Friday’s Finds

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 This kind of thinking is pervasive, dangerous, and outdated.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

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

Image: Mimi and Eunice

@ValaAfshar – “Stop chasing best practices, instead chase the best people.”

@counternotions “notion of a 3-5 yr technology road map is untenable & unrealistic outside of mainframes, ERP, retirement tracking & nuclear containment”

Thabo Mophiring, @Thabo99 posted this to me: @hjarche I just blogged for the first time and now finally understand your comment on blogging in the old days and social curation. [in response to my earlier comment that when blogs were one of the few available social media, the curation included much more commentary and required more work]

Why Britannica failed on paper by @dweinberger

Paper doesn’t scale.
Paper-based knowledge can’t scale.
The Net scales.
The Net scales knowledge.

IM vs KM by @JBordeaux

The difference between IM [information management] and KM [knowledge management] is the difference between a recipe and a chef, a map of London and a London cabbie, a book and its author. Information is in technology domain, and I include books (themselves a technology) in that description. Digitizing, subjecting to semantic analysis, etc., are things we do to information. It is folly to ever call it knowledge, because that is the domain of the brain. And knowledge is an emergent property of a decision maker – experiential, emotional framing of our mental patterns applied to circumstance and events. It propels us through decision and action, and is utterly individual, intimate and impossible to decompose because of the nature of cognitive processing. Of course, I speak here of individual knowledge.

Knowledge Inventories via @IsabelDeClercq

Unfortunately, every few years, the ‘knowledge inventory’ baloney pops up again. It is always proffered by arrogant and unfortunate Western rationalists. They think they can apply analytic reductionism to complex phenomena like knowledge, networks and value. They ALWAYS fail and eventually go away.
…
In summary, business productivity and knowledge inhabits complex networks. It CANNOT be broken down and reassembled. Rather, praxis and phronesis achieve social comprehension, knowledge cohesion, leadership maturity, new capabilities, productivity, growth, business prosperity and optimal outcomes overall.

@ibridazioni – Orangutans shed light on a key insight about Social Knowledge Management

The question was: why all the members of the first group were capable to share knowledge independently from the difference in ages, hierarchy or sex in the group members for generations, while in the second group new discoveries were owned by small groups of orangutans and then disappearing with them? What allowed the widespread of a knowledge inside the whole group and why new ideas did not disappear after inventor’s death but continue for generations?
How could the new knowledge become a group’s assets?

In this exceptional natural scenario van Schaik discovered that this fact has a cultural cause!

The cultural difference in the group characterized by a shared culture was a physical and emotional code of proximity that allowed members of the group to approach and interact between them easily. We are in the knowledge’s economy and the cultural proximity code is the first secret to transform knowledge in a evolutive boost.

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

@JenniferSertl – “Your competitive advantage is not where you work or what you do. It is the accuracy & articulation of your observations & life experiences.”

@mbauwens – ‘Occupy’ as a business model: The emerging open-source civilisation – via @jerrymichalski @petervan

In commons-oriented peer production (first theorised by Yochai Benkler in his The Wealth of Networks, a “p2p” updating of Adam Smith), core value creation occurs through contributors to a shared innovation pool, a commons of knowledge, software or design. The contributors may be volunteers or paid employees. Importantly, even paid contributors add to the common pool. Why?

Because shared innovation makes an enormous difference in costs (give a brick, get a house), and it is also hyper-competitive. A recent study by the makers of the Open Governance Index, which measures the openness of software projects, confirms that more open projects do much better in the long-run than more closed projects. In other words, it makes sound business sense: open businesses tend to drive out business models based on proprietary IP. So it doesn’t matter whether you are a “commonist” free software developer, or a capitalist shareholder of IBM. Both sides benefit and they outcompete or “outcooperate” traditional proprietary competitors.

@hansdezwart – Welcome to the Chaos: The Distributed Workspace

Lori McLeese is the HR lead of Automattic (she is the only HR person at the company of about hundred people now). Nikolay Bachiyski is a developer. The company is 100% distributed and has been like that from day one. They are located in 24 countries and 79 cities. In only 7 cities do they have more than one “Automatician” living and working. They do not have offices and no set working time. Most people work on a single big project: wordpress.com

One thing that they’ve found is that it is hard to build personal relationships. They test new staff in a trial project to see if they are a fit for the culture of the company. The trial can last for a few weeks or even a few months. Once you finish it successfully you are “welcomed to the chaos” and will have to do your first three weeks working in “happiness” which is their customer support team. This helps you learn in a safe environment and teaches you to respect the happiness engineers. You are also learning that it is always ok to ask questions, to bug people and to over-communicate.

@oscarberg – enterprise software significantly hampers knowledge work

Did you know that user-centric organizations achieve 23% higher revenue per employee than those that are technology-centric? And did you know that productivity has dropped 17% the last years in enterprise software usage? If this doesn’t make you think twice about how you approach new IT investments, then someone – probably the owners of your organization – should be really worried.

@margaretatwood – Atwood in the Twittersphere – via @JudithELS

But despite their sometimes strange appearances, I’m well pleased with my followers—I have a number of techno-geeks and bio-geeks, as well as many book fans. They’re a playful but also a helpful group. If you ask them for advice, it’s immediately forthcoming: thanks to them, I learned how to make a Twitpic photo appear as if by magic, and how to shorten a URL using bit.ly or tinyurl. They’ve sent me many interesting items pertaining to artificially-grown pig flesh, unusual slugs, and the like. (They deduce my interests.) Some of them have appeared at tour events bearing small packages of organic shade-grown fair-trade coffee. I’ve even had a special badge made by a follower, just for me: “The ‘call me a visionary, because I do a pretty convincing science dystopia’ badge.”

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

If you read no further: for EVERYONE in the training business, read this entire article, via @MimiBarbara – Evolving Training Into the Perfect Hole by Gary Wise:

If we architect the learning resources correctly, we will have an ecosystem where…

The right performers will have seamless, frictionless, and ubiquitous access…
– to the right learning assets
– at their moment of learning need
– in a work context-friendly amount
– in a readily-consumable format
– to/from the right devices

“Serendipity is too important to be left to chance ~ Yossi Vardi, standing in a hallway during a session at TED2012″ via @jhagel

“Ideology narrows our thinking and keeps us from effectively addressing complex problems.” via @demingSOS

“Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is. ~ Isaac Asimov” – via @psychoBOBlogy

through the lens of the Cynefin framework – by @davecormier [MOOCs (massively open online courses) may be more suitable for workplace learning than academia] –

MOOCs as a structure – and rhizomatic learning as an approach – privilege a certain kind of learning and learner. The MOOC offers an ecosystem in which a person can become familiar with a particular domain. Rhizomatic learning is a way of navigating that ecosystem that empowers the student to make their own maps of knowledge, to be ‘cartographers’ inside that domain. It suggests that the interacting with a community in a given domain is learning. The community is the curriculum.

Micro-blogging: the liquid knowledge network – by @dpontefract [e.g. narrating your work]

Two years ago, I wrote that ‘Micro-Blogging is Good For Leadership, Good for Your Culture’ and I haven’t flinched since.

Two years later however, I am altering my thoughts somewhat. I now believe micro-blogging must be positioned as an organizational habit for employees. (whether for internal or external purposes)

Micro-blogging; it’s truly the liquid knowledge network that (when immersed in daily work routines) can help expedite many work processes as compared to an organization without micro-blogging services and without the all-too-important habit of micro-blogging itself.

Dickinson, Gauguin, Bronte: Communication, collaboration & social networks contribute to creativity – via @JohnnieMoore

[Professor Katherine Giuffre] concludes – It was not when the artists were alone … that they were most creative, but when they were attached to others in a more moderate way and when those others were close to each other, although, again, not so close as to form one cohesive group. (p. 836)

—

Photo by Kenneth Allen

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

@Richard_Florida – ‘In a knowledge & innovation driven economy, why do we fixate on housing & auto sales as “drivers” of “recovery?”‘

@RickWarren – “The moment people stop bringing their problems to you is the moment you stop being the leader.”

“A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject. ~ Churchill” – via @cyetain

“The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes” – via @BenaiahLLC

@dweinberger – “Linking is a public service that reminds us how deeply we are social and public creatures.” JOHO The Blog

@robpatrob – “Is school essential? Can only the church save your soul? Same question – same answer!” Trusted Space

Children taught at home significantly outperform their contemporaries who go to school, the first comparative study has found.  It discovered that home-educated children of working-class parents achieved considerably higher marks in tests than the children of professional, middle-class parents and that gender differences in exam results disappear among home-taught children.

How new Internet Spying Laws will actually enable criminals: What’s worse than building a target? Telling everyone you’re building a target. – via @eprenen

Politicians who propose such measures appear to be thinking that they’re building a weapon — a weapon that law enforcement agencies can use to pursue people who’ve committed, or are suspected of committing, crimes. But they’re not. They’re building a target. They’re building the mother lode for stalkers, pedophiles, spammers, identity thieves, child pornographers, blackmailers, extortionists, and yes — terrorists. A Techdirt story just a few days ago gave some rather creepy examples of what Target’s data mining can do…and they’re just trying to sell you stuff. Imagine what very bad people are capable of, given far richer data and the rather obvious inclination to break the law at will.

Telegraph: Twitter sells tweet archive to marketers – via @sebfiedler [Note: you can access my weekly Friday’s Finds for free, going back to May 2009]

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

@milouness – “As technology & knowledge allow people to handle more complexity, old categories of simplification become less useful.” – via @sandymaxey

“In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards. ~ Mark Twain” via Roger Schank

“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution. ~ Clay Shirky” – via @surreallyno @flowchainsensei

Aljazeera – “Please remember: Humans are ‘naturally nice’ ~ @Ohra_aho”

Biological research is increasingly debunking the view of humanity as competitive, aggressive and brutish.

“Humans have a lot of pro-social tendencies,” Frans de Waal, a biologist at Emory University in Atlanta, told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Monday.

@EskoKilpi – knowledge is socially constructed. Knowledge is not stuff accumulated and stored by individuals:

Whether the social process is called leadership, management, networking, or communication, knowing is an ongoing process of relating. Social media best produce connectedness and interdependence as processes that construct collective authority and responsibility. Social media are most meaningful when giving voice to multiple perspectives, making it possible to seek out, recognize and respect differences as different but equal. Accordingly, reality in science is no longer viewed as a singular fact of nature but as multiple and socially constructed as David Weinberger writes in his newest book: “Too Big to Know”.

Innovator inside: there is little remaining competitive advantage in trying to control intellectual property:

… if the point of IT security is to preserve the privacy and security of individual customers and their relationships with a supplier (and each other of course), then, in a Sidestep and Twist world, security becomes one of the most important disciplines there is. You’re hardly going to have the most customers (the basis of a Twist competitive strategy) if you’re not trusted in the first place.

Recent semi-scandals, such as the one Path and others are presently embroiled in (they were uploading people’s address books without permission) would probably not have happened if those organisations had been advised properly by their information security people.

On the other hand, if the intent of IT security is to preserve corporate intellectual property and trade secrets, then investing significantly to keep competitors out is something of a losing strategy.