Communities

communities of interest and practice

Leveraging collective knowledge

by

This week, a few related knowledge management (KM) articles crossed my path and I’d like to weave them together.

Here’s a model that shows how KM has progressed over the past 15 years. Nancy Dixon discusses three eras of knowledge management as moving from Explicit Knowledge (document management) to Experiential Knowledge (communities of practice; expertise locators)  and now to Collective Knowledge (social media). This post and Nancy’s previous ones, are well worth the read as a primer on KM.

Leveraging collective knowledge may be our collective challenge but there are no guaranteed solutions at this time. This is still new territory.

“Although the first thinking about Leveraging Collective Knowledge began to appear around 2005, there are only a few leading edge organizations that have developed new practices for making use of their organization’s collective knowledge. Most organizations are still centered in the perspective of the second era and some, who have come late to knowledge management, are still struggling with getting good content management in place.”

The need for KM is evident. In the gorilla illusions, Nick Milton points out that we need to create knowledge artifacts in order to counter the tendencies of our brains to make things up over time. These illusions include:

  • The illusion of memory
  • The illusion of confidence
  • The illusion of knowledge

As Nick concludes, “The implication is that if you will need to re-use tacit knowledge in the future, then you can’t rely on people to remember it.” With more information passing by us from multiple sources, our ability to keep track of it with only our brains is rather limited. We need systems, but more powerful and more flexible ones than currently offered by enterprise software systems like document management, expertise location, learning management or communities of practice.

Each person’s knowledge needs and knowledge use are unique. For example, Owen Ferguson explains that experts shouldn’t design online resources for novices:

The curse of the expert when it comes to online presentation is that they often decide they know better and produce a design that matches their own knowledge map – totally confusing the user. IT experts design the IT part of the intranet, HR experts design the HR part of the intranet, product experts design the product information parts of the intranet and all express surprise that users never seem to use them.

Actually, designing “for” anybody becomes a problem. Valued professional* work is non-standardized, as standardized work today just gets automated and outsourced.  Who really knows what knowledge needs any professional may have? How many levels of novices, journeymen and experts are there in an organization? Hence the need for the mass customization of (knowledge) work processes.

The relationship with personal knowledge mastery (PKM) is clear. The challenge is to enable “small pieces (individuals) loosely joined” – to seek, make-sense of, and share their knowledge. I use a combination of my blog, bookmarks, and tweets to inform my outboard brain so I can retrieve contextual knowledge as I interact with my clients and colleagues. My process works for me, but it cannot be copied as a standardized process. The real challenge is to help each person find a process that works on an individual basis while supporting the organization in leveraging collective knowledge.

—

* “A professional is anyone who does work that cannot be standardized easily and who continuously welcomes challenges at the cutting edge of his or her expertise.” —David Williamson Shaffer

PKM: Working Smarter

by

In PKM in a Nutshell, I linked my various posts on personal knowledge management to make the framework more coherent. My ITA colleague, Jane Hart has just released an extensive resource that correlates nicely with the PKM framework. It is called A WORKING SMARTER RESOURCE: A Practical Guide to using Social Media in Your Job and includes seven sections (my annotations on how they connect to PKM):

1. Finding things out on the Web (SEEK)
2. Keeping up to date with new Web content (SEEK)
3. Building a trusted network of colleagues (SEEK & SHARE)
4. Communicating with your colleagues (SHARE)
5. Sharing resources, ideas and experiences with your colleagues (SHARE)
6. Collaborating with your colleagues (SHARE & USE)
7. Improving your personal productivity (SENSE & USE)

Here’s the a description and rationale for adopting PKM, individually and within organizations:

  • PKM is a way to deal with ever-increasing amounts of digital information.
  • It requires an open attitude toward learning and finding new things (I Seek).
  • PKM methods can help to develop processes of filing, classifying and annotating for later retrieval.
  • PKM leverages  open web-based systems that facilitate sharing.
  • A PKM mindset aids in observing, thinking and using information & knowledge better (I Sense).
  • Transparent PKM helps to share ideas with others (We Share).
  • After a while, you begin to realize you’re in a community of practice when your practice changes (We Use).
  • PKM prepares the mind to be open to new ideas (enhanced serendipity, or chance favours the prepared mind).

