Category: Practices

Knowledge management, reinvention, and innovation

Earlier this year I wrote a column for the Enterrpise Systems Journal on the linkage between knowledge management efforts and innovation. You can find the column at:

Get Better at Reinventing the Wheel

To succeed with knowledge management, organizations should focus on getting better at reinventing the wheel instead of avoiding it.

The rant that provoked this column was in response to the frequent justification of knowledge management efforts on the grounds that “we don’t want to reinvent the wheel,” which I finally got tired of hearing. It’s one of those phrases that sounds like it means something useful until you actually take a look at it.

First, equating “knowledge” with “wheels” gets you on the wrong track by confusing knowledge with something vaguely product-like. I can’t think of many knowledge work processes where you could simply take a piece of finished work from elsewhere in the organization and drop it in place. At the very least, you need to understand the current situation and the available knowledge work “thing” well enough to come up with a way to adapt or apply the old thing in a new situation. Any attempt to sidestep that process is guaranteed to lead to trouble. Don’t encourage it by laziness in comparing knowledge work deliverables to wheels.

Second, if you are really doing knowledge work, then your customer, be it someone above you in the organizational food chain or a paying customer, is not interested in and will not pay for yesterday’s answer. You need to divine their unique perspective and explicitly connect your knowledge work deliverable to that unique situation. The value of having organized access to prior knowledge work deliverables lies in improving the quality and the speed of applying that knowledge as an input to the process at hand, not as a deliverable.

Developing an eye and ear for Web 2.0 phenomena

Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead
Benjamin Franklin

I’ve been following the controversy and conversation around Digg, HD-DVD keys, and the AACS-LA response. I’ve found the following to be among the more thoughtful and useful posts on the topic for my interests:

My views on copy protection and DRM (digital restrictions management/digital rights management) have generally been more pragmatic than ideological or policy oriented. I think the evidence suggests that copy protection and DRM schemes generally don’t accomplish what they ostensibly claim to. They don’t stop anyone who wishes to circumvent them, and they increase costs and interfere with the rights of those who do play by the rules.

In this most recent incident, we’re discovering that the latest generation of technology tools and services with explicitly social components are even farther ahead of law and policy than usual. “Cease and desist” letters begin to lose their effectiveness when the number of “offenders” starts to expand exponentially. “Deep pockets” lose their effectiveness when the conflict becomes asymmetrical.

The decision makers here are not stupid people, despite what their responses might suggest. On the other hand, they do appear to be “net deaf” or “net blind.” Their judgment is formed and informed by long experience in linear environments. Whether they can compensate for that experience in a changing world is problematic. Ed Yourdon in another post that just hit my feed reader offers some thoughts on why it may remain difficult.

The problems of hierarchy are largely invisible from the top. The power of new networks is hard to appreciate if you don’t immerse yourself in it. It’s a bit like trying to coach a sport that you’ve never played. There’s only so much you can learn by watching from the sidelines. If you want to make sound decisions, you need to invest in acquiring the requisite experience.

 

Eric Mack webinar on using MindManager as a Knowledge Management Tool

I won’t be able to attend this since I wll be on Spring Break with the family, but I intend to watch it after the fact. Eric’s weblog is also well worth your time if you’re interested in knowledge work and personal productivity.

Sign up for my “How I use MindManager” webinar

MindJet has asked me to present a webinar on how I use MindManager to get things done. I agreed, and on Wednesday, March 28, 2007 at 10:00 AM (PST) I will present a free webinar, entitled MindManager as a Knowledge Management Tool: How I use MindManager and Lotus Notes to get things done. That’s the fancy title. My working title is “Mind Mapping in the Digital Sandbox.” (See description below)   

…

I’ve provided a link to sign up for the webinar at the end of this post.

MindManager as a Knowledge Management Tool:
How I use MindManager and Lotus Notes to get things done.
Date: Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Time: 10:00 am Pacific Daylight Time

Description: Consultant and eProductivity Specialist, Eric Mack, will give us a tour of his world and how he works and how he uses Mind Manager as a visual thinking and planning tool. He will discuss how he uses Mind Manager as a visual dashboard and planning tool for project and action management. He will also share how he uses Mind Manager on a daily basis as a support tool for getting things done with the GTD methodology and how he uses Mind Manager as a research support tool for Knowledge Management. Finally, he will show us how he uses MindManager to brainstorm and track projects and actions stored in Lotus Notes databases. In addition to using Mind Maps at work, Eric uses them when home-schooling his children and when coaching robotics teams. We’ve asked him to share a little bit about how he teaches the kids to use Mind Maps to organize their thinking and strategy when planning for a paper or a competition. At the conclusion of the webinar, Eric will be available to answer your questions.

Click to Enroll

Originally posted on Eric Mack Online

An old look at a new idea – the value of personal knowledge management

(cross-posted at Future Tense)

One of the blogs I’ve been reading on a provisional basis recently is “Inside Higher Ed.” It provides an interesting contrast to the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s Wired Campus blog. Both offer valuable perspective on the life of knowledge work and knowledge workers that goes well beyond their specific focus on the world of higher education.

In a column from November, Scott McLemee reflects on a 1959 essay by the sociologist C. Wright Mills “On Intellectual Craftsmanship.” You can get your hands on a copy by buying a copy of Mills’s The Sociological Imagination. At the core of Mills’s recommendations is the notion of maintaining a file or journal, which ought to sound quite familiar. His description is worth sharing at length:

In such a file as I am going to describe, there is joined personal experience and professional activities, studies underway and studies planned. In this file, you, as an intellectual craftsman, will try to get together what you are doing intellectually and what you are experiencing as a person. Here you will not be afraid to use your experience and relate it to directly to various work in progress. By serving as a check on repetitious work, your file also enables you to conserve your energy. It also encourages you to capture ‘fringe-thoughts’: various ideas which may be by-products of everyday life, snatches of conversation overheard on the street, or, for that matter, dreams. Once noted, these may lead to more systematic thinking, as well as lend intellectual relevance to more directed experiences.

You will have often noticed how carefully accomplished thinkers treat their own minds, how closely they observe their development and organize their experience. The reason they treasure their smallest experience is that, in the course of a lifetime, modern man has so very little personal experience and yet experience is so important as a source of original intellectual work. To be able to trust yet be skeptical of your own experience, I have come to believe, is one mark of the mature workman. This ambiguous confidence is indispensable to originality in any intellectual pursuit, and the file is one way by which you can develop and justify such confidence.

The primary value of today’s tools and technologies for blogging, wikis, and the like is that they eliminate technical and usability barriers to maintaining and investing in the kind of long-lived knowledge asset that Mills is describing. Secondarily, these tools make it easier and more productive to engage in the kind of active reflection and learning Mills talks about.

What the tools don’t do is provide the discipline and support structures to help you keep at the long-term investment in becoming a better knowledge worker. Or provide a nice, neat ROI argument that you can bring to your CIO or CEO.

Becoming a better quick study of new markets and technology

Tim Oren offers
his process for coming up to speed on a new market or technology.
Although it's oriented towards his specific needs as a VC evaluating
potential investments, it is general enough to offer an excellent
starting point for any of us whose lives are characterized by having to
make sense out of new environments on a regular basis. Certainly, there
have been times in my career as a consultant when it seems that the
primary skill requirement is to be an adept quick study on anything.

Here's Tim's key graf:

There are two observations behind this methodology. First, every
technology and market has a private language. It's built of terms of
art, but also names of landmarks such as products, famous papers and
projects, labs, and researchers and other experts. To begin to
understand the market you need to learn this language. Fortunately,
such a distinctive use of language and interlinkage of people and
information artifacts is the very best thing you can have to feed
Google or other modern search tools. The second observation is that the
best way to learn a field is to watch experts argue about it. [Due Diligence]

I would add two suggestions to his approach. First, give some thought
to using a mindmap or something similar to manage your growing
knowledge base. I'm a fan of MindManager for
this kind of effort, and the newest version adds a number of new
features to support this kind of organic research strategy. Jerry Michalski is a fan of a product called Personal Brain.
I used it a few years back and, while I liked it, ultimaely concluded
that mindmaps suited me better. Second, give some thought to how you
want to manage the collection of electronic resources (links, captured
webpages, pdf files, etc) you will ultimately collect. Lately, I've
been having success with a combination of MindManager and Onfolio.

The Art of the Fast Take.
Earlier this week I was in a skull session at the Institute for the
Future, hosted by Howard Rheingold and nominally about bite-size
classes that could be held in real space or virtually in a multimedia
network. As a reflection… [Due Diligence]

How to Create a Better Checklist

While on the subject of lists, this is a nice introduction into what
makes for a good checklist coupled with good arguments about why you
would want to make more frequent use of them to begin with.

How to Create a Better Checklist.
Checklists are great to develop consistency and realiability in
accomplishing routine as well as emergency procedures. But, you ask,
how do I make one? Here it is! [Open Loops]

Merlin Mann on crafting good to-do lists

Merlin Mann offer two excellent posts on the unexpected subtleties of crafting a good to-do list (Part 1, Part 2).
While for many people (like my wife), this is a completely natural
process, I frequently struggle with it. Mann is full of good advice and
understands how our bad habits interfere. This will certainly help me
in crafting to-dos that are much more concrete and actionable.

Building a Smarter To-Do List, Part I.
Planning your work means more than just collecting the detritus of an
occasional “brain dump.” Learn to create an actionable, unintimidating
task list that helps you maintain focus on the outcomes that are
important to you. Part 1 of a 2-part series (new post Tuesday morning).
[43 Folders]

Learning from your mistakes

Some good advice about the important role of mistakes and what to do
with them. My goal has always been to make “interesting mistakes.”

New essay: how to learn from your mistakes.
If you're doing something interesting, mistakes are inevitable. How you
learn from your mistakes defines what kinds of mistakes you'll make the
next time: the same ones? new ones? mistakes that get you closer to
success or move you away from it?

How to learn from your mistakes.

[Berkun blog]

Interviewing Excellence

A typically succinct and insight filled summary of how to think about, prepare for, and conduct fact-finding interviews from Tom Peters. Reading it won’t take long; learning to do it will take a good chunk of the rest of your career.

Years ago, when I was designing the basic consulting curriculum for DiamondCluster, we gave serious thought to building the whole thing around interviewing skills. We weren’t quite brave enough to do it, but we probably should have.

Interviewing Excellence

As promised, I spent several hours in London this past Saturday working on the “InterviewingExcellence31.” You’ll find it here.(ppt file) (FYI: I was in Copenhagen yesterday for HP … and will scoot off today to one of my favorite places … South Africa.)

REPEAT: No B.School teaches PresEx (Presentation Excellence (ppt file)) and IntEx (Interviewing Excellence).(ppt file) What a pity. (Or: How stupid!) [Tom Peters weblog]