Mar 09
Cross Post: Repair
My last post on the Cognitive Edge guest spot:
All living things seem driven at the most basic levels to self-repair. Multi-cellular organisms have a particular obsession with it – in fact, a cell’s inability to maintain its DNA undamaged is one of the primary triggers for what’s called apoptosis, or “programmed cell death”, when the mitochondria in a cell unleash a biochemical collapse. Single-celled organisms don’t seem so fastidious, and we can understand why.
To maintain a complex, interdependent biological system, with specialised cells performing specific regulated functions, it is important that the stability and consistency of the system be maintained. This is called homeostasis. Unregulated mutations and variability in function disturb the balance and the function of the whole. In fact, we have a name for it – cancer.
Mar 03
Cross Post: Sanity
From my Cognitive Edge guest blog:
Does it make sense to think of social bodies such as organisations like they were real people? The analogies from the more corporeal aspects of our existence seem to reap productive insight, as several comments to my previous posts attest. But when we get into trying to make a leap from the mental life of people to that of organisations, it’s a harder jump to make.
Feb 27
Cross Post: Skin
Second post from my Cognitive Edge guest blog————
Skin carries – and reveals – the memory of the body’s interaction with the world, whether it is as an interface with the environment (the effects of being out in all kinds of weather, excessive suntanning, scars from injuries and burns) or as a manifestation of what the body has consumed over time (drug and alcohol abuse, diet, poisoning). We can look into a person’s face, and read aspects of their history, and this becomes easier and easier as they move into middle and advanced age.
Feb 27
Cross Post: The Body Corporate
I’m guest blogging over at Cognitive Edge right now… here’s my first post.————-
I have a few posts in mind which will attempt to use what we know of the human body as an analogy to help us make sense of the social body we call the organisation.
Analogies, like metaphors, example stories and even taxonomies, can be useful sensemaking devices insofar as they reflect broadly similar situations and sets of relationships, and help us transition back and forth between the known and the unknown. They help to the extent that they provide ready-made patterns or frameworks or mental models that can help us visualize or understand or extrapolate things about a novel situation that may not be immediately obvious to us.
Feb 11
What KM Conferences Can Be
I have to give kudos to Ark Group Australia for their just-finished “KM For the Experienced Practitioner” conference in Melbourne. It’s especially important that I give kudos because I’ve given them a bit of a hard time in the past on various listserves and here on Green Chameleon.
There were two reasons for giving them (among others) a hard time: (a) sponsorship-driven content sandwiches just dealing the fake hard sell between the real stories; and knowledge-sharing-unfriendly formats of talk talk talk from the podium, in closed rooms with no natural light and poor opportunities for interaction. I haven’t been alone in this critique, other experienced KMers have said very similar things.
Feb 08
How to Survive a Zombie Intranet
James Robertson posts an idea for cleaning up a collaboration platform which could work just as well for an intranet or any knowledge sharing platform. Dealing with the baggage and medieval layerings and backwaters of an accumulated, unmanaged environment is one of the biggest challenges in moving a culture to a more productive paradigm, let alone improving the practices and the accessibility of content collections. Everyone has their habituated routes through the maze, so nobody except KM and the intranet team have a sense of the craziness of the whole.
Many of the approaches I’ve seen tend to be Napoleonic in scale – raze the streets and slums and start afresh. But this has intrinsic risks. It assumes you have great architects, and it assumes you can actually plan for the needs of a community that nobody really understands – because its self expression in the current intranet is incomprehensible.
James’ idea has some affinity to positive deviance – figure out first what’s working and not working (ie identify the “undead” and the great exemplars), kill the one and propagate the other, and only after the slum clearances, start to look at what the shape of the now is, and how it should be brought forward. This is not the same as a housecleaning, it sounds far more radical.
Thanks Maish for alerting me to this.
Feb 08
Tease, Support, Launch
Via Maish, this very nice example of a human-centred Enterprise 2.0 intranet rollout. The smartness extends to the way that training was approached – not on how to use the intranet, but on how to build Enterprise 2.0 tools into effective working.
Feb 03
RIP Jerry Sternin
On a regular drop-in at the Positive Deviance Initiative website, I discovered that Jerry Sternin, one of the founders of this remarkable change technique, had passed away. This obituary also gives references shedding further light on a technique that looks set to blossom for our times.
Feb 03
Ambient Awareness Part II
In Ambient Awareness I wrote about how some organisations are using social networking tools like Facebook to extend internal social networks and to create greater awareness of collaborative opportunities. This HRM article highlights some of the steps that you might have to take if you wanted to try the same thing. These include: training staff on using the tool; educating them on why the organisation is adopting the tool; overhauling your corporate communications policy to un-inhibit sharing of information via the Internet and; getting the support of senior management (preferably the man or woman right at the top).
A few KM teams in Singapore are interested in leveraging social networking tools for the same purpose as Serena, IBM or Deloitte. Let’s hope that we get to read (or write) about their experience soon.
Jan 28
Google Google on the Wall… Who’s the Guru-est of them all?
An irritating email today invites me to pay $1300 for a day with ”#2 leadership guru in the world” Robin Sharma. If you don’t know who he is (I didn’t), think a younger Ben Kingsley’s face writ large on lots of books with colourful BIG titles like “Discover Your Destiny” “The Greatness Guide” “The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari” (say what?). He’s come a long way since the book “Mega Living!” (1995). So this is gurudom… huge convention halls filled with evangelical fervour at $1300 a pop, for a day of feel-good stories. I guess it works for some.
But I was irritated enough to check out that suspicious ”#2 in the Leadership Gurus Survey”... here are their “criteria”:
“Our research came from e-mails sent to 22,000 business people, consultants, academics and MBA’s around the world for nominations and our public opinion poll. We shortlist 60 names then did a Google search for ranking. The criteria for judging the TOP 30 focused on: Originality of ideas, practicality of ideas, presentation style, international outlook, impact of ideas, quality of publications and writings, dispersion of publications and writings, public opinion, guru factor.”
So it seems in principle that leadership guru-dom can be easily achieved through relentless self-promotion and a gift for entertaining large business audiences at $1300 a pop. My cynicism unabated, I scanned the list of the lucky winners.. out of the top 30, only two are women. So being male helps, which kind of confirms my fledgling theory of the “strutting” requirement for becoming a guru.
So far I’m learning more about guru-dom than leadership. None of this looks like leadership to me, this feels much more like ego-centric theatre. So I browse a little deeper into the “sub-gurus” who didn’t make the top 30. There among them is Sir John Harvey-Jones, former Chairman of ICI (and now deceased). Now here are leadership credentials: “A former chairman of ICI and one of Britain’s best-known industrialists. Under his leadership ICI was transformed into one of the world’s top companies, losses of £200 million a year being turned into a profit of more than £1,000 million in three years.”
Now isn’t that the ICI that doesn’t exist any more, having recently being mopped up by Akzo Nobel after twenty years circling the drain? Sir John certainly got results in the short term, but seems to have started a culture of obsessive corporate bulimia as ICI systematically divested its most important businesses throughout the 1990s. Is leadership really all about a futureless now?
