What is digital health?  Read the rest of our post over at 2gether08. 

A busy week last week for the Digital Health Service with our second workshop for The Learning & Skills Council as well as exhibiting at NESTA's Innovation Edge expo on Southbank.  While the Nina manned our stand at NESTA I was off on a fast train from London bridge to LSC Towers in Croydon to be part of their Learning At Work day (which seemed to also consist of a wine tasting session later that evening - wish I could have hung around!).

We got right in there and got the day started talking through strategies for emailing, information diets and the pros and cons of transparaency of working styles and selective ignorance for the future of the knowledge worker.  Phew. 

Email was top of the list yet again for exploration in the Digital Health Landscape excercise, closely followed by Blackberrys and then Facebook.  We saw some very positive use and love of Blackberrys - it's good to remind ourselves that technology can be a real benefit to our work lives if used in an aware and controlled way. 

Facebook caused a real split with the 'I'm not going near it in a month of Sundays' group facing off the 'Yea I know it's a bit of a pain but I find it quite fun' group across the digital health grid.  The tension disappearing magically when the groups explored how they'd be using it in future - not many were still using it to arrange their social lives.  Each workshop I do there appears to me more and more bordom with Facebook.  Sea change?
  

After the pleasing success of our Wiki and RSS dramatic explanations (imagine a real time CommonCraft show) we'll be adding further how-tos and tips to the next workshop as requested by a the LSC participants.  Thanks for the feedback guys and many thanks to Debi and Bek for arranging the day.

Check out Iain Tait's experience of Mental Detox Week.  My favourite parts:
 
"I’ve been scared of the telephone for a while. I feel more confident writing things down in emails. It gives me a chance to formulate my thoughts and arguments a little better. Phones always smack of having to think ‘in real time’ which gives me the fear.

But you know what. Phones are good. You can get things agreed in one conversation. Conversations on the phone can be finished in just minutes! The conversation goes back and forth really quickly and you can get to decisions much faster. Plus you don’t have to deal with any tyrannical cc’ing."

And:

"But what happens when you leave ’stuff’ for a while? Mostly it’ll still be there. But sometimes it won’t. I think mainly the fear was just that there would be too much stuff when I came back to it. I knew that I’d have to just ditch loads of unread RSS feeds. Which effectively meant that I’d missed out on all those things.

I just had to realise that it was OK to miss out on all that stuff. My life didn’t change in a bad way. Really. Or did it? Now I’m not sure. Maybe there was a blog post or a something that could have changed my life irreversibly.

The point is that there’s too much stuff and I have to learn to let it go. There’s stuff going on everywhere the whole time. Most of it I’ll never get to see. Even if it was all on the internet and all being fed into my brain I wouldn’t be able to cope.

I learned it’s OK to miss stuff."

 
I've been on an information-diet of a similar nature for a while and have been discovering very similar reactions so it's great to read this parallel experience.  Thanks to Matt Weston for the link and to Iain for sharing.

 In a customised version of the workshop dealing with specific LSC issues, we took a particular look at how the staff of LSC could get the best from their intranet and also honed down on the Blackberry problem that plagues most large organisations.  We explored and planned practical solutions on a grassroots level that could begin a sea-change in how people could ease the pressure on their email communication in the regional departments.  Phew.

It was a challenging workshop; the largest yet (beating McCann Erickson by 2 with 18 people) with a greater age range and experience than in previous sessions.  Englightening for me and pleasantly gratifying that all final tweaks to the structure seemed to flow well.  My very-hot-off-the-press Wiki explanation also stimulated debate - it's amazing what can be done with a few markers and some cut out shapes.  I went to Art School you know.

Next up were the amazing ThinkPublic.  An afternoon workshop at their funky offices in Shoreditch East London after a very healthy lunch with the team (thanks guys).

We got straight to work, with email again being one of the hottest topics with another surprise newcomer: Apple's iCal and using it to sync ThinkPublic's working schedules.  Close behind these two was Basecamp the current flavour of the year as far as agile project management software goes.

Thanks to the folks at ThinkPublic (Deborah especially) for the great atmosphere, great food and for the free t-shirt - Public Services do indeed Rock. 

We had a great venue in the beautiful McCann Erickson building near Russell Square here in London organised by the wonderfully engaging Gwyn March; Training Manager for McCann Erickson London and Universal McCann (also thanks to Kathryn Corrick at McCann for the introduction).  Breakfast was laid on for everyone and once the tea, coffee and pastries were polished off we got going.

Joint digital diseases of the morning were email, our old favourite, and a surprise newcomer: conference calls.  The over-riding theme emerging from the session was that in a company such as McCann Erickson, becoming (even more) digitally fit was more about the human processes involved in using their daily digital technology, rather than always trying to find new digital tools to solve the old problems.

I have to say it was a real pleasure - a fun group with some cracking stories of experiences with digital tools, and exciting insights to the productivity issues with a company of McCanns size.  Thanks to everyone who took part.  And if you ever get to go to the McCann Eriskcon building, check out that chair.  Exactly.