Making Actionable Sense II
Gary L. Murphy responds eloquently to my posting on how to turn more of the ideas generated here into action.
Gary is not so sure we fail in the way I suggested, and also argues that loose ends are not valueless, nor lost. He also would not want to see his sense of wonder, of possibility be replaced by plans and deadlines:
The loose ends offer me a sense of the possible, a landscape that can go anywhere, a sense of adventure that keeps coaxing me back to explore a little more. I wouldn't want it tidied up in a tight focused and deadlined bundle because I know, philosophically, to do so would require closing off many of these possibilities, discarding the undiscovered territories. It's an ongoing story, a story of ideas, a story of what's needed, what's possible, a story of senses where there's no way to end the plotline, no way to limit the cast and no way to cut it off in time for the capping colophon. Unhemmed as it is uneven.
Yes, I too love what Gary calls the landscape of possibilities. In fact I think I'm very much addicted to it. To the feeling of that sudden spark in my head where I feel thoughts and ideas are connected but still just out of reach to be able to put it into words well, but I already sense that it is there.
And I certainly would not want to give anything of that wondrous feeling away, nor would I want to replace it with something as hideous as the description Gary gives of what a book is :
[...]diligently ironed out droll, flat and linear, partitioned by topic domain, bound to a dead tree and offered on a shelf with a price tag.
Also I agree that loose ends are not lost. They've been added to my outlook on the world and can't be undone. They might even fall into place somewhere in the future. We don't know.
Nevertheless I do have a feeling that I'm not responsive enough in picking up the thoughts we dream up here in the blogosphere and turn them into action. The blogs reveal emerging patterns, and we can nurture the memes we think important, and block or criticise the ones we think are not.
But I seem to be less succesfull at moving stuff from the complex and un-ordered realm (to adopt some of Dave Snowdens vocabulary) where my addiction is fed, to the more ordered realm of the knowable and practice.
One of the barriers in doing that and that might be turned into an attractor, is the people with whom I try to bring that transition about, from the complex un-ordered to the more ordered knowable. Why would I try to do that with people who never been to the complexity realm, when at the same time I know lots of people who have and are in part neatly listed in my blogroll?
Permalink
| Comments (2)
| TrackBack (2)
Hoder MP
Hossein Derakhshan, the Iranian Canadian blogger who presented on the Blogtalk conference last May will run for a seat in the Iranian parlement, in the next elections. (Via Steffanie)
Permalink
| Comments (0)
| TrackBack (0)
Tool specifications
In the debate whether we should blog or wiki, and thinking about how to support virtual organisations as mentioned in the last post on Making Actionable Sense, I found myself dreaming of a tool like this:
A bloki, i.e. a combination of a blog and a wiki, that is navigable and interfaced like the PersonalBrain (have a look at the nav-tool at the top of the page. I use it on my desktop), but then more styled like a SNA graph, or mindmap. Where new pages end up on the blog, where parts can be shielded from the public, where RSS-feeds are generated for actions resulting from the interaction (things to do lists), and per topic/project, as well as a blog with feed for changes to earlier postings.
UPDATE: See also David Buchan's conversation on the use of PersonalBrain and blogs with Jack Vinson
Permalink
| Comments (4)
| TrackBack (0)
Making Actionable Sense
Lilia Efimova writes about how her blog mercilessly exposes to her the loose ends and ideas she had over time, and did not find opportunities to do anything with. In the comments Denham Grey says that Wikis help solve this problem because revisiting items is easy and you can let the corpus grow on each iteration or passing by, thus incrementally adding to what you already have.
This is a recognisable thing, how to make sense of all these ideas. Or better: how to make actionable sense of them.
In philosophical technology assessment usually 4 steps are made. First a round of diagnosis and inventory, then analysis, a second round of diagnosis, and then consequences for action. It seems as if most of our blog conversations only cover the first two steps: we diagnose a problem, or come up with an idea, and do some analysing around it. I'm not so sure if Wikis take it any further, because I haven't got enough experience with Wikis to be able to judge that.
