Friday’s Finds

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

I modified my use of Twitter favourites for my Friday’s Finds selection this week. I switched my social bookmarking service from Delicious to Diigo and noticed that Diigo offered a method to save my favourites automatically. Instead of reviewing my favourites in Twitter, I went through the bookmarks on Diigo, deleting ones I no longer wanted to keep and updating and annotating those that I found more interesting. This redundancy will provide me with two ways to retrieve information, either from my blog or my bookmarks. It’s not much more effort and I think it will make my bookmarks more useful.

A Baker’s Dozen: Principles of Value Networks | ValueNetworks.com by @vernaallee

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 in designated roles to take action or produce an outcome. Only through the power of value networks can we address our complex issues – together – and create a more hopeful future.

Five surprising changes in 2010 by @lemire

We are replacing physical objects and processes by bits and software faster than I would have predicted at the beginning of the year. We are also becoming a civilization of autodidacts. Scholarship is being fundamentally reshaped under our noses without anyone noticing. I think that much of the establishment is greatly underestimating the amplitude and significance of these changes. The proof is how badly prepared the American government was with respect to Wikileaks.

Mark Federman: What is the (Next) Message?: Death of the Liberal Class

My own position (at the 4 minute point in the video) is simple to state: the constructs that gave us corporatism, capitalism, the liberal class, and modernity itself are now obsolesced, and we need a new framework in which to observe, theorize, understand, and undo the dysfunctions that we have clearly visited upon ourselves, and the wider world …

What is not acceptable in a contemporary context is the penchant of the fogey generation – men like Reihan Salam and Tony Keller – to continue to apply 19th and 20th century principles to the analysis of our 21st century reality.

My Three Words for 2011: Seek, Sense, and Share | Beth’s Blog by @kanter

Jarche defines networked learning as  “an individual, disciplined process by which we make sense of information, observations and ideas.”    He further suggests that networked learning is the solution (in part) to information overload (not the cause!).   For networked learning to be beneficial, it requires an open attitude toward learning and finding new things.   In addition, each person needs to develop individualized processes of filing, classifying and annotating digital information for later retrieval.  His conceptual model include the three words:  seek, sense, and share.

My sense is that becoming a master at networked learning helps you improve what you are doing in world that is changing so fast and is so complex.

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

“In this day and age, if you’re not confused, you’re not thinking clearly.” ~ Burt Mannis – via @mariogastaldi

“I don’t have to attend every argument I’m invited to. ~Author Unknown” via @denniscallahan

@vernaalle: “Good luck = accident. Good management = control (yeah right!). Good fortune means working with what is emerging in a way you can succeed.”

“Downsizing is a sign of management’s failure … passing it along to people who tried to execute management’s flawed strategy” ~ Geoffrey James – via @ajaypangarkar

A Self-sufficient Organization: We spend a lot of time developing leaders and then we rely on them to run our organizations.

(1) By creating leaders, we sometimes diminish others.

(2) By creating leaders, we create followers. We focus on developing leaders but not as much on developing followers. But followers need to develop as well.

(3) Followers distance themselves from leaders. This removes a certain level of trust, communications, and performance from followers. Dominant voices and group think destroy team work.

(4) Leadership creates the hunger for power and power can corrupt people. Corrupted people often make the wrong decisions.

Connectivism: “Basically, networks underpin life & human existence” – “Knowledge in any moderately complex task or activity is networked” by @gsiemens

@jhagel: “Are we hard-wired for hierarchy? Bad news for the kumbaya crowd . . . ”

When participants experienced an outcome that could increase their status and have them become superior players, activity increased in circuitry at the top front of the brain that controls the intention to do something, suggesting that rising in a hierarchy makes one more action-oriented.

My comment to @jhagel: “Perhaps we need to follow our passions to be happy & reinforce what we’re good at. Could mean less stress in hierarchies” [Would be interesting to compare people who work in hierarchical relationships and those who don’t.]

Wakeup call for employers: 84% of workers want to quit! by @stevedenning

When 84% of workers are unhappy in their work and can’t find any reasonable alternative, while a sizable slice of the workforce is either unemployed, underemployed or on the cusp of losing their job, the potential for social and political unrest is significant.

The message for employers, employees and politicians is clear: we need to revolutionize the workplace.

UN-OAS: “information regarding human rights violations should not be considered secret or classified – via @oscarberg

December 21, 2010 – In light of ongoing developments related to the release of diplomatic cables by the organization Wikileaks, and the publication of information contained in those cables by mainstream news organizations, the United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression see fit to recall a number of international legal principles. The rapporteurs call upon States and other relevant actors to keep these principles in mind when responding to the aforementioned developments.

