Friday’s Finds

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.

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

So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads. Dr. Seuss; via @nancyrubin

@GregoryLent : “We are shipping factories, jobs and wealth overseas so rapidly that it is hard to even comprehend what is going on.”

@Complexified : “Complexity demands new levels of relationship building skills. How we work together shares wisdom deeper than any one of us.” via @betseymerkel

“You can’t teach critical thinking without critical situations.” via @ethanbodnar

Higher education: “the mass production of people literally unfit for anything except to take part in an elaborate charade.” via @anya1anya

“Since the way we run universities now is such a train wreck, what’s a better way?” by @danpontefract

I believe the education teaching process at high school and higher education levels need to radically shift. In both environments, I recommend teaching the theory of various subjects for half the day, and the other half is spent working on the amalgamation of subject-matter through application. That’s right – half the time in theory and half the time applying said theory in real world, critical thinking, cross-collaborative, multi-discipline ways that allow the student to actually practice ‘learning by doing’ concepts whilst learning the theory.

“If nothing else, I hope my book gets rid of learning styles” – Ruth Clark about her book Evidence-Based Training Methods; via @hjames

Thanks to a growing body of research evidence, we’ve learned a great deal in the last 20 years about which methods really work when training people. Yet many trainers are still using time-honored methods and assuming that they work — despite recent evidence to the contrary.

Interesting mind map on how decisions are made. by @jackvinson

I was Wrong.  by @timkastelle

In other words, to be innovative, we have to be wrong a lot. Being wrong is the first step towards being right.

Don’t hide your mistakes, learn from them. If every idea that you try works, it’s a sure sign that you’re not trying enough ideas.

What’s the relationship between R&D spending and Innovation? by @MartijnLinssen – Return on R&D

We can only simply notice that Apple is a very innovative company, for example. SAP spending 4 or 5 times as much on R&D doesn’t make them 4-5 times as innovative (I’m fairly sure even that no one could handle a company being 5 times as innovative as Apple).
Most R&D is window dressing and aimed to please the shareholder – not the stakeholder, that much Larry Ellison did prove in his speech at Oracle Open World.

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

Benoit Mandelbrot died this week:

Why Mandelbrot matters “the market is not rational at all”:

“A few fund managers have experimented with these concepts [of price dependence, whatever that is, and volatility]. They often call it chaos theory – though strictly speaking that is marketing language riding on the coat-tails of a popular scientific trend. In reality, the mathematics is still young, the research barely begun, and reliable applications still distant.”

“Fractal joke! RT @Ihnatko: RIP Benoit Mandelbrot. Thank God he wasn’t murdered. It would’ve taken the cops forever to draw the chalk outline” via @stevenbjohnson

—

“The Internet is a serendipity creation machine.” @johnrobb

“Air sandwich = empty space between top of organization and the doers at the bottom.” @jaycross

“Old paradigm: analysis, strategy only. New: those PLUS storytellng, improvisation, movement/embodiment & visual thinking.” @CreatvEmergence

“I’ve had 7 managers in 5 years. None of them know what I do. The only thing they’ve ever done is try to get me to train someone else.” @NatashaChart

@hrheingold: “Great slideshow by @corinnew on building a personal learning network”

PLN’s are deliberately formed networks of people and resources capable of guiding our independent learning goals and professional development needs.

Bilingualism Good for the Brain : Discovery News via @jalam1001

Bialystock has shown that bilinguals do better at tests that require multitasking, including ones that simulated driving and talking on a phone.

“Make no mistake: Everybody is worse,” Bialystock said, “but the bilinguals were less worse.”

“My rant on the futility of Q and A, with a nod to @hjarche” by @johnniemoore

Here’s my beef. The presentation itself sets up a status game in which the speaker and chairperson start and usually stay high and the audience is low. Here are the various ways this gets manifested. For starters, the speakers are usually at the front of the room and often on a raised platform. Before a word is said, they’re already in high status. Then the chairperson offers a flattering introduction; if we’re lucky they merely flatter the speaker but a lot of them have found ways to flatter themselves by implication. The speaker gets a microphone and the licence to talk pretty much unconstrained. If there’s a time limit, it’s rarely enforced …

Latest Learnlet: Serendipitous revisiting by @Quinnovator

So the point is that you have to keep putting ideas out there, again and again, to find the right time for them to take hold.  Not like advertising, but like offerings.  It’s not planned, it’s just at the idea strikes, but I reckon that’s a better heuristic than a more calculated algorithm. At least, if you are trying to inspire positive change, and I confess that I am.

