Friday’s Finds

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.”

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

QUOTES:

Indian PM “Knowledge combined with creativity and productivity has the potential to impact the social economic nature of a nation” – via @stevedineen

“Getting out of the way is a much underrated organizational skill.” – Craig Newmark – via @Mickipedia

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Claiming Ephemeral Media – why it’s important to own your data – by @downes

If people want to converse in an environment that basically owns all their data, I can’t stop them, but I’ve been through this before – remember HotWired Threads, anyone? – and don’t feel like going through the grief again.

I think that’s the most difficult part of reclaiming ephemeral media. The silos [Facebook; Twitter; etc.] have made people feel as though they have to be there, and the people there are complicit in making those who don’t play in the sandbox feel like outcasts. Are you ready to have people act as though you’ve dropped off the grid?

Excellent PKM & networked learning reference list by @hreingold – An Introduction to Mind Amplifiers

a five week course using asynchronous forums, blogs, wikis, mindmaps, social bookmarks, synchronous audio, video, chat, and Twitter

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

QUOTES

@RalphMercer – “would (LMS) learning management systems exist if we weren’t trying to make someone pay?”

@PembaTrees – “Was asked for an easy way to start a NGO …. Spend 5 years writing proposals, give talks, start a social enterprise & get a line of credit.”

@B4HOttawa – “Wisdom is like a baobab tree; no one individual can embrace it – African Proverb”

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“Some psychologists have a theory that many of the world’s ills can be blamed on psychopaths in high places.” via @SebPaquet [reminds me of The Gervais Principle]

“Robert Hare, the eminent Canadian psychologist who invented the psychopath checklist, … recently announced that you’re four times more likely to find a psychopath at the top of the corporate ladder than you are walking around in the janitor’s office,” journalist Jon Ronson tells Guy Raz, host of weekends on All Things Considered.

Without Workflow, Social Business Is Doomed – via @bduperrin

The only way to avoid the social death spiral is to make sure that any social/enterprise 2.0/collaboration initiatives you implement tie directly to everyday work, and sit squarely in the middle of key workflows.  This can take many forms, ranging from project management to targeted Q&A for specific critical topics.  What matters is that the work is important, and that the collaboration tool delivers a substantial reduction in the amount of effort required to complete that work.  Improved quality alone is not enough–the only non-monetary payoff most of us pay attention to is extra time.

Most interesting comment of the week: Storytelling Sucks by @DonaldClark to @jhagel on The Pull of Narrative

[Donald] It’s received wisdom in learning that storytelling and narrative are unquestionably good. But is it? Plato warned against filling young minds with fixed narratives and I’m coming round to a similar view, but with a twist. I’ve always been a big fan of sports and more recently of reality TV. Add to this computer games, virtual worlds, blogging, wikis, social networks, email, messenger and skype, and I find that most (not all) of what I really love is relatively unscripted, open, fluid, and often with more than a touch of ‘play’.

The top-down, command and control, baby-boomer culture is really starting to annoy me. The more I watch prescribed movies and TV, with their fixed plot structure, and abandon the publishing hyped ‘modern’ novel, the more I enjoy life. There’s an obsession with ‘stories’ that borders on the manic in learning, the arts and media. They really do want us to open our mouths and swallow.

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

QUOTES:

@sandymaxey – “Hierarchical networks appear incestuous, perpetuate mindless incrementalism, reinforce stagnant thinking. Need inclusivity for disruption.”

Carl Sagan: “It is suicidal to create a society dependent on science and technology in which hardly anybody knows anything about science and technology.” via @MarionChapsal

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The new China? BMW, Daimler, VW, Siemens & IKEA go to Southern US because labour’s cheap & workers have no rights – via @CWNH

But slumming in America is fast becoming a business model for some of Europe’s leading companies, and they often do things here they would never think of doing at home. These companies – not banks, primarily, but such gold-plated European manufacturers as BMW, Daimler, Volkswagen and Siemens, and retailers such as IKEA – increasingly come to America (the South particularly) because labor is cheap and workers have no rights. In their eyes, we’re becoming the new China. Our labor costs may be a little higher, but we offer stronger intellectual property protections and far fewer strikes than our unruly Chinese comrades.

@SteveDenning: “The real jobs crisis is that most jobs suck” via @SebPaquet

This is not just a matter of keeping the workers happy. In today’s knowledge economy, the motivation of workers is a key determinant of productivity. The lack of passion in today’s workforce is a fundamental cause of the continuing sharp decline in the performance of the Fortune 500.

@nineshift: “We say teleworkers are 25% more productive than office workers”

Industry Canada reports productivity gains of up to 50% by Teleworkers. (Trade-Marks Branch)

IBM Canada had Teleworker productivity improvements of up to 50% per teleworker. (IBM, Canada)

Boeing finds that Telework helps to increase their employee’s productivity an average of 15-30% and, “The quality of the work done has improved even more!” (Boeing Case Study provided by Telecommute Connecticut)

@lemire: conventional peer review system (filter-then-publish) has disastrous consequences:

In the conventional peer review system, you seek to please the reviewers who in turn try to please the editor who in turn is trying to guess what the readers want. It should not be a surprise that the papers are optimized for peer review, not for the reader. While you will eventually get your work published, you may have to drastically alter it to make it pass peer review. A common theme is that you will need to make it look more complicated.

@etiennewenger: New paper on assessing value creation for communities and networks: A Conceptual Framework (PDF) – via @NancyWhite

We will use the term “community” as a shortcut for community of practice, which we define as a learning partnership among people who find it useful to learn from and with each other about a particular domain. They use each other’s experience of practice as a learning resource. And they join forces in making sense of and addressing challenges they face individually or collectively.

We use the term network as a shortcut for social network. The term refers to a set of connections among people, whether or not these connections are mediated by technological networks. They use their connections and relationships as a resource in order to quickly solve problems, share knowledge, and make further connections.

We see communities and networks as two aspects of the social fabric of learning rather than separate structures.

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

QUOTE: @JeffElder: “I’d just love to pick your brain.” Saying that to a consultant is really saying: “I’d just love to pick your pocket.” – via @techherding

Mimi & Eunice: Precious Sacred Idea

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Kelly Craft (@acLuser) reflects my own feelings about Follow Fridays on Twitter, and why I decided two years ago to start Friday’s Finds instead:

I’ll also bust the ‘secret’ vault wide-open and admit I’m not a fan of #followfriday in many respects.

• Truth be told, I really don’t want a bunch of random new followers who I might not share any common interest with.

Internal culture shows you to everyone. – What happens on the inside gets seen by the outside – via @igotan

We live in a world where it’s very difficult to keep secrets anymore.  We communicate very freely, and this causes the walls to turn into veils, and the veils to be more and more translucent.  Imagine the shower in the photo above — it’s symbolic of a new reality, so go to the gym.

Melissa Pierce (@melissapierce) creator of the film Life in perpetual Beta, discussing social media on Chicago Live

“Leaderless groups” are a myth if taken literally” ~ Rosabeth Kanter – via @minutrition

“Leaderless groups,” a phrase I heard stated with pride at Cisco in the early days of councils and boards, are a myth if taken literally. No group is actually leaderless, although it might be highly collaborative. The group might distribute and rotate leadership roles and responsibilities. There might be open discussion of decisions, even if there is a person who declares when it’s time to decided and breaks ties — in short, has the authority. But when everyone is responsible, no one is responsible.

It’s been a long week and not much of it has been on Twitter. I considered not writing a Friday’s Finds post, having recently hit the 100 week mark. However, as I sit in our kitchen (with four computers), my son tells me that he writes in his journal every night before going to bed. So, after a 1,100 KM drive today, here are some of the things I’ve learned via Twitter this past week.

“Every company has an underground reward program of bad behaviors not punished. Tolerated values are often stronger than stated values” – by @Globoforce

NATO general says more training will be on unclassified web:

[Lieutenant General Karlheinz Viereck] is convinced of the need for radical change in training to enable NATO to meet the challenge of a new security environment. He recognises that NATO must “think, organise and plan totally differently to the past.” His belief in the urgent need for change and the adoption of new methods of training is based partly on a recognition that the old methods are no longer always appropriate in the new circumstances of today’s security environment and partly on a shrewd understanding of the immense possibilities that developments in information and communications technology offer for achieving significant improvements in learning and training.

“Deference” by @euan [I’ll take creative, empathetic, self-directed & innovative any day]

So what’s been bugging me. I think it centres around a couple of words used by the BBC anchor man for the day. I was out of the room at the time but overheard him commenting on the size and enthusiasm of the crowd and contrasting this with our “cynical society” and “lack of deference”. At this point I yelled “Oh fuck off” from the kitchen much to my wife’s annoyance!

If knowledge is power – then knowledge sharing is empowerment.

Search is now officially DEAD. Google dissolves Search Group Internally, Now Called “Knowledge” – via @4KM

Google has seven major product groups. Advertising, Commerce & Local, Mobile (Android), Social, Chrome, YouTube and Search. Search is, of course, Google’s first and most important product. But that group actually no longer exists internally. As of April, when Larry Pagetook over as CEO of the company, the search group was renamed the “knowledge group” internally.

The Hidden Power of Renegade Knowledge – by @tdebaillon

Most of the tasks we are trying to achieve in our daily job are either complex or complicated. They involve multiple steps, human-to-human or human-to-machine interactions, use of different tools, all of which require following procedures, navigating through -and sometime despite- hierarchical requirements and validations, mobilizing resources whose availability isn’t aligned to your needs, producing some outcome for clients, either internal or external, whose logic isn’t yours, all of that in a reduced time frame. Whether we run a home-based business, are a public sector clerk or a Fortune 100 executive doesn’t make much difference here.