A nice workflow diagram if you are a fan of David Allen’s Getting Things Done(and you should be).
By way of 43 Folders, which I suspect I will also become a fan of. Some of the material there is a bit Mac centric, but the rest of it more than offsets that minor issue if you don’t happen to be a Mac user.
Getting Things Done fans, definitely don t miss this. A PDF illustrating a cool, annotated version of the basic GTD workflow. [43 Folders]
An interesting piece in Tuesday’s NY Times on a researcher who studies disasters to better understand people and organizations:
A Sociologist With an Advanced Degree in Calamity. Kathleen Tierney, a disaster researcher, says that catastrophes change the way people experience time. By By CLAUDIA DREIFUS. [The New York Times > Science]
There’s lots of good stuff here, but this quote in particular caught my eye:
one of the things you see in a crisis is devolution of authority to the lower levels of organizations, and that happens, in part, because there are so many decisions to be made. Also, effective decision making has to be responsive to what is happening at a given location. The centralized commander is too far away for that. You generally see people taking responsibility themselves.
One organizational advantage in a disaster or crisis is that centralized commanders don’t generally have the time to get annoyed when subordinates decide to take responsibility for themselves.
My own sense is that more of our organizational life is coming to resemble crises in one form or another and that we need to incorporate that reality into our ways of working. Two authors come to mind immediately. The first is Peter Vaill who introduced me to the notion of “permanent whitewater” as a metaphor for today’s organizational world. I’d recommend both Learning As a Way of Being : Strategies for Survival in a World of Permanent White Water and Managing As a Performing Art : New Ideas for a World of Chaotic Change. [Halley, this is the reference I meant today, not Peter Block, although he’s worth reading too]. The second is Gary Klein’s Sources of Power : How People Make Decisions. Klein’s work shows how much real decision making relies on “gut instinct” informed by experience with lots of similar chaotic situations.
Had a fabulous lunch with Halley today in Cambridge. Like all the lunches I’ve had with fellow bloggers, we started way past the pleasantries and our conversation ranged from ice hockey for 9-year olds to the future of the knowledge economy. Lots to think about. Looking forward to continuing the conversations here and elsewhere.
I’ve been thinking about Ted Leavitt recently.
Leavitt taught marketing at the Harvard Business School. His most famous aphorism is that “customers don’t but a quarter-inch drill bit, they buy a quarter-inch hole.” Clever, and possibly helpful, if you’re a marketer by trade. But what if you happen to be a knowledge worker? You don’t have the luxury of knowing that what you need is a quarter-inch hole.
While every technology marketer out there is trying to sell you quarter-inch holes, you actually need to be thinking in terms of what kind of general purpose knowledge work toolkit you need to assemble to address the changing and unpredictable demands you face. For knowledge work, solution selling gets in the way at best. A tool perspective will be more productive, even if it is working against the grain.
Here are some quick contrasts between a solutions perspective and a tools perspective:
| Solutions | Tools |
| Passive | Active |
| Accept/Reject | Co-create |
| Train | Learn |
| Conformance | Craft |
| Consumer | Producer |
| CEO | Hacker |
One challenge to overcome is that we’ve been conditioned to think in terms of solutions. We wait for the early adopters to figure everything out so that we can buy the answer off the shelf. We are still too soon in the world of knowledge work. If you are a knowledge worker, then circumstances have forced you back to the level of creating your own toolset. And back to the level of digging underneath the hypothetical solutions to hypothetical problems that today’s marketing conventions will layer on top of the tools themselves that ought to be your target.
Both Hugh Macleod and Evelyn Rodriguez belong in your pay attention to list if you are remotely interested in the topic of knowledge work and how it is changing the nature of the organizations we inhabit and create.
the creative age. A blogger I’m enjoying a lot these days is Evelyn Rodriguez. She’s in sync with a lot of my current thinking, namely, that we’re entering into what is known as “The Creative Age”. Good-bye white collar, hello black collar…. [gapingvoid]
This struck a chord. I make no secret of being cursed with curiosity and it has come close to killing me a few times both metaphorically and literally (there was that high voltage probe on a Hewlett Packard scintillometer back in high school that wasn’t quite properly grounded).
Curiosity is not something greatly respected in our culture today and that is a dangerous thing. It makes you easier to manipulate. Hemingway’s advice on crap detectors applies to more than writers and appears to be in desparately short supply these days.
My only caveat here is that while I agree that “the pursuit of knowledge is never done,” that does not imply for me that there are no objective truths in the world. If I let go of this laptop in the TSA security line, it will hit the floor. That does complicate things because “agreeing to disagree” isn’t always an out in all conversations. There are “facts” that can be agreed on, but that doesn’t finish the conversation or the deeper search for truth.
Children are our best guides here. None of them need to be trained in the techniques of 7 whys (would that toddlers would stop at 7). After formal schooling, however, most of us need to rediscover what we naturally know how to do.
Can we teach the joy of thinking?. I have been blessed – and cursed – with a curious mind. I say cursed not simply because curiosity killed the cat, but because it makes it very difficult for me to understand people who seem to lack curiosity about themselves and the world around them. This difficulty causes me the most grief when, every fall, I am faced with students who appear to utterly lack curiosity. When I am in a good mood, I ask myself how that is even possible. When I am in poor humour, I wonder why they’ve bothered to go to university at all.
Sound harsh? Well, it probably is. And no doubt oversimplified. But here’s the thing: in a world where people are not equal in terms of interest, how can we teach wonder?
You see, I wonder all the time. Actually, I would need several lifetimes to understand all the things I wonder about. I don’t know how not to wonder. I keep a notebook that contains only questions – hundreds of them – which I share with my students whenever they say that can’t think of anything to research or write about. Colleagues have warned me that I am “giving away” my ideas for future research and, presumably, some sort of future glory. But for me, the beauty and the reward is in our ever-changing understandings – and it sure won’t be me who definitively sorts the world. I only hope there are enough people who keep asking hard questions.
I genuinely believe that the pursuit of knowledge is never done. This is, in part, related to my understanding that there is no absolute, determining, objective truth in the world – a position which obligates me to continue asking questions and forces me to acknowledge that no knowledge is neutral or impartial.
If the best we can offer is subjective, multiple, and partial truths, then learning and understanding requires critical thinking, the questioning of assumptions, self-reflection and self-awareness. In a world that doesn’t want to “waste time” with things other than “the facts,” it turns out that these inter-related practices are, by far, the hardest ones to teach. And I can’t help but to believe they are the most important. [Purse Lip Square Jaw]
Whatever your political leanings, you need to read this interview and think about what Lakoff has to say.
George Lakoff on how to argue with conservatives. David Pescovitz: Last year, BB pal Bonnie Powell conducted a staggering interview with cognitive linguist and cultural commentator George Lakoff about why the Democrats need a lesson in language. In these days just before the Republican National Convention, Bonnie sat down again with Lakoff to discuss his forthcoming book, Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, and why it’s important to think before you speak:
You’ve said that progressives should never use the phrase “war on terror” why?
There are two reasons for that. Let’s start with “terror.” Terror is a general state, and it’s internal to a person. Terror is not the person we’re fighting, the “terrorist.” The word terror activates your fear, and fear activates the strict father model, which is what conservatives want. The “war on terror” is not about stopping you from being afraid, it’s about making you afraid.
I’m not sure whether this is best understood as an example of unintended consequences or of the inevitable evil/cluelessness of the suits. Regardless, it is certainly a story worth understanding in more depth.
As a consultant I’ve spent most of my career working in temporary spaces of one sort or another. There is great power in being able to quickly rearrange workspace to meet immediate needs. More often than not, that has worked best with the cheapest and simplest of furnishings. While cubicles capture the form of flexibility, they often miss the spirit. And the hardest issue is usually how to avoid the furniture police.
Happy 40th Birthday, cubicle!. Mark Frauenfelder: Metropolis‘ Yvonne Abrahams profiles Bob Propst, inventor of the office cubicle. A great example of a neat idea morphing into its opposite.
So, in 1964, Herman Miller’s Action Office system was born. It started with a huge open area, sectioned off to give workers completely enclosed spaces if needed, or semi-enclosed spaces for a more social kind of privacy. Offices were arranged in such a way that workers would be likely to have plenty of contact with each other and with management.
…
Propst’s forward-thinking motives were misinterpreted by some companies, which simply crammed more workers into smaller spaces and took advantage of the system’s huge potential for savings and tax breaks … “Lots are run by crass people who can take the same kind of equipment and create hellholes. They make little bitty cubicles and stuff people in them. Barren, rat-hole places.”
Link (Thanks, Bill!) [Boing Boing]
A good mix of serious and entertaining tips on how to blog successfully.
I would also recommend Phil Windley’s advice on how to start a blog. Noting profound or earthshattering in either one, but they do represent a solid collection of good advice and both have good sets of links to other sources.
I would also recommend taking a look at RSS right off the bat. Feld Thoughts recommends a whitepaper from MediaThink (with annoying Flash animation) called RSS: The Next Big Thing Online (pdf file), as a good introduciton. Skip the annoying stuff and go straight to the useful stuff.
About Blogging Successfully. Simon’s Everything You Wanted to Know But Were Afraid To Ask attempts to be a complete round up of essential and practical blogging knowledge. There are obvious contradictions: Be Original(#19) Vs. Plagiarism is Encouraged(#22), but he probably does not expect to be taken seriously(#4). I wish he extended (#49) to include padding … [wordlog.com]
I have no immediate need for this. On the other hand, it is cool, which still matters to me even if it does brand me as totally out of touch. Which also makes it worth an entry here.
Online Stopwatch. I’m trying my hand at radio commentary, where time limits are critical. But I didn’t have a stopwatch to use for practice. A little Googling and, presto, I found an online version. It’s actually easier to use than a “real”… [Dynamist Blog]