by BruceTurner

Edward Tufte Presidential Appointment
[Via Daring Fireball]

President Obama has appointed Edward Tufte to the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel, “whose job is to track and explain $787 billion in recovery stimulus funds”. Outstanding.

[More]

This is pretty cool. Tufte is one of my favorite people, not only for his highly original books on data presentation but also for his sheer force of personality. He is one of the most entertaining, enlightening speakers I have ever heard.

I attended one of his workshops in Seattle probably close to 20 years ago. There was an interchange that has stuck with me ever since, because it so succinctly illustrates the divide between truly original, innovative change and the typical corporate response.

Tufte was discussing the different interfaces between the Mac OS and Windows. After going through a lot of the pluses he saw in the Mac and a lot of the minuses in Windows, he stated that the Mac looked like it had been created by one or a small group of people with a single purpose, a single view of how the information should be presented, while Windows looked like it had been done by a committee.

He then said that all the best presentations were this way – a single point of view forcefully pushed onto everyone. Someone in the audience then asked but what happens if your single point of view turns out to be wrong, to not work.

Tufte replied, simply, “You should be fired.” You could almost audibly hear the intake of everyone’s breath. That is exactly what they feared and why they would always want to retreat into committee decisions – they can’t be fired if the committee made the decision. FUD is what drives most people.

The creative, the innovative do not really fear failure, often because they are adaptable enough to ‘route around the damage’ quickly enough. They do not usually doubt the mission they are on and are certainly not uncertain about the effects. Read about the development of the Mac. They were going to change the world, no doubt about it. While you can see that there really was a focus of vision, there are also lots of ‘failures’ that had to be fixed. The key was to fail quickly, leaving time to find success.

And permitting committed individuals to find their own way to success rather than rely on committees to fix them.

Committees very seldom fail quickly, since failure is the thing they fear the most. They would rather succeed carefully than perhaps fail spectacularly. And they very seldom produce revolutionary change.

Single viewpoint, change the world, rapidly overcome obstacles, adaptable. All characteristics of successful change. They do not fear spectacular failure because the fruits of success will be so sweet.

by aslakr
[2b2k] Clay Shirky, info overload, and when filters increase the size of what’s filtered
[Via Joho the Blog]

Clay Shirky’s masterful talk at the Web 2.0 Expo in NYC last September — “It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure” — makes crucial points and makes them beautifully. [Clay explains in greater detail in this two part CJR interview: 1 2]

So I’ve been writing about information overload in the context of our traditional strategy for knowing. Clay traces information overload to the 15th century, but others have taken it back earlier than that, and there’s even a quotation from Seneca (4 BCE) that can be pressed into service: “What is the point of having countless books and libraries whose titles the owner could scarcely read through in his whole lifetime? That mass of books burdens the student without instructing…” I’m sure Clay would agree that if we take “information overload” as meaning the sense that there’s too much for any one individual to know, we can push the date back even further.

[More

David Weinberger has been one of my touchstones ever since I read The Cluetrain Manifesto. I cried when I read that book because it so simply rendered what I had achingly been trying to conceptualize.

Dealing with information glut today leverages an old way of doing things in a new way. It uses synthesis rather than analysis. Analysis gave us the industrial revolution. Breaking the complex down into small understandable bits allowed us to create the assembly line that could put together our greatest creations, such as the Space Shuttle, with more than 2.5 million parts.

Yet a single O-ring can destroy the whole thing.

Synthesis brings together facts, allows us to see them in new ways. But to attack the really complex problems of today, we need to utilize synthesis from a wide range of viewpoints, all providing their own filter. As with the story of the 5 blind men and the elephant, no one person has all the information. But a synthesis of everyone’s information provides a reasonable approximation.

David discusses this view:

A traditional filter in its strongest sense removes materials: It filters out the penny dreadful novels so that they don’t make it onto the shelves of your local library, or it filters out the crazy letters written in crayon so they don’t make it into your local newspaper. Filtering now does not remove materials. Everything is still a few clicks away. The new filtering reduces the number of clicks for some pages, while leaving everything else the same number of clicks away. Granted, that is an overly-optimistic way of putting it: Being the millionth result listed by a Google search makes it many millions of times harder to find that page than the ones that make it onto Google’s front page. Nevertheless, it’s still much much easier to access that millionth-listed page than it is to access a book that didn’t make it through the publishing system’s editorial filters.

It is through synthesis that new technologies allow us to deal with information glut. And this synthesis necessarily involves human social networks. Because humans are exquisitely positioned to filter out noise and find the signal.

I’ve discussed the DIKW model. Data simply exists. Information happens when humans interact with the data. Transformation of information, both tacit and explicit, produces knowledge, which is the ability to make a decision, to take an action. Often that action is to start the cycle again, generating more data and so on.

This can be quite analytical in approach as we try to understand something. But the final link in the cycle, wisdom, is the ability to make the RIGHT decision. This necessarily require synthesis.

New technologies allow us to deal with much more data than before, generate more information and produce more knowledge. However, without synthetic approaches that bring together a wide range of human knowledge, we will not gain the wisdom we need.

Luckily, the same technologies that produce so much data also provide us with the tools to leverage our interaction with knowledge. If we create useful social structures, ones that properly synthesize the knowledge, that employ human social networks that act as great filters, then we can more rapidly compete the DIKW cycle and take the correct actions.

by Parksy1964
A Better Way to Manage Knowledge:
[Via HarvardBusiness.org]

We give a lot of talks and presentations about the ways and places companies and their employees learn the fastest. We call these learning environments creation spaces — places where individuals and teams interact and collaborate within a broader learning ecology so that performance accelerates.

During these discussions, it’s inevitable that somebody raises their hand. “Wait a minute,” they say, “isn’t this just knowledge management all over again?”

It’s an understandable concern. Knowledge management, after all, was probably the hottest topic in management in the 1990s. “If only our company knew what our company knows” was the mantra in those days. With knowledge becoming the most important factor of production, surely competitive success awaited those companies that could effectively manage what their employees knew.

But we all know by now that despite massive investments and a lot of highly motivated people knowledge management in some instances didn’t yield all the benefits it could have. The best KM systems succeeded at capturing and institutionalizing the knowledge of the firm. But for the most part the repositories and directories remained fragmentary and the resources didn’t get used. The folks with the knowledge were often reluctant to put what they knew into the database. The folks seeking the knowledge often had trouble finding what they needed.

Moreover, in their quest to capture what the firm already knows, most knowledge managers lost sight of the fact that the real value is in creating new knowledge, rather than simply “managing” existing knowledge. In this fast moving world, what we know — our “stocks” of knowledge — depreciate faster than they used to. So we've got to keep creating new knowledge in order to keep pace.

Most of us, as individuals, know this. That’s why we’re not keen to spend time entering our latest document into a knowledge management system. We know we’re better off engaging in the interactions and collaborations that create new knowledge about how to get things done.

In these circumstances, the last thing the world needs is another knowledge management scheme focusing on capturing knowledge that already exists. What we need are new approaches to creating knowledge, ones that take advantage of the new digital infrastructure’s ability to lower the interaction costs among us all — ones that mobilize big, diverse groups of participants to innovate and create new value.

We’ve found in our research into environments like World of Warcraft (WoW) that new knowledge comes into being when people who share passions for a given endeavor interact and collaborate around difficult performance challenges. Most long-time gamers, for instance, figured it would be months before anybody made it all the way through the many difficult performance “levels” involved in The Burning Crusade, the World of Warcraft extension released in 2007. But a French player named Gullerbone did so little more than 28 hours after the extension was released. His accomplishment made headlines in the gamer world.

Gullerbone succeeded by taking advantage of the tools and resources available to him (and his “guild” of teammates) in the vast creation space that has emerged within and around World of Warcraft. Creation spaces emerge from a careful recipe of participants, interactions, and environments blended by insightful designers. And they succeed where knowledge management fails.

Why? Because these creation spaces, heavily relying on shared network platforms, provide tools and forums for knowledge creation while at the same time capturing the discussion, analysis, and actions in ways that make it easier to share across a broader range of participants. Soon after Gullerbone and his guild figured out how to get through the new performance levels of the Burning Crusade, the details about how they did it soon became widely available in the social media “knowledge economy” surrounding the game — videos, blogs, wikis, etc.

[More]

Knowledge management is really a misnomer.

What most companies called knowledge management was actually information management. It was just a way for them to capture tacit information held by the employees and make it explicit. That is something companies are very good at but not how knowledge is created.

It is through the interconversion of tacit and explicit information that creates knowledge, which is the ability to take an action.

Now, people will participate when there are direct benefits. Blogs and wikis have great benefits for a worker. An emergent property of this is that the community sees the information and can easily transform it into knowledge. That is because, as opposed to almost every knowledge management system, Web 2.0 technologies map almost one-to-one with human social networks, yet provide benefits unattainable before. One example is being able to carry on a conversation without having to occupy the same place at the same time.

These authors know this:

This focus on knowledge creation shifts the motivations of participants. Knowledge management systems desperately try to persuade participants to invest time and effort to contribute existing knowledge with the vague and long-term promise that they themselves might eventually derive value from the contributions of others. In contrast, creation spaces focus on providing immediate value to participants in terms of helping them tackle difficult performance challenges while at the same time reducing the effort required to capture and disseminate the knowledge created.

Creation spaces have the potential to generate increasing returns — the more participants that join, the faster new knowledge gets created and the more rapidly performance improves. They bring into play network effects in the generation of new knowledge. In contrast, traditional knowledge management systems are inherently diminishing returns propositions. Since existing knowledge is by definition limited, it requires more and more effort to squeeze the next increment of performance improvement as existing knowledge gets more broadly distributed.

Capturing information is easy and was the low hanging fruit that many so-called knowledge management systems used. It failed at creating knowledge mainly because it did not leverage the social aspect in worthwhile ways.

They will succeed where others fail.

Technorati Tags: Open Access, Web 2.0

Transformation, not technology:
[Via Jon Stahl's Journal]

It occurred to me yesterday that the real challenge we[1] face is not the question of “how do we apply technology tools to organizations?” but more “how do we help organizations & people transform themselves so that they are more able to harness the power of technology?”

[1] “we” = those of us standing astride the worlds of technology and social change.

[More]

There is really not much more to add to this. I believe this can be accomplished by helping the organizations to diffuse innovations more rapidly. The rest will follow.

Technorati Tags: Technology, Web 2.0

by Christiиa
10 Ways to Recognize the Innovators In Your Organization:
[Via BIF Speak]

Can you recognize an innovator when you meet one? In his latest Mass High Tech column, BIF founder Saul Kaplan offers the 10 behavioral characteristics he uses to recognize an innovator. “If the game is to identify and connect the innovators, how do you identify them and ensure that they have the resources and freedom to innovate?” After years of honing his targeting and selection process, here are Saul’s first five traits:

[More]

The original article is very important to read. The 10 ways are a useful measure but it also says this:

I used to think we could convert everyone to be an innovator or create a culture in which everyone could innovate. I have changed my view after many years as a road-warrior consultant and innovation junkie. Proselytizing doesn’t work. People are either wired as innovators or they aren’t. The trick isn’t to create more innovators; it is to identify them, connect them together in purposeful ways, and give them the freedom to innovate. A leader’s job is to create an environment where innovators can thrive.

While there are times when almost anyone can innovate, but some people are just ‘wired’ to produce and spread new ideas. They just have to do that and an organization that can identify them and harness their ingenuity can adapt much more rapidly than a group that does not.

If their innovative talents are not harnesses, they often simply disrupt the ability of the majority of the company to actually do their jobs. Because, at its heart, innovation is disruptive.

Here is the list of 10 ways to identify innovators:

1) Innovators think there is a better way.
2) Innovators know that without passion there can be no innovation.
3) Innovators embrace change to a fault.
4) Innovators have a strong point of view but know that they are missing something.
5) Innovators know innovation is a team sport.
6) Innovators embrace constraints as opportunities.
7) Innovators celebrate their vulnerability.
8) Innovators openly share their ideas and passions, expecting to be challenged.
9) Innovators know that the best ideas are in the gray areas between silos.
10) Innovators know that a good story can change the world.

While these are traits are those found with innovators, they do not really help identify them when simply looking at a group of employees. Saul’s article provides a hint for separating the innovators from the rest of the group of employees.

It is not important or even possible to have everyone in an organization be innovative. In fact, most of the people in an organization should not be focused on innovation. Rather, they should be focused on delivering results within the current business model. These are the motivated and valued individuals committed to making quarterly numbers and annual business objectives. There is nothing wrong with that, and those individuals must be highly valued in any organization. They are people who get stuff done. They should not be made to feel like second-class citizens just because they are not innovators. Without them there would be no resources to invest in innovation.

In my discussion of the diffusion of innovation through a community, I mentioned the work of some researchers such as Everett Rogers. He splits an organization into 5 groups based on how rapidly each adopts innovations and change. These groups were innovators, early adopters, early middle, late middle and laggards. But I like to rename them.

The word ‘innovator’ has some very positive conotations. People don’t like being told they are not innovators and made to feel like ‘second-class citizens.’ I tend to view each group more by what they do and how the community views each group.

The majority of people, those in the middle, have several characteristics that are identifiable but the easiest to see is that they are Doers. As Saul mentions, ‘they get stuff done.’

Innovators, who usually make up 3-5% of a community, love new things and are always advocating change. They are necessary to any organization the deals in innovations but they are generally very disruptive to the doers.

Innovators keep coming up with things that changes a Doers’ workflow. Often they love new things simply because they are new, not necessarily useful. It is harder to get things done when someone keeps suggesting changes.

Doers do and innovators disrupt. This is partly the reason why the community rarely views innovators as people to listen to. Disruption, while often necessary, often makes a Doers’ life harder.

For innovations to move from the Disruptors to the Doers, there needs to be thought leaders, the early adopters, who act a really good mediators between the innovations of Disruptors and the work of Doers. In fact, the ability of innovative communities to function well, there have to be enough of these mediators. Without them, the Disruptors and Doers have a very dysfunctional relations.

These Mediators are also viewed as the thought leaders of the community, the ones whose opinions are listened to, often because they are so good at filtering disruptive innovations.

So, it can be somewhat easy to find the innovators (Disruptors) by simply asking the majority (Doers) who disrupts their work the most with ideas. Then using the 10 ways that Saul delineates will be very helpful in separating the truly innovative from those who are merely time-wasters.

These Disruptors, however, need to work through the Mediators in order for the community to more rapidly take up change. The Disruptors, by themselves, will generally not be listened to.

So, while finding the people who innovate is important, finding those who can mediate these changes is also important.

In my experience, many communities have enough disruptive innovators and a large majority of doers. What they lack are enough early adopting mediators to permit rapid adoption of change.

Later, I’ll discuss how to identify these mediators by both top-down and bottom-up approaches. These are the key people in the process. I’ll also have some suggestions for overcoming the lack of Mediators in many organizations.

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0

by Ed Bierman
We cannot problem solve our way into fundamental change, or transformation
[Via Gurteen Knowledge-Log]

By David Gurteen

Whenever I run my Knowledge Cafe Masterclasses, a few people always have a serious problem with the fact that when run in its “pure form” there are no tangible outcomes of a Knowledge Cafe.

There are plenty of intangible ones, such as a better understanding of the issue, a better understanding of ones own views, a better understanding of others perspectives, improved relationships and genuine engagement and motivation to pursue the subject but no outcomes in the form of a decision or a consensus or a to-do list.

I and many others don’t have a problem with this — the intangibles are worthy outcomes. And then I recently came across this quote from Peter Block in an online booklet of his entited Civic Engagement and theRestoration of Community: Changing the Nature of the Conversation

My belief is that the way we create conversations that overcome the fragmented nature of our communities is what creates an alternative future.

This can be a difficult stance to take for we have a deeply held belief that the way to make a difference in the world is to define problems and needs and then recommend actions to solve those needs.

We are all problem solvers, action oriented and results minded. It is illegal in this culture to leave a meeting without a to-do list.

We want measurable outcomes and we want them now.

What is hard to grasp is that it is this very mindset which prevents anything fundamental from changing.

We cannot problem solve our way into fundamental change, or transformation.

This is not an argument against problem solving; it is an intention to shift the context and language within which problem solving takes place.

Authentic transformation is about a shift in context and a shift in language and conversation. It is about changing our idea of what constitutes action.

Credit: Civic Engagement and theRestoration of Community: Changing the Nature of the Conversation by David Block

So another intangible I should add to my list: “a shift in context and in language and conversation that changes our idea of what constitutes action.”

[More]

I do not usually include an entire post but this one has so many important points. There are intangible benefits when these changes are made that may eventually lead to tangible benefits. But, most likely, those benefits will be a series of actions that would be wildly different than expected.

This is the paradox of a paradigm shift. People on either side live in completely different contextual worlds and are completely unable to explain their worldview to the other. One example – mimeograph machines. This used to be the only inexpensive way that multiple copies of a test could be produced for schools. There was an entire process developed for creating the stencils for the test, etc. It resulted in a ‘wax’ copy of the test that was used to print off the copies. With the appearance of copiers, the mimeograph disappeared from regular use. Now most young people have no idea of what a mimeograph is.

Thus when they watch National Lampoon’s Animal House, they just do not understand the whole scene with the two characters rifling through the trash bin to find the stencil. They have no personal knowledge of what a stencil is or why having one would be useful for cheating on a test.

Transformation presents a similar division between what was and what is. But those organizations that can effectively learn how to move information around more effectively, who can harness human social networks in order to solve complex problems, will be more successful.

They may just have a hard time explaining it to those organizations still on the other side.

by jordigraells>