While there’s no obligation to explain your process to anyone, working it out for yourself does matter. There’s an observation from Aldo Leopold that’s pertinent:

The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, “What good is it?” If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.

In my previous post, I spoke about the broad spine of my process. There are aspects that feel important although I’ve yet to fully understand their fit and there are other elements whose purpose escapes me but I’m reluctant to set them aside. Learning, for example, appears in multiple non-obvious ways. I allocate substantial amounts of time to reading, of course; the world moves too quickly to rely simply on the accumulation of experience. I also try to have some topic I’m learning that is new to me; as a teacher, I want to always know what it feels like not to know something.

My writing practices have evolved over the years. I’ve gradually become more comfortable with letting writing evolve. When I wrote my first book, Ernst & Young provided us with an editor to work with us as we developed the manuscript. One day, John met me in my office. As I handed him the draft of my most recent chapter, I had to take a call from a client. As I spoke with my client, I was puzzled as John flipped past the first three pages and began reading the draft at the top of page four. When the call finished, I naturally asked John why. He gently explained that he had learned that I had a habit of clearing my throat for several pages and burying the lede; page four turned out to be a fairly predictable first place to look. I’ve gotten better at discovering my lede without outside assistance and putting it where I think it belongs intentionally.

Some find writing by hand a useful element of their process; my handwriting is both too slow and too illegible to help in that regard. What I have learned, however, is that it is valuable to capture snippets of ideas and phrasing as they occur to me. Technology makes that a more reliable process. What warrants further improvement is moving from snippet to finished product.

One practice that has helped at the outset of new projects is to write a “memo to self” that outlines a storyline of the effort as a whole. This is something other than a project plan. A project plan focuses on the sequence of tasks; the storyline is an attempt to find the intellectual thread that will connect facts, insights, and conclusions into a path forward.

I can’t necessarily explain why this works. But I treat it as a form of ritual. Whether you understand the ritual doesn’t matter; what’s important is that you commit to the practice. The open question is how to make these elements more visible to the people I am working with.

I thought of starting this piece with an observation that talking about my process risked spiraling out of control until I realized that feeling was, in fact, a part of my process. The most satisfying part of my work is bringing new things into existence. An essential step is generating enough raw material to ensure that something good and pleasing is likely to emerge

The process is about designing new capabilities. The domain is technology use to support organizational performance. The process and the domain combine to define a practice but it’s helpful to treat them separately.

My process has evolved over the years based on my exposure to other thinkers and on the lessons learned over multiple iterations of the cycle. In today’s vernacular, I would call it a process of design thinking. It starts with someone declaring that a problem exists. What follows is a classic problem-solving process;

• searching out the facts to tease out a picture of “ground truth,”
• immersion in the stew of ground truth and the broader context, adding new morsels and tidbits until there is a super-saturated solution,
• flashing on a crystallizing phrase or formulation that causes insight to precipitate out of the super-saturated solution
• elaborating the implications of the crystallizing formulation for what the next world needs to look like
• bringing the next world into being in thought and deed

The process works in multiple environments. It has to be coupled with domain expertise and local environmental insight to be practical

There are two elements of this process that have proven to be important for me, although I haven’t seen them talked about much. This could be a hint that there’s something to be developed further, or it may simply reflect my idiosyncratic perspective. The first has to do with the step I’ve described as “immersion.” I think of it as a deliberate practice of staying in the question rather than pushing on quickly to old answers we find comfortable.

The danger of staying in the question, of course, is that you never move on; something that others warn against as “analysis paralysis.” This leads to that second element. My signal to move on in the process is when I hit on a short phrase that encapsulates my take.

For example, I was working with the director of a university research lab who was wrestling with the problem of how to better manage a group of professors, post-docs, and research analysts that had grown rapidly. After an initial round of interviews, I was reviewing my raw interview notes to see what I might have learned. The phrase that popped into my head was that the Lab Director was asking how could we help “smart people do smarter work.” Nothing exotic and certainly nothing Pulitzer Prize worthy, yet it was a signal to me that I had found a thread I could now work with.

