Grandad continues to delight with this delightful take on mowing down pedestrians and cyclists following by some pungent views on Childrens' television. He threatened to stop blogging a short while ago but has thankfully been persuaded to continue. We could do with more black humour/satire of this type to keep us sane .....

If any one has any influence over the netvisionary awards (for which he is nominated), use it.

I went back to Lancaster University yesterday to give a lecture on Naturalising Sense-Making. Those looking for the slides will find them here. There are also some podcasts with similar material and related articles in the literature section of the web site. The rest of this blog is more sentimental, possibly mawkish and will mean more if you, dear reader, ever studied or taught there.

Now I have been back a few times since I graduated n 1975 but always in the past by car. This was the first time by train, which was my normal means of transport at the time and thus a more evocative journey. Students with cars in those days were the exception and always had lots of friends ...

I just switched my RSS feed over to Vienna this weekend. This was partly functional, it has some cool features. The one I like best is that if I find an interesting blog it opens up a window for that entry and keeps it open until I choose to close it. That saves me a lot of efforts on book marking, reminder emails and the like. The change was easy, and it's free so all the better. However if I am honest the other reason was boredom, the season is changing and I was restless; the very basis of fashion. I wanted to play with a new piece of software and it gave me a chance to do a heavy pruning on an over cluttered set of feeds.

Now I could have done that in NetNewsWire which has served me well for the last year. It's a good system but not good enough to fend off the attraction of something different with some improved features . Also I picked up the idea from Luis who provided some great data on his switch to Mac. A very similar process to the way my daughter chooses clothes or my son computer games. It's all about proximate contacts and adaption, mixing form with function. This seems to me one of the ways that social computing is going, and some of the consequences (especiallyfor investment and payback for the Venture Vultures) have not been thought through. Software becomes like fashion, something you change with the seasons.

For those interested a discussion/potential flame war has just a started up. My entry in the talk page is set out below and is largely self-explanatory. I intervened to reduce what seemed to be excessive references to Malhorta. Historically the Brint Institute of which he is Founding Chairman and Chief Knowledge Architect has been a useful source of material. It is in a different class from the Certifiers such as KMPro, so it would be a pity to see its Founding Chairman adopt the promotional techniques used by those organisations.

t's been an interesting task taking on an active editorial role here. There is an awful amount of self promotion and I sometimes wonder if it is worth the energy. Some of it is blatant in this case I think it just mistaken but let us see how it develops.

Otherwise known as Head Rambles, in the Best Blogger category here

This morning at KM World in San Jose we started off with a memorial to Melissie Rumizen. Steve Barth, Verna Allee and myself read our own and other tributes to the background of photographs collected from her friends. Many people in that audience knew her directly or through her work so it was a sympathetic audience and a moving experience.

James Surowiecki was first up of the keynotes (my turn comes on Thursday) with a well rehearsed powerpointless presentation that provided a good introduction to his Wisdom of Crowds. Now I have heard James several times before and the material is familiar. On this occasion he focused on the three conditions necessary for the crowd to be wiser that any of its individual members. I think it's worth summarising those and adding some comments on the implications

I was sitting in a presentation at KM World this morning by Barth and Marrs on the subject of Accelerating Decisions. Now there was some interesting stuff here although I was not happy with the linearity of some of the models and the odd dichotomy. I argued two points at the end, but the presenters agreed with me so there may be no real disagreement. The first was that strategy properly understood is an activity in the present not in the future (that will be a future blog). The second related to a question of entrepreneurs and if they use intuition as opposed analytics. Now I was unhappy with the contrast of intuition and analytics. I was also concerned about how you would justify intuition in a corporate environment other than for the CEO. That caused be to reflect on entrepreneurial activity within a large organisation, and some of the methods that work.

With some of the debate on if KM will ever be a profession, this issue within the American Anthropology Association puts things into perspective. It has been a major debate on the anthropology debates for some time, and its not an easy one in which to distinguish right from wrong.

Last week I gave the keynote at KM Asia in Singapore, and then yesterday at KM World in San Jose (the next few weeks see KM India and KM Brazil so life is busy). I used more or less the same slides in each case. However in KM Asia I spent most of the early part looking at the history of KM, while in KM World I focused more on Social Computing. I have loaded the slides here (they do not include the history of KM stuff from KM Asia). The podcast for KM World is here and for KM Asia here. There is supporting material in this interview with Jon Husband.

