Seeing What Others Don’t – Review

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Following Gary Klein on his search to find out how insight happens is a pleasurable, even mind-blowing experience. In Seeing What Others Don’t, Klein begins with an open mind and decides that he needs to stay out of the laboratory of puzzle-solving, described in the chapter on how not to search for insights. His perspective is based on what has been my professional practice for almost two decades: performance improvement. Klein says that PI is a combination of reducing errors & uncertainty PLUS increasing insights. Too often in organizations, management only focuses on reducing errors. Klein cites the overemphasis on practices like Six Sigma over the past 30 years as being detrimental to overall innovation; “Six Sigma shouldn’t be abandoned, it needs to be corralled.”

performance improvement klein

In examining 120 cases, Klein found that there are three main paths that insight can follow. [My overview lacks the depth of Klein’s explanations, so please read the book if you really want to understand this.] Klein’s Triple Path Model neatly describes the phenomena of gaining insights. I find the connection path the most interesting because I think it can be enhanced through practices like personal knowledge mastery. Also interesting is that gaining insight is about changing one’s stories. We have stories that we use to explain why we do things. These can be good anchors that give us the right perspective on a situation or they can weigh us down and stop us from gaining insight. For example, the prevailing theory of miasma stopped researchers from seeing that cholera was waterborne or that yellow fever was mosquito borne. It was when some people paid attention to the contradictions, that they gained insight. Once you have insight, that’s it. Klein quotes the author Hilary Mantel; “Insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.” Which of course can make those with new insights seem like such a bother to the status quo.

triple path model kleinKlein has some advice on how “to strengthen the up arrow”, or improve insight. He sees stories as a strong way of sharing insight. Loosening the filters through which information and knowledge pass in the organization is another suggestion. I’d call that democracy. He also says that organizations need to increase their willpower to act on insight. This takes a shift in the corporate mind-set.

Klein counters some of the contemporary perceptions around insight in the research community.

The heuristics-and-biases community has provided us with a stream of studies showing how our mental habits can be used against us and make us look stupid and irrational. They don’t offer a balanced set of studies of how these habits enable us to make more discoveries.

I see the examples in this book as a collective celebration of our capacity for gaining insights, a corrective to the gloomy picture offered by the heuristics-and-biases community. Insights help us escape the confinements of perfection, which traps us in a compulsion to avoid errors and in a fixation on the original plan or vision.

I strongly recommend Seeing What Others Don’t, which provides new perspectives for a wide range of disciplines and practices. Finally, one of the best features of this book is the Story Index, making each one easy to find, even in the paper copy.

You can read more about the ideas in this book on Gary Klein’s blog posts at Psychology Today [thanks to Kenneth Mikkelsen for the tip].

Working the Past – Review

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Maintaining a useable past takes work. It is as much work as maintaining a useable building, though very different work, using very different tools. The work of this book has been to demonstrate the existence and nature of this work – mundane, daily, and utterly essential to any group that considers it has an identity.

So concludes Charlotte Linde in Working the Past: Narrative and Institutional Memory. This book is based on a study of institutional memory at a US-based insurance company. However, it is written by a researcher who has delved deep into the subject, so it is much more than just an anecdotal study.

There are important patterns both in the ways stories are reproduced and the ways they are changed, and the patterns observed in an insurance company can inform us about the ways in which very different collectivities work their past.

I have become professionally interested in institutional memory, story-telling and decision memory, as well as how these are connected to knowledge management and how knowledge-sharing frameworks can be developed. Institutional memory becomes very important when organizations are going through significant change, such as changing market conditions or major growth.

… we came to MidWest at a time of change … we had a brief opportunity to see the earlier form of organization before the changes … times of change are rich in occasions when the past is invoked. The past is used to reaffirm a sense of identity, to provide a ground from which to assess the effect and meaning of changes, and to provide a basis for critique of changes … And as people talk about change, they tell stories about this past to understand the present and predict the future.

In this book I learned about the importance of “occasions” in sharing institutional memory. “Without the occasion, the story rarely or never gets told”; Linde writes. Later, she concludes; “A story not having a proper occasion on which it can or must be told exists in an archive if it exists at all. An institution not having a range of occasions for telling stories is not likely to be working its past very hard.” My own experience in the military reflects many different occasions, from formal to very relaxed, in which to share stories.

