Tagged Posts: Knowledge_Management
Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user Synesthesia on 2007-01-03
Technorati Tags Agile, iTunes, Knowledge_Management
Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user Synesthesia on 2006-03-22
- Go to the source or use your imagination:
David Anderson reckons development already ‘goes to the source’ through the use of Personas, Snapshots and Usage Scenarios
Keywords: Development/Lean, Requirements
- Perfecting Your Personas:
A persona is a user archetype you can use to help guide decisions about product features, navigation, interactions, and even visual design. By designing for the archetype you can satisfy the user requirement
Keywords: Development/Requirements, Requirements
- Wink:
Wink is a Tutorial and Presentation creation software, primarily aimed at creating tutorials on how to use software (like a tutor for MS-Word/Excel etc). Using Wink you can capture screenshots of your software, use images that you already have, type-in ex
Keywords: Flash, Software
- iTunes Music Store Queries:
Searching the ITMS by using web services
Keywords: WebServices
- Making Flash demos using Open Source Software:
Documents using vnc2swf to record a Flash movie of a remote session.
Keywords: Flash, OpenSource,, Software, VNC,
- Lifestyle Snapshots:
A lifestyle snapshot is a ‘day in the life of’ a persona
Keywords: Development/Requirements, Requirements
- vnc2swf - Screen Recorder:
A screen recording tool for X-Window (X11), Windows and Mac OS Desktop. Vnc2swf captures the live motion of a screen through VNC protocol and converts it a Macromedia Flash(TM) movie (.swf).
Keywords: Flash, Software, VNC
- Mathemagenic Processing and Ernie Rothkopf:
Rothkopf highlighted the fact that it is something that learners do in processing (thinking about) learning material that causes learning and long-term retention of the learning material.
Keywords: KM, learning, mathemagenic
Technorati Tags Development, Knowledge_Management, web-based+tools
I’ve a hunch that the conceptual models discussed in Jeremy Aarons’ new paper, (as I summarised here) could be a useful lever for unpicking the dilemma I found when I wrote that I prefer conversation, but you need process.
In that post I was drawing on conversations with (amongst others) Earl, Taka, Jon and Ton about the apparent conflict between the desire we all feel as empowered, “wierarchical” knowledge-workers to have systems that support a collaborative and improvisational working style, compared with the rigid, dehumanised processes that many companies see as a necessary corollary of delivering consistent service.
The particular paradox is that some of us (ok, me!) have on many occasions required companies (typically suppliers of services) to demonstrate those sorts of processes in order to satisfy our demands for clarity and measurability, even though we recognise that we may at the same time be preventing them from delivering the sorts of innovation that would truly delight us.
I find that the Davenport model helps me understand what is going on here – the underlying assumption of companies that apply prescriptive processes seems likely to be that the work involved is on the left-hand side of Davenport’s diagram – the Transaction and Integration models.
The underlying assumption has to be that the nature of the problems that are faced in these areas do not require interpretation, rather the application of rules and standards, possibly requiring multiple areas to work together but always within a set of rules. This is almost exactly the model under-pinning frameworks such as ITIL.
The other thing that strikes me as I read the contents of the boxes in the model are that they match closely with some of the criteria that are used in job grading systems. The boxes at the left of the model contain descriptions which are usually associated with lower-graded roles. This would seem to support my assertion from experience that companies which base their core competency around deployment of such rigid processes are primarily concerned with containing costs and at the same time guaranteeing minimum levels of service from a transient workforce.
Work that can be described by the right-hand side of the model (e.g. Collaboration and Expert models) is typically well-rewarded by job-grading schemes, pragmatic evidence that such skills are in relatively short supply. Professional services firms typically focus on reserving the efforts of these people for critical projects of areas requiring significant interaction. Such firms often also have (or desperately need) a core competence in taking the intellectual products of the right-hand side and “operationalising” them, i.e. turning them into formal processes and standards that can be scaled up and applied by the more numerous group of people paid lower wages to work “in the left-hand side”.
