January 2012
65 posts
The collaboration matrix - what dynamic structures...
Task: Because the “outcome” drives the members’ attention and participation
Trait: Because the “interest” drives the members’ attention and participation
Transactional: Because the “process” drives the members’ attention and participation
Social: Because the “shared insight” drives the members’ attention and participation
- Paul Culmsee
...
...acting with the intention of enabling rather...
Chris Rodgers on Twitter answering some questions through the perspective of social complex processes:
@RSessions Thx for interesting insights into your thinking re simplifying “enterprise architecture” and seeking greater ‘coherence’. @johnt
@RSessions Paper’s theme seems to be about ‘doing things better and getting them right’–as defined by set of universal design laws…@johnt
I see all...
One size fits all Community of Practice?
Q: Why should there be at least 50 people in a CoP?
A: In a typical community, 10% or fewer of the members will tend to post, ask questions, present, etc. If a CoP has only 10 members, that means that only one person will be doing most of the activity. In a CoP of 50, you can expect around 5 people to be very active, and that is probably the minimum number for success. As the community grows...
Communities of Practice are self-forming and...
Q: Would you include project teams or operating units as communities of practice (CoPs)?
A: Not typically. Communities form around people who share a common specialty, interest, or concern. Project teams and operating units share some characteristics, but they are not self-forming.
Communities exist to help their members better do their jobs and to deepen their skills and expertise. Project...
A networked team is...
A networked team is a social entity that carries out tasks in order to serve the needs of a customer (internal or external) and is embedded in one or several larger social systems . It stands out from regular teams by its network awareness, which mainly manifests itself in the following characteristics:
- Cohesive construct: A networked team is a cohesive social network. It is not too tight...
“Naysayers like to dismiss me as an outlier, telling me I’m the 1% of the...”
– Thiel Fellow Dale Stephens Drops Out (Of College), Moves In (To Silicon Valley), And Starts Up (Talent-Scouting RadMatter) | Fast Company
Instead of keeping the bonus, the employees must...
If I were to ask you if you would prefer to spend your year-end bonus on yourself or spend it on your coworkers, you would likely choose the former.
Pret-a-Manger, a U.K. food chain that is expanding in America, believes the opposite to be true.
“When employees are promoted or pass training milestones, they receive at least £50 in vouchers, a payment that Pret calls a ‘shooting...
The difference between motivation and...
“Peter,” my friend Byron emailed me a few days ago. “I haven’t been diligent about working out over the past five years and I’m trying to get back in the gym and get myself into a healthier state
“I need to fix it,” he wrote. He is motivated to work out; otherwise he wouldn’t have emailed me. He clearly cares about getting fit and when you care...
Parenting, the scientific experiments and...
The scientific experiment is useful for understanding general trends for the type of people studied, but it usually doesn’t apply to everyone (unless you are studying the effects of highly toxic substances that kill all). Hypothesis testing, the usual method for determining significant effects, tests group difference. All that is needed is to find a significant difference between the mean...
Knowledge is captured in the social network...
Increasingly seeing the ability to turn communications into content. Social tools do a better job of capturing the conversation and turning it into knowledge
In essence, you see social networks turning into a knowledge institution
No longer does a departing employees network drive get wiped. Instead, the knowledge is captured in the social network instead of the drive.
- Michael Porter
...
Memory isn't etched in neural stone. It's a...
They said their finding provided evidence that the mind uses sophisticated compression routines … for efficiently packaging previous events as they are being sent to memory.
After watching each video clip, the participants were shown a series of stills and asked to say if each one had or hadn’t featured in the video they’d just watched. Here’s the main finding....
“If you think knowledge is power, you aren’t living in the real world. Knowledge...”
– - Richard McDermott
President of McDermott Consulting (From “Lagestion du savoir”, proceedings of the November 2003 colloquium)
Related
The fallacy of know-how recipes and hoarding
“…rather than scale up successes (the fruits), we should focus on scaling...”
