Friday’s Finds

Here are some interesting finds that were shared on Twitter this past week.

@EskoKilpi – “The big shift: Transformation from status hierarchies to task hierarchies – #networks” [I think this is a critical differentiation between the industrial/information economy and the creative/knowledge economy we are shifting to.]

Mike Wesch “I don’t want to help make students for the world. I want to help make students who make the world over.” – via @JonHusband

@JohnnieMoore – “I see so many promising “breakthrough” methods as if it can be guaranteed, controllable and risk-free.”

@RosabethKanter – “The first rule for change agents is “Stay alive” ”

Survival is more important than heroism. As a wise mentor once said, the first rule for change agents is “Stay alive.” That’s a lot more important than showing off. If you can’t force a major change or get the best possible deal, a lesser deal that keeps doors open for the future means living to fight another day. Baseball analytics show that getting on base is among the most important ways to win the game. If you strike out while trying to hit a home run, the whole side might go down. If you go for a lesser way to get on base, such as taking a walk, you keep the game alive. Sometimes backing down averts a major crisis and keeps the debate alive.

@dhinchcliffe – First Rule of Collaboration: If you can’t link to it, it didn’t happen, HT @maverickwoman No web of links = no social business

What ever tools you use to collaborate with others, make sure there is a way to log the conversations, keeping a history is vital. And beyond that, if you can’t share links to that history, then it may as well not exist.

“Very nice piece by Marc Andreessen in WSJ saying software is eating the world and why that’s good” – @RossDawson

Six decades into the computer revolution, four decades since the invention of the microprocessor, and two decades into the rise of the modern Internet, all of the technology required to transform industries through software finally works and can be widely delivered at global scale.

@SteveDenning  – Why Amazon Can’t Make a Kindle In the USA – Disturbing piece on loss of US manufacturing in high tech:

The U.S. has lost or is on the verge of losing its ability to develop and manufacture a slew of high-tech products. Amazon’s Kindle 2 couldn’t be made in the U.S., even if Amazon wanted to:

• The flex circuit connectors are made in China because the US supplier base migrated to Asia.
• The electrophoretic display is made in Taiwan because the expertise developed from producing flat-panel LCDs migrated to Asia with semiconductor manufacturing.
• The highly polished injection-molded case is made in China because the U.S. supplier base eroded as the manufacture of toys, consumer electronics and computers migrated to China.
• The wireless card is made in South Korea because that country became a center for making mobile phone components and handsets.
• The controller board is made in China because U.S. companies long ago transferred manufacture of printed circuit boards to Asia.
• The Lithium polymer battery is made in China because battery development and manufacturing migrated to China along with the development and manufacture of consumer electronics and notebook computers.

Here are some of the things that were shared via Twitter this past week.

“It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It’s that they can’t see the problem.” – G. K. Chesterton – via @albybisy

@umairh – “Being airlifted into a triathlon is probably a pretty bad way to check if your leg’s broken. And similar is true for social contracts.”

Economist – “The Internet has been a great unifier of people, companies & online networks. Powerful forces now threaten it.” – via @dhinchcliffe

Yet it is another kind of commercial attempt to carve up the internet that is causing more concern. Devotees of a unified cyberspace are worried that the online world will soon start looking as it did before the internet took over: a collection of more or less connected proprietary islands reminiscent of AOL and CompuServe. One of them could even become as dominant as Microsoft in PC software. “We’re heading into a war for control of the web,” Tim O’Reilly, an internet savant who heads O’Reilly Media, a publishing house, wrote late last year. “And in the end, it’s more than that, it’s a war against the web as an interoperable platform.”

IBM poll of CEOs (2010) found they deemed creativity to be “the NUMBER ONE leadership competency of the successful enterprise of the future” – via @charlesjennings

Image by ibmphoto24

Here are some interesting things that were shared via Twitter these past two weeks.

I was called a Bandwidth enhancer by @WallyBock – I like that term!

“Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich.” ~Peter Ustinov – via @CBurell

“if managers really managed, they wouldn’t need performance consulting. Performance is the managers job.” – @BillCush

(organizational / institutional) “Hierarchy is a prosthesis for trust” … Warren Bennis .. an original leadership guru – via @JonHusband

BPM, overpromised & under-delivered: Programming is the automation of the known. Business processes … are the management & anticipation of the unknown – by @pevansgreenwood

Since Frederick Taylor’s time we’ve considered business – our businesses – vast machines to be improved. Define the perfect set of tasks and then fit the men to the task. Taylor timed workers, measuring their efforts to determine the optimal (in his opinion) amount of work he could expect from a worker in a single day. The idea is that by driving our workers to follow optimal business processes we can ensure that we minimise costs while improving quality. LEAN and Six Sigma are the most visible of Taylor’s grandchildren, representing generations of effort to incrementally chip away at the inefficiencies and problems we kept finding in our organisations.

Social & Workplace Learning through the 70:20:10 Lens – by @CharlesJennings

The shift in focus to workplace and social learning by HR and Learning professionals over the past few years is a significant one. And it’s not just a passing phase or fad. It is reflecting a fundamental change that is happening all around us – the move from a ‘push’ world to a ‘pull’ world, and the move from structure and known processes to a world that is much more fluid and where speed to performance and quality of results are paramount.

The Progress Principle: “One of the best business books I’ve read in many years.” … @DanielPink

[Teresa Amabile] Our survey showed that most leaders don’t understand the power of progress. When we asked nearly 700 managers from companies around the world to rank five employee motivators (incentives, recognition, clear goals, interpersonal support, and support for making progress in the work), progress came in at the very bottom. In fact, only 5% of these leaders ranked progress first – a much lower percent than if they had been choosing randomly! Don’t get me wrong; those other four motivators do drive people. But we found that they aren’t nearly as potent as making meaningful progress.

“And no, there was no need for a training department”; comment by @UFrei on Training Departments will Shrink

And why did these experts spend so much of their valuable time coaching us newbies? … And no, there was no need for a training department (our branch had been too small anyway). But there was an attitude to passing on the expertise from the best SMEs to the ‘apprentices’ and this attitude had been sponsored by senior management.

My conclusion: We need Sponsors facilitating learning (something former ‘Training Departments’ could probably do) and motivated Coaches among the experts with the allowance to spend part of their time to develop new expertise.

Here are some of the things I learned via Twitter this past week [I wonder if I’ll have to add Google+ to this process some day soon?].

@denniscallahan – “Knowledge is constructed, not transferred ~Peter Senge”

“knowledge transfer” is a handy fiction we have created – by @downes

My answer, and it’s a perfectly reasonable and well-research answer, is that nothing is transferred. That the whole idea of “knowledge transfer” is a handy fiction that we have created over the years, as simple folk, to function as shorthand for what we know is a much more complex process.

Probably the best intermediate position a person can attempt here is something like “knowledge replication“. That’s what’s actually happening in a lot of people’s theories. We know that the sending of a message from one person to another involves a state change. The signal (another handy fiction; let me have it for now) crosses through several media en route from sender to receiver. Thus questions of signal integrity arise, the problem of distinguishing signal from noise, and all the rest of it.

[Gee, I used to have the job title of Knowledge Transfer Officer ;)]

@PhilMcCreight – “Productivity is for robots. Humans should be inefficient” – @kevin2kelly via @jhagel

@heathervescent – “Paquet’s Corollary: Paradigm shift rests on the shoulders of people who disregard current success metrics and replace them with new value lenses.” HT @sebpaquet

Gamification & work – by @johnt  via @petervan @timkastelle

Not all people at work are engaged as they don’t have the “wanting” and “liking”… for some people it’s just a job. Whereas gamers choose to play games as a recreational activity, and they are fulfilled from doing so. Most of us have to work, and some don’t really like our jobs … sure organisational design can make it a more enjoyable atmosphere if it is recognised that people spend more time at work than with their families, but this won’t guarantee total engagement … it’s only part of the solution.

@DavidGurteen – “Theory is knowledge that doesn’t work. Practice is when everything works and you don’t know why. ~ Hermann Hesse”

and finally:

@lirons – “When the great lord passes the wise peasant bows deeply and silently farts. ~ Ethiopian Proverb”

Here are some of the things I learned via Twitter this past week.

@jhagel on an expansive view on the power of the narrative – via @jseelybrown @quinnovator

But here’s the catch.  Narratives cannot be crafted by PR departments.  They emerge out of, and are sustained by, daily practice. They require taking a long-term view of trajectories that extend well beyond the individual institution. They also need to penetrate beneath the surface events that occupy our daily newspaper headlines to tap into the deep forces that are shaping these surface events. Our existing institutional leaders are generally poorly equipped to take on this opportunity.

