Scott Rosenberg: The single deadliest thing a speaker can do is read from his own slides. Agreed. It always exasperates me to see slides used as speakers notes rather than as helpful visual aids.
Want to know how to give a good presentation with slides? Here’s what I learned from two masters. It’s more than a half-decade old, but its tips are no less useful.
I’ve used this before as part of teaching presentation skills to consultants. Blogging it now so I can find it again later.
Arthur C. Clarke on Information Pollution. Castolari writes “Here is an interesting interview of Arthur C. Clarke and his views on regulating communications, as well as what he sees as the past, … [Slashdot]
Insight and perspective from one of my favorite authors. Here’s my favorite comment:
We are now faced with the responsibility of discernment. Just as our ancestors quickly realised that no one was going to force them to read the entire library of a thousand books, we are now overcoming the initial alarm at the sheer weight of available information and coming to understand that it is not the information itself that determines our future, only the use we can make of it.
It comes down to exercising judgment. Clarke has it and thinking about what he has to say is worth the time.
THE BUSINESS CASE FOR PERSONAL PRODUCTIVITY IMPROVEMENT.
In a recent post I argued that IT and Knowledge Management (KM) should merge into a combined TechKnowledgy department that would, in addition to the traditional responsibilities for managing the financial, HR and sales systems and technical hardware of the organization, take on these two important new responsibilities focused on the individual ‘knowledge worker’:1. Social Software Applications: Development of new social software applications for front-line employees, including:
- Expertise locators – to help people find other people inside and outside the organization they need to talk with to do their job more effectively.
- Personal content management tools – simple, weblog-type tools that organize, access and selectively publish each individual’s ‘filing cabinet‘, as a replacement for failed centralized content management systems.
- Personal collaboration tools – wireless, portable videoconferencing and networking tools that save travel costs and allow people to participate virtually in events where they cannot afford to participate in person.
- Personal researching and reporting tools – technologies and templates that enable effective do-it-yourself business research and analysis and facilitate the preparation of professional reports and presentations.
2. Personal Productivity Improvement: Hands-on assistance to front-line employees — helping them make effective use of technology and knowledge, including the above tools, one-on-one, in the context of their individual roles. Not training, not wait-for-the-phone-to-ring help desk service — face to face, scheduled sessions where individuals can show what they do and what they know, and experts can show them how to do it better, faster, and take the intelligence of what else is needed back to HO so developers can improve effectiveness even more.
I’ve written before about social software applications, and noted that Business 2.0 has named these applications the Best New Technology of 2003.Now I’ve put together, in Word format, a downloadable Business Case for Personal Productivity Improvement. I’ve written this so that it can be used by both:
- IT/KM professions inside the organization, to get executive buy-in and resources for it, and
- external IT/KM consultants who want to sell this service to organizations that prefer to outsource it.
I hope you find it useful and I would welcome comments on it. I am looking to organize a virtual collaborative enterprise of IT/KM professionals interested in providing this service, so I may also post it on Ryze/LinkedIn.
What do you think — could people make a living doing this?
More spot on insight from Dave Pollard. This ties in nicely with several lines of thought I’ve been exploring. Take a look at Is Knowledge Work Improvable? for example.
The key challenge here is that success depends more on leadership than on management.
Comment on post 3734 on 10/18/03 by Dare Obasanjo. *chuckle* It’s amusing to see my words critiqued out of context. It’s almost like being a celebrity or a famous politician being crucified over misconstrued sound bites. Almost. [chaosplayer News]
Dare chides me on taking his remarks out of context in yesterday’s post. On reflection he’s probably right in the sense that we are both making more or less the same point and are not in any disagreement.
His comment, however, triggers several other thoughts. One, that the tools here make it simple for anyone here to go look at what he said and draw their own conclusions. Two, that the particular quote I pulled by way of Scoble did trigger a reaction and let me start a train of thought that served my purposes. For that I am grateful, even if I may have been less than accurate in representing Dare’s point.
This suggests to me one of the advantages of blogging as a form over newsgroups and threaded discussion. In a threaded discussion I am more bound by context than I am here. Lowering the power of context without removing it entirely, makes blogs more conducive to working out your own ideas. I wonder what Denham would have to say about this? He’s generally been an advocate of the collaborative powers of tools such as threaded discusisons and wikis. Blogging adds another flavor to the mix. The challenge now becomes working out for yourself and your organization how to manage the mix.
I just learned about another SQL Server weblog community: SQL Team weblogs. Running on Scott Watermasysk’s .TEXT. By the way, the SQL Team website has tons of info on SQL Server.
I was going to point to this as a good example of the benefits you obtain when you lower the barriers to expression. And it is. But it also contains some interesting material on knowledge work from a slightly different point of view than I’ve taken before. So I’ve also subscribed to their RSS feed (SQL Team Weblog RSS feed).
One of the benefits you get when you lower the barriers to expression and lower the barriers to attention by providing RSS feeds is that the abstract notions of self-organizing networks get a set of operational tools. This is what is getting us excited about the potential for these new tools inside and across organizations.
Blogging in organizations = lowering the barriers to expression + lowering the barriers to attention. That’s a formula that warrants some thought. Moreover, it’s a formula that would likely never have occurred to me without living inside the phenomenon.
Andrew Grumet. Andrew Grumet: “Free your mind, and your weblog will follow.”
[Scripting News]
All the evidence I'm familiar with says peak performance depends on “flow.” So why is so much of the practice of management day to day about control? Some more from Andrew:
To really get into weblogs as a writer, try to keep moving to stay with the flow. The old advice to a budding jazz musicians applies: “If you make a mistake and hit a bad note, don't stop! Hit it again and keep going”. Too much worrying will make a burden of posting, making work of what should be fun.
The promise of weblogs in the organization is that they help us get more accustomed to flow. The threat the pose is the same thing; they work against those who are more comfortable with control than with performance.
Apropos of the gift economy of weblogs, here’s a great little story courtesy of David Gurteen on courtesy among scholars.
The scholar’s courtesy. A few weeks back I met with a very interesting woman called [Shane Godbolt] who works for the National Heatth Service (NHS) in the UK.
As she valued my website and newsletter – she brought me several ‘knowledge gifts’ in return as a ‘thank you’. This is just what I love about Knowledge Sharing – you get back as mcuh as you give – if not more [
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Amongst these gifts was a beautiful little story about the importance of acknowledging the sources of your ideas – regardless of whether they are in ‘print’ or not.
I received an early lesson about acknowledging others from my mentor George Spindler. The Spindlers were houseguests visiting me after I took a full-time academic appointment upon completion of doctoral studies. I eagerly shared an early draft of a chapter I had been invited to write, tentatively entitled “Concomitant Learning”.
Spindler was up early the next morning, but to my disappointment I found him looking through materials he had written (my library contained many of them) rather than reading my new draft. He had already read and enjoyed my article, he explained, but he expressed disappointment at my failure to credit him as a source of inspiration for the concept that provided my title and rationale. He had been searching for the citation I should have made. “But you’ve never written about it ,” I explained, reaffirming what I already knew and he was beginning to suspect. “I got the idea from you, but you only suggested it in a seminar. There was no publication to cite.”
Technically (and luckily ) I was correct, as his search revealed. That wasn’t the entire lesson however. “No matter where or how you encounter them,” he counseled, “always give credit for the sources of your ideas. It’s so easy to do so : so appropriate to good scholarship … and so appreciated.”
Never again have I limited my acknowledgements only to people whose ideas are in print. And I, too, have “so appreciated” that courtesy when extended to me!
Harry F. Wolcott, Writing up qualitative research, 1990, pp.72-73). Quoted in Blaise Cronin, The scholars courtesy, the role of acknowledgement in the primary communication process. Taylor Graham 1995, p122. [Gurteen Knowledge-Log]
Na ve though it may be, I continue to believe that knowledge hoarding and information hoarding are fundamentally pathological behaviors that have little chance of surviving in the face of healthy organizations. People who really know stuff are always willing and eager to share their interests and knowledge with others. Those who feel compelled to hoard their knowledge do so because of the meagerness of their holdings not because of their riches. Dolly Levi is the patron saint of the knowledge economy not Ebenezer Scrooge.
A Taxonomy of Cognitive Stress: I have. A Taxonomy of Cognitive Stress: I have been thinking about UI design lately. With some help from my friend Rob Landley, I’ve come up with a classification schema for the levels at which users are willing to invest effort to build competence. The base assumption is that for any … [Armed and Dangerous]
Somehow, I missed this when it first appeared in May from Eric Raymond. I find his RSS feed erratic at best. It shows up at a good time, however, as I’m thinking through the implications of shifting focus to knowledge workers instead of knowledge management. Raymond is focused on user interfaces, but I think his perspective can be generalized to the challenges of doing and coaching knowledge work.
I’m continuing to work out the implications of shifting attention from knowledge management to knowledge work. It may not sound like a big difference, but I believe it will prove to be a crucial shift in perspective.
