Year: 2004

The Problems With Training (and What to Do About It).

This is a nice collection of tips and strategies for designing large scale training events.

The Problems With Training (and What to Do About It). As the author asserts, “Mirroring the 7th grade classroom and the freshman college 101 lecture hall will serve only to copy their mediocrity.” Too true. But what to do about it? This essay contains a number of good suggestions, ranging from the ever popular 99-second talks to the importance of food, round tables, and varied activities. When I plan a conference (and I will plan a conference some time over the next couple of years) it is my intention to employ a number of these tactics to draw on some of the lessons on learning that we all know but never seem to apply for ourselves. Like, for example, having the conference participants themselves design the conference online before the actual event. Whoever heard of such a thing? Via elearningpost. By Scott Berkun with Vanessa Longacre, UIWeb, February, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily]

New York Times on Knowledge Management

Lots of people have been pointing to this or sending me links to go look. What I found most intriguing is its implicit decision to approach knowledge management from the perspective of personal knowledge management. It simply takes as a given that the primary object of knowledge management is to assist knowledge workers in organizing and applying their own personal stores of knowledge. I happen to think this is a good thing as does Dave Pollard. Here’s a recent post Dave did on Personal Content Management: An Exploration, for example that speaks to this idea nicely. My post on knowledge work improvement – black box, white box, and deliverables is an entry point to some of my thinking on this point of view.

Knowledge Management.

James Fallows writes in the New York Times:

A current race for a solution goes by the deceptively blah name of “knowledge management,” or K.M. It is an effort to bring Google-like clarity to the swamp of data on each person’s machine or network, and it is based on the underappreciated tension between a computer’s capacity and a person’s. Modern computers “scale” well, as the technologists say – that is, the amount of information they can receive, display and store goes up almost without limit. Human beings don’t scale. They have finite amounts of time, attention and, even when they’re younger than the doddering baby boomers, short-term memory. The more e-mail, Web links and attached files lodged in their computer systems, the harder it can be for people to find what they really want.

If anything, the challenge of helping people find their own information is harder than what Google has done. Search engines let you explore sites you haven’t seen before. Knowledge management systems should let you easily retrieve that Web page, that phone number, that interesting memo you saw last month and meant to do something with.

The current creative struggle is important because, when it yields a victor, it will leave everyone less frustrated about using a computer. What makes the struggle intriguing is that it involves two great axes of competition. On the business level, it is another installment of that ancient tale, Microsoft vs. the World. On the conceptual level, it raises basic questions about what knowledge is.

The underlying intellectual question about knowledge management is whether people actually think of knowledge as a big heap of laundry just out of the dryer, or as neatly folded pajamas, shirts and so on, all placed in the proper drawers. The “big heap” theory lies behind some of the programs: we don’t care where or how things are stored; we just want to find certain pairs of socks – or P.D.F. files – exactly when we need them. The “folded PJ’s” theory guides a variety of programs that let you mark information as it shows up – for instance, tagging an article you know you want to refer to later, when shopping for a new car. Brains work both ways, and the ideal K.M. software will, too.

Google’s success suggests that there is a huge potential for solving a problem that people didn’t realize they had until the right solution appeared.

[E M E R G I C . o r g]

Small Pieces Loosely Joined for kids

Going to need this.

Small Pieces Loosely Joined for kids.

David Weinberger is one of the most cogent and original thinkers about the meaning of the Net and the impact it has, and can have, on our lives and our society. As one of the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto, he helped define the impact of the web on how we conduct our business – personal and professional.

In his follow up solo offering, Small Pieces Loosely Joined, he attempts to present a unified theory of the web. It’s a terrific read and a book I have recommended to many friends and co-workers.

Today, while reading through my blog list, John Porcaro pointed out that there is a kid’s edition of Small Pieces. Weinberger originally created this version for his son (11) and it’s a wonderful explanation of the dynamics, the wonder, and the potential dangers of the web.

If there’s a child in your life in the 11-13 year old range (like my son Jason who’s 12), please show them this wonderful work. It can be read online or downloaded in MS Word format for printing. It will change the way they look at the Net and help them to appreciate the potential it has to change our world.

