must be connected to other strategies, usually managed by different departments. Reframing it as central to your organisation’s innovation strategy helps sidestep turf wars. 

Work management... the current state-of-the-practice in task management. Task management tools formerly were limited to a list of tasks... Nowadays, the most competitive tools incorporate social communications, like chat, @mentions, and messaging: these I consider work management tools, like Asana, Trello, and many others. I recently published a G…

META Ventures provides venture capital fund management, entrepreneurial training and innovation consultancy to cities, regions and national governments in several countries, as well as EU Institutions.

enterprise software helps the user answer one or more of the following questions:What’s important? (Surface relevant information)What do I do next? (Support decision making)How do I do it? (Facilitate action)... the conversational interface answers all three of the above questions better than the software tools we have today... Dashboards today …

the most valuable tools make it easier for employees to collaborate—and could even transform the way organizations work... We asked executives about their companies’ use of social tools, digital technologies, and big data... using social begets better use of these other technologies. When organizations digitize a process’s work flow ... using soc…

bandwagons are bad for your health, as illustrated by the impending death of content marketing and the gathering backlash against Slack (Slacklash? BackSlacksh?) and (already!?) chatbots.

this addiction has been killing my sanity and sapping our productivity as we simply used Slack for too many things... we would add more channels in a desperate attempt to allow people to find the important information they needed while avoiding the noise... All of these interactions would happen in Slack, despite there being many other tools tha…

it only takes few weeks before you receive a full diagnostic report providing you with new levers to accelerate the development of your organization. Your employees invest less than 10 minutes completing a user-friendly questionnaire that they can do from their work or home computer, tablet or smartphone – we will do the rest.

at #EuroComm16... “Beyond Engagement.”... how uncoupling the IC function from a focus on Employee Engagement survey scores could have a liberating effect on the function and the profession, and potentially on employees and their enterprises as well... We weren’t here to praise the Employee Engagement Survey. We were here to bury it... In giving …

What happened when I was invited to “do a Rápido” at the IABC’s conference in Rotterdam earlier this week.

Work management is a term that has emerged in recent years as task management tools were enhanced with various social communication capabilities... The primary distinction here is the degree of emphasis for task-centric versus message-centric tools.

The hard part is striking the right balance. The just-right spot where everyone knows enough, no one feels like they know too little, and no one feels like they’re being over-informed to the point of it being annoying or distracting. And doing it all at a variety of resolutions — big picture, medium-picture, and small picture — without overdoing i…

What we’ve learned is that group chat used sparingly in a few very specific situations makes a lot of sense. What makes a lot less sense is chat as the primary, default method of communication inside an organization.... All sorts of eventual bad happens when a company begins thinking one-line-at-a-time most of the time... Frazzled, exhausted, and …

if business needs are met, it generally doesn’t matter whether the intranet is involved or not, so long as the solution is effectively integrated into an organisation’s digital workplace... In trying to make an intranet essential, we lock ourselves into starting with a solution and then looking for the problems... Sometimes the outcome of this ch…

"When starting a new [internal] communication project, asking the right questions of your customer sounds like a no-brainer. But are your questions right? ... Richard shares his method of developing the right questions to deliver the best results –  to start your IC projects right." - The power of critical thinking: How asking the right questio…

they clearly state that there is "no limit on how many people you can add to your team on Slack." So we assumed we wouldn't need to worry about outgrowing their service. But trusting Slack's marketing would prove to be a huge mistake. - Free Code Camp's Learn to Code Blog: So Yeah We Tried Slack... and We Deeply Regretted It

"Slack is just another stream ... of continuous information that you have to follow. I remembered I found it distractive and stressful because it was so easy to miss out on stuff.... This is what drives Slacks’ success. Because if you don’t follow Slack all the time you do not and cannot take part in the conversation with your team members anym…

"In the next five years, millennials will make up half the workforce and 75% of it by 2025... We want to contribute to building something great... with meaning. We’re also talented, driven, and have really high expectations for the companies we join and the type of work we engage in... companies need to ask us what we think and how we feel. Unf…

"People bond. Barriers dissolve. Connections are made. Trust increases. Knowledge is transmitted. Wisdom is shared ... a deep sense of interdependence is felt... If you are part of an organization, no matter what it's shape or size, it's time for some meaning making ... by creating engaging opportunities for everyone, from mail room to board ro…

"The problems that most resist solutions are system problems. In a system problem, if you’re part of the system, you’re part of the problem. This illusion of objectivity is often particularly acute in senior leaders, because there’s a tendency for people to tell them what they want to hear." - If you’re part of the system, you’re part of the pr…

"If you’re embracing online collaboration as a necessary evil — the only way to work with an increasingly dispersed team of global or remote workers, for example — then you’re doing it wrong. Online collaboration is not a second-best substitute for face-to-face work: It’s a complement with its own perks and benefits." - Collaborating Online Is So…

"most digital transformation deployments fall into the 'deploy and pray' category, a minority address known pain points and use cases, whilst only about 20% of projects involve a concerted organisation-wide roll-out aimed at creating a connected company. ... paradigm shift is needed to go beyond just adopting social technologies towards creating a…

"today’s social collaboration tools ... are focused on the wrong things, or at least on the wrong scale.... enterprises do business, but people do work. We will see a shift away from tools designed around ‘business’ and instead see a swing to tools that help people accomplish their work... the mantra will be — people first, mobile first, cloud f…

"Much of what social collaboration tools are designed to support is shallow work, and the stuff of managerial oversight... deep productivity comes from supporting deep work - cognitively demanding activities that leverage our training to generate rare and valuable results, and that push our abilities to continually improve - trying to support…