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:

Kevin Kelly’s Recomendo

Kevin Kelly’s Recomendo. Before Kevin Kelly was the executive editor of Wired, he edited Whole Earth Review. I became hooked when he took over WER, and loved his Whole Earth book, Signal (which was based on an issue of WER that turned me on to Factsheet Five and the zine world). For the past few months, Kevin has been quietly publishing the wonderful Cool Tools email newsletter. It consists of reviews of “cool stuff”:

I include any books, tools, software, videos, maps, gadgets, hardware, websites, or gear that are extraordinarily handy or useful for individual and small groups. The best items are those that open up new possibilities. I depend on friends and readers to suggest things. Generally I try something out first if I can. I only recommend things I like and I ignore the rest. Tell me what you love. Suggestions for tools better than what I recommend always welcomed.

I bought a first aid kit for my trip to the islands based on Kevin’s review in Cool Tools. You can see all the past picks from Cool Tools on Kevin’s Recomendo site. Also, if you email him, he’ll put you on the Cool Tools list. Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]

Kevin Kelly’s Whole Earth Review was one of my favorite reads. The tools perspective was (and still is ) a powerful one, especially because it demands a level of mutual respect between tool and tool user. Tools are multi-purpose and what you create with them depends on the skill and discipline of the user as well as on the quality of the tool. That’s a lesson that gets forgotten in the marketing speak that makes empty promises of pushbutton ease of use and productivity for nothing.

Turns out that the Recomendo site also has an RSS feed, although it is titles only.

Creative Computing Archives 1976 online

Creative Computing 1976 archive online. Stefan sez, “From the primordial depths of personal computing history: A collection of scanned pages from the pioneering educational/entertainment zine, Creative Computing. I read a lot of these pieces in the original magazines, circa 1976. It has a BASIC listing for one of the very first computer games I ever played, DEEPSPACE. Volume 1 is also available on the site. Look for the advertisement by Roger Crumb!” Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan!) [Boing Boing Blog]

Lots of great stuff here. For example, look for Terry Winograd’s Reactive Engine paper. Still worth reading and thinking about.

Don’t define knowledge, improve knowledge work instead

KMPro with Mark Clare. Mark Clare argues that KM needs to step back and define knowledge before plunging forward with the “next wave” of knowledge management approaches or applications. [Knowledge Jolt with Jack]

I disagree.

I think that most efforts to define knowledge get hopelessly bogged down. The reason this happens is that the discussion is locked in an assumption that there needs to be a centrally managed agreement (at a minimum) about the definition.

I take a different approach. Focus instead on knowledge workers and knowledge work. Work on eliminating friction and hassles in their ability to do whatever it is they think matters. Attack the problems that are preventing knowledge workers from being as effective as they would like to be.

There’s an old story that I’ve heard described as a Russion proverb. It says that if each one of us takes care of sweeping the sidewalk in front of our own home, we won’t need streetsweepers. It’s worth thinking about how that might apply to the world of knowledge work, both on the level of being an individual knowledge worker yourself and on the level of helping make the other knowledge workers that surround you more effective.