Trends

by

Here’s an infographic from Ross Dawson on Trend Blends to watch as we consider our common futures:

I’ve noticed these trends pop up in my readings and observations, for example:

Power Shifts Eastward: Clay Burell’s advice for teachers scorned:

Teachers have “asked what they can do for their country,” and they do it. Daily. But they should have the good sense to also ask what their country is doing for them, patriotic martyrdom propaganda aside. If their country has reached a “tottering, chaotic” point at which it “loathes” them, then teachers do have choices.

One of those choices is Asia. America used to be a magnet for other countries’ brain-drain. Asia seems the better magnet now.

It is for me, anyhow.  I’m thankful that I teach in Asia — because Asia is thankful for it, too.

Localism: Seeking Farmland is four people cycling across the land and connecting with local farmers. “We are two couples in our mid- to late twenties who, each having spent two to four years apprenticing on and managing various organic farms, are now seeking a long-term farming opportunity together.”
3 for the road

Volatility: A black eye for democracy, by Steve Paiken:

In Toronto the Good, we saw a law passed and enforced that was more anti-democratic than the War Measures Act. And we saw twice as many people arrested over a single 24-hour period in Toronto — more than 900 at last count — than what took place during the October Crisis in Quebec 40 years ago. And that event is in our history books as the most notorious abuse of civil rights in modern Canadian history.

Digitalisation: Goodbye to the office by Seth Godin:
  1. If you have a laptop, you probably have the machine already, in your house.
  2. If you do work with a keyboard and a mouse, the items you need to work on are on your laptop, not in the office.
  3. The boss can easily keep tabs on productivity digitally.
  4. How many meetings are important? If you didn’t go, what would happen?
  5. You can get energy from people other than those in the same company.
  6. Of the 100 people in your office, how many do you collaborate with daily?
  7. So go someplace. But it doesn’t have to be to your office.
Globalisation: The World is Watching – the World Cup online, from any device, anywhere. Or, as @umairh writes, “when Chinese wages rise, kiss your made-in-china lifestyle goodbye. time for betterness.”

Urbanisation: Urban Revival by Richard Florida, “Long-established trends in the growth and decline of  America’s cities appear to be shifting …” – Cities

Anxiety: We need to learn more about healthy workplaces:
What’s the future? A recent Canadian study showed that depression and anxiety affect up to 15% of pre-schoolers. Mental health is an important issue that will not go away and informed discussions are necessary at all levels. I’m glad I learned about this over the Summer.

Environmental Change: Climate change and environmental degradation should be obvious to all but many are still flogging the scientists.

Social Media and Learning: Implications

by

I’m continuing on my theme of capturing what we learned during our Work Literacy online workshop in 2008, before Ning pulls the plug on us. Previous posts have discussed several aspects of what we learned and I’d like to review some of the summative commentary.

What questions still linger? Jason Willensky – “Will we be forced to chase hot tools and social platforms to stay competitive… is this an ever-expanding universe of tech goodies? How can these tools help quiet participants be more interactive during a training class?”

Thinking about learning. Catherine Lombardozzi – “One of my favorite quotes is from Kent Seibert: ‘Reject the myth that we learn from experience and accept the reality that we learn by reflecting on experience.’ My experiences in this experiment underscored for me how important it is to reflect “out loud” – if not by engaging online, by taking some of what you’re thinking about and talking about it with others. These kinds of tools make it possible to compose and share your thoughts on what you are learning, to ask questions, to get feedback from others (many of whom you have never met). Tools also make it possible to learn from others… following their bookmarks, for example, or using the tools to make contacts, simplify your own research, and more. They expand our learning support system is fabulous ways.”

Workshop Design:

Virginia Yonkers – “The design of the course itself and even the question of how to measure the learning has posed a number of questions that I did not have coming in to the course (questions are good).

Specifically, what are some design options for courses that might be “open ended” that the social networking tools allow? How should we be reconfiguring course designs to support student learning, learning assessment, student support needs in their learning, and administrative planning requirements? How can we make learning both flexible, yet in line with administrator’s (organizations, schools, universities, etc…) goals and needs for accountability?”

Jeff Cobb – “I think one question a “course” like this raises is “Does it end?” It may taper off, but it seems to me the seeds are here for a continuing discussion, ongoing contribution of case studies, exploration of tools not examined here, etc. That kind of thing can, of course, simply continue out in the blogosphere, but it is helpful to have a more focused community.”

