Absolutely brilliant. i love the folks at xkcd. Frame the problem the right way to make real progress.
Constructive
Mon, 25 Oct 2010 04:00:00 GMT
Absolutely brilliant. i love the folks at xkcd. Frame the problem the right way to make real progress.
Constructive
Mon, 25 Oct 2010 04:00:00 GMT
Today is the ninth anniversary of my first post here. It remains the primary place where I work out my thinking about the challenges of knowledge work in today’s world and how to operate at the boundaries between technology opportunities and organizational reality.
It’s also a place that continues to introduce and connect me to other people wrestling with the same kinds of questions. The human connections that flow from this effort remain the real reward.
I would like to ask a few questions from those of you who find this valuable in some way:
I’m back from last week’s Traction User’s Group meeting, TUG2010, where Greg Lloyd graciously asked me to do the opening keynote. I’ve posted the slides on Slideshare and wanted to add some further commentary here.
First, one caution; when I do use slides I don’t design them to be standalone documents. There are too many bullet points in the world as it is. What I’d like to do here is highlight and elaborate on some of the key points I was trying to make.
Peter Drucker first called our attention to the importance of knowledge workers decades ago. The rest of us are slowly catching up to his ideas. One shift in focus that I’ve begun to emphasize is toward the knowledge work itself and away from the notion of knowledge worker as somehow distinct from other kinds of workers. Trying to distinguish who may or may not be a knowledge worker as opposed to some other kind of worker simply perpetuates pecking order games that do little to further the mission of an enterprise. We all do knowledge work to some degree or another, we are all doing more knowledge work than before, and the important question is how to do that work more effectively.
The notions of visibility and observability have been central to my thinking for some time now. The evidence is clear that dealing with complex problems and thinking requires a certain amount of corresponding complexity and mess in our working environments. To those whose focus is on stability and operational control, mess, of course, is disturbing. So disturbing that we ridicule those who deviate from the presumed ideal. We do so at a greater organizational cost than we realize, however, when we ignore the complexity in the environment that is driving the mess.
I introduced the following simple map to suggest just how unavoidably messy the real world of knowledge work can be. The x-axis maps the inherent structure of the knowledge “stuff” we encounter; the y-axis maps the degree to which knowledge stuff is individual or social. It didn’t take long to identify a multitude of items and objects that you might routinely encounter as you go about your work.
It’s tempting to simplify this reality in some way. Many years ago P&G was famed for teaching its managers to distill their arguments into one-page memos. Too many consultants and speakers opt to squeeze all of their output into slideuments; which merely transfers the problem somewhere else. Senior executives rely on staffs to filter the stream at the risk of filtering out the essential insight or data point that truly informs.
The strategy I prefer is to accept the fundamental messiness and seek ways to tame it enough to make it manageable. Part of that relies on exploiting the natural pattern-seeking, pattern-matching capabilities of the human mind. Part relies on enlisting the pattern management capabilities of the other human minds in the system to supplement your own capacity. Both of which also need to be tempered by appreciation for the limits of those same capabilities.
Taming the mess breaks into three layers of practices:
There is a payoff to all of this for both individuals doing knowledge work and the organizations they contribute to. Once again Peter Drucker said it first; “the most valuable asset of a 21st century institution will be its knowledge workers and their productivity.” Economic growth in this century depends on our ability to improve knowledge work productivity; until you can see it, you can’t improve it.