Author: JP

Following a recent post, Stephen questioned:

how much power we have, as all-too-human individuals, to SET norms. (On the other hand I suspect we have all encountered bosses who felt they could, and should, set norms!) Finally, I continue to hold that the norms of the workplace do not always align with the norms of our leisure time

Sean riposted:

This is probably true with respect to the babyboom generation, and probably wrong with respect to the digital generation (or generation ‘Y’). I’m gen X so basically my norms are unclear!

And it made me think, what are the norms of my generation? And at least one emerged:
Norm Peterson.

Shahidul Alam is a fine photojournalist, just take a look at his recent works on his blog. The photo-essay on the recent flooding in Bangladesh is particularly powerful.

My thanks to Rageboy for the tip-off. Apparently Shahidul got in touch with Chris about something or the other; which makes me wonder, is Chris Locke really Kevin Bacon in disguise? Scratch that, I don’t think I know anyone who is six degrees separated from Chris, it feels like everyone is closer to 2 degrees. Anyone else feel that way?

There’s been a lot written recently about the interaction between real and virtual worlds, by people far more knowledgeable about the subject than I could ever be. Yet, something that happened to me over the past couple of days made me think harder about the days to come.

What happened was almost trivial. Some of you know I had had a heart attack last Christmas, and that I wear a pacemaker. (An Implantable Cardioverter-Defibrillator, to be precise). This wee tim’rous beastie they call an ICD has a little built-in alarm. And said little built-in alarm went off in the early hours of Monday morning.

It was an unusual feeling, having an alarm go off inside you. A small part of me went into immediate panic mode, while the rest of me looked at the “facts” as I could see them; I reasoned that I’d never felt better, I was working out every day, I was learning to swim, the weather was hot and gruelling, my recovery rates were good, I was eating well and sleeping well, God was in His heaven and all was well with the world.

And so I carried on through Monday, determining to check things out after I returned to London. There were little voices whispering irritating things to do with having to have another operation, but I wasn’t listening.

Then the same thing happened Tuesday morning. This time I could not let it be, so I woke up early and called my cardiologist. Waited for his call back, resigned myself to not exercising or swimming until I knew better. He called back, and the answer was what I had hoped for.

What mattered most was how I felt. The alarms could have been caused by a number of factors, the key issue was how I felt. And I felt fine.

The incident made me think about the intersection between real and virtual worlds, and how more and more we live in that hybrid world. With hybrid signals. Lots of signals.

The signals need interpreting. Which means we have an increased reliance on people who can do the interpreting, although in most cases the final call will be personal.

This reliance on people doing the interpreting is what concerned me. It requires people to give honest open professional advice, making themselves extremely vulnerable. We need the “valuable but vulnerable” professional advice that Michael Power spoke so eloquently about in The Risk Management of Everything. Yet all the signs are that we are moving into a more and more litigious society, with (as Professor Power intimated) the small print outweighing the valuable advice.

Trust is going to mean something else as the real and virtual worlds collide, and as the sources and devices for signals and alarms increase exponentially. Trust is going to mean vulnerability on both sides, both trusted and trusting. That vulnerability is going to require covenant relationships in order to do away with the garbage-net of litigation.

Unless we do this, unless we move to covenant relationships between professional parties and the public at large, we are going to be overwhelmed. Overwhelmed by the noises we hear rather than the signals we should be listening to. Not waving but drowning.

I don’t know if it’s apocryphal or not, but years ago I heard a story about tulips. With advances in transportation and in technology, there were people interested in time-shifting tulip production. So they tried various methods associated with making tulips believe it was spring already, placing them in hothouses, keeping the surroundings springlike, and so on. The bulbs refused to budge and the experiments were gigantic failures.

Until someone figured out, maybe it’s not worth conning the bulb into thinking it’s spring. Maybe the bulb needed to know that winter was over. So they tried to keep the bulbs in artificial cold, and bingo the tulips had been time-shifted.

I felt the same way when I made the decision, some years ago, to open up my mailbox to my direct reports. My intention was to let them see precisely what I did by showing them what I faced, the incoming mail. That they could somehow vicariously gain the experience of sitting where I sat, doing what I did, thinking what I thought, by seeing what I saw.

And then I observed what they did. Boy was I wrong. Most of them were far more interested in my “sent mail”. They felt they could learn more by watching my outgoing rather than my incoming, they felt they could get “into my head” faster by focusing on my responses rather than on the stimuli.

I am no expert in knowledge management; I just like watching people and learning from them; I like teaching and mentoring people as well; and I try and do all this with an open and “sharing” management style. More trust and less verify until the need for verification keeps presenting itself, so to say.

What I saw with the opening up of my mailbox  confirmed a number of prior suspicions, suspicions that I had held ever since I’d seen early versions of Autonomy and Verity, suspicions enhanced as I got used to Copernic and Momma and Google.

People learn best by watching what you do. Not what you say.

And it is with this perspective that I am fascinated by the potential provided by Facebook and its ilk.

For example, one of the Story Types available in Facebook goes something like this:

John Smith used Blog Friends to read 24 Hours Left to Apply to Join Tulsa. John surfed from his own profile. The post was written by Fred Jones.

I think this is very powerful. Let me explain why.

I believe there are three primary reasons why an enterprise would want to “manage its knowledge”:

One, to share learning, so that the same mistake is not made multiple times.

Two, to share learning, so that activities get sped up.

Three, to share learning, so that people are motivated to learn and to teach.

To share learning.

Knowledge management is not really about the content, it is about creating an environment where learning takes place. Maybe we spend too much time trying to create an environment where teaching takes place, rather than focus on the learning.

Since people want to learn by watching others, what we need to do is to improve the toolsets and the environment that allows people to watch others. It could be as simple as: What does my boss do? Whom does she talk to? What are her surfing habits like? Whom does she treat as high priority in terms of communications received? What applications does she use? Which ones does she not use? When she has a particular Ghost to deal with, which particular Ghostbuster does she call?

What makes her tick. That’s what they want to understand, that’s what they want to learn from.

This type of learning is not just about subordinate-to-boss and succession-plan related, it is also about newbie-to-old-hand, mentored-to-mentor. A picture of the activities and relationships and paths followed, a “let me show you” session, is worth a thousand “let me tell you” sessions.

More and more, knowledge management is going to be about reducing the cost of, and simplifying the process for, letting someone watch what you do. Nonintrusively. Time-shifted. Place-shifted. Searchable. Archivable. Retrievable.

That’s how we are going to create the right learning environments. I think Facebook has the tools to capture much of this in the nonintrusive time-shifted place-shifted shareable way. Let the patterns emerge. Share the patterns. Get inside people’s heads. More to follow, let me see how the comments flow from this Starter-For-Ten.

The kernel for this post came from my gently meandering back and forth through Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan; I’m still reading through it for the first time.

I quote from the book, page 29

Now consider the effect of the first music recording, an invention that introduced a great deal of injustice. Our ability to reproduce and repeat performances allows me to listen on my laptop to hours of background music of the pianist Vladimir Horowitz (now extremely dead) performing Rachmaninoff’s Preludes, instead of to the local Russian emigre musician (still living), who is now reduced to giving piano lessons to generally untalented children for close to minimum wage. Horowitz, though dead, is putting the poor man out of business. […….] If you ask me why I select Horowitz, I will answer that it is because of the order, rhythm, or passion, when in fact there are probably a legion of people I have never heard about, and will never hear about — those who did not make it to the stage, but who might play just as well.

I’ve considered this innate “injustice” many times, apparently caused by the introduction of cheaper reproduction and transmission technologies. But I’ve tended to take quite a different view to that espoused by Taleb.

For me, the unfairness lay not in the reproduction and transmission technologies, but in the bottlenecks, the “experts” whose patronage was required. The people who made the stars. The people who gave the performers airtime, signed them up to record deals, promoted the works, and so on.

The way I looked at it, technological advances had consistently lowered the barriers to entry for various types of artist, only to find that someone else in a downstream process raised the barriers again. And it was these “someone elses” that I tended to look at with great suspicion.

[An aside. The roots for this suspicion were planted while I was still an undergraduate reading Economics, hearing about the concepts of “merit goods”. I could not believe that I was going to join a group of people arrogant enough to decide what was good for others. A few years later, I found myself seemingly on the other side of the fence, working as a technical writer. My boss wanted me to write the manuals so that a “Sun reader” would understand them. I felt it was my duty to raise literacy and refused to succumb to the pressure, and wrote the way I wanted to write, not explicitly highbrow but unwilling to become lowest-common denominator.]

The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that Taleb’s injustice is based on the evils inherent in hit cultures and prodigiously absent in long-tail cultures; evils often spawned by “experts” who believed they had a God-given right to decide on others’ behalf, a problem often avoided by wisdom-of-crowd approaches.

We used to live in a world where a street musician was a nobody until and unless some expert God came along and patronised him. The factors of “star” production were all in the hands of the expert.

Now, the barriers to entry are significantly lower. The street musician has the opportunity to burn his own CD, make his own YouTube demo, and make it to the 21st century variant of stardom driven by wisdom-of-crowds. Why 21st century variant? Because stardom is now a long-tail concept. Instead of a very small number of winners and a very large number of losers in a very big winner-takes-nearly-all pool, we now have many pools, many winners, albeit in smaller pools.

The same is true for blogs and wikis and films and books. The expert-as-judge will pooh-pooh the mass creation of culture, because he is being rapidly disintermediated. Sure there are many bad blogs, sure there are many poor wikipedia articles, sure there are many crap videos on Youtube.

But let’s not forget there are many crap newspapers, many crap TV programmes, many crap encyclopaedia articles, many crap films.

We’ve always had crap. Now we have the opportunity to allow stuff that’s not crap to rise to the surface. Let’s not give that opportunity up just because the disintermediated expert whinges.