Category: Four pillars

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.

David Eastman asked “What happened to Quaero?” in a recent comment on a post I’d written on search. Last I heard, which was early this year, France and Germany had decided to part ways on the project, but France was determined to continue. I remember reading this article while recuperating from my heart attack.

Other than what I can glean from Wikipedia (which you can read here) there isn’t much out there on the web. An article in the Daily Telegraph in early August suggests that the entire project has been “quietly shelved”. Prior to that, I’m sure I’d seen reports that Germany was funding Theseus and France were continuing to fund Quaero. But I haven’t seen anything concrete.

There’s something vaguely amusing in having to search for information on Quaero. Says it all, I guess. Unless someone else knows better, in which case please comment.

Whenever I heard the phrase Thundering Herd I used to think of Merrill Lynch, not surprising for anyone who’s worked in investment banking.

Never again. Not after seeing this video. Unbelievable.

As a scientist I do not have much faith in predictions. Science is organized unpredictability. The best scientists like to arrange things in an experiment to be as unpredictable as possible, and then they do the experiment to see what will happen. You might say that if something is predictable then it is not science. When I make predictions, I am not speaking as a scientist. I am speaking as a story-teller, and my predictions are science-fiction rather than science. The predictions of science-fiction writers are notoriously inaccurate. Their purpose is to imagine what might happen rather than to describe what will happen. I will be telling stories that challenge the prevailing dogmas of today. The prevailing dogmas may be right, but they still need to be challenged. I am proud to be a heretic. The world always needs heretics to challenge the prevailing orthodoxies. Since I am heretic, I am accustomed to being in the minority. If I could persuade everyone to agree with me, I would not be a heretic.

We are lucky that we can be heretics today without any danger of being burned at the stake. But unfortunately I am an old heretic. Old heretics do not cut much ice. When you hear an old heretic talking, you can always say, “Too bad he has lost his marbles”, and pass on. What the world needs is young heretics. I am hoping that one or two of the people who read this piece may fill that role.

The paragraphs above are taken from Freeman Dyson’s latest book, A Many Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe.

I haven’t read through it yet, in fact I’ve only just ordered the book. What you see above is courtesy of edge.org, a place I visit frequently.

Not everyone agrees with “heretics”, particularly the kind of heretic referred to by Freeman. I had the privilege of meeting him at the inaugural Flight School some years ago, where he spoke prior to dinner. Hearing him speak about how scientists like him perceived atomic energy and its use in space travel in the 1940s was very instructive. What he brought alive was the pioneering spirit that keeps any scientist going, a spirit that is sadly lacking in much that we do today. Neither heretics nor pioneering spirits do well in risk-averse cultures.

By now people must be publishing doctoral theses on the meaning and ambience and culture of Web 2.0; so much has been said and written about it that I hesitate to add anything at all. What I will say is that Web 2.0 is about young heretics, and about a pioneering spirit. Which is why an old fogey like me finds it all so very interesting.

I look forward to reading the book.