For a good potted summary of the San Jose presentation (and multiple links) go to this impressive blog by Stuart Henshaw

PS (late addition) the additional KM Asia slides are now loaded and are available here.

One of those great sayings from Gaping Void. Generally if you look at an organisation and trace back the various rules and regulations they can normally be seen as arising from past failure and the attempt to correct it. There is a sub-class here, of controls arising from a re-engineering exercise. In this case we get rules based on idealised processes the net result of which is denser informal networks to find work arounds in order to mitigate the impact of excessive structure. I call it a sub-class as such root and branch exercises normally arise in consequence of some failure to create breathing space.

My old friend, sometime disputant and raconteur Steve Denning has managed to produce another book (I am green given the struggles I have having getting one out), this time on The Secret Language of Leadership: how leaders inspire action through narrative. I don't have my copy yet, but it was promised as we passed in the night at San Jose this Thursday past. More commentary when I do. The one thing I can guarantee is that it will have lots of well researched examples. He has also created a novel means of promotion involving multiple free gifts. Details of the book (and the gifts) here.

Paternalism has always worried me, especially when it is exercised with the power of the state. An example came to mind when a long term friend of mine expressed concern about the imposition of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy for treatment for psychic distress in the UK. We are talking about NICE clinical guidelines being imposed de facto on the NHS here: incidentally how can anyone let anything end up with an abbreviation like NICE. Now I should emphasise that this is not an argument against CBT per se. CBT after all is a technique with an evidence base in practice and theory. It is an argument against selection of a single approach, in particular one which is focused on creating wellbeing and happiness, words which sound good but have a poor history in use by government agencies. The fact that the technique can be self administered by way of CBT is even more scary. Warning bells should start to ring if we ever plan for uniformity. A similar theme, in a different context, is picked up by Kim in Thinking Shift, on the danger of standing out from the crowd, of being different in any way.

We need difference, we cannot afford in an area such as psychology (or any major area of policy) to embed a particular theory or practice and thus prevent evolution of both. To be honest this seems to be another example of inappropriate industrial practices (in this case best practice) being imposed in the public sector to its detriment. There is far too much of this at the moment, and management-speak seems to reign, to make another Orwellian reference. So let those better qualified than I speak on this subject:

In response to several requests I have loaded the additional slides used in KM Asia here. Additional that is to the KM World slides that I referenced earlier this week. The slides relate to the history of KM and my key rules of blogging. I have also fixed the problem that meant people could not download the earlier slide set. Apologies for that and thanks to those who sorted it out.

Further to my earlier post on the dangers of a single approach to treatment for psychic distress, and the dangers of Government (or any other power for that matter) doing things for the best of all possible motives based on current belief. I was reminded in a conversation on the subject of the practice of lobotomy, which was thought to have a calming effect. The portrayal of the consequences of this, and the context of orthodoxy was brilliantly portrayed in One Flew over the Cookoo's Nest, but it is also worth tracking back through this post from Mind Hacks to the radio interview of one of the victims. The picture by the way is of a brain, post lobotomy.

I was invited to attend and speak at an EU event on the above subject in Brussels this week. I had expected a normal small meeting room, but it turned out to a much bigger event with some prestigious speakers. I thought I would report on the summary session, and use that as an introduction to the aspects of our work that I presented; which generated a lot of interest, it was as they say different.

For anyone coming to this site after my lecture at the event, then if you go to the Literature section of the web site then any article by Kurtz/Snowden will give you the academic background. In addition the Helsinki lecture and podcast spends an hour going through the material I covered in 15 minutes and may be useful

Mind Hacks does a good job of reporting criticism of the recent experiment where brain scans were taken of people viewing videos of US presidential candidates. It's one of those things that got picked up quickly (and uncritically) by a lot of bloggers so its good to see something objective here. My other bug bear at the moment is people claiming to provide ethnographic consultancy services when they have had no training or qualification. I draw on ethnography but I would not claim the profession without a professional qualification.

A great post today by Stuart Henshall on reasons to support conference blogging (and not just 'cause it's got my photo in it). I started doing this recently (yesterday the latest) and found it not only increased my attention to what was being said, but also forced me to reflect and not jump to rapidly to conclusions. From a speakers point of view I think it can only be good news.

