By Marta Mellinger on September 17, 2008

Information Technology - Luddite No More

No comments

It started for me with TED.

John Jay at Wieden+Kennedy explained “TED talks” to me at a planning retreat I was facilitating last winter. He was enthused. “I download them and listen to them when I need inspiration,” he said. Then others in the room started talking about this TED talk - or that TED talk. I wrote down the website TED.com. Easy.

photo credit: guspim

TED talks are online for us all - with the absolute easiest, searchable catalogue I’ve experienced. Each talk is 20 minutes or less. The TED talks are delivered by experts - some you’ve heard of, others you haven’t. What they all have in common is a capacity to communicate, and each talk focuses on “an idea worth sharing”.

TED woke me up to the wonders of the Internet. Oh, I had Googled before, I use email, I’ve even done some web research. But TED was something different, a quantum shift in my understanding of how the world is changing and will continue to change as ideas flash around the world, stimulating innovation and creativity.

Luckily, we were beginning work on what would become The Canoe Group, so I had our local experts Dave and Michael to feed my curiosity, answer my questions and introduce me to more.

Dave does the news blogs - daily. All of them. Michael knows web search engines and how companies like Google rank websites for different keywords. Together they can figure just about anything out. And, better still, they can explain it to me in language I can understand.

One of my greatest challenges during my years as an Executive Director was information technology. Understanding the choices, projecting the future, making wise investments and good decisions. Only rarely do our “geeks” (those for whom IT hardware and software are LIFE itself) easily translate their world to we non-geeks.

So I had sort of disconnected, somewhere back a few years ago. In the same way I decided early on to let somebody else fix my car engine, and to let my husband purchase and combine our increasingly larger television with the rest of the home technology.

But TED changed all that. I realized that, even at 55, I could not keep my head in the sand and expect the info technology experts to lead the way. In order for the web to perform its intended function in our human universe, we strategists ALL need to get on board. And that means developing greater knowledge of how the system works - and new ideas about how it CAN work to help the world evolve for the benefit of us all.

So what have I learned in the intervening six months? I’ve been lucky. We’ve been starting The Canoe Group, so we are designing the systems to run our business. And we are, for now, virtual. So the web has to become my new best friend.

Here’s my favorites: Online we are sharing files and calendars and data bases. We built them together and share it all. Online we have a program call NovaMind that lets me draw mind-maps that help me organize my thoughts. Then Nova Mind dumps my mind maps into another program called Merlin, which takes everything and organizes everything in a linear way - as a project plan.

We wrote and designed this new website using WordPress, so we can manage our website and change it whenever. Now I’m writing a blog. We’re using more and more online surveys to get feedback and input for our clients. And we have I-Contact for our new email newsletter The J Stroke. Who knows where we it goes next.

Eight months ago, it all started for me watching Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED talk. Check TED out. Who knows what will happen.