“Gandhi’s conviction on sedition … Priceless !!!!” via @kunalkapoor

The only course open to you, the judge, is either to resign your post, and thus dissociate yourself from evil if you feel that the law you are called upon to administer is an evil and that in reality I am innocent, or to inflict upon me the severest penalty if you believe that the system and the law you are assisting to administer are good for the people of this country and that my activity is therefore injurious to the public weal.

*This is my 85th Friday’s Finds, the last for 2010. See you next year.

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

Business is nothing but “Social Networks” by @sig

Adding “social” as a layer onto a rigid structure created pre-IT will never do it. E 2.0 or it’s new name, “social business”, is commendable but a blind alley, you have to focus on bettering the core mechanism instead. The core mechanism that allows and executes “a series of actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular end by working with someone to produce or create something”. (That was the definition of Process and Collaboration baked into one sentence.)

Social doesn’t just mean friends — it means society; by @umairh

Think of the “social” in social media the way economists use the word: to represent society. The right function of “social” tools is to give yesterday’s creaking, rusting institutions social — as in societal — significance. Social doesn’t just mean friends — it means society.”

@rdeis “RT @OPENForum Why I Was Wrong About Twitter – Very Good summary of what Twitter does really well.”

Back then, when Ashton Kutcher was trying to get a million followers and the news was all atwitter about Twitter, like many others, I thought Twitter was nothing more than a gossipy, truncated, silly platform for, as I put it, learning about what someone was doing “at 3:47 tomorrow afternoon.”

How the app phenomenon is changing economics; by @rbgayle

This rapid adaption to what customers want requires a very different organizational structure than at many companies. It must be able to adapt rapidly to new information and it must move that information around rapidly.

Staying engaged and being adaptive – the successful companies will have both of these attributes.

Leadersheep:

Leadersheep are a species in the Homo genus of bipedal primates in Hominidae, the great ape family. They are most likely descended from the wild mouflon. Leadersheep are raised by some B-schools and a culture of impatience/short-termism for good looks, fast wins, fleece and milk. Leadersheep can be manipulative and self-absorbed, but are usually not dangerous and often mean well. If you are one or see one, teach it to become less important.

@charlesjennings “Transport for London ‘lorry blind spots’ film – why cyclists get crushed (daughter did research for this)” – None of the cyclists along the side of the lorry in this video can be seen from the driver’s seat inside the lorry cab.

Also: augmented reality version

@charlesjennings “@edavidove just pointed out that this is the ideal male performance support ‘tool’ (@hjarche photo at Schiphol)”

It was a busy week, so I didn’t learn a lot via Twitter, though much through conversation with some interesting people.

BRP (Barely Repeatable Processes) ‘Social Learning & Exception Handling‘ @lirons via @jonhusband

We know that most learning in the workplace is informal. Most observers put it at around 80%. Recently, John Hagel and John Seeley Brown contended that ”as much as two-thirds of headcount time in major enterprise functions like marketing, manufacturing and supply chain management is spent on exception handling.” Of course, that fact is a result of the successes of process automation over the past few decades. Yet, still,The Barely Repeatable Process (BRP) persists as an organizational challenge for business.

Reuters: 5 lessons businesses can learn from WikiLeaks, via @michelleblanc

1. There are no completely secure systems
2. Weigh the risks of a data breach
3. Segment your data
4. Understand the maturity of your staff
5. There are right ways and wrong ways to handle an embarrassing data breach

@tonzylstra – “Keeping your own employees away from info anyone else has access to, including when your employees are at home … bureaucratic logic at its best.”

and now I head across the Atlantic ….

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

@JayCross : “You can’t manage things that you can’t mention.”

“A person grows as a person in connection with another person, and in no other way” — Teilhard de Chardin; via @technoshaman

“Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.” — Hannah Arendt; via @jennifersertl

@hypergogue : “The future of workplace learning (or, saying goodbye to all that rhizome nonsense)”

As an example, if you speak to informed Training & Development strategy people they will all say that we’re seeing a trend towards ‘performance support’ and away from learning. Actually, though, trainers have always worked in ‘performance support’. Trainers have always known they’re there to ‘help people learn’. But many of them failed to spot the hidden end of that sentence – trainers help people to learn how to use performance support systems. ‘Teachers’, by the way, are no different in this respect.

Skype learning – 7 great benefits; by @donaldclark

You can always spot a fabulous technology when it can be used as a verb, like email, text, tweet. I’ll ‘Skype’ you, is one of those wonderful verbs. Over the last two years I’ve been doing voluntary Maths and Science tuition for kids that find these subjects difficult. It’s been a mix of face-to-face and Skype. So what follows is a short comparison between these two techniques.