One thing Stuart does not address is what else speakers could do to make the conference bloggers life easier. All suggestions on this appreciated.

One of my recently discovered and oh ever so well written science blogs is Cocktail Party Physics, subtitled Physics with a Twist. Her latest posting has one of the clearest explanations of wave-particle duality I have ever read (and I have read a few). This is provided in the context of reporting on recent experiments which demonstrate the way in which choice of measurement determines what you see. There is also a nice example of the way in which novel scientific ideas that challenge the establishment are ignored: how could Newton possibly be wrong?. Her choice of Paris Hilton as a fictional researcher is inspired and had me laughing out loud. I extract the following quote to give you a sample: Are the photons just messing with her? Unable to cope with the quantum conundrum, Paris Hilton's head explodes. Millions rejoice. Tabloids mourn. And those mischievous photons give an evil cackle of delight at having claimed another victim.

I am writing this blog with tears in my eyes to the sound of the Llanelli Male Voice Choir singing Calon Lan at the funeral of Ray Gravell. For those who don't know him Grav was an outstanding centre from the great Welsh sides of the 1970s. A British Lion in 1980 and a member of the Llanelli side that 35 years ago beat the 7th All Blacks. Grav was more than just a rugby player, he was also swordbearer of the Eisteddfod a bard, a broadcaster and an actor of note. The First Minister of the Welsh Assembly has just said it all He touched everyone. A person of great enthusiasm, immense passion who was always modest, who never really believed the level of his talent and inspired all those around him.

A sense of his importance in Wales can be gained from the fact that the sword of the Eisteddfod led out his coffin, the first time it has ever been used outside of the Eisteddfod. All Welsh radio and Television channels are transmitting the ceremony either in Welsh or with simultaneous translation. The funeral is in a packed Stradey Park, the home of Llanelli Rugby Club and the score from the All Black's defeat is up on the score board (2 goals and a try to a single goal 9-3). I can see former English forwards such as Fran Cotton, who were Lions teams mates unashamedly crying. For a small Welsh town this funeral has a real international presence.

Hywel Teifi Edwards, historian, in his tribute says There was a touch of the Mabinogion about him and closes in Welsh with Heros don't die. Dafydd Iwan has sung Owen Glyndwr will return and the flag of Glydwr was in the procession. Gerald Davies, quotes Carwyn James No one has ever worn the red shirt of Wales with a better sense of what it means to be a Welshman. There is real affection and poetry in these tributes and a smile on the faces of his family as they hear stories of his singing in the dressing room. Gerald Davies again: He was devoid of any malice, he was a granite figure yet tender.

For Llanelli, Wales and the British Lions he wore a red shirt. It was fitting that his two all to young daughters wore that same shirt as they followed their father's coffin into the ground. At the start of the ceremony one of the commentators explained the significance of the Welsh word Cynefin: a place of multiple belongings. Stradey Park, home of the Sospan Fach that adorns the top of its Rugby posts, stands today for a man who symbolised what it was, is and will be to be Welsh; to belong.

With Cwm Rhondda the ceremony concludes, but the memory will live on.

Nice little test site here although one wonders which undergraduates at which Universities. I tested out a couple of the key blogs I read every day. The boys and girls at Anecdote and Green Chameleon (two collective blogs) are obviously communicating with a wider audience as they came out as High School. Tom Davenport made it to PostGrad level.Then came a shock, Euan can only be understood by a Genius, and I started to wonder if the measure was now one of the degree to which a blog is cryptic in nature. Then it got crazy; I tested out Neurophilosophy which occasionally has me searching for dictionaries and it came out as Junior High School along with Stephen Fry. To cap it all Colin McGinn a philosopher's philosopher if there ever was one only made High School. The whole system gave up with Grandad and declared it itself unable to reach a conclusion, so it obviously has no sense of humour.

Something is up with Technorati. Authority levels are not updating, or only occasionally, searches in the watch list that used to work no longer do, or generate Spam entries. Clicking through on an entry often does not take you to the most recent entry. Checking the help discussion boards I am not the only one with these issues, and others have more.

Anyone got any idea what is up?

One of the main (if not the main) strategies for dealing with a complex system is to create a range of safe-fail experiments or probes that will allow the nature of emergent possibilities to become more visible. In an ordered system safe-fail design is not only possible but is probably mandatory, the only issue is who does the design with what validation processes. A complex system has no repeating relationships between cause and effect, is highly sensitive to small interventions and cannot be determined by outcome based targets, hence the need for experimentation. Note: if none of this makes sense then read the HBR article or at no cost this summary from Tom Stewart or a more elaborate version here from myself.

Now the issue which arises is how to construct such interventions and are there any rules or principles that would help. I have a reasonably well established approach here, and recently Raymond over at the narrative lab came up with 9 principles with which I have some but not complete agreement.

James Dellow hopes that this paper will will cause a bit of stir in the knowledge management community. The following extract from the paper's summary may explain why:

we find that sharing codified knowledge in the form of electronic documents saved time during the task but did not improve work quality or signal competence to clients. In contrast, sharing personal advice improved work quality and signaledcompetence but did not save time. Beyond the content of the knowledge, process costs in the form of document rework and lack of advisor effort negatively affected task outcomes

Now for many of us that is not a revolutionary idea, especially those members of the community who have consistently challenged the codification strategies that grew out of Nonaka's SECI model. So its nice to have a paper with the authority of Wharton and INSEAD authors to make the point. That said I think we really need to take this paper with a pinch of salt.

I have always thought that flying with BA was one of the best ways of becoming aware of the worst aspects of the English class system. If you are not in first class you are treated like a serf, and its obvious that those looking after you deeply resent having to spend time with the lower classes. Compound that with poor service, incompetent computer systems and you have a recipe for a bad day such as the one I have just lived through.

In the middle of the night a connection suddenly came to me between claims that payers answered prove the existence of God, and the research basis of management "science". Both could learn from the delightful cult of the Pastafarians by the way. Either way, to my subject by way of some context setting.

A wonderful example of human inventiveness here from Neurophilosopher.

Earl and I are having an interesting exchange on his blog following recent publicity about new British proposals. In my most recent contribution to that I referenced a quote from my earlier blog on fighting satan. I may summarize the material here later, but for the moment the exchange itself is interesting, while the material is both disturbing and paradoxical.

There is a lot of talk about communities and networks not only within KM, but in many other areas. I want to explore some new ideas here, and it is early days in that exploration, bringing teams and crews into the equation. I see an atomistic and individualistic set of assumptions behind most of the conversations I witness on communities and networks. This contrasts with a more collectivist or system focus on roles and identities that comes if we look at teams and crews. I am beginning to think that we need to get more focus (in organisational work) into teams and crews and shift away from some of emphasis on communities and to a lesser extend networks.

I have always had a lot of time for Tom Davenport, which is not to say that I always agree with him. However he really seems to have a blind spot on social computing. This latest post sees him painting himself into a corner on the separation from the supposed functionality of work from social interaction. Aside from the general issue about the blurring of boundaries between work and play among knowledge workers, he also seems to see any social network as a form of market exchange. Social obligation and interaction is not an advanced form of market capitalism, it's the very core of what it is to be human. I don't do something for you and stack debit in an internal bank account. I help you in context because it is a part of being human. Social computing as a concept and tool set provides the means for social interaction across all aspects of my life, to deny it in a business context is just plain stupid - unless you want a workforce of robots.

I took the train up to London this morning from Pewsey on a Great Western service (the title of this blog should therefore give you an indicator that I am not happy). This is normally a good service and runs on time Luckily this morning the train was 15 minutes late: I had been delayed by having to deal with the consequences of an early morning mother-daughter conflict so this was a prayer answered.

While I support the Wikipedia as a useful source of knowledge, along with the general principles of mass participation, it can at times be difficult. In the last few days I seem to have spent a disproportionate amount of time dealing with the deletion of obscenities on the Wales article, and preventing self-promotion in the Knowledge Management article. The latter is especially frustrating given the quality of the discussion and the lack of engagement of the wider community.

Sooner or later this will all get too hard and I will just give up, there are better uses of my time.

Virtual Canuck picks up my posting about crews, teams etc but takes issue with my position, I quote: So I don’t think that Snowden’s use of the term crew to define a subset of groups really moves us forward. It turns out that the author (Terry) along with one Jon Dron has already created a taxonomy of groups, networks and collectives which is more than adequate for the field. interestingly they quote my two statements on the unique features of crews in full. However their failure to take those features into account and their general assumptions about taxonomies indicate that either I did not explain myself well, or they are wedded to their three fold classification and do not want to brook any challenge. On the assumption that the former is the case, I will clarify the statements and deal directly with their comments on crews, after a general discourse on their three fold classification which I find unhelpful (this is not simple retaliation, I really don't like it).

As many people know I tend to avoid the use of Story Telling in connection with my work. Firstly because its not very accurate; most of that work is gathering, permitting self-interpretation, sensing patterns in narrative material. OK a small amount is telling stories, and even that uses an emergent process allowing the story to emerge through multiple interactions. Secondly, I find a lot of what goes under the broad title of Story Telling (especially since the subject has become popular), trite, over evangelical, excessive in its claims and manipulative in all the wrong senses of that word.

I created a little off line bubble of discontent with my posting about the Australian elections yesterday. Not from supporters of Howard (they seem to have disappeared) but from people who felt that the cause of story-telling would be best served by claiming the credit for Rudd's election. Now no one has complained directly via a comment or elsewhere so it would be unfair to name names. However I have no intention of withdrawing my comments and I would also throw down another challenge. It is very interesting how many people are telling me and others how story telling won the election, after the election was won. It is like economists after an stock market crash who can tell you how it happened, but somehow or other make their claims after the fact not before.

Elections are a complex system guys, there are multiple unpredictable relationships between cause and effect. You have a claim for a cause, if you predicted it BEFORE the election , not afterwards.

You know I really love the blogosphere, I had no idea when I started 18 months ago just how much of a productivity tool it would be. To take just one example; last week I was told by several people in no uncertain terms, that I needed to provide a summary of some of the main blogs and other material from this blog's history for new readers. I was starting to think about how to do that, then low and behold along comes Library Clips and does it for me. Not only that but with some interesting commentary and links to other blogs thrown in for good measure. I always wondered why we ever got started with KM, when the Librarians had sussed the field out years ago and here is further evidence of that profession's (for it is, while KM will never be) competence.

It has been overcast in Rio, although we got up the Sugar Loaf on day one with sectacluar views. This morning I got up early to struggle through the use of a very slow internet connection before leaving for the airport and low and behold, the sun was out. It looked like it would shortly disappear so I grabbed the camera and headed across the road to the beach at Leblon (which I must admit I liked better than the more famous Copacabana) with the camera. This shot was of the sun on the water, just before it left for the day into the clouds.

Thanks for Steve Freeman for passing me details of this web site. It made me realise that I am not alone in my experiences, more than that it made me feel well treated in comparison.

It has been a busy year for KM conference keynotes. KM Australia, was followed up by KM Asia, KM World in the US, KM India (by phone) a few in the UK and now KM Brazil. I was given two hours today so could cover a lot of material, although I was tired at the end (keeping the right speed for translators) and the audience were in part exhausted. The slides are available here and while it was not podcast, some of the material was covered in KM World and in my podcast with Jon.

Several good conversations before and afterwards. One of the more distressing things however (and I have said this around the world) is the tendency to take on board US approaches more or less as they are described by the consultants who sell them. We have BPR and SAP implementations out here with knowledge management in its early days. I sometimes think that consultants and software companies start off in their own country, exhaust that market (and the patience of executives for yet another initiative) and then move on overseas, or into Government (the industrial best practice con trick).

You cannot take a method and approach developed in one context, and then apply it wholesale to a different one. I argued strongly that we need countries like Brazil (and Singapore, and South Africa and, and, and...) to learn from but not imitate the reported best practice of US companies. I say reported deliberately as I am dubious as to the reality of case studies used. Those countries have unique advantages, they can create new and culturally relevant ways of sharing and creating knowledge. The US is a unique culture that has driven much, for good an ill. However it is not anti-american to say that it would be a very bad thing if it became the template that the world attempted to follow.

[we must] rethink the relation between knowledge and emotion and construct conceptual models that demonstrate the mutually constitutive rather than oppositional relation between reason and emotion. Far from precluding the possibility of reliable knowledge, emotion as well as value must be shown as necessary ....

Jaggar 1989:157 "Love and Knowledge in Feminist Epistemology" in Jagger & Bordo Gender/Body/Knowledge quoted in Smith & Jenks Qualitative Complexity