While any company’s institutional memory should be what Linde refers to as an open canon, or one that has new stories added over time, there is still a place for an official version of certain stories. An example is the first authorized history of MidWest, published in 1955 and still printed for internal use. Linde at first wondered if the book was more for show than use.

I began to wonder whether the book was displayed as a talisman of loyalty or whether it really was read. When I mused on this question to a district manager I had come to know, she assured me that she used it all the time. I asked what she used it for. Her answer was that she “mined it for stories” for speeches, since she had come to the company relatively recently, and that she didn’t know the history “by blood”, that is, she did not come from a MidWest family, and had joined MidWest in the middle of her career.

working the past - lindeThe book is comprehensive in both its treatment of the situation at MidWest and its delving into the foundational concepts of institutional memory. There is a chapter on “paradigmatic narrative”, another on telling one’s story within a textual community, and one dedicated to “noisy silences” or stories that are not told. This book is for those who want to dig deep into what institutional memory is about and the many ways it can be supported. While written more for sociologists, there is much here for any large organization and those working in knowledge management, narrative, or storytelling.

 

 

 

Friday's Finds 201

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friday2Friday’s Finds:

“Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words. Trust movement.” — Alfred Adler – via @goonth

@ShawnCallahan: “Our memories evolved to hunt, gather & avoid danger. Now we have great memories for places, faces & emotions. Why stories are memorable.”

Tomorrow’s Products & Companies Will Live Or Die By Their Stories:

As I’ve said before, storytelling is perhaps the most important skill a 21st century business can develop. This is certainly the case with marketing — stories build deep relationships with audiences in ways advertisements don’t and coupons nigh can’t. But it’s also the case with product.

That’s because today people don’t want a drill — or a t-shirt or carton of eggs or television set — they want to know where that drill came from, how it came about, and what the drill-maker is going to do with the money they’re about to pay it.

Not all people, of course, but increasing numbers of them.

Knowledge Management is not mere dissemination:

KM should be conceived less as a purely technical information-based area and more as a communication and behaviour-change area, because putting knowledge to practical use needs a certain degree of behaviour change on both sides. Knowledge producers need to package the product in a way that can be easily applied, [e.g. PKM & Curating] while the users need to be “persuaded” to conceive knowledge as a practical tool that can be applied in their field. In other words, KM should close the gap between the theoretical and conceptual constructs and the practical applications.

WaPo: “Are GMAT scores inversely related to entrepreneurship?” – via @ChrisFinley

A study in the Journal of Business Ethics [$40] makes the surprising finding that high GMAT scores may be correlated to some of the negative traits of American business: lack of ethical orientation, male domination of executive ranks, uncertainty avoidance, and individualism. What’s more, GMAT scores may be inversely correlated with entrepreneurship.

Discerning with whom and when to share

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Nick Milton talks about why knowledge does not get “re-used” very easily. Even if knowledge is captured it is not always used by others and Nick cites several blockers:

  • the knowledge was not to hand when they needed it

  • they had no time to go looking for the knowledge

  • they may not trust the provenance of the knowledge

  • the knowledge did not solve an immediate pain, but was more of a long term benefit (see blog post on why some ideas spread and others don’t).

  • they could get away with doing things the way they had always done, even though the new way was better.

In the PKM framework of Seeking, Sensing & Sharing, the latter may seem easy but it does not always equate to other people finding the knowledge artifacts that you have created while seeking & sense-making. For example, I can quickly find something on my blog in the thousands of posts here, that would take someone else much longer. I have the contextual memory of having created each post. This is why it’s also important to incorporate what I call the discern component of sharing.

Seek > Sense > Share

Since it is easier for me to find something I have created, then I should be open to opportunities to share, in order to optimize knowledge management in my workplace. My knowledge artifacts are almost always more “at hand” to me than to others. This is why PKM practices are so important in organizational knowledge management, but are often overlooked. So far, only humans are good at recognizing all the contextual signals in the workplace, making implicit connections, and then identifying something that might be useful to share.

One example of discernment is in “closing triangles“. This is when one person introduces two unknown associates to each other, thus closing the triangle. Discerning when to do this is also important. It would not make sense to make professional introductions as one person is going on a long vacation or when the other is extremely busy with an unrelated project. Sensing the right time and place to make connections is important in network weaving. It’s the same with sharing knowledge.

