Friday’s Finds

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via Twitter this past week.

“A System is a set of variables sufficiently isolated to stay constant long enough for us to discuss it. ~ W. Ross Ashby” via @cyetain

@dlnorman – “that’s not curation, it’s hoarding. curation is a mindful act of storytelling, which is not what these scoop.it / paper.li things do.” [I definitely agree]

@JeanHouston – “It is as if a worldwide nervous system is in the works. Each of us is a brain cell in that system, with powers that once belonged to kings”

@metaphorage – “Life is complex, unpredictable & messy: just admit it & act accordingly. “7habits” & “10 Rules” can be helpful, but overly simplistic”

@HildyGottlieb – “Nobody convinces anybody of anything. People come to their own learning. What does that mean for how you’re doing your work?”

The rise of social everything – by @marciamarcia

The organization began using social tools as an internal document repository for operations; yet over time, it grew to become a dynamic communications tool across their internal and external partners. By capturing learning in the moment, the organization could quickly leverage the collective knowledge of its consultants and provide more value and collective intelligence, to the organizations it served.

Networked Individualism: what in the heck is that? – via @LindaP_MD

At the same time, the networked individualism operating system requires that people gain new social skills to operate within it. They need to develop new strategies for handling challenges as they arise. They must devote more time and energy to practicing the art of networking than their ancestors did in order to get their needs met. They can no longer passively let the village take care of them and protect them. They must actively network to leverage the human resources they need, and they must actively manage the boundaries of their self-presentation in these networks.

Organizational models for social business – via @VernaAllee

You can’t plan networks or force fit them into any pattern. You can’t constrain a network to be purely within your own organization – at least not if you want to get any value from it. Networks involve customers/citizens and partners. In fact every participant in a network is a partner – not in some corny marketing sense but in the reality of the exchanges in the network. Networks support communication across channels you didn’t predict in advance. They cross any organizational unit you might have defined – even following the VSM [Viable Systems Model]. For all these reasons networks are great sources of innovation – and that innovation is emergent.

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via Twitter this past week.

@ChrisNahr – “Socrates would haunt discussion forums. And probably get banned for trolling.” – via @lemire

@nilofer – “In the Industrial Era, the unit of power = Organization. In Information era, power was = Data. Social Era, unit of power = Connection”

@MeetingBoy – “Boss asked for ‘some impressive-sounding stats to support my presentation.’ Decision first, then check the data. That’s how LEADERS do it.”

@montberte – “With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine.”

Five Whys – Business Plans Don’t Work – via @TimKastelle

Let’s take a look at some of the activities which are not being done:

• The business is not validating who its customers are, what problems the product is solving, or how well the product is meeting customer needs
• The business is not finding out which customers will actually buy the product, which distribution channels and pricing strategies work best, or whether the sales model will scale
• The business is not revisiting the business plan in any way, or making any corrections as it discovers new information about its customers, its suppliers or the operational activity needed to generate revenue
• The business is not controlling cash burn, or waiting to find out whether the business model actually works before committing itself to a series of execution milestones and sales targets

@JohnnieMoore – Hierarchy, innovation, disruption

I think innovation often eludes big organisations because they’re just too fat-fingered to pick it up.

I wasn’t there and can’t judge the difference all this made but I am struck by how easy it is to reinforce hierarchy in the name of constraining it.

@sjgill – The unexamined leadership program is not worth doing [I also came across a similar post on measuring the effectiveness of a leadership programme, by Paul Kearns]

Evaluation is not an option; it’s an integral part of the learning process. If you want a leadership development program to be more than entertainment and you want it to achieve learning that results in significant performance improvement, than you must evaluate the program and the organizational environment of that program.

@EskoKilpi – in the social workplace, there can never be just one “boss”

Thus, an individual always has many leaders that she follows. You might even claim that from the point of view taken here, it is highly problematic if a person only has one leader. It would mean attention blindness as a default state.

Following is at best a process of active, creative learning through observing and simulating desired practices. Leading is doing one’s work in an open and transparent way. Leading is engaging with people and being openly reflective. Patterns of recognition and patterns of communication are the most predictive activities there are in forecasting viability, agility and also human well-being.

Identity is a pattern in time. The individuals are forming in the social. You can’t add a social layer to what you do, or to your IT-systems – you are social!

Victorian Family socializing at the Beach
On the Shores of Bognor Regis by Alexander M. Rossi

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via Twitter this past week.

@gapingvoid – “Marketing is not mathematics. There are no solutions, only experiments.”

@gapingvoid – “I think Twitter alone is now a bigger cultural force than Hollywood; a fact the old cultural elite isn’t quite ready for.”

@RalphMercer – “the 4 horsemen of technology adoption: trust, curiosity, leadership and culture”

The Automattic (WordPress) company creed starts with “I will never stop learning“- by @photomatt

I will never stop learning. I won’t just work on things that are assigned to me. I know there’s no such thing as a status quo. I will build our business sustainably through passionate and loyal customers. I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague, and I’ll remember the days before I knew everything. I am more motivated by impact than money, and I know that Open Source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation. I will communicate as much as possible, because it’s the oxygen of a distributed company. I am in a marathon, not a sprint, and no matter how far away the goal is, the only way to get there is by putting one foot in front of another every day. Given time, there is no problem that’s insurmountable.

@johnstepper – “Every single bank I know recognizes that their collaboration solutions are inadequate”

When it comes to sharing information, banks are conflicted. They aim to enforce “need to know” policies and “only use bank devices for work” policies. Yet they also want to break down the silos and discover more cross-selling opportunities.

Which is it? Well, it’s all of the above. Yet, the combination of old tools combined with restrictive policies leads to a set of incoherent, inconsistent, and ineffective controls.

@MarionChapsal – Anyone Can Cook, says Chef Gusto. Can Anyone Present?

I believe, like Pro­fes­sor Max Atkin­son and like Chef Gusto, that any­one can learn to make deli­cious and yummy pre­sen­ta­tions!

Organizational Hierarchy: Adapting Old Structures to New Challenges – by @orgnet

The U.S. government is currently facing a dual problem in the intelligence community:

improve accuracy — WMD in Iraq?
improve agility — stop terror attacks
One of the solutions being discussed is adding a new formal position to the intelligence community. This new box would be an ‘intelligence czar’ to which all other intelligence leaders and their agencies would report. The thinking behind this proposed solution is for there to be one aggregation point for all intelligence. Node 017 in Figure 2 represents this new position.

@tomspiglanin – On using Twitter & URL shorteners

The best practice then seems simple. Paste a link directly into a native Twitter application to share it. If a blog site has a Tweet button that goes directly to Twitter with no additional link shortening/tracking (like the one immediately below), that’s essentially the same. At a minimum, post only a full link using your app or link shortener of choice.

Larry Lessig on Facebook, Apple, and the Future of Code – via @RossDawson

Much worse (and more frustrating) are the easy problems which the government also can’t solve, not because the answer isn’t clear (again, these are the easy problems) but because the incumbents are so effective at blocking the answer that makes more sense so as to preserve the answer that makes them more dollars. Think about the “copyright wars” — practically every sane soul is now focused on a resolution of that war that is almost precisely what the disinterested souls were arguing a dozen years ago (editor’s note: abolishing DRM). Yet the short-termism of the industry wouldn’t allow those answers a dozen years ago, so we have had an completely useless war which has benefited no one (save the lawyers-as-soldiers in that war). We’ve lost a decade of competitive innovation in ways to spur and spread content in ways that would ultimately benefit creators, because the dinosaurs owned the lobbyists.

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via Twitter this past week.

@birgittaj – “Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power. ~ Benito Mussolini”

HCI : “more than 50% of line managers believe that shutting down the L&D function would have no impact on employee performance!”

Too many training departments have become mere “order takers,” responding to requests for training by harried but ill-informed managers who believe that training is the solution to every kind of performance problem. (Managers probably don’t really believe that, but ordering training is easier than tackling the real issues.) I call this the “McDonald’s Clerk” approach to training; take the order and, at most, see if they want fries with it.

Governance in a Networked World : SNA is an 80+ year old science but has been largely ignored by the social analytics community.

Now there may be good reasons for this. Some of the language is frankly impenetrable for the newcomer. The SNA measures can be quite complex and as with traditional statistics, need to be applied with care. That said there is clearly an opportunity here to build a bridge between the current social analytics practice to the more sophisticated but far more powerful world of SNA. It will require some careful translation of the language and some very selective use of the measures, but the potential I believe is worthy of a genuine 2.0 label.

Humans were not born to read – The brain has to be rewired in order to perform this newfangled skill – via @anniemurphypaul

“Reading is a cultural invention,” [Dr. Guinevere] Eden said. “There’s nothing designed in the brain to make us readers. Reading has only been around for 4,000 years, maybe a little longer. There are no systems in place from an evolutionary perspective designed for reading.”

@dpontefract – Analysis: Coursera, EdX & Udacity

There is the possibility that edX and Coursera in particular are using these non-credentialed courses as loss leaders. (see the FAQ of edX – no Harvard or MIT recognition comes with a completed course nor are any credits issued) If the courses are free, and they lead to nothing more than a certificate of completion (affiliated by no university whatsoever) students may want an actual official degree or designation from one of the Academic institutions at some point for their efforts. Do you really think Harvard is simply going to give away their crest for free? MIT? Princeton? Highly unlikely. I see these projects as opportunities to upsell fee-based programs and degrees that otherwise might not have occurred due to the lack of a sales channel.

@sjgill – Do you need a CLO?

The unintended consequence has been to reinforce the notion that work and learning are separate and that one has higher value than the other when, in fact, the success of the organization depends on continuous learning. To break out of this mental model, companies should stop doing things that appear to centralize responsibility for learning. Don’t put all the emphasis on a course catalogue and don’t hire a CLO.

XKCD on teachable moments:

Note the XKCD cartoon’s Alt Text – “Saying ‘what kind of an idiot doesn’t know about the Yellowstone supervolcano’ is so much more boring than telling someone about the Yellowstone supervolcano for the first time.“

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via Twitter this past week.

“@wwjimd: Resilience = Not having all of your eggs in one basket. Abundance = having enough eggs.” – via @SebPaquet

@Kurt_Vonnegut – “Future generations will look back on TV as the lead in the water pipes that slowly drove the Romans mad.”

Young people tire of old economic models – via @steveszed

The dominant narrative says that environmental restraint must be limited and gradual, while social spending must be contained, otherwise the economy will not grow and we will all suffer. This kind of thinking is pervasive, dangerous, and outdated. Infinite growth in a finite world is impossible, growth based on speculative finance is unstable, and since the 1960’s, GDP growth and self-reported well-being have been completely uncorrelated phenomena. In this sense holistic, deep-reaching change of both thought, education and practice is needed. Indeed, we were brought together by an increasing realization that our global economic troubles aren’t just a few bad apples; the problem is indeed the apple tree.

WaPo Note to Class of 2012: More than half of young college graduates now jobless or underemployed – via @TWgy

While there’s strong demand in science, education and health fields, arts and humanities flounder. Median wages for those with bachelor’s degrees are down from 2000, hit by technological changes that are eliminating midlevel jobs such as bank tellers. Most future job openings are projected to be in lower-skilled positions such as home health aides, who can provide personalized attention as the U.S. population ages.

The evolution of design to amplify flow – by @jhagel

If we are not enhancing flow, we will be marginalized, both in our personal and professional life. If we want to remain successful and reap the enormous rewards that can be generated from flows, we must continually seek to refine the designs of the systems that we spend time in to ensure that they are ever more effective in sustaining and amplifying flows.

On the value of exposure, which many of us are frequently offered:

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via Twitter this past week.

Quote via @karlpro

“@charlesjennings: Keynote at #AITD2012 classic quote of the day: “The toothpaste is out of the tube” re: social media in the workplace.” by @AnneBB

Why Sharing Makes Sense to Pleistocene Hunters and Digital Economies – via @eprenen

Bowles proposes that the Internet has created all sorts of digital resources that are as fugitive and difficult to own as wild game on the hoof. No one can really make a software program all by themselves (it takes a lot of people to make one), and it is difficult to own software privately (because it is so easily copied and therefore very expensive to “fence in” as private property).

Roger Schank: How to teach wisdom: induce colossal failure repeatedly

To put this another way, wisdom can be learned and so it can indeed be taught, but only if we are willing to re-conceptualize education.
We simply have to get over the idea of teaching wisdom as the transmission of information and we have to emphasize repeated tries and failure followed by reflection.

The path to productivity is not a new assistant or PM software. It’s these 4 shared characteristics. – via @sardire

1. They have a life.
2. They take breaks.
3. They’ve often worked in several different industries.
4. They have great outside collaborators.

@TimKastelle – 3 critical lessons on innovation in a changing business environment

It’s hard to fit new innovations into old business models
You have to break connections to make room for your new ideas
Optimising when your environment is changing is very dangerous

@MITSMR – 54% of 4,000+ senior managers favor new business models over new products & services for future competitive advantage.

THE LEADING QUESTION
What do executives need to know about business model innovation?
FINDINGS
Business model innovation can consist of adding new activities, linking activities in novel ways or changing which party performs an activity.
Novelty, lock-in, complementarities and efficiency are four major business model value drivers.
Within organizations, business model choices often go unchallenged for a long time.

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via Twitter this past week.

“Her life is like a Twitter stream – awash with the fleeting and the trivial. —@gapingvoid”

“The Internet mirrors society. If you don’t like what you see in the mirror, don’t break the mirror. —Vint Cerf” via @quinnnorton

“We would like an app which costs us nothing, never has intrusive ads, and never sells to a large company. And is free. —@ianbetteridge”

Meet the New Medical Specialist: The Networkologist – via @BrianSMcGowan

“Understanding disease is a bit like getting to know New York, Albert-Lázlo Barabási argued in a talk today at the TEDMED conference in Washington, DC. Barabási is a physicist by training who got into studying disease by first examining networks. He believes that the way we currently practice medicine — identifying a diseased part of the body, then working with a specialist to treat the illness that ails the organ in question — is too specific. It doesn’t account for the complex relationships between parts of the body that make up a larger system. Right now, we’re focusing too much on individual buildings and neighborhoods, rather than examining the links between things.”

“The [issue] is that we’re not solving single problems any more. We’re [addressing] what some people have called ‘messes’.” —Rod Collins” — via @flowchainsensei

Photo taken while walking through McGill University in Montreal this week.

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via Twitter this past week.

Why Thinking About Averages Can Be Disastrous – by @timkastelle

If you are operating in a Paretian world but you assume that it’s Guassian, you’re heading for trouble. That’s why thinking about averages can be disastrous. Think about outliers instead.

Polymaths, bumblebees & the expert myth – by @jerrymichalski @aprilrinne

We need a new kind of expert — one whose expertise is hard-won through direct experience and whose point of view is both flexible and principled. We need people who have a deep sense of the world’s inner workings and interdependencies and who are comfortable in multiple settings and speak multiple national and disciplinary languages. These should be people who can absorb new material very quickly, and then improve it as they share it with others. We need to rely on people who are more than just an “expert” on any one topic, but across topics

We don’t need to do away with experts entirely. Instead, let’s update and refine what it means to be an expert in the 21st century.

WSJ: Better Leadership Through Social Media – by @awsamuel

“Join a new online network? I’d love to!”

In 15 years of helping business, government and nonprofit leaders make strategic choices about digital technology, I’ve yet to hear an executive utter those words.

Network Tensions – by @panklam

This tension I noted, is one of the primary ones I exposed in Net Work: “Outcome v s. Discovery.” Tensions, I wrote, “are present all the time; both leaders and members of a network should be aware of how these tensions impact the health of a network. All networks will shift along these lines of tension as they respond to changes in the environment, changes in the demographics of their members, and changes in purpose, structure, and style.”

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via Twitter this past week.

Brain Rule #2: “There is no greater anti-brain environment than the classroom and cubicle. ~ John Medina” via @chriscognito

“When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course. ~ Peter F. Drucker” via @montberte

@gapingvoid: “Conversations” are fine and dandy, but eventually one actually has to get some work done.”

How creativity works: What Broadway musicals really teach us about collaboration. – via @TimKastelle

[Conclusion]: The global nature of Q—and the difficulty of using global measures to craft local strategies—might be a disappointment for business people who want to use the lessons of Broadway to out-innovate the competition. But it shouldn’t be. The new social science of complex networks is addressing a different kind of problem, a deeper and potentially more important one. This research is concerned less with how to construct teams to maximize their creativity than with the question of what kind of society maximizes everyone’s creativity. And real progress on that front would be something worth singing and dancing about.

[Note on Q]: It’s made up of two parts. The first is the average number of connections you need to join two random people in a network. That number can be surprisingly small, even in a very big network; for example, you can connect two random Facebook users, on average, with a chain that’s less than five friends long. The second part of Q measures the extent to which two people who are connected to the same person are likely to be connected to each other: the “clusteredness” of the network.

Psychology Today: How Da Vinci Got His Ideas – via @marloft

When you make a connection between two unrelated subjects, your imagination will leap to fill the gaps and form a whole in order to make sense of it. Suppose you are watching a mime impersonating a man taking his dog out for a walk. The mime’s arm is outstretched as though holding the dog’s leash. As the mime’s arm is jerked back and forth, you “see” the dog straining at the leash to sniff this or that. The dog and the leash become the most real part of the scene even though there is no dog or leash. In the same way, when you make connections between your subject and something that is totally unrelated, your imagination fills in the gaps to create new ideas. It is this willingness to use your imagination to fill in the gaps that produces the unpredictable idea.

@rushkoff: Whistle-blowers of Goldman-Sachs & Google

In short, the kinds of sustainable, value-creating businesses these corporate escapees are calling for just can’t happen within a corporate model based on borrowing, leverage and expansion. It’s too little and too late for a few corporate whistle-blowers to tell us how the companies they work for are technically incompetent, distracted by revenues or losing the values that once made them great.

On superstition: people believe weird things because of our evolved need to believe nonweird things – via @ValdisKrebs

Through a series of complex formulas that include additional stimuli (wind in the trees) and prior events (past experience with predators and wind), the authors conclude that “the inability of individuals—human or otherwise—to assign causal probabilities to all sets of events that occur around them will often force them to lump causal associations with non-causal ones. From here, the evolutionary rationale for superstition is clear: natural selection will favour strategies that make many incorrect causal associations in order to establish those that are essential for survival and reproduction.”

Learning is the Work – original artwork by @RalphMercer