New Era of Workplace Learning – “social learning is something you do” by @C4LPT

The term “social learning” therefore has a much wider meaning than simply “social training” – where the focus is on the creation, delivery and management of formal learning. “Social workflow learning” (as we might call it) is about workers sharing information and knowledge with others in networks and communities as well as adopting a new collaborative approach to working – in order to DO their jobs effectively.

I’m not sure why this last week was so different than previous weeks, but few things on Twitter caught my attention. Maybe this brings to a close my regular weekly activity of Friday’s Finds, which I’ve produced every Friday since May 22nd 2009. Anyway, I’ll see what happens next week. I’ve put together a few items of interest though I usually have dozens of items to pick from. Perhaps I need to pay more attention.

Still worth checking out though:

A thought during #lrnchat last week: The status quo is maintained by formal learning; revolutionaries embrace the informal.

@jonhusband “Much consulting involves the application of models to a system, as opposed to getting involved in the system as a positive change agent.”

Scathing & quite funny rant about MBTI, Belbin, Honey & M, etc by Paul Kearns – well said, Paul Kearns; via @drmcewan [in case you missed the link on my blog post]

Having taught and trained many, many people over the last 30 years myself, and as an evaluation specialist, I have never ever regarded happy or smile sheets (known as level 1 questionnaires in the trade) as evidence of anything.  Happiness is not evidence of learning and unhappiness is not evidence of failure (learning is often initially painful and starts with resistance). Even if I make participants take a test (level 2) and they can tell me what Belbin’s 9 team roles are does not mean they know what to do with them. Even a level 3 visit (to see if they are applying it in the workplace) might reveal them putting labels on hapless managers but it does not offer evidence that having a defined role, in a particular team dynamic, at a particular time and place, produces better team results.

Taking Stock: “What other profession would go about its business in such an amateurish & unprofessional way as university teaching?” via @MTA_KT [yes, I know that’s me]

Some of the things I learned via Twitter this past week or so (just quotes this week):

“Silence is golden but duct tape is silver!” @JaneBozarth

“Walmart exec (I’m not making this up) told me email was so time-consuming cause she had to approve everyone’s email in advance.” @jaycross

“You can not have a superior democracy with an inferior system of education.” @ginab

“I think “human capital” is an oxymoron. “Social capital” too. Test question: would you consider your spouse, children or friends “capital?” @dsearls

“If I am an effective leader then I have set up a system that is not dependent on me.” @gcouros

“Uncertainty is the certainty that the parameters will change.” @downes

“The fact is that organisation and management sciences are not sciences at all but scientific emperors with no clothing.” Complexity & Management Centre

“No matter how many pairs of reading glasses I buy & strategically place around the house they are never nearby when I need them.” @skap5

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

QUOTES

Chance favours the connected mind. by @timkastelle

*****

If your overall strategy depends on speed to market … patents won’t help much. by @timkastelle

Critically, though, if your overall strategy depends on speed to market or quickness of response to changing environmental conditions, patents won’t help much. They’re too slow.

King Gillette: with patent protection he kept prices high; without protection he lowered prices & increased sales & profits: How conventional wisdom can be wrong by @rbgayle

The ‘sell the razor cheap and make money on the razors’ model is really not true at all but has become a standard narrative. Truth is not as important as the narrative, it seems. we do like our stories.

Observable work – more on knowledge work visibility. by @jimmcgee

• What can you do to make your own work more readily observable?
• How might making your work observable be immediately beneficial to you, even if no one else bothered to pay attention?
• Who else benefits if your work is more observable?
• How do you benefit from others making their work more observable?
• What risks and challenges do you need to manage as you make your work more observable?

Enterprise 2.0 is only the next iteration with a fancy new name for research into new ways of working. E2.0 research & the long tail by @drmcewan

The Long Tail does not only apply to books, films and music. There is a long tail in academic research … I also said in my comment that I get frustrated by much of the Enterprise 2.0 conversation, in that it seems as though there is too much focus on novelty and re-invention. That is unfair, though. So much academic research is not easily accessible and written in turgid language. No wonder it is so seldom referenced. It needs to be discovered, translated and made usable.

“The iPad can trap us in the idea that learning is about content delivery” by @CharlesJennings

What is learning about in your opinion?
John Seely Brown, who was the Head of the Xerox Park research center for many years, together with a colleague of his, John Hagel, recently published a book called “The Power of Pull”. It is based around the fact that we live in a world which is information-rich, but generally interaction-poor. In a learning context, it is a world where learning content is ‘pushed’ to people rather than learners ‘pulling’ just the content they need for their learning to take place.  Seeley Brown and Hagel map out changes that are taking place as this information economy of push is shifting to a more interactive, ubiquitous and on-demand two-way communication – a world of pull. My colleague in the Internet Time Alliance, Jon Husband, calls this new world “Wirearchy”.

Some qualities of a knowledge worker by @jackvinson

So, what is it that knowledge workers need in order to do their jobs?  Merlin talks about three key elements to be great as a knowledge worker in the last two minutes of the talk.

1. Tolerance to handle ambiguity, the unknown, and the incomplete;
2. know that you have enough information to do the work at hand;
3. Courage to work within the uncertainty and the lack of information and still do the job.

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

QUOTES:

@GeorgeKao “There’s no such thing as ‘keeping up.’ There’s only checking in at high leverage times.”

@JohnDCook “He who marries the spirit of the age will soon be a widow.”

*****

@JDeragon People are now the engine of change and the fuel is communications. Systemic Impact of Social Technology

System outcomes can be influenced by numerous factors such as:

1. Competitor innovation that attracts the market away from your business
2. Cost of goods increases and margins shrink. You cut expenses to survive.
3. Employee turnover which fuels inconsistency and waste.
4. Customer leave due to dis-satisfaction
5. Market shifts that you are unaware of and don’t understand

The #1 influence that is threaded through all five examples above is communications.

Knowledge Management = Story Management. Anecdote

How do you organise your stories?

I didn’t realise it at the time but when we started this blog back in 2004 we were creating a type of story bank where we could go back and retrieve great stories to tell.

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

“Education is a self-organizing system, where learning is an emergent phenomenon” Sugata Mitra’s TED Talk via @Willrich45

@openworld “When peer learning meets “results-only work environments” (#ROWE), a breakaway era will begin”

What Girl Scouts have to say about going ROWE. via @caliandjody

In the year and a half since my organization migrated to a Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE), I have talked about our experience extensively. My enthusiastic descriptions of ROWE excite most people, and although I believe that it is an inherently exciting concept, there are people who respond to it with a strong sense of indifference. I have connected this sense of indifference to three potential foundational thoughts: ROWE is too different (shifting to ROWE is so radical that fear supersedes excitement); ROWE is not different at all (been there, done that); or ROWE appears to be not applicable (hint: ROWE is applicable to everyone).

You can’t motivate students, but you can kill what motivation they have. via @bhsprincipal

Motivation – at least intrinsic motivation — is something to be supported, or if necessary revived.  It’s not something we can instill in students by acting on them in a certain way.  You can tap their motivation, in other words, but you can’t “motivate them.”  And if you think this distinction is merely semantic, then I’m afraid we disagree.

On the other hand, what teachers clearly have the ability to do with respect to students’ motivation is kill it. That’s not just a theoretical possibility; it’s taking place right this minute in too many classrooms to count.

@KevinDJones – Baby Boomers vs. Digital Natives – Let the Debate … End

This goes back to my study a few years ago when this notion of the generational divide was starting.  I did some ethnographic research on Enterprise 2.0 adoption for a class I was taking and I was surprised to find that adoption didn’t work by age (which is what I was told).  And now we are finding this more and more.

neuro-science provides new metaphor for organizational reform via @bduperrin

One easily sees benefits of being able to put the PFC [prefrontal cortex] to work: adapt to any situation without chains or barriers, benefit from our total intelligence in any circumstance. Human beings who can do this are very few – as mentioned above, our brains have not yet reached this development level. One can train and improve though, this is some of what we learn to facilitate in neuro-psychology.

JND: Taming complexity through design: modularization, mapping, conceptual models. via @captic

We are faced with an apparent paradox, but don’t worry: good design will see us through. People want the extra power that increased features bring to a product, but they intensely dislike the complexity that results. Is this a paradox? Not necessarily. Complexity can be managed.

Once we recognize that the real issue is to devise things that are understandable, we are halfway toward the solution. Good design can rescue us. How do we manage complexity? We use a number of simple design rules. For example, consider how three simple principles can transform an unruly cluster of confusing features into a structured, understandable experience: modularization, mapping, conceptual models. There are numerous other important design principles, but these will make the point.