Anecdote: November 2005 Archives

30/11/05 |

Let's avoid the grand unifying approach to Personal Knowledge Management

By Shawn. Filed in Knowledge.

Tom Davenport relates an interesting observation about the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) by its developer, Watts Humphrey.

He realized that it was taking too long for many organizations to move up through five stages of the CMM, and began to think about what might accelerate the process. He concluded that if organizations were to develop team and individual-level capabilities in addition to those at the organizational level, they would probably improve much faster.

It makes sense of course to focus on helping people get better at what they do. Like Tom we need to ask “What do knowledge workers do?” and provide ways to improve their ability to do it. Tom picks some of the obvious knowledge worker activities such as reading and writing and suggests we have them covered. He also points out that we’re a group of meeters and could be better at this skill. But Tom want to take us to the topic of information processing pointing out that we do a lot of this but we don’t know much about how to improve our skills in this area.

Personal knowledge management is an important movement. I hope we don’t take to it, however, with a grand unifying approach where ‘the smart people’ decide how it will be implemented. I’d rather see knowledge workers (which is everyone I think—let me know if you can think of non-knowledge workers) design their own interventions and be supported to put them in action and learn from the process.

30/11/05 |

Spot the anecdote

By Shawn. Filed in Narrative.

At the beginning of the month I suggested an exercise to improve your ability to identify stories. Here’s another example to explore.

I remember my first anecdote circle as if it were yesterday. I was a little nervous but Sharon Darwent (one of my former colleagues at the IBM Cynefin Centre) provided some sound and simple advice: “When they sound like they are providing opinions just ask for an example.” Well, in that first anecdote circle that’s all I did. And it worked!

Here is an example of a participant providing their opinion. I then ask for an example. See if you can spot the anecdote. It’s brief.

(1m36s 1.5MB MP3)

By the way, it’s good to have opinion and judgement in your anecdote circles. In fact it’s essential. Opinion and judgement provide the lubricant which enables the next story to slide on by. Your job as the facilitator is to get them back telling stories.

29/11/05 |

Podcast: How story ditting helps to get to the heart of things

By Andrew. Filed in Narrative.

And who said work isn’t fun. Facilitating Anecdote Circles is great fun. What makes them even more fun is when you get ‘Ditting’ occuring. Ditting is the natural phenomenom of story ‘one-up-manship’. One person tells a story and then another has a better one, and so it goes. I thought a great way to demonstrate this is to put you right in the middle of one of our recent Anecdote Circles (about workshops and seminars) and let you hear for yourself.

In this sample you will hear a great bollocking story told about some energy sapping leadership behaviour in a workshop. The facilitator, me, then looks to encourage ditting by asking “can anyone do better than that…?”. And, of course, they can.

Join our Anecdote Circle and listen in by clicking the link below:

(2m51s 2.6MB MP3)

28/11/05 |

Peeping into Scott Adam's window

By Shawn. Filed in Fun.

Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, does make me laugh. He has a blog which is just as funny and insightful as his cartoons. Worth dropping by for a chuckle.

28/11/05 |

Business users are set to by-pass IT departments

By Shawn. Filed in Sensemaking.

I had lunch with Serafino De Simone at Microhelp last week. Serafino has been running his IT company since the 80’s and based on that experience he made the following observation:

The last couple of years is the first time where IT functionality is better at home than at work.

This trend will have some interesting impacts. Take for example the relationship between IT departments and an organisation’s business lines.

IT departments want stability regardless of the business maelstrom swirling about their head. Everything must be locked down and controlled. We can understand this desire. IT systems are complex and must work. But as a result the company’s IT products are multiple versions behind and new software phenomena like wikis, blogs, VOIP, video streaming are just too hard to contemplate. Yet our sophisticated business users freely use these products at home and the gap between what users expect and what is being delivered is only getting wider.

Unless IT departments become more flexible and responsive we will see many business people by-pass IT and directly subscribe to the online services which deliver the functionality they need. Just look at Basecamp (project management), Salesforce.com (sales process), Typepad (blogging), Survey Monkey (online surveys), Bloglines (blog reader) and you will see that these types of applications are proliferating.

27/11/05 |

Making better decisions in a complex world

By Andrew. Filed in Complexity.

A business that’s a hedgehog could go good to great, but a business full of hedgehogs could be a disaster. At least, that’s what I’m thinking after taking a look over Tetlock’s latest book on Expert Political Judgment - How good is it?

Tetlock used a spectrum model of hedgehogs and foxes to investigate the thinking styles of experts and how they make decisions. Suggesting that generally they have two extremes– the fox and the hedgehog, and there is a range of hybrids in between. I’ve summarised it in the figure below:

Fox and the Hedgehog Spectrum

What I found particularly interesting is that in his research which has spanned over 2 decades and included 284 world experts, Tetlock has found that it is the Foxes that have got a leg up (so to speak) over the hard nosed hard ball hedgehog. Apparently Fox style experts are more likely to have a balanced style of thinking which helps them to better deal with a constantly changing complex world. Hedgehog style experts tend to dig themselves into their intellectual positions and have a real problem dealing with counter-evidence to their decisions.

Some tell-tale signs of a hedgehog being near by is that you might hear statements like:

“I was almost right”
“Yes, but”
“I made the right mistake”
“There was some bad luck in getting it wrong”

So what are you? A fox or a hedgehog?

26/11/05 |

Barriers to public participation

By Andrew. Filed in .

This comes from yesterday’s Australian Financial Review regarding a contentious desalination plant which Sydney is planning for.

The key points which the paper reported were:

“Plans for a desalination plant in Sydney have been released for public consultation.”
“The decision to build the plant is final, says the minister.”

Now I’m not quite sure where this fits in Arnstein’s ladder of participation*, but the way that was reported sure looks like a form of non-participation, rather than public consultation.

Arnsteins ladder of participation

No wonder people are wary about ‘public consultation’ programs that go out, which appear participatory, but really are just telling them what will happen.

(* Arnstein S 1969 'A Ladder of Citizen Participation' AIP Journal p 216-224 )

26/11/05 |

Welcome to the blogosphere

By Andrew. Filed in Blogging.

It’s great to see Michael Lissack join the blogosphere with his brand new blog called “He Wears His Own Glasses”.

Michael Lissack lectures on business and public policy at the CEU Business School in Budapest. He is also the director of the Institute for the Study of Coherence and Emergence (http://isce.edu) and a serial entrepreneur. Dr. Lissack is the author of a half dozen books (including the upcoming MBfAke), a noted Wall Street whistleblower, a frequent lecturer on ethics, and a successful real estate agent. He Wears His Own Glasses is Michael's own very direct view of the world.

I enjoyed his latest post on Thanksgiving, Ethics and Donald Trump … Knowing Michael, I’m sure he has a few surprises awaiting us…

Great stuff Michael!

26/11/05 |

Personal Knowledge Management

By Shawn. Filed in Knowledge.

IStock_000001026517Small In an update on Personal Knowledge Management, Dave Pollard states the case for refocusing KM efforts away from the storing stuff in a central repository and onto ‘connecting to the right people just-in-time, canvassing them to gain their knowledge and advice in the context of a particular business problem or pursuit, synthesizing that knowledge and applying it to the issue at hand.’

I has a similar idea at the beginning of this year and I wrote a short paper on how to use blogging and RSS feeds inside a corporation to create these new context-rich connections. Actually Dave’s post is the first time I’ve really understood what people mean by Personal Knowledge Management—that bottom up approach which is all about improved personal productivity.

Dave illustrates his post with a series of anecdotes which really helps us understand the issues he faced inside the professional service firm. It sounded like he conducted a series of one-on one interviews and I was interested to read that,

When I went to conduct the second round of interviews, it became clear that some of the interviewees had given me the answers they thought I wanted to hear because they didn't know the real answers.

This is not uncommon. For example when asking people what they’ve learned in a project there are often long pauses, some ums and ahs, shrugging of shoulders and a desultory, ‘nothing much.’ Then as they share their stories of the events that occurred during the project it dawns what they’ve actually learned. It is important to understand that their learning occurred at the time of the recollection not during the project. It would have been interesting to see what would have happened if Dave conducted anecdote circles instead of interviews.

26/11/05 |

One year on and an updated look and feel

By Shawn. Filed in News.

We’ve given the Anecdote blog a face lift in celebration of its first year of blogging service. This is my third blog. My first started in 2002 as a bit of an experiment and then I moved over to Blogger in 2003. Blogging is still a bit of a mystery to me. For example, I’m not really sure who is reading yet I often meet people who say they love our website; I’m rarely certain what to write yet new topics seem to pop to mind out of left field; and I’m delighted with all the new friends I’ve met in the blogosphere and look forward to the face to face meetings.

Thanks for reading and I hope you like our updated look. We’ve put a new link just to your right so you can ask us some questions and we will post the answers—I probably should say we will post our attempt at the answer because as we know, we do live in a complex world.

25/11/05 |

Whole of Government Innovation CoP

By Shawn. Filed in News.

Photo_112505_001
Thanks to Elena (pictured here in a fetching Christmas hat) for organising the Christmas lunch today and Frank (or should I say Frank’s brother-in-law) for the wines. I’m looking forward to our meetings next year.

24/11/05 |

What are wikis good for?

By Andrew. Filed in .

A few months ago, as an experiment, Shawn, Mark and I attempted using a Wiki as a way to work collaboratively on a paper. What we found however was that the Wiki format forced us down a much too linear way of thinking essentially stifling our creative juices. Even though a paper is finally presented in (hopefully) a logical coherent format, the process and thinking which creates it is far from logical or coherent.

Garr Reynolds of presentation zen makes a great point regarding how we involve technology in our creative processes.

The planning stage should be the time when our minds are clearest and all barriers removed. I love technology, and I think slideware can be very effective in many situations. But for planning, I say "go analog" — paper and pen, white boards, a note pad in your pocket as you take a walk down the beach with your dog...whatever works for you.

It seems to me that maybe wikis are best used for programs and procedures type work. That is work where there are descriptions and definitions that can benefit from a collaborative approach. And of course, let’s not forget the power of the people. As Steve Rubel has pointed out, the Wikipedia has become the first open citizen-powered site to get into the top 10 news sites on the web…

23/11/05 |

What do bank managers, pharmacists and salesmen all have in common?

By Andrew. Filed in Social networks.

Well, they did all just appear in a Roy Morgan survey of Professional Ethics and Honesty. But, the interesting thing is there seems to be a story here looking at the levels of trust since the late 1970’s. To summarise (with poetic license) there has been a marked decline in trust in bank managers over time, an increase in the trust of pharmacists, and salesmen, well...poor old salesmen seem never to be trusted…

Change in Trust

Robert Putnam was one of the first people to bring to our awareness the value of social capital in Bowling Alone. The central premise of social capital is that social networks have value. Looking at the trends for Bank Managers and Pharmacists it seems like there is something happening in their social networks.

Coming from the country, it’s interesting how many stories I used to hear about people who would often ‘go into town’ to have a social visit to their bank manager. Strange it may seem, but bank managers once were quite highly thought of (as you can also see from the data in our figure above). Viewed from this perspective, bank managers had high social capital. Sadly, it seems that all the closing of branches and influx of information technology into the Australian banking sector has severly eroded that social capital.

On the flip side I find it really interesting that Pharmacists have had a slow rise in the levels of trust. Looking around this seems to make sense. Pharmacists are often the first port of call for sick people. I’ve even heard stories of people who profess on hardly ever going to doctors these days, saying that their pharmacist will be able to help them out. It seems that there is a network effect working on the levels of pharmacists social capital pushing them to becoming pillars of the community.

For the record: the Nursing profession (down 1% to 89%) was still seen as the most ethical and honest profession, as it has been every year since being included on the survey in 1994.

23/11/05 |

Community of practice synonyms

By Mark. Filed in Communities of practice.

