There has been a lot of discussion of the massive data set that Pete Warden has been collecting from Facebook and the initial visualization of American groupings of people, based on their friends and other profile information. He's going to be releasing this data for researchers tomorrow - all geared around finding interesting patterns in a massive data set of hundreds of millions of users.
Of course, one of the first things that people outside the research community will want to know is what this data says about them - can it confirm what I already know or tell me something new? We'll have to wait and see what kinds of results and fun applications come out of the work.
But in the meantime, you can play with your Twitter relationships. In the ReadWriteWeb article about Pete Warden, The Man Who Looked Into Facebook's Soul, Marshall Kirkpatrick writes about some of his other side projects, including Mailana and the ability to draw maps of Twitter users - one of many applications that do variations on this - by frequency of @replies. And the first place I looked was my own network. I like that it shows connections between people I follow - using line thickness to provide indication of communication frequency. And then you can expand a view by double-clicking on a contact.
I poking around a bit, I can see cluster of my contact networks who represent Boston, Chicago, Knowledge Management. It becomes even more evident when I add known connectors from any of those networks. And there are other ways to analyze the data provided by Twitter, such as by location or words used in those conversations.
Of the many discussions about "information overload" as it relates to email, on of the biggest frustrations that people deal with is the shear volume of stuff coming at them. It's an easy topic for newspapers and magazines that want to talk about personal productivity.
I hold that the best way to deal with this is to encourage people to send you email less often: walk down to their office or call them! Of course, before these efforts are successful you still need some solutions for triaging when there is just too much. Triage options include dealing with email at select times (instead of "always"); coming to agreement on useful subject and action-oriented writing; filtering as much of that mail into appropriate contextual folders (or GMail-style tags); and more. I wrote about this a bit last year in Is email really so evil?
In this light, Eli Holder of Unblab contacted me with an offer to check out their new GTriage (in Beta). It's a triage tool for GMail that watches how you read and respond to mail and adds "important" tags to email that it believes will be more important to you. Eli has also offered to let my readers in on the beta-test, if you are interested. There are about 25 free trials available. Use the invite code, "jackvinson" to activate. (No disclaimer. Eli hasn't given me anything other than a reason to blog. I don't even use GMail as my primary email processing, so I can't comment on how this fits into the flow.)
In triage of incoming work (email or otherwise), one of the first things you want to know is the context for that stuff. Is it really important to deal with? Does it need to be dealt with NOW or in the next time where you are in the appropriate context? Does it need to be dealt with in the next 24 hours, or can it wait? Will it require deep investigation or a quick response? While many of these questions require that you actually read the messages, there are some likely rules to at least make the messages stand out in importance: it comes from a client or colleague with whom you have a key relationship; it comes from your boss (whether that is your life partner or the president of the company); the subject is particularly relevant; etc.
To be honest, while I use these rules as I review my inbox, my personal process is such that I get this stuff out of my inbox as quickly as I can on a regular basis. If I cannot respond right away or it requires a more in-depth response, I set up an appointment or task to give the item the time it deserves. This way, nothing is sitting there staring at me that still needs action from the last sweep of the inbox.
According to Xobni statistics, I receive 40-80 messages a day, many of which are filtered away for easy skimming (and deleting). But even so, that pales in comparison to the deluge that some people claim. It also pales in comparison to Luis Suarez' < 20 (work-related) messages per week.
[Photo: "An offering to the Ganges" by judepics]
I seem to be on a roll with the business novel form of literature this year. I burned through two TOC-related books, and I have another coming on innovation. This time I picked up Death by Meeting by Patrick Lencioni that I won at the Project Flow conference in September. I had no idea it was going to be another business novel. Lencioni calls it a leadership fable. I wasn't surprised that it was enjoyable, given my experience with hearing him live. It helps that I have seen many meetings like this.
The title is eye-grabbing title, of course. The writing is easy to breeze through. The chapters are short and have obvious titles, like "The Invasion" and "Friendly Fire." Lencioni provides plenty of intentional foreshadowing throughout, so it isn't exactly a novel. The book is geared much more to being about how bad meetings lead to bad decisions, and the story makes those points very clear.
Just how bad are those meetings? The story is a fun description of how terrible bad meetings can be: unfocused, no time for in depth strategic conversations, no help on daily struggles, etc. Even worse, the tone set at the meetings leaks out into the business managed by the people in those meetings. Decisions not made satisfactorily? Then how do you expect your staff to operate? Dread attending the meetings? So does everyone else. Disappointed that you can't dive into your favorite topic, or that it gets glossed over? Yep. Completely numb to the fact that your meetings are killing everyone? How many times have you been in a meeting where you just nodded your head and agreed just to get on with it and go do something more meaningful? I know I have.
That's the situation - possibly overdone - in this fable. It's only until a naive, young protagonist comes on the scene and just blurts out the truth: these meetings are terrible! Then what do you do about it? Our protagonist can't help himself and goes into his own training (as a film student) to try to figure out what is wrong and how to repair it. The solution devised in the comes in a couple of revelations to the protagonist. The first is that bad meetings bury conflict, so conflict needs to come to the surface - in a constructive way. It's only then that the group can come to a useful conclusion about the topic, rather than ignoring the issues only to have it come up again, and again, and again.
The other element has to do with context - one of my favorite KM-related topics. As in there are appropriate contexts for different types of topics. And that conflict in the first realization: it belongs in certain contexts and not in others. The protagonist devises four contexts and compares them to different entertainment options:
- The daily, 5-minute meeting. It's like Headline News, where you get the highlights of the day and provide any help that your colleagues might need. It eliminates the constant back-and-forth status emails or phone calls or visits that waste the day.
- The weekly tactical meeting. This is like a sitcom or crime drama, where the the basic topic for the hour comes out in the first five to ten minutes with updates and metrics reviews. The attendees decide what deserves their time for the rest of the hour and move it forward. If strategic topics arise during the discussion they are tabled for strategic meetings.
- Strategic meetings (monthly and ad-hoc) are like full length movies. People come prepared - having done the research required for the topic (having read the movie hype). The meetings have a hook at the outset (the key topics to be discussed) and they have drama or conflict - again, this is conflict in the Lencioni sense of making sure all the participants articulate their positions. And there is conclusion: the strategic topics get answered.
- And finally there are quarterly off-sites, which are compared to mini series. This is where the executives cover the ground on key long-term business goals and direction that they cannot cover in any of the other meetings. Again, if a topic relevant to another context arises, it is tabled for the appropriate context.
Reading the setup of these types of meetings, I heard a lot of similarities to the talk that Lencioni gave at the conference where I won the book.
[Photo: "Tiare - Board Meeting - Franklin Canyon" by tiarescott]
Just about every day you can find commentary on the impact of social media on the world of business. These might be mind blowing statistics about social media (from my brother, no less); or you might read 7 Questions Key to Social Networking Success from InformationWeek; or you might hear loud a "Woot!" from Luis when Gartner says that social media are starting to replace email.
But what about something that relates to the post I wrote yesterday about experts and expertise location? Well, that kind of thing usually happens too. It's a combination of serendipity and my brain being attuned to certain turns of phrase. This time it was Doug Cornelius pointing to a WSJ article and the underlying MIT Sloan Management Review article, Who Knows What?, by Dorit Nevo, Izak Benbasat and Yair Wand from October 2009.
I particularly like the discussion of expert hunting as being multifaceted. You want to find out who the experts are and their areas of expertise. But you also want to learn how they know it and how they are at working with other people. And this information just cannot come through in yellow pages or other directory-like system. It takes a village:
While IT has made inroads into identifying in-house experts and making them easier to contact, few systems currently offer any clues about an expert’s trustworthiness, communication skills or willingness to help.
The infographic slices up "what we're looking for" in experts, and only about 55% of the reasons have to do with being an expert. The rest is trustworthiness, communication skills and willingness to help. People want good experts, but they also want to be able to interact with them with happy results.
And this is where the newer tools can come into play. The rest of the article talks about how the new social software capabilities can be useful in the context of expertise location and transmitting these additional factors. As I've known for a long time, even the simple fact of having a blog helps people understand more about the author. This also suggests that familiar intermediary grows another role or another venue in becoming the person who can translate and articulate what they learn from interactions with their colleagues.
[Photo: "Old Operating Theater Museum 164749" by Bonemesh]
I noticed this in a friend's email signature:
[Commodore Koudelka] looked back. “You? I know you! You trust beyond reason.”
[Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan] "Yes. It's how I get results beyond hope. As you may recall."
from A Civil Campaign, Lois McMaster Bujold
Just think. If you write in public, it is both easier to find you AND when they do, the conversation can be at a higher level.
Luis Suarez has been doing his darnedest to kill off work-related email in favor of internal social software. He has been at it since February of 2007 - yes, two years! In recent weeks, he has seen less than 20 work emails - per week. A World Without Email - Year 2, Weeks 49 to 51 (EMail Is Where Knowledge Goes to Die).
While I am amazed at his steadfastness, there was something in his description of what he does instead to communicate with people. (He promises a longer article on all the things he does.) The thing that caught my attention has to do with the regular flow of questions and answers that he responds to as an expert in his field within his company.
Indeed, the good old Q&A that every single knowledge worker engages with time and time again during the course of the week and, in most cases, several times a day. As you can imagine, using micro-blogging/-sharing tools for Q&A already provides me with lots of advantages to help me reduce my email clutter even more.
I've thought about these things before, but the connection just rang home for me today when I saw Luis' article. Assuming the technology is there, people looking for help on a given topic should be able to find it - and the person who knows about it - easily. This means two things:
- Experts become more findable. If the expert writes in public on topics that they know well, then people can find her.
- Even better. If the expert records Q&A in public, not only can people find her, they can get answers to those questions that are common to many others. And for the uncommon questions, it gives a better starting point - and a new topic to post.
I don't think I appreciated the second aspect previously - or at least not in this context. Usually, the idea of having better conversation related to better personal conversations, rather than the expertise-level conversation. I mostly considered the first and thought about drawbacks about being too easily found (and disturbed). With this connection, it's no longer just about publicity, it is also about being able to have higher-level conversations when you are contacted. Doing regular Q&A out in the open (whether that's "open" to the company or to the world) leaves the expert free to focus on the more interesting conversations.
This idea has a lot of value, there is always a caveat. While writing in public is great for other people looking for help, there are times (and technology combinations), where writing in public makes it more difficult for the most common user of the expert's material: the expert herself. This is one of my personal frustrations with diverting my personal online attention away from this blog to other places, where it is more difficult to retrieve my (fabulous) words later on: Twitter, LinkedIn Answer, Ning, Facebook, etc. There is a great set of comments on exactly this topic from my friends Lilia Efimova and Doug Cornelius.
Note: Luis works for IBM - the technology is there (see the comments discussion). And for solo entrepreneurs or small businesses, we have had the technologies to make this work well for a long time. Unfortunately, there are a lot of organizations out there who do not have access to the tools that would enable this kind of work.
[Photo: "Lost and Found But Useless" by cacho_please]
Through a Twitter link to Future Changes, I came across Ana Neves' thoughts from last May on The Right Organisational Culture: A Requirement? in relation to knowledge management initiatives within organizations. Should you wait until the culture is in place? Build the culture as part of the initiative? Give up if the culture isn't amenable to your vision? Here is her comment:
Every organisation wants to have the right culture. Unfortunately, few organisations have it. Addressing the culture first is going to take a long time and, as Suarez says, organisations cannot afford that sort of time nowadays. So my advice is: “go for it”. Tackle the organisational culture as part of your KM strategy.
You have to be careful with "culture" discussions because they can lead you down some strange paths. But in the end, I think that the Vision companies have for themselves is heavily tied to their Values / Principles. The Values describe how an organization (or individuals for that matter) does things - the culture. And the how gets tied back to the day-to-day activities an organization engages in. This is where the change needs to happen: make sure that the day-to-day stuff links back to the values and vision of the organization, particularly when making a change in the way you operate. What culture do you want?
How do you do that? There is research showing that incentive schemes do not work (such as described in this Dan Pink talk at TED). And giving people a new tool or process without changing the work simply leads to more and more overload. Here are some thoughts to point you in a new direction - these apply to more than strictly knowledge management.
- What was the old way of doing things? What benefit did it have? What drawbacks did it have?
- What is to be the new way of doing things? What benefit does it have? How does it overcome the drawbacks of the old way? What are the drawbacks of the new way?
- What are strategies for overcoming the drawbacks of the new way?
- How did you know you were successful in the old way? How will you know you are successful in the new way? Will this measure the right things?
- Ana Neves suggests looking at the performance appraisal system as one important element. Is it built to reward the behaviors and values that are important to the organization? Does the appraisal system accidentally drive the wrong behaviors, and as a result, create a conflict for people?
These questions might sound familiar. They are related to the "rules for technology" from Goldratt's Necessary But Not Sufficient (described here). I've adapted them a few different ways, but the ideas under them make a lot of sense.
[Photo: "fungal cultures" from petrichor]
Another business novel from the Theory of Constraints community, and I blew through it again - finishing it in about a day. These things read fast by design, but they tend to have a lot tucked into them. This time it is Velocity by Dee Jacob, Suzan Bergland and Jeff Cox. The core idea of the book is to show how to use Theory of Constraints, Lean, and Six Sigma together to improve the system overall.
The novel tells the story of a company president who is new to the job and learning by fire how to run a business. A big element of that fire is attempting to apply Lean and Six Sigma (LSS) to improve operations in a manufacturing facility and a research lab. The LSS activities do some good, but operating in a world where corporate policies (and blindly-followed computer systems) drive the wrong behaviors. Rather than introduce Theory of Constraints through a "guru" as happens in The Goal (also co-authored by Jeff Cox), two of the characters in the book are familiar with Theory of Constraints and are able to bring TOC into the conversation, eventually. I like how the TOC concepts were introduced and described by the characters in several different ways to help the ideas sink into the story. As a TOC consultant, I could see them right away, but it was nice to see these multiple ways of describing the ideas.
That eventually was a bit of my struggle with the book. It seemed like it took far too long to get to the point - particularly when one of the characters familiar with TOC sat in the manufacturing plant - but could not stop from butting heads with the LSS promoter. But then, most organizations believe that change and improvement MUST take a long time, such as the year that the LSS efforts are given in this story. The first half of the book did a lot to set up the overall issues of the story and introduce the ideas of LSS and how it works - and where it might fall down.
It takes an ultimatum from the top of the corporation for the president to step back and evaluate what is going on. And for several other characters to be in a position to think about different ways to do things. And rather than provide a simple "TOC is the way" answer, the story takes the president through the process of building a Current Reality Tree (which they call an UDE tree) - a tree that logically links all the Undesirable Effects (UDE's) into a logical description of the current reality. And from there, they turn this around and develop a Future Reality Tree that describes a new reality AND how they are going to start getting there. While it is difficult to build these things on a book scale, I thought they did a good job of combining the dialog in the book with fragments of these trees. And they come back to these trees several times in the climax and wrap-up of the story as they learn more about the current reality and as they decide to do more to improve their future reality. The book introduces many more ideas familiar to the TOC community and in a similar fashion: they just make sense to the protagonists, rather than a tools introduced from the outside.
What's up with the title of this post, you might ask. Several characters in this book have a fondness for foods - unusual foods. You have pizzas being baked in laboratory-grade ovens (to get the requisite temperature for a crispy crust) or two old hands at the manufacturing facility lunching on various "secret recipe" dishes and talking about their work and problems. And then there are Atomic Buffalo Turds (photo): jalapeno peppers, stuffed with smoked sausage and cream cheese, wrapped in bacon and then baked. There's a vegetarian version mentioned in the book, but I couldn't find a decent recipe online.
Besides that it's funny, the food in this book serves an important purpose, and one that is spelled out pretty clearly by one of the main characters: if you don't have a more-than-just-work relationship with people, it is nearly impossible to get things done. Without some social capital, it's difficult to go outside the lines and work with one another in situations that aren't by-the-book. And how much of work is by the book anyway? The characters in this book use this to learn from one another as well as to ask each other for assistance.
And the Velocity in the title of the book? That has to do with the combination of Theory of Constraints to provide focus / direction, and Lean + Six Sigma to provide speed. Direction + Speed = Velocity.
[Photo: "Atomic Buffalo Turds" by dustjelly]
There are a lot of interesting conversations happening recently about knowledge management and the value of knowledge sharing or knowledge collecting and what it all means. Surprisingly, one of the sources has been a long discussion on a LinkedIn group, If the term KM could get a do-over what would you call the discipline? The question was asked two months ago and is going strong with over 200 comments.
Fortunately, Mark Gould has given this one a little more pondering and brought in a few other threads too in What do we do with knowledge? I like where he goes with the discussion:
The key thing in all of this, for me, is that whether we talk of knowledge sharing, transfer, or management, it only has value if it can result in action: new knowledge generation; new products; ideas; thoughts. But I think that action is more likely if we are open-minded about where it might arise. If we try and predict where it may be, and from which interactions it might come, I think it is most probable that no useful action and value will result in the long term.
Exactly! We don't want to do knowledge management simply because we need to "know what we know." It's more important that we actually do something with the stuff that we know. Whether that works out to be an individual taking action, based on what they have learned, or a group of people doing something they wouldn't have done without a "best practice" or a "before action review" or talking to their colleagues.
And this connects to a couple other pieces. One is the Harvard Business IdeaCast podcast from this week on Using Checklists to Prevent Failure with Dr. Atul Gawande, author of The Checklist Manifesto. As I was listening, the key thing I heard was that checklists can be a great method of translating on-the-ground knowledge into something useful for the larger organization. Of course, they have to be done well, and the process has to be flexible (not rigid) as they discussed in the podcast.
And this relates, at least for me, to the whole idea of personal knowledge management. Harold Jarche writes about the topic in PKM: aggregate, filter, connect and makes connections to some other articles as well. The personal aspect to knowledge management is all about processing all this stuff - internal and external, often many times - and doing something useful with it. He talks about PKM being about those three verbs: aggregate, filter, connect. And for me, all of those things serve a purpose: help me learn and do things I wouldn't necessarily be able to do otherwise.
Other links in this discussion include Ross Dawson's comments about PKM being all about enhanced serendipity or Richard Veryard on defining what exactly "sharing" is with respect to knowledge sharing in When does Communication count as Knowledge Sharing? (I've also been enjoying Richard's blogging in general since I found him in the last few months.)
[Photo: "U N ( R E A L ) beauty" by d ha rm e sh]
I picked up Eli Goldratt's latest business novel, Isn't It Obvious, and absolutely flew through the book - a comment I've heard from many people. It was co-written with screenwriters, so the high pace shouldn't be too surprising.
The title of the book is one of Goldratt's favorite ideas: that the best theories are always seen (in hindsight) as obvious solutions. And I think that is the whole point of the story at hand. Paul, a store manager, discovers a flood in his basement store room and needs to come up with a solution, fast. This emergency, eventually, leads Paul and the company to a new way to run their retail shops and the entire supply chain. A solution, that in the end, seems an obvious solution to the typical problems of the retail world: the wrong goods in the wrong places.
For people familiar with Theory of Constraints and the "retail solution," the path should be familiar. The book presents the problem, tries a couple attempts at a direction of the solution, and then locks in on a solution that addresses a single store, a region, the entire internal distribution system, and then even out to the external system. Also, for those who have read Goldratt's other business novels, I found the book to have a familiar feel and flow.
For people unfamiliar with Theory of Constraints or the retail solution, the story walks through a likely path to getting from current operations to a better way to do things. Of course, in the end of the story they change from responding to an emergency to instilling the new mode of operations throughout the organization. Even more than that, a couple of the characters look at the world and think that maybe even the sky is not the limit.
There is one other piece to the book. Clarke Ching interviewed Eli Goldratt about this book at the end of November, and he provided some clues to the real meaning behind the book. I highly recommend listening to the interview (on your MP3 player) or at least reading the transcript. Clarke has been interviewing a number of TOC thinkers, so you might want to subscribe to his podcast. Some people have suggested that the next edition of the book contain this information in a readers guide or epilogue of some sort.
[Photo: "Cork Flood 57" by hegarty_david]
Allow me a second off-topic post in a row... My friend, Tammy Green, just sent me a copy of her luscious Chicago Cupcake Crawl e-book, published at the end of last year. Not only is it about cupcakes (cupcakes bakeries) in Chicago, but the pictures are just fabulous. And the writing is funny too - her personality shines right through the pages.
Go buy this book if you have any interest in cupcakes and/or Chicago. She even provides some hints on setting up your own cupcake crawl.
[Photo is the cover image from Tammy's book.]
Hello kind readers (nearly 2000 of you, according to FeedBurner). I have been thinking that I'd like to "freshen up" my blog, but I don't have a whole lot of energy to make a big update.
Do any of you have suggestions for what I could change or improve about the look of my blog? Maybe most people read via the web feed in Google Reader, Bloglines or Newsgator (the three most popular readers), and there is no need to update the blog at all?
One area that I'd like to fix / improve is the ability to read on a mobile device. All those columns get in the way of reading the content...
Thoughts? Suggestions? Enjoy your weekends.
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