Innovation

Innovation

twitter enables open knowledge networks

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Twitter has kept me informed through this pandemic. I have been informed by subject matter networks of experts who share their knowledge with the public on Twitter. I was even taken to task by a troll (now off Twitter) for not blindly following local public health advice — “Twitter doctors are apparently more trusted than our medical officer of health.” But given the performance record of our CMOH, the advice from my pandemic list has kept me safer over the past two years.

Imagine if public health had taken the informed advice of Barry Hunt, an engineer specializing in airborne infection prevention. On 31 March 2020, Barry described the droplet theory of the spread of SARS-C0V-2 as — “90 year-old stale dated fake news” — yet the droplet theory was promoted by the WHO until May 2021.

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strategic doing through agile sensemaking

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Cormac Russell has developed Asset-based Community Development (ABCD) which I see as a complementary model for Strategic Doing, especially Skill #3 — Identify the assets at your disposal, including the hidden ones. Cormac recently shared a thread on Twitter.

Here are a few paradoxes I’ve noticed at play in the dynamics between institutions & communities:

  1. The institutional paradox: Institutions are hardest to reach when you need or want them most. And most difficult to shake off when you need or want them least.
  2. Where there’s a danger that achieving the institutional mission will jeopardise the organisation’s future: Antibodies will be produced to kill off all such progressive efforts. Their prime directive: the institution’s survival matters more than fulfilling its mission.
  3. Past a particular scale or intensity, institutions will become counterproductive: producing the opposite of their stated intention, e.g. stupefying schools; crime producing prisons. (Illich)
  4. Bureaucracies following an iron rule: those who wish to elevate, support, & practically resource community alternatives will always be junior/subordinate to those who want to feature their professional & institutional capacities above citizens and the communities they serve.
  5. The more professionals talk about “community power”, the less power communities actually have and the more disabling institutions are. While where citizens and professionals openly talk about institutional limits and the dangers of disabling professions, the more powerful communities are and the more enabling professionals can be.

—@CormacRussell 2022-03-04

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perpetual beta — our new normal

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The perpetual beta model describes how knowledge can flow between professional networks, communities of practice, and work teams. It shows that it is necessary to connect all three in order to ensure a diversity of ideas and perspectives — as well as safe places to test these — in order to support increasingly complex collaborative work tasks. An essential component of this is ensuring individuals develop the discipline of personal knowledge mastery.

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super-connectors

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Richard Claydon tells a story about a ‘super-connector’ he once worked with. This person was highly respected by everyone and could get things done across departments, ignoring the official hierarchy.

“In today’s interconnected complexity of work, it is next to impossible to isolate performance to the granular, individualised level of a KPI. Everything happens in dynamic context, impacting and being impacted by stuff that is going on elsewhere. A super-connector navigates this complexity for the benefit of all.

Super-connectors are vital for creative and innovative work. They are the people who take strands of thoughts from multiple domains, synthesise them and turn them into something novel. Without people capable of listening to, comprehending, sharing and combining such thoughts, creativity and innovation hit roadblock after roadblock.” —Are you a super-connector?

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sparking curiosity

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“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.” —Ellen Parr

The primary work skills of the past century can be summed up as — compliance, perseverance, diligence, and intelligence. These skills were needed for routine work and standardized jobs. Historically we have used human labour to do what machines cannot. First the machines caught up with us, and surpassed humans, with their brute force. Now they are surpassing us with their brute intelligence. There is a decreasing requirement for machine-like human work which is routine, standardized, or brute.

While the industrial economy was based on finite resources, a creative economy is not. There is no limit to human creativity. We have to make a new social contract — not based on jobs — but enabling a learner’s mindset for life.

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value network analysis masterclass

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Value Network — “A web of relationships that generates economic or social value through complex dynamic exchanges of both tangible and intangible benefits.” —Verna Allee

I participated in my first value network analysis (VNA) workshop in 2007. My impression at the time was that humans work in complex environments and we are by our very nature unpredictable. The result of a VNA allows us to ask better questions but it doesn’t give specific answers (it’s not a tool for bean counters). I felt that VNA was an excellent change management tool. I could see the use of VNA and the resulting concept maps enabling better communication within organizations, with clients, with funders, and throughout communities. These perceptions have not changed

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creativity needs just enough social connections

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During this pandemic and various lockdowns  there have been many discussions about the need for physical contact and how it supports creativity.

The writer and scientist, Isaac Asimov, reflected on — How do people get new ideas? — after a short stint at an MIT spinoff company in 1959. New ideas are not often received well by those in positions or power or influence Asimov noted.

It is only afterward that a new idea seems reasonable. To begin with, it usually seems unreasonable. It seems the height of unreason to suppose the earth was round instead of flat, or that it moved instead of the sun, or that objects required a force to stop them when in motion, instead of a force to keep them moving, and so on.

A person willing to fly in the face of reason, authority, and common sense must be a person of considerable self-assurance. Since he occurs only rarely, he must seem eccentric (in at least that respect) to the rest of us. A person eccentric in one respect is often eccentric in others.

Consequently, the person who is most likely to get new ideas is a person of good background in the field of interest and one who is unconventional in his habits. (To be a crackpot is not, however, enough in itself.)

Once you have the people you want, the next question is: Do you want to bring them together so that they may discuss the problem mutually, or should you inform each of the problem and allow them to work in isolation?

My feeling is that as far as creativity is concerned, isolation is required. The creative person is, in any case, continually working at it. His mind is shuffling his information at all times, even when he is not conscious of it. (The famous example of Kekule working out the structure of benzene in his sleep is well-known.)

The presence of others can only inhibit this process, since creation is embarrassing. For every new good idea you have, there are a hundred, ten thousand foolish ones, which you naturally do not care to display.

Asimov felt that isolation is required for creativity.

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masterclasses

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Several times over the past few years I have been asked to conduct online masterclasses to help organizations with their internal change initiatives, such as — digital transformation, distributed work, & online community building. These sessions are 1/2 day (±4 hours) and have from 20 to 60 participants. Each one is focused on the needs of the client which we discuss in advance. Here are the various components that we have used.

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learning in the complex domain

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Personal knowledge mastery (PKM) can be a lens to examine how knowledge flows in organizations and human systems, especially from a perspective beyond formal training and education.

“A model of curation for the digital era that is being used in health and care is Harold Jarche’s ‘Personal Knowledge Mastery’ (PKM). This is about individuals making the best use of their networks and other sources of knowledge so that they can keep up to date with the most effective thinking in their area and practice new ways of doing things. Leaders who take responsibility for their own effectiveness through PKM create leverage and value for their organisations. The underpinning framework for curation within PKM is ‘seek, sense, share’. ‘Seeking’ is about finding things out and keeping up to date; pulling’ information, but also having it ‘pushed’ to us by trusted sources. ‘Sensing’ is about making sense and meaning of information, reflecting and putting into practice what we have learned and plugging information into our own mental models and turning it into knowledge. ‘Sharing’ is about connecting and collaborating; sharing complex knowledge with our own work teams, testing new ideas with our own networks and increasing connections through social networks.” —UK National Health Service White Paper: The new era of thinking and practice in change and transformation

In addition, PKM is much more than a model of curation.

“Seek > Sense > Share are three elements at the core of Harold Jarche’s Personal Knowledge Mastery (PKM) Framework. With PKM, he shaped one of the most persuasive approaches to personal and professional development, combining natural ways of learning with an approach to sensemaking and contributing to a larger collective.” —GIZ.DE

Personal knowledge mastery is a framework that connects working and learning. Much of what professionals and most adults learn is from experience and interactions with other people, at work or outside of it. We learn from experiences and exposure to people and ideas.

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post-production society

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Technology at Work v6.0 — The Coming of the Post-Production Society, is the latest research report from Citi Global Perspectives & Solutions, published in June 2021 [Disclosure: Citi is a client]. One year ago I summarized the previous version, The New Normal of Remote Work. I concluded that most people would like the option to work from home, most of the time. This is especially true for knowledge workers. They have tasted it, and in spite of the challenges of being forced into what I would prefer to call ‘distributed work’ — they like it.

The report has four chapters.

  1. The Post-production Society
  2. Covid-19 and Digitization
  3. Fiscal Policy — From Life Preservers to Stimulus
  4. Inventing the Future

I will highlight a few sections of interest, but there is much more in this +100 page report.

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