Category: Knowledge work

Your workshop for doing knowledge work

Lately, it seems like I’m always running behind.

Had a column go up at ESJ two weeks ago and I’m just getting around to blogging it here now. It is on the notion of thinking about how you might go about setting up a knowledge workshop for your day-to-day knowledge work. I wanted to set up a contrast with the “one magic, integrated, tool” mindset that seems to dominate most current software marketing.

Check it out if you’ve got a few minutes. I’d be curious about two things. To what extent do you find the analogy helpful as something more encompassing than the typical tools perspective. Second, what’s in your workshop?

Corante launches Future Tense – on the future of work

I’ve signed up to contribute to a new blog at Corante that launched officially today. Hylton Jolliffe lays out the premise below. My involvement grew out of a lunch Hylton and I had last month in Cambridge (at Charlie’s Kitchen, a Harvard Square landmark). We’ll be exploring a topic that’s long been near and dear to my heart and it feels like it’s going to be a great group to work with. For all you fans of RSS, the blog’s feed is here.

Check it out.

New blog on the future of work. Today we launch a new blog – Future Tense – that will examine and explore how the modern work “place” is evolving and adapting to new trends, technologies, and economic factors. Future Tense, authored by a handful of closely read thinkers and practitioners in the broad, industry-spanning “space,” will discuss the trends and pressures that are forcing employers to rejigger the way they think about the workplace, manage projects and staffs, encourage collaboration and innovation, support a decentralized workforce, motivate and reward employees, build morale and foster teamwork, design physical spaces to accommodate a mobile and transient workforce, etc. Future Tense’s co-authors: Elizabeth Albrycht, a 15-year veteran of high technology public relations practice and a co-founder and co-producer of the New Communications Forum; Jim Ware, cofounder of the Work Design Collaborative and the Future of Work program; Regina Miller, formerly of Vodafone and founder of the consultancy The Seventh Suite;… [Corante Blog]

My dinner with Buzz – time to get back to practicing blogging

I caught up with Buzz last week face-to-face. We were both in Cambridge, MA and managed to find time for some pizza at Bertucci’s followed by ice cream at Herrells. If you live in Cambridge, you likely know of Herrells. Those of you who don’t, should make the pilgrimage if quality ice cream is important to you.

Buzz chided me on my less than prolific blogging recently. The usual excuses apply; travel, new client projects, family sporting events when I am in town, etc., etc. But he’s right. I haven’t been making as much time for this practice as I should. Some of the issue is managing and rethinking the split between public and private blogging. I originally began using these tools as a backup brain and as an amplifier on my ability to stay informed about topics that matter to me. I still spend substantial time tracking topics using RSS and my aggregator, but much of that doesn’t find its way into McGee’s Musings nor should it.

I also use my local blog as the place where I draft and work out various ideas for my client projects and other efforts. Again, that is material that is frequently not ready for wide dissemination.

While I find these tools immensely important to my long term productivity as a knowledge worker, I still find it a difficult concept to sell. I don’t think we really give tools the importance they deserve if we are knowledge workers. If you’re reading this, most likely you’ve made this conceptual leap already. But how often do we encounter conversations like the one Rex Hammock reported last week on a question by Ellis Booker, “ What were you trying to achieve with your blog in the first place?”

I agree with Rex. I didn’t start this with a well-developed business case or a clear plan. The out-of-pocket costs to play with these new technologies are close to zero. The time costs can be a different question, but the potential payoffs are what is absolutely critical. And none of it fits into a business case any better than trying to calculate the future value of a newborn baby. You’ve got to live it to create whatever value is going to be found.

Here’s my analogy. We’re about where Frederick Taylor was when he started trying to figure out how to make manual, repetitive work more productive. Figuring that out was science at its most fundamental; observe, experiment, learn, repeat. The sooner you start, the faster you learn. If you continue the process, the most that anyone following you can do is to catch up to where you are now. Waiting for the answer is a sucker’s bet. It’s the person doing the practicing that gets better, not the spectator in the stands. So, Buzz, you’re right.

Latest ESJ Column – Crafting Uniqueness in Knowledge Work

I have another column up at ESJ. I’ve been arguing that knowledge work is best thought of from a craft perspective for a long time. This time I took a look at knowledge work deliverables and came to a new insight (I’m just a bit slow sometimes). Knowledge work products achieve their value from their uniqueness not their uniformity.

This contributes to the failings most organizations have had with their efforts at knowledge management. Managing activities in an industrial economy is about achieving and enforcing uniformity. When it works, we get the PC revolution where my computer gets better and faster and more reliable every year. When it doesn’t, we get everyone in the call center reading from the same debugging script after I’ve been on hold 30 minutes while they ignore the problem diagnosis I’ve already done before I ever called.

Knowledge management efforts need to be rethought to bring this issue to the forefront. They need to put attention toward how to enable knowledge workers to be more proficient at creating unique results, not at creating an artificial uniformity that undermines the real point of knowledge management in the first place. The more sophisticated your knowledge workers, the more likely they are to ignore ill-conceived efforts toward uniformity. Also, the more likely they are to support efforts that address their real concerns.

A strategy for improving knowledge work – new column at ESJ

In my most recent column at Enterprise Systems Journal, I'm taking another look at what a strategy for improving knowledge work
might entail. Of course, as I look around the borderline chaos that
constitutes my half of my home office and the contents of the backpack
that constitutes my mobile office, it's questionable whether I am
qualified to have any useful advice. Based on long prior experience,
this is not something that will get figured out in a single column. But
we'll keep on trying.

The Art of Intelligence

If you consider the C.I.A. as an example of a knowledge based
organization, this op-ed piece from David Brooks is worth some thought.
Here's the money quote from my parochial perspective:

But the problem is not bureaucratic. It's epistemological. Individuals
are good at using intuition and imagination to understand other humans.
We know from recent advances in neuroscience, popularized in Malcolm
Gladwell's “Blink,” that the human mind can perform fantastically
complicated feats of subconscious pattern recognition. There is a
powerful backstage process we use to interpret the world and the people
around us.

When we think about knowledge work processes, we need to be very
careful to ensure that we do not destroy those processes by mapping
them onto bad assumptions about the nature of knowledge work.

The Art of Intelligence. Many of the C.I.A.'s failures stem from its reliance on bureaucracy and analysis rather than humanism. By By DAVID BROOKS. [NYT > Opinion]

Bonnie Nardi on the structure of invisible work

Lilia points to what looks to be an interesting piece on knowledge work
and visibility/invisibility. As she says, “more to read.”

And while I was searching for the right link for “It's just a matter of common sense”: Ethnography as invisible work by Diana Forsythe to add to my story I came across A web on the wind: The structure of invisible work by Bonnie Nardi and Yrjö Engeström, which is an editorial for the “invisible work” issue of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work.

Wonder how I could miss it – with all my interests in invisible work?

More to read 🙂

Productivity blog showdown

Without doubt, a false dichotomy, but this promises to be
entertaining at the very least. Any synthesis will be a helpful
contrast to the still all-too-prevalent notion that drudgery in and of
itself is good for the soul.

Like Frank, I start with a bias in favor of Fred's position as part of
my personal cursade to rid the world of busywork. It reminds me
of an incident during a college summer job over 30 years ago. I had
been hired as a “material accounting clerk” and my job was to spend
each day poring through three-inch thick stacks of greenbar computer
paper containing inventory control reports. I was looking for line
items with zero items in inventory but cost still on the books and
filling out forms to process write-offs. This was one of those seminal
moments that convinced me that I had no future in accounting.

For all that drudgery I could at least understand that this was a job
with some purpose. The incident that truly pissed me off was when my
supervisor handed me a handwritten sheet of numbers and asked me to
calculate the mean and standard deviation (with an adding machine and
slide rule). When I was done I brought the results to my supervisor and
asked what they were going to be used for. His response? He didn't need
the results for any purpose. He knew I was a statisics major and
figured I would enjoy doing the calculations just for fun! This was a
supervisor who believed in the virtue of work for its own sake and a
lesson to ask the right questions before doing what I was told.

Productivity Showdown, Day 1. Productivity Showdown, Day 1
— Is productivity rooted in intensity and effort or in laziness and
efficiency? Obviously a false dichotomy, but a potentially entertaining
one. To that end, Slacker Manager has organized a “blog showdown”
between proponents of each of the sides of the productivity coin.

“Welcome to Day 1 of a 3-day
'Productivity Blog Showdown.' If you're just joining us, here's the
quick background of what's going on. A few days ago, I noted that I'd
like to see a 'showdown' between two upcoming gurus of personal
productivity, Fred Gratzon and Steve Pavlina [who I've pointed to recently in my GTD mode – FP]. Both guys agreed to do the showdown, we collected some questions from readers, and here we are.”

I've got to get familiar with Grazton,
since throughout my career, I've always thought that the best
Industrial Engineer is a lazy Industrial Engineer, who ardently avoids
unnecessary work.

Efficiency is just politically correct laziness. (Laziness is the mother of efficiency?)

And productivity comes from applying efficiency to the things that need
to be done to achieve one's goals. And avoiding the things that don't
need to be done. There is no honor in putting in 12 hours a day if you
can get done what needs to be done in 10, or even 8.

I guess I know what side of the showdown I'm starting on. Let's see if Steve and Fred can turn the showdown into a synthesis. [Frank Patrick's Focused Performance Blog]

Interview: father of “life hacks” Danny O’Brien

More on life hacks. What makes all of this interesting to me, besides
the potential productivity value of the hacks, is O’Brien’s observation
that alpha geeks are early adopters of practices that mainstream
knowledge workers are likely to be practicing in 12 to 18 months.

Interview: father of “life hacks” Danny O’Brien.
Just about a year ago, technology writer Danny O’Brien strung together
the words “life” and “hacks” and fired off synapses throughout the geek
community. After an infamous talk entitled “Life hacks – Tech Secrets
of Overprolific Alpha Geeks” at the… [Lifehacker]