Learning from others mistakes – this is broken

This Is Broken: Bad Design from Good Experience.. Ever notice design errors in everyday things? Send them in for a post-mortem to mark at goodexperience dot com. He’s cataloging them at This Is Broken. Learning from mistakes. [a klog apart]

One of the powers of imagination is that we have the opportunity to learn not just from our own mistakes, but also from the mistakes of others.  Repeating others’ mistakes is a singular waste of time. You don’t make progress unless you’re making new and interesting kinds of mistakes.

I’m reminded of a comment I first came across reading the proceedings of the 1968 NATO conference on software engineering (one of those classics in the field which I unfortunately gave away years ago, glad to see it is available on the web). Paraphrasing Newton’s remark that he had seen farther by standing on the shoulders of giants, software engineering had mostly been characterized by “standing on each others’ feet”.   

Must ‘clueful politician’ be an oxymoron?

Lots of commentary and reactions to Orrin Hatch’s recent less than clueful remarks. Laughter and ridicule seem to be the most appropriate response so I appreciated this effort from Terry Frazier. Twitting the other recent nonsense about someone trying to lay claim to the term clue-by-four seems like a nice bonus.

I’m surprised that Hatch didn’t also endorse the “No Mental Theft Act“

Hatch to Endorse Snipers for Cubs ‘Rooftop Viewers’. AP News (www.aggravatedpress.com) is reporting this morning that Sen. Orrin “Hatchetman” Hatch, R-Utah, spoke at a DC-area Lions Club dinner Wednesday evening on the critical problem of copyright theft.

[…] Referring to the lawsuit filed by the Chicago Cubs baseball team to stop local building owners from watching games without paying a fee Hatch said “I’m all for peaceful settlements in cases like this, but there is no excuse for breaking copyright laws. These people have been warned. If the Cubs want to hire some snipers and pick these thieves off the rooftops I’m all for it. And they shouldn’t be held liable. A few dozen sniper shootings and people will think twice about watching baseball games without a ticket.” Hatch — best known as a deeply religious folk music artist, a technophobe, and a fan of long underwear — also serves in the US Senate when he’s not out advocating corporate attacks on private American citizens. […] Hatch, whose patriotic folk hit, America United includes the line “Those who would divide us could not realize, that from the smoke and ashes America would rise…United…United” received a standing ovation from the Lions Club crowd. “Copyright terrorists are evil-doers, striking at the heart of this country. They have no idea how far we’ll go to stand against them. These baseball thieves are just the beginning. Soon we’ll be destroying computers, cleaning up the Internet, and saving our children and future generations by any means necessary!” As the crowd filed out of the crumbling auditorium to the parking lot they were met by throngs of teenagers — all waiting to drive their aging grandparents home. Dozens of cliques had formed around users with Apple iPods and they were eagerly trading their favorite re-mixes and singles, as the beats of pirated tunes boomed from car stereo speakers. “Look at these fine young Americans,” said a clueless Hatch. “All waiting here to help their elders. These are the young people we care about, the ones we need to protect from the evil-doers. Yes sir. These young people are the future of our country.” […] [AP News]

Author’s note: The above story is satire. In keeping with the spirit and antics of our political leaders it is puerile, mean-spirited, even borderline moronic. But I feel better. Copyright laws in this country are no joke. Artists and creators deserve protection, but the paying public has rights as well. Congress has forgotten this and has allowed a tiny handful of mega-corporations to lock away our culture and our heritage. We deserve better. Now go out and convince the good people of Utah to hit Senator Hatch with an electoral clue-by-four™. [b.cognosco]

Mapping our way to knowledge management

Part of successful knowledge management in organizations will revolve around how good a job we do at drawing “maps” that help explain and represent this new territory. Dane Carlson offers pointers to some resources we can adapt to that task.

You Are Here: Maps 101. How to create a good map. I’ll remember this for the next Talk Like a Pirate Day. via The Map Room: A weblog about maps, a good read itself…. [Dane Carlson’s Weblog]

In the wonderful serendipity that using a news aggregator offers, Frank Patrick’s Focused Performance weblog (a great resource on project management brings the following tidbit:

A Clarification on Maps and Plans. A Clarification on Maps and Plans — I recently quoted Alford Korzybski, using his often cited statement,

“A map is not the territory.”

Upon researching it, I didn’t go far enough. The complete statement from is actually…

“A map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.”

Puts a whole ‘nother spin on it, doesn’t it?

Project plans and schedules can be made to model a “similar structure” to the project itself, sufficiently reflecting reasonable expectations of the future as well as uncertainty to be useful. (I think someone — who was it? — once said that “all models are wrong, but some models are useful.” If that’s so, then I’m comfortable with the idea that some models are more useful than others.) [Frank Patrick’s Focused Performance Blog]

If those of us talking about knowledge management are exploring new territory, one of our responsibilities is to draw the maps that will encourage those who stayed behind to follow us and show them paths that are safe and interesting to travel.

Blogging for knowledge workers–think compound interest and start tomorrow

Why PhDs should start blogging.

Things New PhDs Should Start Doing [via José Luis Orihuela]

  1. Keep a Research Diary
  2. Maintain an Electronic Bibliography
  3. Know Your Search Engines
  4. An Archiving System for Useful Info
  5. Learn The Composition of your Research Community
  6. Document Useful Learning Experiences
  7. Keep a Professional Home Page
  8. Maintain an Updated CV
  9. Get Involved Early On
  10. Develop Research Meta-awareness

This article provide a good reference to justify why PhDs should start blogging 🙂

[Mathemagenic]

This is a much richer post than its title might suggest. What it really offers is a nicely thought out and articulated mini-case about what any aspiring knowledge worker ought to be doing to get more leverage out of their work.

While it’s never too late to start these kinds of strategies for yourself, the earlier you do, the sooner you’ll start building and refining your own private, custom-designed and organized knowledge base. Youe specifics may vary, but this provides a good road map to what you ought to be thinking about. And if you can’t generalize and abstract from the world of a Ph.D. student to your own world of knowledge work, then perhaps you ought to start looking for one of those nice 1950s assembly line jobs that don’t exist anymore.

It’s just like compound interest, the sooner you start the better.

If the only tool you have is a hammer…

A Day In My Life, By Bill Gates. (SOURCE:Scobleizer Radio Weblog)-PREDICTION: Within 10 years, the centre of most knowledge workers (including Bill Gates) will be a blog type application. NOT email. <quote> I’d say that of my time sitting in my office, that is, time outside of meetings, which is a couple of hours, two-thirds of that is sitting in E-mail. E-mail is really my primary application, because that’s where I’m getting notifications of new things, that’s where I’m stirring up trouble by sending mail out to lots of different groups. So it’s a fundamental application. And I think that’s probably true for most knowledge workers, that the E-mail is the one they sit in the most. Inside those E-mails they get spreadsheets, they get Word documents, they get PowerPoints, so they navigate out to those things, but the center is E-mail. </quote> [Roland Tanglao’s Weblog]

Roland catches the real point of this interview with Gates. The interview provides some interesting raw data on the day-to-day work practices of our economy’s quintessential knowledge worker. Email is the tool he has for communications so it is the tool that he uses. It is worth seeing how Gates thinks through how to get leverage from the tools that he has available. We all need to exercise that kind of thought about how to use our knowledge tools — blogs and aggregators included.

Diving into the middle

Mark Bernstein: The core challenge of the weblog is simply that we’re always coming into the middle of the story. This is what I meant with my post Orientation. I’ll steal the David Mamet quote, from his book On Directing Film:

In film or on the street, people who describe themselves to you are lying. Here is the difference: In the bad film, the fellow says, hello, Jack, I’m coming over to your home this evening because I need to get the money you borrowed from me. In the good film, he says, where the hell were you yesterday?

[Tesugen.com]

I wish I had seen this quote 18 months ago when I first started blogging. I did manage to figure it out, but it would have been nice to have this little piece of advice.

It reminds me of the editor who worked with me on my first book, Managing Information Strategically. Jon used to start reading my draft chapters at the top of page three. When I asked him why, he said that was where he always found my real lead. I still struggle with diving into the point I want to make and resisting the urge to offer all the backstory.

Treading softly with blogs in organizations

Site Redesign.

Wherever I go, CIO’s and other business leaders tell me they are in the process of a “Web site redesign.” Site redesign is a good thing but it may obfuscate more important issues. The motivation behind site redesign is typically a desire to increase traffic, make things easier to find, provide better organization of information, or improve the visual attractiveness of the site. These are all good things to do but my experience has been that the reason the traffic is less than desired is not because of the design of the site. It is not the look and feel, nor is it the lack of sophisticated information retrieval. I believe that the most important drivers of traffic are the availability of on demand, integrated, useful transactions and, secondly, the availability of access to expertise. (read more)

[via John Patrick’s weblog]

Some interesting commentary from John Patrick about corporate websites, both public and intranets. He has some very on point observations about the opportunity that blogs present as part of knowledge sharing inside companies.

Blogging is revolutionizing how information gets published and shared. A good blogger loves to communicate and uses blogging tools to write a “column” full of links to experts and sources of information. The blogger may or may not be the expert in a particular area but if not she knows who the expert is and acts as an intermediary and translator, thereby leveraging the available knowledge and expertise. A good enterprise blogger knows everything going on in a particular domain — the key people, the key projects, the key resources, etc. Blogging is not an index of information or a database — it is a living breathing dynamic “diary” of the blogger’s conscious. A blog can include comments from readers, moderated discussion, or an open discussion forum but for enterprise purposes, the simpler the better. The idea is not to reproduce the “bulletin boards” and “news groups” of the past. Blogging is more of a way to get to the experts than to have a free-for-all discussion group.

[via John Patrick’s weblog]

As many have observed with Marketing driving external websites and HR driving most intranets you’re not likely to have people who grasp the impact of dynamic content and voice. You’re also not likely to find the sorts of people comfortable with giving up control to allow the company’s voice to emerge from the harmony of its individuals’ voices.

CXO Bloggers , such as those tracked by Jon Udell, will help legitimize blogging as a knowledge sharing tool. So too will the use of blogs in IT and Project Management settings as Frank Patrick, Phil Windley, and Jonathan Peterson have recently been discussing. Some of their key observations:

Sharing of learnings, surprises and mistakes, is what collaboration for successful project work requires — not just within a particular team, but across programs and portfolios that might benefit. The first is about exploiting immediate opportunities. The latter is about assuring the future does not have to depend on relearning the same lessons [Frank Patrick]

Ex-CIO Phil Windley offers lots of insight into the challenges and potential of blogs in IT management and clearly recognizes the organizational challenges of getting blogs to take root:

One of the things I’ve noticed is that blogging requires an abundance mentality. I’ve also noted that blogs encourage a culture of candor. How do you develop a culture that supports sharing? Are the cultural properties that support blogging the same ones that support building a first rate IT organization

Peterson also has a series of excellent observations about blogs in project management, well summarized by Frank Patrick. One tidbit that I find intriguing is that “the beauty of RSS is the potential for extensibility to a ‘good enough’ level which still leverages all the tools and code that has already been created.” [Jonathan Peterson]

Buried in this is the subtle promise of blogs and RSS aggregation as a tool for knowledge sharing in organizations. The simplicity of the tools allows them to be gently grafted on to existing processes and practices with minimal disruption. The challenge is to let this simplicity work its course. The tempation will be to over-design, over-engineer, and over-control. Resisting that temptation will depend on a strong sensitivity to the dynamics of organizations. We do live in interesting times for helping organizations and knowledge workers make better use of knowledge.

 

 

What teachers make

what do teachers make?. Via Loren Webster, this wonderful poem by Taylor Mali:

What Teachers Make, or
You can always go to law school if things don t work out

He says the problem with teachers is, What s a kid going to learn
from someone who decided his best option in life was to become a teacher?
He reminds the other dinner guests that it s true what they say about
teachers:
Those who can, do; those who can t, teach.

I decide to bite my tongue instead of his
and resist the temptation to remind the dinner guests
that it s also true what they say about lawyers….

[mamamusings]

Go read the rest of it. Something to think about as our kids turn to summer vacation. I’ve done and I’ve taught. If you take it seriously, teaching is harder work.

Active reflection, managed learning, and organizational change

Organizational learning.

Organizational Learning is No Accident makes an important point: effective learning requires time to reflect…and our “right now” form of communication (email, IM, etc.) doesn’t allow reflection time…making it difficult for people and organizations to change (time being an important component to acclimate to changes).

[elearnspace blog]

Excellent material on the challenges of building in the necessary time for reflection to power organizational learning and change. One interesting aspect to this line of thought is that reflection has to become an explicit process for it to work at the operating pace of today’s economy.

It’s a bit of a paradox. When we had time for reflection to work at its natural pace, we didn’t have to depend on learning to keep our organizations aligned with their environment. Now that we need the learning, we can’t rely on unaided reflection.

Turning a problem into an opportunity, we need to highlight the importance of reflection to learning, develop skills at active reflection, and make it easier to create the raw materials for reflection (hint: weblogs). I’ve written about this from time to time with pointers to some resources I’ve found useful.

See: