Friday’s Finds

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.
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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)

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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.

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

“If we value the pursuit of knowledge, we must be free to follow wherever that search may lead us. The free mind is not a barking dog, to be tethered on a ten-foot chain. ~ Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.” – via Nick Milton

Horses for Sources: Why Oracle’s acquisition of Taleo shifts the innovation onus onto the service providers:

Companies buy software because they want standard process that can be automated with as little human intervention as possible.  For process flows such as recruitment, if Taleo can provide you with the steps you need to automate an end-to-end recruitment process effectively, then the only way to find more value (or dare I say “innovation”) from recruitment is in those areas that cannot be automated – such as assessing the cultural fit of a candidate, or making a judgement call that the candidate has potential which his or her former employers had previously failed to unleash.

Sarah Lacy – Why Oracle May Really Be Doomed This Time – via @rstephens

But to win, Oracle will have to change its strategy as dramatically as it did in 2006 when Ellison famously announced that software innovation was dead and just started to buy everything. Buying once-hot companies like Taleo and RightNow isn’t going to cut it this time when there are better products in the market like Workday and Salesforce.

The Speculist – In the Future, Everything Will Be A Coffee Shop – via @jhagel

Universities Will Become Coffee Shops
Book Stores Will Shrink to Coffee Shops
The Coffee Shop Will Displace Most Retail Shops
Offices Become Coffee Shops … Again

@MartijnLinssen – Why it pays to keep rats on starvation diets

I merely showed them the stats. And they’d go on, and stay at the company for many years to come. And I’d think of my wife’s quote “The company’s goal is to keep their employees just not dissatisfied enough”.

@euan – “social business is just the web becoming part of our work life”

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

@SebPaquet – “If the computer is a tool for thinking, then the internet is a tool for thinking together.”

@britz – “Culture, the most powerful presence in your organization, is only learned socially & informally. Social Media spreads your culture quickly … for better or worse”

@nilofer – “When fear rules in the work culture, ideas are weak, stillborn or absent.” via @LucGaloppin

@josemurilo – “‘It’s not the sharing that’s bad, it’s the technological design of giving it all to someone in the middle’ ~ Eben Moglen on Facebook”

Boosting productivity with Workforce Collaboration – A common reaction to a lack of transparency & openness is we tend to work primarily with the people we already know – by @OscarBerg

The harsh reality is that companies that continue to only help a small fraction of the workforce to become well connected, such as managers, sales people and formally appointed experts, will be outperformed by companies that are able to connect all their people regardless of position, budget or whatever.

Epistemic #Games Are the Future of #Learning, Letting Students Role-Play Professions – via @aptara_learning

Epistemology is the study of knowledge and, according to Shaffer, every age has its own epistemology, i.e., what it means to know something. Computers — which are increasingly becoming ubiquitous in work and school — provide the means to think in new ways, which will fundamentally reconfigure our thinking and theories of knowledge. Computers in general, and epistemic games in particular, are structuring new epistemologies for our digital age.

“The epistemology of School,” in Shaffer’s words, “is the epistemology of the Industrial Revolution — of creating wealth through mass production of standardized goods. School is a game about thinking like a factory worker. It is a game with an epistemology of right and wrong answers in which Students are supposed to follow instructions, whether they make sense in the moment or not.”

While this kind of epistemology may have been appropriate and even innovative for the Industrial Revolution, it is outdated for our informational economy and digital age. Being literate in the digital age uses reading and writing as a foundation to build upon, but they are no longer solely sufficient. Students must learn to produce various kinds of media and learn how to solve problems using simulations.

What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (Paul Gee’s 36 principles) – via @EmmanuelleEN

33. Distributed Principle: Meaning/knowledge is distributed across the learner, objects, tools, symbols, technologies, and the environment.
34. Dispersed Principle: Meaning/knowledge is dispersed in the sense that the learner shares it with others outside the domain/game, some of whom the learner may rarely or never see face to face.
35. Affinity Group Principle: Learners constitute an “affinity group,” that is, a group that is bonded primarily through shared endeavors, goals and practices and not shared race, gender, nation, ethnicity, or culture.
36. Insider Principle: The learner is an “insider,” “teacher,” and “producer” (not just a “consumer”) able to customize the learning experience and domain/genre from the beginning and throughout the experience.

The Social Learning Revolution – by @C4LPT

The new role of the Workplace Learning Professional

He or she will need a new mindset: This means understanding it will no longer be just about using traditional “command and control” approaches (that are employed in most training solutions to try and force people to learn), but will be much more about encouraging people to engage in new collaborative activities to support one another as they (learn) to do their jobs – in many cases helping them to “connect and collaborate”. This, of course will be a key feature of building and supporting the collaborative culture of a social business.

The dangers of hydraulic fracturing (comprehensive visual) via @kimlengle

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Image via : Game Junkie

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

@JaneBozarth – “Setting up only private internal social media platforms is like having phones that won’t call outside the building.”

On perpetual Beta & Social Learning: Are You Learning as Fast as the World Is Changing? – via @TimKastelle

Finally, and most personally, successful learners work hard not to be loners. These days, the most powerful insights often come from the most unexpected places — the hidden genius locked inside your company, the collective genius of customers, suppliers, and other smart people who would be eager to teach you what they know if you simply asked for their insights. But tapping this learning resource requires a new leadership mindset — enough ambition to address tough problems, enough humility to be willing to learn from everyone you encounter. Nobody alone learns as quickly as everybody together.

Clueless in Davos – “A very interesting article in the Foreign Policy magazine about the relevance of Davos – via @AdrianCheok”

… the forum’s two major flaws. The first is that the Davos meeting is a gathering of the global establishment. By definition, establishments are slow and even unable to see and understand developments that run contrary to the orthodoxy of the establishment. One should never expect the unexpected from an establishment institution. The second flaw is even more serious. It is that the theory of globalization underlying the Davos concept is false. That theory holds that globalization is a win-win economic movement that will enrich the whole world and thereby lead the nations to democracy and eternal peace.

Going Mainstream by @reubentozman via @quinnovator

The next change required is to stop talking about “performance support” as though it were a job aid or a little something you use to support a training effort. We need to start talking about performance support as though it were the very essence of what we do and look at training as something that may be used when required. We also tend to use performance support to talk about “just-in-time” training. In the world of business process mapping and systems thinking, everything is “just in time.” All of our interventions need to come when required as dictated by the system. The questions we need to continually ask ourselves are how do we strengthen the system? What interventions and when will lead to better performance of the system?

QR Codes: bad idea or terrible idea? – via @KevinMarks

The only place you should use QR codes is if you have a dedicated reader for them, like a classic barcode scanner, and a workflow that is designed for this that actually saves time. If you do empirical research on using QR codes for the public, you’ll likely see 80% worse performance than text, like this museum did. By all means try the experiment and report your results. Put up a QR code and a printed URL and see which gets the most usage.

Photo by Scott Blake