Future Tense

Upcoming Changes to Future Tense

Fri, 19 May 2006 07:39:16 -0500

You may have noticed that posting here has been sporadic of late. As usual, it is the perennial problem of balance that is at issue for all of the contributors to Future Tense. Behind the scenes, however, there has been some significant activity of late as we figure out how to re-invigorate this blog, as we all believe that the topics we cover here are important ones, and we still have much to say, new experiences to share, and questions to ask.

We are therefore going to be making some changes in the very near future, the most significant of which is the introduction of a new conversation leader (the term editor will go away). I am very happy to announce that Giovanni Rodriguez, who some of you may know from his blog The Good Seed, will be leading discussions going forward. I will remain as a contributor, as will most of our current contributors.

I have known Giovanni for about a year and a half now, after "meeting" him in the PR blogosphere. He is a principal at Eastwick Communications, a Silicon Valley PR firm. Since the beginning, I have been impressed by the depth of his thinking, as I think you will be as well. Giovanni is very interested in social media and emergent organizations, and will be sharing his thoughts and experiences on this topic. I'll let him tell you more in a following post.

As for me, my focus these days is on corporate transparency/ethics and digital identity. You'll find posts from me here about how those topics impact future of work issues going forward. I look forward to our conversations.

Deliverables - the fundamental secret to improving knowledge work

Thu, 06 Apr 2006 16:03:07 -0500

I've been exploring the role of deliverables in understanding and improving knowledge work for a while. In January, I took another shot at articulating the link in a column in the Enterprise Systems Journal putting deliverables at the center of the challenge of improving knowledge work.

Knowledge work does not produce standardized, well-defined outputs. Instead, the value of its outputs depends on how well they match the unique needs of their users. No one is interested in a spreadsheet full of someone else's data; no teacher is likely to value a copy of a paper you've submitted to another class. Understanding what aspects and features of a knowledge work product are most valuable to its intended user is key to focusing efforts on producing the desired deliverable. [The Fundamental Secret to Improving Knowledge Work - ESJ].

Our experience in industrial settings encourages us to look at the output as something that is already well-defined and well-understood. We focus on process changes that will produce the output more quickly or more cost-effectively. When we are doing knowledge work, we do better to focus on the deliverable longer and more mindfully. At a minimum we need to understand the user's definition of quality, the balance between uniqueness and uniformity that will meet this level of quality, and the conditions that must be met to declare the work done.

John Sviokla blogging on technology and strategy

Thu, 06 Apr 2006 13:13:58 -0500

Dan Bricklin nicely summarizes most of the nice things I would have said in calling your attention to John Sviokla's new blog (Sviokla's Context). I think I can rightly take some credit for persuading John to add his voice and thinking to the mix. John and I first met twenty plus years ago at the Harvard Business School. John was just finishing his DBA (Doctor of Business Administration, not Data Base Administrator - this was HBS's original version of a Ph.D. in business that explicitly emphasized interdisciplinary thinking) as I was starting work on mine. He joined the faculty there and I worked as his research assistant for a while.

When HBS foolishly chose not to offer him tenure ten years later, I persuaded him to join me at Diamond, where he ended up becoming my boss again. Calling John "quite bright" is along the lines of describing Tom Brady as a "pretty good quarterback." If you are at all interested in how technology and strategy fit together, John is someone you would best pay attention to.

John Sviokla's blog. As part of my work as a DiamondCluster Fellow I've spent a lot of time talking with their vice-chairman and Global Managing Director of Innovation and Research John Sviokla and listening to his presentations. We've also produced a few episodes of a podcast together. Prior to DiamondCluster (a consulting firm that merges technology and strategy consulting) John was a professor at Harvard Business School (not when I was there as I recall). He's quite bright and helps me understand big businesses and organizations.

John has recently started blogging at a somewhat regular pace (a new long post every day or so). Given the disclaimer that I have a financial interest in DiamondCluster, that I do consulting for them, that I talked with John about his blog a few weeks ago as this was starting, and that he pointed to me today when writing about Motorola wikis, etc., etc., I have to tell you this because I think I'd be doing my readers a disservice if I didn't: John Sviokla's new blog is really worth reading. He covers technology and business in a way that will help people in both worlds. He brings interesting perspectives that remind you of those moments in business school when after 60 minutes of discussing a case in class it all starts making sense -- there's a way of looking at things I hadn't considered.

His blog is "Sviokla's Context" and it has an RSS feed.

John is trying to add his voice to the blogosphere. I think it's a welcome addition. A nice sign of the times as a blog may be pushing aside the white paper at a major consulting firm. [Dan Bricklin on John Sviokla]

Checklist of features for good conceptual models

Thu, 09 Mar 2006 10:22:33 -0500

Another excellent resource courtesy of James Robertson at Column Two. Good mental models are especially relevant in knowledge work arenas where so much of what we do tends to be invisible. This checklist should help you improve the models you make, whether for your own use or for broader consumption.

List of features of models

Idiagram has published an excellent list of features that all conceptual models should share. To quote:

Broadly speaking we use the term 'model' to refer to any structured knowledge that accurately reflects and enables us to make sense of the world. Models exist both internally as 'mental models' and externally as 'cognitive artifacts'. Cognitive artifacts can take many forms: written texts, spoken stories, graphs, diagrams, pictures, videos, spreadsheets, equations, computer-simulations, etc. While these different kinds of models vary greatly in their form and function, they all share certain desirable properties.

[Thanks to Mark Schenk.][Column Two - List of Feastures of Models]

Trust, Verify, and Triangulate - column at ESJ

Wed, 08 Mar 2006 23:33:38 -0500

Back in December I wrote a column for the Enterprise Systems Journal on the notion of triangulation as a key data collection and analysis strategy that is increasingly relevant in an economy characterized by information abundance. My central point was that:

In organizational (and other) settings where you are attempting to make sense of—or draw useful inferences from—a multitude of noisy and conflicting sources, the principles of triangulation offer a workable strategy for developing useful insights in a finite and manageable amount of time.

In navigation, the more widely and evenly dispersed your sightings, the more precisely you can fix your position. Focus your data collection on identifying and targeting multiple sources of input that represent divergent, and possibly conflicting, perspectives. Within an organization, for example, work with supporters and opponents, both active and passive, of a proposed reorganization or systems deployment to develop an implementation strategy. When evaluating and selecting a new application, seek out a wider assortment of potential references, vendors, and analysts. [Trust, Verify, and Triangulate]

Since that column, I've watched several of the recurring discussions (e..g Doc Searls, Eric Norlin, and Kent Newsome) about the changing relations between MSM (Main Stream Media) and new media forms such as blogs. Thinking about the contrasts between information collection and analysis strategies sheds some light on this debate. We used to live in a world with a handful of authoritative sources we learned to trust. With a bit more sophistication we added verify'to trust. Both those strategies work in a world of small numbers of sources, but breakdown in the world of multiple, conflicting, and contradictory sources. Triangulation then emerges as a viable alternative.

Tags: triangulation, gatekeepers

A reading list for aspiring knowledge workers

Mon, 27 Feb 2006 16:17:00 -0500

This past weekend I gave a seminar at DePaul University on the topic of "Knowledge worker effectiveness in organizations" as part of the Master's Program in Applied Technology (MAAT). As I was heading out of the house Saturday morning, I decided to grab some of the key books that I thought were important if you were interested in becoming a better knowledge worker. It provoked some interesting discussion and I promised the students that I would send them a bibliography of the books I had brought along.

This is certainly my own idiosyncratic view, but it may be useful to others, if only as a starting point for discussion. Certainly, if you want to improve your skills as a knowledge worker, you are pretty much confined to some form of self-directed learning strategy. I added a couple of titles I didn't see as I was going out the door and decided to limit my suggestions to 25 titles and focus on books that were focused on the needs of the individual rather than the organization. I suspect that you could complete this reading in less than a year if you chose to.

Although I didn't do so on Saturday, I spent a little extra time to organize and categorize the list. I also imposed some sense of the order that I would recommend to attack these titles over time. As far as I can tell, most still appear to be in print or obtainable on-line. The links here go to Amazon.

Learning, Mindfulness, and Reflection

The starting point for getting better at anything, including knowledge work, is to increase your capacity for learning from experience. In organizational settings, this need for learning capacity is increased because organizational work rarely leaves time for practice and rehearsal. You need to develop the capacity to learn while you are engaged in performance and in those little moments of downtime. Here is where I would suggest you start.

Mindfulness

Langer, Ellen J.

Esther Dyson and Tom Davenport, among others, have argued that attention is the fundamental currency of the new economy. "Paying attention" has acquired new meaning and significance. In Mindfulness, Langer demonstrates what comprises attention and what the payoffs are when you direct it intelligently. Learning to be more mindful is an absolutely essential step in any effort to improve your capabilities and performance as a knowledge worker

The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action

Schon, Donald A.

Along with Chris Argyris, Schon was one of the scholars who defined the topic of organizational learning. Here he examines professions such as architecture and management where the fundamental task is to formulate and apply new solutions to new problems. To do that requires the skill of being able to reflect on and extract lessons from experience in a systematic and reliable way. The Reflective Practitioner contains his recommendations on how to develop that skill.

Teaching As a Subversive Activity

Postman, Neil

Still available and in print, I got my hands on this book just as I was starting college. Fortunately, I had gone to a private high school that fundamentally practiced what Postman was preaching, which was to equip students to question, evaluate, and interpret what they were told. I found Postman's thinking and arguments insightful and thought-provoking even when I found myself disagreeing with them.

Years later I had a chance to meet Postman during a seminar at NYU and we ended up in an unsatisfying discussion about how you could influence the development and use of technology in responsible and useful ways. I've built my career on that assumption and Postman essentially rejected it as even feasible. Regardless, this particular piece of thinking is one that I still return to from time to time to refresh myself on its advice on our responsibilities to be critical, self-directed, learners.

Learning As a Way of Being : Strategies for Survival in a World of Permanent White Water

Vaill, Peter B.

Peter Vaill is an organizational theorist and consultant. In one of his other excellent books, Managing As a Performing Art : New Ideas for a World of Chaotic Change, Vaill introduced one of my favorite metaphors for the organizational world we can expect to occupy for the rest of our careers, "permanent white water." As much as we might wish to believe that the rapids we are in are simply a passing moment of thrill to be followed by calm waters, Vaill will convince you that the rapids are here to stay and that rather than simply hanging on until calm returns, we need to learn to navigate as best we can inside that reality. Learning as a Way of Being starts from that permanent white water assumption and explores why and how we need to build learning into the very fabric of who and what we are. Opportunities to coast on what we used to know will come less frequently and be shorter than ever. Most of our systems designed to support learning are not yet up to the task of properly preparing us for that reality; we must take on the responsibility ourselves. Vaill is one of the key handbooks to help discharge that responsibility.

Filters Against Folly : How to Survive Despite Economists, Ecologists, and the Merely Eloquent

Hardin, Garrett

Garrett Hardin was a population biologist who became one of the leading thinkers and promoters of ecological approaches to problem solving. He was the person who succeeded in describing and popularizing the notion of the "Tragedy of the Commons" in dealing with many kinds of resource management problems. Although I had heard of the notion of the "Tragedy of the Commons" I had never linked it to Hardin or anyone else.

I first encountered Hardin's thinking in this small volume in the early 90s. It is a cleaned up version of a series of public lectures Hardin offered about the appropriate relationship between experts and the public and was an effort to offset the notion that experts are people whose expertise is to be automatically deferred to by those who are not expert.

Living in a world that continues to defer to those who claim expertise, this book remains an important antidote. First, no matter what our own expertise, we are always non-experts in many areas and fields that are consequential to us. All of us would do well to understand how to engage with and interpret the work and recommendations of experts in ways that force the experts to be clear about the limits of their expertise and proposals.

As non-experts we need to become more aware of how the "filters" that different sorts of experts use to make sense of their fields not only produce important expert insights but also blind experts to other potential insights that will more than likely bear on making an appropriately informed decision about the questions at hand. To make the general notion of filters concrete, Hardin takes a look at three basic filters that all of us encounter routinely as we engage in interactions between expert and non-expert, regardless of which role we are in today.

The first filter is the literate filter of language, which concerns itself with words and rhetoric. Hardin offers ways to listen to and think about the language employed in expert settings in order to recognize when the language is being used to advance thought and when it is being used to cut off or stop thought.

Hardin's second filter is the numerate filter, which reduces the richness and generalities of the literate filter to more precise efforts to quantify "how much," "how fast," or "how soon." The numerate filter lets us make distinctions about such notions as levels of risk and how much cost is worth how much benefit.

Hardin's third filter is about applying ecological perspectives to questions. He calls it an ecolate filter, but I prefer to think of it as a systems filter. In addition to thinking about questions of language and of numbers, a systems filter focuses attention on questions of what happens next; what are the consequences, both planned and intended versus those that are unplanned and, therefore, unintended that are likely to flow from a proposed change to some system. While some of the specific examples in this book have grown a bit dated with time, the underlying argument and the recommended habits of mind are both worth investing time in understanding.

Improv Wisdom : Don't Prepare, Just Show Up

Madson, Patricia Ryan

One of the peculiar aspects of knowledge work in most organizations is that there is never a time to practice or rehearse. In many other diverse fields, the value and importance of practice is understood and built in. Athletes, Actors, Singers, Soldiers, and Surgeons are all expected to practice their craft as a central part of their training and development. Many continue to practice in parallel with their performance.

In the settings that most knowledge workers operate in, it is always performance time.

If learning is an essential aspect of knowledge work, we must find and invent ways to practice while we perform and to extract lessons from future performance from past. One intriguing path to explore here is to look at another area where performance is unscripted--improvisational theater. This is one of several recent efforts to make this link between the world of improv and the world of work that most of us occupy. It sketches the world and practice of improv that shed light on how that craft might translate into other realms. It also offers pointers deeper into the world of improv should you find the path worth exploring more deeply.

How to Read a Book

Adler, Mortimer Jerome

You have to respect a book that is still in print after first being published in 1940. This one is well worth the time even if for no other reason than to make the point that reading is an active intellectual task not a passive one. Beyond that, however, Adler and Van Doren provide an overall scheme and a set of habits for getting the most out of what you read.

Writing

Although the quality of writing skills I encounter out of too many schools continues to decline, writing remains one of the core skills for the knowledge economy. Your skill matters both as a tool for cementing your own understanding and as a way to communicate what you know to those who would benefit from knowing what you know. If you are willing to work at it and willing to seek out critical feedback, writing is something that you can improve. These are books I've found helpful in my development as a writer and are ones that I return to again and again.

Writing Without Teachers.

Elbow, Peter

I've been writing for most of my life. This book introduced me to one distinction and one practice that has helped my writing processes tremendously. The distinction is between the creative mind and the critical mind. While you need to employ both to get to a finished result, they cannot work in parallel no matter how much we might like to think so.

Trying to criticize writing on the fly is possibly the single greatest barrier to writing that most of us encounter. If you are listening to that 5th grade English teacher correct your grammar while you are trying to capture a fleeting thought, the thought will die. If you capture the fleeting thought and simply share it with the world in raw form, no one is likely to understand. You must learn to create first and then critique if you want to make writing the tool for thinking that it is.

The practice that can help you past your learned bad habits of trying to edit as you write is what Elbow calls "free writing." In free writing, the objective is to get words down on paper non-stop, usually for 15-20 minutes. No stopping, no going back, no criticizing. The goal is to get the words flowing. As the words begin to flow, the ideas will come out from the shadows and let themselves be captured on your notepad or your screen.

Now you have raw materials that you can begin to work with using the critical mind that you've persuaded to sit on the side and watch quietly. Most likely, you will believe that this will take more time than you actually have and you will end up staring blankly at the page as the deadline hurtles toward you.

Trust Elbow.

Instead of staring at a blank screen start filling it with words no matter how bad. Halfway through your available time, stop and rework your raw mind-dump into something closer to finished product. Alternate back and forth until you run out of time (and end on a critiquing cycle) and the final result will most likely be far better than your current practices.

Bird by Bird : Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Lamott, Anne

Reading books about writing is always a safe escape from the act itself. The key is to limit yourself to the really good books about it. Lamott's "Bird by Bird" is clearly in Sturgeon's 10% of what's best. Her advice is consistent with what I've learned from multiple sources I trust and my own experience. She has an acerbic wit you would want muttering next to you at a cocktail party rather then muttering about you from across the room. She also has a collection of useful tips and tricks to add to my toolkit. Perhaps my favorite is "write shitty first drafts."

Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method

Weinberg, Gerald M.

A frequent pastime for all writers and aspiring writers is to read books of advice on how to write. That briefly postpones the inevitable encounter with the blank page or blank screen we are trying to avoid. Most of these books are marginal, some are useful, and a handful prove to be essential. This has the markings of one that may become essential.

Weinberg has produced 30-plus books and 100s of articles over his career. He has also combined a career that started out dealing with technology and transformed to dealing with organizations and the behavior of the people in them. That mixture leads to a view about the practice of writing that is among the most actionable and most aligned with the world I find myself in than anything I have yet encountered. Weinberg is not concerned with the mechanics of writing or particularly with the low-level details. Instead, his focus is on how to integrate the process of writing into the rest of your daily world in a way that makes each better.

Design, Problem Definition, and Problem Solving

We are all exploring new territories. There are few maps and few reliable tools. All of us, then, are called on to take on responsibilities for blazing our own trails and developing the tools and techniques we need as we travel. That makes a deeper understanding of design, problem definition, and problem solving techniques something we all need to develop and continue to develop over time. Here is where I started and where I continue to draw insight.

The Mind Map Book : How to Use Radiant Thinking to Maximize Your Brain's Untapped Potential

Buzan, Tony

The term is a bit "new-agey" for my tastes, but the technique should definitely be in your bag of tricks. Others call mind-maps "spider charts" or "chunking." Whatever the term,it's one of those "coloring outside the lines" kind of insights and this is the definitive book on the technique. Don't get too wrapped up in the artistic advice. You can get 80% of the value from mind-maps out of simple black and white.

Conceptual Blockbusting: A Guide to Better Ideas Fourth Edition

Adams, James L.

I discovered one of the early editions of this book many years ago. As you might suspect of any book that has reached a fourth edition, Conceptual Blockbusting is full of practical advice on how to set up and think about problems in ways that increase the chances of finding or inventing not only a solution but generally several good to excellent solutions. Adams also has lots of insight about how our habits of mind interfere with generating ideas and advice on how to replace those habits with ones that contribute to better ideas.

Notes on the Synthesis of Form

Alexander, Christopher

Christopher Alexander is a mathematician turned architect. Over the years his work has gathered something of a cult following both in architecture circles and in systems design and development circles. The work that initially grew of of this little book grew to a wide-ranging discourse on the notion of Pattern and Pattern Languages that Alexander developed to help him better understand how people shape their environment to their needs in ways that are both functional and emotionally satisfying.

Like most of his work, Notes on the Synthesis of Form can often be dense. On the other hand, I have found Alexander's thinking to be something I always find worth the effort. This was one of the first books I read that started me on the path of considering both the central role of "design" in matching technology, people, and environment and the notion that all of us should think of ourselves as designers rather than allow design to become the province of yet one more category of experts.

