Deep thinking on strategy and talent on the football fields of Texas Tech
[Cross posted at Future Tense]
You must read …The New York Times Magazine, December 4, “Coach Leach Goes Deep, Very Deep.” By Michael Lewis (author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, etc.).
You simply don’t beat NEBRASKA 70-10. And a lightly regarded QB doesn’t pass for 643 yards against Kansas State
Making new old friends by blogging
I just want to reinforce this point. It may be the single strongest reason why I continue to blog. Is there anyone out there who doesn’t need some more new old friends?
Picking up the Conversation Where We Left Off
Shel Israel has a post today about one of the most gratifying and unintended consequences of blogging: running into the friends you’ve never met before:
It is the strangest thing, and if you blog for a while, you’ll know what I’m talking about. You build these trusting friendships, with people you have never met face to face. Then you actually meet. In recent months, I’ve met face-to-face with Shel Holtz, Neville, Evelyn Rodriquez, Tom Raferty, Hugh MacLeod, Loic Le Meur and quite a few others. I considered each of these guys to be old friends before I ever laid eyes on them.
It is the strangest thing. I really like it.
When this happens to me, it feels like I’m re-connecting with an old friend, and we pick up our conversation where we left off.
Paul Saffo on rules for forecasting
[Cross posted at Future Tense]
“Never mistake a clear view for a short distance.”
Paul Saffo
Last month I had an opportunity to listen to Paul Saffo of the Institute for the Future speak at the CIO Magazine CIO|06 The Year Ahead conference in Phoenix. I was there as part of CIO’s Enterprise Value Award Process Review Board and as a facilitator for several of the breakout sessions. Paul was the MC for the 3-day event and his opening talk offered his rules for forecasting. They’re worth having handy if you find yourself in a position to have to make some bets on what might happen next.
Before sharing his rules, Saffo made the point that he thinks of himself as a forecaster not a futurist. In his categories, a futurist is an advocate for a particular future, while a forecaster is an observer trying to understand and bound the uncertainties generated by events and trying to frame the choices that might influence the outcomes. Saffo used the following image (actually his image was much nicer – this is from my notes, but you get the idea).
Rule 1. Know when not to make a forecast. Saffo made pointed reference here to Apple’s famous Knowledge Navigator concept video in contrast with Doug Engelbart’s Demo Video from 1967. I think what Saffo was driving at was the distinction between setting out a vision that will drive inventors and innovators on the one hand and recognizing that a salient event has occurred that opens up uncertainties that you ought to factor in to your planning.
Rule 2. Overnight successes come out of twenty years of failure. If you’re not paying attention, you’re going to be surprised a lot. This is where Saffo began to offer his take on the role of S-curve k inds of phenomena and how to account for them in your planning processes. Two points that I took away here. One is that there early stages of these curves is when you typically have the most leverage, if you can find a curve that will make it to the knee. Nothing terribly new there. The second, which I hadn’t thought about as much, was the difference in planning errors depending on where you were in the curve. I’m used to thinking only in terms of the tendency to overestimate how fast things will happen in the early stages of development. I’ve been less tuned in to the equally likely tendency to underestimate speed and demand changes past the tipping point. BTW, one of Saffo’s specific observations relative to this rule was that he’s paying more attention to Robotics as potentially the next big thing.
Rule 3. Look back twice as far as forward. Another quick bit of capsule advice about how to think smarter when you are dealing with exponential/logistics curve phenomena. This is a rule of thumb that captures the essential error in our tendency to think in linear terms about power laws. The change you’ve lived through in the last 10 years is a predictor of what you are likely to experience in the next 5. Douglas Adams captured this most memorably in his 1999 essay “How to stop worrying and love the internet.”
Alan Kay has talked about this in the context of why we’ve had more success at dealing with smallpox than with AIDS. If you are dealing with something that is operating on exponential terms, then the rate of growth matters as much or more than the slope at any instant in time. Given our tendency to project on a linear basis our tendency to over or under predict actually depends greatly on when/where you make that projection. With smallpox, the growth rate/infection rate is so fast that by the time you make any projection you are likely to be over predicting. With a slow growing epidemic such as AIDS, early stage linear projections will under predict. The corollary, of course, is that the surprise factor in slow-growing exponential phenomena is much higher.