One important view of organizational design is the long standing notion that certain parts of the organization serve as buffers between a volatile external environment and a stable and standardized set of internal processes. The goal is to isolate variation and map it into standardized inputs to standardized products and services.
In an industrial world this is a very sensible organizational design strategy. In a knowledge economy, however, the goal becomes one of providing unique responses to unique inputs. Moreover, more and more of the organization finds itself coming into contact with the external environment. You can’t buffer it and you don’t really want to buffer it.
At the same time, our language and our metaphors keep pushing us back into that industrial, standardized, mindset.
As a consultant, my role is to help clients understand their unique problems and frame a suitably customized response. Yet the industrial mindset, and perhaps human nature to some degree, encourages us to sort problems into the bins we have learned to be comfortable with. To the client, their problem is unique. To the consultant it looks a lot like the last fifteen they’ve dealt with. This is why a client turns to consultants in the first place, but there’s an important shift in attitude that separates the best consultants from the rest. It’s a shift from shoving a problem into a particular standardized box to drawing on a deeper experience base to focus on the unique aspects of the problem at hand.
As an aside, my two favorite resources for helping develop this shift if focus are Peter Block’s Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used (Second Edition) and Gerry Weinberg’s Secrets of Consulting : A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully.
This shift in perspective is relevant to understanding why so many knowledge management efforts have failed and why focusing on managing knowledge work is likely to be more fruitful.
The fatal flaw in thinking in terms of knowledge management is in adopting the perspective of the organization as the relevant beneficiary. Discussions of knowledge management start from the premise that the organization is not realizing full value from the knowledge of its employees. While likely true, this fails to address the much more important question from a knowledge worker’s perspective of “what’s in it for me?”. It attempts to squeeze the knowledge management problem into an industrial framework eliminating that which makes the deliverables of knowledge work most valuable–their uniqueness, their variability. This industrial, standardizing, perspective provokes suspicion and both overt and covert resistance. It also starts a cycle of controls, incentives, rewards, and punishments to elicit what once were natural behaviors.
Suppose, instead, that we turn our attention from the problems of the organization to the problems of the individual knowledge worker. What happens? What problems do we set out to solve and where might this lead us?
Our goal is to make it easier for a knowledge worker to create and share unique results. Instead of specifying a standard output to be created and the standardized steps to create that output, we need to start with more modest goals. I’ve written about this before (see Is knowledge work improvable?, Sharing knowledge with yourself, and Knowledge work as craft). In general terms, I advocate attacking friction, noise, and other barriers to doing good knowledge work.
This approach also leads you to a strategy of coaching knowledge workers toward improving their ability to perform, instead of training them to a set standard of performance. In this respect, knowledge workers are more like world class athletes than either assembly line workers or artists. There are building block skills and techniques that can be developed and the external perspective of a coach can help improve both. But it’s the individual knowledge worker who deploys the skills and techniques to create a unique result.
I’ve been working out the notion of knowledge work as craft for a while now. Knowledge management approaches fail to the extent that they try to shoehorn knowledge work into an industrial framework. If I buy a thousand Thinkpads for my organization, I want and expect everyone of them to function identically. If I distribute them to a thousand consultants, their clients will expect each presentation, analysis, and report to creatively reflect the unique needs and characteristics of each client. If I’m a smart manager, I’ll focus on making it possible for that uniqueness to appear. I certainly shouldn’t expect the management practices designed to eliminate variability to be very much help when variability is what I actually want.
Last week I had a chance to catch up with Greg Lloyd, founder of Traction Software, which is an enterprise level weblogging environment. Traction is rooted in the work of Doug Engelbart and the early hypertext/hypermedia research of Andy van Dam at Brown. One of the topics we talked about was where to find helpful models for understanding knowledge work and how it differs from production work.
Software development is arguably one of the oldest “modern” knowledge work fields and holds many lessons for all of us doing knowledge work. Better still, for my purposes, software development has worked through the blind alley of trying to force knowledge work into a factory model and come out the other end as 21st century craft.
The goal here is to focus on the principles and practices that software developers have developed to guide and manage their work, not on the substance of the work itself. Think of what software craftsmen take for granted that the rest of us knowledge workers lack or have to cobble together for ourselves–version control, issue tracking, forking. These are just a few of the techniques for making the work of software development more visible and, therefore, more manageable. Other concepts that come to mind include iterative development, granularity, prototyping, and modular design.
Lots of details to work out here, but this feels like a productive line of thought. Some of the sources I’ve been monitoring and can recommend: