Knowledge work Archives - Page 30 of 35

A polymath in an age of specialists

A fascinating post and a fascinating new blog for me to read. Personally, I subscribe to Heinlein’s observation that “specialization is for insects.” We live in a world that demands flexibility and adaptability. Specializing has become a much riskier strategy than it once was.

A polymath in an age of specialists. Earlier this month, Suw Charman wrote a great essay on her struggles as a polymath. Don’t miss the comments and trackbacks, especially this connect-the-dots entry on the unpredictable emergence of learning by Julian Elv .
[Seb’s Open Research]

Personal knowledge management in KM Magazine

I’m convinced that Lilia never sleeps. She had this posted within minutes of the material being available and there’s no way I can possible keep up with the wealth of great material she’s been posting lately.

Anyway, this was a fun exercise and the result contains some useful nuggest and insights. Now that it’s out, I’ll try to dig up some of my original responses to Sandra’s interview questions and post them. I realize that making this promise now sets a clock running that will demonstrate the continuing deficiencies in my own personal knowledge management processes and strategies.

Personal knowledge management in KM Magazine.

Just to let you know – April issue of KM Magazine features personal knowledge management. While most articles are subscribers only, this one you can check for free – Your say: Personal knowledge management by Sandra Higgison with contributions of Mick Cope, Tom Davenport, Jim McGee, David Skyrme and me (delighted to be in such a great company 🙂

While it may be not much new in this article for KM bloggers it is a good sign that personal KM is getting mainstream. And of course I’m very proud :)))

[Mathemagenic]

If It’s Urgent, Ignore It

Differentiating between urgent and important is the trick though isn’t it? After the fact, it may be easy but in the moment it can be devilishly hard, especially in a world that treasures action over reflection.

Perhaps one heuristic would be to simply ignore any decision (excepting immediate threat to life and limb) that claimed a need to be made immediately.

If It’s Urgent, Ignore It. If It’s Urgent, Ignore It — From Seth Godin at Fast Comany…

“Smart organizations ignore the urgent. Smart organizations understand that important issues are the ones to deal with. If you focus on the important stuff, the urgent will take care of itself.

“A key corollary to this principle is the idea that if you don’t have the time to do it right, there’s no way in the world you’ll find the time to do it over. Too often, we use the urgent as an excuse for shoddy work or sloppy decision making. […] Urgent is not an excuse. In fact, urgent is often an indictment–a sure sign that you’ve been putting off the important stuff until it mushrooms out of control.”

Obvious, but worth repeating from time to time. [Frank Patrick’s Focused Performance Blog]

Asperger’s syndrome and tacit expertise

An article ran yesterday in the Times about Asperger’s syndrome, what some describe as a form of high-functioning autism. Wired magazine ran a similar piece a few years back under the title, The Geek Syndrome. It makes a case that the social “blindness” that characterizes many of us in technical professions may have a neurological basis.

I could pick out a number of incidents in my past to make my own case for suffering from Asperger’s. One that comes to mind is an early programming job, where I turned into the team debugging specialist. Other team members would leave me candy and core dumps to debug. I finally tracked down one especially tough bug and grabbed the phone to call Glenn, my boss, and tell him the good news. Glen was very kind. He listened to my excited description of my detective process before he gently explained that he and his wife generally thought that 2 o’clock in the morning was a more appropriate time for sleeping than listening to status updates from young programmers.

There is an interesting side dimension to this condition that nicely illustrates one of the key differences between tacit and explicit knowledge. If you do tend to be blind to social cues that most people pick up naturally, one compensating strategy is to develop a series of explicit rules for operating in social situations. You train yourself to pay attention consciously to the clues that most people have forgotten that they use. On the plus side, you develop observational skills you can take advantage of. On the down side, you have to work through the rules to decide how to behave. Your performance is slower and never as expert or fluid as those whose knowledge is tacit.

Answer, but No Cure, for a Social Disorder That Isolates Many. Thousands of adults who have never fit in socially are only now stumbling across a neurological explanation for their struggles. By Amy Harmon. [New York Times: Science][free registration required]

Organisational Story-Telling

Steve Denning did some excellent work using stories to drive change when he was at the World Bank. Here’s a pointer to an interview with Denning summarizing his key arguments about the role and value of story in driving organizational change. If this catches your fancy, you may want to look at Denning’s book, The Springboard : How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations.

Organisational Story-Telling.