Are Your Lights On? : How to Figure Out What the Problem Really Is

Gause, Donald C.

Almost all of our training and experience is focused on how to get the answer; how to find a solution to a well-defined problem. In real life, most of our time is spent trying to fit the current mess around us into something that looks like a problem we might know how to solve. In Are Your Lights On? Gause and Weinberg offer one of the few books (and fortunately one of the best) on ways that you might go about investigating, understanding, and defining what you are dealing with to turn the present mess into a problem that can, in fact, be solved.

The Design of Everyday Things

Norman, Donald A.

We live in a designed world. 90% or more of what we encounter on a daily basis consists of objects, structures, and processes designed by someone else intended to influence our behavior in a particular direction. Sometimes our encounters with the designed world or benign and even pleasant. The designs make our experience easier or more satisfying. All too often, though, our encounters with the world around us are a source of frustration and exasperation, whether we are dealing with a voice mail system from hell or trying to figure out which funny symbol on a sign will lead us to the appropriate restroom.

Norman is a cognitive scientist who began to study and explore how designed objects connect with us as human beings and how choices made in their designs either help or hinder their effective use. This book will help you understand how design impacts your daily life and suggest how you might want to think as a designer in your own knowledge work.

The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

Tharp, Twyla

For me a recurring theme in developing skill as a knowledge worker is that we all need to take whatever talent for creativity we were gifted with and develop it as far was we can. We live in a world that demands on insight and creativity from all of us. We cannot sit back and wait for someone else to frame the question and design a solution for us to implement. We all have to contribute to the earliest stages of the creative processes and stay connected and engaged with the process through to the end. Tharp is among the most creative choreographers alive today and this book is a remarkable blend of practices, tricks, techniques, perspectives, and personal reflections on what it means to accept the responsibility to turn creative talents into creative habits.

For Tharp, being creative is her job and she shares insights and advice about what that translates too in terms of disciplines and habits of work and preparation that deliver creativity when you need. Tharp cannot afford the luxury of waiting for the creative muse to strike. In her world, that is simply an excuse to stall and avoid responsibility. Whether we like it or not, or know it or not, we now live in that same world and we would all do well to listen to and act on her experience and advice.

Management and Consulting Skills

As knowledge workers we are all consultants at some level. We must take responsibility for managing our own work and we must work with our clients (whether they are inside or outside of our organization) to collaboratively agree on what must be done by when. This requires skills for project planning and management that few of us are called on to develop and skills for operating adroitly within complex organizational settings. These titles will help, whatever your current level of knowledge and skill.

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

Allen, David

There are hundreds of books on the topic of time management. David Allen goes beyond them in a significant and useful way. He focuses on a coherent and fundamentally simple system for getting work done. The fundamental insight? Get everything out of your head and written down. Identify all of the projects on your plate and the outcomes you intend to accomplish. Figure out the one next physical action that needs to be done to advance each project. Organize your lists of things to do by the place or context where they can be done.

Developing the discipline takes time (at least for me), but the payoff is high. Also check out David's website at The David Allen Company. Think of this as one of the key process building blocks for a personal knowledge management system

Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used (Second Edition)

Block, Peter

Fundamentally, regardless of what other knowledge work job we might hold, we are all called on to be consultants at one time or another. Your expertise is valued to the extent that others understand it and make use of it. That makes you a consultant and understanding how to do it well is important to your ultimate effectiveness as a knowledge worker.

Talk to just about any consultant who has been at it for more than a few years and they will point you to Peter Block and Flawless Consulting. Peter assumes that you are an expert in something and that you are not an expert in the interactions and issues you will always and predictably encounter when dealing with others who need your expertise but will rarely exactly understand what that will entail. That's where Block is the expert and he clearly understands the connections and will help you understand them as well.

The Answer to How Is Yes: Acting On What Matters

Block, Peter

Another set of insights from Peter Block. This one is less about specific tips on how to be a better consultant/advisor. Instead it focuses on the impact of our default attitudes and assumptions on how we handle change, particularly in organizational settings. In particular, Block takes aim at the debilitating affects of always and quickly shifting discussions about any kind of proposed change to discussions of how things should be done or how they are impossible to do.

He argues, successfully, that our disposition toward leaping into questions of implementation is a disguised way to block change. The first question should never be "how can we do this?" as pragmatic as that might appear. Instead, we need to begin with questions of value. "Is this something that we want to do or that we need to do?" If the answer to that is truly "yes" then we will find the answers to the "how" questions as they appear.

Thinking for a Living: How to Get Better Performance And Results from Knowledge Workers

Davenport, Thomas H.

Over the years, I have found that Tom Davenport is one of those thinkers whose most important contribution tends to be a combination of being among the very first to see important new phenomena on the horizon and organize useful ways to think about what's coming in productive ways. Here Tom is picking up on the importance of managing knowledge workers differently than organizations have managed industrial workers and starting to develop some useful frameworks for thinking about what that might mean. This book is a little more focused on the organizational dimension and response to the issues of knowledge work, than the rest of what I am pointing to here. Nevertheless, it still contains useful insight for the individual knowledge worker within the organization.

Secrets of Consulting : A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully

Weinberg, Gerald M.

Weinberg has been providing expertise to organizations for decades. His particular areas of expertise is at the intersection of how organizations develop and deploy technology. Along with Block, Weinberg is one of the best and most down-to-earth, accessible thinkers about the challenges of connecting your expertise to organizational action. This is among his best compilations of advice relevant to any of us faced with the problem.

The Information and Technology Environment

Not only has knowledge work become a more central element of the economic environment, but that environment is increasingly dominated by information technology and issues created by the proliferation of data and information available. You cannot pretend to be a knowledge worker and allow yourself to remain ignorant of these foundations. The following titles are entry points that will let you begin to enrich this dimension of your skills and knowledge.

Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (2nd Edition)

Rosenfeld, Louis

The defined target audience for this book is professionals responsible for designing web sites and other services on the web from the perspective of how to make them more useful as tools for finding and organizing the information needed by organizations and the knowledge workers within them. My own hypothesis is that as knowledge workers we not only need to be able to recognize and take advantage of the work of professional information architects, we also need to develop a base level of design skill to function as information architects for ourselves and for other knowledge workers who depend on us. This is not a professional skill that can simply be handed off to an expert somewhere. Rather it is becoming an element of the basic skillset/toolkit that every knowledge worker will need to possess. This is an excellent first step to developing that base level of skill.