So far, so good – perhaps not a comfortable conclusion, but it would seem that the model works at least acceptably in certain situations. There is a certain basic business logic in reserving your most highly-skilled people for problems that need their attributes, whilst at the same time finding ways to manage the routine at a lower cost.
So where does the paradigm break?
I think there are at least two areas worthy of further exploration:
- There is an assumption that the market such firms supply will largely pose routine problems which are amenable to a rules-and-standards approach – where does this break down?
- Secondly, underlying the concerns that were expressed in the earlier conversation is a belief or hope that by finding a more integrative approach to knowledge work then there is the potential of finding ways that are more rewarding in either a commercial or human sense.
Ideas for later posts…
Technorati Tags Knowledge_Management, processes, Wirearchy
Jeremy Aarons has blogged the draft of a new paper, Supporting organisational knowledge work: Integrating thinking and doing in task-based support by Jeremy Aarons, Henry Linger & Frada Burstein.
They start by referencing Davenport’s classification structure for knowledge-intensive processes, which analyses knowledge work along the two axes of complexity and interdependence:
Davenport’s classification structure
(From Davenport (2005) via Aarons (2006))
However they then go on to criticise this as an analytic model on the grounds that much complex work often fits into more than one box. In particular, they suggest that work which (by the Davenport classification) is largely within the Integration Model often has elements requiring significant precision and judgement from indivduals - in other words mixes in work from the Expert model.
They suggest then that a more appropriate guiding framework is Burstein and Linger’s Task-Based Knowledge Management, which considers knowledge work as an inherently collaborative activity which mixes pragmatic “doing” work into a conceptual “thinking” framework. In this approach the focus is on supporting rather than managing knowledge-work. The authors express this using the following diagram:
A task-based model of work
(From Aarons (2006)
The rest of the paper is devoted to a case study within the Australian Weather Service which supports the mixed approach, and yields examples of failed business systems which focussed only on the forecast-production aspect of the forecasting task. These are compared with a successful and hugely-popular system which started as a maverick, ground-up project and which expressly addressed and supported the creation and maintenance of conceptual models of weather. This system, which is now the system of choice, only addressed the production of output forecasts as a piece of auxiliary functionality.
Technorati Tags Knowledge_Management
Allan Kelly commented on my post from last year about the possibilities of using pattern languages to describe business strategies, to point out that he has done quite a bit of this already.
So far the only paper I’ve had a chance to read is Business Strategy Patterns for The Innovative Company, which is a set of patterns derived from “Corporate Imagination and Expeditionary Marketing” (Hamel and Prahalad, 1991). In this Allan derives:
- Innovative Products
- Expeditionary Marketing
- Seperate Imaginative Teams
Apart from the patterns themselves there were two things I found interesting about this paper:
Firstly, Allan describes a rather rough ride he received at VikingPLoP 2004, where apparently a lot of negative attention was focussed on whether there was “prior art” for these patterns in the pattern field. I think there is something here that any autodidact will feel an empathy towards. Whereas the scientific community (rightly) puts a lot of emphasis on whether something is new knowledge, in the world of applications there is at least as much value in “new-to-me” knowledge, or even “applications of existing knowledge in a new context”. To me patterns and pattern language fall firmly into the camps of education, application and transference between domains; not the camp of new knowledge creation. Given that, an over-obsession with “prior art” would seem to be rather inward-looking.
Secondly, Allan goes on to elaborate how his understanding and view of patterns has developed and changed, especially as a result of reading “The Springboard” (Stephen Denning, 2001), and “Patterns of Software” (Dick Gabriel, 1996) and that he now sees them as a particularly-structured form of story about a problem domain. I find this an appealing viewpoint, as it harks back to the fundamental way that human beings pass on knowledge, through the telling of stories. Of course, the nature of stories is that each person who retells a story does so in a subtly different way, and over time the story changes. Extending the simile, patterns too will change over time in a two-way exchange of knowledge between the pattern and the environment of the current user, so to say that a particular pattern is derived from (but not the same as) an earlier pattern is merely to state that evolution has occurred.
