Books

Book reviews

The Storytelling Animal

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storytelling-animalIn The Storytelling Animal, Jonathan Gottschall tells us how stories make us human. The book looks at gender differences in weaving our own stories, the cultural significance of stories, and some of the science and pseudo-science on story, narration and memory. It boils down to a simple formula, says Gottschall.

Story = Character + Predicament + Attempted Extrication

This made me consider how this could be important for institutional memory. Would this be a good formula to try to capture past events from those who have experienced them? It could be, but it might be highly dependent on how much time has passed and how important accuracy is, as we are not very good at remembering, especially critical, or ‘flashbulb’, events. “Memory isn’t an outright fiction; it is merely a fictionalization“, says Gottschall.

“The signature flashbulb event of our age is 9/11, which led to a bonanza of false-memory research. The research shows two things: that people are extremely sure of their 9/11 memories and that upward of 70% of us misremember key aspects of the attacks … In one study, 73 percent of research subjects misremembered watching, horrified, as the first plane plowed into the North Tower on the morning of September 11.

The research shows that our memories get worse over time, but our stories, as we remember them, become much clearer. We have a propensity for self-delusion, something every jury member should always keep in mind. But fiction (story) is much more powerful than non-fiction. Gottschall discusses the power of Wagner’s mythology on Hitler, as well as how the book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, influenced the 19th century anti-slavery movement.

“When we read nonfiction, we read with our shields up. We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story, we drop our intellectual guard. We are moved emotionally, and this seems to leave us defenseless.”

Consider the above statement and think about training. Would it not be more effective if content was developed as stories? How about knowledge management? I think stories would be most effective for new hire training. Perhaps we should focus less on instructional design or knowledge repositories. Instead, organizations could engage good story tellers. We hear a lot about the importance of curation in the digital workplace today. The best curators are also story tellers.

I enjoyed this book and learned a fair bit from it, but it is not a book that deals much with how stories can be used for KM or other organizational purposes.

The Nature of the Future – Review

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Nature of the FutureWhat will the future look like? Here are some glimpses.

  • Genomera: Crowdsourcing clinical trials.
  • BioCurious: Hackerspace for biotech.
  • Lending Club: “We replace the high cost and complexity of bank lending.”
  • ScholarMatch: Connect under-resourced students with resources, schools, and donors to make college possible.
  • Foresight Engine: How would you reinvent the process of medical discovery?
  • Open PCR Machine: Do it yourself thermocycler for controlling Polymerase Chain Reactions for DNA detection and sequencing.

These are all discussed in the book, The Nature of the Future, by Marina Gorbis, executive director of the Institute for the Future.

We are quickly finding out that when we go from a centralized communications infrastructure to a distributed one, when we connect everything and everyone, the result is not just to make things faster, better, and bigger. The social system itself acquires a fundamentally different quality: it becomes more diversified, more emergent, and often unpredictable.

This book provides probably the best background, and foreground, reading for most of the ideas discussed on this blog: complexity; the changing nature of work; the need to integrate learning into our work; and the primacy of cooperation in networks. Dedicated chapters cover money, education, science, governance, and health, with interesting future scenarios supported by current examples. While automation and robotics may be taking many jobs away, Gorbis identifies unique human skills which will continue to be important. These should be the core of any public education program.

  • Sensemaking
  • Social and emotional intelligence
  • Novel and adaptive thinking
  • Moral and ethical reasoning

As Gorbis writes, and I wholeheartedly agree, “Learning is social”.

We need to learn how to work better with machines, letting machines do what they are good at. Gorbis shows how machines and average people can outperform experts at playing chess. “Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.”

On the future of health care, Gorbis sees a new role for doctors. “In a socialstructed health care system, the doctor is not an omniscient God but a great conversationalist, astute observer, and insightful partner, that is, she is less a robot and more a real human being.” Doctors will be more like nurses, and with increasingly advanced technology, nurses will be more like doctors. I wonder if in the future, their roles will merge?

Gorbis identifies a major disconnect in our economy.

  1. Our technology tools and platforms are highly participatory and social.
  2. Our business models, by contrast, are based on market, i.e., monetary rewards.
  3. conflicts [between these two priorities] are likely to grow simply because the number of such endeavors [Twitter, Facebook, etc] is growing exponentially.

