Social Physics

I listened to this podcast this morning. I'm not sure I agree with the value of attempting to codify trust in electronic social networks, however what he's talking about seems a huge leap ahead from Linked In, Friendster and the like. His work seems very grounded in an understanding of complexity. It seems to me to have some real potential in terms of digital identities, and what he's calling the emerging 'social web'. There's more info at http://www.socialphysics.org/

Science in the web age

The science journal Nature has just published a set of articles on the use of blogs, wikis, and web services in sharing information in the research community. This one I found particularly interesting as it goes into some of the reasons why uptake in the science community has so far been very low. The usual suspects of course - fear it won't be seen as formal or appropriate enough by peers, fears of research ideas being taken by others etc. This does seem to be changing however, and appears to be leading to bigger audiences for the early adopters, and more cross disciplinary exposure of ideas.

KMAP 2005

Earlier this week I went to the KM Asia Pacific conference, held at Victoria University of Wellington, in New Zealand. The theme of the conference was "Building a Knowledge Society: Linking Government, Business, Academia and the Community". As such there was a lot of talk about using KM methods in the policy and e-government arena. I'm starting to get fascinated by the potential for cross sector KM. In my work in the environmental research and management sector in NZ I think we're starting to achieve some gains, but we're still very much at the first generation of KM, in terms of connecting up data and information systems. Highlights of the conference were:

• Jane Fountain's keynote "Can Government be a Catalyst for the Knowledge Society".
  
• The workshop on "Bridging the Policy-Technology Divide: Developments in NZ Public Sector Information Management" organised by SPEAR. This was a superb example of 'unconferencing' a highly interactive workshop session in the midst of a very 'lecture' style conference.
  
• Meeting David Rooney, a truly lovely and insightful man, and hearing his theories on Wisdom Management. I don't yet quite buy his distinction between wisdom and knowledge, but it's a very useful debate to be having I think.
  
• Dave Snowden's closing keynote on "Co-Evolutionary Approaches to Inter-Disciplinary and Cross Silo Knowledge Creation", in which he roundly challenged the hypothesis driven methods of academics, practioners and managers. His argument was that the current process of industry 'experimenting' and then academics studying those experiments to elicit 'best practice' is just too slow in today's world. He advocated a proactive rather than retrospective approach to research in which research co-evolves with practice, and is done in real world contexts, in organisations, rather than as external observation.
  

Evangelists tell stories

Last week I was asked to present at the World Usability Day events in Christchurch. The topic was Usability: Evangelising for Change. Usability isn't my field, so I wasn't quite sure what I was going to say. I have in my career however, been driven to evangelise many new approaches and methods. This includes web design (in the mid 90s), Intranets, Knowledge Management, Change Management, dataset federation, Grid computing, the list goes on. As I put together the presentation, I realised that almost every means for evangelising that I had used over the years included a strong narrative component.

In the presentation used Steve Denning's World Bank story as an example (using a story to promote the use of story...). In thinking about whether diagrams (e.g. consultant's 2x2 matrices) had ever worked for me, as they hadn't for Steve so he relied on story, I realised that where these had been successful they had used narrative elements. Effectively we had found metaphors that resonated with the client, (e.g. an ecological metaphor for knowledge flow at an environmental research institute) and used these in diagrams to represent a KM strategy.

Another method that works well is centred around the "you can't be a prophet in your own land" truism. This involves getting your customers to tell their success stories. If we look back to many successful prophets and evangelists, they conveyed their new and often controversial ideas through parables and fables.

Stories, stories, everywhere. Here are the presentation slides.

Feral Robot Dogs

It was a sunny day at the Mission Bay Landfill site in San Diego. Over the normally tranquil, sun baked ground came rolling an army of dogs, sniffing here, sniffing there. Following the dogs came an unusual collection of students, local politicians, Environmental Health specialists and journalists. They watched the dogs as they sniffed out environmental toxin emissions, following scent vectors across the site containing over fifty years of industrial waste dumping.

But these weren't just any dogs. They were feral robot dogs. They started their lives as inane children's toys, but through mutations caused by inspired hardware and software hacking conducted by students they have been transformed into tools for mediagenic activist sense making.

Putting aside a passing interest in the emerging hardware hacking movement, I find this fascinating. Fascinating in terms of participative sense making, rather than any techno wizardry. These dogs have cameras mounted in their rears, rather than their fronts (where their toxic sensing 'noses' are). The cameras are in their rears so they can film the people following them. These aren't so much scientific devices as a way of enabling lay people to make sense of the invisible threats in their local environment. People follow the dogs, observe their behaviour, talk to each other, have conversations about the significance of what the dogs do, interact with people they normally wouldn't have, and make collective sense of the problem facing them. The conversations and people's actions are filmed for further discussion and sense making later. This might not be as 'precise' as a scientist taking an industrial strength 'sniffer', analysing the data, writing a paper, and presenting at a conference, but it's a damn sight more real to those who participate. As such, is seems just possible that it might spur more action, make more of a difference.

