Contracting, clarity, and requirements

I’ve certainly been guilty of this kind of approach at multiple points throughout my career. The best techniques I’ve encountered for dealing with these challenges are the “contracting” conversations that Peter Block advocates so strongly in his excellent Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used. Regardless of which side of the table you are on, you had better become more adept at Block’s contracting or you will be building or paying for
entirely too many custom-made drywall saws.

Clarity, Junior Engineers, Requirements, and Frustration.

There’s an amazing essay at The Spurious Pundit on “Picture Hanging.” It’s an allegory that explores how simple requirements in software aren’t that obvious to folks who may not have context. The writing is wonderful, do check it out, it’s worth your time. Subscribed.

A highlight:

You tell him to hang the photo of your pet dog, and he comes back a week later,asking if you could “just double-check” his design for a drywall saw. “Why are you designing a drywall saw?”
“Well, the wood saw in the office toolbox isn’t good for cutting drywall.”
“What, you think you’re the first person on earth to try and cut drywall? You can buy a saw for that at Home Depot.”
“Okay, cool, I’ll go get one.”
“Wait, why are you cutting drywall in the first place?”
“Well, I wasn’t sure what the best practices for hanging pictures were, so I went online and found a newsgroup for gallery designers. And they said that the right way to do it was to cut through the wall, and build the frame into it. That way, you put the picture in from the back, and you can make the glass much more secure since you don’t have to move it. It’s a much more elegant solution than that whole nail thing.”
“…”

This metaphor may be starting to sound particularly fuzzy, but trust me – there
are very real parallels to draw here. If you haven’t seen them yet in your professional
life, you will. [Spurious Pundit]

[ComputerZen.com – Scott Hanselman’s Weblog]

BlogWalk Chicago Reflections

I spent an excellent day Saturday with both old and new blogging friends at BlogWalk Chicago. Jack Vinson and AKMA have good overview posts and more can be found at BlogWalk TopicExchange and Technorati tag:BlogWalk. With some luck I will find some time to process much of the excellent conversation and output of the day.

One conversation thread that wound in and out of the day was the relation of blogs and social
software to large organizations. Tom Sherman struggled with this discussion and I thought it worth taking a few moments to try and articulate my perspective.One reality for most of us is that we can expect to spend a substantial portion of our time in and around large organizations. I believe they will be part of our work landscape for some time to come. The nature of the work expected of many of us is evolving rapidly. It’s more fluid and less well-defined. Job descriptions, when they are available, don’t provide a lot of guidance.

At the same time the mythology around organizations and work is that there should
be clear guidelines around what is expected of us. I know that I struggle with these uncertainties routinely. Most of the day to day work that leads up to knowledge products and deliverables is fundamentally invisible. The bits that make up email and draft documents and spreadsheet models are hidden and shared only among a handful of people until they are completed. More than anything else, what blogs and social software do is make it drop dead simple to make the conduct of knowledge work visible. To me this is of fundamental importance. Knowledge work depends on our ability to learn and improve as we go. That depends on being able to see what is going on and social software makes that feasible.

Organizations struggle with the notion that they need to learn. Too often, learning is something that someone else in the organization needs to do. Moreover, real learning (as opposed to what passes for learning in too many training environments) is a social activity. These tools will be
central to creating the environment in which necessary learning can take place. Today, that learning activity is almost exclusively the province of those who’ve retained their natural curiosity and inquisitiveness in spite of eduational and organizational systems that work overtime to suppress these natural instincts. The work that needs to be done will force the rest of us to adapt as well. Seems to me that working out this transition presents some interesting work to be done inside organizations.

Column at Enterprise Systems Journal.

This week marks the start of a new sideline for me. Jim Powell, editor of Enterprise Systems Journal, has asked me to write a column for them covering the same kinds of material I talk about here. The first column, Bridging the IT Cultural Divide,
ran earlier this week. In it I start to explore an idea I’ve been
trying to work out about oral vs. literate styles of thinking as they
relate to organizations.

Thanks to the indefatigable Buzz Bruggeman for brokering the introduction. And thanks to Jim Powell for his efforts at edting.

UC Berkeley on Information Overload

Certainly one indicator of information overload is that this item has been sitting in my “blog this” queue since October. Nonetheless, it remains an important set of insights about the data and information that is being created on a daily basis. It is an excellent update, by
the folks at the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California at Berkeley, of a study they first did in 1999.

In the early days of my career, we thought the problem was to capture and record the information managers needed to make effective business decisions. We’ve more than solved the capture and recording side of the problem; what we’re now working out is how to solve the problem created by that “solution.”

Information Overload.

Feeling a bit overwhelmed by information? This site will open your eyes.

Alan Kucheck (a Borland VP)
tipped me off to this research. Perhaps this explains why he doesn’t have is own
Weblog. 😉

If you created 800 MBytes of new information last year, congratulations: You’re as prolific as the average person on the planet.

