Knowledge work Archives - Page 32 of 38

The importance of going native

This is the kind of post that makes us happy to see folks like Nancy White join the ranks of bloggers. Insightful, based on experience, and, already, well tuned to the emerging standards and conventions of blogging. danah’s original post that triggered Nancy’s post is also well worth following up on as well.

I’m one of those, for example, who finds web-based discussion less satisfying than blogging. Denham, on the other hand, appears to prefer web-based discussion. But he has made the effort to try the alternatives and can ground his preferences in that experience. You need to “go native” long enough to grasp what makes each of these new experiences worthwhile in their own right. You can’t stop at the metaphorical level. And you can’t stay detached.

There are two reasons I prefer blogging over web-based discussion. First, it allows me to get my own thoughts in order at my own pace. I lose the thread in threaded discussions. Second, blogs make it easier for me to find and link to others’ thinking. The conversation moves at a slower pace and in chunks I find more satisfying.

All of these tools ought to be in the repetoire of any knowledge worker. But that requires a commitment to experimenting and working with the tools long enough to discover their signature rhythms and styles. That runs counter to software marketing practices that emphasize “out of the box experince” over time enough to learn how to use the tools and fit them to your needs. Those of us who are scouts in these new territories need to think about how to ease the transition for the settlers who will follow.

Don’t Practice? Watch your Preachin!. danah posted on Many2Many something that I want to pick up and run witha bit farther:

“This is precisely why it’s bloody hard to study/discuss these technologies without being a practitioner. Distance is valuable as a researcher, but it’s also limiting. You need to engage with the culture at a deep level in order to study it. Because digital technology cultures are so peculiar, you need to be involved at an intimate level. Being a lurker is just not the same. It is the practice of engaging with these technologies that makes you able to move beyond the metaphor.”

I have been harboring a bit of inner burn over the past few months as well. It stems from the ease of condemnation people seem to be able to conjure about things they have not experienced, or perhaps more importantly, not experienced in the same way as another. “If it didn’t work for me, it’s bad. I don’t care that it worked for you.”

I seethe when a “blogger” or a “wiki person” condemns as inferior a web-based discussion and call it a controlling environment. It may have been inferior to them, but for others it is a very freeing, useful and even preferred medium. I boil over when a web-based discussion person dismisses the possibility that bloggers experience “community.” Just because something gets a label slapped on it like “social software” or “old style” does not make it universally better or worse. There is far more subtlety in the context of each instance and deployment. There is the unseen ways in which users bend technology to meet their needs, irrespective of the intention of the designer. This is not taken into account.

There is insufficient experience and practice to slap labels around and make claims that completely ignore a key factor of online interaction technologies.

They are designed for a group experience.

They are almost always experienced by an individual in the isolation in interaction with their computer.

My experience is not your experience. Further more, it is hard to even describe OUR experience. We romanticize the concept of group interaction, but in truth, it is imperfect, online and offline. And online we don’t see the consequences as quickly nor are our communication antennae, trained for millennium to F2F communication, as attuned to online communication. I think we are getting better. I see changes. But I can’t see if you are smiling, frowning, curious or pissed off as you read this. And if I want to communicate and engage with you, that matters to me. (If I just want to spout and publish, well, you are out of luck!)

Circling back to danah’s observation about the need to be involved at an intimate level, I want to chime in with a big AMEN. Intimacy means being ready to let my perceptions aside for a moment and get a peek into yours. In means slowing down, experimenting, diving in, risking failure and god forbid, being wrong.

Or perhaps better, being both right and wrong which is how the world works. Context is everything and my right may be your wrong and visa versa. That’s life.

Also posted at Many2Many
[Full Circle Associates Online Interaction & Community Blog]

Corporate Blogging – Blogs as Paths in Open Spaces

This is a classic and largely familiar story of user center designed from the field of architecture. It had never occurred to me to make this very natural connection to blogs and blogging in the organization. Now that someone else has, however, I expect to use the analogy routinely (with all due credit recorded here).

Thank you, Dina.

Corporate Blogging – Blogs as Paths in Open Spaces.

One more way of looking at blogging in organisations …

“Blogging Paths in the Grass – Will Pate.

Jon Strande was blogging the other day about how Slonian corporate structures divorce employees from each other and customers. He told this litle story that sparked some thinking about one of my favorite subjects these days, organizational blogging.

An architect once designed a cluster of buildings. When asked by the landscape crew where to pave the sidewalks, he told them to plant grass between all the buildings, wait a year, then, after the occupants had worn the most useful paths, the architect told the landscape crew to pave the pathways that the occupants had created.

In an organization blogs can operate much the same way. They become open spaces where people can create their own path. Discussions emerge and the lines wear deeper into the solid ground, creating meaningful relationships built on common interests.”

[Conversations with Dina]

Welcome, Nancy!

Welcome, indeed. Nancy and I started talking about getting her up and blogging over a year ago. I’d like to think the delay was a function of other things on her plate, rather than testimony to my persuasive skills. Regardless, it’s nice to have her here finally.

Welcome, Nancy!. Woo-friggin-hoo! Long-time online facilitation expert Nancy White has finally started her own weblog (did she hear my plea?). The online community toolkit that she s been building for years is chock-full of great material, which I suppose she ll do us the pleasure of introducing bit by bit.

A recent post reports on an experiment I d been meaning to try but had yet to find the right conditions for: having group of chat participants listen the same music while chatting – much as would happen at a party – as a means of creating a shared atmosphere and giving participants a better sense of togetherness. Apparently it turned out very well I ll really have to try it. Webjay could make it quite easy.

This post also appears on channel social software

[Seb’s Open Research]

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]