What is left out also contains the sifting of those ideas: which ones are the better ideas. A blog invites you to have lots of ideas, and that is the key to having good ideas. But we're not good yet I think at taking the gems from that and turn them into action.
In my earlier posting about Networking Fatigue I talked about how after a long period of exploration and discovery (blogging) you need time to digest and broaden the base you work from.
The problem I think is that for both those steps, digesting the results of exploration, and making actionable sense of them, we should bring our co-discoverers, i.e. the bloggers, along for the ride, but by and large still fail to do so.
We together came up with the idea, so why should we not together turn it into action? Current reality is that we try to feed the ideas into our regular workflow, and try to bring our colleagues into it. Most of our organisations however will not yet be layed out for the types of things we come up with here.
So, why not form ad-hoc (virtual) organisations, and create our own value adding networks. Bloggers together putting in proposals for conferences, defining projects etc. I'm not saying this is not being done already by some on some projects, but I am saying that we could be doing it a lot more. We feel like a community, so why not act like one. I think blogging is my first internet experience where there is a real bridge between my internet activities and my life off the net. Let's broaden that bridge, blur the lines some more. Turn our loosely coupled blogging-get-togethers into small enterprising networks.
And then blog it, so we can see what takes place.
Permalink
| Comments (7)
| TrackBack (8)
The Difference Between a Website and a Weblog
Tonight, while discussing the topics my parnter might include in her masterthesis, I came up with this metaphor:
The difference between a website and a weblog is like the difference between a photo and film. Yes it's both pictures, but the richness of the message conveyed is much bigger in the latter.
It's the elapsing of time, grasped in the weblog, where in the more static website formats at best a number of stills is produced. It wouldn't surprise me if this metaphor has been formulated as well elsewhere, though.
Permalink
| Comments (1)
| TrackBack (3)
African blogs
While browsing around a bit relating to culturegaps, as between blog-ecosystems, languages, and continents, I came across this list of African weblogs, hosted at AllAfrica.com which looks like a portal site related to the whole continent.
Permalink
| Comments (1)
| TrackBack (0)
Spanning blog-ecosystems
When I wrote about Language Barriers last month, one of the people who reacted to that was Pernille Rudlin who recently started her own blog Hightext. Pernille Rudlin runs her own company, Rudlin Consulting, to assist Making communication technologies work across cultures.
She seems to have a lot of experience on cross-cultural issues, and is fluent in both Japanese and English.
Interestingly enough it's the first LiveJournal blog I've come across in the past year. So for me Hightext is the first bridge between that part of the blogosphere and the part I reside in. LiveJournal seems, by several indications to be a closed community. Well, now there is one bridge at least.
Permalink
| Comments (1)
| TrackBack (0)
Keynote Dave Snowden
At the KM in Europe conference I went to Dave Snowdens keynote presentation.
The presentation sadly is not available for download from the KM in Europe website, this paper on Sense Making in a Complex and Complicated World (pdf format), however might serve as an alternative. The illustrations used in this article are the same as used in the keynote.
Several people also have blogged about Dave Snowden like Lilia Efimova, Lee Bryant, or thoughts on this by John Moore and Paul Goodison, and Ian Glendinning over on Psybertron.
Dave Snowden is a well experienced presenter and does this with a lot of humour and storytelling. That makes listening easy but might trick you into thinking you understand what he's getting at. Looking through my notes I find that I need to read a lot more to get my head around all this. But having seen and heard the man will probably help reading his texts, as Lilia already pointed out. Below are some not overly coherent picks from my notes.
Title Complex Knowledge
General quotes
Nonaka is the worst that could have happened to KM, because of it's tacit to explicit assumptions and reducing KM to steering on a 2 by 2 where the good stuff is always in the right hand top quadrant.
Best practice is useless, we only learn from worst practice. Trying to copy the best others have done amounts to ignoring context of both place and time, and reduces you to copying which in its turn is the death of innovation.
Communities of practice too often try to formalize the informal, which is why they fail and end up killing the natural community they were meant to strengthen.
Cynefin
Dave Snowden works for Cynefin which is Welsh for something like origin, place of belonging. The Welsh meaning is more nuanced and complex than that, and Dave translates it as "a place of multiple belongings", which is the combined roots we have geographically, culturally, intellectually etc. It's more the total of context we function in and stem from. We are all influenced, be it consciously or unconsciously, by this context, our Cynefin, but we cannot precisely name this influence. This introduces a zone of uncertainty from a managerial point of view.
The difference between the US and EU
Then followed a brief description of how Snowden sees the difference in European and American approaches to KM.
The American approach to KM is likely to be something like finding 3 cases, analyse them thoroughly and then advise people to copy the actions contained in the cases.
The European approach is more like this: Find 10 acknowledged experts, talk to them, conceptualize their input, and validate those concepts by questioning and application.
The European Union would do well to stop trying to catch up with the US by emulating them, and start celebrating and leveraging their diversity more. If we all are to achieve the aim of the EU becoming the worlds foremost knowledge economy by 2010 as set in the Lisbon Summit, I think we'd do well to follow this advice.
A brief history of management
1900-1985; "We can build the perfect machine" as organisational model. Designed from a to z, and based on (non-adaptable) rules. Process re-engineering, Total Quality Management are examples.
around 1985 - now; Tom Peters and Peter Senge introduce systems thinking to management. Heuristics in stead of rules. Recognition of diversity.
now; Time to recognize that emergence and complexity will have to be accomodated in our managerial approaches as well.
Snowden says to recognize there is a space for all of these approaches like process re-engineering and the learning organization. But we have to acknowledge the fact that there are borders to their field of applicability and usefulness.
Innovation and Complexity
The last 150 years of management we focussed completely on order and creating order. But we have to open up to the unordered complex spaces also, if we are to be able to innovate. Ordered innovational processes only lead to incremental innovation, and no true innovation. True innovation stems from serendipity, pickung up on emergent patterns in the unordered areas, comes in leaps and brings true learning.
In this unordered space we can use the concepts of boundaries and attractors from systems thinking. Look for emergent patterns (in your organisation and outside it) and introduce attractors to those you want to leverage more (and ultimately move over into more ordered spaces) and boundaries to those you don't want.
Caveat
I'm not representing Snowden presentation adequately nor coherently by a long shot. I have to mull over the concepts and read some more, and hopefully I'll then be able to reflect better on this. I left out a lot of the presentation in this post for this reason, but you can find most of that in the article mentioned at the start.
Future projects of Cynefin
Interesting enough Cynefin will have projects on Culture in 2004, and on Trust in 2005. They work with a range of universities as well. I have to look into these projects, especially the one on Trust.
UPDATE: Ian Glendinning follows up with some links to interviews, but also to a set of slides, that resemble the ones used at KM in Europe.
Permalink
| Comments (3)
| TrackBack (0)
Politicians blogging
There is a lot of discussions on the use of blogging for politicians. Especially since the enormous effect of the grass roots campaign of Howard Dean for the Democratic nomination.
As I see blogging as conversation mainly, and also think that it is through conversations that we create networks, and create value in those networks, I would like to share this little quote from the weblog of Gerrit Zalm, minister of finance and deputy prime minister in the Netherlands:
Het weekend was zonder verplichtingen. Toen mijn directeur Voorlichting mij zaterdag belde of ik zondag naar ‘Buitenhof’ wilde (onderwerp, stabiliteitspact en een interview in de Financial Times met Eichel) heb ik nee gezegd. We hadden kaartjes voor ons vijven voor deel 3 van de Matrix en dat mocht wel eens voorgaan. Was de moeite waard.
Translated:
The weekend was without any official obligations. My PR-director called on Saturday if I wanted to go to Buitenhof [a political commentary and backgrounds programme on national TV. Ton] the next day to talk about the Euro-stability pact and an interview I had with the Financial Times. I said no. We had tickets for the five of us to go see part three of the Matrix, and I thought that for once deserved priority. It was worth it.
I like it. It rings true and authentic. His weblog generally describes with whom he meets during the week and what topics he discusses. I would like to see more like this as it makes visible to us what it is our politicians do, with whom they are in contact, what the world looks like from where they're standing and how that relates to my views. And also it makes them human, in stead of the grey suited talking heads as they are generally perceived.
The weblog was hosted at www.zalmlog.nl first, but it now links through to the official website of the Ministry of Finance where the blog now is part of. No RSS, comments or trackback yet. But it's a start.
Permalink
| Comments (0)
| TrackBack (0)
On the KM-community
In his impressions of last weeks KM in Europe conference in Amsterdam (presentations now on-line for download) Martin Dugage, (weblog Mopsos) writes:
The network of KM professionals is quite active. This community is likely to use the most advanced networking tools available, and many have their own weblogs (« K-logs »). The bonds created across borders of country, language and organizations are quite amazing. Everybody knows everybody.
That coincides with my own feeling about this conference. Next to the bloggers, the KnowledgeBoard community added to this effect as well. It created a good mix of familiar faces and new people to meet.
I think conference organisers would do good to realise that by making free space for 'fringe-events' like the meetings of KnowledgeBoard, or like a Knowledge-Café by David Gurteen, or a bloggers meetup and start seeking out and inviting these initiatives (not organise them themselves) they will be able to both add value to the conference and boost visitor numbers, who will then probably go on and pay for other parts of the conference. The Edinburgh Festival calls itself Fringe not for nothing.
Permalink
| Comments (0)
| TrackBack (0)
Squarewise: KM's Soap More Slippery Than Suggested
Last week I spent three days on the KM in Europe conference in Amsterdam.
The first presentation I visited was by Squarewise under the title "Why KM is not different from selling soap." I was kind of intrigued by the title. The image I had of this Dutch company is that they approach KM with a lot of sense, and I hoped that this presentation would give me a glimpse of how they combine abstract insights with the practical. It is in that that so much other consultancies seem to fail often.
It was visible that the three people presenting spent a lot of effort in preparing their presentation, and also that they seemed to be pleased with what they had come up with.
But sadly their presentation to me at least was a total dud. The content was not that bad, if you ignore their 'knowledge is an object' approach, they tried to convey that implementing a KM-solution is not much different from any other implementation project, e.g. marketing a new product (the soap from the title).
What they totally failed to do however was to make a connection to the audience. Here you had three presenters together staging a well rehearsed but obviously fake conversation (read from cue cards). They acted out a conversation, with one playing the Eplaining Expert, one the Colleague Seeing the Light, and the third, the Commentator Who Summarizes the Message. After it ended all present were invited to 'come to the Squarewise Lounge' where you would be able to ask questions and have a conversation with them. Free coffee coupons at the door.
What if they had used this half an hour to try and make a connection to me and the rest of the audience, to strike up a conversation with me right there and then, telling me about their experiences and inviting interaction? We were all in the room, ready to listen and be listened to. Instead we were shown a live television commercial, ending in an invitation to put in some additional effort to be able to talk to them. What about the effort of coming to them already? Their little play did nothing in the way of providing a starting point for conversation, it merely added to the unlikelihood of it. A waste of their own effort, and a waste of ours. KM apparently is too slippery a soap to get a grip on every now and then.
(But at least they were not the ones saying that to be able to manage intellectual capital you had to 'find out in which database it resides first', as Verity did.)
I will be at another event early december where I will in all likelihood meet people from Squarewise as well. Maybe we will be able to have a genuine conversation then.
Permalink
| Comments (0)
| TrackBack (2)
KM in Europe
From November 10th thru 12th I will be visiting the KM in Europe conference in Amsterdam.
My schedule, apart from meeting a host of interesting people face to face, during those three days will look something like this:
Monday, November 10th
Tuesday, November 11th
Wednesday, November 12th
Do not hesitate to e-mail me or call me at +31-621830899 if you would like to meet up in the coming days.
Permalink
| Comments (0)
| TrackBack (0)
Blogtalk 2.0
Thomas Burg has good news: After the successfull Blogtalk conference in Vienna last May, a second Blogtalk conference is foreseen
for July 2004. Get your planners out and jot it down. This will be fun.
Hopefully there will be some more time available for face to face contacts, as well as a different venue (with canteen services in the weekend, and no disfunctioning WLAN routers behind locked doors.
Permalink
| Comments (1)
| TrackBack (0)
Teams and CoPs
Miguel Cornejo on the difference between teams and communities of practice:
In a community of practice the members work together on something they find valuable.
In a team the members work together on something their boss finds valuable.
Permalink
| Comments (0)
| TrackBack (0)
One year ago today....
I wrote my first blogpost. Since then I've been on an exhilirating rollercoaster of learning and meeting new people.
So on my very first "bloggiversary" I would like to thank you all for provoking my thoughts, adding new vistas to my outlook on the world and enriching my social networks. A big hand of applause to you all.
Permalink
| Comments (3)
| TrackBack (0)
Wrong vocabulary?
Yesterday Elmine and I spend a beautiful day in London,
visiting among other things the Tate Modern Gallery,
where at least the sun was coming up (or going down, we're not sure).
At the end of the afternoon we met up in HaHa, a pub off Charing Cross Station,
with John Moore and Tim Kitchin.
Over beers we had some conversation, looking back on the NGO Workshop last Wednesday in Brussels,
where Verna Allee emphasized the importance of social innovation.
Tim correctly remarked that social change is not something you can plan,
or can set goals in and then work towards them.
However, as John said, being able to gain understanding of current social issues
and conventions in an organisation may well be the first step in working towards
(evolutionary) change.
Thinking over this conversation, Tim's remark about how social change cannot be designed
or engineered, sparked off a few thoughts.
The first thing is that the combination of design and social change implicitly contains
the wish to make social change a controlleable process. The point to me however would be
that there is no such control, nor is it needed.
We can work towards change, but we'll never be sure of the outcome.
It is such with technological change, and organisational change, in much the same way,
we merely adopt the attitude that this would be within our grasp of control.
So, to me it increasingly sounds like we're trying to work with the wrong vocabulary here.
It reminds me of American pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty who stated that
it is not possible to argue the pragmatist case with the vocabulary of
Platonian dichotomies, the very thing it aims to replace.
The Platonian vocabulary simply is not fitted out for this.
Something Verna Allee said last Wednesday reflects this as well. During a coffeebreak
I talked to her about how a lot of organisations pay lip service to being knowledge-aware,
working with intangibles and supporting the knowledge worker.
But how they in the end shrink back from really changing themselves to the core.
Verna Allee then said "I just don't put any energy into those organisations anymore.
I only work with those who 'get it', and devote my energy to them."
If only I had that luxury.
(John Moore had a lovely picture for this change that we require of organisations and they resist:
it's as if you're walking on the stairs, holding the rail, and say "I'm prepared to let go of
this rail as soon as I see the other rail on the other side of the stairs, but not before."
Where the leap of faith to be taken is to let go of the rails in your left hand on the
assumption you will find the other rail before you fall down the stairs.)
What Verna is saying here amounts to saying that she'll only work with companies who don't
expect her to defend her position in the terms of the industrial era command and control
organisational models.
That's an uphill battle she just isn't going to waste energy on.
She works with those who don't ask her to defend herself, but who will be looking at the results
of trying something new.
Winning the uphill battle would merely amount to showing how the 'new' fits in with the 'old'.
The thing is: it doesn't, and it does not at all have to either.
Which leaves us with the question what the new vocabulary would be?
(Also read Ian Glendinning)
Another case of wrong vocabulary, but then funny, was the show we attended at the Cambridge Theatre, called Jerry Springer the Opera.
Hilarious, and great entertainment, with Jerry Springer's guests hurling verbal abuse at each other in the form of singing aria's.
Great show, but hard to put into words! Read John Moore's account, or the reviews at the shows website.