– - Ewen Le Borgne
Related
Replicate starting conditions
Beware of outcomes thinking in complex environments
Social construction of meaning, rather than...
This gave us an idea from which we evolved a series of experiments to see if from a body of culturally situated narrative, we could enable the emergence of archetypes that would allow insight into issues relating to culture and perception. Those experiments were successful and also established the importance of the social construction of meaning, rather than meaning mediated or interpreted by...
An example contrasting a survey vs narrative...
Prompting questions should be indirect to avoid correct answers and role play; the question should situate the storyteller in a meaningful context and should be phrased to ensure that a real story is told, either about the storyteller or about someone they know
An example of such as question follows…within a pharamceutical company looking at corporate values; Imagine you have just...
Excessive order stifles the opportunities for...
You can build a wonderful portal with the best taxonomy in the world but people will still use people to connect with knowledge. I often ask a simple question at conferences: faced with a difficult or intractable problem, would you use a best practice or find a group of people with relevant experience and listen to their stories? Inevitably people go for the stories not the database. Of course...
What you can learn about the behaviour of dopamine...
With Internet porn it’s easy to overstimulate your brain. Each search, each novel image, each surprising visual, each new genre, and sexual arousal itself all release dopamine in your reward circuitry. Dopamine is the gas that powers the reward circuitry and it equates with desire, anticipation, cravings, and wanting something in particular.
Unfortunately, too much stimulation causes some...
KM and sensitization
This post points out how we make memories; and from it I reinforce that real KM is about dialogue, reframing to your context, and then acting on this to create personal knowledge; an imprint on our mind. When we act, dopamine runs to our prefrontal cortex…it can signal an important experience.
This adds another pattern to our mind and is correlated with other similar patterns…the...
“Content at rest is expensive, content in motion is valuable,” says Schick....”
– SharePoint is a ‘document coffin’, says IBM | Computerworld New Zealand
Intentcasting
Interest brings groups together, but intent is what brings teams together to actually get things done.
Intentcasting is deceptively simple to describe. It consists in broadcasting your intent to make something happen. That something could be anything:
“I want to have a party at my house!”
“We want to raise $1,000 for Japan!”
Although it does not have to spell out...
The drive to compete comes mainly from scarcity,...
My suggestion, and this is probably pretty basic to economics, is that scarcity drives competition. With abundance, people do not compete to obtain the thing because they do not need to. Rather, they must compete for it when there is less of it then there are people who want it.
I agree that sports themselves are fundamental human behaviors in their most simple form, which I would define as...
Tyranny was the solution to what was essentially a...
The default mode for human beings is equality. Every pre-civilized society we know about operated on the assumption that its members were equals. Nobody had the right to give orders to anybody else.
What drove this was not idealism but pragmatism. In hunting-and-gathering groups, nobody can own more than they can carry, so there is no way to accumulate wealth. If you want meat, then...
The Social Business of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA)
When I read this article about AA, I thought wow so many correlations with social business and complexity…and it’s not the first time that similarities have been made between Alcoholics Anonymous and all things 2.0
Gamification
AA doesn’t work for everybody, but when it does, it can be transformative. Members receive tokens to mark periods of sobriety, from 24 hours to one...
An anecdote of social messaging as the killer app
Wicklin is one of the experts on statistical software development at SAS Institute. Prior to creating the Hub, SAS already had other collaboration systems in place, such as SharePoint, and implemented wikis and blogs on its intranet for knowledge sharing. But the Hub caught Wicklin’s attention in a way those other tools never had.
“I guess the difference between the Hub and all...
It's not the job, but the autonomy and service...
In my own early work experience as a dishwasher, I remember my manager complaining to me because some of the plates and pots weren’t clean. He told me that I wasn’t washing the dishes. I replied, “I have washed every single dish,” which was true—I just hadn’t washed them to the standard the manager was looking for. But instead of getting into a battle around...
“Autonomy without competence is really risky and dangerous, and lack of autonomy...”
– Ken Blanchard and Scott Blanchard
From compliance to autonomy
The traditional idea of management is that managers are responsible for controlling the efforts and compliance of the people working for them. The irony of that notion is that the managers who put the idea of compliance aside are the ones who get more of the behaviors they are looking for.
People begin striving and yearning for autonomy early in life—to have the ability to act...
Employees set their own rules for engagement
The power of engagement has shifted from leaders who originally defined it to the employees who live it every day…Traditional conventions of engagement are based on a definition by leadership of how employees should act, contribute, accept and appreciate. These workers have, in turn, set their own rules that business must follow if it wants to reach them, motivate them, solidify their...
A fable about meaningful work and alignment
There is a fable about a man who approaches three laborers breaking and shaping rocks. The man asks the first laborer what he is doing. “What does it look like I’m doing? I’m breaking rocks,” the laborer replies. The man asks the second laborer what he is doing and he responds that he is building a wall. The man then asks the third laborer what he is doing and the laborer...
The HR shift from administration to supporting...
When Randy MacDonald arrived at IBM in 2000 as senior vice president of HR, he felt the function was too focused on administration. “I have a fundamental belief that it’s important to decide what is core and non-core,” he told me recently. “Administrative responsibilities, such as getting paychecks out on time, are not core. Attracting, retaining, and motivating employees...
“We are neural beings,” states Berkeley cognitive scientist George Lakoff. “Our...”
– Brainy Trees, Metaphorical Forests: On Neuroscience, Embodiment, and Architecture | Neuroanthropology (via wildcat2030)
Related
Does reality exist without the mind?
Your brain tells your eyes what to look for
We make choices…it’s what we choose…
Embodied cognition
The bodies influence on...
Coffee machines, not knowledge bases
What I learned from John Seely Brown is that coffee machines are more relevant than handbooks if I am really interested in solving a problem. According to him real knowledge is not taught, it is experienced in the form of unwritten stories and conversation.
In his brilliant 2000 article Growing Up Digital, he describes the anthropological study he conducted at Xerox in order to find out...
The carpet has now become the ceiling; the stakes...
When the rules of the game change, the way to get to your destination changes as well. Imagine what it would feel like when you are a middle manager and you are almost breaking though the glass ceiling. Then, all of a sudden it turns out to be the carpet on the floor?
In this changed game, middle management is still conditioned into compliance-mode by top managers who – ironically enough –...
Social Validation
Social validation is the way to value ambassadors and heroes who work hard for a goal. Social validation is done from several directions at the same time: employees, supervisors, colleagues and even competitors. Most important, it happens in real time and according to the dynamics of the new literacy of collaboration.
Until now there was no way to record appreciation in a formal way; but...
The gap between influencers (high status/low...
My prediction is that the gap between influencers (high in status) who are low in rank (low in power) on the one hand, and command-and-control bosses (low in status and high in power) will get bigger.
…People have acquired a new form of literacy called online collaboration and the relationships and bonding that happens in so-called communities is tribal (based on co-creation), rather...
Instead of creating the community you should be...
Make no mistake about it: communities are not replacing hierarchy. We still need hierarchy and control to get things done. The only difference with the old days is that control will only get you half-way. The Industrial Revolution is over. Today, getting things done requires an extra layer on top of hierarchy. This is the layer of communities, tribes, movements, problems and solutions. Each...
Compliance is no longer the shortest path to...
Without any doubt compliance is still the shortest path towards a stable objective. It calls for well defined function descriptions and performance reviews. And did you notice that it also makes sheep out of your workforce
Compliance is no longer the shortest path to productivity…and information is no longer a scarcity.
When the world changes, the rules change. And if you insist on...
Analytical thinking vs. Intuitive thinking
According to Roger Martin, analytical thinking is great for exploitation within the existing stage, i.e. improving core business through incremental innovation. Intuitive thinking is indicated for leaving the existing stage by exploring unknown terrains. Analytical thinkers focus almost exclusively on generating reliability – the ability to produce a consistent, replicable outcome. In contrast,...