[Marc’s Outlook on Productivity]

Adding to my reading list

This is the sort of unanticipated problem with reading blogs creates. I have too much interesting reading in the queue as it is. Brad may have gotten some free time, but he’s going to cost me some of mine.

Notes: More Free Time Tomorrow.

Raj Arunachalam has cancelled his appointment with me tomorrow: he’s flying to George Mason to interview James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock.

I have owned seven copies of Buchanan and Tullock’s (1962) The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy in my life. I keep loaning my copy out to graduate students: “You haven’t read this? You must read this!” They keep liking it so much they don’t return it. So I go and buy another one.

[Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal (2004)]

After Action Review Toolkit

This is a nice process for running AARs together with a case study of AARs in action. AARs are a simple and powerful technique for discovering and communicating lessons learned. They work especially well in project-based environments. If they aren’t already in your bag of tricks, they should be

After Action Review Toolkit. Allison Hewlitt has posted a draft After Action Review Toolkit, which provides a practical step-by-step process for running these reviews. To quote: The AAR is a simple process used by a team to capture the lessons learned from past successes… [Column Two]

Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon – 50 Book Challenge

Altered Carbon
Morgan, Richard

This was getting lots of buzz in different places that I trust. I picked it up and browsed it in the book store and put it back several times before I finally decided I was going to read it. Glad I did.

What makes good science fiction work, and the reason I continue to make it such a major component of my fiction reading, is to make plausible hypotheses about a technology innovation and then be relentless in pursuing that “what if” wherever your understanding of behavior and society leads. Morgan does exactly that. If technology could give you a real-time backup brain that essentially lets you cheat death (but not pain), where does that take you? To some frequently nasty but compelling places.

John Brunner's Shockware Rider – 50 Book Challenge

Shockwave Rider
Brunner, John

Long before William Gibson launched the genre of “cyber-punk”, Brunner was writing about the impact of information technology and accelerating change on society. This is Brunner’s effort to understand what Toffler’s Future Shock might feel like in human terms. To me, it’s one of the more effective examples of why someone once described science-fiction writers as the “advance planning department for the human race.” And it’s a hell of a good story, besides.

I re-read this story every couple of years and still find it compelling. I marvel at Brunner’s ability to extrapolate how the collision of technology and human nature is likely to play out. This time I picked it up again because of a recommendation from Evil Genius Chronicles to check out some music written as a backdrop to the story, which was also worth the download.

Complexity and design

If you think that technological systems are complex, imagine what that implies for the combination of technological and social systems. The socio-technical systems arena has been a rich vein that’s been mined in the organizational design and development world for decades. In general, though, that literature has been ignorant of the world of systems design (and vice versa, of course). These are some of my favorite quotes on the topic and it’s so nice to see that someone else has done the work of assembling them for me :).

On Complexity.

There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
— C.A.R. Hoare

These new problems, and the future of the world depends on many of them, requires science to make a third great advance, an advance that must be even greater than the nineteenth-century conquest of problems of simplicity or the twentieth-century victory over problems of disorganized complexity. Science must, over the next 50 years, learn to deal with these problems of organized complexity. […] Impressive as the progress has been, science has by no means worked itself out of a job. It is soberly true that science has, to date, succeeded in solving a bewildering number of relatively easy problems, whereas the hard problems, and the ones which perhaps promise most for man’s future, lie ahead. We must, therefore, stop thinking of science in terms of its spectacular successes in solving problems of simplicity.
— Warren Weaver

In our time, the technology of machines has drawn its inspiration from mechanics, dealing with complexity by reducing the number of relevant parts. The technology of government, on the other hand, has draw upon statistical mechanics, creating simplicity by dealing only with people in the structureless mass, as interchangeable units and taking averages. […] For systems between the small and large number extremes, there is an essential failure of the two classical methods. On the one hand, the Square Law of Computation says that we cannot solve medium number systems by analysis, while on the other hand, the Square Root of N Law warns us not to expect too much from averages. By combining these two laws, then, we get a third – the Law of Medium Numbers:

For medium number systems, we can expect that large fluctuations, irregularities, and discrepancy with any theory will occur more or less regularly.

— Gerald M. Weinberg

[Incipient(thoughts)]