Complexity, chaos and enterprise-architecture ~ by @tetradian – via @DavidGurteen [explores the under-represented Chaotic domain of Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework]

But what’s not there in Dave’s model is any consistent framework to tackle the Chaotic domain – instead, we’re just told to run away back to the safety of one of the other domains. And yet, following that same logic above, we can see straight away what its base would be: the aspirational dimension, the explicit choice of meaning and purpose – otherwise known in the enterprise-architecture as vision, values and principles.

“The only metric that matters is engaging passion” ~ @jhagel via @panklam

In his elegantly constructed Tuesday morning keynote, the always inspiring John Hagel nimbly set  the tone for a business-focused conference. Starting with last year’s big E2.0 question “How do we get adoption for social software?” he linked adoption to passion and performance (“If you are interested in performance you have to be interested in passion”). People who are engaged in activities they are passionate about will connect with other people — and if you’ve got the platform available, and right, then they will use it in conjunction with passion. The only metric that matters is engaging passion.

Resiliency & the Working Smarter Framework: Building on Strengths ~ by @brentmack

As you can see, the role of Management in this model is to tap into or mine the emergent (next) practices stemming from staff collaborations and transform these practices into new tools and processes.

In this type of workspace, the new tools and processes are put into service much faster. It is accepted that rapid change and the complexity of overlapping issues is the norm. Organizations are positioned more on the outer boundaries where change is happening. Management at the bottom of the pyramid supports a work culture where staff use a variety of social media tools that enables effective social learning activities which fuels collaboration and innovation.

[Brent then creates a diagram unifying working smarter & resiliency, with this graphic summary of the working smarter framework]

@Spigit – New post! Getting Innovation Results from Our Cognitive Surplus – “super post by the @spigit boys” via @petervan

Let’s return to the three elements of this underutilized asset, employees’ cognitive surplus: knowledge, perspectives, heuristics.

All need interaction to be surfaced and applied in context.The knowledge to address a new challenge isn’t likely to be recorded anywhere. It’s the tacit knowledge you want to get at. Perspectives are vital, but can only be applied in the context of the issue. They don’t really have a life outside of a specific need. There is no recording of perspectives to apply to a problem – it’s all about interacting. And heuristics are similar. Methodologies to apply to a problem can be recorded, but we’re all coded differently. Someone has to actually apply those problem-solving methodologies.

Given these requirements, what are the keys to getting innovation results from our cognitive surplus?

1. Seek out diversity in innovation efforts

2. Focus the innovation effort

3. Use social graph for communication, not collaboration

[this post motivated me to make a small addition to a previous graphic]

Friday’s Finds are a compilation of what I have learned on Twitter the previous week. This started as an alternative to the popular #FollowFriday on Twitter where people say who they recommend to follow. I find that most #FF recommendations lack context so I usually ignore them and I don’t post them as I feel they just add noise to the stream. Instead, I curate Friday’s Finds.

For 107 consecutive weeks I published Friday’s Finds but I missed last week because I was having too much fun deep in many conversations. Offline took precedence over online. So here’s what I learned via Twitter these past two weeks.

QUOTES

Here are some of the things I learned via Twitter this past week.

There were lots of quotable folks on Twitter this week, so that’s what I’m highlighting:

@charlesjennings “My credo: real learning is all about experience, practice, conversations and reflections – no more, no less.”

@hwakelam “Complex systems create fast space (simulation) improving engagement with physical space and helping adults play ~ John Smart”

@oscarberg “Collaboration is in a more sorry state in most (even leading) large organisations than they dare to confess.” – “I have yet to experience an organisation where their collaboration practices are as good as they say.”

@JenniferSertl “As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being ~ Carl Jung”

@SebPaquet “Money has no smell, but reputation does.”

“the Knowledge makes us the most qualified cabbys in the world, twitter makes us the most informed” via @Jackcabnory & @KARLcabbyJAMES

@techherding “Starting a new business based on Apple “cloud” model. You pay me to buy a Ferrari, but I keep it for you.”

@susancain “In modern organizational life, the most important things are the ones you can’t measure ~ Roger Martin, at World Innovation Forum”

@ImaginaryTime “Organizations need to start regarding knowledge as an emergent property of social interaction as opposed to a material object.”