Toluu

Green Chameleon

Blog>> People Process TechnologyNovember 13

Dave Snowden has been having a hoity toity about stupid categorisations over at Cognitive Edge, and he’s included the “People, Process, Technology” triad (some people add Content) into the Domain of the Damned. He asks: “All three have to co-evolve; why or why do people fall into the pit of reductionism and categorisation with such ease?”

Well I can think of one good reason why it’s good to have this trio (or quad) – not so much as reductive categories (Dave may be building a straw man here) but as useful reminders to people who need to span all three. Technology people do need to be reminded (forcefully and painfully sometimes) that process and people (and content) matter. People have to be reminded that magic only exists on TV and by sleight of hand, and the affordances and constraints of technology and tools have to be grappled with to be understood at the operational level. They don’t always understand that IT people can’t read their minds.

I see this trio (or quad) as a salutory mnemonic which has emerged from too many occasions where one or two of them have been privileged over the others – meaning that they have not co-evolved, and thereby the initiative has flopped disastrously.

That’s why I especially liked one of the Intranet In

Blog>> DisobedienceNovember 12

Every now and then we struggle with clients who say something can’t be done within their organisation. They would never get permission or support from “them”. It’s even dangerous to ask “them”. Let’s just try to do this quietly without disturbing anyone, they suggest.

Unfortunately, if you’re trying to get any kind of large scale KM going, you can’t do it without “disturbing” people. At the end of the day, KM is not about what the KM team does, it’s about what “they” do out there.

So I was pleased to find this little gem of a post from Don Cohen from a couple of years back, about how a successful KM initiative started with an act of disobedience.

We have another client with a manager whom I would call flexibly stubborn. When one major initiative was rejected by senior management, where the more faint hearted might have just abandoned it, he took note of the sensitivities, went back and reworked it into a form that had fewer visible allergenic components, and gave it to them as a planned activity “for information”. Some important elements were dropped, but he made the judgment that they are currently unsolvable. At least something is getting done.

Now… how do we get knowledge managers to be more disobedient?

Organising Knowledge>> Where Should Taxonomy be in the Taxonomy?November 11

“Word Herder” takes issue with the Library of Congress’ allocation of the DDC classification 658.4038 to my book Organising Knowledge (ie Information Management, deeply buried behind Technology (Applied Sciences). It doesn’t seem like a very happy place to be, but then again, I’m not sure where in Dewey – or any single-tree hierarchical scheme – my book, or any general book on taxonomy work, would fit. We need facets.

Blog>> Metrics for InsightNovember 11

A while back Mary Abraham tagged me on the meme of why when and where I blog, and over the past few days I’ve been coming to the conclusion that blogging for me is a way of storing my memory in the external environment. This is not just recall memory, but sustaining the continuity of thinking over time… blog posts help me to think things through discontinuously. As I come across topics and issues of interest to me, related to things I’m interested in thinking through, I try to relate and assimilate them. That’s also why categories are helpful memory mechanisms for me to recall where my thinking has been in the past.

So I appreciate it when I come across people who are also thinking things through as they blog. Lee Romero has started a series of blog posts (here and here) on how he’s developing some relatively simple metrics for the communities in his company. What I also like is the smart, thoughtful way he’s approaching the matter of metrics, not from the routine “how are we doing?” angle, but for how the metrics can giv

Blog>> Context as MemoryNovember 9

Shawn has blogged about how we use or arrange our external environment to give us memory cues, partly based on a wonderfully serendipitous conversation we had yesterday in a bookstore, leaping from title to title and using them as cues for discussion and memory. Externalising our memories is also something a function that taxonomies fulfil, and is my official reason why I never allow anyone else to tidy my desk. It may look a mess, but whenever I have to sift through things to find that bloody document I know is in there somewhere I’m also being re-cued on all those interesting things I set aside to look at later.. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Brain science tells us that we forget things so as to be able to focus our continuing or repeated attention on things that are important to us. It’s a filtering and discarding mechanism. We remember things if we are reminded of them. There’s a wonderful language learning website based on this principle, focused just on the memory aspects of language learning. It tests your memory of the target language by measuring your pauses and hesitations on receptive and productive tasks of the target language presented in context and then recalculates the optimal interval be