Steve Neiderhauser points to an interview with Steven Denning. Excerpts:

People can’t absorb data because they don’t think in data. They think in stories. If you give people a story, then they can absorb the meaning of large amounts of data very rapidly….

The good news is however that we are all storytellers. We’ve simply been browbeaten into thinking that this is some kind of arcane skill that only a few people have. As Jerome Bruner has documented, we all do it spontaneously from the age of two onwards, and go on doing it throughout our lives. When we get into a formal setting, we succumb to what our teachers have told us and start to spout abstractions. But once we realize that our listeners actually want to hear stories, then we can relax and do what we all do in a social setting and tell stories.

One of the things I have done in some recent presentations is not to use a presentation aid. I have just stood up and talked, trying to weave a tale around the points I want to make. I have found this much more effective personally – I tend to speak with more passion, and the audience is listening to me, rather than looking to the presentation. While this may not work in all settings, this approach is something which definitely needs more thought.

[E M E R G I C . o r g]

The power of questions to create knowledge

Lilia has been on a roll lately with lots of great posts on her blog. Here, again, she raises important points and offers her usual insight.

Too often knowledge management initiatives are sold and implemented around prospective benefits. They try to collect and organize knowledge assets of one sort or another on the notion that they ought to be useful to someone, somewhere. You can pretty much guarantee that these efforts will fail, regardless of how clever an incentive or punishment system you contrive.

Absent real questions, the materials contributed are stale and lifeless. With real questions in context, however, you get answers. I can’t recall a time when some expert hasn’t given me a helpful response to a sincere question in context. Sure, sometimes the response is a series of further questions that demonstrate that I don’t yet know enough to ask an intelligent question. But we get a dialog started that ends in new and deeper understanding. Sometimes it even ends in answers.

This is the magic of vibrant weblog communities that excites those of it who see their promise as a knowledge sharing tool. Unlike email, a community of weblogs and webloggers creates a space where those knowledge questions turn into the seeds of new knowledge creation. It isn’t likely to be neat and orderly and engineered. Instead, like the real world it will be messy and organic and fertile.

Knowledge flows are powered by questions.

Don’t know if this piece will survive in the paper I write, so post it here. This is pretty much what I think on “why people share knowledge”.

One of the goals of knowledge management is to improve knowledge flows and knowledge reuse in an organisation. While there is much discussion on knowledge sharing, motivation and culture, the demand side of knowledge exchanges seems to get too less attention.

I believe that knowledge flows are powered by questions: in many cases employees do not mind to share their knowledge, but do not do it because nobody asks them or because they are not sure that others need to know. This could be one of the explanations behind the success of on-line communities where knowledge bases fail (e.g. in Shell EP case, see Petersen & Poulfelt, 2002 or ask Andy): many communities work in a problem-solving mode, where knowledge sharing starts with a question or problem. In this case knowledge is shared to help others, and it is rewarding. In contrast, submitting a document (for example, “lessons learnt” from a project) to a knowledge base doesn’t have an immediate question behind it, but more of an expectation of future questions that may never arise, so the motivation to share is much lower.

And, as I wrote before, asking is more difficult then answering and reinventing is more fun then reusing.

Guess what my conclusion is? KM is about motivation to learn 🙂

[Mathemagenic]

John Seely Brown on knowledge creation and storytelling

I’ve also been a long time fan of John Seely Brown. There’s been a recent spate of references to him and his work showing up in my aggregator. Most important, perhaps, is a pointer to his own website where much of his published work is available.

John Seely Brown.

I’ve long been a fan of John Seely Brown. His views of how knowledge is shared, how people work, and how digital media are impacting society are visionary. Thanks to Maish for providing a link to JSB’s website.

[elearnspace]

Much of Seely Brown’s work focuses on the processes and dynamics by which knowledge is created and shared. Seb Paquet points to and excerpts from a recent interview with Brown that talks about his work and about the crucial role of storytelling in the realm of knowledge work:

John Seely Brown on stories and knowledge flows

Jay Cross points to a terrific Seth Kahan interview with John Seely Brown, touching on storytelling, innovation, creative abrasion, and the dissemination of ideas. He quotes this incredibly clear paragraph on the connection between stories, emotion, and personal change:

“Why storytelling? Well, the simplest answer to your question is that stories talk to the gut, while information talks to the mind. You can’t talk a person through a change in religion or a change in a basic mental model. There has to be an emotional component in what you are doing. That is to say, you use a connotative component (what the thing means) rather than a denotative component (what it represents). First, you grab them in the gut and then you start to construct (or re-construct) a mental model. If you try to do this in an intellectual or abstract way, you find that it’s very hard, if not impossible, to talk somebody into changing their mental models. But if you can get to them emotionally, either through rhetoric or dramatic means (not overly dramatic!), then you can create some scaffolding that effectively allows them to construct a new model for themselves. You provide the scaffolding and they construct something new. It doesn’t seem to work if you just try to tell them what to think. They have to internalize it. They have to own it. So the question is: what are the techniques for creating scaffolding that facilitate the rich internalization and re-conceptualization and re-contextualization of their own thinking relative to the experience that you’re providing them? Put more simply: how do you get them to live the idea?”

On why, somewhat counterintuitively, strong internal social capital in a group is not always all good because it can result in the buildup of a membrane around that group and push members into “us vs. them” thinking:

“We all talk about social capital, but some of the worst labs that I’ve ever been in had extraordinarily high social capital within the lab. But social capital can create the feeling, “I’m better than anybody else,” and this creates dysfunctional work relationships. It creates the idea that “you’re a bad guy.” One of the best ways to build social capital is to have a common enemy. If that enemy is in the outside world, then guess what? You’ll have a very hard time transferring ideas from the inside to the outside. So, social capital can work against you. Communities of practice are not necessarily very open. They can become very rigid structures, just as rigid as hierarchies. Look at the guilds in medieval times, like the stonecutters. They were very exclusionary. They were seats of absolute power. They were evenable to challenge the church!”

Speaking of JSB and stories, there’s a page I’ve been meaning to link for months now. I figure if I don’t do it now I’ll never get around to doing it. It’s a great bike-riding story he told that illustrates tacit knowledge. Read it – I promise that you’ll be surprised. [Seb’s Open Research]

Finally, Seely Brown shows up in today’s Technology Review blog thinking about the connections between storytelling as learning tool and how online games extends the power of storytelling:

Why study Rome when you can build it?

…focus on the game itself which involves all the players building and evolving a complex world, and you see a new kind of nonlinear, multi-authored narrative being constructed…

[snip]

In the past, I had tended to think of narratives as being basically linear and but they arent necessarily. As Steve Denning has pointed out part of the power of a narrative is its rhetorical structure that brings listeners into an active participation with the narrative, either explicitly or by getting them to pose certain questions to themselves. [Technology Review RSS Blog Feed]

The power of story then is twofold, at least. One, stories connect at an emotional level making action a much more likely outcome. Second, storytelling that engages a group in creating a tale collectively, also imposes a thought structure that helps the group organize its thinking.

Ernie on weblogs as smart filters

Good advice from Ernie that applies to more than law students and explains one of the key values of weblogs as a key element in your personal knowledge management strategy (you do have one don’t you?).

Read the dissenting opinion first. Here’s a tip for law students: read the dissenting opinion first. Assuming you can glean the facts of the case from the dissenting opinion (and, if not, then skim the main opinion until you have the gist of the case),… [Ernie The Attorney]

Here’s Ernie’s key point:

This concept of ‘reading the dissent first’ is applicable to weblogs. In fact, I’d say it is a large reason why reading certain kinds of weblogs makes news gathering more efficient. Reading opinion blogs changes the news gathering process from one where the reader is a ‘passive receptor’ to one where she is an active participant.

Go read the whole thing, it’s worth your time.

Mark Hurst on bit literacy

I continue to track Mark Hurst's thoughts about bit literacy with interest. I came across this originally reading Richard Saul Wurman's Information Anxiety 2, which should definitely be on your reading list if you haven't read it already.

Good Experience: Bit literacy: an overview. Obviously, bits have become more important to the average technology user since then. In fact, I find that the essay – although it predates those developments – is even more relevant in 2004. Thus I plan to write more about bit literacy this year. [Tomalak's Realm]

Here's the key graf:

To have a chance to survive the infinite bits in the future, we'll need a lot of bit literacy: in our behavior (letting go of bits), in our beliefs (searching for the meaning behind the bits), and in our technology — with simpler tools granting us control over the bits, and working with bits in their simplest formats. And as we shift to becoming not just consumers but *creators* of bits, the discipline of bit literacy will show us how to *create* bits differently: mindfully, meaningfully, and with an acceptance of their essential emptiness.

In a world where information is carried in physical containers (e.g., books, reports, papers), the containers set limits for us. With bits, we need to exercise explicit managerial control.