Update: Allan’s latest paper Strategies for Technology Companies has more on his interpretation of patterns as stories.
Technorati Tags Knowledge_Management, Patterns, Strategy
I think I’ve just caught myself out in a “one rule for me, another for you” attitude over something… A conversation across several blogs made me realise that I was facing both ways on an issue and hadn’t acknowledged it – oh the power of the internet!
Earl Mardle posted about Information Architecture as Scaffold based on a conversation with Ton (More on Ton’s position here). The gist of the view expressed by Earl and Ton is that all this “knowledge” that companies are seeking to “manage” is really only accessible through relationships, and once the relationship is established then the information that was part of the initial exchange is no longer relevant:
And that, my friends is what information does; it provides the scaffold that bridges the gap between people. A bridge that we call a conversation. And once you have built the bridge, you can take away the scaffold and it doesn’t make any difference, the conversation can continue because it no longer has any need for the information on which it was built, it has its own information; a history of itself, on which to draw and whenever the relationship is invoked, it uses any old bits of information lying around to propagate itself.
Earl then expands his view that in the real world of work, when you need to create some kind of output, you do it based on your own knowledge and the knowledge of your team, rather than through re-purposing some previous piece of corporate “knowledge”.
Several of us joined in the conversation in support of the view – in particular I made the point that the key thing that stands in the way of re-using the typical corporate knowledge artifacts (i.e. documents) is the lack of contextual information about why they were created in the way they were. A good provider of context would be a record of the conversations that happened around the document creation (e.g. through blogs and wikis) but that is still too difficult to add on if it requires people to learn new tools.
As a good counter to all this virulent agreement, Taka disagrees strongly with the concept of information as scaffolding around conversations – in his view the information is the conversation, the scaffolding is the network of relationships that enable the conversation. That’s probably a difference of opinion over the meaning of words, where it gets interesting is what Taka goes on to say:
This is what I call the McDonalds question: how do you get low-skilled, inexperienced trainees to consistently produce hamburgers and fries to an acceptable level of quality? Process. And it’s the same thing in a corporate environment: how do you get people, who generally don’t really give a toss about what they’re doing, to write proposals and reports and all the other guff to an acceptable level? Document templates and guidelines.
Coporate KM and other such initiatives are our typically short-sighted attempt to find technical solutions to what is actually a people problem. There are plenty of people selling solutions and processes and methodologies to “fix” the information management issues that exist within companies because it’s an easier problem to tackle than the real underlying issue: how do you get people to actually give a damn about what they’re doing?
Which Earl extends and restates;
Underlying what I was talking about in the other post is to make explicit that very fact; organisations that think of their people as fungible will be lead inexorably down the path of document management and “knowledge capture” solutions that will not help them survive, and they don’t deserve to.
The kicker for all this came from Euan Semple the other night who told me about a company rep who asked him, “how do you stop corporate knowledge leaving with the person?”
So, to reiterate a point that might have been a bit buried in the verbiage, organisations with a future do not need KM systems because they have active, engaged people who know what the hell they are doing.
And that is where I did the metaphorical forehead-slap.
Because I’m all for work practices based on conversation and shared context where they involve me or my colleagues – of course we are wonderful knowledge-workers who thrive in such an environment! But, as I realised, when it comes to speaking with suppliers of IT services, or designing how our organisation should inter-operate with their organisations, it’s always about process.
In part that’s about how they work, and when I am in that purchasing role it’s not directly my concern about how they can deliver good consistent service to the company I am representing, rather a matter of being sure what they deliver, but I’m sure we throw out quite a lot of baby with that bath water. We struggle to find ways of getting the sort of human, responsive service we want at a price we are prepared to pay.
So why is this a problem? The clue is in the words I used – “good, consistent service”. The whole world of out-sourced services companies is about consistency. The way services are usually measured – “x% of faults fixed within y hours” – is about aggregation, statistics, removing variability. The companies who supply these services, in their turn, are looking for ways to meet those contractual arrangements that allow them to make a profit. The major costs in any service are the people who deliver it, so inevitably there is downward pressure on salaries and a drive to make everything a process that can be automated as far as possible.
In that sense, modern out-sourcers truly are the last bastions of Taylorism. Almost as a foregone conclusion, there is low job satisfaction in these bastions of “service”, leading to high turnover of front-line staff, leading in turn to increased management pressure for process and consistency.
I think there are several conflicts at work here:
- Be consistent v. Delight the customer
- Maximise productivity by using low-skilled staff v. Maximise productivity by supporting people to use all of their skills and knowledge
- Protect the service against staff turn-over v. Protect the service by creating an environment where people want to stay and grow
- Get the lowest cost service from suppliers v. get service that truly helps your business
- and probably some more…
The simple answer to all of this seems to be “work in small teams” and only use small suppliers, but it’s not clear to me how that scales. When I think about small teams, I can see how a wirearchical approach works when there are several companies involved (in the limit, several individuals), but again, I feel various mental blocks when I think about scaling that. I’m still struggling with these, and other dichotomies, which is probably a good sign that it’s time to draw the CRT! Food for a later post I suspect.
Technorati Tags Knowledge_Management, TOC, Wirearchy
Via Earl Mardle I’ve found a new tool to add to my personal knowledge management toolkit: Awasu
Although the core of the product is an aggregator, it’s a lot more than that as it offers a number of ways of inter-acting with the flow of information through the tool, both manually and in various automated ways. It also offers the facility to add “channel hooks” - plugins which carry out specific actions on selected channels.
Having installed the product, I must admit the first learning hurdle was to get used to a thick-client aggregator rather than my normal approach with Bloglines.
The next challenge was finding an easy way to blog using the tool. Although Earl recommends a workflow using Qumana, I’m not sure that’s the right one for me. I think that reticence is a little about Qumana: I’ve tried the tool before, in its earlier days and didn’t stick with it, so maybe I am transferring that to the latest version. Also, Earl’s proposed method involves using the Workpads and Reports in Awasu - functionality that I have played with, but not yet got to grips with fully. There have been a couple of funnies which might be bugs or might be configuration problems.
I shall keep experimenting with different methods of using the tool and integrating it into my work, and may well come back to the approach earl suggests. In the interim I have taken advantage of the easily-configurable User Tools menu in Awasu to call up the normal Wordpress posting page for this blog within the Awasu main window, pre-populated with key content from the source page.
Technorati Tags aggregators, Awasu, blogging, Knowledge_Management, PKM, Productivity, Qumana
Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user Synesthesia on 2006-02-06
Technorati Tags Agile, Databases, Emotional-Intelligence, Enterprise-IT, IPR, Knowledge_Management, OpenOffice, presentations, Productivity, Project_Management, Scrum, Syndication-Formats, Training, wiki
Dave Pollard has written about the psychology of information, or why we don’t share stuff, the organisational and human factors that impede knowledge-sharing:
- Bad news rarely travels upwards in organizations
- People share information generously peer-to-peer, but begrudgingly upwards, and sparingly downwards in organizational hierarchies.
- People find it easier and more satisfying to reinvent the wheel.
- People only accept and internalize information that fits with their mental models and frames.
- People cannot readily differentiate useful information from useless information.
- The true cost of acquiring information and the cost of not knowing are both greatly underestimated in most organizations.
- People know more than they can tell, and tell more than they can write down.
- People can internalize information presented graphically more easily and fully than information presented as text, and understand information conveyed through stories better than information presented analytically.
- Most people want their friends, and even people they don’t know, to succeed, and people they dislike to fail and this has a bearing on their information-sharing behaviour.
- People are averse to sharing information orally, and even more averse to sharing it in written form, if they perceive any risk of it being misused or misinterpreted.
- People are generally reluctant to admit they don’t know, or don’t understand, something.
- People don’t take care of shared information resources.
- In some organizations, internal competition mitigates against open sharing of information.
- Some modest people underestimate the value of what they know.
- We all learn differently.
- Rewards for sharing knowledge don’t work.
The point, of course, being that it’s almost nothing to do with the technology.
At almost the same time, David Weinberger has published an article in KM World about the impact of the social software tools that Euan has managed to sneak in “under the radar”… where again the emphasis has been on using the lightest-possible technology to support conversations.
Interesting juxtaposition.
Technorati Tags Knowledge_Management
In how to build on bubble-up folksonomies Tom Coates says:
[…] The concept is really simple - there are concepts in the world that can be loosely described as being made up of aggregations of other smaller component concepts. In such systems, if you encourage the tagging of the smallest component parts, then you can aggregate those tags up through the whole system. You get - essentially - free metadata on a whole range of other concepts […]
and goes on to play with ideas for aggregating tags on radio songs into folksonomic descriptions of aggregates of those songs (radio shows, albums) and aggregations of aggregations (a radio station, an artist’s body of work).
Reading it I was struck by a link to something I wrote about a year ago on semantic aggregation and filtering (I’m using aggregation to refer to a slightly different thing in that post) - so from that I would add to Tom’s idea the possiblity for allowing new tags to be added to describe different entities in the aggregation - e.g. directly tagging the shows as well as using tags derived from the tags applied to the songs.
Tom goes on to suggest that by using the links between these emergent tags you could lead people to new-to-them material that reflected the best example of things they may like - “best” being determined in a Wisdom-of-Crowds-like way by the station’s listeners.
The concept makes immense sense from the perspective of a broadcaster that is seeking to create new metadata about material, and to provide listeners with the most engaging experience.
From the perspective of a listener though, I’d like another layer. Alongside the “transmitter-side” aggregation of metadata from the broadcaster based on the tags submitted by their listeners, I’d like a “receiver-side” metadata aggregator that aggregates my tags across all the media I’ve ever listened to over time - and on top of that a way of comparing “my” folksonomy with “their” folksonomies so that I can find new artists or stations that I am likely to enjoy.
Technorati Tags Folksonomy, Knowledge_Management, metadata, radio, Social_Software, tags
Inside Knowledge has a great article on the work my friend and colleague Euan Semple has been getting up to. He introduced me to blogging, so I’m really pleased to see him getting the sort of profile he deserves.
Technorati Tags blogging, Friends, KM, Knowledge_Management, Organisations
Jack Vinson has helpfully listed over 20 Knowledge Management blogs that he reads regularly. I already had about half of them on my sources list, I’ve now added Conniecto, How do you know that?, The Pragmatics of KM Equals Success, Knowledgeline, Mopsos, Myndsi, Networks, Complexity and Relatedness, …no straight lines…,; Reflexions, Scrapbook of My Life, SoulSoup, x28’s Blog and yet another f*$#&@! learning experience
Technorati Tags Knowledge_Management
Shawn Callahan points to his own white paper Using Content To Create Connections Among People [PDF] that advocates (in a style accessible to the non-techie) the use of blogs, feeds and aggregators as a more flexible solution (compared with a grand “knowledge repository”) to sharing knowledge within a company and between a company and its customers.
Technorati Tags KM, Knowledge_Management
When I wrote this article I started from a belief that by combining Denham’s thoughts with my earlier post I had seen a new aspect of the possibilities for knowledge aggregation and filtering.
Then I read the background links that led to this addition, added in a spirit of “Oh, perhaps it wasn’t that original after all, I’d better acknowledge this other work”. In other words some of the glow of achievement I felt about spotting the earlier idea had been tarnished.
Today via Phil Jones’ wiki I found this David Weinberger post from a few years ago which has restored some of the good feelings - others may have had a similar idea before but that doesn’t reduce the value to me of the new-to-me thought.
Technorati Tags Knowledge_Management, Philosophy
At the suggestion of Marc Eisenstadt I’ve been trying Compendium.
The tool itself seems relatively straightforward (I have used both cognitive mapping and mind map software before so this may not be a fair assessment of how a beginner would get on) - the trick I suspect is in learning a methodical approach to applying it to a specific task.
I experimented trying to map out the exchange of views in the recent “Hierarchy” exchange (1 2 3 4 5 6 7) [order may not be quite right] between Dave Rogers , Jon Husband and Euan Semple but ran out of steam partway through analysing the second post. I don’t think that is a comment about Compendium, more a facet of the difficulty of mapping this sort of writing especially when you are very rusty at that sort of thing.
This will be the problem with creating the semantic web, it’s completely conceivable to have nice well-formed RDF triples as a way of navigating information that is already structured but the vast majority of human knowledge is tied up in messy human-written text.
My gut feeling is that most of us, most of the time, don’t analyse information to the depth that is needed to make good use of a tool such as Compendium. Certainly my tendency is for a strong degree of pragmatism in my learning - I’d suggest that generally knowledge-workers dig just enough to get a sufficient gist of things for the immediate purpose - as long as I have good enough knowledge for the task in hand then why seek more precision?
The willingness to stop digging could be increased by the illusion of explanatory depth. This tendency for people to over-estimate their knowledge of a subject where there are attractive intuitive explanations was identified in 2002 by Frank Keil and Leonid Rozenblit. I’m probably doing it now of course!
The next area to try Compendium will be working the other way - assembling a set of facts or assumptions about the world and seeing if it helps extrapolate meaningful abstractions. The obvious application of this will be in strategy development.
Wiki page for evaluation notes: [wiki]Compendium[/wiki]
Technorati Tags Knowledge_Management, Minds, Psychology
Denham Grey has been thinking about knowledge management for a long time - it looks like he has been turning his thoughts to some of the issues I touched on in Semantic Aggregation and Filtering. He writes in Social Categorisation:
The ability to develop and share a common taxonomy / classification / ontology is a very fundamental knowledge practice that leverages knowledge creation, communication, promotes meaning and enables sense-making.
Tools to do this are far and few right now but likely to be moving toward center stage in the near future…
He adds a fourth mechanism for extracting and sharing a taxonomy
The starting point for this advance may be tools to extract key concepts from free form text.
Imagine if you wrote a text, ran a key concept parser, compared the extracted concepts to your groups ontology then selected the best fit meta-tags for later search and browsing - Now that would really assist content sharing!
to which I would add another nuance - as well as deploying these tools to categorise your own text how about deploying them inside a feed aggregator with mapping rules based on the reader’s frame of reference - this way in addition to using the author’s taxonomy you could decide how to categorise a piece of content in the reader’s context.
Update: From this article via Denham’s wiki it looks like there has been a lot of work in this area already…
Technorati Tags Knowledge_Management, Social_Software
Dale Pike has some interesting things to say about semantic focus as an organising principle for understanding technology – in particular for explaining how a specific aspect of some arbitrary technology helps with specific tasks. The down side of this, he observes, is that tools tend to become pigeon-holed by the application that is first used to explain them – seeing the tool in a different context might enable new uses but for many people there is a cognitive barrier set by the first mental model they have created.
He extends the thought to consider how context modifies the use we can make of specific pieces of information – as an example notes that are contributed to a topically-focused space such as a bulletin board or mailing list contrasted with the same note expressed in an individually-focused space such as a weblog. He sees syndication formats such as RSS as the connecting bridge that allows people to assemble published information into unique contextualised views that serve their specific needs.
This idea seems to be teasingly close to what I have described as projections of knowledge - each context is a map of the knowledge space projected in a particular way. Beyond the raw mechanics of content feeds the key to assembling projections/views is being able to find and select the information you want in an automatable way. The problem is to determine which concepts are “close” to each other on the map in question.
Most approaches that I have heard of use categorisation and filtering as a proxy for measuring conceptual proximity. Whether you use shared taxonomies or the more emergent “folksonomy” approach a mechanism is needed to determine which labels are close to each other within the map of choice.
I can imagine this happening in a number of ways.
- At the most basic level tools could use some shared thesaurus to identify synonomous labels.
- An enhancement would be to allow the user to view a set of available labels and identify their own associations – this could in turn be published to allow “association aggregators” to form emergent thesauri.
- Even more subtle would be to allow the user to modify the view parameters by assigning votes to the returned concepts.
I have a hunch that all of this is buildable with currently-available standards. There may be tools out there already but I suspect they are proprietary – what we need are the simple building blocks to allow a “small pieces loosely joined” solution.
Wiki page: [wiki]SemanticAggregator[/wiki]
Technorati Tags Knowledge_Management, Social_Software
I’ve been introducing wikis into my workplace, especially for project teams - not in any forced way but more by making the technology available and starting to use it. Understandably the takeup is mixed but I was most surprised by the very strong aversion expressed by another senior technology manager with whom I have to produce complex joint strategy documents. Last week the opportunity came up to ask “why doesn’t wiki work for you?”; I was expecting answers that were about the difference between a web interface and a wordprocessor, or perhaps issues about the markup but what he told me had nothing to do with the technology and everything to do with mental models.
I’ve written before about how blog and wiki fit together for me and my mental model of document outlines and mindmaps as two dimensional projections of knowledge. In short I’ve found that for capturing and structuring “flow of thought” ideas in a way that can later be linked together the easy hypertext writing style of wikis works very well - I find myself thinking in terms of hyperlinks as I write.
By contrast my colleague finds the typical collection of wiki pages with dense hyperlinks very difficult to map into a mental structure of information. Under some gentle questioning he explained that for him information is always hierarchical - the technique he has found that works for him when organising knowledge is to think in “high level” concepts and then expand these down into details - the sort of model that fits very well with traditional outlining or a mindmap where you are not allowed to cross-link between branches.
What for some people is a strength of wiki - that any given page can appear in many different contexts depending on the relationship of hyperlinks - is for him a disadvantage of almost show-stopping proportions (certainly enough to make it too much effort to switch to the tool) because it is impossible to see a single clear hierarchy of information.
The obvious workaround that we will try for areas where we have to work jointly is for him to write “his stuff” in outline form and for me to construct index pages that present a view into “my stuff”; as we work on joint editing we can then pull together further pages that present different hierarchies.
I can sense a few vague ideas starting to bubble about how the tool itself could be changed but they aren’t making themselves articulable yet.
Technorati Tags Knowledge_Management
Several people have blogged Global Knowledge Review, the new venture from David Gurteen.
I’m thinking about a longer post on my reactions to the whole document, however in passing wanted to flag something that Lilia wrote in the sample copy that caught my eye. (update - Lilia has pointed me to her original post that spawned this article)
It is probably a matter of personal preferences or thinking style, but I always have problems with tree structures. […] Another example is about mind-mapping tools […] Those that I tried force me to organise my ideas into a tree structure. Of course, visualisation is nice to get an overview of ideas (especially if you use it for others), but forced tree structure makes these maps useless for (my) thinking. I tried to use mind-mapping software to structure my ideas for writing papers, but it didn’t work. It’s fine on paper for drawing a web of relations and thinking about steps of explaining them, but drawing a tree on my screen doesn’t make any sense […] for me ideas live as webs. […]
Reading this I was struck by the simile with map projections - just as rendering a 3D world onto a 2D map causes distortions, rendering an interconnected web of ideas into a two dimensional tree (e.g. a mind map or an outline) will focus on a different aspect of what is being mapped.
How does our choice of view for information affect the interpretation we place on that information?
Technorati Tags Knowledge_Management
In the same post that I just blogged Johnnie Moore goes on to say:
Traditional models of group thinking seem based on me trying to cement my well-formed brick of thought to your well-formed brick. Increasingly, I find much more satisfaction in sharing the less-formed ideas and responses I have to conversations. I sense that by doing so, it’s possible to create some sense of joint intelligence that can get beyond existing mental models.
I suppose that my blogging process tends towards bricks, as I write down ideas and get to tweak and edit them and improve them, to make them more palatable to the outside world.
For me this is the nub of why I need a blog plus me-writable and world-writable wikis.
Blog posts by their nature are a snapshot at a point in time and therefore imply some form of stasis. Wiki pages however are timeless and hence never finished, always open to flux.
I’ve found the writing style that has started to evolve since I had this combination of tools is to scatter thoughts around the wiki-spaces until some juxtaposition forms that is sufficiently clear to create a blog-entry. The blog-entry becomes a picture of my thinking at a point in time and therefore essential to mapping out some kind of path. The state of the wiki pages continues to evolve - by looking where there is activity you can see which parts of my mental associations are currently to the forefront of attention.
Technorati Tags Knowledge_Management, Learning_Organisations, Meta_Blogging
Johnnie Moore is thinking about changing mental models , in particular how to ensure that group work really does take advantage of the collective intelligence of the group rather than falling back to s simple comparison or accumulation of everyone’s individual world view.
This reminded me of the work published by Chris Argyris, Peter Senge and others on the [bliki]LadderOfInference[/bliki] . I wonder how we could encapsulate this thinking into the world of the blog?
Technorati Tags collective_intelligence, Knowledge_Management, Learning_Organisations, Psychology
Amy Gahran writes about the power of context - How Arranging Ideas Spawns New Ideas - to stimulate new thoughts around a subject:
No idea exists in a vacuum. It is connected to related ideas, and to the real world, and to other people’s perspectives. Those connecting threads of context are where the vast creative potential of the human mind lies. cite=”http://blog.contentious.com/archives/000288.html”
The idea that the mind works associatively is pretty well established - amongst many other things it’s the key behind mind mapping. Making public some of my own associations I can see a connection between Amy’s thoughts, Tony Goodson’s Butterfly moments and bricolage (worth noting that Tony is a fervent advocate of mind mapping) and the ideas I tried to capture here, in particular:
The benefits of any specific piece of knowledge are not always forseeable until the right combination of circumstances and other people arises – in other words unpredictable emergent behaviour;
Another possible connection is to The Social Origins of Good Ideas
Where Amy particularly extends our thinking is the way she then derives some very specific ideas for enhancements to knowledge management tools that would take advantage of associative thinking:
* Random elements […]
* Visual juxtaposition […]
* Embedded brainstorming tools
* Sticky notes (that capture context for the thought) […]
There’s an interesting challenge for developers here but not an insurmountable one I think… Just needs someone with the skill to hang together a few existing tools perhaps?
In a sense a blog entry like this is a form of the fourth item (”Sticky notes”) because it captures an idea and via a combination of hyperlinks and the use of trackbacks captures a a lot of the context as well - but it’s not exactly fast - how many ideas slip by before you can grab the idea and it’s context? I think we need a system that treats “ideas” as some kind of atom and deals with the messy business of collecting and managing URIs in the background.
For embedded brainstorming tools could someone integrate Freemind with a bliki?
Are there any open source developers out there who feel inspired by this?
Technorati Tags Creativity_Tools, Knowledge_Management, Psychology
Interesting synchronicity of posts that have caught my attention in the last 24 hours
Yesterday I blogged Suw Charman’s thoughts about being a generalist / polymath, in particular the tendency for useful real-world knowledge to come out of the unique overlaps between fields created by the particular experiences of one person.
Earlier today I linked to Tony Goodson on Butterfly Moments and Bricolage - his experience that general tinkering about across various subjects and ideas often leads to unexpected benefits at later times.
And now I’ve just read George Por writing on How local meetings with global experts can boost CI in which he advocates cross-fertilization of generative ideas and transfor