User-centred requirements
They sent me a detailed spreadsheet with their requirements. Now this is not unusual and often forms the basis of the evaluation process. But what was unusual was the way they documented their requirements.
They took the typical software requirement of “the system shall do X” and wrapped it with some more context. It’s a user-centred requirement, without needing to write some massively detailed...
People still need to interact the way we evolved...
When girls stressed by a test talked with their moms, stress hormones dropped and comfort hormones rose. When they used IM, nothing happened. By the study’s neurophysiological measures, IM was barely different than not communicating at all.
“IM isn’t really a substitute for in-person or over-the-phone interaction in terms of the hormones released,” said anthropologist Leslie Seltzer of the...
Big data, and how the properties of knowledge are...
Researchers plan to build a computing system that would model the entire world to predict the future.
The project would be powered by the enormous data streams now available to researchers.
Yet models are not perfect; many researchers think they will never be able to capture the world’s complexities.
A better knowledge machine may arise out of Web-like principles such as interconnection...
Distribute control to adapt
One of the most difficult challenges companies face today is how to be more flexible and adaptive in a dynamic, volatile business environment. How do you build a company that can identify and capitalize on opportunities, navigate around risks and other challenges, and respond quickly to changes in the environment? How do you embed that kind of agility into the DNA of your company?
The answer is...
How to get employees to act as if they own the...
The idea of aligned incentives is kind of a holy grail. The goal is always the same: to align the interests of managers and employees with the owners of the business.
Why do so many incentive plans fail?
We pay commissions to salespeople because we want them to get energized about selling things. We use profit-sharing and stock options to get people excited about increasing the value of the...
Social business is here
For the genius is always, as Benjamin Disraeli and later Peter Drucker predicted, succeeded by a “lieutenant of Marines” who understands the business but nothing else. So the company is only left with an innovation vacuum. In IBM’s social business culture, the genius lies in the 400,000 employees who are free to create circumstances that enable their associates to build on each other’s ideas....
There is a way to make us cognizant and care for...
I love giving advice. I write blogs, articles and a newsletter. I host a radio show. I tweet, Facebook and share nuggets of advice almost daily. So what is it in all of that, that would make anyone think they can still have the right to “pick my brain”?
I can’t tell you how flattering it is to be approached by representatives from major companies seeking my wisdom and advice. It shows they are...
Treats employees like the adults
The 9 a.m.-to-5 p.m. workplace is almost dead. Throw your preconceived notions about vacation out the window and give your employees the no-strings-attached, unlimited vacation days they deserve or you’ll soon be a dinosaur.
Producing vast amounts of quality work is the norm, so we reward them with unlimited vacation and they, in return, reward Red Frog with outstanding work that blows me...
Money Means Different Things to Different People
We all know that people come to work for a variety of reasons, and that pay is one of them. But money always needs to be seen within the context of other, less tangible, motivators.
In our company we employ about 300 people and we have to have a highly competitive pay and benefits system. We work hard to maintain a fair compensation system and make sure that we’re paying people...
Holisitic mentorship
…in a true mentor-disciple relationship, the mentor, contrary to what many believe, is not intrinsically superior to the disciple. Human beings have a tendency to conceive of all relationships in terms of power and authority: all of us tend to think of other people as either superior, equal, or inferior to us. A mentor-disciple relationship, on the other hand, functions optimally only...
Can enterprise social networks help CEO's sleep...
A few months ago, the Conference Board released this study about CEO priorities across industries. The following were determined to be the key priorities across all industries: business growth, talent, cost optimization and innovation. Let’s take a closer look at how enterprise social networks like Yammer can help CEOs reach these challenging goals.
Business Growth
Ultimately, growth is every...
Yes, talent and knowledge exploitation is the new...
“I’m getting the sense that CEOs have squeezed out [all] the efficiency they can and now have to move to innovation and talent to grow,” he said. Talent wars between high-tech companies have heated up, he said.
“The emergence of talent as a key challenge [shows] the economy may be beginning to take a turn to a more healthy state,” said Ms. Ray.
- Joe Light
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