OK, I have never done this before but I thought I might try out blogging during a conference. I am sitting here in Bentley College which is the host for a Boston KM Forum event: I am speaking in the afternoon. The Forum has brought together a lot of the main players from the old IBM Institute of Knowledge Management (we are only really missing Larry Prusak and Rob Cross which is a pity) more or less a decade after it became a road-victem of an IBM attempt to consolidate thought leadership (something they never understood as they wanted to engineer it)

The major theme here is Knowledge Management - Current Directions and from the introductions today we have a broad range of people from inhouse people to a large number of independent consultants (where most of the old CKOs have now gone). Its going to be interesting, especially as I finally arrived at my hotel at 0300 this morning, roughtly 27 hours after I left a hotel in Paris the previous day.

The first speaker up is Kate Ehrich who used to be a part of the Lotus Institute and has done pioneering work on expert location over several years. She is still in IBM and talking about her work. If anyone else here is on line you can find me in facebook .....

Kate's off to an interesting start. She has gone out of her way to differentiate her work from Tacit. She argues that this established player in expertise location is about finding solutions not people. Not sure if this is real or marketing but we will see. I have a lot of respect for Tacit and David Gilmour their founder. He built the software on the principle of privacy, i.e. you should have a right to keep the fact that you know something private. There must be a reason for this strong statement.

Now we are getting to the problem statement. A cute statement to start Its not what you know, its what you do that really matters. Looks like she is going on to expand on this so I will report (with comments).

Now with Millennium Pharmaceuticals. Joe was one of the IKM originals and the most ethical of all the members. During the period of the knowledge wars in IBM (it takes a few beers for me to talk about that) he refused to be sucked into the politics and I gained a lot of respect for him. He put some great stuff together on tacit knowledge back in IKM days.

Good idea here. Training is about propagating what you know, knowledge management is more about uncertainty, linking and connecting people. Joe is a researcher who is now a practitioner so this is going to be interesting. Joe is also going fast so I will keep notes and comment at the end.

Mike put together one of the best readers on KM and strategy some years ago partly sponsored by the IKM. I'm looking forward to his updated thinking. He is referencing the received wisdom of the early days of KM that managing KM would improve strategy and arguing that all his work later shows that this has not happened. A recent exercise (survey technique) showed that there is no correlation between KM and financial performance, but they did find a relationship between KM practices and better performance of strategy, which in turn imp[acts on financial performance. In order to make it happen (he argues) you have to find very specific leverage points. This is emergent wisdom: I think this means he thinks it is the right thing starts with the strategy

Nice post from Nicholas Carr on the eBay confession that they made a bad investment decision in Skype. I hope they stick with it as it has saved me a fortune over the years and is a key part of my daily life. It does however raise some interesting questions for those of us who remember the dotcom bubble burst. One question I keep asking is this: What will happen when advertisers realise that no one reads adverts on web sites?

A nice little satire here courtesy of Mind Hacks. Now as many of you know I have a particular dislike for psychometric tests that focus on categorisation. I almost think a special place in Hell should be reserved for the creators and perpetrators of the worst of these, Myers Briggs tests; at least in so far as they make ay assumption of objectivity. It's all a part of the mechanical, pseudo-predictive HR practice which has done so much to damage both the profession and their subjects. It has no real basis is science that I can see and I am not alone in this view. Methods based on orientations, which in effect allow a fluid approach to understanding the way in which people behave and recognize the criticality of context, I think can be useful in enabling conversation. Any use for recruitment or promotion however I think is very dubious. It's another way (like excessive outcome based targets) of allowing managers to abrogate responsibility of exercising human judgement and taking responsibility for their decisions.

The one off Led Zeppelin reunion concert this November attracted 20m applications for 18k tickets. Croeso is one of the lucky ones. Now Led Zep (along with Cream, John Mayall, Black Sabbath etc.) represent my youth not the current generation. So what is it about the 70's? At the time we wished we had been around the 60's that seemed much more exciting. Its even more scary, the population of the the UK is only 3-4 times the number of applicants.

The above named were Odin's two Ravens. Melanie Rawn's latest novel Spellbinder references the translation of their names as Thought and Memory but states that the more accurate version is Thoughtful and Mindful. Now I came across that reading in the bath this morning . There is no better place than a bath to think by the way and why US hotels only have showers I will never understand. The bath followed an email exchange with Ivan Webb in Australia. He was asking about how to you sustain successful practice (so much better a phrase than best practice) in schools, and also how you would scale those practices up to a whole school or to other schools.

So what's the connection? Well it's in the difference between the state of X and being Xful. The former is a thing, a manageable object. The latter an attitude or way of doing. It strikes me that the solution to Ivan's problem may lie in this difference. Its also one of the general problems in KM, the difference between lessons learnt and learning lessons on which I have blogged before. However the issue of ICT in schools raises some wider issues and ones that justify the polemical category into which I have placed this. So I sat down today and developed seven (its always a good number) learnings/comments/recomendations that I offer for criticism.

Nick Carr is playing devils advocate again to some effect:

The CIO doesn't matter," writes vnunet's Silicon Valley Sleuth. "In [the new] reality, the average firm doesn't need a CIO – or at least doesn't need one as part of the management team. Such a role warrants an IT organization that is constantly raising the bar on its vendors and software. Companies like Google, Merrill Lynch or Wal Mart need a CIO. But for the majority of the economy, a CIO demonstrates a desperate attempt...

The rest of the article is worth reading and corresponds with my own experience. It also links back to my post of yesterday about ICT in schools and the danger of failing to treat IT as a tool, and instead seeing its use through the filters of fetishism.

Thanks to Retrospectacle for this neat pair of clips. Another of those science blogs by the way that demonstrate the power and use of the blogosphere as a knowledge location tool.

This past weekend my daughter and I were in France for the Rugby. it should have been for Wales V South Africa, but that was not to be (and it was for the best, we needed to get rid of that coach). All in all a great experience. Being in Paris in a public bar during the French defeat of the All Blacks was a wonderful experience (I would normally support the ABs but got swept up in the atmosphere). In Marseille if only the Fijians had been a bit more street wise and grounded that ball I think they would have won, in and in any event they deserve financial support. Then one of the great 7s teams of the world joins the superpowers. Oh, and we need some rule changes. If the game allows a team (England) to win by throttling all life out of the game, making a feature out of winning ugly and boring any spectator rigid then something is wrong.

I am settled into Durham University for three days, with a small group of very interesting people discussing the subject of extreme events. Our guest blogger Max is one of those (if you have not checked out his delightful combination of wit with serious reflection do so) and there are other old friends. Bill McKelvey of UCLA, Peter Allen of Cranfield and others all brought to together by Pierpaolo Andriani of Durham. So expect three days of reflections and comments on this most important of subjects.

A good meal and conversation last night ending with a gentle walk back through the cobbled streets of Durham to our hotel, then a short additional walk for me to the nearest WiFi hotspot (regrettably at the bottom of the hill). Back this morning after a wonderful sunrise over the cathedral but there was no charge in the camera, better luck tomorrow if I get up early. We are now back into a series of presentations so I will reflect as we go today. I won't comment on everything. Where I do I will give it a headline to help readers sort out what they are interested in.

An interesting question came in last night from Les Handford over in Canada. He had been reading my paper with Stanbridge on The Landscape of Management and picked up on this quote: ...executives need to pay more attention to management theory rather than to pay more attention to simple recipes derived from superficial understanding of past practices in other organizations 'in the naive belief that is a particular course of action helped other companies to succeed, it ought to help theirs too. His question was deceptively simple: How can one lead "leaders" to the trough and get them to drink?

Over a decade ago we went to see my wife's cousin shortly after her marriage. The guy concerned was a audiophile and had spent more the cables for this HiFi set than I had spent on my whole system. Now I am no cheapskate here, minimalist high quality stuff all round, as few dials as possible to maximise the sound quality. However this guy was in another league. The really sad aspect to his life is that he only had one CD which he thought brought out the best in his equipment, and there was me thinking the purpose was the other way round.

The Phineas Gage Fan Club has a delightful post on such obsession with some great illustrations and base science. An explanation for the behaviour is provided by Cognitive Dissonance theory, in which we have two alternatives when reality catches up with out theory: abandon the theory or re-describe reality. Having read this it reminded me of the behaviour of Executives who have just installed some wonderful new system to solve all current problems (you know, life the universe and everything stuff) generally based on some ideal model of things should be, rather than an evolutionary model of potentialities. They know its not working in their heart of hearts, but would you believe it from their descriptions? The other great example is Knowledge Management people presenting case studies at conferences that are often not recognised by the staff of the companies they work for.