Images[1] I have just returned from a conference in Sydney on Knowledge and Innovation. I sat on a panel yesterday addressing the question “Communities of Practice: why do they work or fail?” One of the points I made was that communities of practice are often named something else, normally to adopt a title more suitable for the organisational context. The question was then asked “what other names might be applied to communities of practice”. I rattled off a few examples, and a number more came to me later. Here are some of the generic synonyms for communities of practice that I am aware of::

Networks of Excellence (CRS Australia)
Centres of Excellence (various)
Knowledge Networks (ASIC)
Networks of Expertise
Special Interest Groups (various)
Domain Teams (Jacobs Sverdrup Australia)
Professional Forum (US Army CompanyCommand)
Networks (BHP Billiton, Shell Oil US)
Taskforce (eg NSW Health Greater Metropolitan Clinical Taskforce that started as a temporary structure and has now become relatively permanent)
Thematic Groups (World Bank)
Tech Clubs (DaimlerChrysler)
Best Practice Replication Networks (Ford)
Community of Interest Network (COIN) (Cap Gemini Ernst and Young)
Practice Forums (legal firm)
Practice Areas (CSIRO)

Of course, many communities of practice are referred to by specific names rather than the generic ones listed above, with examples including Project Management Forum (Defence Materiel Organisation) and the ‘turbodudes’ (Shell Oil US – as described in Wenger, McDermott and Snyder: Cultivating Communities of Practice).

Do you know of any other generic names used to describe communities of practice?

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22/11/05 |

Our tendency to categorise and the effect on sensemaking

By Shawn. Filed in Sensemaking.

Patti over at 37 Days provides a brilliant and humorous description of Richard Nisbett’s work on how Cow-chook-grass westerners and Asians perceive the world differently. Her renditions of Dick and Jane stories are priceless. According to Nisbett our early years of language development consist of Western children being taught nouns while Asian children are taught verbs. And as a result westerners become obsessed with categorisation while our Asian neighbours are in tune to relationships. OK, perhaps these are broad generalisations but please indulge me for another minute. Here’s another one from Nisbett. What belongs better together, the chicken, grass or cow?

Apparently westerners tend to put the cow and the chicken together (they are both animals) and Asians put the cow with the grass or the chicken with the grass (cows and chickens eat grass).

When helping people design interventions it is important to be mindful of these tendencies to categorise or connect. Most of my work is with westerners and we do like to put things in boxes as quickly as we can. Our job in sensemaking is to help people resist categorising and keep the activities in a state of flux. This allows new things to emerge and helps us avoid snapping into the familiar patterns which constrain our thinking.

21/11/05 |

How do you design your questions for a Social Network Analysis?

By Andrew. Filed in Sensemaking, Social networks.

One of the key components to a social network analysis (SNA) is the designing of the questions.

Here are some examples of some questions often used in SNA*:

Whom do you typically turn to for help in thinking through a new or challenging problem at work?
Whom are you likely to turn to in order to discuss a new or innovative idea?
Whom do you typically give work-related information?
Whom do you turn to for input prior to making an important decision?
Whom do you feel has contributed to your professional growth and development?
Whom do you trust to keep your best interests in mind?

These listing of questions reflect all kinds of qualities like trust, communication flow, problem solving networks etc.

You can face a real dilemma however, if, once having designed the questions you get feedback like “we are not sure this survey should go across our teams” or even worse “ we don’t feel comfortable revealing our names in this survey so we would like to make it anonymous”.

Such problems bring up a really good, but maybe often overlooked point. How the group will actually make sense of your wonderful SNA questions? One approach to this conflict may lay in the use of our Power Law. Simply raise the power of the group that you are working with. Involve them, collaboratively, in a discussion around the design of the social network analysis.

PreOpenSpaceNetworkColourAnonymous

(*-See The hidden power of social networks )

20/11/05 |

Annotations and their role in building context

By Shawn. Filed in Knowledge.

150px-Pierre_de_Fermat Denham Grey’s post on just how useful annotations can be in providing context reminds me of two famous annotators, Pierre de Fermat and J Edgar Hoover.

Fermat was a genius mathematician born in 1601. Apart from being a judge he delighted in his hobby of solving the most difficult mathematical problems. While studying Diophantus’ Arithmetica (published in 1621) Fermat made an annotation which would spark creativity, competition, angst and reward for the following 400 years. I bet it also irritated the hell out of the mathematical community. He made the following marginal note in response to a well known mathematical conundrum related to Pythagoras’ theorem:^[1]

It is impossible for a cube to be written as a sum of two cubes or a forth power to be written as the sum of two fourth powers or, in general, for any number which is a power greater than the second to be written as a sum of two like powers.

I have a truly marvellous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.

He never published his demonstration and created a 400 year search for a proof. While Fermat’s annotation initially clouded the waters of understanding he simultaneously sparked a new discourse among mathematicians and through these conversations new meaning emerged. In the process a raft of techniques were created.

J. Edgar Hoover was FBI Director for almost 50 years from 1924 to 1972. During Hoover’s tenure he compiled a mass of files on his associates, politicians and other powerful people. Many of these files contained Hoover’s annotations but the wily director preferred the make his marks in pencil just in case he needed to erase his instructions at some later date.^[2]

Should our annotations be permanent? Perhaps they could fade over time or when written we can decide which type of ‘pen’ we will use. The choice of writing implement provides an additional layer of context and meaning. Using pen and paper the meaning is contained in more than simply the words. Will we lose this information in a digital equivalent?

One final thought. Perhaps in the digital age our annotations could be created as discussions, for example, using instant messaging. The completed discussion could be stored with the object being discussed linked to the specific part of the object under discussion.

[1] Singh, S. (1998). Fermat's Last Theorem. London, Fourth Estate.

[2] Centry, C. (1991). J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets. New York, W. W. Norton & Company.

18/11/05 |

Words should be full of meaning

By Andrew. Filed in .

Following right on the tail of my post on Facilitation is a fat word I came across this posting over at The Monster Blog:

Words should be full of meaning, not hollow phrases. Sounds in an empty room also resonate. Too many management slogans resonate around us at work and too many of them are hollow and empty.

Seems to resonate for me…

18/11/05 |

Got conflict? Use the power law

By Andrew. Filed in Open space.

Imagine this scenario of how conflict might arise in a group:

You are facilitating a meeting. Everything is going great. During an action planning session one participant stands up, looks around the room assertively and says “I've done a quick analysis and it's clear that there are parallels and similarities between several group’s work here. Right. We need to do this, this and this. Let’s form a group over here and we can get started and have this knocked off in no time flat...”

Question: What do you do?

A great insight which Vic McWaters explained to me is the power of power. In fact, let’s call it the power law:

Conflict often arises when there is a differential in power. To address conflict, reduce the power differential.

In our example, the conflict arose out of one person threatening to railroad the group onto a new track. What has happened is that the person has just changed the power differential in the group. They want to be ‘high power.’ They want to lead. Using our power law, what needs to be done is to reduce the power differential which this person has just created.

Answer: Ask the group “What would you like to do?” This simple question helps bring the balance of power back to the group and at the same time addresses (and reduces) the power gap created between the participant and the group.

Think about the times when you have faced or anticipated conflicts in a group. When have you been able to observe a power differential and then act to address that differential?

17/11/05 |

Facilitation is a fat word

By Andrew. Filed in .

Earlier this year Brian Bainbridge and I ran an open space event with a group of highly experienced facilitators exploring “Ways to even better NRM facilitation”.

One topic raised was ‘What is facilitation?’ We explored this using Bruce McKenzie’s conversation mapping technique and what emerged was that facilitation is considered a fat word. That is, a word overused and abused and one which seems to hold way too much meaning for its own good. What I also found interesting was that our group of “facilitators” decided they wanted to change the language and become known as “Passionista’s” rather than be associated with this troublesome label and word “facilitation”. I must admit, I am still slightly baffled by the ‘Passionista’ label.

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15/11/05 |

So what does Anecdote do anyway?

By Shawn. Filed in News.

A typical comment from people who visit our website is, “love the content Shawn but what does Anecdote actually do?” We seemed to be so busy over the last year doing stuff that we hadn’t really clearly described our services on this site. So, to remedy this oversight we now have what I think is a clear description of Anecdote’s services. Of course the true test if whether they make sense to you. Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions.

15/11/05 |

Free access to Peter Drucker articles in commemoration of his recent passing

By Shawn. Filed in Knowledge, News.

McKinsey Quarterly is making available articles by Peter Drucker in commemoration of his death this week. He will be sadly missed, especially for those of us in the knowledge management profession.

Normally reserved for premium members, these articles are available to all site members until November 21. Read them for free this week only.

Best practice and beyond: Knowledge strategies
1998 Number 1

Managing the knowledge manager
2001 Number 3

Do you know who your experts are?
2003 Number 4

Making a market in knowledge
2004 Number 3

The 21st-century organization
2005 Number 3

Update: Thanks to Hal who checked these articles out (see comment). He found they are not actually written by Drucker but reference him. Still worth a look however.

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15/11/05 |

Knowledge mapping is sensemaking

By Shawn. Filed in Knowledge, Sensemaking.

Map I’ve noticed an increased interest in knowledge mapping recently. A couple of tenders have been released, there’s talk about it on ActKM and some of our clients have engaged us to help them with the process. The other thing I’ve noticed is the misguided belief that a knowledge mapping exercise should create a single, one-off, accurate map.

Knowledge mapping should primarily be a sensemaking exercise where people are prompted to discover and consider their knowledge assets, discuss them, argue about them, decide which things or processes are important, and most importantly guide them to a point in order to take some action. Before starting mapping ensure the intention are clear because the map created will depend on its purpose. Some maps are social network charts, some are yellow-pages, while others are simply a matrix showing knowledge assets and their relationship to business processes. In many cases multiple maps are needed and every case it’s important to repeat knowledge mapping on a regular basis. Just like cartographic maps there is never a single map for every purpose. The world is too rich and varied, to include everything, if that was possible, would result in a noisy and confusing picture.

Denham Grey has created a wiki, which you are welcomed to join and contribute to, which provides an excellent starting point for a discussion of knowledge maps and mapping. I’ve started to contribute some of my perspectives on sensemaking and recognising that the process is just as important as the map. It would be great to see your contributions and perhaps we can create a useful artefact about knowledge mapping for our KM community.

At Anecdote our knowledge mapping process is based on a three papers Dave Snowden wrote in 2000 where he made the following thoughtful observation: asking someone what they know is a cruel question, it lacks context and is virtually impossible to answer meaningfully. Consequently, our first step in knowledge mapping involves collecting evidence for where important knowledge resides. For this job we use narrative techniques because contained within each story of how work gets done are pointers to important knowledge. “Last time we conducted a performance review we had to ask Jessica about how it was done in 2003. She’s our go to person for anything like that.” or “No one actually uses the database to identify folks to work on projects. We tend to chat to people who we’ve worked with in the past and update the database retrospectively. It keeps management happy.” Once the evidence is collected surveys and interviews can be used to flesh out what the knowledge looks and feels like. The final and vital step involves conducting a workshop of key players to make sense of the collected information. The purpose of the workshop is to identify which knowledge assets support key business process and using this information for the group to identify gaps or points where knowledge is at risk. From here new knowledge initiatives are identified. Knowledge mapping is often the first step in an overall knowledge improvement programme.

Snowden D (2000) Organic Knowledge Management - Part 1. Knowledge Management 3, 14-17.
Snowden D (2000) Organic Knowledge Management - Part 2. Knowledge Management 3, 11-14.
Snowden D (2000) Organic Knowledge Management - Part 3. Knowledge Management 3, 15-19.

14/11/05 |

What makes a blog post worth commenting on?

By Andrew. Filed in Blogging.

Something Shawn and I have chatted about is what makes a blog post worth commenting on. Having a browse through some of our most commented on blogs over the last year I must say I’m none the wiser…

Unconferencing: How should we select our Keynote speakers? 7 comments
A unique presentation style 8 comments
What to include in a newsletter for your community of practice 4 comments
Don’t prepare – Just show up! 6 comments
The problems with a dotmocracy 6 comments
"Lessons learned" creates the wrong mindset 6 comments
Combining a conference call, IM and a wiki 5 comments
Metaphors for vrtual collaboration 6 comments
Storytelling versus storysensemaking 4 comments

Shawn seems to think that blog posts that are ‘potato peeler’ blog posts are the ones which get the comments. In other words, blog postings which are common variety and able to meet many levels of experience can grab a comment. What do you think?

11/11/05 |

Where have we been?

By Andrew. Filed in .

Mountain climber archetype We just got back from doing our “narrative techniques in practice” roadshow through Sydney and Brisbane. We had a fantastic time. Having a cartoonist help us with the archetypes was great too. The figure is of one archetype which emerged in our theme of “the learning environments of workshops”. This archetype was named ‘The Mountain Climber’ and represented the very prepared, ready for anything learner. They say a picture tells a thousand words…

11/11/05 |

What you're not being told about unconferencing...

By Andrew. Filed in Open space.

The unconferencing meme is currently being discussed here and here. One point I believe that needs to be raised is that unconferencing is not something that will naturally happen just by deciding to remove your panel of conference speakers and hoping for the best.

I think a lesson can be drawn from Open Space.

Open Space is a deceptively simple meeting format where an agenda emerges from the participants and then essentially self manages. We have shown before the impact that Open Space can have regarding empowerment and participant engagement. Regarding who’s facilitating Open Space I have heard quotes like “Open space needs at most one facilitator and often none”. I have even heard statements like “a good OS facilitator should be felt but not seen”. Given all this simplicity: no agenda, the meeting self manages, the facilitator is invisible it’s easy to forget that underneath Open Space there is a strong robust system which keeps it all together.

So the lesson? People need to consider what the system underneath is and how this is going to make the unconference work.

6/11/05 |

Who's leading the stakes in the blogosphere? Women or Men?

By Andrew. Filed in Blogging, Fun.

A recent profile on Women business bloggers only listed about 5 women business bloggers. I was sure there must be more, and I was also curious whether women bloggers are the quiet achievers in the blogosphere…So using a tool which can value blogs I thought it would be fun to look at where women stand compared to a couple (*) of leading male bloggers: Tom Peters and Seth Godin. The results seem pretty clear….

Blogger	Blog Value
Mary Schmidt	$8,468.10
Andrea Learned	$29,920.62
Michele Miller	$84,116.46
Nancy White	$84,116.46
Yvonne DiVita	$98,794.50
Evelyn Rodriguez	$175,571.94
Halley Suitt	$221,864.22
BL Ochman	$337,030.38
Virginia Postrel	$360,741.06
*Tom Peters	$576,959.88
Kathy Sierra	$657,124.56
*Seth Godin	$1,454,819.58
Michelle Malkin	$2,889,315.72

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5/11/05 |

Australian cartoonist

By Shawn. Filed in Sensemaking.

We use cartoonists to illustrate archetypes as part of the sensemaking process. This is a fun activity which has the serious side of helping to illustrate an organisation’s culture through the depiction of prevalent archetypes. Finding good cartoonists can be tricky but here is a great place to start in Australia—the Australian Cartoonists’ Association. It is important to find performance cartoonists; people who can draw and redraw characters in front of an audience.

Thanks to my old friend David Pope for helping me find cartoonists over the years. I believe he has been nominated for another Stanley award this year. Good luck David.

5/11/05 |

Share a story - March of Dimes story

By Shawn. Filed in Blogging, Narrative.

Whenever someone asks me ‘who is doing something really interesting with blogging?’ I point them to the March of Dimes’ Share Your Story website. Share is a place for parents whose newly born child is having problems to share their experiences and gain support from a community of people going through similar circumstances.

Nancy White and Lee LeFever have written a case study of Share’s development. Some key points which were reinforced for me in this study include:

careful attention to community nurturing is the centrepiece—for example, not wishing to over influence the discussion yet wanting to protect the group from misinformation by moderators reading each post.
listening to the group and adapting the moderator model from mostly hands-off to being interactive and a participant.
creating the conditions where the community managed itself
everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler (well said Einstein)
blogging is a natural online way to collect stories
stories are powerful

3/11/05 |

Developing your narrative competence

By Andrew. Filed in .

Shawn recently blogged an interesting post on how to develop your narrative competence. The value of a developed sense of narrative competence is well recognised in the Medical field.

Here’s an interesting one for pictorial narratives*.

Do you think the figures below are both narratives?

Calvin and Hobbes

Model Airplane

(*- From “Narrative Representation to Narrative Use: Towards the Limits of Definition – NARRATIVE, Vol. 13, No. 2 (May 2005)”)

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2/11/05 |

Home Comforts not Sun Tzu

By Shawn. Filed in Narrative.

