I've a whole set of blogs in half written state, all of which I had hoped to publish over the last few weeks. They range from new thoughts on exaptation, to reflections on various journeys and some new thinking on power laws. A it happens work and travel have radically disrupted by ability to do much more than survive for the last couple of weeks.
I am now in Bad Homburg, a small town (and pretty in parts see photograph) just outside Frankfurt for KnowTech 2009. I was the only (and I think the first) non German speaker at this event and it was good to meet up with several old friends from IBM, the IKM and also various other events in different parts of the world. I gave a keynote on why social computing works, or more specifically a natural science approach to understanding why it has worked, and also to understanding changes that need to be made in order for it to work in the more restricted ecology of a modern organisation. The slides I used are here, and the podcast is here (one error, at one point I say Canada, when I should have said the UK but it doesn't alter the point). I also did a pre-conference workshop. Participants in that can get the slides and podcasts by email
There are some basics in this, this was after all an audience for which much of material is new. I started off with a key quote from Polyani, to argue (i) that Nonaka's SECI model was a gross and dangerous misinterpretation of tacit knowledge and (ii) that we need to aim for a synthesis of human and machine intelligence to enable, and enpower sense-making in organisations and society. I reproduce it here, its from his Knowing and Being which is hard reading, but worth the effort.
While tacit knowledge can be possessed by itself, explicit knowledge must rely on being tacitly understood and applied. Hence all knowledge is either tacit or rooted in tacit knowledge. A wholly explicit knowledge is unthinkable.
I then used a modified version of the 7 rules of knowledge management to introduce insights from the cognitive sciences, moved onto complexity (with the Children's Party Story) and then moved on to show the way in which you can create a highly functional KM system from social computing (using my own desk top as an illustration). From there I went to to a series of statements about complexity based change in knowledge management:
- from “COP” & the matrix organisation
to social network stimulation & crews - from taxonomies & ontologies to
social computing, semi-constrained signification (not a folksonomy) - from “best practice” and structured documents to
worst practice, fragmented micro-narrative and real time capture & deployment - from recipe books to
Chefs, understanding and applying principles - from thinking of knowledge as a “thing”
to enabling the flow
And some implications for management:
- The technology for the original vision of KM is now largely available for free, or in lower cost for generic & interoperable capability
- Applications co-evolve within architectural constraints with changing software components in varying forms to adapt, but also exapt.
- Not all cars are black, and not all IT procured
- Security and audit trail are not an issue, but they are an excuse to hang onto power
- Applications emerge from agent interaction within light constraints
- Context is everything, scale etc. etc.
There is also relevant material in two blogs late in September on knowledge management governance and definitions, with some great comments. They are here and here. For good measure I used the Nasrudin story to warn them about turning falcons into pigeons (and I just hope that translated.
Nasrudin found a weary falcon sitting one day on his window-sill.
He had never seen a bird like this before.
“You poor thing”, he said, “how ever were you to allowed to get into this state?”
He clipped the falcon’s talons and cut its beak straight, and trimmed its feathers.
“Now you look more like a bird”, said Nasrudin
Comments (1)
Dave,
I enjoyed your podcast but I note that you continue to make side references to scenario planning.
I do not wish to defend or promote any technique, but I do think you take a very simplistic view of the approach.
Your comments on scenario planning may have validity in respect to considering their meaning and value as predicting the future. However, is this all they represent?
Although some may consider their value (or in your case, their lack of value) in this context, many others see it as a technique to engage art with work such that variety is reduced and confidence in strategic decision making is increased. In this regard, one can only meaningfully apply a personal evaluation and judgment of relevance (probability by impact) to the crafted (well or not) conjecture about the future unknown. In most simple cases it simply provides alternate thinking about business-as-usual (BAU) and can represent hypotheses to test policy resilience without recourse to high technology.
I suggest it is the subjective cognitive response that is the point: not reading the tea-leaves.
Both the conscious and subconscious responses to the plausibility (and the analysis of possibility, probability and desirability) of the models, whether they be presented as a set of quantitative models, or as a set of creative narratives, is the desired aim of the scenario practitioner.
Everyone knows the set of scenarios will not be true (except in rare cases such as Shell’s classic Oil Embargo scenario in the 1970’s). Properly used they set the context for strategic discussion on what policy, strategy and operational responses would occur etc. It is more about risk assessment than prediction. The value to Shell was the pre-work done to set out their strategic and operational response to that hypothesis -- it gave them a 6-month competitve advantage and they made $zillions!
In addition, Futurology (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurology ) is also about investigating the “the worldviews and myths that underlie them”. It is these that are manipulated or brought to the surface in a well crafted work of art. At a broad global level, such as the WBCSD’s three global scenarios (Frog, Jazz, Geopolity), they can become unifying theories –- and if successful can enter the lexicon to provide efficient shorthand for strategic discussion in the “global village”.
I think your approach (SenseMaker etc) is in a slightly different space. My criticism of scenario planning is related to its costs (time and money) and often poor practice. The same risks apply to any approach -- yours as well.
What interest me at present are the shifts taking place, not only in the social computing/networking domain, as you describe in your podcast, but also in the application of media (internet included) and how this is biased towards written or oral/vernacular (ref: Innis and McLuhan –- there is a good archive here if anyone is interested: http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/innis-mcluhan/index-e.html). We can definitely see the end of empires occuring (UK in the last gasp, and USA in just heading over the cusp): Minerva's Owl is definitely flying!
I suspect that 'successful' scenarios (of the narrative kind) are actually structured towards the oral traditions and vernacular, by virtue of the role they attempt to play in setting the context for better decision making.
I’d like to suggest that your orientation, in spite of your claims to be Welsh, is more towards the written -– i.e. the use of the visual. Interest by the military in your products and services fits in with this hypothesis (if we follow Innis and McLuhan). Yes, I understand that your SenseMaker system attaches and links text, image and audio as an innovative application of modern communications technology, but I also suggest it communicates with the ‘space-based’ systems both internal and external to the human mind. If the "medium is the message" then there is bias in the communication medium. Could you be affected by this 'bias' in your judgements on the value of scenario planning?
I think expanding on the simplistic approach to the subject of scenario planning that your side-comments suggest would be of value -– especially if you can separate out the issues in the two domains of: (a) pragmatic business application; and (b) cognitive impacts. Some years back (circa. 2?) you indicated an interest in writing something on scenario planning – did this ever happen?
regards
Russell
Posted by russell | October 14, 2009 6:27 AM
Posted on October 14, 2009 06:27