It is nice to see Graham Durant-Law joining the blogosphere. His second post makes a plea for KM people to read some basic epistemology before engaging in What is Knowledge Management debates on the listservs. Something I would endorse. A lot of sterile debates could be avoided with the investment of a couple of hours reading into the subject. An even easier introduction would be Sophie's World or the Wikipedia entry on the subject (although this one is weak compared with other philosophy pages). If knowledge management practitioners want their field to be considered a professional discipline then it behooves them to behave professionally in knowing some of the theory.

At long last, and after many requests (myself and others) the BBC have finally podcast the Archers. The oldest running soap opera in the history of broadcasting and a cultural icon. It is only two cheers, because it has taken so long, and there were some pathetic excuses along the way.

Max signed off in grand style with a wonderfully witty and educational post on the cognitive load of queuing at Starbucks. In two weeks time, bracketed around the HBR publication date, Mary E Boone my co-author of our leadership article (which is confirmed as the cover feature) will occupy this space. For the next two weeks we have one of the longest standing CE practitioners (back to IBM days), one of the originals, Shawn Callahan. I have often called Shawn and his colleagues at Anecdote magpies (which is a high complement, the corvidae have a special place in celtic legend) as they have an ability to find and connect to interesting things which is more or less unrivaled. Mind you I am a bit worried, Facebook just told me that Shawn had taken the Movie Compatibility Report and while we are Good Friends overall there are some key differences. Titanic, Chonicles of Narnia, King Kong, The Ring and Braveheart are all very bad or grounds for divorce!

Like many others my RSS feed has been full of the spinning silhouette optical illusion. It has been used as a left/right brain test. You know the theory: left brained people are logical, right brained people are emotional. It is another variation on the absurd but all to common desire for simplistic categorisation models on which I have commented previously. The whole idea is, and always has been an arrant nonsense and you have to be very naive or poorly read to take it seriously (if that offends some people hard luck). I had made a note to myself to put together a post on this, but fortunately Nerophilosophy has done the job for me with an excellent post which I highly commend: The left brain/ right brain myth. A good quote to wet your interest: So the notion that someone is "left-brained" or "right-brained" is absolute nonsense. All complex behaviours and cognitive functions require the integrated actions of multiple brain regions in both hemispheres of the brain

Why oh why, do people want to put other people (and themselves) into neat and tidy boxes; it is so limiting.

I don't know if anyone can help but I received two research requests and promised to use this blog as a knowledge gathering device.

1. Does anyone know examples of companies that have a significant amount of self-organisation in their structure (either the whole group, a sub division or whatever). One example so far has been W.L.Gore which imposes a strict size on any division, splitting and breaking when that limit is reached. Another example would be the Grameen Foundation.
2. There is considerable interest in the issue of Communities of Practice (CoPs). Are they dead, are they at the end of their life cycle, will Social Computing Tools replace them, are they something so fundamental they will continue regardless. Does anyone know of any published, or about to be published work about trends in the development of CoPs.

All help appreciated. Ideally by commenting to this post, or my email if you want to be private.

Never kick a man when he is down, takes on a whole new meaning when you view the clip below. Cory Banks received this from Nam Pham on Facebook with the inscription "Never, ever, trust a woman!!. There must be a story in there somewhere

Over thirty years ago I lived off and on in the Rathmines area of Dublin for a couple of years. It was a great experience, but one of the most important cultural learnings was how to buy and drink a pint of Guinness. I should say now that I only drink Guinness in Ireland, and in Ireland I only drink Guinness. I had thought that the rituals could only be learnt by experience but Head Rambles (who is up there with Dilbert as a daily dose of cynical realism coupled with a delightful humour) has managed to codify the practice with brilliance here. For context you need to understand that as a service to humanity, Head Rambles believes in culling tourists ....

For those who have been trying to download the KM Forum slides & Podcast and the Accreditation slides (the latter on limited circulation to registered network members only), they are now avaialble in the literature section of the web site. Apologies for the delay we hit a problem with size limits and had to take a new approach to uploading files. There are still some gremlins in the system (failure to delete a reference, sequencing) but these will be fixed shortly. In the mean time the material is now available and if you follow the hotlinks above you should have no problem

There are upsides and downsides to being a pioneer. You start off excited by a new idea or concept, continue to develop it in multiple collaborations often covertly, make it practical, get the first few organisations to take a risk and do something with you. That period is frustrating but enjoyable. Then the idea starts to creep into the collective consciousness and selling becomes easier. This is the sweet period, vindication is great, even without acknowledgment. However almost inevitably a sour note creeps in as the ignorant and the opportunistic (and sometimes the opportunistically ignorant) jump on the band wagon and trivialise the subject. The other major problem is where another field purloins the new language or idea, hijacking it to vindicate a now tired concept, the classic example of this is relabeling Information Management as Knowledge Management. In effect the characteristics of my title are, in effect the four horsemen of the apocalypse for new ideas and concepts. Hijacking is the main topic of this post having come across a fairly blatant example yesterday which I want to share. I was also irritated enough the avoid the usual circumspection and name names, so read on if interested.

In a comment to my post of yesterday, Brian Sherwood-Jones referenced this wonderful story. It is a great fable of a good idea, trivialised through opportunism and ignorance. All told as a reverse of the tale of the Three Little Pigs. It is a delight, and given that some people do not have an RSS feed on comments I thought I would give it an airing here.

Earl Mardle while generally agreeing with my post on IT education in schools takes issue with me over my statement that: In any complex system you can never replicate outcome, but you can replicate starting conditions. Now this is probably a conversation best held over a Sassy Red in The Brewery or brunch in Felix (my favorite cafe in Wellington) when I am out in New Zealand in December but I thought it best to give a response now as its an important issue.

I am not sure what Kim's mind was on, but this post on death and the experience of death makes for morbid reading. The seven to thirty seconds on consciousness after decapitation over stimulated my imagination and I needed to lie down to recover ...

Great podcast here on how changing the context makes the impossible possible. I almost understood the big bang at the end of listening to it. Universe Today is good for some of the best pictures in the blogosphere as well by the way. Worth scrolling though after you heard the podcast.

I have been carrying around a newspaper clipping from Simon Caulking in the Observer at the start of the month. He is reviewing From Higher Aims to Hired Hands by Khurana. I have the book on order, and will blog after I have read it but there are some key points that deserve and early airing. The question of management as a profession has been around and unresolved for some time; it comes up from time to time in Knowledge Management but I think that is a lost cause (not as a valued practice, but as a recognised profession). I am more or less summarising other peoples' words hereafter.

As we get close to the publication date of the HBR article on Leadership and Complexity expect some more blogs on leadership and related issues. Also my co-author Mary E Boone will be our guest blogger from next week. I am also planning something on the origins and evolution of the Cynefin framework as there are already myths out there! We are also working on some offerings around Leadership which will go up on the web site over the weekend.

In the mean time I have agreed with ARK group to run a one day master class on the subject of leadership this December. Its a bit short notice and therefore a punt, but the brochure is here for those interested. It has a knowledge flavor given ARK's mailing lists but it will be a general session on leadership picking up on aspects of the HBR article.

I've just come off a conference call to a class at the University of Texas. I was there to answer questions on the nature of consultancy and it was an interesting experience. To be honest I feel a bit of a fraud. While I have been asked to consult on many occasions I have never had to sell myself as a consultant, or been through consultancy education of any type. In fact on two occasions where I was looking for a job as I was told by partners in large consultancy firms that I had none of the necessary qualities. I have come to see that as a complement by the way.

One of the questions was a request for wisdom (oh my god I must be getting old), to wit what advice would I give a person starting out. Thinking about it I came up with these (other ideas welcome):

1. Join a small company where you are going to be thrown in deep end early. That way you will find out if you can cut it before it is too late, and you will have a more interesting life than acting as utilisation fodder.
2. Work very hard on building and creating your network, not just in your firm but with clients, academics and others. Above all read, read and read more in related fields, rather than consultancy magazines and management text books. You have to be curious, and diverse in your reading and learning to do the job well.
3. Go the extra mile, you are selling value not time. It's what people do with your ideas that count, but don't be afraid to walk away if nothing meaningful is going to happen. If the client wants to make something happen, help them even if you don't always get paid for the time.

Given more thought I could come up with a better list, but for tonight that was it.

Its funny how a quickly written blog often produces interesting reactions, while one that takes several hours to write is ignored (well maybe not ignored, but not cross referenced or commented on). I was very tired last night and took my call from the University of Texas in bed following a raid on the minibar fully prepared to fall asleep as soon as I put the phone down; fortunately for the students it was not a video-conference. However after answering questions I was awake again and had an idea for a blog which would have nagged at me and prevented sleep, so five minutes on the keyboard produced yesterday's attempt at wisdom in respect of a consultant starting out on their career.

Today would have been Melissie's birthday, author of Complete Idiot's Guide to Knowledge Management, friend to many, passionate advocate of the human dimension of knowledge management. She died after a long struggle with cancer last December. There are plans for a tribute at KM World in a few weeks time. Aside from reflecting on memories of working with Melissie, its also interesting to see the way in which electronic systems create fragments of memory and triggers. Plaxo brought me a routine birthday notification yesterday which was anything but routine when I read it.

Earlier this month Jon Husband of Wirearchy interviewed me on a range of issues around social computing and knowledge management. He sent me a copy with permission to load it and with the kind comment that I have had several people say your responses are really clear, great thinking, very interesting, etc. This may or may not be true, but to make your own mind up the podcast is here, and Jon's outline questions are set out below.

I was always attracted to the ideas of Plato's Republic but realised that such feelings might have been considered elitist. However having subjected myself to this, and this I think the case against universal suffrage is now clearly established and the empathy of George Bush for his electorate cannot be disputed. No thanks to Sonja for finding these.

I gave two keynotes today in Helsinki (by far and away one of my favorite European Cities). The first was a general one on strategy and you can find the podcast here, and the slides here. The second was to a smaller group and restricted to half an hour so I did not record it, but it was a subset of this material. If you have downloaded a keynote before you will find a lot of the same material. This is probably the best of recent months, took under an hour although I could have done with another ten minutes. Supporting articles and other material available in the literature section of the web site.

At the moment this stuff is all fairly new and I keep getting asked to do the high level overview. Someone asked me today if I found it boring to repeat. I must admit I was surprised by the question. Each audience is new, each gives a different reaction, not to mention that I love this stuff!

I got a bit carried away yesterday with four posts but this will be it for today with time off line for a flight from Helsinki to London followed by Das Rheingold this evening. Next week may also be light as I have a double red eye to Singapore between Die Walküre on Sunday and Siegfried on Wednesday, a lecture in Lancaster on Thursday with Götterdämmerung on Friday evening. More on Wagner's Ring Cycle next week. Even in isolation Wagner is more than simply music and a complete Ring Cycle (my fifth in person) is something special: 15 sublime hours.

For the moment, for all of those over 50 I thought I would share this myth busting post on what happens to your brain as it ages. There is hope out there, and of course, there is no comparison between Die Hochzeit and Parsifal if additional evidence is needed.

"There's a growing body of academic research about decision making under uncertainty. (If you Google the term, you will get — or I did — 284,000 hits.) Not much of this research has worked its way into practical frameworks for managers. To me, one of the great values of "A Leader's Framework for Decision Making" is that it lives up to its title. In so doing, it connects sense-making to action in ways that are both wise and practical."

The HBR article on the Cynefin framework is now out and available for $6.50. Tom's Letter from the Editor, the generous conclusion of which I quote above, is a great summary of the context and need for the article. It also has the benefit of being free!

It's change over the time on the guest blog. My thanks to Shawn who took time out from a busy schedule (and from his own blog) to introduce the first videocasts. We now move on to Mary Boone, my co-author on the HBR article and long term friend. We first met when she was researching Managing Interactively and got on like a house on fire. I can still remember the phone conversation from my old study, with a malt whisky in my hand enjoying every minute of the conversation. We want on to an encounter in the West of Ireland with a militant appreciate inquiry group (that has a whole set of stories linked to it). Since then we have met and talked on many an occasion.

Written in haste from Heathrow before a double red eye to Singapore

Thanks to Sonja's brother for this delightful and witty New York Times article. If the author was British I would take it for granted that it was ironic, but I must admit to some ambiguity of interpretation with an American author, so the pinches of salt are scattered around my hotel room as I write this.