Integrating PKM practices with organizational knowledge management can help knowledge to flow better and not remain knowledge stock in some database. This takes time, practice, and a good sense of what others are doing. Discernment, like PKM,  requires mindfulness.

Data is nothing without people

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About 30 percent of the U.S. workforce is currently self employed, Moritz [Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital] says, a figure that could rise to 60 percent in the next 10 years. Those who lack the skills or entrepreneurial experience to create their own careers could struggle.

In the next great industrial revolution will be data-driven, the major premise is that data factories are “changing the nature of work by allowing freelancers to market their services to an increasingly large audience.” The danger of course is that a few companies will have control of these data factories and freelancers will become the product. As they say with social media, if you are not paying for the service, then you are the product. But all they really have is data. It’s the freelancers who actually do the work. These data factories are nothing but a new breed of middle-men.

As a freelancer for the past decade I can state how important it is to control your own data platform. While I use services that are owned by others (e.g. Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Flickr) I keep very firm control of my website and blog. If I have one piece of advice for any freelancer, it is to own your own domain name and keep your content on it. You can share it through whatever social medium is currently hot, but keep the original work on your own site. No matter how wonderful some hosted platform may look, it’s not about you – ever.

harold jarche standing deskSo after a decade of blogging, consulting, and speaking; my experience is that almost all of my new clients find me through my blog. Yes, it’s that important. A good blog is like an extensive résumé and tells much more than an interview or marketing brochure can. While a labour force of 60% freelancers can sound scary, if we first take control of our own data, and then create our own communities of practice, the future may look even better than the past period of mostly indentured servitude. However, it’s up to us to make it so.

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Related posts:

Freelancers Unite

Jobs? We ain’t got no jobs!

Taking charge of your own professional development

Prepare for the future of work

The Mobile Enterprise

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Work is becoming predominantly social, collaborative & mobile. This mobile work requires mobile learning and a mobile workforce needs more flexible approaches in supporting learning. At the same time, a mobile workforce should have physical spaces that encourage conversations when nomadic workers do get together. With a mobile workforce, we cannot take for granted the hallway conversations of the last century, but should be optimizing our physical work spaces for conversations.

These conversations are necessary to help implicit knowledge be shared as explicit knowledge. As mobile workers become responsible for their own devices as well as their own learning, learning from colleagues gets even more important. Just look at the rise of video-conferencing.

Odds are again, if you’re a mobile professional you are probably doing more video calls lately than ever before — and far fewer, if any, are taking place in a “video room” or some other specialized broadcast facility. Instead, you’re likely doing it yourself, on a webcam built into your laptop or via a smartphone or tablet. It’s the way work is going to be done, increasingly, going forward. – Paul Kapustka in Mobile Enterprise 360

The increase in mobility will reinforce the need for openness in organizations. A mobile workforce must easily collaborate and cooperate across timezones in order to deal with complex and often time-sensitive issues. One reason workers are mobile is to keep them closer to their customers. This proximity means they can sense changes faster, but they also need to be able to react quicker. Trust needs to be pushed to the organization’s edges.

A mobile workforce can be a formidable way to deal with complexity. But this workforce needs to be supported for networked learning as well as networked working. Knowledge networks are optimized through openness, transparency and diversity. If your workforce is becoming increasingly mobile, it may be time to review how things get done:

vintage-164281_640—

This post is brought to you by Mobile Enterprise 360 Community and Citrix

Note: I retained editorial control and take full responsibility for what is posted. Contract writing is one of the ways I make my living.

Experience, Exposure, Education

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70-20-1070%: Experience

20%: Exposure

10%: Education

The 70:20:10 Framework Explained is a holistic framework, a “reference model”, and not a recipe. “A reference model is an abstract framework consisting of an interlinking set of clearly defined concepts produced by an expert or body of experts in order to encourage clear communication.” —p.17. Charles Jennings explains the framework in detail so that organizations can use it to improve how people work and learn at work. Each organization will have to add its unique context in order to implement the framework, but this book provides an excellent start. The 70:20:10 institute can provide more contextual feedback.

The book gives clear guidance on dealing with the changing nature of work and organizations, such as:

  • Flattening organizations
  • Softening structures
  • Increasing complexity
  • Globalization pressures
  • Decrease in the half-life of knowledge
  • Rapid changes in business conditions
  • Increasingly dynamic market for expertise
  • Shifting and diminishing role of managers

The 70:20:10 Framework is based on learning at work, not in a classroom and not in a lab. Charles describes workplace learning as based on four key activities:

  1. Exposure to new and rich experiences.
  2. The opportunity to practice.
  3. Engaging in conversation and exchanges with each other.
  4. Making time to reflect on new observations, information, experiences, etc.

In today’s workplace, work is learning and learning is the work. This book helps you get there. Not only do I recommend this book, I think most organizations should buy several and keep them around so that everyone can read them. Why? Because experience with the framework, “tells us that reductions of 50% of spend on formal development are not unreasonable to expect.” That’s one good reason, and there are many more.

Top Tools for Learning

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Jane Hart compiles a list every year of what people find to be their best web tools for learning. Voting closes on 27 September. Here are my top tools this year, with last year’s position shown in brackets.

tools

9 (new): Wikimedia Commons is a great source for copyright free images to use in presentations.

8 (new): Feedly is my new feed reader, now that Google Reader has been shut down.

7 (8): Flickr: Still a great way to share photos online. I like the feature that automatically creates images in multiple sizes. Though the deletion of Pro accounts, for which I paid two years in advance, shows that Yahoo! (the owner) does not really care about its customers, only advertisers.

6 (10): Google Plus: I find G+ is very good for deep conversations and the live Hangouts feature is still a killer app, even though the features and interface keep changing, showing that the platform is built by engineers, for engineers.

5 (5): Keynote: Apple’s presentation application has enabled me to improve my slide presentations, through its simplicity and lack of clip art.

4 (9): Slideshare: A handy way to share presentations so that people can view them before or instead of downloading them.

3 (3): Diigo: Social bookmarks are a quick way for me to save a web page and find it easily (Diigo allows me to do an auto backup to Delicious).

2 (4): Twitter: Next to my blog, Twitter is my best learning tool and allows me to stay connected to a diverse network.

1 (1): WordPress: It powers my blog, which is the core of my self-directed learning and online reflection. It’s easy to use, has a huge community, and there are many plug-ins and additions available.

Leadership by Example

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Leadership training usually does not work. It seems that leadership coaching and mentoring is not that effective either.

In a survey of 200 CIOs, only one leadership-development technique–mentoring or coaching–was rated as highly successful or successful by at least 50 percent of respondents. All others were rated as not successful or only somewhat successful by most respondents. Even mentoring and coaching was rated highly successful by only 14 percent of the CIOs.

MBA-like executive education classes were rated the least effective development technique. “Sending your employees off to a course and expecting them to be an expert and apply the lessons is not as valuable as taking your own time to mentor and grow someone,” says Paul Brady, CIO of Arbella Insurance Group. “It’s not easy–hence the desire to ship employees off to an executive course.” – Brenda McGowan, in Network World

Perhaps the problem is the nature of leadership. Is it a skill that can be fairly quickly developed, or rather a craft that takes time to develop? When it comes to crafts, that require much time and practice, modelling may be a better method than shaping. So what exactly is modelling? Here are two examples.

Dr. Clare Brant was the first Indigenous psychiatrist in Canada and a professor of Psychiatry at the University of Western Ontario. In 1982 he presented Mi’kmaq Ethics & Principles, which included an examination of the differences in teaching between native and non-native cultures.

Now the Teaching; Shaping Vs. Modelling

“This is a more technical kind of thing. The white people use this method of teaching their children – it’s called ‘shaping’. Whereas the Indians use ‘modelling’. Shaping is B.F. Skinner’s ‘Operant Conditioning”, if you want to look into that one. Say a white person is teaching a white kid how to dress – he uses the shaping method, one way being ‘rewarding successive approximations’ of the behaviour he wants. Some are really complicated; for instance, if a white woman wants to teach her kid how to dress, she puts his sock on halfway and encourages him to pull it up, finishes dressing him and says he’s a good boy having done that much. The next day he learns to pull the whole sock on, then the other sock. Now that process takes about six weeks. But the white mother who does not have all that much to do can take that time to do that sort of thing every morning to teach her kid how to dress. So in this group that we ran, with these young Native people in London, we started to sniff this out, and there is nothing random about this, as a matter of fact. I asked Mary, a Native person, how she taught her kid to dress and she said, ‘I didn’t, he just did it.’ And I said, ‘Well, what do you mean?’ It came to me that she did it until he was four or five years old, and then one day when the kid felt competent, he took over and did it himself. He did it then ever after, unless he was sick or regressed in some way.”

 

“Then we asked Josh, a renowned hunter, how his father taught him to hunt. He said, ‘He didn’t teach me.’ Well, that’s ridiculous, everybody has to be taught everything. We are not born with this information. But Josh went on the hunting party and carried ever more of the packs on his back, and stood behind them and held a .22. One day when he was about 14 years, he got into a canoe, and a loaded gun was where he usually sat. He knew at that point it was his turn to make the kill, that this was ‘the day’ that he was to become a man. He was enormously frightened but did make the kill correctly, appropriately through the process of ‘modelling’. Now Mary modelled how to dress for years. Then one day the kid took over and did it when he felt confident. The people and father in the hunting modelled hunting behaviour, and then suddenly, ‘Okay, you’re ready to do it, and you can do it forever’.”

Shaping can work when the task to be done is straight-forward, time is of the essence, and the learner is ready.  In the cases above, time was needed. For complex behaviours like leadership, consisting of several skills, modelling may be best, as there is much implicit knowledge to be learned, which takes time. Education and training usually don’t provide the time for enough reflective practice. As long-time painter Stephen Scott has noted, most of what he knows about the technique of oil painting he learned on his own after leaving the university. Management and leadership are similar types of abilities.

Education and training are shaping technologies. They reward successive approximations of the desired behaviour. Modelling, on the other hand, is the foundation of social learning:

“Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory posits that people learn from one another, via observation, imitation, and modeling. The theory has often been called a bridge between behaviorist and cognitive learning theories because it encompasses attention, memory, and motivation.”

If we look at how organizational training & development has functioned over the past half century, it has been mostly separate from the work being done and focused on shaping behaviours. But the valued work in the enterprise is shifting, as it increases in variety and decreases in standardization. There is strong evidence that we need to integrate learning into our work in order to deal with the increasing complexity of knowledge work. Modelling is integrative, while shaping is usually external and out of the work context.

Consider also that as knowledge expands and new information is constantly added, who has the base knowledge to do the ‘shaping’ anyway? In our networked world, modelling behaviours may be a better strategy than shaping on any pre-defined curriculum. As can be seen by Dr. Brant’s second example, with modelling, the learner is progressively supported. In connected leadership, people can be both teachers and learners. Therefore neither training programs, nor coaching are enough. Leadership by example becomes the key.

Three types of KM

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In an organizational knowledge sharing framework, I put together several ideas to show how knowledge could be shared and codified. As I explain this to others I realize that these ideas go against many established assumptions about knowledge in organizations. For example, knowledge management is not a software system, but really three processes that are conducted in parallel and support each other; namely Big KM, Little KM and PKM [Patti Anklam].

Big KM is needed in larger organizations that have a lot of outputs, events and processes to keep track of. For instance, a company like P&G has a lot of history and many brands that each have a story. Just keeping track of all these products is a significant effort. This requires enterprise-wide systems. Big KM also provides the institutional knowledge that is needed to have common understanding amongst those working in the organization. It consists of the big, important stories.

Little KM helps groups make decisions given the knowledge they have at the time, but learning from each subsequent decision. By creating “safe-fail” experiments, they can try out new ways of working, with minimal risk. Little KM practices ensure that much of what is learned is shared and as much codified as possible. These feed into Big KM, institutional knowledge.

Little KMPKM is what individuals practice in order to fully participate in Little KM. I would say that PKM is the most important to keep organizational learning alive. Individuals who are actively engaged in their sense-making will likely be more participative in Little KM, and their sharing (as in Seek-Sense-Share) will contribute to Big KM. Imagine an organization where everyone blogs professionally. It would be very easy for an organizational curator to weave together the narrative threads from all employees, thus feeding into a Big KM system.

My experience is that Big KM is ‘relatively’ easy, but it does not guarantee knowledge-sharing. On the other hand, PKM is an individual skill that can be developed with practice. It benefits both the individual and the organization. Little KM, where teams share their learning and note their failures as well as success, is the most difficult. In large organizations, who probably have a Big KM system, I would focus next on PKM. Then, once sufficient people have PKM skills, Little KM (knowledge-in-action) can be put into practice. In the long run, it takes all three to ensure good institutional memory as well as a culture of learning.

knowledge organizational asset