The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master

Hunt, Andrew

This might appear to be a bit too technology-focused to be relevant or accessible to the average knowledge worker. On the other hand, I believe that software developers have been doing knowledge work inside of rich technology environments longer than anyone else. The problems they have encountered and the solutions to those problems that they have developed are worth exploring and understanding.

This is possibly the best entry point to that exploration that any knowledge worker might find. If you are not particularly technically oriented, there may be spots that will seem heavy-going or that will not seem relevant. On the other hand, time invested in thinking about the arguments that Hunt and Thomas make and thinking about how you might translate them into your knowledge work settings will prove well spent. At the very least, it will make you more observant and critical about the tools that have been given you to as a knowledge worker. You might well begin to wonder why the lessons of the past 40-50 years of developing software technology have seen so little application to newer knowledge work environments. You might also start looking for ways to translate some of those lessons to your own practices.

Information Anxiety : What to Do When Information Doesn't Tell You What You Need to Know

Wurman, Richard Saul

I encountered this book when it first appeared in 1989 and I was in the midst of working on my doctorate. For me, it was full of insights and tidbits about the problems created by the information environment we were living in then (it has only gotten worse with time) and ways of thinking about how we might tackle solving those problems for ourselves and for others. Wurman is credited with being among the first, if not the first, to coin the term "information architect" and this was his first attempt to describe what that might mean. As knowledge workers we will all have to our own information architects in many respects. This will help get you on your way.

Information Anxiety 2

Wurman, Richard Saul

Wurman essentially created the idea of information architecture in 1975, the year I graduated from college. I wish I had encountered him then rather than 1989, when the first version of this book appeared. His quest is to persuade designers to pay more attention to making it easier for all of us to cope with the onslaught of bits. While that would be nice, I find this more useful as advice for what you and I can do personally to cope until that day comes. One example--LATCH. It's a mnemonic for the fundamental ways to organize any set of information: location, alphabet, time, category, or hierarchy.

Procrastination, knowledge work, and important problems

Wed, 04 Jan 2006 13:11:51 -0500

Paul Graham's latest essay is getting some play including within the David Allen, Getting Things Done, world where I came across it. Frankly, I didn't find it one of Graham's better efforts and you'd probably be better off sticking with Allen's insights about life and work. I'd boil down Graham's take as "stay focused on what's really important and let the little stuff slide in order to do that." I don't have the luxury to hire a personal assistant to let me do that and I'm confident that my wife wouldn't let me get away with it either. One of the reasons I keep sticking with Allen's approach every time I fall off, is that Allen gets the reality of both the important stuff and the nitty-gritty reality of day-to-day errands that still have to get done.

On the other hand, Graham also points to another essay by computer scientist and Turing Award winner, Richard Hamming that has much more importance to any of us who want to accomplish something significant in the knowledge work that we do.

Hamming's essay, You and Your Research, dates to 1986, but is still packed with insight about how to think about your work and problems worth tackling when you have significant discretion about what problems to work on. That's the defining characteristic of knowledge workers and there's precious little guidance to draw on. Just a few sample quotes to pique your interest:

What Bode was saying was this: ``Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.'' Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate.
...

Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame.
...

After quite a while of thinking I decided, ``No, I should be in the mass production of a variable product. I should be concerned with all of next year's problems, not just the one in front of my face.'' By changing the question I still got the same kind of results or better, but I changed things and did important work. I attacked the major problem - How do I conquer machines and do all of next year's problems when I don't know what they are going to be?
....

...I suggest that by altering the problem, by looking at the thing differently, you can make a great deal of difference in your final productivity because you can either do it in such a fashion that people can indeed build on what you've done, or you can do it in such a fashion that the next person has to essentially duplicate again what you've done. It isn't just a matter of the job, it's the way you write the report, the way you write the paper, the whole attitude. It's just as easy to do a broad, general job as one very special case. And it's much more satisfying and rewarding!

As you can see, lots and lots of good ideas and advice. I'll be chewing this one over for several days at least. Start with Hamming's essay, go back to Graham's later if you have the time. And for fun, do take a look at John Perry's classic, Structured Procrastination as well.

Great essay on procrastination.

Jack Holt e-mailed me a link to Paul Graham's essay on procrastination. It's great, couldn't agree more. Thanks, Jack, and Paul.

Comments (1)

Comments on this Entry:

(Pascal Venier on Jan 1, 2006 10:29 AM) An old classic ... in praise of procrastination is Stanford Philosopher short essay from 1995 on "Structured procrastination": http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~john/procrastination.html

[David Allen]

Technorati Tags : knowledge+work, Richard+Hamming, procrastination

Deep thinking on strategy and talent on the football fields of Texas Tech

Thu, 22 Dec 2005 16:11:47 -0500

Dave Winer may work best with a river of news approach to RSS feeds, but I seem to fall more into the "compost heap of knowledge" school. I finally got around to an item from Tom Peters' blog from earlier this month, which pointed at a Sunday New York Times article that never reached the top of my stack that particular weekend. Peters declares that it "may be the best article on business strategy I've ever read." Granted that Peters does have a predisposition for hyperbole, I think he's on to something this time and I would second his advice to "read every damn word in the article." You should also make the effort to read Tom's take on the article as well, which begins:

You must read ...

The New York Times Magazine, December 4, "Coach Leach Goes Deep, Very Deep." By Michael Lewis (author of Liar's Poker, Moneyball, etc.).

You simply don't beat NEBRASKA 70-10. And a lightly regarded QB doesn't pass for 643 yards against Kansas State—before being pulled early in the 4th quarter. And you sure as hell don't do all this in Division 1-A with a coach who topped out as a bench-rider during his junior year in high school in Cody, WY. [tompeters! ]

The article is a feature piece on the unorthodox coaching strategies and success of Mike Leach, head football coach at Texas Tech. It's a very different riff on the relationship between strategy, leadership, and talent than you usually find. Leach and Texas Tech don't get first or second crack at the best talent. Not when you you've got UT and Texas A&M to compete with for starters. Here's how one NFL Coach summed it up:

Schwartz had an N.F.L. coach's perspective on talent, and from his point of view, the players Leach was using to rack up points and yards were no talent at all. None of them had been identified by N.F.L. scouts or even college recruiters as first-rate material. Coming out of high school, most of them had only one or two offers from midrange schools. Sonny Cumbie hadn't even been offered a scholarship; he was just invited to show up for football practice at Texas Tech. Either the market for quarterbacks was screwy - that is, the schools with the recruiting edge, and N.F.L. scouts, were missing big talent - or (much more likely, in Schwartz's view) Leach was finding new and better ways to extract value from his players. "They weren't scoring all these touchdowns because they had the best players," Schwartz told me recently. "They were doing it because they were smarter. Leach had found a way to make it work."

I'm a huge advocate of getting the best possible talent as a starting point, but Leach offers a pointed reminder that what you do with talent is more important. And it's much more than simply cheering them on to do better than they think they are able. It's also about digging deep into the real depths of strategy. Go read the article. For extra credit, go read what Peters has to say. Then put both of them down and think about it.

Technorati Tags : strategy, leadership, knowledge+work

Paul Saffo on rules for forecasting

Thu, 22 Dec 2005 12:21:24 -0500

"Never mistake a clear view for a short distance."
Paul Saffo

Last month I had an opportunity to listen to Paul Saffo of the Institute for the Future speak at the CIO Magazine CIO|06 The Year Ahead conference in Phoenix. I was there as part of CIO's Enterprise Value Award Process Review Board and as a facilitator for several of the breakout sessions. Paul was the MC for the 3-day event and his opening talk offered his rules for forecasting. They're worth having handy if you find yourself in a position to have to make some bets on what might happen next.

Before sharing his rules, Saffo made the point that he thinks of himself as a forecaster not a futurist. In his categories, a futurist is an advocate for a particular future, while a forecaster is an observer trying to understand and bound the uncertainties generated by events and trying to frame the choices that might influence the outcomes. Saffo used the following image (actually his image was much nicer - this is from my notes, but you get the idea).

Rule 1. Know when not to make a forecast. Saffo made pointed reference here to Apple's famous Knowledge Navigator concept video in contrast with Doug Engelbart's Demo Video from 1967. I think what Saffo was driving at was the distinction between setting out a vision that will drive inventors and innovators on the one hand and recognizing that a salient event has occurred that opens up uncertainties that you ought to factor in to your planning.

Rule 2. Overnight successes come out of twenty years of failure. If you're not paying attention, you're going to be surprised a lot. This is where Saffo began to offer his take on the role of S-curve kinds of phenomena and how to account for them in your planning processes. Two points that I took away here. One is that there early stages of these curves is when you typically have the most leverage, if you can find a curve that will make it to the knee. Nothing terribly new there. The second, which I hadn't thought about as much, was the difference in planning errors depending on where you were in the curve. I'm used to thinking only in terms of the tendency to overestimate how fast things will happen in the early stages of development. I've been less tuned in to the equally likely tendency to underestimate speed and demand changes past the tipping point. BTW, one of Saffo's specific observations relative to this rule was that he's paying more attention to Robotics as potentially the next big thing.

Rule 3. Look back twice as far as forward. Another quick bit of capsule advice about how to think smarter when you are dealing with exponential/logistics curve phenomena. This is a rule of thumb that captures the essential error in our tendency to think in linear terms about power laws. The change you've lived through in the last 10 years is a predictor of what you are likely to experience in the next 5. Douglas Adams captured this most memorably in his 1999 essay "How to stop worrying and love the internet."

Alan Kay has talked about this in the context of why we've had more success at dealing with smallpox than with AIDS. If you are dealing with something that is operating on exponential terms, then the rate of growth matters as much or more than the slope at any instant in time. Given our tendency to project on a linear basis our tendency to over or under predict actually depends greatly on when/where you make that projection. With smallpox, the growth rate/infection rate is so fast that by the time you make any projection you are likely to be over predicting. With a slow growing epidemic such as AIDS, early stage linear projections will under predict. The corollary, of course, is that the surprise factor in slow-growing exponential phenomena is much higher.

Rule 4. Hunt for prodromes. Learned a new word. For you non-medical types, a prodrome or prodroma is an early symptom or leading indicator. This is William Gibson's observation that the "future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed."

Rule 5. Be indifferent. Don't confuse your desire for a particular outcome with its likelihood.

Rule 6. Tell a story or, better, draw a map. Trying to package your insights into a story (or scenario if you need to justify your consulting rates) helps reveal gaps, risks, and opportunities present in the events you are trying to understand. It can also help you get a better grasp on the potential wild cards. Saffo was more keen on the value of trying to find a way to capture your insights into something more graphical/visual. The value there is that those representations can help you highlight important relationships more easily and they raise the possibility of revealing 'whitespace' where you might find important opportunities to exploit or risks to minimize.

Rule 7. Prove yourself wrong. The essential wisdom of the scientific method. Understand and resist the natural human tendencies to believe. Be careful not to rely on a single element of strong information. Look for lots of pieces of weak information that collectively reinforce your insights. Your search for strong information should be for that one piece of evidence that proves you wrong. Look for the one thing that will make you look stupid if someone else brings it up after you've gone public.

It was a well spent morning listening to Paul, as was the opportunity to interact during the breaks.

Technorati Tags : paul+saffo, forecasting, s-curve, predictions2006

Something's Happening Here....

Fri, 09 Dec 2005 17:05:23 -0500

Imagine for a moment that you’re the newly-appointed CEO of a Fortune 500 company. You are standing at a podium in the company cafeteria, dressed in your brand-new $1500 Brooks Brothers suit. You’re holding your first open meeting with your new company’s employees.

You’ve just delivered a few opening remarks about how pleased you are to have joined the organization, and how much you’re looking forward to working with everyone. Now you turn to the staff with a smile and say, “So, what’s on your minds? What can I tell you about myself and my vision for the company?”

And the first question (from a 30-something kid in khakis and a sweater) is:

“What makes you worth a million and a half a year when I’m only getting paid $50,000?”

Welcome to the executive suite.

That scene actually took place recently. Charlie Grantham and I heard the story from a good friend and colleague who was there, but who shall remain nameless for rather obvious reasons (it’s not just the New York Times that needs anonymous sources). He didn’t ask the CEO that question himself, but he did ask us, “What’s going on? Everyone I talk to and work with these days seems restless, frustrated, on edge. While I share some of that young guy’s feelings, I’m appalled that he was rude enough to ask it like that.”

We were taken aback too, but mostly we were surprised that the kid had the cojones to stand up to the CEO like that – not that he was angry about the pay differential, but that he was so upset that he was so willing to “tell it like it is” – or at least how it is to him.

But as we thought about it, this isn’t just another case of the younger generation not knowing the “rules” or not being polite enough to stay quiet. We’re convinced there’s something much, much deeper going on.

Consider for a moment several other recent events that also reflect unease, discomfort, frustration, angst, and even anger, about 21st century life (maybe Jimmy Carter’s famous comment about “malaise” was 25 years too soon).

Start with the most recent heated debates in the U.S. Congress (in both houses) about the Iraq war. They’re striking more for their outright hostility and complete lack of civility than they are for any progress they’ve generated in creating understanding of what’s going on or consensus about what to do. It looks to us like people on both sides of the aisle are incredibly angry about a situation they can’t seem to resolve and are just taking it out on each other. And no one wants to listen to any conflicing points of view or understanding of what's really happening.

Then consider the difficulty a middle manager we know was having completing performance reviews for several of his subordinates. They’re all part of a global team focused on infrastructure productivity improvement, and he can’t figure out how to isolate their individual contributions. As he put it, “None of them can claim to have produced any savings on their own, but the team as a whole has taken out over $2 million in costs over the last six months. I just can’t sort out who did what.”

I think our world (both at work and everywhere else) has gotten so complex and interconnected that a whole lot of folks (just about all of us, in fact) are feeling powerless, unable to have any impact on anything that matters to them, and ready to pull out, hunker down, and focus on their own lives – often to the exclusion of the world around them.

Our friend who told us about the attack on his new CEO mentioned that he feels like the folks up north of the Arctic Circle who get edgier and edgier every spring as they wait to hear the sound of thawing ice cracking on the rivers and in the bays. That’s a very important event because it signals that spring is coming, but they don’t really know when it’s going to happen (see this month’s “In Our Humble Opinion: Waiting for the Ice to Crack,” for more of why that’s an important insight).

The waiting for something they can’t control creates a lot of anxiety. They get nervous because they can’t get started on their spring chores until the ice breaks up, so they often take it out on each other – being cranky, short-tempered, and even (believe it or not) turning to certain forms of liquid refreshment to quench their thirst and help them tolerate the uncertainty.

Well, I think the whole world may be going through that kind of uncertainty right now. We’re waiting for the ice to break. The “game” has changed, but we don’t know why. And more importantly, we don’t know the rules for new game, or how to succeed at it. That’s a tough place to be, and we’re all getting edgier and edgier about it.

Wherever we turn, things aren’t going right, and it feels like we can’t do much about it. The weather has gone crazy (tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes – when do the locusts arrive?). Energy prices are completely unpredictable. We feel threatened by the possibilities of terrorism, we can’t seem to get on track in the Middle East, and major companies are declaring bankruptcy almost every day (if General Motors goes under, what company can we count on?). Health care costs are skyrocketing, the federal deficit is exploding, the stock market (and therefore everyone’s 401K) seems to be going nowhere, and there’s practically no job certainty anywhere any more.

And on top of that, the kind of work that many of us do has gotten more and more abstract, with less and less connection to tangible, measurable results. At the same time, we’re more dependent on others than ever before. We work in teams (or as part of extended value chains) with colleagues we’ve never met (and who often don’t speak the same language or live on the same continent). And we’re doing everything in less and less predictable ways. We move around a lot, no two days follow the same pattern, we often don’t see our boss or teammates for days or weeks at a time, and we can’t be sure the damn computer will work today like it did yesterday (and if it doesn’t we’ve lost control once again).

No wonder we’re so anxious.

So what do anxious folks do who can’t figure out what or who to blame? They strike out at authority figures. They challenge their leaders. They “retreat” to their families and their local communities. They hunker down. They look for alternative sources of comfort and for strong leaders who they hope will make sense of it all.

As Charlie and I talk to corporate folks around the country and continue our quest to understand how to construct positive organizational change (in spite of it all, we’re still optimists), we’re thinking of constructing a “Near-death Index."

What’s a Near-Death Index? Truth is, we haven’t actually invented one, but if we did it would be an indicator of just how close to complete collapse an organization (or a society) is. Because, like it or not, that seems to be what it takes to become open to genuine, meaningful change – to put aside old habits and assumptions and embrace transformational change as the only way to survive. As someone once said, “There’s nothing like facing hanging in the morning to focus one’s mind.”

The really sobering thought that keeps me awake all too many nights is that I'm starting to think our whole society may be in the throes of a near-death experience (at least I hope it’s only a near death).

Yet, I remain an optimist. If it really does take near-death to drive Big Change, then maybe – just maybe – we’re on the brink of something important and positive. I sure as hell hope so! One thing I do know for sure: this isn’t a time to predict the future by extrapolating trends.

This is a time of major discontinuity, and for imagining the unimaginable. We need to develop totally new scenarios for the future of work (and of life outside of work). When the ice finally does break I suspect we’re going to find that it’s completely rebuilt the shore line – and we just might discover we’re on a whole new continent.

This is an adaptation of a thought piece I wrote for the December issue of Future of Work Agenda, a free monthly electronic newsletter published by the Work Design Collaborative. You can sign up for the mailing list at our website, www.futureofwork.net.

An old look at a new idea - the value of personal knowledge management

Tue, 06 Dec 2005 11:03:37 -0500

One of the blogs I've been reading on a provisional basis recently is "Inside Higher Ed." It provides an interesting contrast to the Chronicle of Higher Ed's Wired Campus blog. Both offer valuable perspective on the life of knowledge work and knowledge workers that goes well beyond their specific focus on the world of higher education.

In a column from November, Scott McLemee reflects on a 1959 essay by the sociologist C. Wright Mills "On Intellectual Craftsmanship." You can get your hands on a copy by buying a copy of Mills's The Sociological Imagination. At the core of Mills's recommendations is the notion of maintaining a file or journal, which ought to sound quite familiar. His description is worth sharing at length:

In such a file as I am going to describe, there is joined personal experience and professional activities, studies underway and studies planned. In this file, you, as an intellectual craftsman, will try to get together what you are doing intellectually and what you are experiencing as a person. Here you will not be afraid to use your experience and relate it to directly to various work in progress. By serving as a check on repetitious work, your file also enables you to conserve your energy. It also encourages you to capture 'fringe-thoughts': various ideas which may be by-products of everyday life, snatches of conversation overheard on the street, or, for that matter, dreams. Once noted, these may lead to more systematic thinking, as well as lend intellectual relevance to more directed experiences.

You will have often noticed how carefully accomplished thinkers treat their own minds, how closely they observe their development and organize their experience. The reason they treasure their smallest experience is that, in the course of a lifetime, modern man has so very little personal experience and yet experience is so important as a source of original intellectual work. To be able to trust yet be skeptical of your own experience, I have come to believe, is one mark of the mature workman. This ambiguous confidence is indispensable to originality in any intellectual pursuit, and the file is one way by which you can develop and justify such confidence.