Permalink
| Comments (4)
| TrackBack (2)
NGO workshop in Brussels
Last week I've visited a great day of presentations and conversations in Brussels. Olaf Brugman hosted a workshop on knowledge sharing for NGO's.
Five of those presentations I'd like to mention here, although I take it the proceedings will become available at the KnowledgeBoard NGO Special Interest Group as well.
The one to kick off the day was Verna Allee. You can read impressions of her presentation (and others) from John Moore at the Roundourhouse weblog, Martin Roell at the E-business Consultant Weblog, and Olaf Brugman at the Knowledge Bridge.
If you ever get the chance to talk to Verna, grab it. (She'll be in Amsterdam at the KM in Europe conference next week) She extremely eloquently stated that knowledge management is mostly about manageing through a knowledge lens. The people I just mentioned have worked out their notes very well, and as I haven't got them with me, as I'm writing this from London enjoying a weeks vacation, I'll stick to just two observations I made. (Or read Lee Bryant on Verna Allee's keynote on KM in Europe)
The first is her great use of mapping flows of intangible between organisations and other stakeholders/people in their network. It also showed quite nicely how such a map is so much richer than one just showing the official relationships, and the flows of tangibles (deliverables, commodities and money) between them. Bottle-necks and opportunities just jump you in the face looking at these maps. Finding win-win approaches this way can become a routine excercise.
The second, which resonated immensely with me, was her emphasis of innovation as a social issue. Way to often innovation is presented as focussed on technological progress, or reinventing the production lines with efficiency as a result. What this approach lacks is that it does not look at the organisation this all takes place in. How about innovating your social and organisational structures? That is what KM to me means mostly. Of course this is the scary bit, because it means REAL change of you and the environment you work in. But as it probably is unavoidable in the end anyway there is an awful lot to gain by making change a conscious effort. Innovation is not technological, it's social.
Nico van den Oudenhoven was up next with a courageous account of how to use emotions to make sense of the information overflow we find ourselves in these days. Also I liked his introduction of the notion of "optimal ignorance", by which to find the balance of being in the know and deliberate choice of what not to know. Emotions as a filtering process is of course very much how we go about things, but to acknowledge that and explicitly work with it is something else. For a start it releaves you of the need to rationalise your gut-feeling based decisions afterwards :)
John Moore gave us a hugely entertaining after lunch wake-up session on trust. Although I am pretty familiar with his approach to trust and authenticity, it was good to hear him explain it another time. His attitude that trust is not about reducing risks, but is the risk you take to find out who the trustworthy contacts are clearly solves the paradox I came across last year when I stated that if I trust someone I actually need less trust.
Miguel Cornejo, whom I met for the first time but was familiar with from Knowledge Board, introduced us to his view on communities of practice. Very expiring to hear how he applied this approach not to communities of professionals, but to connect hiv-infected people, their families and friends, their doctors and a host of organisations, including government, and giving them all a voice and access to information in an environment tailored to their needs. Without central control, without people deciding what the needs of others are. Inspiring to see the emphasis here on community, and not on (professional) practice. Miguel thus lives the technologists dream: to make technology really enrich people's lives. He muttered something on the other presenters all being optimists but I suspect he is one too, and one doing something about it as well.
Geert Kobus was the one to wrap up the day for us, with explaining the difficulties with crossing the differences between languages. If anything he deepened the problem Olaf and I wrote about earlier this week. It's not about merely translating from one language to another. There is also the real possibility of concepts being different or even absent from one language to another. The language trap he promised us to learn to avoid, is even bigger than we thought. But we're more aware of it now, and that is a good thing.
Part of the group met for drinks and dinner afterwards, where my partner joined us. Thanks to Olaf for organising this event, and thanks to all present for making it such a worthwile day to spend in Brussels.
Weblog by 
Lilia Efimova *
Gary Murphy
Sebastian Fiedler *
Thomas Burg *
Terry Frazier
Dina Mehta *
Stuart Henshall *
Spike Hall
Phil Wolff *
Jim McGee
David Gurteen *
Elmine Wijnia *
Julian Elvé
Denham Grey
Ian Glendinning
Paul Goodison