Rule 4. Hunt for prodromes. Learned a new word. For you non-medical types, a prodrome or prodroma is an early symptom or leading indicator. This is William Gibson’s observation that the “future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.”
Rule 5. Be indifferent. Don’t confuse your desire for a particular outcome with its likelihood.
Rule 6. Tell a story or, better, draw a map. Trying to package your insights into a story (or scenario if you need to justify your consulting rates) helps reveal gaps, risks, and opportunities present in the events you are trying to understand. It can also help you get a better grasp on the potential wild cards. Saffo was more keen on the value of trying to find a way to capture your insights into something more graphical/visual. The value there is that those representations can help you highlight important relationships more easily and they raise the possibility of revealing ‘whitespace’ where you might find important opportunities to exploit or risks to minimize.
Rule 7. Prove yourself wrong. The essential wisdom of the scientific method. Understand and resist the natural human tendencies to believe. Be careful not to rely on a single element of strong information. Look for lots of pieces of weak information that collectively reinforce your insights. Your search for strong information should be for that one piece of evidence that proves you wrong. Look for the one thing that will make you look stupid if someone else brings it up after you’ve gone public.
It was a well spent morning listening to Paul, as was the opportunity to interact during the breaks.
Technorati Tags : paul+saffo, forecasting, s-curve, predictions2006
More new tools for knowledge work from MindJet
I’m beginning to suspect that the folks at MindJet have a secret plan for world domination. MindManager is rapidly evolving into a platform for doing the hard part of knowledge work and this is one more example.
I’ve lately found that I am spending more and more of my ‘think time’ working inside of MindManager. I’ve always been a fan of mindmaps in general and of good outlining software. As I continue to invest time in becoming more comfortable and adept at using MindManager the payoff in terms of quality thought feels as though it is going up even faster. I suspect that adding OPML to the mix will just accelerate that process. Nice piece of work.
Mindjet Labs unveils OPML Editor.The Mindjet Labs has just released a new Mindjet MindManager Pro 6 OPML Editor. The Editor enables users to open, edit, and save Outline Processor Markup Language (OPML) files in MindManager Pro 6. The editor also reads and writes the Simple Sharing Extensions to OPML introduced by Microsoft under a Creative Commons License.
Originally conceived by Dave Winer, founder of Userland Software, OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) is, according to WikiPedia, “an XML format for outlines. Originally developed
An old look at a new idea – the value of personal knowledge management
(cross-posted at Future Tense)
One of the blogs I’ve been reading on a provisional basis recently is “Inside Higher Ed.” It provides an interesting contrast to the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s Wired Campus blog. Both offer valuable perspective on the life of knowledge work and knowledge workers that goes well beyond their specific focus on the world of higher education.
In a column from November, Scott McLemee reflects on a 1959 essay by the sociologist C. Wright Mills “On Intellectual Craftsmanship.” You can get your hands on a copy by buying a copy of Mills’s The Sociological Imagination. At the core of Mills’s recommendations is the notion of maintaining a file or journal, which ought to sound quite familiar. His description is worth sharing at length:
In such a file as I am going to describe, there is joined personal experience and professional activities, studies underway and studies planned. In this file, you, as an intellectual craftsman, will try to get together what you are doing intellectually and what you are experiencing as a person. Here you will not be afraid to use your experience and relate it to directly to various work in progress. By serving as a check on repetitious work, your file also enables you to conserve your energy. It also encourages you to capture ‘fringe-thoughts’: various ideas which may be by-products of everyday life, snatches of conversation overheard on the street, or, for that matter, dreams. Once noted, these may lead to more systematic thinking, as well as lend intellectual relevance to more directed experiences.
You will have often noticed how carefully accomplished thinkers treat their own minds, how closely they observe their development and organize their experience. The reason they treasure their smallest experience is that, in the course of a lifetime, modern man has so very little personal experience and yet experience is so important as a source of original intellectual work. To be able to trust yet be skeptical of your own experience, I have come to believe, is one mark of the mature workman. This ambiguous confidence is indispensable to originality in any intellectual pursuit, and the file is one way by which you can develop and justify such confidence.