The primary value of today's tools and technologies for blogging, wikis, and the like is that they eliminate technical and usability barriers to maintaining and investing in the kind of long-lived knowledge asset that Mills is describing. Secondarily, these tools make it easier and more productive to engage in the kind of active reflection and learning Mills talks about.

What the tools don't do is provide the discipline and support structures to help you keep at the long-term investment in becoming a better knowledge worker. Or provide a nice, neat ROI argument that you can bring to your CIO or CEO.

Living the Google Life

Mon, 05 Dec 2005 10:50:00 -0500

Hylton Joliffe alerted me to a great piece in the latest issue of Newsweek on the "secret sauce" in Google's management practices ("Google: Ten Golden Rules"). It's a great recipe for leveraging the talent in your knowledge workers. I wrote about the same issue briefly just last week at the Future of Work blog, stimulated mostly by Intel CEO Paul Otellini's new insights into Google as a recently appointed Google director ("Intel's Inside Scoop on Google"). Getting the most out of your knowledge workers is clearly the key to success in the future. And Google's a terrific role model. And for a more comprehensive Google story, be sure to check out the December 5 issue of Business Week ("Googling for Gold ").

A New Look at Distributed Work

Fri, 02 Dec 2005 13:50:36 -0500

I just posted this note over at my own Future of Work weblog but wanted to share it with FutureTense devotees as well.

I am very pleased that several of the Future of Work corporate members (Forest City Covington, Agilent, Boeing, and IBM) and the Business Community Center^tm concept that Charlie Grantham and I are promoting are mentioned in the December 12 issue of Business Week ("The Easiest Commute of All" - paid subscription required to access), now available online and scheduled to be in print on newsstands everywhere on Monday, December 5.

Special thanks to author Michelle Conlin for her interest, enthusiasm, and perseverance in getting the story written and published. I especially liked Michelle's description of remote and mobile workers as "post-geographic."

I think this excerpt from the article says it all:

"More and more, the creative class is becoming post-geographic. Location-independent. Office-agnostic. Demographers and futurists call this trend the rise of "the distributed workforce." Distributed workers are those who have no permanent office at their companies, preferring to work in home offices, cafes, airport lounges, high school stadium bleachers, client conference rooms, or some combination of what [author Richard] Florida calls the 'no-collar workplace.' They are people who do team projects over the Web and report to bosses who may be thousands of miles away."

Michelle really gets it:

"Indeed, at many companies across America, the most innovative new product may be the structure of the workplace itself. Today, every knowledge worker has the tools to work from pretty much anywhere: a laptop, a mobile phone, and global, high-speed Internet access that is becoming as ubiquitous as pay phones used to be. Teams are increasingly transnational, warming undersea cables with Net meetings, conference calls, and collaborative projects involving large, far-flung groups. Increasingly, no one is sure of where anyone else is anymore; what's amazing is how little it appears to matter."

Among the important examples and data she cites:

Charlie Grantham's prediction that by 2012 fully 40% of the workforce will be distributed
At IBM 40% of the workforce has no office at the company
At ATT one-third of the managers are post-geographic
At Sun Microsystems close to 50% of employees are equipped to work from just about anywhere; and Sun's virtual workers "are 15% more productive than their office-tethered brethren"
Agilent closed 48 offices in 2003; today 70% of its workforce is connected remotely (and Agilent estimates that its virtual workers cost the company 60% less than their in-office peers)

Finally, at Boeing, Jeffrey Hobbs, Director of the Workplace of the Future, says that distributed work is a necessity.

"It's a key to retaining younger workers as well. At Boeing, the average employee is 46 years old, says Jeffrey Hobbs, Boeing Co.'s (BA ) director of the workplace of the future. So to draw younger workers, the company has no choice but to offer the flexibility they prize. Yet its virtual work program is a smash with all ages. 'Of the 8,000 employees participating, I've only heard of a few who have said they want to come back to a regular office,' Hobbs says."

Do you have a good distributed work story? What it's like, how it works, what it's worth? I'm always on the lookout for more case examples, and I'd love to hear from any of you about your experiences.

Tags: DistributedWork FutureofWork Agilent ATT Boeing ForestCity IBM SunMicrosystems

Design as a signature skill for knowledge workers - ESJ Column

Tue, 22 Nov 2005 21:57:32 -0500

Over the summer I wrote a column for the Enterprise Systems Journal that I neglected to point to at the time. The broad point I was trying to work out was that for all the recent attention to issues of innovation and design, the focus has been on addressing the needs of the organization.

Design thinking and design skill are equally, if not more, pertinent to individual knowledge workers. My wrap up there was:

Design is a talent, but it is also a skill, and whatever talent we were graced with, the skill can be developed. Few of us will rival MacGyver (few of us have a scriptwriter and props department handy either), but we can learn to start looking at the world around us as potential resources with more possible uses than intended. We can start to see opportunities to make small changes that will lead to a better fit between our resources and our problems. [ESJ: Design as a Signature Skill]

This is part of a more general trend of organizations needing to deal with how to strike a new balance between execution and design. In the last century, that balance was one person thinking design for every hundred to thousand doing execution. Today, that ratio needs to be much closer to one to one. Moreover, that balance will often have to be managed within each of us as knowledge workers. Perhaps that is one factor that accounts for the relative strength of small organizations versus large ones.

Moveable Reputation

Tue, 22 Nov 2005 05:30:42 -0500

Neville Hobson shares the story of a friend who is leaving his company and the challenges that such movement presents to his reputation/identity/connectivity. He offers a variety of tips on how to manage your "personal presence" (as he calls it) culled from a couple of sources, including Tom Foremski and Mitch Ratcliffe, and adds a couple of his own.

The question of a global, persistent online identity (and corresponding reputation) is a challenging one. One of the big issues is how to measure reputation (not easy). If you are anything like me, your online reputation is fragmented or multiple. I blog in a variety of different places, on a number of different subjects. In each, I have some roughly visible level of reputation. But I don't think I have any global/aggregate reputation. And I can't carry any of those reputations with me easily if I move into a new topic area, for example.

Or to put it another way, say you are the expert blogger at a company. Maybe you are the CEO. And you leave. This throws a wrench in your former place of work's online reputation, and leaves you fragmented. And what about history? Is your past reputation-generating device archived? Does it disappear? Is our reputation so ephemeral?

We are increasingly moving away from easy titles or recognition devices. Our identities and reputations are works in progress, a process if you will. Multiple. Changing. Today there is no really easy way to track and/or manage that. It will be interesting to see what happens in the future. Maybe something like Squidoo's lenses is a good start.

Update 11/23: Allen Jenkins adds some more ideas.