Category: Knowledge work

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.

Thinking of tools for knowledge workers

I’ve been thinking about Ted Leavitt recently.

Leavitt taught marketing at the Harvard Business School. His most famous aphorism is that “customers don’t but a quarter-inch drill bit, they buy a quarter-inch hole.” Clever, and possibly helpful, if you’re a marketer by trade. But what if you happen to be a knowledge worker? You don’t have the luxury of knowing that what you need is a quarter-inch hole.

While every technology marketer out there is trying to sell you quarter-inch holes, you actually need to be thinking in terms of what kind of general purpose knowledge work toolkit you need to assemble to address the changing and unpredictable demands you face. For knowledge work, solution selling gets in the way at best. A tool perspective will be more productive, even if it is working against the grain.

Here are some quick contrasts between a solutions perspective and a tools perspective:

Solutions Tools
Passive Active
Accept/Reject Co-create
Train Learn
Conformance Craft
Consumer Producer
CEO Hacker

One challenge to overcome is that we’ve been conditioned to think in terms of solutions. We wait for the early adopters to figure everything out so that we can buy the answer off the shelf. We are still too soon in the world of knowledge work. If you are a knowledge worker, then circumstances have forced you back to the level of creating your own toolset. And back to the level of digging underneath the hypothetical solutions to hypothetical problems that today’s marketing conventions will layer on top of the tools themselves that ought to be your target.

Risking curiosity

This struck a chord. I make no secret of being cursed with curiosity and it has come close to killing me a few times both metaphorically and literally (there was that high voltage probe on a Hewlett Packard scintillometer back in high school that wasn’t quite properly grounded).

Curiosity is not something greatly respected in our culture today and that is a dangerous thing. It makes you easier to manipulate. Hemingway’s advice on crap detectors applies to more than writers and appears to be in desparately short supply these days.

My only caveat here is that while I agree that “the pursuit of knowledge is never done,” that does not imply for me that there are no objective truths in the world. If I let go of this laptop in the TSA security line, it will hit the floor. That does complicate things because “agreeing to disagree” isn’t always an out in all conversations. There are “facts” that can be agreed on, but that doesn’t finish the conversation or the deeper search for truth.

Children are our best guides here. None of them need to be trained in the techniques of 7 whys (would that toddlers would stop at 7). After formal schooling, however, most of us need to rediscover what we naturally know how to do.

Can we teach the joy of thinking?. I have been blessed – and cursed – with a curious mind. I say cursed not simply because curiosity killed the cat, but because it makes it very difficult for me to understand people who seem to lack curiosity about themselves and the world around them. This difficulty causes me the most grief when, every fall, I am faced with students who appear to utterly lack curiosity. When I am in a good mood, I ask myself how that is even possible. When I am in poor humour, I wonder why they’ve bothered to go to university at all.

Sound harsh? Well, it probably is. And no doubt oversimplified. But here’s the thing: in a world where people are not equal in terms of interest, how can we teach wonder?

You see, I wonder all the time. Actually, I would need several lifetimes to understand all the things I wonder about. I don’t know how not to wonder. I keep a notebook that contains only questions – hundreds of them – which I share with my students whenever they say that can’t think of anything to research or write about. Colleagues have warned me that I am “giving away” my ideas for future research and, presumably, some sort of future glory. But for me, the beauty and the reward is in our ever-changing understandings – and it sure won’t be me who definitively sorts the world. I only hope there are enough people who keep asking hard questions.

I genuinely believe that the pursuit of knowledge is never done. This is, in part, related to my understanding that there is no absolute, determining, objective truth in the world – a position which obligates me to continue asking questions and forces me to acknowledge that no knowledge is neutral or impartial.

If the best we can offer is subjective, multiple, and partial truths, then learning and understanding requires critical thinking, the questioning of assumptions, self-reflection and self-awareness. In a world that doesn’t want to “waste time” with things other than “the facts,” it turns out that these inter-related practices are, by far, the hardest ones to teach. And I can’t help but to believe they are the most important. [Purse Lip Square Jaw]

Putting the hours in- working on your craft

This got a lot of play earlier this month in my aggregator, but I only managed to get to it this weekend. It certainly lives up to its billing and Gaping Void now has a place in my aggregator.

Too much writing and thinking about creativity perpetuates a myth that creativity is some sort of innate binary characteristic–you either have it or you don’t. I much prefer a perspective that, regardless of your creative gifts, there is craft to be learned and developed. You can’t do anything about the raw material you were given at birth, but, as Macleod also points out, it is within your power to put the hours in. Reminds me of Jerry Pournelle’s classic advice on how to get his job.