Cooking The military metaphor is dominant in many organisations. How many times have you heard colleagues talking about doing battle, gathering the troops, working in headquarters, having Chief EOs, FOs, IOs, OOs. Sun Tzu’s Art of War is often suggested reading for new managers. Here is an alternative metaphor—the organisation as a tumultuous household. Hillary Johnson’s article is funny and insightful. She recounts her experience as a new manager and the wisdom to be found in Cheryl Mendelson’s Home Comforts: The Art & Science of Keeping House. Here are some of the pearls:

Learn how to make a meal without looking at a cookbook
In the old days, laundering was done on Monday, after the Sabbath rest, because it involved such backbreaking labor that you needed to be fresh and rested to get through it.
Having a meal is not the same thing as simply eating something
Avoid walking around with knives.

What are some of the alternative metaphors you can think of which can help us understand how an organisation works?

2/11/05 |

Practicing identifying anecdotes

By Shawn. Filed in Narrative.

Our narrative technique relies on the identification and extraction of anecdotes, typically from transcriptions. The ability to quickly identify an anecdote comes with practice so I thought I would take you through a way to develop this skill.

First we need to have an idea of what we are looking for. The broadest and simplest definition of narrative is ‘any representation of events over time.’* These events are often caused by characters (in this case I won’t delve into how stories can be effectively portrayed with non-human entities). Two examples will help us here. This first has very little narrative while the second drips with it.

Example 1 – low narrativity

Two powerful ways of making sense (in a Weickien way) are:

Using frameworks to ‘frame’ data
Getting people to explain and explore surprises

The first technique of placing data into frameworks is common. Shawn posted a great example of such a technique here.

I like the surprise approach. Asking ‘what has surprised you’ is a great way to generate surprise as well as helping a group to make sense of what’s going on. It’s interesting that this approach doesn’t seem to work so well on lone individuals. For instance, if I ask you, “what has surprised you today”, you probably might struggle to come up with something surprising. Yet, be placed in a social setting and it seems that surprises are ripe to occur.

Example 2 – high narrativity

Apart from rain, Washington State is best known for earthquakes and coffee. Unfortunately, John Pennington—the man in charge of the federal disaster response in mainland America’s most seismically sensitive region—has most experience of the Seattle staple that comes in a cup. After helping the four-term Republican state representative gain his $138,000-a-year post as FEMA’s Pacific Northwest regional director in 2001, congresswoman Jennifer Dunn described him as a “natural.” With no formal disaster-relief experience, the 38 year old ex-Bush campaign co-chair who used to run what local journalists dismissed as a “mom and pop coffee company,” would have to be. Following the Michael Brown fiasco, The Seattle Times picked up on Pennington’s lack of preparedness and found that just before his appointment he had gained a degree from a correspondence school that government investigators later branded a “diploma mill.” In his defense, Pennington argued that as well as surrounding himself with disaster experts since his appointment, he managed to gain an “in-depth working knowledge” of FEMA following a series of catastrophic floods in the late 1990s. But, as professional emergency manager Eric Holdeman noted, “Walking through an emergency room doesn’t make you a doctor.”

Example 1 consists primarily of a person’s opinion except for the last sentence which recounts an example. There are very few events and the relationship between the character (in this case, the storyteller) and the events is unclear.

Example 2 is replete with events and characters who who impact them. Pennington helping the Republican, Jennifer describing him as a natural, Pennington running a coffee shop, Pennington gaining a degree, Pennington surrounding himself with experts, Pennington in the 90s floods and Eric’s observation about emergency rooms.

Both examples are taken from blogs. The diary nature of blogs seems to encourage narrative and in fact organisations interested in collecting narrative should consider installing a corporate blogging solution. Consequently the blogosphere is a great place to look for narrative and develop your anecdote identification skills.

An exercise to do with your colleagues and friends

Gather together a handful of people who want to develop this skill
Go to www.weblogs.com (this is effectively a random listing of blogs)
Choose a blog post for the group to consider
Individually rate the blog post’s narrativity. Give it a 0 if it lacks any narrative and a 3 if it predominantly narrative— it’s compelling, coherent and moving. Give it a 1 if there are a few aspects of story in the post and a 2 if there is a balance between description or opinions and narrative components.
Get together and discuss your ratings and why you made them. This is the essential step. Sensemaking.
After about 10 posts you will get a good feeling for what is an anecdote and what isn’t.

* Abbott HP (2004) 'The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative.' (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge)