Most of us scan the external environment every day, either consciously or sub-consciously. We usually scan around our jobs, our professions, our industries. What we find usually stays in our heads, however, unless your organisation has a formal scanning system in place, or you join a site like Shaping Tomorrow where you can record what you are finding. A formal scanning system aims to take the scanning information out of individual minds and share them across the organisation, so that the breadth of information that informs strategic thinking is diverse rather than narrowly focused on what one or two individuals think is important.

Everyone in an organisation can contribute to a scanning system if given the opportunity, but a core group of scanners needs to be formed as early as possible in the set up of your scanning system. This group will act as champions for the scanning process, and will be provide the first analysis point to begin to determine relevance for the organisation.  A representative group is best, so that all areas of the organisation are formally involved in the scanning process, and a senior manager needs to be involved to ensure the work of the group can be put into the context of broader organisational strategy. This sounds easy, but to be successful, it requires commitment or at least acceptance of the need for scanning so they allow their staff to be involved. Because variable support among managers is common, it’s important that setting up the scanning group only occurs after the formal scanning system has been endorsed by the CEO and Board.

People in the scanning group need open minds, and be willing to have their ideas challenged. They need to be able to think outside the box and not be tied to the present way of doing things. They need to be willing to share their knowledge and be able to see the big picture rather than being limited by their job.

The scanning group needs to be trained in how to do scanning, and then supported while they become familiar with the process.  Regular review meetings need to be held to allow the group to share their experience and frustrations and to fine tune the scanning process for their organisation. Once they have started scanning on a regular basis, and scanning hits are accumulating, the group can begin to look for patterns and themes in what they are finding.

Sharing what the group is finding across the organisation is important, so that staff are keep informed about what the team is doing. A regular ‘look what we’ve found’ type email or newsletter is a good idea – it can have three items, a brief summary of each and a link to follow up if people are interested. The aim of this type of communication is to raise awareness of what is going on ‘out there’ in the external world, and to highlight that there are trends that are likely to change the way they work in the future.

Ultimately, all staff can be involved in providing scanning hits, and the ideal situation is for scanning to be included in the position description of all staff – which is more likely in smaller organisations. A rating system of scanning hits is another way to get staff involved in identifying what they think will be important to consider as strategy is developed. Finding ways to involve anyone who wants to be involved in scanning is not the easy way to ‘do’ scanning, but it promotes the collection of diverse perspectives about trends and drivers of change critical to the organisation’s future.

That diversity of perspective is key to challenging assumptions about what is possible in the future, and moving beyond business-as-usual approaches to strategy development.

The next post will be on starting to scan.

Download scanning resources at:  http://thinkingfutures.net/more-info

Last year, I posted about the need to have thinking workshops – because thinking about the future and how to respond today, is work too. Rather, it should be considered as work, because right now, it’s usually regarded as something we don’t have time to do because we are too busy dealing with short term imperatives and deadlines.

We spend a lot of money on strategic planning workshops that create plans based on what we know about the past and the present, rather than investing some of that money in a process to think first about what the shape of the future operating environment might be over the next 10-20 years, and what challenges and opportunities might emerge over time.  The process might look something like this.

• Schedule a thinking workshop 1-2 months before your planning workshop. Invite a wide range of people – staff and stakeholders – to attend. You are looking for diversity of perspectives about the future here so you can test your assumptions about doing business in the future.
• Send out a survey or open up an online discussion forum for staff and stakeholders to get their views on what they think will influence the shape of the future of your organisation over the next 10-20 years.  Provide some background reading about key issues today, and ask them to think about how those issues might evolve over time.  If you have been doing environmental scanning, you will be able to produce a report on trends and drivers that have been identified in that process.  Not everyone will take up the opportunity to participate; providing the opportunity is the critical step.
• Analyse those discussions and identify key trends and drivers of change.  If you have time, do some environmental scanning around the trends and drivers to make an assessment of whether they are relevant for you to consider.
• Provide a report on the trends and drivers to people who will be attending the thinking workshop.  You can include an initial assessment of likelihood and potential impact on the organisation in the report, and including some questions to trigger discussion is useful.  You are aiming here to stretch the thinking of people beyond today, to begin to be open to what is possible, rather than what is impossible.
• At the thinking workshop, ask some simple questions: What is coming? When might it appear on our horizon? What is important and relevant for us? What might we do today? Encourage participants to question their assumptions underpinning their views, and to seek out alternative perspectives to inform their thinking.
• Take the output from the thinking workshop to your planning workshop, where you can review your options around what you will do today, and document in the plan. The actions in your plan will be stronger because they are based in a systematic and information rich assessment of future possibilities, as well as an understanding of the present and past.

Finding the time for thinking workshops is critical, because no matter how smart we think we and our leaders are, and how much we think we know about what is going on out there in the external environment, there’s always something we don’t know we don’t know.  If you want to be proactive in your strategy, you need first to think about what’s coming over the long term and how how you might respond today. Without this step, you will continue to be surprised when something shifts in the external environment and you have to enter crisis management mode again.  Thinking about the future is work too.

I often get asked ‘how do I start environmental scanning?’.  This is usually followed by something along the lines of “I understand what scanning is, I know we need to do it, but how do I start?”  So, this is the first in a series of short posts about doing environmental scanning in your organisation. I’m going to assume that you have made the decision to scan to inform your organisation’s strategic thinking around possible options and strategies available to it into the future, and you want to know how to get started.

First step:  focus your scanning.

I have had some online discussions about my advice about starting your scanning with a focus.  My reason for that is simple: we have limited time and energy. If you head out into the external environment without  a focus, then pretty soon you will be overwhelmed by the amount of information out there, and the result of that is that you get frustrated and give up.  The argument put forward about not having  some sort of  focus and doing what Choo calls undirected scanning is that you might miss something at the periphery or just emerging if you are concentrating on one thing. However, a focused or conditioned scan is cost-effective and allows you to evaluate relevance for your organisation.

A focus for scanning gives you a framework or some parameters for where you start to look but it does not constrain you from looking wherever your scanning takes you.  In fact, that’s one of my scanning guidelines: go wherever your scanning takes you, and do this deliberately.  You will end up in places you never imagined, and this is the point of scanning – sensitising us to both current trends that are relevant now and the issues out there at the periphery, often in the realm of the weird and the whacky, that may be relevant into the future.  These are the early signals of change.

Because most of us do scanning to provide high quality input into our organisation’s strategy development processes, however, we need to end up with scanning reports that are useful are relevant for our organisation.  Those reports need to have a focus to be seen as useful and relevant – they need to show what’s coming that you need to be aware of, but the information in the report has to link to the organisation of today for people to accept it as valid and important to consider.  Your scanning report is about the future, but it informs decision making today.  Having a focus does not stop you from exploring what’s out there; you do have an ‘anchor’ though to allow you to start to make sense of what you are finding – and that will be the topic of a future post.

So, to get started with environmental scanning: identify your focus.

Deciding what to scan for will most likely be linked to your institutional strategy initially, by identifying the major drivers of change in the external environment that are likely to have an impact on that strategy into the future. There are drivers of change that are relatively pre-determined, such as demographic shifts and the likely impact of globalisation that affect the strategy of just about any institution. There will then be drivers that are industry related and some which are unique to you.

The key to scanning is to identify those drivers that you know a fair bit about, and to seek out those drivers which are uncertain in terms of what impact they might have - for examples, delivery of educational services – how quickly will the idea of student determined learning develop (learning at the discretion of the learner – what, when and where they decide)?

Over the past few months, I have helped organise a celebration of 10 years of the Masters of Strategic Foresight course at Swinburne University of Technology here in Melbourne. Last Saturday (31 July), a group of about 40 alumni, current students,  present and past teaching staff gathered to celebrate those 10 years.

This course was a life-changing experience for me, not only because I had one of the most intense learning experiences of my life in my first year, which was delivered online, but also because I had a personal epiphany about the importance of thinking about the future impact of our decisions today – before we make those decisions – that caused me to change careers. The concept of responsibility for future generations and being a good ancestor struck a real chord with me, and by the end of the two years of the course, I had decided that I wanted to work in the futures field. It took me a few more years, but in 2007 I left behind a career of almost 30 years as a university manager, to set up Thinking Futures. Two and a half years later, I feel privileged every day for the opportunity to work with people who want to understand what the future might bring and who are willing to open up their assumptions to challenge – so that we can collaboratively create better futures for us all. The Swinburne course set me on this foresight journey, and I’ll always be grateful for that.

Back to the day.  The organisers gathered at around 8am on a cold morning, and set up the hall where we would be meeting. The food was organised, as was the Wall of Wonder, and the Open Space Technology posters.  We had sent out a survey before we started organising, and we got a clear message that participants wanted the day to be about their experience and their passions. So we structured an opening and a closing, and devoted the remainder of the day to Open Space discussions.

A brief introduction and welcome was followed by the Wall of Wonder, facilitated by Karen Newkirk (Creating Eternity), who did a great job of drawing out of us all our feelings and beliefs about the past, present and future of the course.  A really big wall was created with a timeline and we each wrote our ideas on pieces of paper which were then stuck to the wall. It provided both personal and big picture views and perspectives, and allowed us all to hear about what drew us to the course, our experiences in the course, and then the driving forces in our work after the course now and into the future.

I facilitated the Open Space Technology session which saw sessions on:

• Foresight in Schools
• Foresight and Permaculture
• Building a network of alumni
• Helping socially disadvantaged people find their voice, particularly aged care
• Where to from here: what strategies to we have?
• Personal discovery through Future sculpture
• Our Foresight Journeys
• Aspirations for Change
• Conversations that Enrich Foresight

Perhaps not surprisingly, the Open Space approach worked well – people were responsible and took ownership of the day themselves. And, as perhaps some sort of sign, the sun came out just before we moved into the Open Space segement of the program. People commented that they loved the emergence of the Open Space process, although it requires us to ‘unlearn’ how to meet without structure that is defined for us. The degree of involvement of the facilitator was also raised as some people felt some intervention was necessary to keep the process on track.  We did not have a formal feedback process on session outcomes, but rather encouraged each group to work out whether or not they wanted to take their topic beyond the day. A more general review of the day highlighted that:

• there is lots of good ‘stuff’ happening,
• we might need more ‘in the box’ thinking so we can act now,
• we may not be clear about whether we are using futures to advocate something, or promoting advocacy of futures
• there were many light bulb moments, and
• overall, a re-energising day – we can make a difference.

We closed with a time capsule exercise facilitated by Barbara Bok, where we each – individually or in groups – developed our own futures triangles based around the future of the course. The time capsule will be opened in 10 years time. Richard Slaughter, who set up the course, then provided an overview of its history and reminded us of the urgency of the work we are now all doing if we are to help ensure a sustainable future for us and the planet.

For me, the day was marked by remarkable openness, from the passion of individuals who spoke about their drivers, to discussing methods and ways of working in the futures field. Sharing experiences, wonderful food and making new connections were hallmarks of the day. A common respect yet simultaneous dislike of the Integral Futures subject in the course was very clear!  This subject is challenging and forces you to question your own assumptions and worldviews in the context of learning about four quadrants, holons, streams, waves and much more. It remains a defining and connecting element of the course – in one way or another – for all of us.

The one thing that kept cropping up for me, however, was a question around why, if we understand the imperative of the future, can we as a society, and individual foresight practitioners, not work out a way to move to action?  Why is it that we don’t change the way we think and operate in the face of overwhelming evidence that that change is essential?  This was a much bigger question than we could do justice to on the day, but it’s remained with me and I’m pondering how to make this action step more overt in my work.

People stayed after the formal close and had more conversation before gradually heading off in the twilight of the evening. We organisers cleaned up, shared the left over food and said our goodbyes, exhausted but all feeling that the effort to organise the day was well worth it.  The challenge now will be to try and maintain the energy on the day, so that we can keep the conversations going.

The strategic planning industry has done a good job of convincing everyone that strategic planning is the whole game when it comes to developing and implementing strategy. As a result, everything – scanning, thinking, assessing, writing, measures, monitoring, reviewing – gets lumped together under the banner of ‘strategic planning’.  What usually happens then is that a whole lot of energy goes into writing a beautiful, glossy plan rather than strengthening the thinking that informs the goals and actions in those plans.

If strategy is the art of an entity confronting its external environment to ensure its continued development, then there are two elements to that art – one is the acting to do something to ‘confront’ the environment, the other is a cognitive or thinking component which determines what those actions will be (as defined by Joseph Voros from Swinburne University of Technology).  Right now, the focus in strategy work is predominantly on the acting or doing part – writing the plan and executing it.

Foresight is the cognitive aspect of strategy development. It’s called strategic thinking. And the mindset needed to think strategically is not the same as that needed to write and implement a good strategic plan.  Foresight is about exploring and coming to understand as best we can the shape of possible operating environments for our organisations, and using that insight to inform our actions today.  In this space, we need to comfortable with ambiguity and complexity, be able to take a systems perspective, have an open mind and deal with incomplete information. Planning, on the other hand, requires a mindset that is about implementing, taking action, reporting and bringing things together.  Both thinking and acting capacities are needed for effective strategy development and implementation.

Both activities require organisations to commit time and energy the processes. But because foresight is about thinking, its outcomes are usually intangible and, in the current evidence based world, spending money and time on the intangible is often not supported.  A plan, however, is a tangible product that can be displayed to internal and external audiences as justification for much time and money being spent preparing it.  It is time we regarded thinking as work too, and invested in holding thinking workshops before we start writing a plan.

Developing a foresight capacity requires opportunities for all staff and stakeholders to have their say about the future of the organisation and for CEOs to have open mind and be willing to have their views challenged. It’s a continuing process, not a once a year planning workshop. It’s about understanding what the future might bring and how you can influence that future. It’s about building a shared view of a preferred future and then writing a plan to get you there. And, it’s about keeping it simple, and not over-complicating the process with volumes of data, formula, models and software.

If you think that strategic planning somehow magically includes foresight, then you do so at your peril. You can’t develop a foresight capacity in your organisation by holding a half day working with your senior management team to talk about trends.

This type of planning is based on what we know about the past and the present, and an assumption that the future will be more of the same. If you take this stance, you risk writing a plan that is superficial and that you have to throw out the next time there is a shift in the external environment. You will be pursuing a reactive approach to the future – waiting until an event or shift forces you to take action – waiting until the future hits you in the face.

Before you begin your next planning cycle, ask yourself these questions:

• do we understand how we connect and interact with other organisations and the external environment?
• how deeply are we questioning our ways of operating?
• do we operate from our interpretation of the past, or our anticipation of the future?
• are our assumptions today valid into the future?
• how far into the future are we looking?
• do we understand the shape of alternative futures for our organisation?

Ask ‘what might we do?’ before you ask ‘what will we do?’ and you will be starting on the path to developing a foresight capacity in your organisation.

I have just been to the Association of University Administrators Conference at the University of Warwick where there was much discussion about changing academic and administrative roles in universities and higher education.  The discussion about terminology for administrators is continuing, largely based at the conference about professionalism and the need to change the phrase used to describe those staff who don’t have roles that are primarily about teaching or research. ‘Professional staff’ seems to be gaining acceptance in Australia, and I heard the term ‘professional services staff’ often at the conference. Right now, however, the term ‘non-academic’ is most often used in formal structures and systems by government and institutions. And, despite the efforts of many, governments, institutions and those who think administrators should be seen and not heard have resisted calls for change, largely by ignoring them.  I think the momentum is building so they may not be able to ignore the call for change for much longer.

As I left the Conference, I picked up Engage, the magazine from the UK Leadership Foundation, and read an article by Tom Kennie, Academic Leadership: dimensions and dynamics.  It’s a good article, highlight six key dimensions of academic leadership:

• credibility – personal, peer, positional, political,
• curiosity – challenge, creativity,
• collegiality – team, discipline, academic unit, profession, institution,
• capabilities – horizon scanning, sense-making, performing, connecting, celebrating,
• character – integrity, resilience, distinctiveness, and
• confidence – inner, outer.

I like the model, but as I was reading about it, I wondered by this is a model of ACADEMIC leadership?  Why not a model of university leadership?  Would a model of leadership developed by professional administrative staff look any different?  I think not.

Getting our brains to recognise that leading the university into the future will require the talents of all staff to be tapped, no matter what their background, is probably one of the biggest challenges in the sector today.  Alongside how to deal with declining funding, increasing globalisation and the impact of technology on universities, we need to be thinking strategically about how to shift our mental models about how universities are managed and led.

The historical and now clearly out-dated view that only an academic staff member can manage and lead a university is holding these institutions back. We must stop trying to define academic and administrative leadership in different ways, and open our minds to the idea of a leadership model that applies to all staff.  And, we need to get beyond the corporate managerialist hold on the thinking of some people about how universities are governed and led (see this article in the latest issue of  Times Higher Education which has fallen prey to the ‘administrator as evil’ myth) if we are to be able to build a new paradigm of university leadership that will sustain these institutions into the future.

Today, two emails have crossed my desk which have both had ’2010 predictions’ in them. Another email was a review of their 2009 predictions with some thinly veiled justifications about why some of those predictions didn’t eventuate.  Three hits on my scanning radar, and out popped the title of this post.

Predictions are based on our understanding of the past and the present. They have less to do with what might happen in the future, and more to do with the writer succumbing to the ‘top 10 list’ syndrome that afflicts us at this time of the year.  In this era of data driven decision making, why do we believe that predictions are valid when they are little more than crystal ball gazing?

Strategic thinking is taking a deliberate stance to think about what the future might bring, and then decide how to respond today. Strategic thinking always, let me repeat that, always takes the view that there are multiple possible futures, not one certain future. It involves people sharing their knowledge, expertise and informed intuition to build a shared view of what the future might bring – not will bring. You cannot predict the future, except by luck.

You have to spend time in future spaces to think about what might happen before you have any informed idea about what the future might bring. Predictions take what’s happening today and say the future will be more of the same. The people who write predictions cross their fingers and hope that they won’t get found out in a year’s time. Predictions assume certainty, strategic thinking embraces uncertainty.

Predictions are just put ‘out there’. There’s no value in them except for a bit of comic relief in most cases. Strategic thinking takes informed views about possible futures and generates value by identifying a range of strategic options today to ensure their organisation is sustainable no matter what future eventuates.

If you want to think strategically, stop thinking about predictions and move to the possibility space – where you ask questions such as: What is possible and why? What does it mean for us? How might we respond? What can we do now? Predictions trigger no such questioning because their writers assume their is no human choice influencing the future. They assume the future is fixed because it will be a linear projection of today.

Think back 10 years and think about how much the world has changed since then (think about ipods and iphones, social media and the scope of the internet). Talk to your colleagues about the speed of change. Think about how the way you work and communicate has shifted. Think about what that scale and pace of change might been for the next 10 years. Then try and write ‘my top 10 predictions for next year’ at your own peril. Instead, write about how major trends emerging today might shape your future, and the 10 things you can do to be ready to respond quickly to however those trends play out over time.

Prediction is the enemy of strategic thinking, and the sooner we stop thinking we can fix the future, the more robust our strategic thinking will be today.

A personal posting this one, rather than one focused in my Thinking Futures space.

I’ve been watching, pondering and musing of late about the debate on whether climate change is real or not.  Here in Australia, we have just witnessed the extraordinary spectacle of a political party (the Liberal Party) imploding around this issue – driven by disagreement about approaches to climate change, and strong resistance to an opposition leader who – horrors of horrors – wanted to come to an agreement with the government about an emissions trading scheme.

Issues about the validity of ETS aside, the Liberal’s approach was to cast the whole issue as ‘a new tax’, with predictable outcomes. I couldn’t help thinking – again – about why politicians can’t lift their sights, and help the public lift its collective sights, above the here and now. Climate change is an issue that we need to take a longer term view on, and ask the simple question, what might happen if we don’t act now?

Today, I came across some comments in an email conversation by Andrew Curry, who writes at Next Wave on this very question.  He writes:

For my part, it is fairly clear that the climate change bet is the modern equivalent of Pascal’s wager: if they’re right, and we’ve done something effective about the risk, we might just about get away with low enough levels of global warming to muddle through. If they’re right and we do nothing, we’ll be heading fast for four or five or six degrees (and I hope our kids and grandchildren forgive us); if they’re wrong, and we do something, the cost will have been quite low, since we’ll largely have done things which improve resource outcomes, which are an issue regardless of climate change; if they’re wrong, and we do nothing … well, that’s the bet you seem to be making and you’d better hope you’re right.

Emission trading schemes may not be perfect, but we need to do something now, and let’s all hope and pray that the Copenhagen Summit reaches that same conclusion and agrees on some action.

There is much written about how learning will need to be delivered into the future – that online delivery will move to a new level and that the way we develop and run courses will move from a content driven to a facilitation driven approach, and that the role of academic staff will change accordingly.

I’ve been doing some work on how universities in particular are managed today, and the shifting nature of the relationship between academic and administrative/professional staff – it’s clear to me from this research (submitted for publication) that we have to change the way we perceive how universities need to be managed, if we are to start to shape the new paradigm we are going to need if universities are to continue to be relevant learning organisations in the future.

Add that all together with conversations I have had lately with people ‘on the ground’ in universities who talk about silos, hierarchies, ineffective communication, ego driven decision making, and of course, lack of resources. I still see and hear people trying to hang on to the idea of a university that is no longer relevant, rather than pushing the boundaries of their comfort zones to see what’s possible.

While, of course, not everyone who works in or manages or leads a university has a mindset stuck in old paradigms, there is still a disconnect between what we know about the possible and likely impacts of global trends and drivers of change on higher education and how we structure and run our universities.

Below are just a few trends that are starting to exert their influence today, and which we need to be thinking about how to respond to now, instead of just talking about them.

Re-learning your Career An increasing focus on re-training and re-skilling of existing workers and more generally, mature age learners (eg career changers, semi-retired folks). This trend is being driven by an increasing competition for talent and the increasingly mobile global workforce.  People just don’t stay with organisations as long as they used to, competition for good staff is increasing, and retaining and training the people already on staff is big business, and will probably get even bigger.

Changing Workplace and Job Design
The need to design jobs and workplaces to suit new generations of workers – not only GenY who are entering the workforce, now, but subsequent generations as well.  This trend is being driven by the apparent different values held by GenY, particularly around liveability, work/life balance and concern about environmental impact. Industry reports that there is increasing demand for working hours and employees are looking for organisations that take social responsibility seriously.

Students as Designers of their Student Experience
This trend is all about students designing/customising their student experience – what they learn, how they learn it, when and where they choose to learn. It’s being driven by consumer trends and an increasingly strongly view of education as a commodity that, like all other ‘products’ and services, can and should be tailored and customised to suit user needs. This will require nimble organisations to be able to respond to the needs of particular student segments in a timely way. Industry reports on the need to provide flexible delivery options for training, and the growth in workplace training, the ability to be able to move in and out and up and down qualification frameworks and an ever increasing focus on student needs and service standards.

Co-Creation of Content
Web 2.0 or social media technologies have facilitated the ability of users to create their own web content; increasingly companies are co-creating products with consumers, and the logical extension of this is that students will become co-creators of their curriculum.  The trend is being driven by the expectation that users will be involved in their learning decisions – no only about which course to choose but which content matters to them. Institutions will need to provide information and support about career development in particular industries, related knowledge and skills and how students can design a course that provides these requirements. Industry reports that they need to be able to tailor curriculum needs to their needs by co-creating that curriculum with universities.

