The global pandemic is a wake up call and an opportunity. It has shocked our triform (Tribes +Institutions +Markets) economy and society. Over the past two decades we have seen many experiments and movements toward a more equitable, sustainable way of living on this planet (+Networks). We have made the rules for how we are governed and how the economy works. We can change them. We cannot change how the planet’s environment works. We cannot change the laws of physics. We cannot change how the SARS CoV-2 virus acts, as much as we would like to.
Books
Book reviews
perpetual beta 2020
For 16 years my primary sensemaking medium has been this blog. This is where half-baked thoughts get tested, changed, and recombined. They reflect my interactions on social media, experiences through professional engagements, and conversations with colleagues around the world. The final part of my Seek > Sense > Share PKM practice is to put it all together. This too is in perpetual beta because once I do so, I begin on the next iteration.
After 3,300 blog posts, the latest instalment in the Perpetual Beta Series [now updated to Perpetual Beta 2022] is now available — Perpetual Beta 2020
I wrote the original perpetual beta series as four standalone digital volumes between 2014 and 2017. The changing nature of work, and our evolving perspectives on learning and knowledge were the core themes. I wrote Seeking Perpetual Beta first, in order to create a coherent narrative after ten years of blogging.
Subsequent volumes focused on leadership, personal knowledge mastery, and working models. The next volume, Life in Perpetual Beta, combined the best of the first four books in late 2017, with a new edition in December 2018. An updated edition comprises the first eleven chapters of this e-book.
Strategic Doing — getting to metamodernity
Strategic DoingTM is a process where strategy emerges through the continuous asking of four questions.
- What could we do? + What should we do — enable us to answer, Where are we going?
- What will we do? + What’s our 30/30? [what did we learn in the past 30 days & what will we do in the next 30 days?] — provide us with an emerging pathway.
Strategic Doing comprises 10 skills and the book’s authors state that of 500 projects in one initiative, the most successful teams consistently used eight of these skills, while the least successful used only two.
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Building a safe space for deep and focused conversations.
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Using an appreciative question to frame your conversation.
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Identifying the assets at your disposal, including the hidden ones.
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Linking and leveraging your assets to create new opportunities.
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Identifying a big opportunity where you can generate momentum.
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Rewriting your opportunity as a strategic outcome with measurable characteristics.
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Defining a small starting project to start moving toward your outcome.
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Creating a short-term action plan in which everyone takes a small step.
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Meeting every 30 days to review progress, adjust, and plan for the next 30 days.
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Nudging, connecting, and promoting to reinforce your new habits of collaboration.
reflecting on the future of knowledge
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.
more on meetings
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
range & inefficiency
An innovation system should preserve range and inefficiency, concludes the book Range—Why generalists triumph in a specialized world, by David Epstein. Focusing deep yields efficiencies and incremental innovation. But a broad base of learning and experience can produce radical innovation. Many (most?) of our research and education practices are designed for ‘kind’ environments where the rules and parameters are relatively clear. Playing chess is one example. But the world, and most fields of human endeavour are complex, or ‘wicked’. “In wicked domains, the rules of the game are often unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be repetitive patterns and they may not be obvious, and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate, or both.” When faced with new and complex challenges, we cannot rely on learning from experience, as we have none.
the silo effect
“Silos are cultural phenomena, which arise out of the systems we use to classify and organize the world,” states Gillian Tett in The Silo Effect. Silos are bounded hierarchies that define specialized work or areas of knowledge. They come in the form of academic fields, organizational departments, schools of thought, and many other forms created by humans. They are all based on an explicit or implicit model of how things are done. But all models are imperfect explanations of the world. Forgetting that can make us blind to what would be obvious to an outsider.
Tett first gives an overview of silo thinking and its effects — such as the 2008 financial crash — and goes into detail with examples. This is followed by various stories of silo-busting. The conclusion provides a few rules of thumb. Hierarchies and classification systems are necessary, especially in complex fields of practice, so we will never get rid of silos, says Tett.
The challenge is to find ways to get outside their boundaries and see from multiple perspectives. Silo thinking can be countered by engaging ‘cultural translators’ — “people who are able to move between specialist silos and explain to those sitting inside one department what is happening elsewhere” — but only about 10% of an organization’s staff need these skills.
Helping information to flow requires that everyone not only share data and information but also have the opportunity to interpret information and share their conclusions. Not everyone sees the world in the same way. Cultural translators are also ‘knowledge catalysts’.
our learning blueprint
“Culture is an emergent property of human groups, a new property of the whole not manifested in the parts themselves. And it arises from humans having the brains and social systems that allow for retaining and exchanging ideas.
Human culture also accumulates. This means that brains and social systems capable of coping with more and more stuff are increasingly advantaged across time. And it also means that the force that culture has been applying to our evolution has been increasing over the past ten thousand to forty thousand years. Once humans evolved to be capable of teaching and learning, they developed a parallel evolutionary strand, cultural evolution, side by side with genetic. These two strands intersect repeatedly in many places and times. Each leaves its mark on the other. ” —Nicholas Christakis, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society
Christakis’s ‘social suite’ is a range of traits that are common among all human societies, though not always manifested in the same way. For more information, read Howard Rheingold’s review of Blueprint. When it comes to the age-old question of Nurture versus Nature, Christakis answers that it is both, like a double helix. This is not a unique perspective.
metamodernity
Continued from: understanding the shift
To an older culture, a newer one often looks amoral, as morality guides older cultures. To a newer culture, older cultures appear to be primitive, lacking complexity. But each culture has its pros and cons. The challenge in developing what Lene Rachel Andersen calls ‘metamodernity‘ is in taking the positive aspects of previous human cultures in order to create a global culture that can deal with the complexity of technology, climate emergency, and evolving political situations.
The Nordic Bildung perspective of societal evolution aligns with David Ronfeldt’s TIMN Model, which I have discussed in — understanding the shift. Andersen suggests we can build upon the positive aspects of each previous societal form in order to create a metamodern society. We do not need to destroy the old ways.
learning myths & superstitions
In Millennials, Goldfish & other Training Misconceptions my colleague Clark Quinn has written a handy guide for every training shop or L&D department. Using his decades of experience combined with a scientist’s analytical mind, Clark first looks at learning ‘myths’ — beliefs we hold that aren’t true. Each myth is analyzed from seven perspectives:
- The Claim
- The Appeal
- The Potential Upside
- The Potential Downside
- How to Evaluate
- What the Evidence Says
- What to Do
This book is a useful job aid for anyone supporting learning in the workplace. Clark uses a different approach for ‘superstitions’ — AKA bad practices. He examines each of these from five perspectives:
- The Claim
- The Practice
- The Rationale
- Why it Doesn’t Work
- What to do Instead