—

Immediately after the workshop, I wrote, So what did I learn or what was reinforced?

  • A loose-knit online learning community can scale to many participants and remain effective.
  • Only a small percentage ~10% of members will be active.
  • Wikis need to be extremely focused on real tasks/projects in order to be adopted.
  • If facilitators can seed good questions and provide feedback, then conversations can flourish.
  • Use a very gentle hand in controlling the learners and some will become highly participative.
  • Design for after the course, using tools like social bookmarks, so that artifacts can be used for reference or performance support.
  • Create the role of “synthesizer”. I found it quite helpful when Tony and Michele summarized the previous week’s activities.
  • Keep the structure loose enough so that it can grow or change according to the needs of the community.

Having worked with many other online communities in the past two years, I would say that the role of “synthesizer” remains important, and it is a critical part of being a good online community manager.

Introduction to Social Networking

by

Looking for deeper insight on social networks as they relate to work and learning? Here are four guidebooks for the network era: the perpetual beta series – social networking and much more!

Introduction to Social Networking

This was originally posted in 2008, after Michele Martin and I ran what today would be called a MOOC (massively open online course) with over 700 participants. It was called Work Literacy and was hosted on the Ning software platform. As the platform changed its fee structure, I exported a number of the pages and resources to my blog. What follows below the image, is what we suggested in 2008 [updated October 2016].

network-learning-model

Online social networks facilitate connections between people based on shared interests, values, membership in particular groups (i.e., friends, professional colleagues), etc. They make it easier for people to find and communicate with individuals who are in their networks using the Web as the interface.

By some definitions, just about all Web 2.0 tools are a form of social networking, but each platform highlights certain aspects. Ian McCarthy’s honeycomb model is one way to see the differences between consumer social media platforms, as it highlights 7 functions with 7 implications. For example LinkedIn is strong in Identity and also supports Relationships and Reputation. On the other hand, Facebook is strong in Relationships, and also supports Presence, Identity, Conversations, and Reputation. Ning is strong in Groups, and also supports Sharing and Conversations.

honeycomb-social-media

 

There are several different online social networks, but for our purposes, we focused on the three that tend to be used the most by learning professionals in 2008 – Facebook, LinkedIn and Ning. Each of these networks has its own unique style, functionality and patterns of usage. You will also find that different people are active in these different networks.

LinkedIn is primarily a professional network, designed to facilitate linkages between people who are wanting to connect for work-related purposes. It is more “buttoned-down” than Facebook with a more formal culture of relationships and connections. It is also the network of choice for most professionals.

Because LinkedIn is designed for professional networking, there’s a greater emphasis on building a reputation and connecting to employment and business opportunities. LinkedIn Questions and Answers is a way for people to ask questions and receive expert advice. Answers can be rated and people who do this well can improve their LinkedIn reputation. There are also employment listings and an ability to receive recommendations from your connections that then become part of your profile. You can also create and join groups.

Facebook was originally developed for college students to connect, so it has a more informal, social air than you find on LinkedIn. Now open to anyone, you will still find that Facebook is the preferred network for Millennials (2008) who see the encroachment of Boomers and, to a lesser extent, Gen X into the network as cause for some alarm.

Facebook combines the personal and the professional. Members can play games, join groups, share photos, and send each other virtual “gifts.” This is the network where you’re most likely to see both pictures of someone’s weekend activities, as well as a link to their online portfolio or professional website. Many companies are using Facebook as a recruitment tool for Gen Y, while college and university professors are exploring it’s use for their classes.

Ning is what’s referred to as a ‘white label’ network–anyone can use the Ning platform to create their own social network related to a particular topic or area of interest. We operated the MOOC on the Ning platform.

As a learning professional, you can think of Ning in two ways. First, there are a number of Ning networks related to various topics of interest to learning professionals that you could join. In addition, because Ning allows you to create your own network from scratch, you can also use it to facilitate learning events or activities. Therefore Ning offers opportunities for you to be both a joiner/collector and a creator.

One great advantage of Ning for learning is that it allows you set up your own private space that can only be accessed by members. It also offers great functionality, including allowing members to write blogs and engage in forum discussions.