From facts to data to commons; by @dweinberger

In a world too big to know™, our basic strategy has been to filter, reduce, and fragment knowledge. This was true all the way through the Information Age. Our fear of information overload now seems antiquated. Not only is there “no such thing as information overload, only filter failure” Clay Shirky, natch, in the digital age, the nature of filters change. On the Net, we do not filter out. We filter forward. That is, on the Net, a filter merely shortens the number of clicks it takes to get to an object; all the other objects remain accessible.

“analogy making is at the core of all cognition” Eide Neurolearning

Hofstadter believes that analogy making is at the core of all cognition, and what is especially interesting is how frequently analogies seem to occur in everyday experiences and how complex the parallels can be when suddenly we have a flash of insight, “That’s just like…(something else)”.

Henry Mintzberg on coaching ourselves & learning at HR 2010 World Congress; via @jonhusband

Highlights from these excellent videos:

• “The Inflated Sense of the CEO” – hero worship is horrible for organizations
• All MBA grads [without previous experience] should be stamped on the forehead with a skull & crossbones warning: “Not Prepared to Manage”
• The role of Human Resources (HR) is to be a fifth column in the organization
• The first thing HR can do is to get rid of the “R” [people are not resources]

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

My piece “teamwork, real work and the wicked enterprise” on @cmswire – via @deb_lavoy

Some problems are such complex, entangled, multifaceted hairballs that we cannot approach them alone. They change and morph as quickly as our ability to understand them. They are known to academics as “wicked problems.”

In modern enterprises, we need a new way to talk about these wicked problems, as well as new approaches to address them. Normal isn’t normal anymore. Change is the norm.

Trends in Knowledge Management – “a short synthesis & worth a read”:

Traditionally, KM was more often than not a top-down driven approach. For example, document taxonomies and knowledge sharing procedures were defined; identified experts shared their knowledge in defined communities.

Today, we can identify six strong trends that lead into new concepts of knowledge sharing and collaboration:

The obsession with purely technology driven solutions to wicked problems is dangerous. via @snowded

My takeaway was simple: Just as a previous generation confused correlation with causation we are now confusing simulation with prediction. We need to realise that the obsession with purely technology driven solutions to wicked (or as I prefer intractable) problems is dangerous and we need to see technology as augmenting human cognition, triggering extended human sensor networks into states of anticipatory awareness; rather than trying to anticipate the inherently unpredictable.

Free as in Freedom: The State of Learning in the Workplace Today. via @sumeet_moghe

I’ve just scrambled into Jane Hart’s session about the state of learning in the workplace today. This is a guide in soundbites and images and is a way to summarise the excellent guide on Jane’s website that a lot of us have already seen. I’m a self-confessed fan of the incredible thinking that the Internet Time Alliance put out, so I am sitting through the session even though I already comprehend the material.

The traditional approach to workplace learning has been about managing and controlling the learning experience, keeping it really top down. There are 10 factors that are shaping the new era of workplace learning.

@hjarche thinking that you may find this interesting from a #pkm [personal knowledge management] perspective. via @mikey3982 & @doctorblogs

My conclusion is the information problem is now so big, that we need to do things radically differently, instead of doing more of the same. So perhaps in the future we’ll see wiki-Cochrane reviews or clinical trials on YouTube. Otherwise, the only remaining solution may be for doctors and researchers to set up an Information-Users Anonymous support group. We could start each meeting by solemnly declaring the first of the twelve steps: “We are powerless over information – and our lives have become unmanageable”. I hope it doesn’t come to this.

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

“Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and diligence.” – Abigail Adams via @Adisaan

“What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.” – Thoreau via @shauser

“the learning profession is the hole in the data donut” – Ellen Wagner @edwsonoma at DevLearn 2010

Or, as noted thought leader Ted Williams said, “If you don’t think too good, don’t think too much.” via @Dave_Ferguson

Hierarchies are systematically stupid and inefficient, for the following reasons … via @prem_k

People in authority make stupid decisions because the people who know more than they do are their subordinates, and the only people who can hold them accountable know even less than they do.

The only way the people doing the work can get anything done is to treat irrational authority as an obstacle to be routed around, the same way the Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it.

In a complex environment, analysis loses its primacy & long-term planning becomes impossible. via @downes

Book: Mojo in its purest form is an internal positive spirit toward what you’re doing which shows on the outside: via @marshallgoldsmith

Note: now I need to reflect on all the other things I came across and learned at the DevLearn 2010 conference in San Francisco.