The other major keynote at KM Asia was Nancy Dixon and it was good to meet up again after several years. The last conference we spoke at together was in Caracas along with Tom Stewart and others in a different age. She quoted Alan Webber of Fast Company who said: What’s new about the new economy is that work is conversation. Partly in order to provide continuity, but also as a part of a general theme I am developing that social computing takes on the form of an older oral tradition, I added my own codicil: It always has been, we just forgot about it for a while. This is important, its not that social computing creating some completely new form of human interaction, what it has done is to enable conversations across barriers and boundaries. We can now be a global tribe (or rather tribes), if we can make the changes that the technology permits. Given some of the conversations that ensued from my brief polemic on IT departments that change may not be easy!
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Comments (3)
I've been doing a little bit of work with Marshall McLuhan's 'tetrads', whose four questions seem relevant here:
- what does this innovation enhance?
- what does this innovation obsolesce?
- what does this innovation reverse?
- what does this innovation retrieve?
Social computing has retrieved the idea that work is conversation.
Posted by Andrew Curry | December 1, 2008 10:01 PM
Posted on December 1, 2008 22:01
JC (Chris) Jones, in 'Design Methods, Seeds of Human Futures' describes the transition from craft (based on conversation) to engineering (that requires drawings and documents).
The point you are making - that we can return to older, more natural (?) forms of communication - is an important one. People do seem very locked in what is really a distortion brought about by technology that is now obsolete.
Posted by Brian Sherwood Jones | December 3, 2008 9:14 AM
Posted on December 3, 2008 09:14
Dave,
It was a pleasure to be with you as well at the KM Asia conference. I think there is a new valuing for conversation that has been missing, maybe since Taylor took such hold on management and left everyone thinking that managing is and engineering task. And yes I agree there are good things to say about Taylor (Weisbord in Productive Workplaces does a great job of laying out his contribution.
I am pushing for more conversation that leads to sensemaking - we have been to eager to see conversation as a waste of time rather than a critical element of usnerstaning
Posted by Nancy Dixon | December 10, 2008 2:17 AM
Posted on December 10, 2008 02:17