A short note on owning your data

Open source gives you something extra though, and that is the ability to take the whole application, source code and all, and move it or even modify it. For instance, this website is on WordPress, an open source blogging platform. If I am not satisfied with my host, I can take the whole application and set it up somewhere else. I cannot do that with Gmail or Skype or Ning. Therefore, I own my data and the application that makes my data available to my readers. With almost 2,850 posts on this blog, these data are becoming quite important to me as my knowledge base. The decision to use an open source system as well as an OS database gives me a certain amount of flexibility, evidenced by my switch from Drupal to WordPress in 2006. My only costs were labour. I could not have taken my data out of a proprietary system (like Ning) as easily.

More information on owning your data.

Common Features of Social Networks

The ability to create a Profile page–this is your main “home” on the network. Different networks offer varying abilities to personalize your page in terms of look and feel. They may also differ in terms of the types of information you would include, such as name, location, education, etc. Facebook, for example, asks for your relationship status (because it’s more “social”), while on LinkedIn, which is primarily for professional use, does not.

A way to find and link to “friends” or connections–The purpose of a network is connections, so facilitating a members’ ability to find and connect to other people is important. Each network offers different types of search capabilities and once you’ve located a potential friend, you must send an “invitation” to invite them into your personal network.

Privacy Controls–In most networks, your ability to access more detailed information about a person is based on their status as one of your connections; “friends” can see much more information than those who are not your “friends.” You can control who is actually in your personal network by effectively managing who you invite into your network and whose invitations you accept.

The ability to send public and private messages–In Ning and Facebook, you can communicate with your connections either by sending a private message or “writing on their wall.” On LinkedIn, you communicate via person-to-person messages. Ning also provides Forums where members can interact with one another on specific topics (you’re reading this in one of the Ning forums).

Ability to share various digital objects and information–Both Ning and Facebook allow members to share various online items, including photos, videos and RSS feeds. LinkedIn offers some ability to share links, although it’s multimedia capacities are nothing like what you find on Facebook or Ning.

As in real life, the value of an online social network lies in the people. While you can have some fun playing around with some of a network’s online functionality, if you don’t have the right people in your network, it will be a waste. Here are some good resources on building a social network:

To learn more about the basics of social networking, check out Common Craft explanatory videos. You may also want to read this article (2008) on myths and risks.

Further Reading

PKM: social media for professional development

Blogs: Social Media’s Home Base

Social Media for Senior Managers

Social Business & Democracy

Social Networks Require Ownership

Social Media for Onboarding

Plus ça change

by

Tony Bates made these recommendations to the University of New Brunswick, “to foster further development of knowledge-based industries in the province”:

1. Greater incorporation of ICT and other 21st century skills (e.g. independent learning, problem solving) in a wider range of programs and subject disciplines.

2. A gradual move from almost entirely face-to-face courses in first year programs to hybrid or fully distance programs in the fourth year undergraduate and graduate programs, as well as develop more online non-credit certificate or diploma programs focused on the lifelong learning market.

3. Start gradually to redesign courses in this way on a program by program basis. Make sure the new programs are properly resourced (time for development + learning technology support).

4. Stop treating distance education courses as extra load, but integrate them into regular credit programming as part of a normal teaching load for instructors, perhaps supplemented with revenues from full cost recovery courses aimed at lifelong learners.

5. Look to partnership and consortia to leverage the development of online programs on an international basis.

6. Provide systematic and comprehensive training in pedagogy and educational technology for instructors scheduled to work on online programs.

7. Provide instructional and web designers to work in teams with instructors for the redesign of courses.

After reading this and seeing what advice they got from the west coast, I just had to dust off a (not successful) online learning strategy proposal that Rob Paterson and I submitted to UNB in 2008. Here are some highlights:

We see the objective of building a community of learners as the critical aspect of any future endeavour in online learning.
—
In two years time, 2010, the web will be the principal place where most business, entertainment, and socializing will take place – learning will follow shortly – so by 2012 you will be a player or dead.
—
The university can still grant a degree and the degree has a certain amount of societal value. The university can also offer a social space, but most kids don’t need 4 years of this.
—
UNB wants to be a leader in online learning but there must be several reasons why the university is not a leader already. There is no competition in New Brunswick and little competition in the Atlantic provinces. One of the reasons for declining enrolment is demographics, as cited in the UNB Online Partnership document, and another is the lack of students outside the traditional age range. This age range is what business ventures call “low hanging fruit” and the model worked well when a university education was accessible, affordable and provided a decent return on investment. Given the rising cost of a university education and the declining perception of a bachelor’s degree, the traditional university business model has peaked.

—

I respect Tony very much, but I do not believe that an incremental approach will work. However, it’s probably what the client wants to hear.

“collaboration is extremely important”

by

Some of the things I learned on Twitter this past week.

Always worth repeating: “Management is an overhead” by @EskoKilpi

The Internet is an extinction-level event for the traditional firm
If the (transaction) costs of exchanging value in the society at large go down drastically, the form and logic of economic and organizational entities also change! Accordingly, a very different kind of management is needed.

Business Today: processes are global, distributed, invisible & intangible by @drmcewan

(3) We are now in a new phase of disruptive management innovation …
(6) Continuous improvement in the previous wave of disruptive innovation is now the collaborative intelligence of the second.
(7) In the first wave, management innovations were concerned with accommodating process innovation and control. Only then processes were largely contained, constrained, tangible and visible.
(8) This new wave is also about process innovation and control / coordination. Only now processes are global, distributed, invisible and intangible.

Encouraging online collaboration & discouraging unnecessary travel = prepared for disruption by @suw

From meetings to conferences to team-building events, unreliable air travel changes how we think about long-distance travel. It should also change how we think about working over long distances, and, thence, how we work with the people who sit right next to us.

@johnniemoore : Lovely post from @euan on how “grown up” work environments foster childishness, while “childish” forum demand maturity.

I find it increasingly paradoxical that the “grown up” world of suits and offices and job titles is the one that encourages you to remain childish. You are not really encouraged to say what you think, you pass responsibility up to the grown ups above you and you are rarely able to be held accountable for your decisions.

The 5th Social Media (finally) and the updated presentation by @panklam

So I’m defining this SM [Emergent] as the networked, community, purposeful use of social media to generate relatedness among crowds and emergent networks in support of ideas, causes, and events. It’s still a little mushy, but I just can’t go on adding categories forever and I need to acknowledge the ways that people are using social media to create networks.

Big Question: how do you foster communities to which each and every worker can attach? by @gminks

I would not have learned much without some community to help me learn, to keep me grounded, to challenge the questions I had about different topics. Since I was a distance student, the University just didn’t know how to make and foster that community. Thank goodness there was #lrnchat.

@Padmasree (CTO of Cisco Systems, on demand for collaboration): ComputerWorld

I met 15 customers in Washington recently, and every single one was looking for collaboration and security. Small and large companies in the last five years have had distributed resources with sales and engineering teams all over, so it’s a question of how to bring that expertise together. That’s the reason collaboration is extremely important.

Quote of the Week:

@mrch0mpers : “Easy to rank on the LMS in hindsight. Is the disdain of eLearning the fault of LMS? Evolution of pervasively tech-aware learners? Or is the common disdain for eLearning perhaps … PERHAPS … the result of years of compounded decisions to design to the mediocre? Or did the solutions that emerged to make eLearning easy for masses separate design decisions from the abilities to wield them effectively? There’s an abundance of waxing hyperbolic lately on the LMS. A system didn’t make crappy courseware. People did it under people constraints.”

Our aggressively intelligent citizenry

by

In 2004 I commented on an article by Peter Levesque calling for new leadership for the information revolution. He said that communities have not been as successful as corporations in producing certain kinds of societal benefits as a result of the internet’s enabling connectivity. “I suggest that the leaders will be found among the aggressively intelligent citizenry, liberated from many tasks and obligations by technology freely shared; using data, information and knowledge acquired from open source databases, produced from the multiples of billions of dollars of public money invested through research councils, universities, social agencies, and public institutions.”

It seems that some of that is happening now, as reported by Stephen Downes:

Congratulations to the Canadian government (yes, you Mr. Harper) for allowing openparliament.ca. And even more to the point, congratulations to Michael Mulley for making it happen. And from David Eaves, “‘Parliament IT staff agreed to start sharing the Hansard, MP’s bios, committee calendars and a range of other information via XML by the end of the year.’

This is great news. Having this data in XML, an open interchange format, means it’ll be far easier for this and other sites to use Parliamentary data, and will really lower the barrier to creating new and innovative ways of sharing information on our democratic system.” It goes without saying what a valuable resource this would be for schools, especially with the XML data feeds.

