Synesthesia

Although I first skimmed this paper back in May I’ve finally got around to reading it properly and writing some summary notes.

At an emotional level I feel pleased that a behaviour that I find natural (i.e. to dip into different work groups or areas of study and share ideas between them) and feel to be one of the more useful of my talents is shown to have measurable benefits. If anything it prompts the networker’s perennial question – “which groups haven’t I tapped into yet?”

In a similar vein, serendipitously this comes into view: Caves, Clusters, and Weak Ties: The Six Degrees World of Inventors on the way that researchers can bring in new ideas to a company through their weak ties with other technologists.

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.

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?

Lilia Efimova points to Introducing New Ideas Into Organisations, in particular the collection of patterns [PDF, 454 kB].

This is 123 pages, so I’ve only just started to work through it, but on first reading it’s fascinating – you know the “ah ha” moment when someone codifies stuff that you’ve been doing intuitively…

Certainly I recognised many patterns here as things I and others have learned the hard way as ways of introducing our ideas into the daily life of the organisations we work with – and I think many of us will also be able to learn from it.

The patterns are grouped into the following categories:

* Roles
* Events
* Keeping the Idea Visible
* Dealing with Sceptics
* Early Activities
* Reaching Out
* Convincing Others
* Teaching and Learning the Idea
* Long-term activities

I’m sure this will be a great resource for coaching – an inherent assumption of the NLP approach is that if you can identifiy the patterns under a successful piece of behaviour you can teach it to others.

Dave Pollard offers Seven Survival Tips for Knowledge Managers

1. Focus knowledge and learning systems on ‘know-who’, not ‘know-how’
2. Introduce new social network enablement software and weblogs to capture the ‘know-who’.
3. Keep only selected, highly-filtered knowledge in your central repositories.
4. Don’t overlook the value of plain-old ‘data’.
5. The bibliography may be more valuable than the document itself.
6. Don’t wait for people to look for it, send it out, using ‘killer’ channels.
7. Create an internal market for your offerings by giving valuable stuff away.

In the comments to the last entry Frank Patrick raised a “clarity reservation” (TOC-speak for “huh?”). I’m not surprised, those were both entities which assumed a considerable amount of background knowledge – so I’ve added the following two tree fragments: T-i-U dictates strategies people use and People have Model I Theory-In-Use

The entire CRT(Current Reality Tree) so far can be seen in this PDF

While the wiki is offline, here
is the first part of the CRT I’m building from the Argyris book

Hyperlinks to broken Wiki deleted
The work following on from ealier posts 1 2 3 was starting to get too convoluted for blog posts, so I‘ve set up a Constraints section on the Wiki, and started to document my process there

Having discovered the Twiki Draw plugin, I think a wiki with a drawing tool could well be the perfect tool for developing this sort of exchange…

Continuing to work through Overcoming Organizational Defenses to find links with the TOC approach it struck me that creating a CRT was in itself a form of Cognitive Mapping.

In other words by extracting the key concepts from the book into a CRT it should be possible to graphically display and test the book’s argument at the same time as comprehending it.

In the first chapter Argyris gives some strong clues about the sort of Undesirable Effects (UDEs) we might see in the real world…
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As noted in an earlier article I’ve started re-reading Overcoming Organizational Defenses with the intent of seeing how to integrate Argyris’s approach with TOC.

Confirmation that my intuition may have taken me down a fruitful path comes from Chapter 1 “Puzzles”:

“The players in these studies also take for granted policies and practices that are contrary to their managerial stewardship. They bypass root causes. They equate being realistic with being simplistic. They make all these actions undiscussable. They thus wind up creating a world in which the bad is tied up with the good so that producing the latter guarantees the former. Finally all of this is done with the best of intentions”

Which also sounds like the sort of situation a CRT was designed to explore!

Another piece of the jigsaw I started in the previous article – Coaching: Dealing with subliminal �Theories in Use” from Neuro-Semanticist Armand Kruger [via OnePine ]

I’ve been reading ideas from Mitch Ratcliffe and Frank Patrick on how the technology deployed in a business both embodies and is constrained by the hidden, unspoken mental models held by the sponsors, specifiers, implementers and users of the technology.
Reading this I was reminded of the work of Chris Argyris, particularly the “theory in use”/”espoused theory” difference and organisational defensive routines. I wonder how we might usefully combine insights and tools from those different perspectives?
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