paying for online freedom

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Back in 2007 I suggested that the first step to take in online sensemaking is to free your bookmarks. Social bookmarks reside online, not in your browser, so they can be accessed from multiple devices and easily shared. My own journey went from Furl, to Magnolia, to Delicious, and most recently to Diigo. Today I decided it was time to make another move — to Pinboard. This is a paid service and adds to several others that I now pay for, such as 1Password, Fastmail, Zoom, and Tweetbot.

Paying for online services makes for a healthier web, in my opinion. It means that service providers are not motivated to sell advertising and/or user tracking. A recent thread on Twitter by the founder of Pinboard gave me the impetus for this move. It was about the flawed business model of Medium, a ‘free’ blog hosting site that I used for a short time and then left.

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mapping healthcare

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This past year my wife and I have spent a fair bit of time in hospitals and doctors’ offices, helping friends navigate the healthcare system. One thing we have noticed is the siloed nature of medicine here.

When you get limited time with a healthcare professional and they have limited time to get up to date on the patient, a lot of information and context slips through the cracks. Add in the fact that many of these professionals do not regularly communicate with each other, and the patient becomes responsible for closing these gaps. This is impossible with patients suffering from dementia or other cognitive challenges.

In addition, many family members do not know what information is important and are not able to be effective patient advocates. For example, some information — such as the recent death of a spouse — does not get transmitted and the physician’s diagnosis is based only on the visible symptoms as presented at the time.

This example reminded me of a project we did for a healthcare client in 2004. We conducted an elearning and community of practice initiative for a hospital system as part of the transition to a new nursing care model — from the Henderson to the McGill model. The Province of Québec (healthcare is the responsibility of each Province in Canada) was moving from a patient-centric to a learning-centric nursing framework. As part of our project, we developed software for visual mapping to support the standard patient charts and records. The software was used to create visual models of the patient’s family (genogram) and the patient’s community relationships (ecomap).

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from tweets to the blog

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

When Francis Harwood, anthropologist, asked a Sioux elder why people tell stories, he answered, “In order to become human beings.” She asked, “Aren’t we human beings already? He smiled, “Not everyone makes it.” —Laura Simms, via @SophiaCycles1

“First they said they needed data about the children to find out what they’re learning. Then they said they needed data about the children to make sure they are learning. Then the children only learnt what could be turned into data. Then the children became data.“ —@MichaelRosenYes

“If you worked every single day, making $5000/day, from the time Columbus sailed to America, to the time you are reading this tweet, you would still not be a billionaire, and you would still have less money than Jeff Bezos makes in a week. No one works for a billion dollars.” —@_Floodlight

“The more I think about it, the more sure I am that the post-industrial revolution will be a moral revolution, or it will not be at all.“ —@EskoKilpi

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reflecting on the future of knowledge

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I started my independent consulting practice in 2003 and one of the first books I purchased was — The Future of Knowledge: Increasing Prosperity through Value Networks by Verna Allee (2002) Butterworth-Heinemann (ISBN: 0750675918). The topic of value network analysis and the leading role that Verna Allee played came up in some recent discussions in one of my online communities of practice. So I decided to re-read the book that planted so many ideas in my mind. Here are some of the highlights, almost 20 years after Verna started writing The Future of Knowledge.

LESS COLLECTION, MORE CONNECTION

One of the primary requirements for supporting knowledge work is to ensure that people have the tools and information they need to complete their everyday tasks. But, another equally important goal is to provide appropriate technologies for collaborative work in a complex global environment. The more complex modes of knowledge cannot be turned over to databases and automation. They are accomplished by people through active and immediate conversation and interchanges. Connective technologies enable us to link up with our peers so that we may weave the threads of our understanding together into new synthesis and insights.

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the relationship era

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“In the agrarian age of the 19th century, when schools meant one-room rural schoolhouses, teaching morality and morals and character was all important. That’s because society needed, and so demanded, good moral character.”—Nineshift

Not so long ago ‘gee’ was an offensive word in the USA. It was considered to be short for Jesus. But a focus on morality shifted to a focus on responsibility, as we entered the factory era, where timeliness was necessary to keep the machines moving. We are nearing the end of this era, but its influence is still in our schools.

So today ‘responsibility’ means:
* Being present, not absent.
* Showing up on time.
* Handing in your homework on time.
—Nineshift

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more on meetings

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I listened to a podcast recently where Steven Rogelberg was interviewed about his 2019 book — The Surprising Science of Meetings. I think that meetings are prime areas of opportunity for workplace performance improvement. For example, optimizing meetings can make time for learning. So I reviewed Rogelberg’s web page that provides links to podcasts, interviews, and references in various media. Here are some of the highlights.

Why meetings?

“In many ways, meetings are the building blocks and core elements of our organizations. They are the venues where the organization comes to life for employees, teams, and leaders.” —Steven Rogelberg

Meeting managers

“The people who love meetings are the managers who run them.” —Quartz 2019

“In 1973, Canadian business management expert Henry Mintzberg was among the first to examine the problem [frustrations with meetings]. His book ‘The Nature of Managerial Work’ found that more than half of managers’ time in his sample was spent in meetings.” —CNBC 2015

Making meetings better

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making time for learning

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For over a decade I have promoted the idea that work is learning & learning is the work. It seems the idea has now gone mainstream, as it’s even noted in Forbes that, “Work and learning will become analogous”. It is much easier to just say that workflow learning is essential rather than putting in the structures and practices that can enable it. There are many structural barriers to learning in the workplace that have been established and embedded over the past century.

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the knowledge artisan

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An artisan is skilled in a craft and uses specialized tools or machinery. Artisans were the dominant producers of goods before the Industrial Revolution. Knowledge artisans are similar to their pre-industrial counterparts, especially when it comes to tools. Knowledge artisans not only design the work but they can do the work. It is not passed down an assembly line.

Augmented by technology, they rely on their networks and skills to solve complex problems and test new ideas. Small groups of highly productive knowledge artisans are capable of producing goods and services that used to take much larger teams and more resources. Many integrate marketing, sales, and customer service with their creations.

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media and massages

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

I just had the dumbest fight of my professional career, which I assure you is saying something, and there’s not a day we actually disagreed. We just hadn’t talked voice.

Oh. Well then.

Talk. No really. Actually talk. Don’t play telephone. Pick up the telephone. Lunch. TALK.

Text has enough bandwidth to escalate conflict between humans, but not enough bandwidth to de-escalate. Base assumptions — what people actually want — can get wrong and stay wrong really easily, without low latency, high metadata exchange.

Never fight over text. —@dankami

@johnrobb — “Incoherence makes group decision making impossible … Incoherence arises from a ​distrust of information​ (due to misinformation/bias), a ​distrust of messengers ​ (due to a loss of fictive kinship), and a ​distrust of the medium ​ (due to corporate interference).”

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the internet and democracy

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I got off Facebook about 10 years ago. I know that this has had no impact on the company or its business model. When I saw in 2007 that Facebook was selling user information, I knew I could not stay on the platform much longer. But the lure of network effects, where it takes almost no effort to connect with other people, is too powerful for most of us.

Facebook is convenient. For most businesses it is suicide not to be on Facebook. It is an extremely convenient way to connect all your online communication and most of your digital content consumption. It is so convenient that it is the only way some people connect online. In thinking about Facebook, I noted that we may be heading toward a platform-dominated global social network that will not only shape our behaviour but narrow the scope of our humanity.

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