Probing Our Future

For some time, I’ve been mentioning The Transformation Society, a new organisation I co-founded with Dr. Neus Lorenzo. We are very excited about a project we will be doing at this year’s TCUK conference.

Technical Communication UK will take place September 13-15 at Wyboston Lakes Executive Centre in the UK. This year’s theme is From Novice to Expert – Writing Your Career Path as a Technical Communicator.

It’s about how we TC’s pass from beginner, with our ideas, illusions, and uncertainties, to the level of master professional where we are recognised as knowledgeable, maybe even as thought leaders, and our personal skills and knowledge base are considered exemplary.

The conference theme also points out how our work not only provides specific solutions for identified questions or problems, but has implications for the design processes, management structures, and ultimately the entire culture of our organisations.

More than that, a gathering like TCUK provides an opportunity for us, as a discipline, to look ahead at how technical information needs to be conceived and offered in complex environments. In these contexts, we are widening opportunities offered by technological change and the evolution of corporate cultures. We engage in research, training, the creation of economic influence, and diversification of technologies, tools, interfaces, and processes. This works to help users also take the path from novice to expert as part of a rich customer experience.

We in The Transformation Society are continuing our long collaboration  with Adobe Technical Communication in a research project that will join influencers at the TCUK conference together to provide a glimpse into the realm of the possible in an accelerating future that is rushing up on us faster than we imagine.

We’ll be publishing some of our findings after the conference in a webinar and a white paper. We invite you to participate in the webinar and in a real time Twitter chat, to develop a rich transmedia experience that we hope will generate more debate and creative interchange to help shape wider horizons.

You can see a report on some of our past work with Adobe in this white paper on Tech Challenges: Surfing and Diving Deep.

You can learn more about our projects by following @TransformSoc on Twitter and visiting our web site.

Author: Ray

Ray Gallon is president and co-founder of The Transformation Society (www.transformationsociety.net), a research, training and consulting company focusing on building learning organisations that can manage complexity and the digital transformation. He has over 40 years as a communicator, first as an award-winning radio producer and journalist, then in the technical content industries. His management experience includes a stint as program manager of WNYC-FM, New York City’s public radio station. Ray is a self-described "humanist nerd," and has always been interested in the meeting point between technology and culture, and has used his broad experience to advantage with companies such as IBM, General Electric Health Care, Alcatel, 3M, and the OECD, as well as in smaller companies and startup enterprises. Ray recently helped co-found the Information 4.0 Consortium (www.information4zero.org) and serves as its current president. Ray is a university lecturer and a keynote speaker at events throughout the world. He has contributed articles and chapters to many books and periodicals and is the editor of the recently published “Language of Technical Communication” (XML Press). View all posts by Ray