Whoo!, with additional Hoo!

It’s funny how things work out sometimes. No more than a couple of weeks ago I was sitting on a plane on my way to Vienna when the steward announced that if there was a Mr Lee Bryant on board he should raise his hand. Knowing we had mutual friends and were both heading to BlogTalk2.0, I went over to say hello.
Today I went up to London to meet up with Lee, his business partner Livio Hughes and the rest of the crew at Headshift, with whom I am delighted to say I will now be working.
In what has to be the co-incidence of the year, when I turned up at the Headshift offices at Butlers Wharf – a place I used to walk through daily when I first moved up to London in order to cross the tube zone 1/2 boundary and save myself 70p – I was greeted by Sigrun, one of my fellow Zoetropers. Who would have guessed?
I take all this as a good omen, myself.
So, what will I be doing at Headshift? What I’m best at – writing, blogging, talking to people, getting my head round the bigger picture and communicating it to anyone who will stop still long enough.
I am very excited about working with Lee, Livio and the guys. Not only are they a sterling bunch of people, they are also doing what I consider to be some very cool work using blogs and other tools as a way to create social knowledge networks within organisations such as the NHS.
I like their approach to the whole issue of knowledge management (a jaded term that really doesn’t do them justice). For them it’s all about finding out what the people who actually use the tools need to do and then figuring out what will enable them to do that. It’s good, solid, bottom-up emergent behaviour thinking, the sort of thinking that most companies appear to be allergic to.
Lee and Livio gave me a run through of what they’re doing, the projects they have ongoing at the moment and an overview of the way they work. I felt a wee bit like the recipient of an over-zealous Vulcan mind-meld as I tried to take it all in, but in a good way, obviously.
It’s going to take a massive brain dump and a lot of mind-mapping for me to get my head round all this new data, but I can’t say how much I am looking forward to getting my teeth into it. It’s the first time I’ve felt really excited about working with a company in ages. Good feeling.
Disclaimer: And I’m not just saying that cos I know they read my blog. Honest, guv.