Hard Truths from the Gaping Void.

A few months ago I stumbled upon Hugh Macleod’s Gaping Void weblog, enjoying his crazed cartoons and his jaundiced insights. He has one post that he keeps adding to that is just completely fricking brilliant, called “How to be Creative”. The original post is good, but he has a couple elaborations that are even better:

He has one observation that is straight out of the advice I hear over and over for new writers, most of whom are looking for some sort of silver bullet that will allow them to become successful without spending all that boring time with their ass in a chair doing the work:

3. Put the hours in.

Doing anything worthwhile takes forever. 90% of what seperates successful people and failed people is time and stamina.

This stuff is all good reading, and worth thinking about if you have any ambitions towards being creative – as an artist, as an entrepeneur, as a software developer, as a person.

Comment on Hard Truths from the Gaping Void [Evil Genius Chronicles]

Martin Roell on Improving Knowledge Workers’ Productivity

Martin has put together a nice synthesis of thinking about weblogs and knowledge worker productivity.

Improving Knowledge Workers’ Productivity and Organisational Knowledge Sharing with Weblog-based Personal Publishing.

In case you wonder what to read this weekend: Martin Roell published 0.9 version of the paper for his BlogTalk presentation – Distributed KM – Improving Knowledge Workers’ Productivity and Organisational Knowledge Sharing with Weblog-based Personal Publishing.

This paper briefly explores the failure of traditional knowledge management to adress the problem of knowledge worker productivity and argues that a deeper understanding of knowledge work is necessary to improve it. It then explores knowledge work and how it is supported with information technology tools today, focussing specially on the email client as a knowledge work tool.

The paper introduces weblogs as personal publishing tools for knowledge workers and shows how personal publishing supports knowledg work processes, is personally beneficial to the knowledge worker and helps the dissemination of knowledge through an organisation.

Martin intergrates lots of thinking on “blogs in KM”, so, next to an interesting read by itself, this paper is a good starting point to discover follow-up reading.

[Mathemagenic]

David Gelerntner on Beauty in Computing

Here’s a great thought to start off my day. I think it applies beyond the obvious complexity of computing.

David Gelerntner on Beauty in Computing.

David Gelerntner, a computer scientist at Yale, perhaps put it best when he said, “Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defence against complexity.”

Quoted in the Economist article “Unix’s founding fathers” (via Dan Hill)

[Tesugen.com: Peter Lindbergs Weblog]

Weblogs and literacy for knowledge workers

Substitute “knowledge worker” for “information literate student.”

Which raises the next question. How good a job are we doing at preparing people to be knowledge workers in today’s world?

Weblogs and Literacy.

“The information literate student validates understanding and interpretation of the information through discourse with other individuals, subject-area experts, and/or practitioners.”
—ALA

I’ve been working through some ideas for a piece about Weblogs and wikis and all these new tools and their impact on “literacy.” In a nutshell, the Internet has changed the requirements of what it means to be literate. While just about everything we used to teach with was a finished, edited text, the Web now provides us with a gazillion unedited texts, which means it’s no longer enough just to be able to read; we have to read critically. And now that the Internet is a read AND write technology, part of our literacy has to include skills to communicate and collaborate with a much larger, less contrived audience. Finally, since there will no doubt be an ever-growing body of information out there to deal with, we need to be literate in managing information what we find relevant and meaningful.

In my travels this morning, I landed on the Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education put up by the American Library Association. It gives some pretty in depth definitions of information literacy, and lists 23 performance indicators for information literate students. What struck me is how many of them can be addressed by blogging:

  • The information literate student retrieves information online or in person using a variety of methods.
  • The information literate student extracts, records, and manages the information and its sources.
  • The information literate student summarizes the main ideas to be extracted from the information gathered.
  • The information literate student articulates and applies initial criteria for evaluating both the information and its sources.
  • The information literate student synthesizes main ideas to construct new concepts.
  • The information literate student compares new knowledge with prior knowledge to determine the value added, contradictions, or other unique characteristics of the information.
  • The information literate student validates understanding and interpretation of the information through discourse with other individuals, subject-area experts, and/or practitioners.
  • The information literate student applies new and prior information to the planning and creation of a particular product or performance.
  • The information literate student communicates the product or performance effectively to others.
  • The information literate student follows laws, regulations, institutional policies, and etiquette related to the access and use of information resources.
  • The information literate student acknowledges the use of information sources in communicating the product or performance.Weblogs are such a great tool for doing much of this, and they offer a transparent, organized way for teachers and students to measure these proficiencies and others. [Weblogg-ed News]