Gorbis concludes that “much new value and innovation will move from commodity-or-market-based production to socialstructed creation.” This reminds me of the T+I+M+N framework. A networked economy is not a mere modification of a market economy, but a form in itself that can address issues beyond the capabilities of markets.

Would I recommend this book? Yes. There are few people who would not benefit from this synthesis of the forces of technological, economic, and societal change coming at us. I will close with some practical advice, applicable to all, but especially for anyone entering the workforce.

In a world where people’s jobs will not be given to them, each individual will need to look deeply and understand what she or he is good at, how she or he can contribute to multiple efforts and navigate multiple roles and identities as a part of different communities.

As the world keeps churning, work today is all about learning

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to sell is humanThe title of this post is what Dan Pink, in his book To Sell is Human, would call a rhyming pitch. He also discusses the question pitch, and I followed his recommendation in the Pitch chapter and developed my own.

Are things more complex now, than they were five years ago?

Your Work? Your Markets? Your Customers? Your Profession?

I also developed a Pixar pitch:

Work used to be fairly straight forward. You had a job, knew what to do, and were paid to do it. Then the Web appeared. Everybody got connected to almost everyone else. All these connections made things more complex.  Some work was automated. Some of it outsourced. Much of it became more complex. Making sense of complexity, and developing ways to keep up, is how I help people and organizations.

Finally I created a one-word pitch: SENSE-MAKING

The Pitch chapter also explains the Twitter pitch (140 characters) and the subject line pitch. These are all excellent exercises to focus on your business or mission, and I will continue to refine mine over time.

Here is Dan’s pitch to continue reading the book, subtitled “the surprising truth about moving others“:

Here we confront a paradox. There are no “natural” salespeople, in part because we are all naturally salespeople. Each of us – because we’re human – has a selling instinct, which means that anyone can master the basics of moving others. The rest of the book will show you how.

I found the book quite compelling and much of what was covered, such as improv skills for business, are areas of interest for me. The chapter on Clarity was directly aligned with my work on personal knowledge mastery . In it, Beth Kanter is quoted using my Seek-Sense-Share framework in her Content Curation Primer and earlier post.Kanter-PKM

In this chapter, Dan also proposes that you seek out the “one percent”.

Don’t get lost in the crabgrass of details, he [Pink’s Law professor, Harold Hongju Koh] urged us. Instead, think about the essence of what you’re exploring – the one percent that gives life to the other ninety-nine. Understanding that one percent, and being able to explain it to others, is the hallmark of strong minds and good attorneys.

This is the essence of sense-making in PKM. It is about seeking information and knowledge and distilling it so that you can make sense of it and then it is ready to be shared. Seek, make-sense and share (then repeat).

The Power of Pull and PKM

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The Power of Pull by John Hagel, John Seely Brown & Lang Davison looks at how digital networks and the need for long-term relationships that support the flow of tacit knowledge are radically changing the nature of the enterprise as we know it. It is also an excellent reference book for understanding many facets of personal knowledge mastery. I have had this book on my reading list for quite some time and luckily Jay Cross gave me a copy which I read on the flight back from the west coast this week.

PKM helps people stay focused on the edges of their knowledge and look for innovation and opportunity. I have written, in embrace chaos, that I think the edge will be where almost all high value work gets done in organizations. Core activities will be increasingly automated or outsourced. Value is moving to the edge. The core is being managed by fewer internal staff and any work where complexity is not the norm will be of diminishing value. PKM enables tacit knowledge flows from the edge to the core and back.

emergent value

“Edge Participants also often reach out to participants in the core in an effort to build relationships and enhance knowledge flows. But these efforts are often frustrated – or at best marginalized – because core participants are too busy concentrating on defensive strategies within the core, trying to protect their profits and position, to understand the true growth opportunities represented by relevant edges.” – The Power of Pull, p. 54

PKM is a process of moving knowledge from the edge (social networks) to the core (work teams) and back out to the edges. It is the way that Pull can be done on a daily basis. Connecting the edge (emergent & cooperative) to the core (controlled & automated) is a major challenge for organizations. Part of the solution is more open management frameworks but another part is edge-like individual skills and aptitudes. PKM covers the latter.

PKM is a continual process of seeking from the edge (networks), filtering through communities of practice (CoP) and sense-making at the core (work teams) and also sharing back out to our communities and networks. Once habituated, it’s like breathing.

PKM flow

As stated in the book, “Pull platforms tend to allow us to perform the following activities with a blurring of the boundaries between creation and use“, showing four components that map directly to Seek > Sense > Share.

  • Find (Seek)
  • Connect (Seek)
  • Innovate (Sense)
  • Reflect (Share)

As the authors write, “Pull is not a spectator sport.” Neither is PKM. I would highly recommend The Power of Pull as a reference book that looks at how organizations need to change and how individuals need to redefine the nature of work.

“The choices each of us makes about the environments we participate in and the practices and behaviors we choose to pursue once we’re there will make a crucial difference in what we experience and the extent to which we can shape these experiences or simply let random experiences shape us.” – The Power of Pull, p. 99

“Chance favors the connected mind.” – Steven B. Johnson.

PKM 2013

Future Perfect

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What is a “peer progressive”? Steven Johnson, in Future Perfect, describes a person who is neither right-wing nor left-wing, ignoring the labels of 20th century politics, and one who embraces the power of networks for the betterment of society.

To be a peer progressive, then, is to believe that the key to continued progress lies in building peer networks in as many regions of modern life as possible: in education, health care, city neighborhoods, private corporations, and government agencies. When a need arises in society that goes unmet, our first impulse should be to build a peer network to solve that problem. Some of these networks will rely heavily on technology, as Kickstarter does; while others will be built using older tools of community and communication, including that timeless platform of humans gathering in the same room and talking to one another.

This book talks a lot about governance models and how people can organize to make better organizations: political, business, and non-profit. For example, Johnson discusses the work of Scott E. Page who states that “Diversity trumps ability“, an interesting concept for decision-making.

Take two groups of individuals and assign to each one some kind of problem to solve. One group has a higher average IQ than the other, and is more homogenous in its composition. One group, say, is all doctors with IQs above 130; the second group doesn’t perform as well on IQ tests, but includes a wide range of professions. What Page found, paradoxically, was that the diverse group was ultimately smarter than the smart group. The individuals in the high-IQ group might have scored better individually on intelligence tests, but when it came to solving problems as a group, diversity matters more than individual brainpower.

Steven Johnson argues that it is time to change our guiding economic framework: corporate capitalism.

Capitalism helped us see the value of decentralized networks through the price signalling of markets. The next phase is for capitalism to apply those lessons to the social architecture of corporations themselves.

Some people might call this social business.

The modern regime of big corporations and big governments has existed for the past few centuries in an artificial state that neglected alternative channels through which information could flow and decisions could be made.

Johnson shows in the book that we need to shift our thinking from centralized power to the power of distributed networks, which are more robust, especially in facing complex problems.

Image: Paul Baran (1964) RAND

Future Perfect: The case for progress in a networked age, is a recommended read.

Taking Charge of your own Development

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I was interviewed by Rob Paterson (podcast at link) this week and we talked about work, jobs and taking charge of your own professional development. Rob summarized our half-hour together with these points. It is a real pleasure to have someone else encapsulate what you think.

  • The Change in Work – It’s not just factory workers but even Doctors that are going to be automated or outsourced. So how will you make a living? Only truly creative work will pay.
  • So what is Creative Work? – It is not just design etc but will include making valuable things and even growing food – and new sites such as Etsy enable you to find a market
  • The Industrial World Deskilled work – It all became assembly – Anything like this can be automated and will be
  • The jobs cannot come back
  • Training works well when you want to learn how to drive a car – you can train to be a carpenter but making the shift to be creative or to stand for themseleves – you cannot train for that

What is the new?

  • So what helps you be this new person?
  • Apprenticing – complex things cannot be learned except by shared experience
  • The crafts communities have never lost this – learn the rules and then learn how to break them – look at studios – very little teaching – mainly doing
  • Then you have to get connected to your community
  • All sorts of studios will emerge that will help you where clusters of people who know aggregate
  • The Knowledge Artisans have to take charge of themselves

What about advice for you?

  • Learn REAL skills – not just how to make it in an organization
  • Learn how to have a network – in the job world we don’t have them – many of us don’t know anything about this if we have had a job – so start now
  • This must be diverse and be about your interests
  • Put yourself OUT THERE
  • You are as good as your network
  • Think of yourself as a Freelancer for Life – and so always nuture your network  no matter what – avoid getting lulled into a sense of false security

His [my] advice to his [our] kids

  • Find the sweet spot (Dave Pollard) Find out your passion, what you are good at and what people will pay you for
  • You have to have all three

Rob just wrote a book, the first in a series, called You Don’t Need a Job. If you could spend an evening with Rob, I am sure he would share much of what he has written here. But for less than the price of buying him a glass of red wine [his preference I would guess] you can purchase this e-book for only $2.99. Rob provides an interesting way to look at the changing nature of work, and how people are reacting to the fact that the economy and society have fundamentally shifted.

We can see the world now dividing into three camps. There is a camp in Phase I [childhood]. They want simple answers. They want the good old days where women know their place and God rules the natural world. All who are not with them are against them. There is a camp in phase II [teenager]. They want to belong. Status is granted to them by belonging to the system. They want structures that can be predicted. The natural world is only a resource. They want control. And finally there is phase III [adulthood]. Here people need to express themselves. They need to be part of what is going on. They feel connected to all people and to all things.

There is lots of good advice in this first manual for the network era. You may not need a job, but we all need to work together in creating better structures for exchanging value. This book can help. Rob’s next book, You don’t need a Banker, will be out soon. Rob is also an ex investment banker, and has seen the inside of the beast, so I am sure we will learn much from him on this subject.

The Connected Company Review

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I received a copy of Dave Gray’s The Connected Company from O’Reilly books and must say that Dave has done a great job. It is a comprehensive read, covering complexity and networks, and how they are changing business. The book also includes a lot of detail (almost 300 pages) on how to shift to becoming a connected company as well as how to lead one. In addition, the book is sprinkled with Dave’s great illustrations, making the complicated much simpler to understand. It is not a light read, but it is well written and easy to follow. There is so much detail and good information that it should be picked up by anyone managing, running, or advising any organization today.

So what is a connected company? A connected company is a complex, adaptive system that functions more like an organism than a machine. To design connected companies, we must think of the company as a complex set of connections and potential connections: a distributed organism with brains, eyes, and ears everywhere, whether they are employees, partners, customers, or suppliers. Design for connection is design for companies that are made out of people. It’s design for complexity, for productivity, and for longevity.

Connected companies are all about learning, writes Dave, and this is music to my ears. I have been saying that Work is Learning & Learning is the Work for so long now that it’s really nice to hear it from others. Seeing the prominence of learning as a business imperative is refreshing.

The learning challenge for the company comes from the dynamic relationship between the two forms of knowledge. Tacit knowledge is where the action is, and in most cases, it’s the people with the tacit knowledge that deliver the results. But the only way tacit knowledge can be broadly shared is by translating it into explicit knowledge — a very difficult task that very few companies have mastered.

As Chapter 8, Connected Companies Learn, concludes:

Most importantly, a connected company must be able to respond dynamically to change—to learn and adapt in an uncertain, ambiguous, and constantly evolving environment. A connected company is a learning company.

At the end of the book are discussion questions for each chapter. For chapter 16: How connected companies learn, the questions are: “How does our company learn and grow over time? How does individual and team learning become company learning? How do we share knowledge across the company? How might we do it better?” These are the questions I have often helped my clients to ask. This is an excellent business book for the network era, and one that I would highly recommend for learning and performance professionals as well.

Organizations Don’t Tweet – Review

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Managers’ authority is being replaced by the need to influence, so how will they manage in the future? How do you manage online environments and encourage them to be a productive use of people’s time? Being obsessively interested in what people are doing and asking great questions is the way to help steer their collective energy towards successful outcomes.

The title, Organizations Don’t tweet, People Do – A manager’s guide to the social web by Euan Semple pretty well describes this book. If I could recommend just one manager’s guide to dealing with the network era, this would be it.

Euan is one of those on my short-list of must read blogs, and I was most pleased when Wiley sent me a copy of his book. It covers the full gamut of what is becoming known as social business, from work literacy to collaboration and innovation. Each chapter is short and focused and usually includes anecdotes from Euan’s many years of experience. In spite of the title, this book is not about Twitter, but it is a manager’s guide to the social web, and would be a valuable to asset to every organization I have ever dealt with.

If you only read each chapter summary, this book will still be an excellent performance support tool for managers. Euan and I share similar perspectives, such as democracy in the enterprise or workplace transparency, so it’s not surprising that I liked it so much. However, I think this book has great value for anyone dealing with enterprise social media or becoming more collaborative as an organization.

Chapters like Dealing with a Boss who Doesn’t “Get It” or Heading Into the Great Unknown offer practical advice that can be applied right away. This is not management theory, it’s hands-on. Since the topic of return on investment often comes up from some detractors of social business, here are excerpts from Back to Front ROI.

Quantifying the return on investment on anything to do with increasing intangible assets has always been difficult and social media is no different. But what if we are asking the question back to front?

… In fact I was once offered a Scotsman’s tip on ROI – keep the “I” really small and no one will give you hassle about the “R”.

… As a final resort, consider turning the ROI question on its head. Given that it appears inevitable that the web and social tools are going to become an even more significant part of how we do things, instead of asking me to justify the ROI of encouraging this process – justify to me the ROI of stopping it.

With 45 chapters and 266 pages, there is a lot of good information and shared knowledge in this book. I know I will refer back to it for my client-related work. This book can be read in order or haphazardly by individual chapters, obviously informed by Euan’s hyperlinked writing for the past decade. The book closes with Chapter 45, A word or two on love,  a reprint of the blog post Euan wrote in 2006 as he left his job at the BBC:

Maybe love does have a place in business after all. Maybe more and more of us will start to have the courage to begin to talk about what really matters to us about work and our relationships with each other and to push back the sterile language of business that we have been trained to accept. Maybe we will realise that accepting love into the workplace reminds us of the original purpose of work – not to maximise shareholder value but to come together to do good things, to help each other and hopefully to make the world a better place.

Betterness: Review

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Umair Haque’s Betterness: Economics for Humans is a quick read and a very cheap book at $2.69 for a Kindle version. It’s worth much more than that. Haque starts with an invitation:

If you’re delighted with the status quo, splendidly contented with the present, firmly convinced that the way live, work, and play is the best and last way we can, put this volume back on the digital shelf.

He defines the problem …

Today, business is held fast to this paradox: the more “business” we do and the more we think solely in terms of “business,” the more we structure human exchange according to the precepts of yesterday’s paradigm; the less wealth we create, and often, the more wealth we destroy.

… and shows the signs:

Our institutions are failing. They’re failing us, failing the challenge of igniting real, lasting human prosperity. If institutions are just instruments to fulfill social contracts, then ours are shattering because the social contracts at their heart have fractured.

Haque takes on existing organizational structures and especially skewers vision and mission statements, proposing that businesses should be asking “Why are we here?”, much as Simon Sinek does.

Betterness is a wake-up call to our business leadership and perhaps the best thing you can do is buy a copy for your managers, their bosses, and all the way up the industrial ladder.

I believe we are on the cusp of such a turning point – here and now. Consider what Kuhn famously argues: that a paradigm shift happens when we encounter anomalies that can’t be explained by the paradigm responsible for progress thereto. So here’s our anomaly: that industrial-age wealth hasn’t neatly powered lives lived meaningfully well; that near-term profit, gross product, and hyperconsumption haven’t produced a fuller human prosperity; that the frenzied pursuit of opulence hasn’t been sufficient for the attainment of a good life – of eudaimonia.

Enabling Innovation – Book

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I had the pleasure of writing an article for the book, Enabling Innovation: Innovative Capability – German and International Views as a follow-up to some work I did with the EU’s International Monitoring Organisation. An interesting aspect of this book is that major articles are written by German researchers and then shorter comments or additions are presented from an international perspective. My article was in response to a weighty paper by Sibylle Peters, entitled, New Forms of Project Organisation and Project Management – Dynamic and Open.

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Abstract
The increasing structuring of work and organizational processes by forming project involves new challenges to the handling of knowledge work and expands the scope to generate innovations. The classic project management alone is less and less able to manage complex, uncertain, knowledge-based processes. Through alternative approaches social, actor-oriented topics of management will be adressed.