If we let people create tools that enable them to make collective sense of their surroundings (whether in a landfill or a corporate organisation), are they more likely to take effective action than if they receive advice from an outside expert?

A pod cast on the project is available at IT Conversations. More info on the project at http://xdesign.ucsd.edu/feralrobots/

Collective excellence vs individual excellence

Andrew Rixon's recent post on Anecdote regarding a book called 'Improv Wisdom' has got me thinking about about collective excellence vs individual excellence. I'm seeing lots of trends moving away from considering that intellect and productivity come from the individual to these coming from groups. Dave Snowden's 'From Atomism to Networks in Social Systems', The Wisdom of Crowds, the increasing profile of techniques like Open Space Technology, World Cafe, Dotmocracy are all favouring collective wisdom. If you start translating that into excellence and productivity, the four maxims from Improv Wisdom begin to make sense:

• "Say Yes"
  
• "Be Average"
  
• "Make Mistakes, Please"
  
• "Take Care of Each Other"
  

These might be considered suboptimal behaviour in many organisations. Where the culture encourages individual excellence, and aggregates that up into what it believes to be optimal organisational performance these would be seen as signs of weakness. It seems possible thought that they might actually optimise overall organisational excellence in many cases. The last three especially perhaps add enough slack/redundancy in the system to enable more knowledge sharing, synergy, and the emergence of collective innovation. It's well understood in designing networks that having a degree of redundancy (introducing cycles into the network, which ensures that nodes are connected by more than one path) both protects against failure and ensures more optimised system wide results in the long run. Is it possible that the above maxims might produce a similar effect in the complex social systems in the organisations we work in?

Thinking alike, separately

Curiously Shawn just posted this: Anecdote: Collective meaning and group decision making. Given its similarity to my recent post on collective decision making I asked him if he'd seen my post. He hadn't but concluded that when interesting books like Wisdom of Crowds appear it starts people thinking in a certain direction. I'm sure this happens with many ideas. It seems a related phenomenon to 'aggregated, non-interactive' decision making, but instead of a decision it's the spontaneous distributed emergence of an idea or distinction.

Collective decision making - To interact or not

Another take on collective sense making/decision making I've been thinking about is the difference between methods that do or don't use interaction in the process. Open Space Technology and Cynefin methods for example use group deliberative processes where people engage with each other to make decisions. Even conventional facilitated consensus approaches to strategy
require that people have to engage with each other in some way to come up with a collective decision. James Surowiecki in The Wisdom of Crowds suggests however that some highly effective predictive decisions can be taken by the aggregation of individuals' decisions with little or no interaction in the process. For example he cites the case where participants in the stock market collectively determined which of the potential four companies was responsible for the defect that caused the Colombia space shuttle disaster, a full six months before the official investigation concluded the same. It'll be interesting to see how methods emerge for using this type of 'aggregated, non-interactive' mass decision making in organisations.

Folksonomy - How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mess

Folksonomy - How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mess. I found this podcast fascinating. It's a panel interview with Joshua Schachter (del.icio.us), Stewart Butterfield (Flickr), Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia) and Clay Shirky on different approaches to tags and the loose, user defined ontologies they create. The key distinction for me was the different purpose tagging has in each service. In del.icio.us people are tagging other people's things (URLs) for their own benefit (so they can find them more easily than with conventional bookmarks). The 'social software' benefit is effectively just a handy side effect. With Flickr people tag their own things for their own, and other people's benefit. With Wikipedia, a group of people tag to categorise content purely for other people's benefit. This has interesting implications in terms of the way things are tagged, and whether tags can be useful combined across a range of different services.

Purple on the nose

I attended the afternoon of a full day session the Ministry of Education put on for Etienne Wenger in Wellington. Etienne is a world renowed expert on Communities of Practice. He covered some practical aspects of communities of practice in the morning, and more theoretical content in the afternoon. Those who know me will know it's not often I wish a speaker would be a bit more tangible...

Etienne talked about knowledge being socially constructed, that it was more about your identity as a knower in a community than about storing stuff in your head. He used the example of 'purple on the nose' a phrase used by a friend of his who was a wine connoisseur. Etienne could not 'know' this in that he didn't have the experience or competence to detect it in the glass of wine. Nor could he claim that it was in fact 'yellow on the shoulder' because he didn't have the status within the wine tasting community to make such a claim. The knowledge of 'purple on the nose' he said was a property of the wine tasting community, and knowing it was a socially negotiated act of membership in that community. Human practices, he said, create a universe of knowledge of their own, which is inaccessible unless you join that practice. The path of learning is more about managing your trajectory through a community of knowers than it is about acquiring information.

Great stuff, but a bit like the bottle of red Etienne mentioned, it did make my head swim a bit trying to take it all in. I've often pondered the notion that even though knowledge is essentially 'brain based' (as distinct from information which is paper or electronically based) it is possible for organisations to 'know' things. Etienne solidified these ideas a bit further for me. I'm not sure I agree completely, but it does provide another useful lens through which to investigate the way knowledge works in groups, communities and organisations.

I also like the comments Derek Wenmouth makes about the session in his blog post on Boundary Workers.

Ownership vs Resonance in Strategy

Buy in and ownership are often touted as essential in strategic planning and in ensuring planned strategic actions actually happen. I've always focused more on the process rather than the output (or document) in strategic planning. I've attempted to make strategy memorable, to boil it down to a few key guiding principles so that it continues to inform day to day action (without people having to re-read a long document every time they make a decision).

This has got me thinking about resonance. When a group of managers go away on a retreat for example and write a mission statement or vision they go through a myriad of discussions, arguments, story telling and thinking processes to end up with something that is, for them, richly embued with meaning. Then they bring it back and present it proudly to the organisation and wonder why people aren't all that excited by those carefully crafted words.

I think part of the answer has to do with ownership and involvement - if people haven't been involved in something they're less likely to be enthused about it. I also think there's more to it than that. Involvement in the process creates resonance. The words in a strategy, mission statement or vision are semantic hooks into a set of ideas, experiences and judgements they've had through the process. They become a shortcut to a set of cognitive patterns, or tacit knowledge, that reinforce and affect action.

A colleague I met with in Australia recently shared with me a story about a mission statement he'd recently developed with a community group he was a member of. He knew he would only get involvement from a small subset in a half day workshop, so he devised an activity where everybody wrote down three or four words that represented what the organisation meant for them. These were clustered and used as a basis for discussion in the workshop. This meant everyone participated, many saw their words in the final mission statement, and there were different degrees of resonance based on this graduated method of participation.

Knowledge Environments I've just published a review of the way physical environments can influence knowledge flow in organisations. This was based on a paper I wrote for Landcare Research looking at how they might better use the space in their new building in Auckland. The review contains summaries of a lot of the leading thinking in this area, especially that of Victoria Ward and the Space SIG on Knowledgeboard.com.

I was jogging in the early morning with my friend Tim who I was staying with in Wellington. We were talking about the pictures from the probe sent to Titan. Tim, who has a much greater degree of interest in space told me that the mars rovers were still going, 360 days after they landed when their anticipated life was only 80 days, and that the titan probe was only sending back one data stream because they'd forgotten to turn the other one on. I realised that we had different levels of knowledge about the same topic even though we both only took a passing or amateur interest in the topic. If the sun could be used as a metaphor for knowledge about space exploration, Tim was more tanned than I. He was slightly 'closer to the sun'. It got me thinking about the way clusters of knowledge occur in organisations, and that the level of 'light' diminishes the further away from that source we are. If we want to make sure people in our organisations are more 'enlightened', perhaps it's about moving them closer to the source, or taking away shade causing barriers than it is about moving the knowledge to them.

IT Conversations: Tim O'Reilly - O'Reilly Radar - just listened to this from ITconversations.com. Tim O'Reilly was talking about the possibilty of using social software driven contributions on mapping services. For example Microsoft research is developing a system to let people contribute photos to map locations. This got me thinking about a story Dave Snowden told about narrowly escaping mugging in New York. He was using this to illustrate the difference between information and knowledge, using a map and a taxi driver as examples. Long story short he used a map to figure out how to get somewhere more quickly using the tube and a short cut across 42nd Street. As a gang of muggers approached a police car picked him up and told him he shouldn't be there, especially dressed in a tux and carrying a laptop bag. Any New Yorker, let alone any taxi driver would have had the knowledge to tell him not to take that route, but the map didn't say 'here be muggers'. With the ability for large groups to annotate and describe map locations wikipaedia style, the map actually could.

The other highlight of the speech was an anecdote about a service in cambodia where a small number of people drive a route daily through remote villages picking up email without stopping from user's wireless networks.