Goodies from Frank Patrick

Quotes for the Week. On Technology Management — From Quotes of the Day

“Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand.”
— Putt’s Law

But on the other hand, from the same source…

“Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything.”
— Sydney Smith (1771 – 1845)

Spoken like a true consultant – [Frank Patrick’s Focused Performance Blog]

More goodies from Frank Patrick. His Focused Performance Blog is a consistent source of insight and resources on the broad topic of project management.

A resource on story from Kevin Kelly

Story. Mastering the inner life of stories [Recomendo]

Another great recommendation from Kevin Kelly. Among his observations:

Halfway through this book, it altered me as an audience; I was watching and reading differently. By the end, I realized that this was actually a book about living. Constructing a story that works is similar to constructing a life that works. For people trying to write a story, for people listening to a story, for people trying to compose an interesting life, this is a profoundly important guide. I find it worth rereading every couple of years.

I've already ordered a copy.

James Roberston on the laws of nonsense

Three laws of nonsense. I just had yum-cha to celebrate a cousin’s birthday. The food was good, but much better were the discussions I had with my uncle, Noel Thompson. He has been working for many years in large organisations (such as BHP and… [Column Two]

A profound way to grasp much of what I see inside organizations. These are the laws that Robertson quotes:

  1. The source of nonsense is that for every piece of nonsense there exists an irrelevant frame of reference in which the item is sensible.
  2. The persistance of nonsense comes from rigorous arguments from inapplicable assumptions.
  3. The diffusion of nonsense results from the fact that people are more specialist than problems.

Robertson offers them as a way to better understand knowledge management. I see them as more broadly applicable to most of what I run into inside organizations.

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Shooting for wisdom, hoping for common sense

Occasionally, in the discussions around knowledge management, someone will throw out the notion of wisdom as the next thing up some tacit hierarchy. Liz Lawley here offers an excellent example of the very human nature of wisdom in the context of recent ruminations about the need for blogging rules;

rules? i don’t need no stinkin’ rules!. Everywhere you look these days, bloggers are writing policies and rulebooks. For themselves, for others, for everyone. With calls for accountability, integrity, consistency, appropriateness, and ethical behavior, it seems that every blogger I know is publishing their own set of guidelines for blogging. Feh. A pox on all their rules, that s what I say. How many of us have published rules to govern how we talk to our friends? I d be horrified if a friend had to consult his or her published personal policy statement before saying something to me (or correcting a misstatement, for that matter). In his wonderful… [mamamusings]

Well worth your time to go read all of what Liz has to say and follow through to some of the other debate on the topic that she points to. I plan ot emulate Liz’s fine leadership by example here. There will be no rules here. You get to judge whether I’m demonstrating any common sense.

Crude classifications and false generalizations

Those that belong to the emperor. UUIDs in Python. In defense of Fahrner Image Replacement. That famous quote from Jorge Luis Borges. New writing from Leslie, Michael, Michael, stavros, and JD. (589 words) [dive into mark]

A short catch-all post from Mark Pilgrim illustrates the wonderful serendipities of the blog world. In amongst his brief snippets is this quote from Borges:

These ambiguities, redundances, and deficiences recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. On those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.
— Essay: “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” [Borges Quotations]

The challenges of knowledge work and knowledge management have been on my mind the past few days. Watching how people react to this particular quote offers interesting insights into their tacit assumptions about the nature of knowledge management.

I see this as the essence of good knowledge management; understanding and acknowledging that classification schemes are all arbitrary and should be judged in terms of their usefulness not their truth. I suspect there are at least two other relevant reactions to consider. First are those who are upset by the apparent flippancy of this scheme and expend energy in trying to find the right scheme. These are dangerous and unpleasant people to deal with. Second are those who don’t get the joke. Not dangerous, but boring, or perhaps simply na ve. Try to keep both well away from any serious roles in knowledge management initiatives.

Some resources worth taking a look at in this context would include Sorting Things Out : Classification and Its Consequences, Wurman’s Information Anxiety : What to Do When Information Doesn’t Tell You What You Need to Know, and Rosenfeld’s Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (2nd Edition).

Shaw summed it up well with this observation:

“Crude classifications and false generalizations are the curse of organized life.”

My secret hope for blogs

The last few days in my aggregator have been discouraging. Today’s nonsense was this from Gizmodo:

Airlines on the look out for gadgets. In light of the recent discovery a whole panoply of gadgets in al Qaeda hideouts that had been converted into weapons or bombs (like camera flashes that turned into stun guns), the Department of Homeland Security is issuing a warning to airports to be pay extra close attention to passengers with computer equipment and consumer electronics. So maybe bringing two laptops, a digital camera, a Pocket PC, and a WiFi detector with us on our current trip to California wasn’t such a good idea after all. [Gizmodo]

Boing Boing is full of similar distressing items ranging from:

TSA adds “sarcasm” to list of aviation risks

A kid who put a note telling TSA snoops to stay out of his luggage was busted on trumped-up “bomb-threat” charges for penning the following and putting it in his bag:

”[Expletive] you. Stay the [expletive] out of my bag you [expletive] sucker. Have you found a [expletive] bomb yet? No, just clothes. Am I right? Yea, so [expletive] you.”

Boy, good thing the eagle-eyed, sticky-fingered underwear fetishists on search-detail were on their toes, otherwise, this kid might have been able to board an airplane with a deadly sarcastic note in his checked luggage.

to John Gilmore’s recent experiences as a “suspected terrorist.”

As I read these and other tidbits offered up through my aggregator and through news channels, I fear we are a civilization that has abandoned the capacity for rational thought.

Fortunately, my aggregator also brings me gems such as Seb’s recent post on the late Edsger Dijkstra’s efforts at what I’ve described before as thinking in public (plus parts 2, 3, and 4). The whole post is well worth the effort, but let me focus on the last section of it.

The end of the article offers a great quote from Dijkstra on the struggle to accurately observe and steer one’s own thinking:

“The need to get some sort of verbal grip on your own pondering will by sheer necessity present your ponderings as something in which, as time progresses, patterns will become distinguishable. Once you have established a language in which to do your own pondering, in which to plan and to supervise your reasoning, you have presented a tool that your students could use as well, for the planning and supervision of their reasoning.”

I completely agree with Chalmers who writes about that quote:

Geek that I am, I find this passage incredibly touching. It’s the combination of Dijkstra’s searing integrity and his humility and willingness to make a complete ass of himself, by actually standing up and pondering aloud in front of his students, for their sake, that gets me every time. I wonder if the success of the scientific method does not depend on exactly this combination of integrity and humility? Dijkstra doesn’t just advocate it. He models it.

Here, for me, is the secret promise of blogs. They lower the barriers and make the practice of writing widely accessible. Which increases the chances we will begin to start thinking again.

Writing is the fundamental tool of reasoned argument and what we need as individuals, organizations, and civilization is as much reasoned argument as we can get. In the blogosphere you get to watch good writers at work as they develop ideas. Thanks to aggregators those ideas appear in a form that makes them natural raw material to kindle your own thinking. The combination of blog technical features (public distribution, short posts, chronological ordering, permalinks) with social practices (personal identification, generous linking, blogrolls) highlight the development of ideas as a social phenomenon over time.

Here’s a Gedanken experiment. How would activities at the TSA change if they published a daily weblog with real stories of the best and worst of what they had encountered that day? Not likely to happen, but worth thinking about.