If all you want to read is my short article, then let me save you the $189.00 list price for this book.

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Managing in Complexity

In New Forms of Project Organisation and Project Management – Dynamic and Open a key theme discussed is the lack of flexibility of traditional project management methods in dealing with complexity.

With increasing requirements for complex and creative work we need new models to get things done. Many of our practices are still premised on work being simple or complicated. Simple systems are easily knowable, whereas complicated systems, while not not simple, are still knowable through analysis. These can be easily managed. However, complex systems are not fully knowable though they can be partially understood through interaction with them. This is antithetical to many of the control protocols of traditional project management.

In the developed world, simple work is constantly getting automated (e.g. automatic bank tellers) while complicated work is outsourced to the cheapest labour market (e.g. off-shore call centres). If companies want to remain competitive in the global market, they need to focus on complex and creative work. Much of complex work is in exception-handling and when exceptions are the rule, rigid rules must become the exception.

We have to understand complex adaptive systems and develop work structures that let us focus our efforts on learning as we work in order to continuously develop next practices. In a knowledge-intensive and creative workplace the role of leadership becomes supportive and inspirational rather than directive. Artificial boundaries that limit collaboration and communication only serve to drag projects (and companies) down and create opportunities for more agile competitors.

While agile methods for project management are discussed in New Forms of Project Organisation and Project Management, an overall agile mindset is also required. This can be fostered in a culture of perpetual Beta. Perpetual Beta means we never get to the final release of our work and that our learning will never stop. Agile organisations realize they will never reach some future point where everything stabilizes and they don’t need to learn or do anything new.

In additional to a mindset of agility, workers need a skillset of autonomy. However, we are trained early in life to look to authority for direction in learning and work. The idea that there is a right answer or an expert with the right answer begins in our schools. Too often, the message from the workplace continues to be that good employees wait for their supervisor to tell them what to do. This is counter-productive in dealing with complexity and working in perpetual Beta. It destroys creativity.

When we move away from a “design it first, then build it” mindset, we can then engage everyone in critical and systems thinking. Workers in agile workplaces must be passionate, adaptive, innovative, and collaborative. Autonomy is the beginning.

Fostering autonomy and agility means that we talk about work differently. For example, dropping the notion of being paid for time is one way to start this change. An hourly wage implies that people are interchangeable, but no two minds are the same. Being paid for time fosters neither autonomy nor agility. There are many other human resource practices should be questioned and dropped, such as job competencies.

The new networked workplace requires collaboration and cooperation. Complex problems cannot be solved alone. Tacit knowledge flows in networks through social learning. Learner autonomy is a foundation for effective social learning. It is the lubricant for an agile organisation. Agility becomes a necessity as we deal with increasing complexity. In order to develop the necessary emergent practices to deal with complexity we therefore need to cultivate the diversity and autonomy of each worker. We also must foster richer and deeper connections which can be built through meaningful conversations. This is social learning in the workplace.

Even in project management, learning is the work.

One example of encouraging social learning is the government of British Columbia, Canada which developed an interactive intranet in order to foster collaboration and communication.

The success of a social intranet ultimately has less to do with technology than with planning, governing and managing change. Walsh [B.C.’s Manager of Creative Strategies] had these lessons to share.

Ditch perfectionism [perpetual Beta]

Communicate! Communicate! Communicate! [social learning]

Trust your team [Autonomy]

Not your government’s voice

As traditional core activities get automated or outsourced, almost all high value work will be done at the outer edge of organisations. At the fuzzy edge of the organisation life is complex and even chaotic. On this periphery, where things are less homogenous, there is more diversity and more opportunities for innovation. Individuals, project teams and organisations have to move operations to the edge to continue learning and developing. In agile organisations, a greater percentage of workers will be on the edge. The core will be managed by very few internal staff. What does this mean for project management? No matter what model one prefers, it will have to be more open, networked and cooperative.

Change and complexity are becoming the norm in our work. We already see this with increasing numbers of freelancers and contractors. Any work where complexity is not the norm will be of diminishing value.

Embracing complexity and chaos is where the future of work lies.