| 4/04/08 | | Craftsmanship |
Every good craftsman conducts a dialogue between concrete practices and thinking; this dialogue evolves into sustaining habits, the these habits establish a rhythm between problem solving and problem finding
Sennett, Richard. The Craftsman. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.
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| 24/02/08 | | What is thought? |
I'm listening to Will Durant's book, The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time, and I noticed this passage which help us understand why we get in such a pickle when we try and define knowledge.
“What is thought? It baffles description because it includes everything through which it might be defined. It is the most immediate fact that we know, and the last mystery of our being. All other things come to us as it forms, and all human achievements find in it their source and their goal. Its appearance is the great turning point in the drama of evolution.”
| 8/02/08 | | Marshall Goldsmith on balancing technology and other skills |
I heard Marshall Goldsmith say this on my ipod this morning:
"So many people have spent a lifetime for preparing themselves for technological skills yet have spent no time training themselves on how to influence people so the technical skills make a difference."
The same is true for collaboration. So many people have spent countless hours preparing themselves for collaboration technology skills yet have spent no time learning how to collaborate so the technical skills make a difference.
| 3/02/08 | | Lao Tsu on communities of practice development |
Go to the People
Live with them
Learn from them,
Love them.Start with what they know,
. . . But with the best leaders
Build with what they have.
When the work is done
the task is accomplished
The people will say,
‘We have done this ourselves.’
| 9/01/08 | | The intuitive mind |
I'm in the process of cleaning out my filing cabinets today—what joy—and discovered this quote:
The intuitive mind is a sacred gift
And the rational mind is a faithful servant.
We have created a society that honours the servant
And has forgotten the gift—Albert Einstein
| 21/11/07 | | Knowledge Strategy - an emphasis on action |
We have long advocated the importance of action over analysis in both our knowledge strategy and community of practice work and I blogged about the 'ready, aim, aim, aim' phenomenon in 2005. Maybe it is because I am conscious of this issue, but in the past few months I have noticed many voices emphasizing the 'do something' theme, starting at the AIM Annual Convention in Sydney in September.
Here are some of the comments/quotes I have heard recently on this theme. I have heard all of them before, they just seem to be more prevalent recently.
- "Ready...Fire...Aim" - attributed to Ross Perot
- "You only find oil if you drill wells" - unknown
- "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzsky
- "Plan a little, implement a lot" - Etienne Wenger
- "Do-think, not think-do" - unknown
- "You cannot think your way to success, you have to 'do' your way to success" - related by Tom Peters at the AIM Convention
Does anyone know of other similar quotes. More interestingly, have others noticed a trend toward action/experimentation over lengthy analysis in recent times?
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| 21/11/07 | | Truth and fact in stories |
I'm often asked, "What happens if the story is untruthful? Wont that skew the participant's viewpoint?"
Robert McKee makes this paradoxical observation which you might find helpful.
"What happens is fact, not truth. Truth us what we think about what happens."
McKee, Robert. Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. New York: ReganBooks, 1997.
| 19/09/07 | | Complexity described |
Here is a great quote from Ursula K. LeGuin that succinctly describes complexity. It was posted by Kathleen Osta to the Open Space List earlier today.
The only thing that makes life possible
is permanent, intolerable uncertainty;
not knowing what comes next
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| 11/09/07 | | Rugby team uses narrative to develop winning culture |
On a recent flight to Sydney, I was flicking through the Virgin Blue in-flight magazine 'Voyeur' and came across an interesting article about the ABC-TV series South Side Story, a documentary on the turnaround of the South Sydney Rabbitohs - an organisation that has seen its fair share of turmoil in recent years. Here's a quote that particularly stood out ...
"The major challenge was how do we get people to think only about what they can achieve in the future, as opposed to what they have witnessed in the past? ... That's why we've been getting players to share their stories and to build an ethos between them."
This is an interesting real-world example of how an organisation is using narrative to transform their flagging team into a high-performance organisation. It'll be interesting to watch their progress and see if it translates into both on-field and off-field success.
| 30/08/07 | | Mooers' law |
I was reading Ambient Findability this morning at breakfast and found this law posited by Calvin Mooers in 1959.
An information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to have information than for him not to have it.
Technorati Tags: calvin mooers, usability
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| 29/07/07 | | Quicklinks |
Just cleaning up my Bloglines and thought I would share some of the posts I was saving.
- Brad Hinton reflects on oral history and storytelling and points to some useful resources.
- Stephen Dubner (of Freakonomics) sharing Mark Twain's view of work and play.
- If you have read Made to Stick, you might also like these columns from the Heath brothers in Fast Company.
- Psychologist Daniel Gilbert writes some excellent essays. Here is one on our biases.
- This is a neuroscience blog and here they talk about the difference in thinking with exploration or direct reward
- Why It's Hard to Get Rid of Old Ideas - this will be the subject of an upcoming post I think
- Supporting Community of Practice Facilitators by Stephen Dale (well worth signing up to Stephen's RSS)
- Here I reveal (again) my stationary fetish. Grid and ruled paper.
- Victoria Ward on silence.
Enjoy!
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| 26/06/07 | | It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story |
I read this lovely quote in the following paper, Petranker, J. (2005) 'The When of Knowing', The Journal of Applied Behavioural Science, vol. 41, no. 2, pp. 241-259.
“When you are in the middle of a story, it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion, a dark roaring, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood, like a house in a whirlwind, crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all, when you are telling it to yourself, or to somebody else.”
Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace
Thanks to Keren Winterford for sending it to me.
Technorati Tags: jack petranker, margaret atwood
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| 27/02/07 | | An engineer’s paradise |
“If it weren’t for the people, the god-damn people” said Finnerty, “always getting tangled up in the machinery. If it weren’t for them, the world would be an engineer’s paradise.”
Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano (1952:59)
[thanks Bob Sutton]
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| 14/02/07 | | Finding success stories |
Have you ever been asked to find success stories and been unsure where to start? Done well success stories slide effortlessly from one teller to the next conveying company values, strategic directions and the good reasons why your company should invest in initiatives like communities of practice. Done badly the stories remain captive and moribund in content management jails.
What is a success story?
We have all heard the term ‘success story’ but what are we really talking about? First let’s take a look at a few examples.
In their Change This manifesto, Talking Strategy, Chip and Dan Heath retell this story from FedEx, the company that promises to deliver your package “absolutely, positively” overnight.
In St. Vincent, a tractor trailer accident blocked the main road going into the airport. Together a driver and ramp agent tried every possible alternate route to the airport but were stymied by traffic jams. They eventually struck out on foot, shuttling every package the last mile to the airport for an on-time departure.
Here is one from SCORE—the counsellor's to America’s small business.
Judith Moore, a lifetime baker, was on a quest to find the “perfect” chocolate chip cookie recipe. Her son-in-law thought she should start her own business.
“I started investigating what it would take to start a cookie company,” she says. Charlie Elberson, who owns an advertising agency, offered to develop a brand identity for her. In return, Judith would supply him with free cookies for a year.
Judith next contacted Coast SCORE in North Charleston, S.C., for advice on her business plan. SCORE Counselor Greg Kopatch helped her focus her vision. Greg also recommended that she create a spreadsheet and produce cash flow projections for three years of business.
His encouragement and enthusiasm helped to keep Judith going forward. “I could not have accomplished this much without SCORE’s help,” she says. Greg’s guidance was crucial to the completion of Judith’s business plan, as well as the necessary financial data to support it.
Greg continues to advise Judith on her ongoing business and its structure, business management and growth. And, it’s been a recipe for success. Judith recently entered into a new partnership with Dean & Deluca, a retail and catalogue gourmet food company based in New York City.
“It’s been a pleasure working with Greg, and a thrill to have all that information available to a small business, like we are, at no cost,” Judith says. “Having the expertise of SCORE counsellors is invaluable!”
And finally here is an example of a success story from Sun Microsystems.
SIM University (UniSIM) has to operate in a different manner than other educational institutions — the curricula, modules, programs, and even classes have to be flexible to enable students to strike a balance between work and study. The university recognised that it has to invest in its IT infrastructure to efficiently manage and operate an online e-learning solution to give its students a flexible learning environment. “Since we have decided to implement the e-learning infrastructure, it is increasingly critical that the system that supports this remains highly available and that the archives are easily managed,” says Gary Teo, Senior Manager of Educational Technology and Production for UniSIM. “We have to have systems that are always available so that our students can log in anytime, anywhere. We need something that is robust, stable and scalable. Most importantly, it must be cost-effective and highly reliable, which is why we turned to Sun.”
With almost everything online, learning becomes more flexible and interactive as students can now submit their assignments online, chat with their tutors and peers, download course materials online and even watch lectures online — from the comfort of their homes or wherever they happen to be. “We knew we made the right choice to go with Sun when the company took these seemingly irreconcilable requirements, customized them, and set up our infrastructure within a very short time,” adds Teo. “We are all very impressed.”
In order to run the Blackboard Academic Suite, the school put together an array of high-performance Sun products, including a storage area network (SAN) to house its mammoth database of lecture materials and administrative documents. To minimize the need for staff to manage the system, UniSIM acquired high-performance Sun Fire T2000 servers for high availability and automated recovery, and a Sun Fire X4100 server to support video streaming applications. To manage its database, UniSIM chose the Sun Fire V890 server. UniSIM’s critical storage and archive systems runs on a Sun StorageTek 6130 Storage Array and Sun StorageTek C2 Autoloader. As a result, UniSIM is now set for future archive expansion with additional arrays that can easily be added seamlessly.
Success stories come in all shapes and sizes but they share the trait of wishing to communicate, “look at us, look how clever, persistent, innovative [insert positive characteristic] we are.” But that’s where the similarities end. The FedEx story can be told and retold—it’s an oral story. The cookie story is more like a journalist’s version of a ‘story’. Sun Microsystem’s is more like a case study. These three examples are a microcosm of the possibilities.
Most organisation have had experience writing case studies and commissioning journalists to write pieces for their corporate newsletters. As such, I would like to focus on the characteristics of oral stories and how to find them.
The first thing to notice about an oral story is their length. They’re short; an anecdote. While there are examples of storytellers retelling epics like Homer’s Iliad, mere mortals like us find it difficult to remember really long stories. A good oral success story is memorable. Its short length helps but there are more important features that make a story memorable.
People remember concrete details that create a picture of what’s happening in our mind’s eye. What did you see when you read the FedEx story? Did you see anything while reading the cookies or Sun stories? If the story recounts events we’ve seen before—airports, delivery truck, traffic jams—we can picture the story and it’s memorable. We simply replay the pictures to remember the story. If the scene is unfamiliar other devices are needed such as analogies, similes and metaphors. But, beware of the dead metaphor.
A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically "dead" (e.g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves (George Orwell, Politics and the English Language)
Or as F. Scott Fitzgerald noted: “The very phrases were worn so threadbare that they evoked no image except that of a turbaned ‘character’ leaking sawdust at every pore as he pursued a tiger through the Bois de Boulogue.” The Great Gatsby.
But this is not an essay on writing. We just want to be in a position to identify good success stories when and where we hear them. Some of the other characteristics to look out for include:
- a hero overcoming adversity
- detailed and concrete rather than vague and abstract
- simple and clear
- and most importantly, authentic and plausible
BHP Billiton, one of the world’s largest resources companies, justified its significant investments in communities of practice through the collection and retelling of success stories. They purposely created two versions of the same story: an oral retelling and a case study replete with detailed graphs showing savings, increased quality and reduced downtimes. Their most successful story is the rope shovel story. Here is how it was told to me.
In Ok Tedi there was a rope shovel, the largest moving machine on the planet, that was up and running 63% of the time. The very same type of rope shovel in a mine in Santiago had very little downtime by comparison and the Global Maintenance Network (the internal CoP for maintenance) wondered why. So they sent a team from Ok Tedi to Santiago to find out. After a few weeks with their colleagues in Santiago, they worked out that lubricant cleanliness made the difference. After changing their practices at Ok Tedi their rope shovel gradually improved its availability over a five year period saving BHP Billiton more than a million US dollars every year. And that was just one thing the Global Maintenance Network has done.
The details might be wrong but the message remains intact. The Global Maintenance Network is helping members improve their practices and saving the company significant money.
We could improve this success story by finding out the names of people who were involved and then tell it from their perspective. Some dates would make the story more concrete and verifiable. An analogy might help those of us who haven’t seen a rope shovel. I know its big, but how big? How about, a rope shovel would barely fit into the MCG and could be seen poking out above the stadium and be mistaken for an additional lighting tower. I guess this only works for Australians, but football stadium comparisons are always effective.
One last story before we look at how we find these examples.
Ruby S. presented with lower abdominal pain. She was tender in the right iliac fossa, and was therefore operated on as acute appendicitis. On opening the peritoneum there was a smear of turbid fluid, but the appendix was normal. Loop after loop of small bowel was pulled out, much to the irritation of the registrar, and there, in the upper jejunum, was a toothpick sticking through the wall. (Cox, 2001)
This story illustrates the effectiveness of an unexpected ending, the power of specific and visual language (loop after loop), and the need to use the language of the intended reader.
How do you find success stories?
The first step is to know what you’re after. Who are you trying to impress? What do they value? What is your purpose? Kathy Sierra recently posted a request for success stories which shows a woman who knows what she’s after.
The overall point is to find success stories about people whose lives have been affected by the web or software apps. I'm particularly interested in places where there is an intersection between live (face-to-face) interaction and online interaction (like people who've met online then forge off-line relationships). But even purely online experiences are important to me as well.
So here’s the first strategy. Ask for success strategies. This approach works when you have a large group of people listening. Kathy Sierra certainly has a large audience being one of the most popular bloggers in the world. You might have a similarly popular communication channel like a well-used intranet, email lists, or newsletters. But in large organisations this if often not an option. Broadcast communication channels are carefully guarded.
A good plan ‘B’ is to go to your social networks. Who are the connectors and mavens who know what is going on in the organisation? If you don’t have a well established network, I suggest you seek out roles that tend to be performed by natural connectors.
- Personal assistants
-
Professional association leaders
-
Community of practice leaders
-
Union reps
-
Successful business developers (connectors outside the organisation)
-
Good (internal) head-hunters
-
People who travel around the organisation
Social network experts say that we’re most effective in finding the people we are seeking by first exploring likely physical locations. “We need stories that illustrate good safety behaviours. Where are some of our most dangerous operations? Don’t we have operations the Ukrainian Donbas?” The next place we should look is in the organisational structure. “Our mine operations people will have some good stories. The coal division would be a good place to start. Who heads up that division?” In combination with getting to know the company’s connectors you should be able to pin point a plethora of possibilities.
A way to use oral stories to target case studies
Many companies are obsessed with writing customer case studies. The Sun Microsystem example above gives you a feeling for what these case studies look like. When I worked at IBM we had an extensive case study database. These systems cost a fortune to maintain. And I have to tell you, I’ve never really found them that useful. I suspect because each case study requires so much effort to compile they are never done well. Here is an approach inspired by what I learned when I ran a photographic library.
Our photo library had over 100,000 photos. All the images were transparencies ranging from 35mm to large formats. It was impossible for us to catalogue the entire collection with the resources at our disposal. So we developed a general understanding of where groups of slides were physically located (which slide box) and when we sold a picture we catalogued it.
Oral success stories could represent an organisation’s first attempt at recording a success story. It’s essential that the oral story can be easily retold, just like the FedEx van driver story above. Some stories will be what Dan and Chip Heath call ‘sticky’, that is, they will be told and retold and eventually there will be a queue of people wanting the full case study. This is the signal to investigate and report the full story enabling a wisdom of crowds prioritisation of which case studies get written up and when.
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| 13/02/07 | | Truth or verisimilitude in story work |
The Master gave his teaching in parables and stories which his disciples listened to with pleasure – and occasional frustration, for they longed for something deeper.
The Master was unmoved. To all their objections he would say, ‘You have yet to understand, my dears, that the shortest distance between a human being and Truth is a story’.
Anthony De Mello, One Minute Wisdom
Now this opens up a whole can of worms because if you take Bruner’s concept of a narrative mode of thinking, then the objective is not truth but verisimilitude.
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| 6/12/06 | | Knowledge management fact - collaboration degrades when people are further apart |
Mark and I have been helping clients with knowledge strategies lately and as we write them up we would remember knowledge management ‘facts’ like, “knowledge transfer significantly degrades when people are separated by more that 18 feet.” You know how it is, you remember something like this but where is the original research.
So I went looking and found the following:
“When employees work at locations more than approximately 30 meters apart, they have a much-reduced daily contact and less frequent informal communication. Physical separation from others in daily life drastically reduces the likelihood of voluntary work collaboration.” (Kiesler and Cummings 2004: 59)
The authors quote the following references in relation to these statements about proximity and collaboration.
Allen, T. J. (1977). Managing the Flow of Technology. Cambridge, MIT Press.
Kiesler, S. and J. N. Cummings (2002). What Do We Know about Proximity and Distance in Work Groups? A Legacy of Research. Distributed Work. P. J. Hinds and S. Kiesler. Cambridge, Massachusetts, The MIT Press.
Kraut, R. E., S. R. Fussell, et al. (2002). Understanding effects of proximity on collaboration: Implications for technologies to support remote collaborative work. Distributed Work. P. J. Hinds and S. Kiesler. Cambridge, Massachusetts, The MIT Press.
Kraut, R. E. and L. A. Streeter (1995). "Coordination in software development." Communications of the ACM 38: 69-81.
Are you aware of any other research that support or contradict this idea of “out of sight, out of mind?”
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| 15/10/06 | | Facts and stories (go together like a horse and carriage) |
Steven Pinker says:
“Cognitive psychology has shown that the mind best understands facts when they are woven into a conceptual fabric, such as a narrative, mental map, or intuitive theory. Disconnected facts in the mind are like unlinked pages on the Web: They might as well not exist.”
Thanks to Les Posen for point me to this one.
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| 8/09/06 | | On noticing |
The range of what we see and do
Is limited by what we fail to notice.
And because we fail to notice
That we fail to notice,
There is little we can do
To change
Until we notice
How failing to notice
Shapes our thoughts and deeds.
by R.D.Laing
In a Foreword by Stephen Covey for Alex Pattakos, Prisoners of Our Thoughts, Viktor Frankl’s Principals at Work. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2004.
[Thanks to Charles Savage]
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| 25/07/06 | | Being comfortable not knowing |
Andrew says we should be more comfortable with not knowing and I have to admit I don’t entirely know what he means. :-) This post over at Fast Company starts with a nice Einstein quote. I wish people would cite where these quotes were written, said, etc. Does anyone know where this quote comes from?
"The difference between what the most and the least learned people know is inexpressibly trivial in relation to that which is unknown." -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
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| 12/07/06 | | Narrative quote from Steve Denning |
I like this quote from Steve:
“The choice for leaders in business and organizations is not whether to be involved in storytelling—they can hardly do otherwise—but rather whether to use storytelling unwittingly and clumsily—or intelligently and skillfully.” (xvi)
Denning, S. 2005. The Leader's Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
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| 3/04/06 | | Some complexity quotes |
I’m always on the lookout for good quotes. I found these in the forward to Michael Lissack and Johan Roos’ book The Next Common Sense: Mastering complexity through coherence.
"What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our methods of questioning." Walter Heisenberg
"Our theories determine what we measure." Albert Einstein
"You don't see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it." Thomas Kuhn
My next task is to find out where they came from. Any ideas?
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| 20/12/05 | | Have a merry christmas... |
Finally after some busy months since the anecdote team grew, coupled with some SNA work, it is now time for christmas. I’m sure looking forward to it. My wife and I are jumping in the car and heading to Dubbo (and its zoo), Moree for christmas with my family and then Brisbane for the new year with my wife’s family. I will be back in Melbourne, ready to blog on January 5th 2006.
In the meanwhile, I’ve pulled together a few quotes which I enjoyed, and maybe you might too…
It takes a thousand voices to tell a single story.
-Native American saying
The universe is made of stories, not atoms.
-Muriel Rukeyser
If you don't know the trees you may be lost in the forest, but if you don't know the stories you may be lost in life.
-Siberian Elder
Australian Aborigines say that the big stories-the stories worth telling and retelling, the ones in which you may find the meaning of your life-are forever stalking the right teller, sniffing and tracking like predators hunting their prey in the bush.
-Robert Moss, Dreamgates
"There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories."
-Ursula K. LeGuin
"The tale is often wiser than the teller."
-Susan Fletcher (as Marjan, in Shadow Spinner)
Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
- Hannah Arendt
It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.
-Italo Calvino 1923-1985, Cuban Writer, Essayist, Journalist
One good anecdote is worth a volume of biography.
-William Ellery Channing 1780-1842, American Unitarian Minister, Author
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| 8/12/05 | | Being open to communication |
I recently came across this quote in Steve Dennings “The leaders guide to storytelling”:
“To be understood is to be open to understanding.”
And, thanks to Mark, another one which seams to sing with the same tune, or is drumming along to the same rhythm:
“The meaning of the message is the response you get.”
…something to think about…
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| 30/01/05 | | Some good quotes in support of narrative in business |
If you are building a business case to use narrative techniques in your organisation, here are some great quotes to spinkle throughout the story you might tell your executive.
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| 7/12/04 | | Stories not atoms |
“The universe is made of stories not atoms.”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980, poet) – The Speed of Darkness
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| 30/11/04 | | Advancing civilization |
"Civilisation advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them."
—ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD