Friday’s Finds

Some interesting things I found on Twitter this past week, on the themes of organizing and uncertainty:

via @SebPaquet – Neat infographic: Major Shifts in History: The Emergence of Techno-Economic Paradigms by the fantastic @robpatrob

Organisational Effectiveness via @sig [is this what your HR department is focused on?]

It’s all about organisational effectiveness. How fast, efficient and correct all information is disseminated, how effective hand-overs in the workflow happens, how visible and easy to understand the process is, how effective the capture and subsequent dissemination of knowledge is and how little time you spend on making the flow happen.

via @SemiraSK – Excellent! Organizing For Uncertainty – a Rich Agile Model for the Organization of Work by @zenext via @timkastelle

In change-resistant approaches, people can spend more time planning and reporting than actually doing the work. Rigid plan models define intelligent resilience as an indicator of failure. Teams need to be expensively managed because they are never continuously clear what they’re actually doing with their costly time and talent. Someone is punished with the costs of change once plans are approved. To protect the organization from change, clients are adversarial negotiation opponents rather than collaborative partners in continuous shared learning. Because innovation is explicitly the creation of surprise, no inflexible planning models can help create it, and actually only prevent it.

Collaboration: the secret sauce via @sourcePOV

I’ve been grappling with collaboration for a couple decades now, usually in the context of IT projects in corporate silos that seems designed to shut down cross-functional collaboration.  The hardest part was watching talented people lose motivation in the midst of their best efforts to overcome resistance.

Interesting things I learned on twitter this past week:

American Bar Association article on Personal Knowledge Management. by @KMHobbi

Lawyers are knowledge workers who must cope with an ever-increasing volume of information flowing within and outside of their workplaces. In this ever-more connected world, sifting through irrelevancies to find what you need can take a lot of time. Solution: Try PKM.

Slumdog reveals learning treasures: hole-in-wall computer founder Sugata Mitra turns his hand to British education. via @charlesjennings

“If you give children time to investigate an answer, it’s surprising what they can learn,” Mitra says. “Instead of guessing, they do their own research, and acquire an advanced, university-style of learning. The children have a common goal, and bounce ideas off each other – in the friction session, for example, they started to discuss everyday examples, such as tyres, snow chains, carpet burns, and Olympic swimmers’ shaved bodies.”

Melvin Conway on homomorphism. via @BFChirpy

The basic thesis of this article is that organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. We have seen that this fact has important implications for the management of system design. Primarily, we have found a criterion for the structuring of design organizations: a design effort should be organized according to the need for communication.

Objections to social media: Bell invents the telephone. Twitpic by @JaneBozarth

Some of the things I learned on Twitter this past week.

@oscarberg “Most enterprise social software platforms actually separate internal communication from external communication while email & phone doesn’t.”

via @timkastelle Good #km post – Informal Information Management and Knowledge Management Are Not the Same Thing by @johnt

My thinking is that just the sharing aspect of informal stuff is “know-what”, this is what KM has been about, but we need to go further to the “know-how” ie. to learn and to be able to have the skills to come up with your own “know-what”. We can do this via conversations. We can now converse with people who shared their informal information, and not only know “what” but also “how”…the ultimate example is apprenticeship and mentoring.

via @VenessaMiemis  A fairly good source on Social Capital

In general, there is no one model for social capital formation or the creation or strengthening of local groups. Albee & Boyd (1997) argue that there is no single answer or model to promoting participation … there are only frameworks and guiding principles. Pantoja (1999) argues that instead of one particular model of local organisation, a wide variety of community organisations should be promoted. There needs to be an individual, participatory approach to each intervention.

@downes Social OS and Collective Construction of Knowledge

The development of a technological literacy, though, is uneven. In the divide between a world where we control technology and a world where we are controlled by technology lies what Henry Jenkins calls the “participation gap.” It is the divide between those who can create and have created using digital technologies and those who have not. This is not simply a digital divide, not simply a division between those who can access technology and those who cannot, but rather, a divide between those who have been empowered by technology and those who have not. And it is a gap we see not only at the base level of simple web constructs such as web pages or Twitter profiles, but even more so at the higher reaches of social engagement, in professional discourse and communities of practice. To begin to learn is to begin to participate at the periphery of a community of practice; to become learned is to reduce the participation gap between oneself and fully engaged members of that community.

Some things I learned on Twitter this past week (the first article describes what I’m trying to do here with Friday’s Finds):

@cdn – Filtering is the new search. The next frontier in information management. Search is about Where. Filtering is about Who. It’s about Trust.

Excellent checklist for remote workers & managers. via @dria

@JaneBozarth [ Jane was looking for some case studies on Twitter in the workplace]: microblogging at Qualcomm & Qualitative Study on Micro-blogging at Work

@timkastelle – Great post by Irving Wladowsky-Berger – focus on idea flow, not idea stocks: The Business Value of Social Networks.

Value creation has thus been shifting from protecting proprietary knowledge, to fostering collaboration, both within the company and beyond its boundaries, in order to help the firm participate in as broad and diverse a range of knowledge flows and thus improve its competitive position. It is within this context that one has to consider the business value of social networks, and their impact in helping people better connect with each other, and build sustaining relationships that enhance knowledge flows and innovation.

More complexity, more crises: we need new management models. via @tdebaillon

Our environments are more complex than they were ten or fifteen years ago, or maybe even three years ago. Complex situations become more common and more normal every year. It would not be a good response to panic or blame others. It’ll probably be better to accept the fact that the world is quite complex, and that there is not a standard solution for everything. As crises become normal, deal with it normal.

@valdiskrebs – Is the sun about to set on the corporate machine?

For one, the existence of a burgeoning alternative landscape in which corporations have no real part will push the Western corporate model further towards redundancy. Trends in such boom fields as fair trade, farmers’ markets, organic produce, self-made and/or recycled products, the barter economy, the black or alternative economy, micro-brands, Islamic banking, micro-credit, social networking and, ethical investment all carry, in different ways, the germs of the corporation-as-we-know-it’s demise.

@gsiemens Lack of Sympathy

Comment #13 by Howard – Before universities existed, most people learned by apprenticeship. As Harold points out, before WWII universities apprenticed elites; priests, doctor, scholars, teachers, etc. . .. The mode of learning was still an apprenticeship model and most elite education ended with a very specific apprenticeship practice like a dissertation or medical residency, or for the wealthy, an initiation into “the club”. But educational theory ignored the way things worked and stressed knowledge over doing, knowledge that was represented by a degree. Many people are now finding out that a degree correlated with higher incomes, but did not necessarily cause them. Knowledge alone proves to be no covering, the emperor has no clothes. We may not be blacksmiths or leather tanners, but evolution has not changed us that much and we still learn in much the same way as we always have, by watching other people do things. I think education would be better off if it focused on doing instead of knowing.

Interesting finds on twitter this past week:

Tom Haskins: When we get confident in our own informal evaluation schema- we can take others’ evaluation of us with a grain of salt.

Enterprise 2.0: Start broad with many conversations – then find champions to take a narrow & harder-driving approach. FastForward

@juneholley: Emergence and management

Yes, it is certainly true that the role of managers is probably exaggerated (with their pay).  But the project of changing management is unnecessary.  Over-managed firms will self-destruct, possibly at great cost to themselves and others, simply because managers have to be paid for and management that is not necessary simply makes a firm unwieldy, inefficient and unprofitable.

@David_A_Eaves: The world is not flat, it’s walled & non-integrated

@CharlesHGreen: “It’s not plagiarism, it’s mixing.” Our changing mores on how to think about who owns content. NYTimes – “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” said Ms. Hegemann in a statement released by her publisher after the scandal broke.

@gsiemens: “I have not found a SINGLE school that shows ANY evidence of using technology to transform teaching and learning”. The Good Morrow

Teacher roles in networks = Amplifying; Curating; Wayfinding; Aggregating; Filtering; Modelling; Persistent Presence. [A similar perspective would be that the Teacher/Instructor role in networks is supporting personal knowledge management PKM] – Connectivism

@itsthomas RT @avinashkaushik “You don’t blog to be known. You blog to be knowable.” – @hughmcguire

@JPBarlow Information is free. Experience is expensive.

Here are some words of wisdom, gleaned from Twitter this past week.

Knowledge

@snowded: Narrative as Mediator:

Without the mediation of narrative there can be no knowledge transfer or learning.
Without the symbolic, learning will not diffuse to broad populations & there will be no advance.
Without embodied knowledge there will be no wisdom.

@ken_homer “The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.” ~ Hans Hofmann

@exectweets “Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.” – Peter Drucker

Learning

@mfrancone A single conversation across the table with a wise man is worth a month’s study of books ~ Chinese proverb

@valdiskrebs: Social learning -> You are as smart as the network you are embedded in!

@eduinnovation: “You weren’t born to be a cog in the giant industrial machine. You were TRAINED to become a cog.” ~ Seth Godin | via kdwashburn

@mglazer: Myth: the “training dept” is responsible for the learning that goes on at the company.

@zecool Nous sommes comme dans un mega-buffet mais chacun a 1 assiette seulement; il ne faut prendre que ce qu’on aime, pas tous les plats!

@jarche [result of a conversation with @janebozart & @denniscallahan] “When you learn with and from your customers, learning and marketing are the same.”

@BFchirpy Next step in Informal/Social Learning? If you want to cut out the middle man, go direct to your customers.

Working

More Trust Yields More Innovation via @CharlesHGreen

HBR: To be effective in this new world, you will need to master the skills of empathy & teamwork.

@jackvinson: PKM [personal knowledge management] in the enterprise? It’s all about the enterprise recognizing the importance of individuals getting work done.

@sebpaquet Thought-provoking quote … “The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government.” – Cornelius Tacitus (56-117 A.D.)

Here are some of the interesting things I learned on Twitter. This week I’m featuring my colleagues at the Internet Time Alliance.

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I remarked earlier in the week that “crowds don’t need wise contributors, but diverse & independent ones; it’s like evolution: simple mechanisms create complexity.”

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We learn through idle chatter, so it seems (via @shareski):

@charlesjennings

“if it’s social & engaged there is no us & them, only we”

“It’s not the channel that empowers or dis-empowers the learner. It’s the presence or absence of the ‘course and curriculum’ chains”

“True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing” – Socrates

@c4lpt (Jane Hart)

The Changing Face of Learning & Development

Leapfrog to the Future

@jaycross

“I think of crowd sourcing as tapping the wisdom of the crowd, not getting one idea by asking a large group.”

Go straight to the finish line

Jay’s book on working/learning smarter in the cloud

@Quinnovator (Clark Quinn)

Innovation’s Long Gestation

“lesson from Twitter (for web, mobile design), you don’t *need* full sentences, you DO need to communicate”

“as my colleague @hjarche says, “increasingly, work is learning and learning is work” [yes, I already knew that]

@jonhusband

The HR Problem: the traditional organization is a machine and we are human

The Problem with the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom Hierarchy

The temporary and flexible hierarchies of Fishnet Organizations

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and I also learned that “eMail Is Where Knowledge Goes to Die” via @elsua

Some of the interesting things I found on Twitter this past week.

How we teach:

“Any teacher who can be replaced by a computer …. should be!” — Arthur C. Clarke. via @charlesjennings

@moehlert: “My son, the not-so-excited about math, won’t quit playing carrotsticks.com”

Video: “Most schooling is training for stupidity & conformity” ~ Noam Chomsky. via @courosa

What we can teach:

Educators beware: The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement #ACTA. via @josiefraser

The treaty would provide legal protection for digital locks and security protection on material, provisions that draw upon the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA), but extend far beyond existing international law. As some American teachers and researchers have learned the hard way, these so-called “anti-circumvention” measures have had the unintended consequence of stifling scientific research. Since the DCMA has been in force, a number of computer scientists researching software and network security have faced lawsuits and criminal prosecution as a result of their legitimate research activities into anti-circumvention technologies.

Wherever Crown Copyright would be used, Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) would be used instead. Copyright Consultation via @mgifford

RIP Howard Zinn:

Howard Zinn passed away this week:

A People’s History: what the classroom didn’t teach me about the American empire, by Howard Zinn