Friday’s Finds

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

QUOTES

“Your brain is most intelligent when you don’t instruct it on what to do” ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb – via @KareAnderson

@adriarichards: “You do a disservice to entire STEM [science, technology, engineering, mathematics] community when you don’t think about bridging the gap between your knowledge and a layperson’s experience.”

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Can there really be Too Much Information? via @jrobes

Information rules all of our lives. In fact, DNA, the building block of our bodies, is “the quintessential information molecule,” writes journalist James Gleick in his new book, The Information: A Theory, a History, a Flood. Yet all this information can be overwhelming and difficult to use effectively. In advance of Gleick’s appearance at Zócalo on March 15, we asked [five] experts whether more information is always a good thing.

Information overload and innovation by @rhillard

Business and government innovation is best measured by the new connections it adds to society and the organisations that support it rather than by the quantity of transient data that becomes persistent or even the amount of truly new data. Adding something new adds the greatest value to the people that it serves when it increases the number of connections.

A little more on not doing KM – via @DavidGurteen

The potential of KM [knowledge management] is enormous but many KM projects have failed to live up to expectations. Why?

• KM projects are NOT focused on the business
• KM projects are tough
• KM project leaders are often inexperienced
• KM projects poorly conceived
• Lack of senior management support

“every single organization has an informal network where 70% of the work takes place” by @dustinmattison

Work usually doesn’t get accomplished the way management sees it formally. The problem with formality is the fact that you really cannot foresee every circumstance that takes place in an organization, especially unanticipated circumstances. For example, a mid-level manager is called into his boss and she says that “we need to do a project and my idea is to do it in such as way, now go ahead and put it together and let me know if you have any questions.”

You will typically see that mid-level managers going back to his or her section and calling people together where he needs participation on a project. The first thing they will do is try to figure out exactly what the instructions entail. The thing to keep in mind is that every person has to interpret something in their own way. There is no way that two or more people see something in exactly the same way. The management needs to interpret those instructions and have an interaction with his/her people and try to determine what needs to get done.

The Power of Conversations by @charlesjennings

We rarely, if ever, work and learn alone. We reach our goals and contribute to our organisations’ objectives in a social context. In the maelstrom of our digital communications age the need to think ‘socially’ is more important than ever.

Here is some of what I learned via Twitter this past week.

QUOTES

The Internet: “The private interests of all have to be subsumed to the public good.” – by @robpatrob

@Euan “We depersonalise business so it doesn’t get messy. Instead it gets dysfunctional.”

Leadership Freak: “If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less” ~ General Shinseki – via @KoreenOlbrish

@AronSolomon – “Insiders who claim a desire to change the status quo are sheep in wolf’s clothing.”

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The advantages of social learning propelled incipient human groups along a different evolutionary path from chimpanzees – via @c4lpt

The new data on early human social structure furnishes the context in which two distinctive human behaviors emerged, those of cooperation and social learning, Dr. Hill said. A male chimp may know in his lifetime just 12 other males, all from his own group. But a hunter-gatherer, because of cooperation between bands, may interact with a thousand individuals in his tribe. Because humans are unusually adept at social learning, including copying useful activities from others, a large social network is particularly effective at spreading and accumulating knowledge.

The Return of the Barbarian –  “Civilization is the process of taking intelligence out of human minds and putting it into institutions.” – via @sebpaquet

In the short term this works brilliantly. The ideas of the smartest people (usually embedded higher barbarians) are externalized and encoded into the design of institutions, which can then make far stupider people vastly more effective than their raw capabilities would allow (this is the reason why the modern economic notion of “productivity” is so misleading).

But in the long term this fails. The smart people die, and their ideas become obsolete and ritualized. Initially, more intelligence is being externalized into institutions than is being taken away through ritualization, but at some point, you get a peak, and the decline begins. As entropy accumulates, it becomes a simple matter for another wave of lower barbarians on the periphery to take down the civilization.

Irving Wladawsky-Berger: A Time of Institutional Recomposition – via @raesmaa

When companies are no longer competitive, they go out of business and their clients take their business elsewhere.  But, the invisible hand, creative destruction and other powerful free market forces that impose rigorous disciplines on business have not applied to government.  There is a huge difference between failed companies and failed communities, cities or countries.  Clients can easily find other companies to do business with in place of the ones no longer around.  This is not the case with citizens.

Systemic vs. Silo Thinking & Social Media – by @JDeragon

Social media are an influence on markets. The market of conversations can be used to improve an organizations system and its ability to serve a market. That is of course if we understand the “system and all the interrelated parts”.

Most organizations are failing at social media because:

It is being used in silos
The current measures are not relevant to systemic improvements
It is disconnected from the organizations people, processes and systemic improvements
Use is isolated in marketing and advertising processes
It is not designed around people’s intents or relational objectives

The advancement and improvement of any organization starts and ends with alignment of people, processes and communications. Not leveraging social technology systemically means the organization will be out of alignment.

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

QUOTE: “How to squelch human potential – Step 1) Create assembly-line schools, 2) Distract w/ pop culture, 3) Build corporate cube-farms. Mix well” by @Richard_Florida

Dyer: Why the Arabs can handle democracy via @ewellburn

A mass society, thousands, then millions strong, confers immense advantages on its members. Within a few thousand years, the little hunting-and-gathering groups were pushed out of the good lands everywhere. By the time the first anthropologists appeared to study them, they were on their last legs, and none now survive in their original form. But we know why the societies that replaced them were all tyrannies.

The mass societies had many more decisions to make, and no way of making them in the old, egalitarian way. Their huge numbers made any attempt at discussing the question as equals impossible, so the only ones that survived and flourished were the ones that became brutal hierarchies. Tyranny was the solution to what was essentially a communications problem.

Fast forward ten thousand years, and give these societies mass communications. You don’t have to wait for Facebook; just invent the printing press. Wait a couple of hundred years while literacy spreads, and presto! We can all talk to one another again, after a fashion, and the democratic revolutions begin. We didn’t invent the principle of equality among human beings; we just reclaimed it.

Modern democracy first appeared in the West only because the West was the first part of the world to develop mass communications. It was a technological advantage, not a cultural one – and as literacy and the technology of mass communications have spread around the world, all the other mass societies have begun to reclaim their heritage too.

The Arabs need no instruction in democracy from anybody else. They own it, too.

RWW How Recent Changes to Twitter’s Terms of Service Might Hurt Academic Research via @jonhusband

Twitter’s recent announcement that it was no longer granting whitelisting requests and that it would no longer allow redistribution of content will have huge consequences on scholars’ ability to conduct their research, as they will no longer have the ability to collect or export datasets for analysis.

We all know that our bosses legally spy on us. But what do they do with the info? by @jessebrown [read through to the conclusion]

“Almost everybody monitors—close to 100 per cent,” says Avner Levin, a business law professor at Ryerson University and director of the school’s Privacy and Cyber Crime Institute. “It’s become a fact of corporate life. There’s hardly a discussion about it anymore.” While British Columbia, Alberta and Quebec have legislation guaranteeing some level of employee privacy, Ontario offers none. Many companies ask you to sign away every possible claim on your own data. You may have agreed to be spied on when you signed your employment contract.

Why the weak students end up as educators CS Monitor via @pgsimoes

We also need to develop our future teachers’ own minds, by holding them to the same intellectual standards as other college students. Their so-called methods courses would be much richer if we asked them to read and write about the key dilemmas in their fields. And they should also take more classes outside of the ed-school, where intellectual requirements are already higher.

Would that make them “better” teachers? I’d like to say yes. Surely, though, it would make them more complex, curious, and contemplative human beings. There is nothing in the world more inherently fascinating than education. But ed schools have made it boring, by stripping it of its intellectual edge – and by letting our students slide along.

The students know it, too. That’s why weaker ones flock to the subject – and the more able ones stay away. In each of the past four decades, as my colleague Sean Corcoran has shown, a declining fraction of America’s top college students have chosen to become educators. If we want to reverse that trend, we’ll have to make teacher-preparation programs challenging enough to lure these students back in.

PEG: Knowledge Workers in the British Raj – by @pevansgreenwood [excellent series]

The future of our business – post Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business Design – is not in applying a new human-resources paradigm to our existing workforce. Much like the British Raj in provincial India, our businesses need to adapt to an environment where we don’t have the time or resources to micromanage every task. The workforce which staffed our bureaucracy in the past is not the same workforce we need in the future. The future of our business is with a smaller, more dynamic workforce of self-starters, built around flat organizational structures and more general skills which devolve responsibility for operational problems to the front line and empower them to work together and solve these problems under their own direction, while freeing the executive team to focus on steering the organization through the challenging environment we operate in today.

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

“A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.” ~ O. W. Holmes Jr – via @zecool

Forget About Being a Fast Follower – via @TimKastelle

Experimentation is very intertwined with innovation. Both require a hypothesis – if we do X, then we will get benefit Y. Both require a lot of work for uncertain outcomes. Both require rigor and careful planning. And both are consistently avoided by turning to “experts” who provide an answer, which takes less time and exposes the executive to less risk. After all, if the idea fails and the expert supported it, it can’t be the executive’s fault!

ADAPT: leverage complexity; develop ‘wise’ IT; encourage cross-mentoring; tap networks; strategic community-building – by @Quinnovator

The reflection was that the mechanisms we were suggesting then, to make companies more resilient, were actually strategies making companies more flexible and adaptive.  It’s been a number of years, so it’s interesting to me to see what we were recommending back then and it’s even more relevant now:

• leverage human complexity: encourage diversity and use it to drive richer solutions
• develop ‘wise’ information technology: use technology more strategically to complement our capabilities
• encourage always-on cross-mentoring: have mentoring networks to provide support across tough times and develop people in multiple dimensions
• tapping social and value networks: reach out across organizational boundaries to partners and customers and eliminate blockages
• strategic community-building: facilitating information flows

@mbauwens “Most of the economic growth during the Internet era has been largely unmonetized”

As for the great stagnation in real wages in particular, the biggest reason is probably the extraordinarily rapid pace at which the BRICs and developing world has become educated and accessible to the developed world since the Cold War. In other words, outsourcing has in a temporary post-Cold-War spree outraced the ability of most of us in the developed world to retrain to the more advanced industries. The most unappreciated reason, and the biggest reason retraining for newer industries has been so difficult, is that unmonetized value provides no paying jobs, but may destroy such jobs when it causes the decline of some traditionally monetized industries. On the Internet the developed world is providing vast value to the BRICs and developing world, but that value is largely unmonetized and thus produces relatively few jobs in the developed world. The focus of the developed world on largely unmonetized, though extremely valuable, activities has been a significant cause of wage stagnation in the developed world and of skill and thus wage increases in the developing world. Whereas before they were buying our movies, music, books, and news services, increasingly they are just getting our free stuff on the Internet. The most important new industry of the last twenty years has been mostly unmonetized and thus hasn’t provided very many jobs to retrain for, relative to the value it has produced.

Revealed: Air Force ordered software to manage army of fake virtual people | The Raw Story via @tomatlee

Unfortunately, the Air Force’s contract description doesn’t help dispel suspicions. As the text explains, the software would require licenses for 50 users with 10 personas each, for a total of 500. These personas would have to be “replete with background , history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographacilly consistent.”

It continues, noting the need for secure virtual private networks that randomize the operator’s Internet protocol (IP) address, making it impossible to detect that it’s a single person orchestrating all these posts. Another entry calls for static IP address management for each persona, making it appear as though each fake person was consistently accessing from the same computer each time.

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

“I’m an outsider by choice, but not truly. It’s the unpleasantness of the system that keeps me out. I’d rather be in, in a good system. That’s where my discontent comes from: being forced to choose to stay outside.” George Carlin, Napalm and Silly Putty. via @cburell

“In human affairs, times of advancement are preceded by times of disorder. Success comes to those who can weather the storm.” —The I-Ching – via @ken_homer

The secret life of chaos – BBC video via @complexified

It turns out that chaos theory answers a question that mankind has asked for millennia – how did we get here?
In this documentary, Professor Jim Al-Khalili sets out to uncover one of the great mysteries of science – how does a universe that starts off as dust end up with intelligent life? How does order emerge from disorder?
It’s a mind bending, counter intuitive and for many people a deeply troubling idea. But Professor Al-Khalili reveals the science behind much of beauty and structure in the natural world and discovers that far from it being magic or an act of God, it is in fact an intrinsic part of the laws of physics. Amazingly, it turns out that the mathematics of chaos can explain how and why the universe creates exquisite order and pattern.

“throwing out the web is like breaking a mirror because you don’t like your own reflection” — @stoweboyd — via @sebpaquet

Value Networks and the true nature of collaboration by @vernaallee (Digital Edition)

The true shape and nature of collaboration is not the social network – it is the value network. Value networks are purposeful groups of people who come together to take action. Value network modeling and analytics reflect the true nature of collaboration with a systemic human-network approach to managing business operations. It shows how work really happens through human interactions, and provides powerful new practices and metrics for managing collaborative work. It provides a way to a) better support non-hierarchical organizations such as cross-boundary teams, and task forces, and b) quickly and effectively model emergent work and complex activities that have multiple variables and frequent exceptions.

The HR ‘Wheel’ that adds no value. by Paul Kearns

Paradoxically, while HR is pretending to play a strategic game, there is plenty of evidence that it is actually wasting huge amounts of value every day just doing the reactive, transactional work that is the comfort blanket of the majority of HR practitioners. The disciplinary, grievance and contractual query work they pretend to dislike is actually the only job they know. Worse still, they have a perverse incentive to ensure they have as many problems to deal with as possible (that’s why they make such a meal of trivial issues). This has the dual appeal of not only keeping them in employment (for now) but also, simultaneously, making them ‘too busy’ to do the really difficult, but high value, strategic work.

How Information Overload and the Rate of Change Effect Training. by @charlesjennings

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

“It was 1977. We thought we were doing an experiment. The problem was, the experiment never ended.” ~ Vint Cerf on the Internet. via @moehlert @monkchips

Triple Bottom Line: the bad idea that just won’t die

This idea is of course ridiculous. It’s ridiculous not because companies can’t or shouldn’t track performance in those areas — they can, and they should. It’s not even ridiculous because such performance can’t be quantified — many environmental and social impacts can be measured, and companies’ performance on various measures can be tracked from year to year.

No, the problem with the 3BL is that it’s a terribly misleading metaphor. It’s an accounting metaphor, used in domains that don’t satisfy some of the basic assumptions that make financial accounting work. (In my Critical Thinking class, this is what we call the “False Analogy” fallacy.)

Johnnie Moore: Learning is not a parcel via @DavidGurteen

Learning is not a FedEx package that you sign for at the door. Learning happens on its own schedule. We often realise the significance of events long after their original impact, and may actually continue to revise what we think the lesson is as our lives unfold.

L’Innovation via les réseaux d’apprentissage. by @fdomon [my article translated to French]

C’est Tim Kastelle qui m’a présenté le concept Agréger-Filtrer-Connecter pour l’innovation, que j’ai utilisé pour mon PLE (Personal Knowledge Management) avant de le changer en Enquêter-Discerner-Partager. L’innovation est inextricablement liée à la fois aux réseaux et à l’apprentissage. C’est pourquoi les compétences nécessaires à l’apprentissage en réseaux sont essentielles pour les entreprises aujourd’hui. Nous avons besoin d’innover pour rester en tête dans un monde en mutation. Les règles sont en constante évolution. A peine le temps de s’habituer à de nouveaux business modèles comme Amazon ou Google, que quelqu’un comme Alvis Bigis nous propose un excellent article sur la façon dont l’économie américaine a besoin de devenir sociale. A parlant du site Groupon.com, il dit « Jamais avant Groupon, une entreprise n’avait atteint 2 milliards de dollars de chiffre d’affaires annuel en seulement 2 ans. » Qui sait quelle sera la suite ?

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

From KM to complexity – Necessary silos, cognitive truths about knowledge sharing, narrative as mediator, the zone of effective diffusion, and decision-making; by @johnt

At the highest level of abstraction (you have a conversation with yourself) the cost of codification is very low as you have a 100% shared context (hopefully).

[NOTE: the moment you have to transfer (it’s more of a dance rather than a transfer anyway) with another person then you have to be aware of the barriers (their current level of understanding, expert language, world view) which are ultimately overcome with experience and acquiring skill…see curse of knowledge]

On the other hand if you want to share your knowledge with everyone then the cost of codification will approach infinity.

Blogging for knowledge workers: incubating ideas; by @mathemagenic

Blogging is primarily known as an instrument for personal publishing, reaching a broad and often unknown audience without pushing content on them. While blogging is personal, most of its advantages are the result being part of an ecosystem, where weblogs are connected not only by links, but also by relations between bloggers. Those relations do not appear automatically: it takes time and effort before one can enjoy social effects of blogging. To sustain blogging before those effects appear it is important to find a personally meaningful way to use a weblog.

The connected company – excellent analysis of social business; by @davegray

It’s time to think about what companies really are, and to design with that in mind. Companies are not so much machines as complex, dynamic, growing systems. As they get larger, acquiring smaller companies, entering into joint ventures and partnerships, and expanding overseas, they become “systems of systems” that rival nation-states in scale and reach.

So what happens if we rethink the modern company, if we stop thinking of it as a machine and start thinking of it as a complex, growing system? What happens if we think of it less like a machine and more like an organism? Or even better, what if we compared the company with other large, complex human systems, like, for example, the city?

You Feel the Earth Move Under Your Feet | “the twin revolutions of information and connectivity are turning society upside down” via @sebpaquet

Egypt is about much more than a popular uprising against a ruler who has stayed in power through what can only be described, charitably, as a corruption of the democratic process. Egypt is the most compelling example to date of how the physics of human society are being rewritten. In much the same way that Quantum Physics turned Classical Physics on its head, the twin revolutions of information and connectivity are turning society upside down or perhaps better put, every which way and loose.

Here are some of things I learned via Twitter this past week [Friday’s Finds].

We need to save our tigers [follow link for ways to help] by @Sumeet_Moghe

“Do not cut down the  forest with its tigers and do not banish the tigers from the forest; the tiger perishes without the forest and the forest perishes without its tigers”  – Mahabharata, 400 BCE

“C’est avec la logique que nous prouvons mais c’est avec l’intuition que nous trouvons. [Henri Poincaré]” via @MichelleBlanc

@jmcgee “‘diligent laziness’ = DRY – don’t repeat yourself, = take advantage of what others know and share, = take/make time for reflection”

@snowded “Never try to excite a conservative with something novel or interesting (note to self)”

From information to conversation by @EskoKilpi

People often need to act and make decisions in situations in which causality is poorly understood, where there is considerable uncertainty and people hold different beliefs and have personal biases. However, people very reluctantly acknowledge that they face ambiguity at work. Problems in organizations tend to get labeled as lack of information. It feels more professional to try to solve a knowledge management problem that is called lack of information than a problem that is called confusion.

[SEED Magazine] “Critical slowing” as a threshold approaches could be a signal for collapses in complex systems. via @ViRAms

The practice of science has always been grounded in predicting outcomes. The hypothetico-deductive method—the due process of scientific inquiry—can be summed up by four basic steps: review data, make prediction, test, repeat. Now the ways in which we as a society are extracting information from large-scale events and systems, identifying patterns, and making predictions are clear examples of the analytical logic of science—what might be referred to as scientific thinking—transferring to the organizational principles of the public at large. In this way, scientific thinking is a nascent tool for policymaking, governance, and problem solving in general.

Foreign Policy: the “nation that out-educates us today is going to out-compete us tomorrow”. via @ValdisKrebs

The first generations of Indian startups focused on selling IT services, and the Chinese developed copycat web technologies such as Baidu, China’s Google rival, and Sina, its Twitter clone. But they are going beyond that now. They are gaining the knowledge — and developing the confidence — to create innovative products, not only for domestic markets, but also for global ones.

Social Business planning: set up a process of discovery by @robpatrob

When I worked with NPR back in 2005 the question was “How will social media affect us and what should we do?”

The great thing then was that No One could know the answer to that question. And if by chance one of us did, no one else would just accept that answer.

So what we did was to set up a process of discovery where it was agreed at the outset that no one knew.

We then set off, nearly 1,000 people, on a number of test journeys where groups “Played” with creating stories about what the future might be.

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

“I don’t do NDA’s” Implied Suspicion Versus Implied Trust – via @petervan

Overheard: “School is where young people go to watch old people work.” via @simfin @ScottElias @zecool

When I Grow Up (Video) – We Never Intended to Work This Way by @kevindjones

When I grow up, I want to stay until 5, even when I have nothing to do.

I want to suppress common sense for company policy.

Strive for mediocrity.

Learn not to take chances.

Not state the obvious because I fear retribution …. (cont)

State of Washington to Offer Online Materials, Instead of Textbooks, for 2-Year Colleges – Technology – The Chronicle of Higher Education via @cgreen

Mr. Green, of the state community-college board, says the Open Course Library is very much a work in progress, and may always be. Indeed, its success depends upon the academic community to continually review, revise, and improve the courses, and then post them back online for others. (The idea of freely sharing information, he concedes, might just be the more challenging cultural shift.)

But “getting there” is not in question, says Mr. Green. He says he’s been blunt with textbook publishers and has encouraged them to get on board if they can.

“You saw what happened with Craigslist and newspapers,” he says, referring to the free classified advertising that has helped force some newspapers out of business and required others to reinvent themselves. “We are going to get there with or without you.

Stephen Downes: ‘Connectivism’ and Connective Knowledge by @downes

Let me explain why we take this approach and what connectivism is. At its heart, connectivism is the thesis that knowledge is distributed across a network of connections, and therefore that learning consists of the ability to construct and traverse those networks. Knowledge, therefore, is not acquired, as though it were a thing. It is not transmitted, as though it were some type of communication.

What we learn, what we know — these are literally the connections we form between neurons as a result of experience. The brain is composed of 100 billion neurons, and these form some 100 trillion connections and it is these connections that constitute everything we know, everything we believe, everything we imagine. And while it is convenient to talk as though knowledge and beliefs are composed of sentences and concepts that we somehow acquire and store, it is more accurate — and pedagogically more useful — to treat learning as the formation of connections.

EFF Celebrates 20th Anniversary With New Animation by Nina Paley

Onerous user agreements.
Tracking and surveillance online.
“Three Strikes” and copyright cops.