If we can’t change the way we think about how universities need to be run and managed, we don’t have much change of being able to respond to these sort of trends in a proactive way.  Albert Einstein’s often cited comment that we can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them’ remains true, particularly because what seems reasonable today will probably not be reasonable in to the future. I’m not sure that the higher education sector isn’t still stuck in the rhetoric of change, and won’t move beyond that until mindsets about what a university is and what it does start to shift to take account of what’s really happening beyond the university walls.

In the last week,  I’ve heard several comments about how online communication isn’t real communication. The assumption underpinning these comments is that to really communicate you have  to have a face-to-face conversation.  Anything else just isn’t real.

In a room of 50 people last week, the question was posed: who in the room uses Twitter?  I put up my hand (I had been tweeting all morning), but no one else did.  This was a room of cross-generational people, not just baby boomers like me. I was a bit stunned – surely not?  One of the presenters said he just didn’t get it.  I got home that night to discover my tweets about future trends had been retweeted, and five new people were following me by the end of the day.  Now, this probably doesn’t conform to our understanding of traditional communication, but on that day my global network expanded just a little, and my voice in the global conversation about futures work is now being heard by a few more people.  I have met some of my fellow tweeters but not others, and if we do meet, we already have a relationship that can inform our communication.  But, we don’t need to meet in person to communicate effectively, share knowledge and learn from each other.

I remember my year as an online student doing the first year of the Masters of Strategic Foresight at Swinburne University. Not knowing what to expect at the beginning of the year but open to the process, I got to the end of the year realising that I had just had one of the most intense formal learning experiences of my life. I didn’t meet any of my classmates until the end of the year when we joined the classroom group for presentations, but I felt strong connections with the group which built very quickly, and some of the conversations we had online were of an amazingly high quality intellectually.  Of course, the key to this success was Jenny Gidley, who facilitated the whole year and made sure we did connect, contribute and communicate in authentic and meaningful ways.

My sister posted a comment on Facebook last week about something that had happened and I replied to her (privately) on Facebook – what’s up?  I could have rung her (we live two states apart), but we both post at very strange times of the night. We then had an online conversation that was just as real as if we had talked on the phone.  I don’t spend much time on Facebook, but it does help me find out what my friends and business colleagues are up to, and how I might be able to intersect with them in some way. My daughter’s best friend once broke up the friendship with her online, and the pain she felt was just as real as if it had been done in person. In some ways, it was probably better it was not done in person. Life happens online too.

Online communication in its rawest form, like answering questions like ‘what are you doing?” or ‘what’s on your mind?” probably is of interest only to people who are in your immediate circle of friends and family. Some say online communication methods allow people to retreat from the real world – but having we been doing that in various ways forever?  Some say online communication means young people don’t develop social skills, but my perception of that is that, like all generations, we need to learn how to interact with society at large, and we do that when we interact with it. Online communication has its etiquette too, and if you breach that etiquette, you will know about it – directly and quickly.

For me though, online communication is very real, a very meaningful way to communicate with other people across the globe, and a way for me to stay in touch with them, and find out new things every day.  The way we live and communicate is changing, and we shouldn’t dismiss one form of communication because it doesn’t fit with our current understandings of what is effective and what isn’t. We have just added to our existing hybrid communication methods – mail, email, phone, skype, online, face-to-face, written, spoken – all valid methods, all serving a communication purpose.

Our current understandings about the effectiveness of online communication may not be relevant or useful into the future.  We need to challenge and test the assumptions underpinning those understandings by immersing ourselves in the alternative forms of communication to experience it and what it means and how, and in what ways, it can be used to improve how we connect with each other now.  I think the next time that someone tells me that communicating online isn’t real communication, I’ll check to see if they know what they are talking about by asking whether they tweet or not!