Books

Pasteur said that discovery favoured the prepared mind. A diagnosis, also a discovery, must favour the prepared mind. Yet medical schools have been inattentive to preparing the mind to meet the patient, inattentive to errors, inattentive to attention, inattentive to inattention, and inattentive to the study of the self which is to be inattentive to the minefield within. —JMM

Dr. John Mary Meagher has over 40 years experience as an emergency physician. In Medicine, Mistakes and the Reptilian Brain, he combines lessons from health care, aviation, and some of the greatest thinkers in history to examine why mistakes are made and how to develop methods to overcome the reptile within all of us. While focused on physicians, there are many lessons that anyone can take from this book.

Dr. Meagher identifies three core tendencies that increase errors in medical practice:

1. Apathy
2. Haste
3. Egoism

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“How do our minds cope with the torrent of information coming at us from every angle today? How do we convert so much knowledge into socially productive wisdom? What can we do to close the gap between those who have access to open learning, and those who (still) do not?

The genuine democratisation of knowing is still being fought over.”
– David Price in Open: How we’ll work live and learn in the future

I really enjoyed reading “Open” as it flowed well and was full of interesting stories, all bound into a singular framework. The core of this book is David Price’s SOFT model and I have highlighted some components in this summary table, with further explanations below.

Society

A Global Learning Commons is “… essentially a shared resource, which works through carefully balancing rights and responsibilities. As it is with air, or water, so should it be with learning. Your right of access to the knowledge and skills of others is balanced with a responsibility to share what you can offer.”

Three characteristics of a GLC are participation, passion, and purpose. “The enthusiasm and ability of small groups of self-organising citizens to respond to respond to challenges makes bigger, better funded, organisations look slow and cumbersome in comparison.”

Business

“A commitment to sharing radically alters the culture of organisations.” On the subject of open for business, the CEO of Ingenious media, an investment and advisory group, states, “The reason why we don’t worry about giving that knowledge away is because most people can’t implement what they know. The capital value of something these days is the ability to implement it rather than to create it originally.” Freedom to fail is what enabled 3M to invent post-it notes and Google to develop new products through Google Labs. Finally, trust needs to be a core business value; “The lesson to be learned from IBM is that trust demands courage; the courage to let go, the courage to trust others, and, more than anything, the courage to jump the knowing-doing gap.”

Education

“[Innovators cited in the book] believe in education as a force for social equality – Marc Lewis sees his school as a catalyst for diversity and equality in the communications industry (a notoriously white, male, middle-class occupation). They believe in values-driven learning – Larry Rosenstock is fond of quoting Thomas Jefferson, ‘The purpose of public education isn’t to serve the public; the purpose of public education is to create a public.’ And they see it as a duty to ensure that the ideas behind their successes don’t remain in the petri dish, but spread virally throughout the system – witness Anne Knock’s sense of responsibility to educators across Australia. They all see themselves as part of a social movement to redefine education, not simply to lead it in their own schools.”

I recommend this book and would see it as a good one to keep a couple of extra copies, so you can give them away to those on the other side of the Open adoption chasm.

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.

The 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.

The New How: Creating Business Solutions through Collaborative Strategy is a how-to book for anyone involved in strategy development in a large organization. It’s a toolkit for implementing a more collaborative workplace. It’s about the How and not so much the What or Why, though there are many anecdotes shared by the author Nilofer Merchant, from her experiences with companies like Apple, Adobe, Nokia and HP. Co-creation of strategy, especially the How part it, is a major theme here. As Nilofer explains:

Once upon a time, some firms had more access to data and information than others. Some firms had more skills at slicing and dicing. In that time, heavy-duty data analysis was enough to form a competitive advantage. Today, everybody has access to vast amounts of high-quality information and the tools to crunch it. What matters now is the ability to act on that information: to conceive – now – the nugget of hidden opportunity in a given situation. The key is being able to work with one another and come up with new ideas, build on those ideas, and then add insights based on the data that empower us to act in unique and differentiated ways.

Another reason that collaboration is so important is that the notion of the great leader, or what Nilofer describes as The Chief Answer Officer, cannot handle the complexity of the current hyper-connected business environment. Here is her advice to GMs, VPs and others in high management places:

The answer to today’s specific question is only that – part of the solution to today’s problem. Next week’s problem will require a different solution. And next month’s question will need yet another answer. Crowning yourself the Chief of Answers puts you in a difficult position, one with very little advantage. It sets your team up to be the Tribe of Doing Things. And, at the end of the day, you end up feeding the very counterproductive cycle you need to alter.

As a bonus, the book is amply illustrated by Hugh MacLeod, which makes it an even more interesting read.

A good part of the book covers the Quest method of strategy development, with plenty of examples and aids. I found the “MurderBoard” the most interesting section. This section alone makes the book worth buying. The MurderBoarding sequence is simple: 1) Decide what  matters; 2) Sort; 3) Test; 4) Choose. The last step is critical, for “If you don’t choose, you don’t have a strategy; you just have a set of options.” Or, to make it as clear as possible,  “MurderBoarding: It’s not how many ideas you have. It’s how many good ideas you kill.“

This is a detailed and practical book. It is not a high-concept tome where at the end you feel good but don’t know what to do next. There is enough pragmatic advice in this book for any executive or manager to run with. It’s a valuable addition for people with management responsibilities in large organizations or anyone consulting to such an organization. Here is one final quote that succinctly describes the end goal of The New How:

“Permission to innovate without asking happens when the strategy is co-owned.”