“people are for caring”

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Christian Madsbjerg concludes in his book, Sensemaking: “What are people for? Algorithms can do many things, but they will never actually give a damn. People are for caring.”

How can we understand the complexity of human networks, especially when they are massaged by algorithms that drive our social media? Empathy can put us in other people’s shoes. We can try to understand their perspective. Empathy is a requisite perspective for the network era. Empathy means engaging with others. The ability to connect with a diversity of people is the human potential of the internet: but it takes effort.

B.J May shared his story on ‘How 26 Tweets Broke My Filter Bubble’, which enabled him to see the world beyond a workplace that he described as, “All men, all heterosexual, all white”. He decided to follow Marco Rogers’ advice to use “Twitter as a way to understand viewpoints that diverge from your own”. At the end of this experiment, which turned into a permanent practice, May concluded that you can learn when your mind is open, but it can hurt.

“Every one of my opinions on the issues at hand had been challenged, and most had shifted or matured in some way. More importantly, however, was this: The exercise had taught me how to approach a contrary opinion with patience and respect, with curiosity and an intent to learn, with kindness and humanity.” —B.J. May

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hunters in the jungle

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The challenge for workers in what is becoming a freelance & gig economy is to survive in the global jungle. Work is moving toward temporary, negotiated hierarchies. The challenge for the modern organization is to have a flexible enough structure to let people move in and out of the jungle. Workers can also find short-term informal communities which can function like game preserves to develop skills necessary for the jungle, but in a safer environment.  Staying too long in an organization (a zoo) destroys their jungle instincts and disconnects them from the world of their clients. Read more at life in the jungle.

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thinking critically

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

“Experience plus reflection is the learning that lasts.” —Charles Handy, via @olliegardener

On internet privacy, be very afraid [including the canvas fingerprinting on this link] via @courosa

“Unfortunately, we live in a world where most of our data is out of our control. It’s in the cloud, stored by companies that may not have our best interests at heart. So, while there are technical strategies people can employ to protect their privacy, they’re mostly around the edges. The best recommendation I have for people is to get involved in the political process. The best thing we can do as consumers and citizens is to make this a political issue. Force our legislators to change the rules.”

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Sensemaking and the power of the humanities

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What is Sensemaking?

Christian Madsbjerg, in Sensemaking: The Power of the Humanities in the Age of the Algorithm, describes sensemaking as an interaction with fellow humans in the real world.

“Sensemaking is practical wisdom grounded in the humanities. We can think of sense making as the exact opposite of algorithmic thinking: it is entirely situated in the concrete, while algorithmic thinking exists in a no-man’s land of information stripped of its specificity. Algorithmic thinking can go wide — processing trillions of terabytes of data per second — but only sense making can go deep.” —Christian Madsbjerg, Sensemaking, p. 6

Why Sensemaking?

“Too many of the top cadre of leadership I have met are isolated in their worldview. They have lost touch with the humanity of their customers and their constituents and, as a result, they mistake numerical representations and models for real life. Their days are sliced and diced into tiny segments, so they feel they don’t have time to wander around in the mess of real-world data. Instead, they jump into a problem-solving process and a conclusion without understanding the actual question.” —Christian Madsbjerg, Sensemaking, p. xiv

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friday’s urban finds

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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.

“Cars are like pharmaceuticals. There’s a legitimate place for them, but we resort to them too much.” —Peter D. Norton, via @grescoe

“And then you automate it, and it makes that same mistake hundreds of millions of times.” —@eskokilpi

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blogging break

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No, I have not stopped blogging, though my lack of recent posts may have given that impression. I have decided to take a bit of a Summer break, continue my reading and observations on social media, and take time for cycling. I recently completed a 4-day trip to Cape Breton, enjoying the slow pace of life and the time to watch the world go slowly by.

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lies & damn lies

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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.

@white_owly : “Lies, damn lies and people who purport to understand blockchain.”

@zeynep : “Silicon Valley still mostly run like they are legos for grownups; once something cool is assembled, the real business, people, are ignored.”

@alaindebotton : “Academia: an invention of genius to keep the brightest, most enquiring minds from tampering with the status quo. Paddocks for intellectuals.”

“Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.” —Bertrand Russell, via BrainPickings

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beta conversation 2017-08-14

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I will be hosting the next Beta Conversation on Monday, 14 August at 21:00 UTC  [17:00 EDT]. This is 07:00 on 15 August in eastern Australia.

The subject will be Personal Knowledge Mastery (PKM) and leadership. The Harvard Business Review article, The Best Leaders are Constant Learners, gives a general idea of the themes to be discussed. Participants can add their own questions in advance.

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the complexity of capitalism

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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.

@alaindebotton: “Academia: an invention of genius to keep the brightest, most enquiring minds from tampering with the status quo. Paddocks for intellectuals.”

Is Teal the new Black? Probably Not

“I suspect that the clean, uncomplicated notions put forward in the book [Organizing for Complexity, by Frédéric Laloux] will be undone by context, the actual details of implementation and to a large extent power-dynamics (for example, autocratic ‘Teal’ leaders making ‘non-Teal’ people do things they don’t want to do). In other words, I’m not sure I actually believe Teal even exists. I’m not sure I believe any of the ‘stages of development’ actually exist.

I believe the colour schema is an instrument, a not very accurate map. And like all instruments it appeals to a certain instrumental logic, one that craves a simpler world and shies away from complexity. In my opinion, this cognitive style mostly serves to distract from the important questions of who we are and what type of organizations we want to be creating.”

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future of work influencers

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I don’t put much stock in lists and ‘best of …’ rankings as they rarely tell you the methodology behind the system. When Antonio Santo (@akwyz) shared a list of the top 50 influencers on ‘the future of work’, I asked about the methodology. Vishal Mishra, CEO of Right Relevance, kindly obliged.

“The Right Relevance score of an influencer for a TOPIC represents the authority within the social community for that topic, say for e.g. ‘machine learning’, of that influencer. It is a normalized score ranging from 10 to 100. This numeric influence is then inductively applied to the topical content curated by that individual for measuring relevance.

The process is fully algorithmic and leverages ML, semantic analysis and NLP on unstructured data at scale. It is primarily graph based and involves performing a 2-level proprietary people rank”
—Influencers Topic Scores & Rankings

I use Twitter as a medium to teach people how to find experts and how to build a knowledge network. This is a core part of my PKM Workshop. Understanding the algorithms behind search results and rankings is an important network era literacy, and I am glad that Right Relevance (RR) shares some of this.

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