I marvel that the myth of the 5-year plan persists. Without the invention of the spreadsheet it might have already passed away. You would think that the “success” of 5-year plans in the former Soviet Union would have been a better clue. Regardless, managers continue to stress over their ability to predict the future and manage to those predictions.

There are only two ways to make plans that can survive a 5-year test. One is to operate in a stable/stagnant enough environment that the future can be seen in today’s reality. The second is to take so few risks that you convert your local environment into something that can pass for stable.

Smart organizations and smart managers approach planning differently. When we started Diamond in 1994 we talked about our 23 and 1/2 year plan. This “plan” was a simple picture that showed 3 1/2 years of high growth followed by a 20-year line of sustained, steady, growth. The point of that simple picture was to set a shared direction. The first task was to establish an organization and a culture. The second was to manage that organization for the long term.

There was no way and no point to make or believe predictions about what we would be doing in 5 years. But our aspirations gave us insights into the organizational capabilities we needed to build. Without the sense of direction, we would have no way to make choices about what to work on and what to ignore.

We were indeed trying to build a business but there were also insights to take over into building a body of work perspective. Chief among them was to focus on the skills and capabilities we needed to develop. Planning was about understanding the skills we had and the skills we hoped to develop next. If you have choices about what projects to take on, then one filter is what new paths does each project open up.

I just gobbled up Charles Stross’s The Labyrinth Index, which is the 9^th book in his Laundry Files series. The series is the hybrid that might result if you threw Ian Fleming’s, Robert Heinlein’s, and H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction into a blender. I love it; your mileage may vary.

The underlying premise of the series is that computation and applied mathematics is magic. Not magic in a metaphorical sense; real magic that can unleash demons and eat souls. The Laundry is secret British organization that tries to keep the average computer science student or random hacker from accidentally destroying the universe.

In my last post I talked about understanding the magic in technology. I remain puzzled by people who are content to not understand, who are content to accept something as mysterious and get on with it. As we continue to build and deploy technology we are putting magic in the hands of many who can inadvertently wreak havoc.

More often than not, they inflict harm only on themselves. But that is small comfort. Consider the example of the Morris Worm that crippled the early Internet because of a programming error that turned an unwise experiment into a catastrophe.

Clarke’s Third Law posits that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Gregory Benford, another science fiction author suggested the variation, “any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.”

Those who market technology are fond of promising magic. Too many individuals and organizations treat that claim as operational guidance rather than puffery. Stross offers a reminder that we do so at significant risk. The answer lies not in further insulating people from the technology they employ, but in working to reduce the magic factor. We have to get better at making the technology beneath the magic accessible and understandable.

The short version of the story I tell about why I decided to leave work to get a Ph.D. is that I needed to figure out why those stupid users weren’t taking advantage of the clever systems I was designing. That turns out to be a midpoint in a longer thread of trying to bridge two worlds that should be one.

The tagline for my blog is a quote from Dorothy Parker: “the cure for boredom is curiosity, there is no cure for curiosity.” In business, curiosity is acceptable only up to a point. You can be curious about the specific things you need to learn to tackle your next well-defined goal; free-floating curiosity is suspect.

Today, we are likely to label free-floating curiosity as attention deficit disorder and bring it under control. ADD is a problem of poor executive control, which implies that curiosity must be subordinate to focus.

I was fortunate to grow up in a time before we had ADD as an explanation for certain behaviors. I also had enough natural talent for school-like activities that my curiosity was nurtured and encouraged rather than constrained.

Sometime around the second grade I had my first collision between instinct and the conformity that most schools and teachers preferred. It was a Catholic school and I posed a problem for the nuns; I was clever but, as an eldest child, generally well-behaved. One morning, my teacher—a nun whose name is long lost to me—discovered that the workbook I was supposed to be maintaining for the last several weeks was empty. Who knows what I had been doing instead.

I was dispatched to the principal’s classroom with the empty workbook as evidence of my failure. The principal taught 8^th grade students so my arrival provoked their amusement and my humiliation as intended. Knuckles rapped with the principal’s yardstick, I returned to my classroom. I was sent home at the end of the day with the empty workbook so that my mother would also know of my dissolute ways.

I don’t recall Mom being terribly upset. What I do recall is that I did the exercises I had neglected and completed the rest of the workbook that night as well. I returned the finished workbook the next morning.

Here’s where I got lucky. My teacher then and those who followed encouraged me to discover what else I could accomplish rather than force me to conform. None of them imposed their agenda or expectations. Once I got the work at hand done, I was free to explore whatever caught my attention. Their gift was to help me discover that learning was about questions not answers and, then, how to ask questions safely rather than ask safe questions.

In an alternate timeline, I might have gone strictly down the math and science path. I was certainly curious about things that were logical—puzzles that had answers, things that made sense. But, not only was I a Catholic in those days, I was catholic in my interests. I was equally interested in things that didn’t make sense to me. It turns out, of course, that many things don’t make sense in the way that mathematics and science make sense.

In my early years, I wasn’t well equipped to distinguish between what didn’t make sense because of my ignorance, what didn’t make sense because of its inherent complexity, and what didn’t make sense because of my limitations rather than my knowledge. I didn’t even have those buckets to work with.

Among the things that made less sense to me were people, especially in groups and organizations. I understood classrooms, I didn’t understand recess.

My intuitions about the logical, systemic, and structured world developed and improved pretty robustly. My intuitions about the human world were weaker and slower to develop.

One choice would have been to stay within the bounds of the logical. But my innate curiosity kept pushing me to make sense of all of my environment.

There’s a long-running split between the human and the systemic. C.P. Snow called it “The Two Cultures” back in 1959. Working that gap has been the place that suits me, although I prefer to work it at a more detailed level than Snow. Recognizing a big problem doesn’t yield a big solution. It calls for building bridges one piece at a time.

 Becoming a founder of Diamond Technology Partners in 1994 was a textbook example of leveraging your network. In late 1993 I was ready for something new. I had published my first book and sent a copy to a former boss and mentor with a note that I would like to use his name as a reference as I started to look for that next new thing. Our phone rang early on a Saturday morning in October—this was when phones were still attached to walls. My wife answered and handed the phone to me.

It was Mel. He had read the book the night before after traveling all week. He quickly came to the point. We needed to meet as soon as we could synchronize our travel schedules. I could not use his name as a reference.

Within the week we were seated in a conference room at the Admiral’s Club at LaGuardia Airport. Mel shared one of the very first copies of the Diamond business plan. The plan included a projected organization chart with a box labeled “Chief Knowledge Officer/Chief Learning Officer.” The only job Mel was prepared to help me land was to figure out how to make that box work.

Three months later I began commuting from Boston to Chicago. By June my wife and two young boys were in a new house on the North Shore of Chicago trying to make new friends while I tried to figure out what that box might mean.

Putting knowledge management and learning on our to do list demonstrated no special insight; these were issues that all professional services organizations were tackling. Professional services firms live off their accumulating knowledge and their ability to disseminate that knowledge across the organization. Knowledge management and learning are core requirements.

Drawing different maps

What was less clear at the time, to me at any rate, was that the lessons from established firms could not simply be transplanted. The issues and problems they faced were problems of maturity; their solutions addressed their problems. We had to work out how our problems were different before we could begin to design appropriate solutions.

I think of this as drawing different maps because it reminds me that we were in different territory. That wasn’t immediately obvious. We had all come from established firms and had limited experience in start up environments. It was tempting and comforting to view our challenges as simply matters of resources and scale.

The limited resources of being a start up turned out to be an advantage. We had combined knowledge management and learning in one box on the organization chart because we didn’t have two people to warrant two boxes.

We did not have a “Diamond” way of working. We were actively creating one out of the McKinsey/Accenture/Booz/Bain/Ernst&Young/IBM/LEK ways we drew on from our collective experience. Our clients worked with us because they had problems that didn’t fit any of those established ways.

There’s the business you plan and there’s the business the market tells you that you are in – you had better learn to listen to the market. Rather than match problems to the solutions we understood from experience, we let the features of problems shape our approaches. Our learning and knowledge problems were tightly coupled.

Our knowledge management problem was not about how to codify and scale our work so that it could be reliably distributed. It was to push on the boundaries of what we knew to make room for more new ideas. Our fundamental knowledge management problem was how to extract and organize insights from the innovation that was taking place. Our problem wasn’t so much knowledge management as it was knowledge creation.

We had to learn how to draw the maps we needed as we went further into the wilderness. Our problem was more like being part of a research team collectively trying to figure out what we were seeing, what it meant, and what to do about it.

Expanding the learning problem

With the market pushing the entire organization to create new ways to work, the scope of our learning needs expanded. Who had to learn, what they had to learn, and how they had to learn it all changed.

In established firms, the primary learning problem is to equip younger staff with the skills and expertise of their elders. For us, everyone had to deal with learning as both learner and teacher. Junior staff came wanting and expecting to learn; not all senior staff shared that mindset.

We also had to reduce the lag between knowledge creation where we learned something for the first time to sharing that learning with everyone else who could take advantage of it. In more stable environments, knowledge creation could be followed by investments in codification and confirmation. In our environment, we were happy if there were a handful of relevant examples from prior work that could help us shape what to do next.

Circumstance forced us not only into learning by doing but often learning while doing. There’s a rich base of knowledge backing the case for the power of learning by doing. We had the good fortune to be able to tap the insights of two of the leading thinkers in this area—Roger Schank and Alan Kay.

You can incorporate doing into almost any learning situation. Learning while doing turned out to be a bit trickier. Thinking in terms of how to better support reflective practice is one element. Building After Action Reviews into our projects was another.

We also deliberately blurred the lines between learning and practice. In our presentation skills class for new hires, rather than craft exercises we polled the field for research tasks and assigned those to students. If, for example, we needed to gather intelligence on a prospective client that became an assignment for a team in the course. Further, we brought in experienced staff from the field to evaluate and judge the quality of the research and the quality of the presentations.

The success of these experiments encouraged us to knock down more of the barriers between the field and learning/knowledge management. We brought experts back from the field to serve as instructors. We asked those same experts to ground the courses in their current client experiences.

What makes all of this matter beyond the challenges of one start up is that more of today’s organizations face similar problems of external environments that change too quickly to be captured in the knowledge management and learning practices of more mature organizations. We have all become start ups and our practices need to adapt to remain relevant.

The experiment continues. The first post here came in 2001. This post is somewhere north of 1500. The number is inexact because portions of the earliest postings here aren’t easily tracked down.

The past year has seen a bit of a reboot here in terms of posting frequency., For those of you who’ve been following along, what would you like to see more of? What would you like to see less of?

 Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals. Peter Morville

Conversations about project management often invoke Dwight Eisenhower’s dictum that “plans are useless, planning is essential.” We’re agreed that it is the process that matters. Peter Morville’s Planning for Everything offers an extended and illuminating reflection on the nature of that process.

It’s an effective interweaving of vignettes and case examples illustrating how planning principles and practices play out. That actually makes it more actionable and adaptable than generalities or detailed processes and checklists. It certainly doesn’t hurt that Morville is an excellent writer.

The title captures a perspective on planning that squares with where my thinking has been evolving – that effective planning is more about design than about execution and that the design process revolves around the interaction between paths and goals.

The book is organized around six central chapters:

• Framing
• Imagining
• Narrowing
• Deciding
• Executing
• Reflecting

that lay out the essence of planning processes. These chapters are bracketed by chapters stepping back to adopt a wider perspective; some may find those a bit too removed from the pragmatic, don’t let that stop you from working through the core.