However, my conclusion from 2004 pretty well remains the same – our management and corporate models need to change even more to allow our “aggressively intelligent citizenry” to lead in business. They need to be free to express their opinions, without fear of losing their livelihood. They need to be able to share data (including information & ideas, which are now represented as data) and build upon them, without fear of being sued.

We are an information society, moving into a knowledge society, while a few corporations own our data and can make profits off it for a very long time. The problem is that we cannot grow as a creative knowledge society without the free flow of ideas. Patenting ideas slows down our collective ability to learn.

Open government data is one step forward, but we also need open business data, especially ideas. From Intellectual Property, Information and the Common Good (1999):

The fundamental problem with intellectual property as an ethical category is that it is purely individualistic. It focuses on the creator/developer of the intellectual work and what he or she is entitled to. There is truth in this, but not the whole truth. It ignores the social role of the creator and of the work itself, thus overlooking their ethically significant relationships with the rest of society. The balance is lost.

Social media, social learning, social business – these all influence the social role of the creator and the work, and cannot be clearly delineated in our hyper-connected society. In a networked world, we need to divorce data from physical property. If not, we will have the worst of both worlds: corporations freely aggregating our crowd-sourced data and then selling it back to us. It’s happening already with Google, YouTube, Facebook and all the other social media sites that use our data, legally own it and profit from it.

Parliament is slowly opening up and communities are waking up, but our wealth-generation models are lagging behind, in spite of the few good examples from WorldBlu. What good is an aggressively intelligent citizenry without access to its own ideas?

Emergent Social Media

by

Four major types of social media (SM), according to Patti Anklam are:

  • Media SM – news, commentary & opinions
  • Customer SM – listening to customers, responding to market needs
  • Enterprise SM – provide the conditions for enabling knowledge & action to emerge
  • Personal SM – learning, creating, co-creating, sharing, weaving

Patti also asks, what’s the fifth SM? — “the networked, community, purposeful use of social media to bind networks, causes, and events.” Ideas include: Cause; Crowd & Community SM. My suggestion would be Emergent SM, because it is not separate but a result of activities in the other four.

Learning is described as an essential part of Personal SM but really it is part of all four. In networks, learning cannot be pulled out as a separate activity. We have to stop thinking of learning as a separate thing/area/silo. As I have said before, when you learn with and from your customers, learning and marketing are the same. Perhaps getting rid of the L word is a start. It’s all learning.

Here’s my perspective:

Personal SM facilitates cooperation in networks. It is self-directed.

Enterprise SM enables collaboration inside the organization and focuses on shared objectives.

Media & Customer SM are specialized areas for certain organizational objectives and are market focused.

Emergent SM develops as continuous learning, co-creating & sharing become the norm, at the individual, organizational and market level. As Esko Kilpi states:

Complex organizations are neither products of random experimentation, nor can they be perfectly designed beforehand  and managed efficiently top down. The Internet could not have been designed top down, nor can any living organism be planned from outside.

What is going on in these cases is called emergence. Interaction itself has the capacity to create emergent structure, coherence, consistency and change.

Emergent SM is the combination of self-directed learners and learning organizations who connect as a network that learns: Networking = Learning

“Shape Patterns, Not Programs”

by

Excellent lessons and a wealth of references are included in this paper, Changing Homeland Security: Shape Patterns, Not Programs which is applicable to a wide and sundry audience.

Advice from Socrates to a man who over-planned his son’s birthday party – “ask the women”, with the following results:

We held the party at Panathinaikon Stadium. We set up places to eat, a site for crafts, a tent for shelter and rest, a station for music, and a space for art. Singers wandered and told stories. There was a field for wrestling and running and flying kites. We encouraged the children to try what they pleased. We helped if they asked, then we stepped back and watched. When there was hitting or crying or harsh words – and there was – we immediately spoke sternly or separated the offenders. Then we redirected them toward an established activity.

In sum, our strategy was to control only that which could be ordered. For those activities in the realm of that which is, and must be, unordered, we watched and we shaped – gently, but with insistence. Because I have learned to know the difference between the states of order and unorder, I am now seen by all Athens as the wisest of men. Second to you of course.

On planning for the future

We need to learn how to become a partner with an uncontrollable future.

Consider how one rears children. They are not little machines waiting to be directed by higher headquarters. They are people learning how to be free and responsible citizens. Their future emerges; it is not designed. So too with homeland security – it is only five years old.

There is much good advice here for all organizations dealing with complex issues.