Ten years after publishing Seeking Perpetual Beta, the latest e-book in the perpetual beta series is here. This book is based on my writing for the past two years, with a particular focus on automation with artificial intelligence. The previous edition, perpetual beta 2022, is still available at a reduced price.
Books
Book reviews
the fifth discipline redux
Harvard Business Review described The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge, as one of the seminal management books of the previous 75 years. In 2017 I reviewed mastery and models and showed how they still pertain to organizations 30 years later. I concluded that the challenge for learning professionals is to help organizations become learning organizations. It is also to master the new literacies of the network era and promote critical thinking, for ourselves and others.
Questioning existing hierarchies is necessary to create the organizations of the future where power and authority are shared, based on mutual trust. The dominant organizational models need to become network-centric and learning-centric.
“Personal mastery is the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively. As such, it is an essential cornerstone of the learning organization — the learning organization’s spiritual foundation.” ―Peter Senge (1990) The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization
community finds
I am a member of several private online communities and I also host one — the perpetual beta coffee club. There have been some interesting conversations over the past few weeks and I would like to highlight some online resources that were shared. I learn a lot from these communities.
media drive organization
It was almost 300 years from Gutenberg’s invention of the European printing press (1450) until the Age of Enlightenment beginning in 1715. If we see digital media — first invented as telegraph transmissions in 1855 — to be the dawn of the electric/network age, then we may have a similarly long period of change and turmoil still ahead of us.
Marshall McLuhan famously said that, “The medium is the message”. Thousands of years ago, the medium of the written word enable rulers to extend their command and control over larger empires and kingdoms. Institutions, like the three religions of Abrahamic tradition, were able to use the written word to get their messages spread across vast regions. As discussed above, the printed word enabled the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment. Printed works enabled mass literacy and market economies emerged in kingdoms and later dominated nation states. In summary:
- Writing enabled institutions larger than tribal societies could build.
- Print enabled markets that could cross oceans and continents.
When “hope and history rhyme”
When the pandemic began — it’s not over — I stopped reading dystopian fiction, some of which I had recommended in Summer science-fiction a couple of years before. The last one I had read was Station Eleven, which I am glad I did so before March 2020. My first read this Summer has been Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future — here is Bryan Alexander’s final instalment from his book club.
The Ministry for the Future can be called speculative fiction, and in this case provides a wide array of methods and processes that we might collectively use to get us through the current climate catastrophe. As fiction, it is more persuasive than any research report or white paper. It opens with a heat wave in India with temperatures above 38C and 60% humidity. Millions of people die as a result. Well, the 2022 heat wave in Pakistan and India hit 49.5C!
dare to un-lead
In Dare to Un-lead: The art of relational leadership in a fragmented world Céline Schillinger shares her personal experiences in several work environments and connects this to a framework of liberté, égalité, and fraternité. For example, Céline discusses her time as the Head of Quality Innovation & Engagement at Sanofi Pasteur and the creation of the Break Dengue global community to fight dengue fever. The book refers to a wide variety of management theorists and organizational development professionals who advocate for more freedom in the workplace.
A movement toward more liberty, equality, and fraternity at work starts, as we have seen, with an individual distancing themselves from a dominant model — one inherited from the past, which has become restrictive and counterproductive — with others eventually electing to do the same. At the beginning, there is personal risk-taking and a sense of both refusal and encouragement, even if this sense only takes the form of a voice in the change-agent’s head telling them “no”, partly in disgust at what is, partly in disbelief at what might be, partly in recognition of the rules and norms that constrain them. In The Rebel, an examination of the development of revolutionary thought, Albert Camus wrote, “I rebel, therefore we exist.” That phrase could sum up the essence of this book.
Working Smarter Field Guide
Working Smarter with Personal Knowledge Mastery
The Working Smarter with PKM Field Guide is also available as a PDF.
More information about the PKM Online Workshop
This field guide supports the Working Smarter @ Citi program.
The Changing Nature of Human Work
For the past several centuries we have used human labour to do what machines cannot. First the machines caught up with us and surpassed humans with their brute force. Now they are surpassing us with their brute intelligence. There is not much more need for machine-like human work which is routine, standardized, or brute. But certain long-term skills can help us connect with our fellow humans in order to learn and innovate — curiosity, sensemaking, cooperation, and novel thinking.
debunking handbook 2020
The Debunking Handbook 2020 has just been published and is an excellent free guide to address the mass amounts of misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda that flow through our digital communications everyday and then influence real life behaviours. I have discussed some of these phenomena previously, in confronting the post-truth machines and pre-bunking the conspiracy theorists.
The 19-page Handbook provides these handy definitions.
- Misinformation: False information that is disseminated, regardless of intent to mislead.
- Disinformation: Misinformation that is deliberately disseminated to mislead.
- Fake news: False information, often of a sensational nature, that mimics news media content.
- Continued influence effect: The continued reliance on inaccurate information in people’s memory and reasoning after a credible correction has been presented.
- Illusory truth effect: Repeated information is more likely to be judged true than novel information because it has become more familiar.
weird stuff
Fiction sometimes explains reality in a much better way.
Corvallis had asked the usual questions about job title and job description. Richard [CEO] had answered simply, “Weird stuff.” When this proved unsatisfactory to the company’s ISO-compliant HR department, Richard had been forced to go downstairs and expand upon it. In a memorable, extemporaneous work of performance art in the middle of the HR department’s open-plan workspace, he had explained that work of a routine, predictable nature could and should be embodied in computer programs. If that proved too difficult, it should be outsourced to humans far away. If it was somehow too sensitive or complicated for outsourcing, then “you people” (meaning the employees of the HR department) needed to slice it and dice it into tasks that could be summed up in job descriptions and advertised on the open employment market. Floating above all of that, however, in a realm that was out of the scope of “you people”, was “weird stuff”. It was important that the company have people to work on “weird stuff”. As a matter of fact it was more important than anything else. But trying to explain “weird stuff” to “you people” was like explaining blue to someone who had been blind since birth, and so there was no point in even trying. —Neal Stephenson (2019) Fall: or Dodge in Hell
innovating with pkm
Last month I published the latest e-book in the perpetual beta series (163 pages) which is focused on actionable insights for working and learning in a networked world. I have extracted the 23 pages of Chapter 7 on personal knowledge mastery to provide an idea of what the remaining chapters in the book look like and as a reference for the online PKM workshop.
This chapter proposes that the connection between innovation and learning is evident. We cannot be innovative unless we integrate learning into our work. Improving our ability to see contradictions, by seeking disconfirming data, can easily be integrated into the discipline of PKM.