There are nuggets of insight throughout the book. I’ve recently been teaching courses on project management and requirements analysis; the combination is triggering thinking about the conflicts between agile approaches and management needs for predictability and control. Morville observes “since no amount of subsequent planning can solve a problem insufficiently understood, problem framing is the most important step in planning.” That reminds me that you can only plan as far ahead as you understand. The debate shouldn’t be about agile or waterfall or scrum; it needs to be about how to generate the best understanding of the problem at hand. Not a stunning insight but something that is too easily forgotten.

This is a book worth re-reading, or at least taking a pass through, whenever you face a significant planning task.

I’ve often quoted Tom Davenport’s observation that the default HR strategy for knowledge-intensive organizations is to “hire smart people and leave them alone.” While there’s wisdom in that perspective, I fear it is no longer a desirable strategy.

I once had the office next door to Tom’s when we both worked at the Center for Information Technology and Strategy in Boston. The Center was an experiment by Ernst & Young to build better connections between academic research and business practice. It was an embodiment of Tom’s observation, grounded in our experiences in organizations that had pursued other approaches.

What does it mean to “leave them alone?” People don’t become managers to leave things alone. Managers set direction, they marshall resources, they evaluate and interpret results. Why should smart people be exempt from these eminently sensible actions?

They’re not.

But managers of smart people often aren’t qualified to do these essential management tasks. Setting direction, marshaling resources, and evaluating results depend on understanding practice. This is where managers struggle. In a world of manual tasks and procedural paperwork, managers could be expected to have a good grasp of how the work was and should be done. Managers understood practice. Thus, they were qualified to manage it.

We no longer live in that world.

In a world of knowledge work, it is knowledge workers—the smart people—who best understand practice. In this world, Tom’s strategy is a safe and responsible one; if you don’t know how to do what you manage, you’re well advised to resist the urge to meddle.

“First, do no harm” is commendable but not the same advice as “do nothing.” Setting direction, marshaling resources, and evaluating results depend on understanding practice. But understanding practice tells us nothing about whether that practice is advancing the goals of the organization. Practice is anchored in where we are; we also need to know where we would like to go.

Blending these perspectives implies that managing smart people requires a collaborative effort. Smart people provide sense-making of where we have been. Managers provide insights on desirable places to go. Smart people and managers jointly develop the maps and plans that connect the two.

It is not yet clear to me how this collaboration should play out in practice.

Smart people must be able to articulate what they do for those who can’t be expected to know as much as the smart people do about their domains. This places a responsibility on smart people to be able to educate others—particularly managers—about the point and promise of their expertise. Smart people who can’t, or won’t, explain how their expertise matters do a disservice to their organizations.

When smart people were a rare phenomenon in organizations, smart people and pretenders could both get away with jargon and faux-complexity. The numbers were small enough that a few wise gatekeepers could contain the downside risk and the upside of actual smart ideas was worth the trouble.

There’s an old, likely apocryphal, story told of Tom Watson in the early days of IBM. Seems an engineer had made a 10 million dollar design mistake. When asked why the engineer hadn’t been fired, Watson’s response was “I spent too much money learning from that mistake to get rid of the one person who won’t make it again.”

The calculus changes when smart people represent a significant proportion of your work force. For one, tolerating a single 10 million dollar mistake is reasonable; managing a hundred simultaneous potential mistakes—and upsides—becomes an existential problem. There is too much chance to leave the process to chance.

The organization needs a view into the mix of potential smart ideas. Further, the organization needs to actively shape the mix to align with the goals of the organization. This becomes a conversation about “command intent” and how that interacts with “ground truth.”

Leaving smart people alone makes sense when the alternative is to give orders that are ignorant of context and possibility. Far better to combine the perspectives of smart people and forward-looking managers and increase the smarts applied.

 

Vendors and too many managers continue to promote and search for the One True Tool. This is a clear indicator that someone is trapped in an industrial mindset irrelevant to the actual world of knowledge work that we inhabit. If your work can be accomplished with one tool, then you are little different from or better off than the average wrench-turner on an assembly line. You are a replaceable component in a rigid system.

To build a body of work as a knowledge workers you need at least a well-equipped toolkit; ideally you will learn to operate within a proper knowledge workshop.

For simple projects, Swiss Army knives and Leatherman Tools are the answer. No one serious about their craft works with a single tool. Good craftspeople depend on a collection of tools that work together and co-exist in a workshop where they can be found and used as tasks require.

We are at a point in carrying out knowledge work where we would be well-advised to set aside the quest for the one true tool and turn toward the problem of creating and equipping a knowledge workshop suited to our needs.

What makes a workshop?

A workshop is

• a collection of tools, each suited to particular tasks and projects. Some tools are old, some new; some are general purpose, some specialized; some are used every day, others less frequently
• organized and arranged so the right tool is available whenever needed.
• containing an inventory of common parts and useful raw materials already assembled just in case.
• and a scrap bin full of fragments and discards sitting in the corner. These are handy to test new tools or to create quick jigs and fixtures that might be helpful in constructing a final product.

These typical features of physical workshops offer guidance about how to create a knowledge workshop suited to our needs.

For a few specialized forms of knowledge work, the nature of a knowledge workshop is already reasonably well understood. Software developers have rich choices for their development environments. Bond traders and other investment specialists can have very sophisticated custom work environments built and maintained in the quest for a few more basis points.

Those of us doing more general knowledge work need a strategy for getting from concept to the creation of our own knowledge workshop. That plan consists of three phases; setting the workshop up, learning to use it effectively, and dealing with the roadblocks that a craft-centered strategy will inevitably provoke in the typical organization.

Setting Up

The exact details of setting up a knowledge workshop will vary by the particular form of knowledge work you do. Are you extracting insight from numbers? Are you designing new organizations? Are you writing research reports? The specific form your knowledge work takes will guide you to the particular tools relevant to the deliverables you create.

There are some general guidelines that apply regardless of the specific area of knowledge work. First, you are building a workshop, not searching for the perfect tool. Pay attention to whether tools you are considering play nicely with one another. Second, be conscious of how the tool mix is developing. Is there a balance between big tools and little specialty tools? Do the specialty tools bridge the gaps between what the big tools handle? Do the specialty tools get used often enough to be worth keeping, or do they exact greater demands on your memory than they return in improved effectiveness?

While selecting, assembling, and (eventually) integrating a random collection of tools into something more useful, consider how you will assemble relevant supporting materials. If you are a wordsmith, do you want an online dictionary available? Do you want more than one? If you perform market analysis, are there general statistical tables or reports that you draw on repeatedly (e.g., the Statistical Abstract of the United States)? Are the tools and materials arranged and organized to make your work easier, or are they a long list of random entries or icons on your desktop?

Learning

Once your workshop is set up, you can begin what will become a never-ending task of learning to use it effectively. Set aside time to play with your tools and discover their limits and features. If you want to take advantage of pivot tables in Excel, waiting until they are essential to the product you must deliver by the end of the week is a mistake. Do you need to discover that pivot tables exist first?

This is all in the nature of “productive play,” of learning what is possible from the workshop you are designing.

Overcoming Resistance

“Productive play” may be essential to doing better knowledge work, but it is also a notion certain to trigger corporate antibodies in most organizations. You will encounter resistance, so you must have a plan for addressing it. Your most potent weapon: your ability to deliver better quality knowledge work.

Before you can do this, identify and enlist allies in your efforts and co-opt or counteract the most dangerous sources of resistance. The specifics will vary by organization, but expect to run afoul of your IT group and whoever ended up with oversight of Sarbanes-Oxley compliance for starters.

Step zero of any knowledge workshop strategy then becomes: “Take your CIO to lunch or befriend the folks staffing the help desk.” Their policy roles make them potential enemies, but their natural predispositions also make them potential allies.

Getting Started

The monoculture of office suites and corporate Web portals is rooted in outmoded assumptions about the nature of work as an industrial task.

Knowledge work is not factory work; factory strategies will not help knowledge workers. Tools are what you give to someone filling a well-defined role on the assembly line. A knowledge worker—you—needs to go further. Build your custom workshop now and see your work prosper.