Aug 03
When in Doubt, Decorate
The other day I was watching this TED talk by Gever Tulley about his “Tinkering School” where he unleashes eight year olds on power tools and lumber and coaches them through the design and creation of wonderful things. Nice to watch in itself, but one of his side comments had me pondering. He has noticed that when the kids get stuck and frustrated with a problem that they can’t solve in constructing their thing, the marker pens and paint comes out, and they start decorating it instead. After a while, they are able to go back to it and tackle their problem afresh.
I’m sure there’s something in that – the idea of stepping aside from a problem and doing something else for a while is not a new one. But this practice of a much looser, undirected, reflective commitment to the same work sounds interesting, and almost sounds like a naturalistic strategy we iron out of ourselves as adults. Except for web designers. Now… where are my markers?
Jul 31
Paying Attention
There’s a concept in the human factors engineering community called “attentional tunnelling” that happens when you invest too much trust in an information channel, and stop paying attention to the cues in your surroundings – ie your situational awareness breaks down. Here’s a beautiful example from Associated Press of what happens when the channel is normally reliable, but you don’t spot your own mistake in using it:
“ROME – OFFICIALS say a Swedish couple looking for the pristine waters of the popular island of Capri ended some 660 kilometers away in the northern industrial town of Carpi after misspelling the destination on their car’s GPS. Angelo Giovannini, a spokesman for the Carpi town hall, near Modena, said Tuesday the couple drove into the main square last week and asked the local tourist office how to reach Capri’s famed Blue Grotto sea cave. Giovannini said ‘we thought they might mean a restaurant. Capri is an island, they did not even wonder why they didn’t cross any bridge or take any boat.’ He said the couple, who were not identified, arrived from Venice and later set off to their planned destination at the other end of the Italian peninsula.—AP”
Thanks to the Straits Times iPhone application for this gem!
By the way, Carpi doesn’t look half bad. I think I would have stayed, on principle (“No darling, I MEANT for us to come here, it’s so much more homely than that chintzy little island!”
Jul 30
Commenting Back On
Apologies to those who have been trying to post comments, we have just migrated our system and there’s a bug in the new environment which affects the Captcha utility. We’ve switched off Captcha until it’s fixed, and gone to moderation instead.
Jul 30
Conference Season is Upon Us
It’s that time of year, and the next few months will see me on the conference and workshop trail in different guises.
Next week I’m in Sydney chairing KM Australia as well as leading an interactive session, moderating a debate between Dave Snowden and Shawn Callahan, and conducting a workshop on KM competencies.
August 13-14 sees me closer to home at KM Singapore, where I’m announcing the iKMS KM Excellence Awards for Singapore and otherwise causing trouble.
Sept 8-9, also in Singapore, I’m co-facilitating a masterclass on business narrative with Shawn Callahan (looking forward to that!) as part of the Singapore International Storytelling Festival. (Apparently that’s already sold out, but if you beg really hard, they might be able to squeeze you a place).
October 12-13 I’ll be speaking on “Faith, Magic and Culture in KM” at the actKM Conference in Canberra. I understand Dr David Vaine will also be speaking at that event.
November 17-20 I’m planning to speak at KM World in San Jose on expertise management, leading a workshop with Nancy Dixon on the same topic, and doing something at Taxonomy Bootcamp about competencies and skills for taxonomy work. I might just be in Washington DC the week before KM World for some client work, so if you would like to host one of our free expertise workshops as part of our open expertise project or just to meet up for a chat, let me know.
November 24-26 I’ll be at KM Asia in Singapore again, and it looks like I’ll be moderating a MAKE discussion panel at that.
I’m not sure yet if I’m going to make it to ICKM 2009 in Hong Kong 3-4 December, but would like to catch up with old friends there if I do.
Oh… and then there’s work in between…
Jul 29
The War Between Awareness and Memory
About a month ago Robert Scoble blogged about abandoning Twitter and Friendfeed. He said that he thought “real-time systems” like these and other micro-blogging tools were hurting long term knowledge. Turns out that he’s mostly worked up about the lack of archiving and quality of search.
On April 19th, 2009 I asked about Mountain Bikes once on Twitter. Hundreds of people answered on both Twitter and FriendFeed. On Twitter? Try to bundle up all the answers and post them here in my comments. You can’t. They are effectively gone forever. All that knowledge is inaccessible. Yes, the FriendFeed thread remains, but it only contains answers that were done on FriendFeed and in that thread. There were others, but those other answers are now gone and can’t be found.
This is not exactly the same idea as the theme in this post, because a lot of what bothers him can be solved technically. But there is evidence that faster, easier, access to current awareness broadens our absorption of the present and thins out our access to the past. Simply put, too much of now means less and less memory.
Jul 29
Memory and Infantilism
Jed Cawthorne has an excellent post following up on my July 20 post on NASA’s latest organisational memory failure. He links much better than I did the role of KM in preserving organisational memory, and he shows quite clearly how information management (and metadata management) processes connect to this critical KM role. I wish the purists would think contextually and concretely when they sniffily claim that IM and KM are different things. They might have distinct foci, but they cannot be treated as separate. It’s like trying to separate bones from flesh – you can do it, but the body won’t work any more.
Meanwhile UK police have been embarrassed by the loss of a critical case file. New evidence has emerged to implicate a suspect in a twelve-year-old rape case. Unfortunately the police have lost the original case file which contains the victim’s statement and details of supporting evidence. Without the file, the case cannot proceed. Memory loss in the form of tangible records can have big consequences.
But back to Jed Cawthorne. Towards the end of his post, he poses some pointed questions that have been turning over in my head:
“I often wonder why, if I could watch Neil step down from the Lunar Lander at Tranquility Base as a 3 year old perched on my fathers knee watching a tiny black and white tv, after they navigated themselves to the moon using a navigation computer that had a 1mhz CPU and 200K of memory, programmed using punch cards, over 40 years ago, why indeed are we not on Mars yet considering our current levels of technology ??
In an enterprise context, you might ask why do we keep repeating the same mistakes when we have powerful collaboration technology, the theories behind metadata, taxonomies and information management in general are well known and understood, various levels of legislation have produced reams of records management guidelines etc. Is it a vicious circle ? Because we don’t have good KM including organizational memory, we ‘forget’ on an institutional level how to do these things well and successfully ?”
GREAT … and uncomfortable … questions, very sharply put. Now I’m not sure that knowledge management as we know it today is equipped to provide the answer, though it is certainly a problem that KM tries to deal with. There’s something about organisational stupidity in the mix there somewhere as well (and I think there is a technical meaning to “stupidity” to be unravelled, I’m not just using it emotively).
Unfortunately, the practice of KM itself is a victim of the same forgetfulness – something I have come to think of as a perpetual infantilism. Some research we did a couple of years ago found that knowledge managers, KM teams and organisations themselves rarely get the chance to maintain enough continuity in KM to learn how to do it well. KM takes long periods to bed down and become sustainable (I’m beginning to think 8-10 years of sustained, focused effort gets you into the right sort of ballpark), and yet we found that teams and managers rarely stay the course that long. The feedback loops are just too long to enable us to learn before change comes along and disrupts the cycle. So the organisation lapses back into its original infantile and incompetent (in this domain) state.
Is this a memory problem or a learning problem or something in between?
Jul 20
Not My Job to Preserve History
The hoo hah about the 40th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing has surfaced yet another NASA organisational memory failure. It seems that NASA (economy being their thing in the 1970s and 1980s) reused the tapes storing the video footage of the moon landing. A years long search for the missing tapes resulted in the conclusion that they must have been recorded over. NASA had to beg copies from TV stations and the Australians (the signal with original footage was received first by an Australian station). Here’s the engineer in charge (who’s now responsible for refurbishing the recovered copies):
“Nafzger, who was in charge of the live TV recordings back in the Apollo years, said they were mostly thought of as data tapes. It wasn’t his job to preserve history, he said, just to make sure the footage worked. In retrospect, he said he wished NASA hadn’t reused the tapes.”
This is why records management policies and processes are important! I’m not going to tell you about the client who lost a contract, then got into a dispute with the other party, and wasn’t able to back up their position. Managers are woefully undereducated on the importance of organisational memory beyond the “decide now, let the next guy worry about the consequences” mindset.
Jul 13
Bonnie Cheuk Webinars on Enterprise 2.0 Technologies and Safety
In my recent post on Sharepoint implementations, I pointed to Bonnie Cheuk’s case as a successful exemplar. Now Bonnie is running a couple of free webinars to look at the use of enterprise 2.0 tools to help employees discuss safety issues in the workplace. Check them out!
Jul 06
Knowledge Retention Video
Here’s a nice, concise 2 part video presentation from James Alexander of the US Food Safety and Inspection service based in Washington DC, describing how they got started in a knowledge retention programme for their leaders and also subject matter experts. It’s hosted on Youtube, hence the two short clips of under ten minutes each, which makes it a bit choppy, but worthwhile nevertheless.
I liked the way they laid out progressively more complex options to their senior leadership, from a rapid response knowledge retention interview team who could deal with individual cases as they arose, all the way to a more structured individual and group knowledge capture programme, and looking after the knowledge transfer side of the equation as well. I also liked the way they recognised that knowledge transfer and continuity was also about relationship building and not just about codification.
If you haven’t seen it yet, you can also check out our video on putting together an expertise transfer programme, and if you have not yet taken our survey on how organisations manage their expertise, please do so! We have about 70 responses so far with an interesting picture building up, and you will get to see a summary of the results so far when you have completed, together with a link to our expertise project site.
Thanks to Thomas Blumer via the SIKM Leaders Forum for this find. The forum has been discussing knowledge retention in the wake of a well received presentation for the community by Bill Kaplan on managing the risk of knowledge loss this month.
Jul 02
Narrative Unbound
An interesting piece from the Financial Times a couple of weeks ago about “the author as performer” (thanks Liam). It starts with Malcolm Gladwell “performing” his book Outliers (a great read, wonderfully written, but with a tinge of the “so-what” after-taste), and digresses via the TED talks phenomenon to a discussion of how contemporary artist Mark Leckey has turned to performance lectures as a verbalised, storied form of performance art.
There’s good thinking material in here about the theatricality of storytelling (ie good storytelling goes beyond the telling technique, and can involve the context, situatedness, deliberate placement in space and time).
This is a tad different from the recent Wharton-profiled thoughts on the role of narrative in leadership from movie-maker Peter Guber. He has a couple of interesting thigs to say about narrative eg “Narrative bonds information to an emotional experience” but then he undoes it all with the appalling acronym of narrative-use in management as MAGIC: Motivating your Audience to a Goal Interactively with great Content.
Somebody hand me a gun. If I have to deal with thinking like that, give me a lecture anyday.