The primary value of today’s tools and technologies for blogging, wikis, and the like is that they eliminate technical and usability barriers to maintaining and investing in the kind of long-lived knowledge asset that Mills is describing. Secondarily, these tools make it easier and more productive to engage in the kind of active reflection and learning Mills talks about.
What the tools don’t do is provide the discipline and support structures to help you keep at the long-term investment in becoming a better knowledge worker. Or provide a nice, neat ROI argument that you can bring to your CIO or CEO.
Corante Web Hub launches
I've got a spiffy new logo over in the right sidebar (and yes, I know
that I need a major visual makeover – real soon now). I'm very
impressed with what Corante is trying to accomplish and extremely
flattered to have been asked to participate. At the very least, it will
serve as another gentle reminder for me to make more time for writing
about this tremendous transformation of work and technology we're all
living through.
Welcome to the Corante Web Hub
Welcome to the Corante Web Hub. From the world's first blog media
company comes a new effort to gather some of today's leading voices to
articulate the exciting unfoldings of the Web.To get started, I'd encourage you to view the complete list of the contributors.
After you have familiarized yourself with these folks, you can check
out some of their latest posts under the “More from The Corante
Network” section. These posts come straight from the contributors'
blogs, meaning that you receive unedited straight talk, perspectives,
and insights.If you like what you see, consider subscribing to the Corante Web Hub Network Feed,
which is an aggregated feed for all contributors. For non-RSS users,
you can subscribe via email under the “Subscribe via email” section in
the right-hand sidebar.As your editor, my work will always appear in the top section of the
page. I'll attempt to synthesize what's occurring both inside and
outside of the hub, highlighting the day's talking points and tying
together pervasive themes and important ideas.Of course, we are just getting started and are very interested in your feedback. As we move forward, be sure to drop us a line
and let us know what you like or where we could improve.
Here's to a bright future!
Ken Yarmosh
Corante Web Hub Editor
Can't we please try to solve real technology problems for real users?
Why does Scoble choose to deliberately misunderstand Tim Bray’s thought experiment about Microsoft using ODF as the underlying core document format for Office? Robert isn’t dumb, so I have to assume his response is a deliberate misreading of what Bray is suggesting. It’s reflective of all too many technical arguments.
As a user of technology, my devout wish is for technologists to make a real effort to make my life simpler. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I have enough gray hair that I no longer have any expectation that the real world resembles the one I wish existed. Microsoft’s approach to making my life simpler, of course, is to persuade the entire world to use the same version of Office. In the world I live in (where 90% of my documents are simple paragraphs of text with a bit of bold and italics thrown in, as Bray suggests), I can’t even count on compatibility between different versions of Microsoft’s own differing versions of Office.
My solution over the last several years is twofold. First, when I do work on documents that are developed, reviewed, and edited by a group that frequently crosses several organizational boundaries, I end up working with lowest common denominator features and functions of Word, Excel, or Powerpoint. If I’m lucky I get to use maybe 5-10% of the features available. Don’t even get me started on Word’s notion of version control, Track Changes. If this part of my strategy is as common as I suspect it is, I might be trying to muddy the waters too. If Office did put ODF at the core of its file formats, I doubt that I would ever bother to use any feature that depended on a Microsoft specific extension.
The second element of my personal strategy has been to treat Office products and file formats as my final output formats only. I do somewhere between 75-90% of my knowledge work today using tools that help me create and manage ideas and substance first and foremost. I wait until the last possible moment to transfer this work into Office formats and tools and, when possible, bypass Office entirely. Frankly, I don’t really expect Microsoft to be terribly interested in helping solve my knowledge work problems. Making it easier to share my work among colleagues and clients would be a good step in the right direction. But, I expect that looks like a threat to the installed base that Microsoft will go to great lengths to avoid.
Tim Bray wants Microsoft to make Office support ODF.
Tim Bray just told me (and my fellow Microsofties) to do more work. He wants us to convert Office to support the open document format from OASIS.
Tim, I think you are GREATLY overstating the point when you say
Case-based learning and mindmaps
Some interesting thoughts on how mindmaps can work in the context of case-based learning.
I'll admit to long-term biases in favor of case-based learning properly
done. I come by these biases having worked all sides of the experience;
case method student, case writer, and case-based discussion leader.
Doing it well can be exceptionally powerful. Doing it poorly is also
much more immediately evident than doing other forms of teaching poorly.
One of the keys to success in case learning is active engagement with
the material and active engagement in the discussion process.
Developing a path of inquiry and analysis that leads to an action plan
is the goal, not finding the hidden “right answer.” This can be
immensely frustrating to students indoctrinated to believe in right
answers, but ultimately is hugely useful in a real world that
rarely contains right answers.
I certainly would have loved to have something like MindManager back in
my b-school days. I did use them from time to time as study tools, but
the process of generating them by hand didn't lend itself well to the
time constraints of three cases a night. More recently I did make
extensive use of MindManager and mindmaps as a tool to organize case
discussion and review when I was teaching knowledge management at
Kellogg. As a case discusssion leader I found mindmaps more useful than
powerpoint. This was because a dynamic mindmap let me more easily adapt
to the flow of the actual discussion. If I can find any in my archives
that look interesting I will post them here later.
Case Study-Learning with MindManager.
MindManager maps can make the life of business school students much easier.
When
Harvard Business School first opened its doors in 1908, the “case
method” was just an idea of the School’s first Dean, Edwin F. Gay.
Today, the “case method” is the heart and soul of how business is
taught at HBS and has been widely adopted by many other leading
business schools in the world.“It’s action learning,”
says HBS senior lecturer Michael J. Roberts, executive director of case
development. “As professors, we have to distill the realities of
complex business issues and bring that into the classroom. Students, in
turn, want to extrapolate from that narrow experience to the world at
large. So, we have to pick good examples and maintain the relevance of
them.” Roberts believes that the case method continues to be the most
effective teaching technique because of its applicability to real
management situations. “Those who practice business are in the real
world making decisions that have real consequences,” he says. “The case
method is intellectually engaging for students because they acquire the
knowledge, skills, and tools to deal with the kind of problems they’ll
encounter in their careers. Because they go through this inductive
reasoning process to arrive at answers, the learning process is more
powerful.”Mindjet MindManager
amplifies the benefits of this “action-learning” model and follows the
exact same logic that case studies do: capture, organize, and then
share information. With MindManager, learning groups can distill
complex issues into manageable “business topics,” chunks of information
that can be easily re-arranged and interconnected in the way they make
most sense to the students.….[snip]….
Have you ever used MindManager for case studies? Send us your maps and we will exhibit them in our map library.
Tim Leberecht, Senior Corporate Communications Manager
Helpful Phrase Dictionary for Readers of Dissertations and Scholarly Articles
I'm not sure which is more disturbing. The thought that I successfully
navigated my dissertation because my committee didn't know about this.
Or that they knew full well and let me graduate anyway.
Regardless, for any of you who need to decipher academic writing, this will prove helpful.
Translations of phrases often seen in dissertations and scholarly articles
- “It has long been known” … I didn't look up the original reference.
- “A definite trend is evident” … These data are practically meaningless.
- “While it has not been possible to provide definite answers to the
questions” … An unsuccessful experiment but I still hope to get it
published.- “Three of the samples were chosen for detailed study” … The other results didn't make any sense.
- “Typical results are shown” … This is the prettiest graph.
- “These results will be in a subsequent report” … I might get around to this sometime, if pushed/funded.
- “In my experience” … Once.
- “In case after case” … Twice.
- “In a series of cases” … Thrice.
- “It is believed that” … I think.
- “It is generally believed that” … A couple of others think so, too.
- “Correct within an order of magnitude” … Wrong.
- “According to statistical analysis” … Rumor has it.
- “A statistically-oriented projection of the significance of these findings” … A wild guess.
- “A careful analysis of obtainable data” … Three pages of notes were obliterated when I knocked over a glass iced tea.
- “It is clear that much additional work will be required before a
complete understanding of this phenomenon occurs” … I don't
understand it.- “After additional study by my colleagues” … They don't understand it either.
- “Thanks are due to Joe Blotz for assistance with the experiment and
to Cindy Adams for valuable discussions” … Mr. Blotz did the work and
Ms. Adams explained to me what it meant.- “A highly significant area for exploratory study” … A totally useless topic selected by my committee.
- “It is hoped that this study will stimulate further investigation in this field” … I quit.
By terrywfrazier@gmail.com. [b.cognosco]