That’s a big number, but it will likely grow faster than we can imagine. This is the
“information tsunami” that we refer to from time-to-time. Although MyST and MySmartChannels are far from the solution to this rapid per-capita growth of content, they do represent useful tools for chipping away at many of the information problems that are best addressed by lose-coupling applications.

See Also

[Into the MyST]

Snowden’s rules for knowledge exchange

I don’t know how I’ve missed Snowden’s rules for knowledge exchange. Now, I can find them here.. Thank you Judith.

knowledge conversion as a social process….

Today I was reading an article in EContentMag.com titled–Knowledge Management Involves neither Knowledge nor Management–by Martin White.

Among other things, Martin writes about Dave Snowden‘s three rules for knowledge exchange:

“Knowledge can only be volunteered; it can’t be conscripted.”
“People always know more than they can tell, and can tell more than they can write.”
“People only know what they need to know when they need to know it.”

[judith meskill’s knowledge notes…]

Tuning in to the whispers

Another little gem from Jack Vinson.

Apropos of this thought is the item next to it in my aggregator from Evelyn Rodriguez, A Loud Voice Cannot Compete With a Clear Voice. In addition to both of these being excellent food for thought, they also illustrate the notion that RSS plus newsreaders like Radio are your window into a distributed network of intelligent agents all applying their idiosyncratic eyes and minds toward filtering useful information in your direction.

Data, Information, Clarity?

While listening to WBEZ, the Chicago NPR affiliate, begin their non-pledge-drive-pledge-drive, I was surprised to hear a new version of the data-information-knowledge discussion. It went something like this:

It’s about clarity. You are overwhelmed with data from 24-hour news networks and the internet, but there is too much. At WBEZ, we analyze all this information to bring you clarity about the news of the world.

And they aren’t too far off. Clarity is one of those components of knowledge that makes knowledge so difficult to quantify. Other components include context, understanding, attention (thanks Tom Davenport), history… Interesting.

jackvinson (jackvinson@jackvinson.com) [Knowledge Jolt with Jack]

Long tail creators vs. organizational control

Scoble’s message in a bottle to Bill Gates keys in on an essential truth; that the underlying reality of the wealth of new tools around the web is about creating:

I told him to understand the content-creation trend that’s going on. It’s not just pod-casting. It’s not just blogging. It’s not just people using Garageband to create music. It’s not just people who soon will be using Photostory to create, well, stories with their pictures, voice, and music. It’s not just about ArtRage’ers who are painting beautiful artwork on their Tablet PCs. It’s not just the guys who are building weblog technology for Tablet PCs. Or for cell phones. Or for camera phones.

This is a major trend. Microsoft should get behind it. Bigtime. Humans want to create things. We want to send them to our friends and family. We want to be famous to 15 people. We want to share our lives with our video camcorders and our digital cameras. Get into Flickr, for instance. Ask yourself, why is Sharepoint taking off? (Tim O’Reilly told us that book sales of Sharepoint are growing faster than almost any other product). It’s the urge to create content. To tell our coworkers our ideas. To tell Bill Gates how to run his company! Isn’t this all wild?

Obviously, this all ties into the recent flurry of commentary about the “long tail.” We’ve been indoctrinated for so long into the mythos of mass markets, that we’ve forgotten that human creativity preceeds and predates those markets. After you’ve created a mass marketing/distribution system, the system demands that you find or create hits to feed it. Change the economics of the creation and distribution systems and you open up the entire distribution not just the obvious tail. This is nothing more than Coase’s arguments about how changing transaction costs will play out. Tim Jarrett makes this point and also connects the argument to Clay Shirky’s Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality article.

Both Robert and Tim begin to show how the problem of attention may not be as big a problem as has been argued. Sure, it’s a problem to the mass marketer/distributor who thinks they are entitled to a portion of my and everyone else’s attention. And initially, it’s a problem for me as I learn how to find and connect to that unique mix of sources scattered throughout the entire distribution that warrant my attention. When it settles down, however, my attention ends up better spent with that unique set of trusted advisors than it does filtered through the classic lens of mass market distribution.

One of my particular interests lies in what all of this means for doing knowledge work inside organizations. The mentality of mass market distribution manifests inside organizations as a concern for control. In a mass market world or organization there is room for only one message and, frequently, only one messenger. From this industrial perspective, attention management looms as a grave threat. If I insist on routing all decisions about attention through a central node, then, of course, that node suffers from attention overload. But it does so at the expense of wasting potential attention capacity distributed throughout the organization. The only hope of tapping the available attention capacity of the organization is to give up the attachment to conventional notions of control. Put another way, the biggest obstacle to success remains the emotional needs of senior leadership to stay in control.