Internet Time KnowledgeBase

Introduction

2004-11-21T23:15:00.000-08:00

Blogs scroll off the screen into a black hole, so every now and then I divert worthy items to the Internet Time KnowledgeBase.

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Archives Posts to Internet Time and Jay Blog by name, 2001-2004) eLearning Jump Page Archives of Internet Time Blog from 1/2001 to 8/2004

First Principles

2004-11-20T20:35:00.000-08:00

PEOPLE

Perception is reality.

Placebos work.
Hawthorne effect.
Halo effect.
There need be no commodities.
Reality is relative: we each have our own.

Mental expectations set real limits.

Learned helplessness.
"They are able because they think they are able." Virgil
Optimism works better than pessimism.
Logic = blinders to intuitive exploration.

Modern people have cro magnon brains.

The human brain is the product of 10 million years of evolution, 99.8% of it in caves, on the savennah, hunting and gathering.
Our relatively modern "thinking" brains are in perpetual contact and conflict with our ancient "feeling" brains.
Pre-agricultural troglodytes lived entirely in the now. Our brains didn't need to plan very far ahead, so looking longterm is not in our natural repertoire.
Our brains seek patterns, often finding one when it's not intentionally there. As we retell a dream, our brains invent the context to make sense of nonsense. We do this in waking life as well, but are not conscious of it.

People are warm-blooded, omnivorous, sight-mammals.

We are creatures.
Circadian rhythms control our thinking.
If it full empty it; if it's empty, fill it; if it itches, scratch it.
Fight or flight response is the root of stress in the office as well as the jungle.

People like what they know; they don't know what they like.

In marketing, position services for maximum halo effect.
First we make our habits, then our habits make us.
Personal comfort zone = blinders, rut.
Change threatens stability.

Be alert. Keep an open mind. Follow your heart.

Mindfulness matters.
Be here now.
Walk in other people's shoes.
Get out of your comfort zone.
Learning is an active process.

To every thing there is a cycle.

You're born, you live, you die.
You live on through your children, your start-ups.
Epigensis = born at the right time.

THINGS

Everything flows.

Time flies.
Nothing alive is ever finished.
Worthwhile documents, policies, reports, and relationships live.

All things are connected.

Connections often as important as the things they connect.
Value of a network increases exponentially to the number of nodes.

Less is more.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication
When confronted with two explanations, choose the simplest.

Everything exists on numerous levels.

Level of abstraction/detail. Meta-.
No matter what's happening in the plaza, you can always go up to the balcony for a look at the bigger picture.
Laterality, everything/idea has neighbors, related by concept, co-location, timing, etc.
Everything is rooted in a life cycle. It's young or old, evolving or dying.

Process is power.

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. --Chinese Proverb
One person's process is another person's content.

Virtually everything is on a continuum. It's shades of gray rather than black or white.

There is no absolute truth. There is no meaning without context.

Most things in life are beyond our control.

Better to think things through than to thrash and force-fit.
The mind and body are one.

In diversity is strength.

Diversification decreases risk.
All of us are smarter than one of us.

Shit happens.

Entropy.
Moorphy's Law (On Internet time, shit happens exponentially.)
Chaos.

ECONOMICS

Decisions are a tradeoff of risk & reward.

Leverage = How much risk or reward.
R & R are not logical.
...rather, a mix of logic, emotion, biological drives, habit, associations, current state of mind, etc.
Information is valuable only to the extent that it will change decisions.

Does it matter?

What's in it for me?
What business are we in?
Principle of materiality.
Don't fret over the inconsequential.
Don't sweat the small stuff.
The past is a sunk cost.

Invest time and resources wisely.

Time is the scarce resource.
Optimize mix of up-front preparation and auctual doing and folllow-up.
Do not confuse thought with action.
There is no such thing as a free lunch.
Beware of armchair data.
Diversify
Leverage

When management treats time, space and no-matter as resources rather than as roadblocks, our methods of organization will no longer be lagging behind, at the end. --Future Perfect

TECHNIQUE

In business, take Jack Welch's advice...

focus on customers
resist bureaucracy
think imaginatively
invigorate others.

How to behave

Live as if this is all there is.
Look for the best in others. Other esteem.
Share my thoughts and feelings. Be authentic.
Open the door to feedback.
Smile. Learn. Laugh. Pay attention.
Practice optmism. Be here now.
Live with intention.
Think out of the box.
Do what I love. Do it with gusto.
Maintain balance.
Don't obsess.

Seek patterns

Homeostasis -- central tendency, self-correction, standard deviation.
Pareto's law: 20% of the resources yield 80% of the results.
Self-organization
Organize by product or area or function

I don't ask him ”What's the problem?" I say, "Tell me the story." That way, I find out what the problem really is. --Avram Goldberg

Structure follows strategy. (Strategy = plans and policies by which a company aims to gain advantages over its competitors.)

Drivel, BS, and caution signs

Time problems.

Anachronism. Fighting the last war.
And so he continues to plan his future with the rules of the present in mind -- heedless of the possibility that the future will have rules of its own. Change is inherent in civilization." --Harry Brown
Finding comfort in obsolete, vestigial rules and concepts. Accounting is BS.
Short-term fix for long-term problem
Too busy chopping down trees to sharpen his ax

Accepting the wrong answer to the right problem.

Illogical expediency
Group think
The madness of crowds

Evaluating with what's easy to measure rather than what's appropriate.

examples: $/hour, academic grades, IQ, multiple choice
need to measure what counts
Nasrudin story
confusion of means & ends

Information is not instruction.

Telling is not teaching.

Using my context to understand your situation.

Jimmy Swaggart syndrome
Jungian projections
Cobbler's children
Crazy psychiatrists

Confusing meaningless social noise with a message.

"It's a communicating problem."
"We don't have time."
"How 'bout them Niners?"
"Thanks a lot."

A word is not the thing itself.

The Principle of Materiality

As Alan Watts titled a book, "Does it matter?" Contrary to what you may think, accountants don't strive to account for every penny. They strive to present a fair picture of an organization's financial condition, not to balance its checkbook. If your employer is auditing your expenses, a $300 discrepancy on your hotel bill is probably significant; it's "material." If Deloitte is auditing Exxon, a $5 million discrepancy in expense reimbursements is trivial -- it's a drop in the bucket that won't even show up on Exxon's financial statements. I interpret the Principle of Materiality as "Don't sweat the small stuff." Don't fixate on false accuracy. And if you're unsure whether or not something's material, change its value up or down to see if it makes a meaningful difference. Impress your friends by saying you're performing a "sensitivity analysis." And, never confuse activity with results.

Words to Live By

Time is all we have. Barnaby Conrad

There is no free lunch.

Perception is reality.

Be here now.

Become who you are! Nietsche

Perform every act as if it is all that matters.

Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime. Chinese Proverb

Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood. Daniel H. Burnham

Imagination rules the world. Napoleon

Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought. Henri Bergson

One person's constant is another person's variable.

One person's process is another person's content. Jay

Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are a good person is like expecting the bull not to charge you because you are a vegetarian. Harold Kushner

Never, Never, Never, Never give up. Winston Churchill

In my life I've experienced many terrible things, a few of which actually happened. Mark Twain

The word processor is mightier than the particle beam weapon. George Carlin

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage. The Talmud, also Anais Nin

None of us really understands what's going on with all these numbers. David Stockman

Don't compromise yourself. You're all you've got. Janis Joplin

If you think you can do a thing, or think you can't do a thing, you're right. Henry Ford

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. - From the tomb of Machiavelli

The truth will set you free - but first it will piss you off.

An invasion of armies can be resisted but not an idea whose time has come. Victor Hugo

We look at the present through the rear-view mirror.

We march backwards into the future.Marshal McLuhan

Don't just learn the tricks of the trade. Learn the trade. James Bennis

In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists. Eric Hoffer

It is best to learn as we go, not go as we have learned. Leslie Jeanne Sahler

Edward De Bono on

Simplicity

Value simplicity highly.
Strive for it.
Understanding begets simplicity.
Explore alternatives and possibilities.
Challenge and discard vestiges.
Always be ready to start over.
Think conceptually.
Break things into pieces.
Trade off other values for simplicty.
Know who you're making it simple for.

Hubris

Early in life, I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose honest arrogance and have seen no occasion to change. Frank Lloyd Wright

My father was a contemptible man. I owe my success to not following in his footsteps. He was lazy; I work very hard. He frittered away his talent, and I nurtured mine. He was poor as a church mouse, and I'm worth $550 million." John Sperling, founder and CEO of Apollo Group

Perspective

The real voyage of discovery, wrote Marcel Proust, "lies not in seeking new lands but in seeing with new eyes."

To get a different view, go up to the balcony. Look at the big picture. Look down from a higher level to gain a broader perspective. Try to discern what’s really going on. Back away from the trees to see the forest.

The Law of Raspberry Jam

Formulated by consultant Gerald Weinberg, the Law of Raspberry Jam states "The more you spread it, the thinner it gets." Few things scale forever.

Focus on core

Focus on core; outsource everything else. Shareholder value (AKA market cap) is a function of sustained competitive advantage, and organizations achieve it by leveraging their core competencies. Everything else is context (overhead), and context is a needless distraction. Without careful management, context always gets in the way of core because it absorbs time, talent and management attention.

Sunk cost

Don't throw good money after bad. Imagine you've sunk $100,000 into a project. Another $10,000 and it will be completed. But market conditions have changed and you'll only recoup $25,000. A colleague discovers an open-source code that will generate the same $25,000 return for an investment of only $8,000 total. Do you go for the first option and complete the $110,000 project? Or do you abandon the $100,000 and go for the cheaper new alternative? The rational businessperson chooses the second option. The $100,000 is a "sunk cost." It's water over the dam. You need to make decisions based on incremental costs and incremental rewards. Paying $8,000 to get $25,000 beats paying $10,000 to get $25,000 any time, anywhere.

Setting Personal Goals

Examine attitudes twd money, power, success and time.
Clarify values, needs, wants.
Inventory desires in all parts of life.
Create clear, focused images or mental pictures of what you want.
Figure out an action plan -- the strategies and tactics necessary to achieve the goals. "Doubt your doubts and radiate optimism."

"I shall pass through this world but once; any good things, therefore, that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any human being, or dumb animal, let me do it now. Let me not deter it or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again." --John Galsworthy

From a review of In Pursuit of Happiness: "the invisible foot," says Milton Friedman. That's the law of unintended consequences.

Martin Seligman: Life is about happiness -- which people (when pressed) generally concur isn't a new BMW or an orgasm, but rather lasting and justified satisfaction with one's life as a whole. Happiness includes the self-respect that comes from accepting responsibility for one's life and earning one's way in the world. It flows from realizing your innate capacities by doing productive work and overcoming ever more challenging obstacles, impelled more by your own inner imperatives than by the mere need to make a living.

From the Well: Conf: News On/Off the WELL Topic: 643 I should be telecommuting from Tahiti. Dawn on a beach of pure white sand and green sparkling seas....I catch the few fish I need for my daily fare and then walk naked down the beach to my grass hut with massive metal Linking up with the satellite, I quickly type in enough code to make my daily expenses. Length of my workday? Three minutes and thirty-seven seconds. I yawn as I turn off my battery-powered laptop and head for my hammock and a cool glass of fermented coconut milk.

Getting Things Done

Life in the Projects

Fast Company, May 1999, Tom Peters

Distinguished project work is the future of work—for the simple reason that more than 90% of white-collar jobs are in jeopardy today. They are in the process of being transformed beyond identification—or completely eliminated. “WOW” projects add value and leave a legacy (and make you a star.)

“Will we be bragging about this project five years from now? If the odds are low, what can we do right now to turn up the heat?” Draft people as if you’re an NBA general manager – get the hottest people you can. And pick projects like a venture capitalist: bet on cool people who have demonstrated their capacity to deliver cool projects.

Point of the exercise is not to do a good job; it’s to use every project opportunity that you can get your hands on to create surprising new ways of looking at old problems.

Never accept a project as given. That’s someone else’s way of conceptualizing the project!

everyone focuses on the tangibles but the intangibles (i.e. emotion) are what matters.
embrace the confusion: “when we launched this project, we thought we knew what we were doing. Now we know that we don’t know what we’re doing—but the things that we’re confused about are much more important.”
be your own firm within a firm.
think diversity.
project management is emotion management.

Reengineering

Reengineering by Mike Hammer (See HBR '89). Managing, or administering, businesses doesn't work today. What a retched work--administer. It conjures up the image of a bureaucrat.

The apotheosis of mid-20th-century administrator was Robert McNamara at Ford. McNamara didn't know anything about cars. He knew nothing about making cars, nothing about selling cars. He was a financial analyst. He had a deep, unspoken assumption that work didn't matter.

Reengineering means radically changing how we do our work. Work is the way in which we create value for customers, how we design, invent, and make products, how we sell them, how we serve customers. Reengineering means radically rethinking and redesigning those processes by which we create value and do work.

Titles: I would rip out VP/marketing and replace it with "process owner of finding and keeping customers."

In a reengineered company you have to leave behind this single-function mentality and wear more than one hat. You need to do whatever it takes to keep the customer coming back. Managers are not value-added. A customer never buys a product because of the caliber of management. Less is better. One of the goals is to minimize the necessary amount of management.

If you are designing a business for a world of stable growth, then you want the Adam Smith, Frederick Taylor, Henry Ford model. Trouble is, stable growth does not characterize our environment today.

"Folks, we're going on a journey. On this journey, we'll carry our wounded and shoot the dissenters."

A worker is someone who cares about a task, about getting things done, and is basically working for the wage at the time. We don't need workers in our company. We need professionals. A professional is someone who focuses on the result, on the customers rather than on tasks. Professionals need coaches and leaders.

De-engineering

London: What do you think about all the talk today about "re- engineering the organization." One word I've heard you use is not "re- engineering" but "de-engineering."

Wheatley: Yes, I put that word out to the world. We really have to "de-engineer" our thinking, which means that we have to examine how mechanistically we are oriented -- even in our treatment of one another. This is especially true in corporations. We believe that we can best manage people by making assumptions more fitting to machines than people. So we assume that, like good machines, we have no desire, no heart, no spirit, no compassion, no real intelligence -- because machines don't have any of that. The great dream of machines is that if you give them a set of instructions, they will follow it.

I see the history of management as an effort to perfect the instructions that you hope someone will follow this time -- even though they have never followed directions in their whole life.

How is the world going to be different because you and I are working together?

A Simpler Way

Author: Margaret Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers in A Simpler Way

There is a simpler way to organize human endeavor. It requires a new way of being in the world. It requires being in the world without fear. Being in the world with play and creativity. Seeking after what's possible. Being willing to learn and be surprised.

This simpler way to organize human endeavor requires a belief that the world is inherently orderly. The world seeks organization. It does not need us humans to organize it.

This simpler way summons forth what is best about us. It asks us to understand human nature differently, more optimistically. It identifies us as creative. It acknowledges that we seek after meaning. It asks us to be less serious, yet more purposeful, about our work and our lives. It does not separate play from the nature of being.

The world of a simpler way is a world we already know. We may not have seen it clearly, but we have been living in it all our lives. It is a world that is more welcoming, more hospitable to our humanness. Who we are and what is best about us can more easily flourish.

The world of a simpler way has a natural and spontaneous tendency toward organization. It seeks order. Whatever chaos is present at the start, when elements combine, systems of organization appear. Life is attracted to order -- order gained through wandering explorations into new relationships and new possibilities.

OLD ways die hard. Amid all the evidence that our world is radically changing, we cling to what has worked in the past. We still think of organizations in mechanistic terms, as collections of replaceable parts capable of being reengineered. We act as if even people were machines, redesigning their jobs as we would prepare an engineering diagram, expecting them to perform to specifications with machinelike obedience. Over the years, our ideas of leadership have supported this metaphoric myth. We sought prediction and control, and also charged leaders with providing everything that was absent from the machine: vision, inspiration, intelligence, and courage. They alone had to provide the energy and direction to move their rusting vehicles of organization into the future.

Michael Crichton: In recent decades, many American companies have undergone a wrenching, painful restructuring to produce high-quality products. We all know what this requires: Flattening the corporate hierarchy. Moving critical information from the bottom up instead of the top down. Empowering workers. Changing the system, not just the focus of the corporation. And relentlessly driving toward a quality product. because improved quality demands a change in the corporate culture. A radical change.

Drucker

the first constant in the job of management is to make human strength effective and human weaknesses irrelevant. That's the purpose of any organization, the one thing an organization does that individuals can't do better.

Managers are accountable for results, period. They are not being paid to be philosophers; they are not even being paid for their knowledge. They are paid for results.

These are the factors stressed by GE in its new management process:

focus on customers
resist bureaucracy
think imaginatively
invigorate others

Dee Hock on Management and Organizations

Dee Hock on Management

An organization, no matter how well designed, is only as good as the people who live and work in it. Ultimately what determines the organization's performance is the approach to management its leaders take. Some of Dee Hock's management principles, in his own words:

PhD in Leadership, Short Course: Make a careful list of all things done to you that you abhorred. Don't do them to others, ever. Make another list of things done for you that you loved. Do them for others, always.

Associates: Hire and promote first on the basis of integrity; second, motivation; third, capacity; fourth, understanding; fifth, knowledge; and last and least, experience. Without integrity, motivation is dangerous; without motivation, capacity is impotent; without capacity, understanding is limited; without understanding, knowledge is meaningless; without knowledge, experience is blind. Experience is easy to provide and quickly put to good use by people with all the other qualities.

Employing Yourself: Never hire or promote in your own image. It is foolish to replicate your strength. It is idiotic to replicate your weakness. It is essential to employ, trust, and reward those whose perspective, ability, and judgment are radically different from yours. It is also rare, for it requires uncommon humility, tolerance, and wisdom.

Compensation: Money motivates neither the best people, nor the best in people. It can move the body and influence the mind, but it cannot touch the heart or move the spirit; that is reserved for belief, principle, and morality. As Napoleon observed, "No amount of money will induce someone to lay down their life, but they will gladly do so for a bit of yellow ribbon."

Form and Substance: Substance is enduring, form is ephemeral. Failure to distinguish clearly between the two is ruinous. Success follows those adept at preserving the substance of the past by clothing it in the forms of the future. Preserve substance; modify form; know the difference. The closest thing to a law of nature in business is that form has an affinity for expense, while substance has an affinity for income.

Creativity: The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out. Every mind is a room packed with archaic furniture. You must get the old furniture of what you know, think, and believe out before anything new can get in. Make an empty space in any corner of your mind, and creativity will instantly fill it.

Leadership: Here is the very heart and soul of the matter. If you look to lead, invest at least 40% of your time managing yourself--your ethics, character, principles, purpose, motivation, and conduct. Invest at least 30% managing those with authority over you, and 15% managing your peers. Use the remainder to induce those you "work for" to understand and practice the theory. I use the terms "work for" advisedly, for if you don't understand that you should be working for your mislabeled "subordinates," you haven't understood anything. Lead yourself, lead your superiors, lead your peers, and free your people to do the same. All else is trivia.

Dee Hock on Organizations

Whenever Dee Hock talks to people about chaordic organizations, someone always wants to know, "Where's the plan? How do we implement it?" But that's the wrong question, he says, because an organization isn't a machine that can be built according to a blueprint.

"All organizations are merely conceptual embodiments of a very old, very basic idea--the idea of community. They can be no more or less than the sum of the beliefs of the people drawn to them; of their character, judgments, acts, and efforts," Hock says. "An organization's success has enormously more to do with clarity of a shared purpose, common principles and strength of belief in them than to assets, expertise, operating ability, or management competence, important as they may be."

The organization must be adaptable and responsive to changing conditions, while preserving overall cohesion and unity of purpose. This is the fundamental paradox facing businesses, governments, and societies alike, says Hock--not to mention living cells, brains, immune systems, ant colonies, and most of the rest of the natural world. Adaptability requires that the individual components of the system be in competition. And yet cohesion requires that those same individuals cooperate with each other, thereby giving up at least some of their freedom to compete.

Selling your ideas

Selling the value of a project to management takes more than talking like a businessperson. It requires thinking like a business person. In essence, if you’re not there already, you must become a business person. The overriding focus of business leaders is creating value for stakeholders. Stakeholders include owners, managers, workers, partners, and customers. The firm’s leaders are responsible for articulating a vision of how the organization will create value and specifying milestone objectives along the way there. Any businessperson worthy of the name can relate how his or her activities support those objectives and help fulfill the vision. You should be able to articulate how what you're doing establishes value in these areas. This is your "elevator pitch" and you should be able to giive it in your sleep. Analysis and Decision-making Techniques Here are techniques for business analysis and decision-making that we rely on continually. We suggest you run through them when making major decisions until they become second nature.

Trade-off. Every business decision is a trade-off. (If there’s no trade-off, it’s a no-brainer.) We find it useful to list the pro’s of doing something and the con’s of not doing it or doing something else. Try to be aware of what you’re trading off when making a decision.
Risk. Every decision is made with less than perfect information, and every decision entails taking a risk. The way to make sound decisions is to judge when you have enough information to move ahead and when the level of risk is acceptable. A decision-maker who takes no risk receives no reward. A decision-maker who disregards risk is a fool, a pauper, or both. Financial decisions trade off risk and reward. An important corollary: There is no free lunch.
Empathy. To understand your customer, walk a mile in her shoes. Here’s how. Make up several representative customers (personas). Give them names, positions, likes, gripes, habits, intelligence and personalities. When you’re planning marketing campaigns and learning activities, stop every now and again to slip into these personas’ shoes. How does our proposal make them feel?
The Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, describes the common situation where 20% of the effort gets 80% of the results. It’s not uncommon for 20% of the sales force to make 80% of the sales. Or 20% of the customers to generate 80% of the profits. It’s likely that 20% of your effort produces 80% of your results. The point is that input and output are not balanced. As marketers, we break the market into pieces (“segments”) in order to identify and focus our attention on the significant few who produce most of the results. As designers of learning experiences, less is often more. Find the elusive 20% of the learner’s time that yields 80% of what is learned and put your energies there.
The bottom line. Earnings. Profit. Revenue minus costs. Over time, profit and shareholder value are the same thing. The total value of the shares is equivalent to the stream of expected future profits, discounted for the cost of capital. Forgive us if you find this obvious, but you must be able to relate your decisions and choices to the profitability of your organization. Otherwise, you will not be able to make sound decisions as conditions change. Focus on core; outsource everything else. Shareholder value (AKA market cap) is a function of sustained competitive advantage, and organizations achieve it by leveraging their core competencies. Everything else is context (overhead), and context is a needless distraction. Without careful management, context always gets in the way of core because it absorbs time, talent and management attention.
To get a different view, go up to the balcony. Look down from a higher level to gain a broader perspective. Try to discern what’s really going on. Back away from the trees to see the forest.

Business leaders present themselves to the world as confident, authoritative, conservative, results-oriented, deliberate, and a bit staid. It’s best to leave your clown suit in the closet when you’re selling a concept to executives. Be concise. Hit the concepts described above as they apply to your project. When you’ve said your piece, ask for questions and sit down.

"It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism while the wolf remains of a different opinion." -W.R. Inge

"A democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding on what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the results of the decision." - Benjamin Franklin

Design

2004-11-20T20:34:00.000-08:00

Design

I am a designer.

Design Principles for Clock of the Long Now (Hillis)

design is not merely an indicator of esthetic taste, but a social phenomenon that both mirrors and shapes how we think. Whereas objects of art reflect the personal vision of their makers, manufactured goods - which are designed to be salable and profitable - tend to embody more generalized beliefs about society, and so ''can cast ideas about who we are and how we should behave into permanent and tangible forms.'' Modern office equipment in ''bright colours and slightly humorous shapes,'' for instance, can help perpetuate the myth that office work is fun; just as modern, streamlined kitchen appliances can underline the contemporary faith in progress and technological salvation. SOURCE

design tradeoffs

Balance...............................................Instability Symmetry..........................................Asymmetry Regularity...........................................Irregularity Simplicity...........................................Complexity Unity..................................................Fragmentation Economy...........................................Intricacy Understatement..................................Exaggeration Predictability.......................................Spontaneity Activeness..........................................Stasis Subtlety..............................................Boldness Neutrality...........................................Accent Transparency......................................Opacity Consistency.......................................Variation Accuracy............................................Distortion Flatness..............................................Depth Singularity.........................................Juxtaposition Sequentiality......................................Randomness Sharpness..........................................Diffusion Repetition..........................................Epicodicity

IBM on Design

AskTog Design Section

Tog's First Principles of Design
Anticipation Autonomy Color Blindness Consistency Defaults Efficiency of User Explorable Interfaces Fitts's Law Human-Interface Objects Latency Reduction Learnability Limit Tradeoffs Metaphors Protect the User's Work Readability Track State Visible Interfaces
Living with Your Users by Marc Rettig. This is the way all major projects should be planned. Absolutely wonderful.

The Ferrari 355 F1 has a clutch but no clutch pedal. A computer changes gears, using data downloaded from Michael Schumacher's Formula One races. Floor it and you experience Michael's greatest hits -- shocking, slamming shifts that expand one's sense of the possible.

Design History in a Box
The Design Dimension, Product Strategy & The Challenge of Global Marketing, Christoper Lorenz, 1986

The designer's personal attributes and skills are:

imagination -- the ability to visualize in 3D

creativity -- a natural unwillingness to accept obvious solutions

communication -- in words & sketches

synthesis -- bringing it together into a coherent whole

Design & marketing -- united in the search for meaningful distinction

Shaker Design Guidelines

Industry: Do all your work as if you had a thousand years to live and as if you were to die tomorrow.

Honesty: Be what we seem to be; and seem to be what we really are; don't carry two faces.

Functionalism: That which in itself has the highest use possesses the greatest beauty.

Less is more.

Form follows function.

The one-size-fits-all approach to training ignores that people learn in fundamentally different ways. Most current training is highly discriminatory. Howard Gardiner

"The most outstanding design is that which is perfectly appropriate to what is trying to be accomplished."

"Design is one of the few tools that for every (dollar) you spend, you actually say something about your business." -- Raymond Turner, exec, BAA

"The designer's purpose is to stimulate curiosity, amusement and affection."

Achilli Castilgioni Alessi, Art & Poetry

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

Beautiful Things & Ugly Things

Design is in everything we make, but it's also between those things. It's a mix of craft, science, storytelling, propaganda, and philosophy." Erik Adigard

Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need, and beautry to produce something that the world didn't know it was missing. Paola Antonelli

Bruce Sterling lecture on Shaping Things to Come

An intriguing vision of design in a virtual world...

Interactive chips can identify anything.Once we name things, we can track them throughout their lifetime. Bruce called them spimes. It has a history, a trajectory. The recorded history of objects will be more valuable than the objects themselves. Imagine bar codes on objects. 30 years they didn't exist and now they are everywhere. Barcodes enabled accurate inventory, better market analysis, better flow of goods, and fewer human errors. 5 billion were scanned today. However, paper barcodes are obsolete.

Traditional barcodes tell only two things: the maker and the sort of object it is. Braun_coffeemaker. It is vulnerable to fraud, abuse, and degredation. The electronic product code will be more vulnerable -- but it will be 1000s of times more efficient.

Barcodes identify only a class of things. There's no fine detail. Far better with electronics to identify individual objects. RFIDs (pronounced R-fids) are tiny, cheap combinations of computers and radios. This enables an "internet of objects." Some protest. RFIDs create dossiers. The object is inert, the system that tracks it is alive; the tracking system is more valuable.

Local & global positioning. Locative technology. RFIDs have radar. You can hear them while they move. An RFID inventory can be automated. Powerful Search Engines. Google local beta. In the internet of objects, a search engine will be able to tell you where anything is. Virtual design. We can work with the electronic plans of the objects. Before those objects physically exist. Often a virtual model (interactive, weightless, manipulable) serves me better. Gravity, friction, raw material...I don't need any of that. I can change, copy, restore, and save digital models as many times as I want.I have an object processor. I can email this. Computer fab. I'll use a 3D printer, a fabricator. My virtual model has become the crucial part of the object. The model is the command and control aspect of the object; it is the entity. Say it's 30 years from now. You call up a Spime. It's not created until you want it to me. After the purchase, manufacture, and delivery of your object, a link is made to a list of its ingredients, history of design, position history, recipes for customization, a public forum for discussion of your Spime, and the Blue Book value, should you care to sell it, and links to service centers. Cradle-to-cradle recycling. At the end of its useful life, it is deactivated. It is smart garbage. It's data lives on for analysis, but the object is put back into the manufacturing stream. The Spime is a set of relationships first and always, and an object only now and then.

Imagine my shoe is a Spime. No product lasts forever. Once my shoe is a Spime, fully trackable from beginning to end; the shoe is a momentary entity, a pause in time. It evanesced. History is our one inexhaustible resource.

Designer's Jumpola

The Psychology of Everyday Things by Don Norman

keys to good design:

1. provide a good conceptual model

2. make things visible

3. good mapping

4. feedback

A reminder is (1) a signal and (2) a message. (use different signals with different messages....)

why designers go astray:

1. aesthetics put first

2. they're not typical users

principles for design:

1. use both knowledge in the world and knowledge in the head.

design model <-> system image <-> user's mode

"In the best of worlds, the manuals would be written first, then the design would follow the manual."

2. simplify the structure of tasks

Short term memory can't hold more than 5 (some say 7) unrelated items at once; the mitations of long term memory mean that info is better and more easily acquired fi it makes sense, if it can be integrated into some conceptual framework. moreover, retrieval from long term memory is apt to be slow and contain errors. limitations on attention are also severe.

provide mental aids. use technology to make visible what would otherwise be invisible. automate but keep the task much the same. change the nature of the task

3. make things visible: bridge the gulfs of Execution and Evaluation

4. get the mappings right

Exploit natural mappings. make sure that the user can determine the relationships: between intentions and possible actions, between actions and their effects on the system, between actual system state and what is perceivable by sing/sound/feel, between the perceived system state and the needs, intentions and expectations of the users

5. exploit the power of constraints, both natural and artificial

6. design for error (Murphy's always there)

7. when all else fails, standardize

The nice thing about standardization is that no matter how arbitrary the standardized mechanism, it has to be learned only once. People can learn it and use it effectively.

Remember, standardization is essential only when all the necessary information cannot be placed in the world or when natural mappings cannot be exploited. The role of training and practice is to make the mappings and required actions more available to the user, overcoming any shortcomings in the design, minimizing the need for planning and problem solving.

Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context--a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.--Eliel Saarinen

Instructional design

Internet Time Group Methods of delivering eLearning Time Capsule of Training and Learning from Big Dog Product Development Process from Payback Training (now Avaltus) Characteristics of a Complete eLearning System (Hambrecht) Instructional Design and Learning Theory Theory into Practice Database 50 theories relevant to learning and instruction

from the University of Denver School of Education: Theoretical Sources | Instructional Design Models Instructional Design in Distance Education (IDDE) database of instructional theories and tactics to support the design of effective distance education

Training magazine's April 2000 issue had a wonderful article debunking the effectiveness of traditional instructional systems design (ISD). Why is ISD obsolete?

It's too slow and clumsy to meet today's training challenges.
There's no “there” there.
Used as directed, it produces bad solutions.
It clings to the wrong world view.

here's more on the subject...

Roger Shank's delightful Top Ten Mistakes in Education

The implications of the research literature on learning styles for the design of instructional material, Australian Journal of Educational Technology, 1999

source: Cisco

International Society for Performance Improvement History of Instructional Design Big Dog and Glossary Yale Web Style Guide

Distributed Learning: Approaches, Technologies and Solutions Lotus Institute (1996)

Fred Nichols

(This is why HPT won't work. It's Taylorism in new clothing.)

(It's a joke. Don't get bent out of shape.)

Remember: knowledge work must be configured not prefigured.

It is the day-to-day stuff of leading people, not of managing them or their work, that really affects productivity; it's the hand-holding, the encouraging, the going to bat for people, and the sharing of the hardships, the risk, the recognition, and the rewards that tempts people to contribute and sustains them as they strive for excellence. These leadership behaviors must themselves be configured not prefigured. In other words, conformity at the executive level is as deadly as compliance at the working level.

To sum it up, the era of compliance has ended, and with it has ended the dream of engineering individual human performance. The era of individual contribution has just begun and we don't even have a vocabulary suited to discuss the issue let alone formulate decisions and then carry them out.

Roger Schank interview with Cappuccino, Deloitte

Learning Objects

"Object-orientation highly values the creation of components (called "objects") that can be reused in multiple contexts. This is the fundamental idea: instructional designers can build small (relative to the size of an entire course) instructional components that can be reused a number of times in different learning contexts. Learning objects are generally understood to be digital entities deliverable over the Internet, meaning that any number of people can access and use them simultaneously (as opposed to traditional instructional media, such as an overhead or video tape, which can only exist in one place at a time). Moreover, those who incorporate learning objects can collaborate on and benefit immediately from new versions. These are significant differences between learning objects and other instructional media that have existed previously."

So states the online version of The Instructional Use of Learning Objects, a complete book on learning objects by David Wiley, David Merrill, Wayne Hodgins, and a host of others. Wiley: "Atoms, not Legos."

Cisco's Reusable Learning Object Strategy.

Objects of Interest, a nice intro

Terms like classes or courses don't capture the essence of personalized learning. I'm starting to think in terms of learning experiences. Here, between the section on instructional Design and User Interface Design, is the ideal spot to point out a really practical site, Good Experience.

Instructional Systems Design

1. Assess 2. Design 3. Develop 4. Instruct 5. Evaluate

Instructional Design grew up building courses. Courses are being supplanted by eLearning experiences. A new discipline is called for, Instructional Infrastructure Design. For most enterprises, you buy this from someone else. You can build your own from components, but often that's about as practical as assembling your own Chevy from bags of gadgets you buy at the auto parts store.

Constructivism

The Webby Awards for Education

Impact of different learning media

User Interface design

Human Computer (HCI) Interface Bibliography Information Design Nathan's Interaction Design Bibliography Information Presentation for Rapid Knowledge Transfer Review of Alan Cooper's The Inmates are Running the Asylum Interface Design and Usability Engineering from Isys Information Architects provides great examples of what to do -- and what not to do -- in interface design. Hans de Graaff's HCI Index, Jakob Nielsen's Recommended UI Books Common Ground, a Pattern Language for HCI -- iffy, incomplete.

Personalization Consortium

Don Norman -- human-centered design

...major improvements in interface design are both profitable and moral — profitable because a good interface is cheaper to implement, is more productive, is easier to maintain, has lower training costs, and requires less customer support than a bad interface — moral because it brings smiles to the faces and erases furrows from the brows of users. One can do good and yet do well by rethinking interface design.

Jef Raskin, The Humane Interface

Future UI

Comments

ID magazine online. Check out the contest winners. I.D. interview with Edward Tufte. The information design guru offers a few choice words about PowerPoint.

Posted by: jay cross at December 15, 2003 10:34 AM

from Lilia:

Quality that emerges in action .:new

I know that I'm not going to catch up with all interesting posts from Internet-cafe, but I'm still trying :)

John Moore (and long chain of others) point to a quote from Art & fear:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the quantity group: fifty pound of pots rated an A, forty pounds a B, and so on. Those being graded on quality, however, needed to produce only one pot -albeit a perfect one - to get an A. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the quantity group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the quality group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

John adds a connection with the book Changing Conversations in Organisations by Patricia Shaw.

This is such a fantastic book I can't do it justice here, but essentially Shaw discusses (moving from a) thought-before-action, design-before-implementation, systematic, instrumental logic of organizing, towards a paradoxical kind of logic in which we see ourselves as participatingin the self-organizing emergence of meaningful activity from within our disorderly open-ended responsiveness to one another

Shaw is talking about how we talk to each other, the story is about making pots; they're both about recognising that it is misleading to think we can entirely separate thinking from doing - an insight that may trouble a great many management thinkers.

CSS

2004-11-20T20:32:00.000-08:00

Better Living Through XHTML

Floatutorial

Moveable Type Plug-Ins

These people must be idiots. This is so 1999.

The EAI Xpo has been initially produced to work with Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.01 or higher on Windows 95 or higher, browsers used by over 85% of Internet users. The most recent versions of Internet Explorer include much more comprehensive and sophisticated graphic capabilities than other browsers, including Netscape browsers. These enhanced capabilities are required when producing a rich multi-media experience such as the EAI Xpo and save considerable time and expense in programming. Therefore, the EAI Xpo has been launched first for the later editions of Internet Explorer.

HTML dog's HTML Tag reference

9rules not only has great advice and links; the sites themselves are examplary.

9rules, Whitespace

CSS vault

Community

2004-11-20T20:30:00.000-08:00

Building community is like gardening: you plant the seeds and pray something worthwhile happens. Fertilizer helps. Care is indispensable. But you can't force them to grow. Informal Learning -- the Other 80% Connections: The Impact of Schooling Who Knows?

Collaboration Supercharges Performance (presentation) Trends in Collaborative Learning (Macromedia Breeze) Silicon Valley, The DNA of a Community of Practice

Ensemble Collaboration

Online Community Technologies and Concepts by Cameron Barrett

reputation management content management mail list management document management categorization collaborative filtering

Robin Good is Mr. Online Collaboration. He spends more than half his time online and probably knows more about online collaboration tools than anyone else on the planet. The Robin Good/Robin Hood connection is apt, for he shares lots of information on his sites: Kolabora and Master New Media.

Robin Good kicks off Competitive Edge. We are there.

A Manifesto for Collaborative Tools by Eugene Eric Kim

Internet Time Group on building community (dated)

Beyond One-to-One: The Power of Purposeful Communities, ArsDigita Building an Online Community (book), ArsDigita

Learnativity on Building Community

Online Community Report

Nine Timeless Design Strategies for Community Building

(Amy Jo Kim)

Doblin Group's community bibliography

Joel Udell's Internet Groupware for Scientific Collaboration is a comprehensive guide to software for coordinating events, discussing issues, publishing findings, and making & distributing news.

These Sites Make Teams Work, Fast Company's comparison of five Web-based tools that are designed to help teams work better.
Distributed Learning Communities, CU Denver The Nature of Nets, Doblin Group Collaborative Strategies -- great case studies and astute analysis by SF consulting firm. groupware gurus.

Cafe Knowhow from The World Cafe (Juanita Brown) Howard Rheingold handpaints his shoes, here's his Virtual Community group jazz hosts events Electronic Learning Communities Research Group at Georgia Tech. (Amy Bruckman) Online Discussion Groups

Resources for Moderators and Facilitators of Online Discussion (Collins and Berge)

Yet, there are times when people need to see each other face-to-face for optimal learning. What are these?

Teambuilding—True teambuilding means being together—at the same place. Building trust, a sense of purpose, and commitment to outcomes requires an intimacy not possible through technology at this time.

Personal coaching—Feedback and coaching around performance issues is difficult, if not impossible, if the climate of trust and respect hasn’t been built in real-time, face-to-face.

Networking/Teaming—Getting a sense of an individual, exchanging thoughts and ideas, and crafting the invisible links that tie a network together require engaging the senses in the interaction.

Building culture—Organizational culture is built on a shared commitment to values. The shaping of these values to inspire and motivate performance need multiple face-to-face contacts with all involved—thinking, doing, acting, and reacting to embed the cultural values in each person.

The Invisible Key to Success, Fortune, Tom Stewart (1996)

Denham Grey's Knowledge Community has a great and growing selection of links on communities of practice, who's doing what, and who the players are. See also his Collaboration Tools (How can you have community without collaboration?)

Convergence is coming....

On-line Collaborative Learning Environments, a special issue of Journal of International Forum of Educational Technology & Society

Is "virtual community" just a Ponzi scheme?

Participating on The WeLL taught me more about community than anything since. ~~They have a deal (until 3/31/01) where you can try it out for $2. Use me as your reference (jaycross@well.com)~~.The WeLL was acquired. The only way I could maintain my email address and access was to purchase Salon Premium. Good bye, old friend.

Rheingold Associates

Community Building on the Web : Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities by Amy Jo Kim. ISBN: 0201874849 . $29.99. Check out the companion web site.

Don't leave out the fun.

The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguit (2000).

Well-written argument that ontent is not king. The refuge of simplistic infocentric futurists: demassification, decentralization, denationalization, despacialization, disintermediation, and disaggregation.

Jay's notes on The Social Life

Communities of Practice: The Organizational Frontier

Harvard Business Reivew, 1/1/00 by Etienne C. Wenger & William M. Snyder

A new organizational form is emerging in companies that run on knowledge: the community of practice. And for this expanding universe of companies, communities of practice promise to radically galvanize knowledge sharing, learning, and change. A community of practice is a group of people informally bound together by shared expertise and passion for a joint enterprise.

Communities of practice can drive strategy, generate new lines of business, solve problems, promote the spread of best practices, develop people's skills, and help companies recruit and retain talent. The paradox of such communities is that although they are self-organizing and thus resistant to supervision and interference, they do require specific managerial efforts to develop them and integrate them into an organization.

Fred Nichols on Communities of Practice (2000)

Nurturing Three Dimensional Communities of Practice: How to get the most out of human networks, Knowledge Management Review, Richard McDermott, PhD (1999)

Key Hypotheses in Supporting Communities of Practice by John Sharp (1997)

In February 2004, I finally got an opportunity to hear Etienne Wenger in person and spend a little time chatting with him.

Etienne Wenger is a social learning theorist who cut his teeth at the Institute for Research on Learning. He is best known for popularizing the concept of communities of practice. His presentation spoke to me deeply.

Communities of practice are not new. The earliest version may have been cavemen sitting around a fire talking about the best way to hunt bears. That’s the way “communities” work: practitioners in a field or practice come together to share, nurture, and validate tricks of the trade. Apprentices have always done this. Sometimes we mistakenly thought most of the learning was going on between master and apprentice. In fact, most apprentices probably learn more from one another.

Question: What does a flower know about being a flower? And what does a computer know about being a flower? Stumped? That’s because neither flowers nor computers are members of the human community, and it’s community that harbors knowledge.

A friend of Etienne is a wine professional. Describing a wine, the friend said it was “purple in the nose.” This meant absolutely nothing to Etienne, because he is not a member of the wine-tasting community.

Now imagine the wine-tasting friend is with his fellow wine tasters. He discerns a new element in the wine which he describes as a convergence of fire and gravity. If others in the group buy in, the fire & gravity meme is legitimized. Here we have the two primary aspects of any community: participation and reification.

By the way, the concept of community is value-neutral. The word community has a warm and fuzzy feel to it, but we’re talking about groups that can impede progress, engage in group think, or neglect their responsibilities to the larger organization. I recall being shut out of a community of instructional designers because I was perceived as a business man, not a designer.

Now let’s think about how eLearning might be a transformative force. Learning in a community involves answering four questions:

• Identity: Who are we becoming? • Meaning: What is our experience? • Practice: What are we doing? • Community: Where do we belong?

Learning by sharing knowledge in a community leads to what Etienne calls the “horizontalization” of learning. In school or workshops, the learning relationship is vertical: there’s a provider on top and a recipient. In a horizontal community, peers learn from one another.

First generation knowledge management failed because it was top down. (Identify the critical knowledge and stuff it in a content management system. Nobody took ownership because no community embodied the knowledge. Now that we appreciate that knowledge lives in communities, we can facilitate KM by nurturing their development. Etienne quotes Pasteur, saying “Chance favors those who are prepared.”

Etienne suggests scrapping our industrial model of training and the notions that go with it. Learning will become an internal part of live itself. Teaching will fade in importance. Progress along a trajectory of development will replace skills training.

The three aspects of social learning are the Domain, the Practice, and the Community. What, how, and who.

Related links: What is Knowledge, Building Community, and Informal Learning.
Googling out these references to past entries here, I found that I'd already recorded many of the concepts Etienne presented in Edinburgh. No matter. It took an hour of live presentation for them to take hold in a transformative way. cp square

Peter Senge: "Knowledge generation really only occurs in teams, where people engage in doing meaningful work." Teams are task-oriented and fleeting; they don't last. As the teams dissolve, people go off and reform in other teams. But they keep those networks of relationships, and they maintain those community ties." The Fifth Discipline... "was really about team learning and not very much about organizational learning. It took all our experience with member companies to recognize that communities are the place where this knowledge moves into, gets tapped, accessed, diffused and shared. Knowledge is contextual; it comes in the context of doing work. We send people off to training, we educate them, we give them tools and ideas. But that's not really knowledge generation. The real question is what happens when people try to use their training?"

Learning Organization (but read the above)

Dance of Change

Peter Henschel, in LiNEzine

The manager’s core work in this new economy is to create and support a work environment that nurtures continuous learning. Doing this well moves us closer to having an advantage in the never-ending search for talent.

By sheer force of habit, we often substitute training for real learning. Managers often think training leads to learning or, worse, that training is learning. But people do not really learn with classroom models of training that happen episodically. These models are only part of the picture. Asking for more training is definitely not enough—it isn’t even close. Seeing the answer as “more training” often obscures what’s really needed: lifelong, continuous learning in work and at work.

That is one reason why preserving the integrity of these informal communities is so important. The worst effects of downsizing and reengineering come from their complete disregard for communities of practice. The fact that training deals only with explicit knowledge, while the value is often in tacit knowledge, is another reason training can get at only part of what is understood to be effective. The other main limitation of traditional classroom training is that it is episodic and mostly relies on “push” (we want you to know this now) rather than “pull” (I need to know this now and am ready to learn it).

Another dimension to the community idea is seldom discussed, but critically important: Learning is powerfully driven by the critical link between learning and identity. We most often learn with and through others.

What we choose to learn depends on:

Who we are
Who we want to become
Which communities we wish to join or remain part of.

So, not wanting to be like “them” can be enough to keep someone from learning. That fact seems to hold whether we are talking about company apprentices, high school gangs, or seasoned software engineers.

But it gets even more interesting: IRL studies, among others, have shown that as much as 70% of all organizational learning is informal. Everyday, informal learning is constant and everywhere. If this insight is true even in a bare majority of enterprises, why would we leave so much learning to sheer chance?

Slashdot Posted by JonKatz on Tuesday October 03, @12:00PM

from the de-bunking-the-utopians dept. Berkeley scholar Joseph Lockard (a doctoral candidate in English Literature) claims the idea of the virtual community is a Ponzi scheme, promoted by benighted utopians and elitists who equate access to the Net and the Web with social and democratic enlightenment. This myth has been virtually unchallenged for years, he says, and in a provocative and interesting essay called Progressive Politics, Electronic Individualism, and the Myth of Virtual Community, Lockard claims that it's nothing more than a bunch of hooey. Does anybody out there think virtual communities are real?

Lockard's essay scores more than once. He's right in going after the hype that has surrounded the idea of the virtual community for years now. The tech world is rich and elitist, and becomes more so daily. Apart from developments like open source, which has done much to try and make technology more inclusive (though very few people will ever be able to successfully program) there are few signs yet that the Net is re-vitalizing democracy, or that virtual communities are supplanting or improving upon real ones. online, we see little organized concern for the technologically-deprived, or worry about the inevitable social divisions created by classes of empowered and tech-deprived people. It's already obvious that people with access to computing and the Net will have enormous educational, social and business advantages over those who don't; the latter face menial, low-paying jobs all over the planet.

Lockard also accurately points out that the largest communities forming online are corporate, not individualistic, and their agenda is marketing, not community. He calls the very idea of a "virtual community" an oxymoron.

"Instead of real communities, cyber-communities sit in front of the [late but not lamented] Apple World opening screen that pictures a cluster of cartoon buildings which represent community functions (click on post office for e-mail, a store for online shopping, a pillared library for electronic encyclopedias, etc.)" Such software addresses only a desire for community, Lockard writes, not the real thing.

...Certainly there are bulletin boards and mailing lists -- from sex sites to San Francisco's WELL, from media-centric gatherings from pet rescue forums to AOL's Senior Net -- that have functioned for some time as very real communities that foster conversation and mutual understanding, spawn friendships, generate support for members in trouble. Topical, community oriented Websites -- everything from Camworld.com, Kuro5shin and myvideogames.com to Slashdot -- function as information or true cultural communities as well -- sometimes for idea-sharing, sometimes for material support and information.

The early cyber-gurus definitely got carried away by notions that everything would become virtual, a mistake now shared by all sorts of panicked businesses -- publishing comes to mind -- and starry-eyed utopians. Cyberspace is definitely a new kind of space, but there's as yet no reason to believe that it won't compliment or co-exist with the material kind. So far at least, virtual communities suggest a Middle Kingdom, existing somewhere in the middle between the utopian fantasies and Lockard's dismissive jeers.

Online people do make powerful connections and the virtual realm does permit us to share information (including software), research and commerce and and encounter all sorts of people in all kinds of places -- something that has never been possible before. But when the dust settles, and if the history of technology offers any clues, people will always hang out with their friends, get drunk. They'll still be logging off their computers to have sex, get married, fight with their parents, send their kids off to school and go to the movies, and seek out the company of human beings to meet human needs. The best virtual communities have always complimented that need, not supplanted it.

Corporate Culture in Internet Time

By Art Kleiner

Anyone who has tried to create a culture knows it can't be done on Internet time. Cultures aren't designed. They simmer; they fester; they brew continually, evolving their particular temperament as people learn what kind of behavior works or doesn't work in the particular company. The most critical factor in building a culture is the behavior of corporate leaders, who set examples for everyone else (by what they do, not what they say). From this perspective, the core problem faced by most e-commerce companies is not a lack of culture; it's too much culture. They already have two significant cultures at play - one of hype and one of craft.

...during most of the 20th century, as companies matured into mainstream corporations, other cultures - those of finance, labor relations, marketing and managerial bureaucracy - eclipsed and overwhelmed the cultures of hype and craft.

It is currently fashionable to say that the old, tightly knit mentoring relationships of bricks-and-mortar companies are dead, that individuals are now responsible for their own development and career growth. Unfortunately, this view is not sustainable; there are too many risks, even in a high-growth economy, and too much human waste. The task of developing people will move away from companies, since they are not stable enough; it will move to the team level. In other words, if success depends on building a new "culture," that effort will have a lot more effect at the team level than on any company-wide level. It's reasonable to expect, in the turbulent e-commerce business environment, that companies won't necessarily evolve intact cultures. But teams do; as one e-commerce veteran puts it, they're "islands of stability in a place where nothing else is stable."

Ultimately, I suggested to Jane, all the organizational-learning techniques in the world wouldn't do her any good unless she were willing to go to her bosses, the startup's founders, and say something like this:

"If you let me build my own team, and choose and develop the people, I'm willing to take on [name of tough, challenging project here]. But I want to take our own development seriously. I want to try some new ways of organizing the work, regularly evaluate them, and try to learn how to manage ourselves in this new territory. After a few months, we'll come back together and see what we've accomplished, and which of those innovations might apply to the other teams around here. But it will only work if you give our team enough autonomy to learn from our experiments."

12 Principles for Designing an Online Gaming Community

Define the community's purpose

Create distinct gathering spaces

Provide rich communications

Implement a rankings ladder

Evolve member profiles over time

Provide online hosting and support

Offer guidance to new members

Provide a growth path

Support member-created subgroups

Anticipate disputes

Hold regularly scheduled events

Acknowledge the passing of time

It's Not What You Know, It's Who You Know

Work in the Information Age First Monday, 5/2000 http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue5_5/nardi/index.html#n1

"It's not what you know, but who you know," could, paradoxically, be the motto for the Information Age. We discuss the emergence of personal social networks as the main form of social organization in the workplace.

NetWORK is our term for the work of establishing and managing personal relationships. These relationships can involve a rich variety of people including customers, clients, colleagues, vendors, outsourced service providers, venture capitalists, alliance partners in other companies, strategic peers, experts such as legal and human relations staff, and contractors, consultants, and temporary workers. These are fundamental business relationships in today's economy. As we have noted, studies that focus on narrowly scoped "teams" miss the vital work that goes into relationships that enmesh workers in a much wider, more complex social framework.

To keep their network engines revved, workers constantly attend to three tasks:

Building a network: Adding new nodes (people) to the network so that there are available resources when it is time to conduct joint work;
Maintaining the network, where a central task is keeping in touch with extant nodes;
Activating selected nodes at the time the work is to be done.

NetWORK is an ongoing process of keeping a personal network in good repair. In the words of one study participant, "Relationships are managed and fed over time, much as plants are."

The reduction of corporate infrastructure means that instead of reliance on an organizational backbone to access resources via fixed roles, today's workers increasingly access resources through personal relationships. Rather than being embraced by and inducted into "communities of practice," workers meticulously build up personal networks, one contact at a time. Accounts of the "virtual" organization and organizations with flattened hierarchies have stressed the benefits of the streamlined, nimble, democratic workplace, responsive to contingency, empowering workers to make decisions quickly and independently. It seems however, that these transformed organizations also mean reduced institutional support, and that individual workers incur some of the costs associated with these corporate gains. In the Information Age, workers meet the challenges of diminishing organizational resources through who they know.

It is this discussion that has captured the categories we use to analyze the social impact of the Internet. The Internet has been drafted to serve duty as yet more evidence of the disintegration of "community", etc. As is sadly always the case in American intellectual discourse, complex social and historical issues get reduced as quickly as possible to simplistic binary oppositions which exclude by definition all the really interesting choices and developments (a good analogy here is our reduction of the categories used to analyze sexual behavior to either promiscuity or monogamy).
I do not believe the internet is an effective facilitator of community. And this fact is largely irrelevant to how we judge its impact on society. Instead, what the internet facilitates is friendship, and it does this in a very 19th century way - through writing. The modern replacement for traditional community is a web of self-chosen relations that can now span the globe. In this respect we are recreating the relations that existed among scholars and humanists in Europe before the modern era, except that now it is no longer just the elite that have this opportunity.

The development of friendship in this manner is I believe a very good alternative to traditional community, which, for all the "meaning" it bestows on life, is more often than not coercive, intolerant and closed-off. I see the disappearance of the one and the ascent of the other as a good thing, not something to lament. (Most of the intellectuals today whining about community would never put up with one in reality for a second, since they would never assent to the restrictions on their personal freedom that communities traditional require).

Participation Inequality

from Jakob Nielsen

A major reason why user-contributed content rarely turns into a true community is that all aspects of Internet use are characterized by severe participation inequality (a term I have from Will Hill of AT&T Laboratories). A few users contribute the overwhelming majority of the content, while most users either post very rarely or not at all. Unfortunately, those people who have nothing better to do than post on the Internet all day long are rarely the ones who have the most insights. In other words, it is inherent in the nature of the Internet that any unedited stream of user-contributed content will be dominated by uninteresting material.

The key problem is the unedited nature of most user-contributed content. Any useful postings drown in the mass of "me too" and flame wars. The obvious solution is to introduce editing, filtering, or other ways of prioritizing user-contributed content. One idea is to pick a few of the best reader comments and make them prominent by posting them directly on the primary page, while other reader comments languish on a secondary page. It is also possible to promote the most interesting postings based on a vote by other readers who could click "good stuff" or "bozo" buttons.

Collaboration is a lot more than communication and will eventually split off into a separate topic.

Culture	Value discipline	Where it shines	Source of shareholder value	Global focus	End stage
Cultivation	Discontinuous innovation	Early market	Infectious charisma	Shared vision	Cult
Competition	Product leadership	Early, bowling alley, tornado	Pierce competitiveness	Measurement & compensation	Caste systems
Control	Operational excellence	Tornado, Main Street	Relentless improvement	Business Planning	Bureaucracy
Collaboration	Customer intimacy	Bowling alley, Main Street	Perceptive adaptation	Customer focus	Club

From Clock of the Long Now

The Learning HIstory Project is a combination of story telling and corporate culture. Very much in tune with the work we did at Oral History Associates.

The e-Discussion Toolkit, suggestions for setting up and implementing online problem-solving discussions. "Since 1998 electronic discussions have played a valuable role at the World Bank. By promoting consultations with the public, they have furthered the vision of the Knowledge Bank, which is about putting in place systems for capturing knowledge more effectively.""

The Salon-Keeper's Companion

An Utne Reader Guide to Conducting Salons, Council and Study Circles —By Eric Utne

Throughout this guide the word salon is used to describe a wide range of ways groups can interact.

* Traditional salons like those that seeded the French Revolution tend to emphasize spirited group discussion. * Council, derived mainly from Native American traditions, emphasizes "devout listening" and unpremeditated speaking. * Study circles tend to involve reading and focused group discussion.

www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/website/view.cgi?dbs=Article&key=1075564356

About Corporation for Positive Change

Corporation for Positive Change (CPC) is dedicated to the design and development of Appreciative organizations - those capable of sustaining innovation, financial well-being and market leadership by inspiring the best in human beings. CPC provides consultation and training based on the principles and practices of Appreciative Inquiry. For more information about CPC, or to contact any of our principal consultants, please visit our web site at www.positivechange.org.

David Bohm on Dialogue

Blogs

2004-11-20T20:29:00.000-08:00

Weblogs (blogs) began as personal websites which make it easy to record daily entries. I blog to learn. Blogs let me read content from a single individual, unadulerated with corporate claptrap. On the outbound side, my blogs stick memories in my head -- the teacher always learns more than the student. Blogs are gut-simple to set up. Go to Blogger to see for yourself.

Then look at some blogs -- here's an up-to-the-minute list of the 100 most popular blogs.

My main professional blog is

I also maintain an informal learning blog.

If you read lots of blogs, you'll become interested in syndication and, more recently, here.

Blogging was arcane when I started in mid-1999. Now (2006), more than a million people have registered with Blogger alone. Once the realm of individuals, corporations are joining the blogosphere.

Blogging captures some of the individualist spirit of the early days of the web. I believe blogs have lots to offer in knowledge management, customer communications, and community-building.

How to Save the World offers wonderful advice on style, usability, reader interest, and more. It's also an interesting read in general.

January 2005 Update:

Weblogs have become quite popular in last 12 months. A recent report by the Pew Internet, nearly 7% of the 120 million U.S. adults who use the internet say they have created a blog or web-based diary. That represents more than 8 million people. About 27% of internet users say they read blogs, a 58% jump from the 17% who told us they were blog readers in February. This means that by the end of 2004 32 million Americans were blog readers. Bacon’s Information, a media industry research group has recently started tracking blogs as a news source. Ben and Mena Trott of Six Apart, and Peter Rojas of Engadget were recently featured on the cover of Fortune magazine. from Om Malik

Semantic blogging.

12/03. After reading Jeffrey Zeldman's Designing with Web Standards, I started separating form from substance here at InternetTime.com. Old habits die hard. My fingers are programmed to use b tags for spacing. And convert everything to XHTML. And use style sheets to define all style. I'm recrafting pages as I come to them.

Customer Blogs

Blogging for Business by Jay Cross, August 2002

Blogs are a great way to put information on the Web. They’re fast to implement, and most blogging solutions are dirt cheap. Here’s who’s using them. New formats are intimidating. Remember buying your first DVD? Or your first book on tape? Felt odd at first, but soon it was natural. Blogs are a new format. Approximatley four million people write blogs, and blogging is growing faster than when the Internet was experiencing its period of maximum growth. Nonetheless, when I asked the audience at a recent knowledge management conference how many of the three hundred people in the room maintained blogs, only three hands went up. As Neuromancer author William Gibson says, “The future has already arrived. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.” So, if you’ve been reluctant to look into blogs, let me tell you some of the things you’ve missed.

How to read the LC Blog

An informal rule among bloggers is to keep the front page lean enough for you to skim and decide if you want to go deeper. So, some of the articles on the front page may seem short, but they usually end with “There’s more! Continue reading….” You will also see a line that reads “Comments”. Click it to add your own thoughts. Blogging can and should be quite participatory. If there’s a number attached, such as Comment (2), a click will show you previous comments.

Down the right-hand column of most blogs, you’ll find a search box and indexes to earlier entries by category or date. (The LC Blog shows only the most recent entries on the front page.) Also, the small, orange XML boxes at the bottom of the page enable users and organizations to syndicate content from the LC Blog.

Bottom-up organizations use blogs. Indeed, blogs are the leading edge of the social software movement that’s propelling the bottom-up, self-organizing reformation of versatile businesses. A bottom-up organization values the collective work of individuals over top-down authority; it supports cooperation and co-evolution in lieu of command and control. Instead of telling people what to do, it provides the networks that enable them to do what they want to do. Hence, they use blogs. Schools are embracing blogs. They use them to create projects, offer and access feedback, study in groups, post assignments, develop portfolios, and build relationships.

Newspapers and newsletters blog, too. Why? Blogging is faster than printing and useful feedback is inevitable. Learning Circuits has its own blog where you’ll find a series of short pieces written by Clark Aldrich, Sam Adkins, Tony O’Driscoll, David Grebow, Clark Quinn, and a dozen other thought leaders. Some excerpt posts include

E-learning, by any other name...Is finding a factoid on Google “e-learning?”
Are we finally ready for the 80 percent piece of the puzzle? If most learning comes from adopting and adapting on the job, why don’t we invest more in it?
Train to imitate versus learn to innovate. What is learning all about?
Reshuffling the technological deck. Recent postings have highlighted affect, emotion, the informal and the social. How can they be built into manageable and productive training?
Outsourcing learning? It may cut costs and improve efficiency, but at the cost of less informal learning and community development?

Blogs to reach out to customers. Customer blogs. These are designed to tear down the walls that traditionally separate corporations from their ultimate constituency. As The Cluetrain Manifesto says, “Corporate firewalls have kept smart employees in and smart markets out. It's going to cause real pain to tear those walls down. But the result will be a new kind of conversation. And it will be the most exciting conversation business has ever engaged in.”

With a simple customer blog in place, a company can make announcements to its Web customers immediately. All customers can benefit from a question asked by only one. To be sure, the intimacy found in blog culture conversation, customers can get to know workers—and vice-versa. Affiliation breeds loyalty. Customers begin to talk among themselves. A typo that would be an embarrassment in an advertisement becomes a sign of authenticity on a blog.

Overgeneralization alert: Blogs are informal, breezy, shoot-from-the-hip, personal, newsy, rapid-fire, defiantly individual, stream-of-consciousness, individualistic, enthusiastic, emotional, unfettered, daring, creative, and focused on the moment. As such, they embody the important messages of The Cluetrain Manifesto.

“Markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can't be faked.

Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies. No wonder networked markets have no respect for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do.

But learning to speak in a human voice is not some trick, nor will corporations convince us they are human with lip service about 'listening to customers.' They will only sound human when they empower real human beings to speak on their behalf.”

The Cluetrain Manifesto

One more example: Have you read about the campaign of presidential candidate Howard Dean? The opposition is building a war chest of hundreds of millions of dollars to inundate the American people with sound bites and attack ads. Dean is rallying crowds by blogging and using the power of the net. For pennies. Which would you prefer?

This story is a beginning, not an end. Let’s continue here, on the Learning Circuits blog. I’d like to hear what you think.

Learning Circuits TechTools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . April 2002 By Jay Cross

Blogs

Learn to blog, blog to learn.

Blog stands for Web-log, an informal personal Website. Thousands of people blog every day. (Blog is both a noun and a verb.) I’ve blogged for 18 months, and I’m convinced that blogs are destined to become a powerful, dirt-cheap tool for e-learning and knowledge management.

A blog is defined as a Website with dated entries, usually by a single author, often accompanied by links to other blogs that the site’s editor visits on a regular basis. Think of a blog as one person’s public diary or suggestion list. Early blogs were started by Web enthusiasts who would post links to cool stuff that they found on the Internet. They added commentary. They began posting daily. They read one another’s blogs. A community culture took hold.

In 1999, blogging software arrived on the scene, enabling anyone to post content to a Website. Generally, blog software comes with a personal Website for those who don’t already have one. The software captures your words in dated entries, maintaining a chronological archive of prior entries. In the spirit of sharing inherent to Net culture, the software and the personal Websites are usually free. Currently, blogging is one of the fastest growing trends on the Web. Nearly half a million people have downloaded blogging software.

But what’s so special about this way of posting text to the Internet? Blogs are personal and unfiltered. Real people, rather than corporate PR departments or ad agencies, write them.

"Imagine Hunter S. Thompson writing about the new Mac operating system," writes Carlyle Adler in Fortune Online. "That's the wacky spirit you can expect when you check out the online narratives known as Weblogs. While these sites represent both the best and worst of Web self-publishing (the virtual tour of ugly couches wasn't for us, nor were the angry ex-girlfriend sites), several of the technology Weblogs are worth checking out."

Blogging to learn

Not long ago, a blog pointed me to Chris Ashley's article "Weblogs: A Swiss Army Website?" He writes, "Weblog software and the Weblog model of content production and platform interoperability are proving to be increasingly useful and powerful, pushing and inspiring innovative developments for, and uses of, the Web. These areas include content, information, and knowledge management; community building; publishing and journalism; teaching, learning, and collaboration; and course management systems.… Weblog software, interfaces, and workflows are helping to realize a Web of increasing organization and interoperability, ease of production, improved and flexible information flow, and interlinked accessibility…."

After reading this, I asked Ashley to discuss the role of the e-teacher, meta-learning, and more. Our conversation revealed a half-dozen ways that blogging can support learning. Essentially, blogs are a personal writing space to organize our own thoughts and share information with others.

Blogging pioneer Peter Merholz adds, "the power of Weblogs is their ability to immediately put form to thought. I can get an idea in my head--however [half] baked it might be--and, in seconds, share it with the world. Immediately, I get feedback, refinement, stories, and so forth spurred by my little idea. Never before was this possible."

Also, blogs are easily linked and cross-linked to form learning communities. A few days after we met, Ashley emailed, "It was interesting how the next day you posted on your blog about our talk, about which David Carter-Tod commented on in his blog. One of my colleagues, Raymond Yee, noticed it after we had lunch, and I told him about our discussion. Then, Yee wrote a post about our circle on his blog. Of course, then I had to comment about it on my blog. It's all an interesting little Web that blogs make happen so quickly."

In another setting, innovative teachers are encouraging students to maintain class and personal school blogs. Enthusiasm grows as students take ownership of the content. They write, edit, review, and publish content. They also critique each other and present different viewpoints. Teachers make articles available to read electronically. Blogs maintained by individual students enable teachers to assess their students’ thinking patterns and depth of understanding. In the future, students may learn by assembling personal digital portfolios.

Former MTV-vj Adam Curry is working with teacher Peter Ford to offer free school blogs and advice on how to use them. They note that "Children are vain, just like adults. They desire and require an audience for their thoughts and achievements." they add, "The simple intuitive nature of SchoolBlogs is precisely what's required to allow students to express themselves on their own terms. Children's involvement with Websites has to be more than a posting of a few pieces of their work on a third person's static Website for a non-existent world to see. There's no ownership in that. School Blogs can give children their own soapbox, their own voice. They become habitual writers. They are in control." (See Weblog-ed for additional accounts of the power of blogs in schools.)

Although everyone would like to learn a craft by apprenticing to a world-class master, it’s not always possible. Workshops held by master craftsmen don't scale. By combining blogs and digital storytelling we get the next best thing, a virtual apprenticeship. The Center for Digital Storytelling believes that "in the not distant future, sharing one's story through the multiple media of digital imagery, text, voice, sound, music, video, and animation will be the principle hobby of the world's people." Imagine learning to teach by observing and learning from stories told by a world-class instructor.

Sample blogs

Build a Blog To start your own blog, go to blogger.com. A blog account is free! Here are instructions for building your personal, company, or team blog.

The best way to understand blogs is to visit a few.

ElearningPost. Maish Nichani’s blog deals with corporate learning, community building, instructional design, knowledge management, and so forth. Every weekday Maish links to four or five interesting articles. Sample sources are Wired, Chronicle of Higher Ed, Syllabus, First Monday, Training, PBS, and CIO. Maish writes a brief paragraph to describe each link.

I no longer read three-quarters of the magazines I once felt obligated to, but I do read e-learningpost religiously to find out what I need to read. It’s also more fun to read from a variety of voices--an article from Fortune, a story from Learning Circuits, or a white paper from IBM.

Research on Learning and Performance (now the learning category of www.internettime.com/blog).This blog began as a personal tool to capture ideas that I would later add to the e-learning page of my company's Website. As more information about e-learning became available, keeping that page up-to-date became a burden. Now, every couple of weeks I harvest worthwhile entries from the blog to post. What sort of content do you find on this blog? Whatever I found interesting at the time. Essentially, the blog is a clipping service. Love me, love my blog. Some sample content includes

photos and impressions of ASTD TechKnowledge in Las Vegas
notes from a Centra press event (posted during the session)
poetry about meta-learning
a pithy quote from Cisco’s Tom Kelly
notes from a meeting with Chris Ashley at The Interactive University

My blog contains more than a year’s worth of items like those. The content comes in small bites. How do people retrieve needles from this haystack? Most use the Google search box that appears atop each page.

Bottom line?

For me, blogs highlight useful information that I may never find on my own--or think to find on my own. Cameron Barrett's blog has taught me more about Web design than any course. David Weinberger’s blog mentors me on knowledge management, and often it has me laughing out loud. Chris Pirillo keeps me abreast of Windows' developments. Recently, Stephen Downes began augmenting my understanding of how people learn.

I know what you're thinking. Why couldn’t I get the same insight from reading a book or a magazine? Let me count the ways. First, the informality of blogs makes them engaging. Second, they're a time management tool. Because bloggers read one another's stuff, the best of the best rises to the top and eventually appears on the handful of blogs I read. In addiiton, blogs offer personal and even contrarian viewpoints. Third, blogs are current. For example, and unfortunately, I first learned about the World Trade Center disaster on DaveNet rather than CNN.

Basically, blogs work.

Learning Circuits December 2002

Visit the New Learning Circuits Blog

by Jay Cross

Blogs (short for weblogs) are informal Websites where people publish stories, opinions, and links--often on a daily basis. The most recent entry comes first; old entries are relegated to online archives. Originally personal diaries and lists of recommended links, blogs have blossomed into tools for knowledge sharing, public education, customer service, journalism, community-building, and marketing.

Learning Circuits was there first. The Learning Circuits Blog kicked off in April 2002 with commentary from Peter Isackson, Tom Barron, Clark Quinn, Bill Horton, Kevin Wheeler, Ellen Wagner, Margaret Driscoll, Allison Rossett, Richard Clark, and me. Six months and 18,836 words later, this starter blog sputtered to a halt, a victim of overly long postings, advances in technology, and other priorities. Today we're re-starting the new Learning Circuits Blog with the ability for you to make comments and an enthusiastic team of contributors.

Bloggers have always linked to one another; it's how one gets known. Lately, blogs have begun to accept comments. Many blogs are "syndicated." For example, my blog entries are automatically swept into a consolidated blog published in China. Comments, cross-referencing, and syndication connect bloggers.

For example, I just posted this comment on George Siemens's elearnspace: George, at first, your piece on blogging made me angry but now I'm growing to love it. You see, I sat down twenty minutes ago to write a progress report on blogging for Learning Circuits. A link from Dave Winer's blog to Phil Windley's blog led me back to elearnspace, where I found that you'd already written a lot of what I intended to say. But then it occurred to me that the true spirit of blogging is sharing ideas. Passing along a meme can be as powerful as originating one. After all, most bloggers gladly point to other sources they like. So now I'm happy, for instead of writing something original, I'll just quote you extensively. Thanks.

Discussing the implications of the tremendous expansion of blogging, George says: "As a disruptive technology, blogging is altering (or perhaps responding to?) many aspects of information/content creation and use. These changes are not without impact. What are some of the implications of a tool that functions at the same speed as the medium it serves? Here are a few:

Content creation and consumption on the Internet has finally caught up with the Internet. Traditional content suppliers (publishers and news organizations) will face substantial pressures to respond appropriately or they'll cease to be relevant.
There's decentralization of content and distribution. This is a trend well underway on the Internet. Napster capitalized on it, and blogging is the "canary in a mine" reacting to (and reflecting) it.
The user is in control. The end user of a service or product has acquired a central rather than fringe role. If you disagree with a blogger you can tell him or her via comments and links and initiate a dialogue with the author and other readers.
People expect conversation rather than lecture.
The pipe is more important than the content. By various estimates, bloggers number between 750,000 and 1 million. The ecosystem of blogging is more important than the content being generated. The content has a set life span but the process for content acquisition--blogging--stays fresh.
There's an increase in shared meaning and understandings. Knowledge is acquired and shaped as a social process, which results in spiraling effect. I say something, you comment on it. I evaluate your comments, respond, and present a new perspective. Then, the process repeats until a concept has been thoroughly explored.
Ideas are presented as the starting point for dialogue, rather than an ending point.
George concludes, "The simplest innovations are often the most effective in responding to ground swells of trends and change. The potency of the blog phenomenon is two fold: perfect match for its medium and ease of use."

Please drop by the new Learning Circuits Blog. Post a comment. Join the fun. And visit again.

Published: December 2002

THE BLOGGING PROCESS (July 2003) "A pretentious and presumptuous attempt to document what bloggers have learned, without any formal instruction, to do every day. And then a description of what's needed to make blogs a medium for real conversation."

The blogger is no longer the solitary writer, detached from the real world. Today's blogger spends quite a bit of time reading, commenting, researching, recommending, and promoting. She may be part of a community of bloggers.

"A Weblog (also known as a blog) is a personal Website that offers frequently updated observations, news headlines, commentary, recommended links and/or diary entries, generally organized chronologically. Weblogs vary greatly in style and content." from Triumph of the Weblogs by Kevin Werbach.

Blogs about blogs

Blogroots index of sites, pointers, books & more

BlogDex (MIT) "blogdex is a system built to harness the power of personal news, amalgamating and organizing personal news content into one navigable source, moving democratic media to the masses. at current, blogdex is focused on the referential information provided by personal content, namely using the timeliness of weblogs to find important and interesting content on the web."

BlogHop "About BlogHop! Your friendly neighborhood blog portal. Bloghop was made with one thing in mind -- to help readers find good blogs. It's all about the readers, man. If you find a blog you like, rate it, and it'll float to the top for the next reader."

the complete guide to weblogs "This resource is intended to contain as much information as possible about weblogs." And they do it rather well.

Keep Trying "Mike Sanders Looks at Life Through The Blog"

LinkWatcher aims to "supply linkwatcher users with much more powerful tools for searching, monitoring, and discovering new blogs."

Eatonweb Portal Brigitte says "this portal is a labor of love. it started back in early 1999 when there were less than 50 known weblogs-there were a lot more than that out there, they just hadn't been discovered. as more kept turning up or getting started, i kept adding them to my list. it's grown a little since then." She lists 3377 blogs.

BlogCon 2002 the first blogger conference. Vegaa, August 23-25

Weblogs and the News "Where news, weblogs, and journalism intersect. The following links provide information about new forms of personal journalism — including weblogs, collaborative news sites, personal broadcasting, and more — as well as pointers to examples of each genre."

Weblog Review "This page has been made so that people can find weblogs that interest them. Rather than just a bunch of links like other weblog portal pages, this one will actually include reviews of weblogs."

Write the Web "News for web users that [sic] write back." 12 Things No One Ever Told You About Having a Weblog

Google zeitgeist

Full article

Will businesses blog?

Jay Cross, CEO of the Internet Time Group, a Berkeley, Calif., e-learning and knowledge management consulting firm, thinks a Blogger-enhanced content management system could be a powerful business tool.

“It would allow subject matter experts to document what’s important to them, and then publish it,” Cross says. “Instead of some knowledge engineer telling you what’s good for you, which is the old style of top-heavy corporate thinking, you’d have people in the sales force saying to each other, ‘This is information that’s really worthwhile.’ So you get informal exchanges of information within the corporation.”

Cross believes that a Blogger-based content management system would help employees deal with information overload, as an editor could filter out the clutter and make sure only relevant information gets posted.

While Cross sees the potential for Blogger and other Web log software, he believes it will be a difficult sell at a time when dot-com technology is out of vogue and the nation’s economy is depressed. “I think a content management system using Blogger may be a stealth sell; people buy it because it doesn’t cost much. If you offer five seats for $1,000 and there are some early adopters, it might catch on,” he says.

Blogging as Knowledge Management Tool

Corporate lawyers aren't going to applaud my concepts of KM through blogging. After all, if old email that might be subpoenaed as evidence is a legal nightmare, imagine what attorneys will think of uncensored blogs. Ray Ozzie has offered a policy to keep employee blogs from violating SEC quiet period rules.

Of course, the urge for secrecy, understandable for a Worldcom or Enron, can backfire if employees can't access their own firm's know-how:

People who have heard my call for information sharing in business warn that (1) knowledge workers won't share their know-how because it's their meal-ticket and (2) you'll never get everyone on board. The first issue is motivational; reward systems can change the balance. Secondly, things will be a whole lot better if only one person in five takes part; 100% participation is not the objective.

See Using Blogs in Business, chapter from We Blog

Blogs for Education

Edblogger notes

a place to write, nothing fancy, Chris Ashley

Weblogging: Another kind of website, Chris Ashley

"What is a weblog? A weblog is easy to use but less easy to explain, a technology that is becoming more widely used but still remains little known, and a writing tool that supports practicing writers and previous non-writers"

Weblogs: A Swiss Army website?, Chris Ashley

"Weblog communities are encouraged and supported by the ability of writers to use relatively simple publishing and writing environments that they can own, by the tools that help readers and writers find each other and connect over similar interests, and when readers themselves are empowered to write."

weblog-ed, Will Richardson

Weblogs in Education/School Blogs, Adam Curry and Peter Ford

Berkeley Interactive University

Grassroots KM through blogging - Maish Nichani & Venkat Rajamanickam - 14th May 2001

Blogs are a really cool way of telling stories. And because they are digital and use the Web for publishing and distribution, they have some advantages over traditional means of storytelling.

They are much more accessible than face-to-face mode.
They scale very easily across a large network, thus reaching a wider audience.
They can be easily archived and retrieved any number of times.
Providing context is much easier with hyperlinks and cross references.

Finally, as the popularity of blogs catches on, we are going to see many more twists on their use, but as we have noted, many will grow from their grassroots ability to communicate and share personal stories. In concluding this article, we take another quote from David Weinberger (he seems to have the most commonsensical approach to KM; simply can't resist quoting him):

So, here's a definition of that pesky and borderline elitist phrase, "knowledge worker": A knowledge worker is someone whose job entails having really interesting conversations at work.

The characteristics of conversations map to the conditions for genuine knowledge generation and sharing: They're unpredictable interactions among people speaking in their own voice about something they're interested in. The conversants implicitly acknowledge that they don't have all the answers (or else the conversation is really a lecture) and risk being wrong in front of someone else. And conversations overcome the class structure of business, suspending the org chart at least for a little while.

If you think about the aim of KM as enabling better conversations rather than lassoing stray knowledge doggies, you end up focusing on breaking down the physical and class barriers to conversation. And if that's not what KM is really about, then you ought to be doing it anyway.

Weblogs and the News -- "Where News, Journalism and Weblogs Intersect"

"Blogs are heaps of words that stick to the water: annotated transcripts of conversations that have no sides. They are the accumulata of What We Know, of open-ended conversation with who-knows-who. And perhaps I mean that last phrase a bit more literally than I intended when I wrote it eight seconds ago." Doc Searles

Dave Winer's History of Weblogs

Tacit Docs by David Weinberger "To hell with tacit knowledge. Go for tacit documents instead."

from Netsurfer Digest: Blogging or Web logging has been around since the early days of the Web. Weblogs offer a vital, creative outlet for alternative voices. While conventional media haven't exactly faded away in the meantime, as some thought they might, blogging is an increasingly potent, credible and creative force for individual expression. It allows people to reach out beyond their immediate geographical confines and find an audience, no matter how small, on any subject under the sun. The lure of blogs is their creative freedom; no one else has a say in what you say and how you say it. And, it's becoming easier for anyone to join in with relatively simple and inexpensive tools for self-publishing. Diversity of viewpoint is another important rallying cry. There's a lot to be said for blogging, and three interesting, expressive bloggers do it well here, providing thoughtful, intriguing and diverse points of view about the phenomenon. We should shamelessly but briefly blow our own horn a little here and point out that in some ways Netsurfer is a blog, and perhaps the oldest of them all.

An early list from the eLearning Jump Page

(In time this will become a history lesson.)

Blogs

Learning Circuits jaycross.com

BlogDex (MIT) Blogwise Tweeny Paquette Oblivio A List Apart Metafilter Robot Wisdom Weblogs.com

camworld evhead megnut & at O'Reilly peterme dave doc JOHO the Blog eLearningPost Tomalak's Realm Slashdot Zeldman Kuro5hin Kevin Werbach Rebecca's Pocket The Guardian Fuzzy Blogic Jon Udell Steve Johnson elegant hack

Technorati Top 100 JD Lasica/News Rebecca Blood's links Yahoo Groups Klogs

Six Apart Log

Posted by Jay Cross at August 31, 2001 11:44 PM | TrackBack

Comments

"It is becoming obvious that no one really understands weblogs," says Rebecca Blood in this piece in the Guardian.

All this represents something new: participatory media. And it matters. Not because of its resemblance to familiar institutions, but because of its differences from them.

Weblogs are just too varied, too idiosyncratic, to fit into an existing box. Industry analysts might call this disruptive technology because weblogs have changed personal publishing so profoundly that the old rules no longer apply. We are at the beginning of a new age of online publishing - and I predict that this generation of online pamphleteers is just the first wave.

Posted by: jay cross at December 18, 2003 10:15 PM

Lockergnome RSS Resource

Posted by: jay cross at December 21, 2003 10:39 AM

PressThink on What's Radical About the Weblog Form in Journalism?

Also see Questions and Answers About PressThink

Posted by: Jay Cross at April 29, 2004 05:50 PM

Weblog Design: Personal Knowledge Space

Presentations

2004-11-20T20:28:00.000-08:00

The Future of Learning. CSTD Symposium, May '04. Windows Media. All over the map with Stephen Downes, Rob Pearson, Lisa Neal, and me yammering on for about an hour. Collaboration Supercharges Performance, ASTD International. Macromedia Breeze. Covers blogs, RSS, information overload, complexity, time acceleration, network models, value of collaboration, Emergent Learning Forum, social network software, and more.

Vision for Emergent Learning Forum, Macromedia Breeze, 15 minutes.

Trends in Collaborative Learning (Macromedia Breeze) Keynote presentation for Collaborative Learning '04

Implementing eLearning, (Webex) Presentation by Lance Dublin & Jay Cross, October 8, 2003. More than 350 people attended the live presentation.

Writing the Next Chapter of eLearning (Macromedia Breeze) slides from Interwise webinar with Boston eLearning Association, July 2003. No sound.

Recording of event

Blogs (Macromedia Breeze) very short, from Interwise webinar with Boston eLearning Association, July 2003

A Pocketful of Memes (Macromedia Breeze) Jay's Keynote at I-KNOW 03 in Graz, Austria. July 2003

Implementing eLearning (Windows Media streaming video) Jay and Lance's presentation at TechLearn 2002, November 2002

eLearning is not Important (streaming, Icohere) Jay's presentation for Collaborative Learning 2002, November 2002.

Articles

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Feel free to quote from any of these, in whole or in part, so long as you credit Jay Cross or Internet Time Group and link back to this site. I write about learning and performance because I enjoy it, it helps me shape up my thinking, and sometimes it leads to writing assignments from outside organizations. Starting in 2005, I post the article I wrote for publication; the version that appeared in print may differ.

Foreword to The Handbook of Blended Learning. Is it not nutty for a learning strategist to ask “Why blend?” The more appropriate question is, “Why not blend?” Imagine an episode of This Old House asking, “Why should we use power tools? Hand tools can get the job done.” For both carpenters and learning professionals, the default behaviour is using the right tools for the job. Storytelling, PowerPoint's New Friend. CLO 12/05. it makes no more sense to blame PowerPoint for boring presentations than to blame fountain pens for forgery. Podcasting: Broadcast Your's Organization's Knowledge. CLO 10/05. Recent advances in information technology, such as podcasting, will profoundly impact knowledge management, corporate training, and in-house communication. Just as blogging gave us all a personal printing press, podcasting gives us an inexpensive, personal broadcasting studio. The Learner Lifecycle, CLO 8/05. Most people arrive at adulthood having built the foundational skills, mental models and working knowledge they need to get along in the world. Adults learn when they need to solve pressing problems. They don’t have patience for superfluous material or rehashing what they already know. Curriculum is for kids—exploration is for adults.

Useful Things, CLO (2005). Working smarter. The New Yorker once published a cartoon titled “Useful Things.” Pictured were a paperclip, a nail file, a Swiss Army knife and $10,000 in cash. This month, I’ll update the list and share a few things that may lift a little of the burden from the CLO’s shoulders. Enterprise Collaboration Integration, Internet Time Blog (2005). People are an organization’s most valuable asset but many companies miss a great opportunity to leverage their people’s abilities. Individual performance is rewarded with bonuses, promotion, and advancement. However, individuals do not create profits; profit comes from people working together. Few organizations take advantage of readily-available technology to make it simpler, faster, and easier for their people to work with one another. Extreme Learning: Decision Games, Chief Learning Officer (2005). Until recently, extensive experience was the only way to become an expert. It took decades to develop and hone one’s craft—you couldn’t teach it in a classroom. That’s about to change. An Alternative Pattern Language, Internet TIme Blog (2005). We unearth new patterns during a visit to Christopher Alexander's house. Meta-Lessons from the Net, CLO (2005). Before the dot-com bubble burst, enthusiasts loudly proclaimed, “The Net changes everything.” They were right. It has. In fact, the Internet is such a powerful metaphor that it has shaped our expectations of response time, around-the-clock access, self-directed action, adaptive infrastructure and other aspects of learning. R&B and Workflow Learning (2005). Before long I was flipping through Rummler and Brache's Improving Performance: How to Manage the White Space on the Organization Chart. Intuition told me it was time to dig into this book.Performance: How to Manage the White Space on the Organization Chart. Intuition told me it was time to dig into this book. Workflow Learning Gets Real, with Tony O'Driscoll, Training (2005). This same 80/20 rule applies to training. Ask workers where they learned how to do their jobs, and 80 percent of the time the answer is "at work." Most learning takes place on the job, outside the purview of formal learning. When we do conduct formal training, 80 percent of it is wasted effort: Workshops progress at the pace of the slowest participant, content is dated, the learner needs little of what's being delivered, the method of delivery is not tuned to the needs of the individual worker, motivation is absent, or timing is off. The half-life of newly learned material is three days; if learners don't use it immediately, they lose it. The Transformation of IT, Training (2005). Web services and services-oriented architecture are utterly geeky terms for describing the most important advance in computing since the byte. Finally, computing is going to serve business instead of enslaving it. How will this sea change in IT come about? By applying the same principles that fuelled the titanic growth of the Internet: interoperability built on simple, common standards; flexibility; faster cycle times; decentralized control; incremental development; repurposing of content; network effects; the promise of wealth; and the collaboration of countless true believers. A Brief History of the Term eLearning and A Lesson for Portugal, Nov@ Formação (2005). People tell me I coined the term eLearning when I started writing about it on the web in 1998. In the spring of '99, nine of the top ten links on Alta Vista for e-Learning connected to Internet Time Group. What is Workflow Learning? (2005). Let's look at that in the context of: * Performance-Centered Design * Exponential Acceleration * Living Information Systems * Dense Interconnections The Roots of Workflow Learning (2005). I doubt this cast of characters had ever appeared beneath the same roof before. SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle, Saba, Docent, Click2Learn, Plateau, Knowledge Products, Siebel, Sun, Thinq, vCampus, and Global Knowledge (now OnDemand) all sat at the same table. On Demand, In the Soup, on the Path to Glory (2005). When every business is getting exponentially quicker and more connected, who's to say we should evaluate future potential by the conventional calendar? Permit me to describe the inevitable convergence of some very powerful forces from the perspective of the Workflow Institute.

The Business Singularity, Chief Learning Officer (2004), The structure of business, the role of workers and the architecture of software are changing before our very eyes. Business is morphing into flexible, self-organizing components that operate in real time. Software is becoming interoperable, open, ubiquitous and transparent. Workers are learning in small chunks delivered to individualized screens at the time of need. Learning is becoming a core business process measured by key performance indicators. Taken together, these changes create a new kind of business environment—a business singularity.

Improv Education, Chief Learning Officer (2004), Walk into the sales department, the warehouse, the call center or the executive suite, talk with the people there, and you know what you’ll discover? The members of the organization are known as “workers.” They are blue-collar workers, knowledge workers, hourly workers, commission-only workers and contractors doing work-for-hire. Nobody calls them “learners.”

What Counts?, Chief Learning Officer (2004), Training directors bemoan not being able to demonstrate significant business results. If they remain entirely within the training function, they never will, because they don’t own the yardstick that measures business results. Who owns that yardstick? Generally, it’s training’s sponsor, the person with authority to sign off on large expenditures.

Who Knows? Chief Learning Officer (2004), What would you think of an assembly line where workers didn’t know where to find the parts they were supposed to attach? Absurd, you say. Heads would roll. Yet for knowledge workers, this is routine. Consider a knowledge worker stymied by a lack of information—hardly an uncommon situation. In fact, in many professions, knowledge workers spend a third of their time looking for answers and helping their colleagues do the same.

Emergent Learning Chief Learning Officer (2004), Before the World Trade Center attack, the world was more predictable. Knowledge was power. Adaptability has now taken its place. Our requirements have changed. Corporations and government agencies are on permanent alert. Networks have taken the slack out of the system. Timing is the critical variable. The performance metrics for troops on a plane headed to a new hot spot and for systems engineers countering a new competitive threat are the same: How soon will they be ready to perform?

Personal Intellectual Capital Management Chief Learning Officer (2004), Ultimately, you’re responsible for the life you lead. It’s up to you to learn what you need to succeed. That makes you responsible for your own knowledge management, learning architecture, instructional design and evaluation.

Connections: The Impact of Schooling Chief Learning Officer (2003), "Your 16-year-old daughter says she’s going to take sex education at school and you’re relieved, but she tells you she plans to participate in sex training and you’re unnerved. Why? Because outside of education, you learn by doing things."

Informal Learning: A Sound Investment Chief Learning Officer (2003). "Workers who know more get the most accomplished. People who are well connected make greater contributions. The workers who create the most value are those who know the right people, the right stuff, and the right things to do."

Blogging for Business Learning Circuits (2003). "Four million people write blogs, and blogging is growing faster than the web at its high point. A customer blog enables a company to make announcements to its Web customers immediately. All customers can benefit from a question asked by only one. The intimacy in blog culture conversation enables customers to get to know workers-and vice-versa. Affiliation breeds loyalty. Customers begin to talk among themselves. A typo that would be an embarrassment in an advertisement becomes a sign of authenticity on a blog."

Informal Learning -- The Other 80%. DRAFT. eLearning Forum (2003). This paper addresses how organizations, particularly business organizations, can get more done. The people who create the most value are those who know the right people, the right stuff, and the right things to do. People learn these things through informal learning that flies beneath the corporate radar. Because organizations are oblivious to informal learning, they fail to invest in it.

How E-Learning Professionals Learn About E-Learning Most of the respondents said that they place a higher value on information from individuals: friends, fellow bloggers, authors, and people who send them email or that they meet at conference. As a group, they didn’t put much stock in information from organizations: suppliers, magazines, and conference sessions.

eLearning: You Built It -- Now Promote It, eLearning Developers Journal (2003). "Your elevator pitch is what you say when your CEO steps onto your elevator and asks what you're doing. You'll probably include the three basic elements of marketing design: your brand, your position, and your target segments."

eLearning: Apples and Oranges, Learning Circuits (2003). "Perhaps corporations should consider how small an e-learning application can be and still get the job done rather than try to create monster centralized e-learning systems. In doing so, would companies lose economies of scale? Maybe. But consider this: As many as half of all grandiose, enterprise software initiatives fail to live up to expectations. Many simply fail."

See What I Mean, eLearning (2002). "In the 20th century, we confused reading words with learning. Learning is a multisensory, both-sides-of-the-brain experience. Pictures unlock the imagination. Yet, most books do not contain a single illustration." More legible jpg here.

The Value of Learning About Learning, with Clark Quinn (2002). "If Olympic athletes approached running the marathon the way business people approach learning, they would show up for the race without having trained. Learning is a skill, not a hard-wired trait. The discipline of meta-learning seeks to re-invent learning as a self-correcting, ever improving process. Its measure of success is not effort, but business results."

The DNA of eLearning, with Ian Hamilton (2002). "eLearning technologies, as platforms for business-critical training needs, simply don't do what companies need or envision them to do. The fact of the matter is that different companies need them to do different things. Lacking the ability to purchase an effective eLearning technology platform, companies certainly cannot be convinced to purchase third-party eLearning content to play on these platforms."

Tomorrow's Too Late LiNEZine (2002). How would you describe an elementary school principal who didn?t conduct fire drills? Irresponsible. And how would you describe a chief operating officer who didn?t prepare for crises? Typical.

Envisioning Learning (2002). "It's right before our eyes, but we're so habituated to it that we can't see it. We've confused reading and writing with learning. What's the problem with line after line of type? They're linear. This is not the way we think. We think associatively. Thinking resembles freeform conversation, hopping from one subject to another, changing in emphasis, delivered with emotion, forever an engaging assortment of choices and surprise. The written word conveys but one of the options." Blogs Learning Circuits (2002). Blog is short for web-log, an informal personal website. Half a million people have blogs. "...blogs are destined to become a powerful, dirt-cheap tool for learning and knowledge management.

The SunTAN Story (2001). "Appropriately enough for a company whose motto is 'The network is the computer,' Sun Microsystems started using eLearning to train newly hired sales people long before the term eLearning was invented.... The time it takes sales people to achieve quota dropped from 15 months to 6 months. What's the value of 9 months of additional sales from 1,440 people? Given that the people have $5 million quotas, that's in the neighborhood of $5 billion in incremental revenue."

A Fresh Look at ROI Learning Circuits (2000). "Where you stand on ROI depends on where you sit. Different levels of management make different sorts of decisions, so it's appropriate that they use different measures of ROI. In a nutshell, traditional accounting recognizes nothing but physical entities; intangibles are valued at zero. Vast areas of human productivity--ideas, abilities, experience, insight, esprit de corps, motivation--lie outside the accountant's field of vision. Accounting fails to recognize that people become more valuable over time."

Frontline: eLearning Forum Learning Circuits (2001). "Cliff Stoll caught everyone's attention by loudly proclaiming, "E-learning is a fraud!' Unquestionably, Stoll took control of the floor. He asked the group, 'If you were hiring a plumber, which would you choose: one with an online degree in plumbing or one who learned firsthand?' Muttering that simulations were a great way to avoid the person sitting next to you, Stoll said that the designers of flight simulators spent more time making the clouds look right than getting to what the pilots really need...."

Being Analog LiNEZine (2001). "Computers are bipolar. A bit is on or off. 1 or 0. Unless you're a digital processor, this binary thinking can trick you into oversimplifying what's going on. The human world is not yes or no; it's a sea of maybes. Most decisions aren't black or white; they're shades of gray. Are you liberal or conservative? Perhaps like me, you're a little of each. Treating the world as an open-or-shut case leads to thought crimes like "The Internet changes everything." In my work, I struggle with the knuckle-headed assumption that learning must be either instructor-led or computer-delivered rather than a blend of the two. Few things in life are really all or nothing."

The Changing Nature of Leadership LiNEZine (2001). "Wide, ever-shifting boundaries change all the rules. We once rewarded compliance; today we reward innovation. We once praised obedience; today we praise ad hoc solutions. Yesterday?s subversive employee is today?s innovator. Leadership?creating value by hopping outside boundaries?used to be the province of a well-paid, well-educated few somewhere near the top of the pyramid. Turbulent times have converted leadership into a responsibility shared by all members of the organization."

Food for Thought LiNEZine (2001). "Treat the learner as a customer. Make it easy for the learner to buy (learn). Use interactivity, relevance, wit, and excitement to keep the learner/customer engaged. If the customers aren't buying, it's your fault, not theirs. The learning revolution is over. The learners won. Take control by giving control. Problem formulation often counts for more than problem solution. School always gives you the formulated problem; life does not."

eLearning (1999). "In the training jungle, corporate performance is the elephant. Training's only function is to hunt the elephant. Focusing solely on employees' needs does not bag elephants. The "e" in eLearning is not only for electronic; it's also there to remind you about the elephant. Remember, corporate performance is what you're hunting for."

Vendors commission us to write white papers and articles, for example: Time Matters, Profit Returns (for X.HLP, 2001). "While training directors may have different objectives than CEOs, everyone in today's business world shares one need: they want it all now. Benefits you don't see until two years from now are hardly benefits at all. Given enough time, a million monkeys at a million terminals could develop your entire curriculum, with Flash animations and a repository of SCORM-compliant learning objects. Nobody's got time to wait."

Leveraging the People Value Chain (for SmartForce, 2000). "Companies looking for workers who take orders, understand discipline, and put the welfare of the company above their own will be disappointed. Workers like this no longer exist. While some companies decry high turnover, others turn the mindset of the new recruit to their advantage. After all, they want innovators, not followers. They prefer self-starters who will do what's right rather than waiting for instructions. They need people more concerned with getting the job done than punching the clock. For too long, we've looked at investing in people through the wrong end of the telescope. Instead of trying to keep the cost of training and development down, what if we were to try to keep it up?"

Converting Intellectual Capital into Competitive Advantage< (for Avaltus, 2001). "Success in the knowledge age requires new tools. This paper describes a unified approach to creating, maintaining, and exploiting intellectual capital, the knowledge platform. The objective is to deliver the right information at the right time to the right person, simply, economically, and immediately."

Learn Fast, Go Fast. (for SmartForce, 1999). "eBusiness needs an eBusiness approach to learning itself, something we call eLearning. eLearning is to traditional training as eBusiness is to the five-and-dime. eLearning puts the learner in the center of the equation instead of the trainer."

Visual Learning

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Center for Visual Learning

Galleries All on the same page Visualizing a complex discussion Transforming an organization Learning from the past Snapshot of a session Improving Team Performance Understanding "Wicked Problems" Explore the future TechLearn 2002 "Anti-terrorism" Changing behavior Simplify

Library

Books Blogs Papers People Presentations Tools

envisioning. 1. Seeing from a fresh perspective. 2. Looking at relationships and non-linear sequences. 3. Imagining and prototyping new ideas. 4. Focusing and documenting the flow of group discussion. 5. Shortening the time it takes learners to say, "Now I see." 6. What visionaries do.

Time

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It's about time

Great map of the world's time zones Current time in major cities | Time around the world - 30 clocks Jay's Personal World Clock

Calendars: 2004 | 2005 | 2006

Time is all we have. Most of us can feel time speeding up. Many of us are enslaved by time. But most of what we consider "time" is actually in our heads.

"What part of now is it you don't understand?" --Zydeco group Frog Kick

Official U.S. Pacific Time

Industrious Monocraft Clock

TimeTicker gives you times around the world with sound effects and one-button correction of your computer's clock. Very cool.

Human Clock

What is "Internet Time?"

Internet time is shorthand for the accelerated pace of business and life brought about by networks and eBusiness. The amazing growth of Netscape is frequently cited as an example -- in its first year, the firm accomplished what had taken others a decade or more. Some say a year of Internet time equals seven years of calendar time, but there's really no absolute measure. It's a concept, like a "New York minute."

Timelines

Timelines provide perspective. Check these out.

Check this 4.5 billion year timeline of evolution

Powers of Ten: from 1 attosecond to 31 billion years

Timeline of Knowledge Representation

Time Capsule a la New York Times

Timely topics

> Timelines, for perspective > Ideas from 50 books about time > Essays on time from Forbes ASAP > Clocks and Calendars > How the average American spends time > Observations > Time is relative

On Time at the Museum of American History

"What then, is time? If no one asks me, I know. If I wish to explain it to someone who asks, I know it not. " --St. Augustine, Confessions, Book II, Sec. 14.

From Wired, An Extremely Brief History of Time

1687: Isaac Newton

The universe has one absolute clock: • Time and space are independant of the observer. • Time's arrow points forward; events move ahead from the now.

1905: Albert Einstein

every observer has his or her own (accurate) clock: • The universe exists in a space-time manifold. • Everyone's "now" is different. • Acceleration affects time.

2003: Peter Lynds

There is no clock; "time" is an illusion • Time has no indivisible unit. • There is no "now," only sequences of events.

Encyclopædia Britannica:

time a measured or measurable period, a continuum that lacks spatial dimensions. Time is of philosophical interest and is also the subject of mathematical and scientific investigation.

time perception experience or awareness of the passage of time.

The human experience of change is complex. One primary element clearly is that of a succession of events, but distinguishable events are separated by more or less lengthy intervals that are called durations. Thus, sequence and duration are fundamental aspects of what is perceived in change

Swatch, the maker of curious looking watches, has brilliantly highjacked the term Internet Time, confusing millions of people into thinking that Internet time is "Swatch time." Swatch divides the day into 1000 beats and sets the prme meridian at Biel, Switzerland. While it's great not to hassle with time zones, you'd probably have to buy a Swatch to figure out what time it really is.

Why Time Matters in Business

Breakaway, by Charles Fred, is a marvellous book about the impact of reducing "time to proficiency" in business. Excerpts.

"Put your skepticism on hold and ask yourself if you and the people of your company can reach proficiency at the speed of the new economy. Can your current system for developing people fulfill the growth requirements of your shareholders, satisfy anxious customers, and excite your workers enough to keep them?"

is a French Medieval alchemy symbol for time.

Time concepts presentation (1999)

How the average American spends time

sleep 33 % work 27.0 leisure 13.0 religion 1.4 eating 8.6 travel 10.0 illness 4.3 personal care 2.5

Ideas from 50 books and articles about time

Deep inside, I know people can lead more productive, happy lives if they overthrow the tyranny of clocktime. I've dumped my digital watch. Now I carry my Swiss railway conductor's pocket watch on days that I carry any timepiece at all.

"...so I decided to have plenty of time."

Unwinding the Clock “I circle around the arguments, coming back to them again and again, from slightly different angles, touching on them in slightly different places. I do this partly because it’s often the best way to learn—not through single events, and not through strict repetition either, but though variation. And partly because it’s impossible to resolve your relationship with time once and for all.”

If I can fool myself into thinking that I don’t have enough time, couldn’t I just as well fool myself into thinking that I have plenty of time? So I decided to have plenty of time.

In education it’s particularly important to look forward. it’s strange that we so often concentrate on previous knowledge. knowledge that precedes us is, of course, important, but it deals only with things as they once were. it’s just as important to consider things that point forward: expectations, hopes, objectives.

Faster, faster...

Time is speeding up. In agrarian days, time didn't matter so long as you got up around sunrise and turned in at sunset.

Railroads must keep to schedules -- and require people to agree on the time. (Before railroads, time zones were unnecessary--and often arbitrary.) Military coordination and air travel require even greater precision.

These days, two minutes to receive a message from the other side of the world feels agonizingly slow.

When I studied physics in college, we didn't talk about nanoseconds.

Are You on Digital Time? Fast Company's Alan Webber talks with BCG's George Stalk about time-based competition. February 99.

Prisoners Of Time Report of the National Education Commission on Time and Learning April 1994

If experience, research, and common sense teach nothing else, they confirm the truism that people learn at different rates, and in different ways with different subjects. But ,,,our schools and the people involved with them are captives of clock and calendar. The boundaries of student growth are defined by schedules for bells, buses, and vacations instead of standards for students and learning.

Po Bronson describes Danny Hillis & the 10,000-year clock

The legendary designer of computer architecture, Danny Hillis ... is building a monument-sized mechanical clock that ... will continue ticking and counting time through the year AD 12,000. In essence, he wants us to stop thinking about what's for lunch and start thinking about how to feed the world.

"In some sense, we've run out of our story, which we were operating on, which was the story of power taking over nature - it's not that we've finished that, but we've gotten ahead of ourselves, and we don't know what the next story is after that."

According to Hillis, certain problems aren't solvable in three years, and it's people's nature not to work on problems they can't solve. If we can extend people's horizons, a whole range of challenges fall back into play.

Hyper History Online

An extraordinary timeline: 3,000 years of history in 2,000 linked files.

Calendars

Caution! Dates in calendar are closer than they appear!

History of the calendar

When Do You Want To Go Today?, an awesome list of calendars -- celestial, historical, religious

Calendar Home for links, 10,000 year calendar, no. days between two dates

This Day in History

Clocks

"A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches does not."

"The clock is not merely a means of keeping track of the hours, but of synchronizing the actions of men. The clock, not the steam engine, is the key machine of the industrial age... In its relationship to determinable quantities of engergy, to standardization, to automatic action, and finally to its own special product, accurate timing, the clock has been the foremost machine in modern technic; and at each period it has remained in the lead: it marks a perfection toward which other machines aspire."

Lewis Mumford

CLOX

CLOX is a free program that displays the time in as many timezones as you like on an array of clocks reminiscent of the wall of a newsroom. Digital or analog. Pop up a daylight world map. Set alarms and reminders. Have it automatically update the time via the Net every day.

The Royal Observatory at Greenwich.

Ground zero, celebrating the new millennium with exhibits. Also see Greenwich Electronic Time. Introduced with great Y2K fanfare as the new standard for e-commerce, the "What's New" tab contains nothing but the original press release. Interesting links.

One World Time

One World Time is what Greenwich Electronic Time should have been, a time standard for e-commerce. Easy to use.

Official U.S. time

Also links to a history of calendars, an interesting (really!) history of Daylight Savings Time, Brittanica's Clockworks (neat animations), and more. Time Service Department, U.S. Naval Observatory.

The World Clock

Time in cities around the world.

World Time Zone

Time in countries around the world.

Swatch

People who think Switzerland is the center of the world.

Time Sync

Great variety of time synchronization software.

Internet Clocks, Counters, & Countdowns

Lots of software goodies Clocks and Time Horology site for books, magazines, organizations, museums

Geologic Time

Perpetual Headline News Election in Doubt Congress Defies Prez Flood Waters Rising Moore's Law Upheld Politicians Found Corrupt Conflict in Middle East Industries Consolidate Markets Fluctuate Perception is Reality Shit Happens Taxes Rise Time Flies Entropy Increases "No Free Lunch," Study Finds "What's in it for me?" ask consumers

"Time is but the stream I go a-fishin in. I drink at it, but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. It's thin current slides away, but eternity remains." --Henry David Thoreau

"So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the path of each man's genius contracts itself to a very few hours." --Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I put instant coffee in a microwave oven and almost went back in time." --Steven Wright

"It's like trying to understand time other than linearly... So maybe we will just give up on leap years and all the seasons will shift slightly and the definition of a year will change and then we will all understand time as a series of concentric circles... or some other nifty metaphor that I can't predict from here in Flatland." Lemonyellow

"The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time."

Tom Cargill, Bell Labs

Getting It Done by Roger Fischer and Alan Sharp

"By formulating a statement of purpose in terms of proposed results over three or more points in time you can have: an inspiring distant vision, a mid-distant goal en route that is a worthy goal in itself, and some immediate objectives to start working on at once."

Continually shift your vision

The rapidly accelerating future and growing irrelevance of the past have thrown our sense of timing out of kilter. We need to look at the world through time trifocals. Each perspective has built-in plusses and minuses.

Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, who often call themselves evangelists, speak with quasireligious fervor of "Internet time" – the apocalyptic sense of urgency caused by the fleeting half-lives of products and business plans.

Tim Race, Industry Standard, August 20, 1999

Save (and Savor) Time

Our advice on Making Time and enjoying it more.

Timing Is Everything Time is all we have

I am retiring this from the Internet Time Group page in mid-2001 while buckling down to provide eLearning consulting.

Time is relative

Epigenesis... If things don't develop at their appropriate time, they are not going to develop at a later one.

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on Time

How do you know time is passing?

A lot of the differences among people are, in fact, based on their differences in time perspective. Zimbardo has found that students who are future-oriented tend to wear watches, take many notes in class and study for longer periods of time, smile more and laugh less than those in the here-and-now group. In the south Bronx where Zimbardo grew up, people live in the "expanded present," with no future or past. Some attributes of the expanded-present mode: greater enjoyment of sex, nerve enough to take risks, greater artistic creativity. "What's happening?" .

..research by Stanford's Philip Zimbardo.

"In the old days, you'd finish a day's work and announce, 'I'm done.' Nobody ever does that now. There's never enough time."

Elliott Masie

"The space of time separating George Washington's first inauguration in April 1789 from Lincoln's first in March 1861 was only seventy-two years, a mote in the eye of history. But that slice of history contained extraordinary events. From a third-rate republic, a sliver of sparsely populated seaboard extending inland from the Atlantic for a few hundred miles, threatened by foreign powers and dangerous Indian tribes, America had become a pulsing, burgeoning world economic power whose lands stretched across the entire continent." --Don't Know Much About History Here's one that's out of the box: non-solar time. Check out OmniTime. I am not a believer. Then again, I never thought FedEx would make it either.

from the first (October 1999) issue of CapGemini Focus... Yes, yes, yes. Somebody else gets it.

Thinking out of the time box by Jayne Buxton and Crystal Schaffer

"Breaking time paradigms The way to approach the task of re-timing work is to think about it differently."

"First, consider that there are no jobs but, rather, that there is work to be accomplished. This requires a business to break down its jobs, analyze them, and reconstruct them as collections of work that need to be done as opposed to positions that need to be filled. As processes are pulled apart and put back together in different ways, re-thinking how we use time becomes easier. Some of the things once regarded as essential to effectiveness are seen for what they are: bad habits which developed to support a particular inefficient process. For example, the assumption that a manager needs to be on call five days a week, eight hours a day, disappears when work is restructured to enable employees to make more effective decisions themselves, and to take managerial input at specific times.

"How do you start this breakdown process? You begin with a long-term perspective."

"Companies that want to make the most of the time available to them must abandon their 'punch the clock' mentality, be it a full-time, part-time, or flextime clock. It is not enough to 'bend' work time; it must be broken up and reconfigured if the power of technology and human ingenuity and diligence to create growth opportunities in today's knowledge and service-driven economy is to be realized."

"Happiness may well consist primarily of an attitude toward time. Individuals we consider happy commonly seem complete in the present: we see them constantly in their wholeness, attentive, cheerful, open rather than closed to events, integral in the moment rather than distended across time by regret or anxiety." --Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living

Current organization models are not time-based. They still operate in a three-dimensional universe of being rather than becoming. Notions of a real-time business and of an organizational life cycle are not widely held or used. --Stan Davis, 2020 Vision

"When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute--and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity."

Albert Einstein

Einstein's Dreams 1905-1999 - The interactive adaptation

Einstein's Web

How much is that in Dog Years? It's a myth that each year of a dog's life is the equivalent of seven human years. Here's the real equivalency for an average-sized dog:

Dog Years/Human Years:

1 /15 2/ 24 4/ 32 6/ 40 10 /56 14 /72 18/ 91 21/ 106

Every time we postpone some necessary event, we do so with the implication that present time is more important than future time.

--Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living

Time is best spent when we are:

concentrating wholly on what we are doing
freeing our minds from thought altogether
communicating honestly with others
dreaming asleep or awake
planning
remembering

What is to be avoided is preoccupation and disordered occupation--the compulsive worry, the nervous escape from thought to thought, the scratching and hair-fluffing, the short circuit of distraction.

--Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living

Henry Ford The month Henry Ford was born, July 1863, horses dragged Union and Confederate cannon to Gettysburg. The first gasoline-powered automobile was 23 years in the future. When Ford died, in 1947, one in seven U.S. workers held a job in the automobile industry. Ford said of the Model T, the only thing wrong with it is that people stopped buying it.

Lenk, Bernese Oberland, Switzerland

A trail always takes longer the first time. Therefore, to extend time, be adventurous and take a lot of new trails. Avoid the familiar path. Stay out of ruts.

Clock time has lulled us into a wrong-headed sense of expectations.

"How much does he want per hour?" asked the fellow who was requesting some of my colleague's time. It's as if we churn out a good idea an hour, like working on an assembly line.

For creative knowledge workers, a brilliant insight may pop up in a matter of seconds. The world looks like this:

Nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, flash of brilliance, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada.

In knowledge work with a high degree of discretion, a flash of brilliance before breakfast is worth a lot more than eight hours of nada at the office.

More chaos, fewer hours?

The User Illusion explains that consciousness lags reality (and then covers its tracks). Your nonconscious mind is a lot closer to "now" than you are. The Mind's Past reiterates this reality, saying that our internal "interpreter" chooses the slides in the show we see. The brain decides to hold up our right arm--and we think this is something we thought up. Hah!

excerpts from Islands in the Clickstream Telling Time by a Broken Clock By Richard Thieme

Trying to understand what's happening using old words, old images, old paradigms is like telling time by broken clocks. The landscape created by speech, writing, print is being terraformed by digital humans, rocking in our boots, out of joint with our times. We are riding a ship on the river of time as the ship is being built. It will take time to finish that ship, and when we do, we will already have been becoming something else.

In the meantime, we live between, snickering at those who expect something immense in the Year 2000 because they are rowing to the rhythm of a river overflowing its banks, flooding our town and cities, rising like rain into the mystified sky.

Millenium's End

My machinery is wired to move pretty fast, and all my life people have told me - bless their hearts - to slow down. It always comes from people who move more slowly, never from those who are faster, so once in a while I reply, no, YOU speed up. But then they think I'm rude.

It's fashionable to equate being slow with being spiritual. There's something to that, but popular culture turned it into the Forrest Gump School of Wisdom, where life is never complex and wisdom is rules for the first day of kindergarten.

Fast and slow are relative. For some projects, cycles of a thousand years work best, for others, nanoseconds. Yes, we twitchers often find serenity when we take things down a notch, when we focus on something outside ourselves that induces a state of flow and short-circuits our habitual thinking. But it's also true that we relish those moments when our brains or bodies twitch like the fingers of a teen genius at a game of Quake, lost in light-speed heaven.

THE END OF TIME The Next Revolution in Physics. By Julian Barbour. Illustrated. 371 pp. New York: Oxford University Press. $30.

Warning: extreme complexity ahead. Deep relativity.

Time does not exist. Imagine collections of triangles, cubes and other geometrical shapes. Think of an entire three-dimensional universe as built up of them and all their spatial relationships. Any universe of shapes (a configuration) compares to another, not with respect to relations in time or space (they are not ''in'' time or space), but qualitatively, in terms of their internal, intrinsic properties. (Still with me?)

Circuit City: "Because of rapid changes in technology, the return period for digital cameras, camcorders, PCs and related products (monitors, printers, scanners) is 14 days."

String Theory

2004-11-20T20:02:00.000-08:00

from the Edge:

PHILIP W. ANDERSON Physicist and Nobel laureate, Princeton University Is string theory a futile exercise as physics, as I believe it to be? It is an interesting mathematical specialty and has produced and will produce mathematics useful in other contexts, but it seems no more vital as mathematics than other areas of very abstract or specialized math, and doesn't on that basis justify the incredible amount of effort expended on it. My belief is based on the fact that string theory is the first science in hundreds of years to be pursued in pre-Baconian fashion, without any adequate experimental guidance. It proposes that Nature is the way we would like it to be rather than the way we see it to be; and it is improbable that Nature thinks the same way we do.

Social Software

2004-11-20T20:01:00.000-08:00

Many-2-Many on Corante

Clay Shirky

Ross Mayfield & Socialtext

Seb's Open Research

Are you ready for social software?

The Social Software Weblog and their awesome Social Software Meta-List

This is a nascent category here. The topic is mushrooming. Social software is bigger than social software. 1/2005

Alas, in early 2005, Deloitte drove the wooden stake through the heart of Cappuccino, a favorite, feistry read with the good taste to print things like:

When it comes to knowledge management and learning, "we may be witnessing the death throes of the command and control organization," according to Berkeley, California-based author and researcher Jay Cross. "The pendulum seems to be swinging from an institutional, top-down model to an individual, or bottom-up, model," he said. Learning, according to Cross, can be defined as optimizing the performance of your social network. You want to find information faster and cut out the less useful, or underperforming parts of your network. Social software makes this happen. "Reputation has to factor into it," he added. The eBay model for feedback may be relevant beyond the online auction business.

Models of Collaboration By Timothy Butler and David Coleman

the majorty of collaborative environments to fit into one or more of five primary collaboration models:

* Library * Solicitation * Team * Community * Process Support

A framework for analyzing and designing collaborative systems can be built based on an understanding of the pure models and how they may be combined.

Institute for Social Network Analysis of the Economy

Visit www.livingnetworksbook.com for information about Living Networks, written by Ross Dawson, CEO Advanced Human Technologies.

Weblogs, Inc is creating a new layer on top of traditional business-to-business media that:

1. saves professionals the time associated with reading dozens of trade publications by providing a non-stop, top-level summary of the news; 2. provides analytical tools that give readers the ability to sort and search stories by topics within an industry; 3. gives users the ability to participate by engaging in discussions, ranking stories and by submitting their own “blogs” (i.e., pointers and summaries of stories on other sites); and 4. promotes fairness and truth in reporting by acting as a public forum where industry professionals can participate.

Musings of a Social Architect, a blog by Amy Jo Kim.

Social Network Analysis

in science, from Wired

Psychology

2004-11-20T19:59:00.000-08:00

Psychology

Authentic Happiness, Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment.

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

Personality Factors | Four Stages of Group Development | DeBono's Six Thinking Hats | Transactional Analysis |

THE 16 Cattell PERSONALITY FACTORS

Factor	Descriptors
Warmth	Reserved	Outgoing
Reasoning	Less Intelligent	More Intelligent
Emotional Stability	Affected by feelings	Emotionally stable
Dominance	Humble	Assertive
Liveliness	Sober	Happy-go-lucky
Rule Consciousness	Expedient	Conscientious
Social Boldness	Shy	Venturesome
Sensitivity	Tough-minded	Tender-minded
Vigilance	Trusting	Suspicious
Abstractedness	Practical	Imaginative
Privateness	Straightforward	Shrewd
Apprehension	Self-Assured	Apprehensive
Openness to Change	Conservative	Experimenting
Self-Reliance	Group-dependent	Self-sufficient
Perfectionism	Self-conflict	Self-control
Tension	Relaxed	Tense

Factor	Descriptors
EXTRAVERSION	Introverted, socially inhibited	Extroverted, socially participative
ANXIETY	Low anxiety, unperturbed	Easily worried and generally tense
WILL	Open minded, receptive to ideas	Resolute and determined
INDEPENDENCE	Accommodating and selfless	Independent and persuasive
SELF CONTROL	Free-thinking and impulsive	Structured and inhibited

Bruce Tuckman's FOUR STAGES OF GROUP DEVELOPMENT

Stage 1: Forming

Individual behaviour is driven by a desire to be accepted by the others, and avoid controversy or conflict. Serious issues and feelings are avoided, and people focus on being busy with routines, such as team organisation, who does what, when to meet, etc. But individuals are also gathering information and impressions - about each other, and about the scope of the task and how to approach it. This is a comfortable stage to be in, but the avoidance of conflict and threat means that not much actually gets done.

Stage 2: Storming

Individuals in the group can only remain nice to each other for so long, as important issues start to be addressed. Some people's patience will break early, and minor confrontations will arise that are quickly dealt with or glossed over. These may relate to the work of the group itself, or to roles and responsibilities within the group. Some will observe that it's good to be getting into the real issues, whilst others will wish to remain in the comfort and security of stage 1. Depending on the culture of the organisation and individuals, the conflict will be more or less suppressed, but it'll be there, under the surface. To deal with the conflict, individuals may feel they are winning or losing battles, and will look for structural clarity and rules to prevent the conflict persisting.

Stage 3: Norming

As Stage 2 evolves, the "rules of engagement" for the group become established, and the scope of the group's tasks or responsibilities are clear and agreed. Having had their arguments, they now understand each other better, and can appreciate each other's skills and experience. Individuals listen to each other, appreciate and support each other, and are prepared to change pre-conceived views: they feel they're part of a cohesive, effective group. However, individuals have had to work hard to attain this stage, and may resist any pressure to change - especially from the outside - for fear that the group will break up, or revert to a storm.

Stage 4: Performing

Not all groups reach this stage, characterised by a state of interdependence and flexibility. Everyone knows each other well enough to be able to work together, and trusts each other enough to allow independent activity. Roles and responsibilities change according to need in an almost seamless way. Group identity, loyalty and morale are all high, and everyone is equally task-orientated and people-orientated. This high degree of comfort means that all the energy of the group can be directed towards the task(s) in hand.

Stage 5: Adjourning

This is about completion and disengagement, both from the tasks and the group members. Individuals will be proud of having achieved much and glad to have been part of such an enjoyable group. They need to recognise what they've done, and consciously move on. Some authors describe stage 5 as "Deforming and Mourning", recognising the sense of loss felt by group members.

DeBono's SIX THINKING HATS

WHITE	is neutral and objective, concerned with objective facts and figures
RED	relates to anger and rage, so is concerned with emotions
BLACK	is gloomy, and covers the negative - why things can't be done
YELLOW	is sunny and positive, indicating hope and positive thinking
GREEN	is abundant, fertile growth, indicating creativity and new ideas
BLUE	is the sky above us, so is concerned with the control and organisation of the thinking process

Transactional Analysis

EGO STATES

PARENT	Critical Parent	makes rules and sets limits disciplines, judges and criticises
PARENT	Nurturing Parent	advises and guides protects and nurtures
ADULT		concerned with data and facts considers options and estimates probabilities makes unemotional decisions plans and makes things happen
CHILD	Free (Natural) Child	fun-loving and energetic creative and spontaneous
CHILD	Adapted Child	compliant and polite rebellious and manipulative

LIFE POSITIONS

... the "OK Corral"

I'M NOT OK

YOU'RE OK

"I wish I could do that as well as you do"

I'M OK

YOU'RE OK

"Hey, we're making good progress now"

I'M NOT OK

YOU'RE NOT OK

"Oh this is terrible - we'll never make it"

I'M OK

YOU'RE NOT OK

"You're not doing that right - let me show you"

People move around the grid depending on the situation, but have a preferred position that they tend to revert to. This is strongly influenced by experiences and decisions in early life.

"I'm OK, you're OK" people are in the 'get on with' position. They're confident and happy about life and work, and interact by collaboration and mutual respect, even when they disagree.

I'm OK, you're not OK" people are in the 'get rid of' position. They tend to get angry and hostile, and are smug and superior. They belittle others, who they view as incompetent and untrustworthy, and are often competitive and power-hungry.

I'm not OK, you're OK" is the 'get away from' position. These people feel sad, inadequate or even stupid in comparison to others. They undervalue their skills and contribution and withdraw from problems.

I'm not OK, you're not OK" is the 'get nowhere' position. These people feel confused or aimless. They don't see the point of doing anything, and so usually don't bother.

TRANSACTIONS

The central concept of TA is that Transactions between people can be characterised by the Ego State of the two participants. What's more, the Ego State adopted by the person who starts the transaction will affect the way the other person responds.

For example, Mr A says "what time will they arrive?", and Mr B replies "at 2pm." This is a simple Adult to Adult transaction.

However, if Mr A adopts a Child state: "I'm worried that they might not arrive on time," that will tend to produce a Nurturing Parent response from Mr B: "Don't worry, we'll still have plenty of time to talk to them."

STROKES

We all need and seek care, attention, love and recognition from others, and in TA, a stroke is defined as a unit of recognition. With children, strokes are obviously sought and given: they show off their new toy, or misbehave to get attention, and know the adults will respond right on cue. But grown-ups do the same: working hard, deliberately making mistakes, arriving late, or simply arriving home and sighing "what a day!"

Strokes can be positive or negative, and it's generally better to give a negative stroke than none at all (because that may be taken as negative anyway). But in many business organisations, strokes are subject to a set of unwritten rules:

don't give positive strokes freely;
if you give positive strokes, make them conditional;
don't ask for positive strokes - certainly not directly;
most positive strokes are insincere ('plastic');
never give a physical stroke - by touching someone;
don't miss a chance to give a negative stroke.

The result is a cold, unfeeling environment where normal human emotions are generally suppressed. Even in 'warm' organisations where it's OK to express feelings, strokes are still subject to certain norms - such as not giving them to people above you in the hierarchy.

In the absence of a free exchange of strokes, people manipulate others in order to get the strokes they crave, and start playing games.

GAMES

The complexity of the TA model leaves it open to manipulation, or "Games". You adopt a Child state because you want someone's help, or a Parent state to make them do something for you. But often the games end up damaging the relationship, and the type of game someone plays is influenced by his or her life state.

Examples of games players are:

The Persecutor: "if it weren't for you", "see what you made me do", "yes, but".

The Rescuer: "I'm only trying to help", "what would you do without me?"

The Victim: "this always happens to me", "poor old me", "go on, kick me".

Left and Right

These notes go way back and some are dated. My main champion of the left/right brain thesis (below) has since recanted (see Robert Orstein, The Right Mind.)

left brain (right side of body)	right brain (left side of body)
plan produce	manage invent
speech/verbal logical, mathematical linear, detailed sequential controlled intellectual dominant worldly active analytic reading, writing, naming sequential ordering perception of signicant order complex motor sequences	spatial/musical holistic artistic, symbolic simultaneous emotional intuitive, creative minor spiritual receptive synthetic, Gestalt facial recognition simultaneous comprehension perception of abstract patterns recognition of complex figures

The User Illusion

In mid-1999, The User Illusion convinced me that conscious vs. unconscious is a more important split than left vs. right brain. "Inside us, in the person who carries consciousness around, cognitive and mental processes take place that are far richer than consciousness can know or describe. Our bodies contain a fellowship with a surrounding world that passes right through us, in through our mouths and out the other end, but is hidden from our consciousness." The nonconscious is largely in control but the conscious thinks it's in control. An amazing book. It will take me a while to propogate its concepts into the Jayhoo Way.

Don't worry. Be happy.

Relativity theory is deterministic, meaning that when given a specific set of conditions, precise outcomes are predictable. Quantum physics, on the other hand, is probabilistic, meaning that when observing a specific set of conditions, change enters into the picture, and predictions can be made only of probable outcomes. Current thinking is that both types of processing, programmed and learned, go on in the brain and similar compatibilities will occur in the marketplace (with today's and neural network computers.)

From a review of In Pursuit of Happiness: "the invisible foot," says Milton Friedman. "That's the law of unintended consequences."

Life is about happiness -- which people (when pressed) generally concur isn't a new BMW or an orgasm, but rather lasting and justified satisfaction with one's life as a whole. Happiness includes the self-respect that comes from accepting responsibility for one's life and earning one's way in the world. It flows from realizing your innate capacities by doing productive work and overcoming ever more challenging obstacles, impelled more by your own inner imperatives than by the mere need to make a living.

See Finding Flow

You might also look at my thoughts on taking your own advice

From Healthy Pleasures, by Ornstein and Sobel...

Happiness changes little even after delightful or devastating life changes.

Man's plight... Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy; happiness is the longing for repetition.

Happiness springs from how much of the time a person spends feeling good, not from the momentary peaks of ecstasy. Simple pleasures are more allied with happiness than are strong, momentary feelings.

When we are in a given mood, such as sadness, anger, or joy, we are more likely to recall other times when we were in a similar mood. This is probably why seemingly minor uplifts such as receiving flowers can "make your day." The mind tends to overgeneralize... Small changes in our current contents of mind have great future consequences.

Make it a weekly goal to think about positive current events and daily experiences as much as possible. Focus on what you have, not on what you lack. The good feelings are likely to spill over into a healthy, optimistic view of your future.

Expecting to be pleased, healthy people cultivate a set of positive illusions. They inflate their own importance and have an exaggerated belief in their ability to control their destiny. They believe that other people hold them in high regard. Human beings never directly perceive the outside world; most judgments are comparative.

When bad things happen, as they will, pessimists explain the causes in stable, global, internal terms.

We often bet our lives on the stories we tell ourselves about the world, but rarely hear them while they are being told. Try to listen carefully to your continuous internal monologue. If we know that our story of the world controls our life, we can choose to rewrite the unpleasant elements.

There is a direct link between good health and knowing what is going on around us, understanding how economic and social forces operate to affect one's life and in general understanding how things work.

Some people have censored so much of themselves for so long that they forget what it is they do feel and think.

from Multimind by Robert Ornstein

"Our illusion is that each of us is somehow unified, with a single coherent purpose and action. That we are consistent and single-minded is a built-in delusion." We do not hear or observe ourselves the way we experience others.

"I know my own mind." But we don't know it very well.

Some conflicts are nobody's fault -- not caused by the badness or madness of one person; it's between the people. linear cause and effect do not apply here. (generally, if something good comes from a relationship, i figure the contribution is mine; if it doesn't work, that's your fault. it's never my fault, i'm merely reacting.) actually, the problems are the product of the relationship. it's just as you can't reduce the properties of water to the properties of either hydrogen or of oxygen.

Ornstein and Erlich: Human culture shaped over a million years; man a sight animal. Focus is on the short-term, visual (mastodon coming); we miss the gradual, invisible (greenhouse effect).

Ernest Poser of McGill University in Montreal found in treating schizophrenic patients that randomly selected undergraduates produced more positive change than did psychiatrists and psychiatric social workers.

Robert Ornstein, The Mind Field

from Do What You Live, the Money will Follow

The more we see ourselves as courageous, even in the tiniest choices, the more self-respect we gain and the more distinctive we become. In addition, acting out our authentic desires and values quickly erases a history of holding back and self-abandonment.

from a talk by Robert Ornstein:

Humans were designed to operate in a world of 20,000 years ago.

We're good at dealing with change (e.g. crack), not constancy (e.g. cigarettes). Cigarettes are six times as addictive as crack!

Consciousness is a weak force in many people's mind. There are many selves inside.

Half the people ever born in the history of the earth were born in my lifetime.

Response after failure shows conquest of embarrassment and confidence in the future; it is a mark of dignity and basic health. Moreover, the analysis of failure is an indispensable activity which demands leisure and time.

Successful people generally have more errors to their credit, and often bigger ones, than unsuccessful people. They view these in the same way that scientists view failed experiments: not as moral setbacks but as the necessary concomitants of discovery.

...one of the most difficult problems we face in life: that of distinguishing between the temporary and the lasting things; between the truly urgent issues and the clamor of trifles.

from a later talk by Robert Ornstein on his newly released The Evolution of Consciousness:

The mind is a squadron of simpletons.

Rationality is only one small facet of mind. It's impossible anyway. (A comprehensive truth table will take a lifetime to figure out anything.)

The primary ability of mind is to adapt to the world. The finishing touches of mind development took place before the cave paintings at Lascaux.

Our self image of rationality leads us down the wrong path. "Cultural literacy" doesn't help anyone adapt or stay safe in the world.

Experiment: People asked to contribute to a good cause; 20% give. People get same pitch + "even a penny would help," 60% give. Explanation: one of the simpletons let the guard down. * * * Similarly, Jim Jones requested that folks "Help the poor for just five minutes." He said that once you got 'em, you can get 'em to do just about anything. Foot in the door. * * * Same situation if people asked whether folks can put up a 6' x 8' Drive Safely sign in their front yard (60% yes), IF they've first put up a 3" x 5" card in their window promoting the beauty of California!

We don't see trends. 540 people die of handgun murders every week in this country and no one cares. 10,000 die every week from smoking tobacco.

We're only 100 generations from the birth of Christ; no time at all in biological time.

There are 450 billion tons of humans on earth. (Something's off here: we'd each weigh 90 tones.... Maybe he's counting our dwellings and factories.)

More people are added to the population every month than existed worldwide at the time of Christ. We need ever-evolving systems of education to cope with these changes.

Self-consciousness is one of the simpletons. It creates resumes: "I did this, I did that...."

(At this point, I read The Evolution of Consciousness. My notes follow.)

SOB - Same Old Brain

Earliest mental routines were developed for quick action and survival.

The idea most people have that they are consistent is an illusion. The self is just one of the simpletons--one with a small job.

Our real history is "written" in our bones, our blood, our neural systems00and was written before we were writers. Physical evolution has had millions of generations to work and we are a mere 100 generations since the time of Christ.

Mind is on-line, responds to changes. Unexpected or extraordinary events have fast access to consciousness.

People misjudge others greatly because they interpret temperamental differences--speed of action, cleanliness, messiness, as reflections of the conscious mind. But we have little or no control over these things.

The world we experience is all a dream of the mind.

Memories go through a lossy compression algorithm. We uncrunch memories from fragments much as the anthropologist reconstructs the whole skeleton from a few bone fragments.

The mind ignores large changes because our ancestors could do little about them. A terrible approach in a crowded environment or a long-term relationship.

You have to learn to observe yourself as though you were another person. This way, you don't keep explaining why you did something, as we usually do. You develop a detachment and start to think of your selves as him and her.

At the time of the agrarian revolution the total human population was less than 10 million. Today, almost that many people are born each month. (About 10,000 years back)

We're 2000 generations form Neanderthal, 750 from Lascaux.

from Ornstein's The Roots of the Self

Three main roots:

Gain -- high or low amplification -- brain stem function.
Deliberation/liberation --how we organize thoughts and actions -- frontal lobes.
Approach/withdrawal --positive/negative and sunny/sour -- right or left lobe

The high gain person is internally aroused; there's enough going on inside. Thus better at tasks that require attention. Not into parties, sex, danger.

We each have a set point on these dimensions.

"Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them...." Gabriel Garcia Marquez

We grow through reduction. We are continually pruning our neural connections. Danny Hillis on consciousness from Wired, January 1994

We'll end up with intelligent beings and not be able to tell any more about how they think than we can tell about how we think. And I think that once the bishop has had a long conversation with them, it will be a very natural step to extend moral law to them.

Consciousness is just a stupid hack. We have a lot of specialized hardware to code and decode grunts--conversation. Presumably you've had this experience of somebody explaining something to you and you misunderstand them, but your misunderstanding is actually much better than what they were trying to explain to you! That's taking advantage of your understanding hardware. Well, ti turns out, since you've got all this hardware sitting around, you use the following stupid hack: Whenever you're thinking, you play the idea out on yourself and you explain it to yourself in hopes that you misunderstand it. You compress it into sort of this encoded representation, and that compressed representation is consciousness. In fact, if you disconnected it, you would only get slightly stupider. But not so as anybody would notice.

Ornstein, The Right Mind

Alexithymia is Greek for "no word for emotions." This is a mental disorder in which a person has extreme difficulty in verbally expressing feelings and fantasies. Alexithymia is thought to contribute to psychosomatic illness, alcoholism and drug addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder, and sociopathic personality. And this difficulty is present to a great or lesser degree in many people who are healthy as well as ill. I think that most women consider it a pretty normal male condition…

Facts are stored and processed in the left hemisphere but the right mind sets the context and makes sense of it all.

Leader traits from Warren Bennis

vision, integrity,
willingness to accept risk
people who are able to express themselves fully
know who they are, what their s&w are
know how to fully deploy their strengths & compensate for their weaknesses
know what they want, why they want it, how to communicate what they want
know how to achieve their goals

Leaders operate on instinct, leader strike hard and try everything, leaders are ready to put themselves at some risk, and leaders use chaos to make changes.

Learned Optimism by Martin E. P. Seligman

The defining characteristic of pessimists is that they tend to believe bad events will last a long time, will undermine everything they do, and are their own fault.

Learned helplessness is the giving up reaction, the quitting response that follows from the belief that whatever you do doesn't matter. Explanatory style is the manner in which you habitually explain to yourself why events happen.

Inescapable events produced giving up. Clearly, animals can learn their actions are futile, and when they do, they no longer initiate action....

People who give up easily believe the causes of the bad events that happen to them are permanent: The bad events will persist, will always be there to affect their lives. People who make universal explanations for their failures give up on everything when a failure strikes in one area.

Depression is pessimism writ large. Normal depression is extremely common . .it's the common cold of mental illness. (The belief that your actions are futile is the cause of depression.)

Pessimists' explanations for bad events are personal, permanent, and pervasive.

The belief in self .improvement is a prophecy just as self-fulfilling as the old belief that character could not be changed.

A = Adversity B = Belief C = Consequence D = Disputation . .argue with yourself (Evidence? Alternatives?) E = Energizer

Decatastrophize.

Use optimism/pessimism scale in choosing sales people.

High IQ Clubs

Mensa 1 in 50 132 IQ

Intertel 1 in 100 137 IQ

International Society for Philosophical Enquiry 1 in 1,000 150 IQ

Triple Nine Society 1 in 1,000 150 IQ

Prometheus Society 1 in 10,000 160 IQ

Four Sigma 1 in 30,000 164 IQ

Titan Society 1 in 100,000 168 IQ

Mega Society 1 in 1,000,000 177 IQ

Notes from Zimbardo's Shyness

"Reticence" is the term that best describes a shy person's reluctance to relate to others. Reticence is an unwillingness to speak unless prodded, a disposition to remain silent, an inclination not to speak freely.

While publicly the shy person seems to be going nowhere quietly, inside is a maze of thought highways cluttered with head-on collisions of sensations and noisy traffic jams of frustrated desires. The same tendency toward self-analysis and appraisal of one's thoughts and feelings signals psychological disturbance when in becomes obsessive. Shy people often carry it that far.

Too much nervous energy is expended in anticipation of an event and wasted on minor details of its execution (like me planning out phone calls in elaborate detail).

Military brats are often shy as a result of having moved around a lot.

Being able to step out of yourself and into a role, a character behind a mask of anonymity enables a basically shy person to perform in person (Carol Burnett).

If you are tired of being shy, no longer want to survive on a diet of social leftovers, or feel unhappy seeing people you care about too shy to enjoy the opportunities life is offering, the time has come to change all that.

the way you think about yourself and about shyness
the way you behave
relevant aspects of the way other people think and act
certain social values that promote shyness

At the core of shyness is an excessive preoccupation with the self, an overconcern with being negatively evaluated. Shyness and low self-esteem go together.

You must come to recognize the extent to which you are living out other people's scripts. You cannot have a well developed sense of self if you are acting out programs written by or for others.

If you have but one life to live, live it with high self-esteem!

Decide what you value, what you believe in, what you realistically would like your life to be like. Take inventory of your library of stored scripts and bring them up to date, in line with the psychological space you are in now, so they will serve your where you are headed.

Look for the causes of your behavior in physical, social, economic, and political aspects of your current situation and not in personality defects in you.

Remind yourself that there are alternative views to every event.

Never say bad things about yourself.

Instead of thinking and saying, "I am a shy person," start thinking and talking about yourself in more specific terms; describe specific situations and specific reactions.

Anxiety, boredom and passivity generate more fatigue than does the heaviest of labors. "Good to see you around." A nod of recognition, a smile, a wave of the hand, a look in the eye. that little action starts your new career as an actor.

Like a method actor, you must learn to dissolve the boundary between the so-called real you and the role you play. Let your actions speak for themselves and eventually they will be speaking for you.

Role playing is a vital ingredient in the development of social skills. It involves taking action and experiencing how it feels to take those actions. by suspending the "self" for the "rote," you are granted permission to engage in behaviors that are normally off-limits. Your overbearing, all-monitoring consciousness is not allowed into the show. Enacting a role different from that which is usually for the person results in corresponding private changes in attitudes and values.

Emotional Intelligence

The emotional mind is associative. It confuses reality and symbols of reality. Perception is reality. It indiscriminately connects things that merely have striking features. The emotional mind reacts to the present as though it were the past.

The rational mind makes logical connections between causes and effects.

Because it takes the rational mind a moment or two longer to register and respond than it does the emotional mind, the first impulse in an emotional situation is the heart’s, not the head’s. There is also a second kind of emotional reaction, slower than the quick response, which simmers and brews first in our thoughts before it leads to feeling. This second pathway to triggering emotions is more deliberate, and we are typically quite aware of the thoughts that lead to it. In this kind of emotional reaction there is a more extended appraisal; our thoughts—cognition—play the key role in determining what emotions will be roused. Once we make an appraisal—"that taxi driver is cheating me" or "this baby is adorable." A fitting emotional response follows. In this slower sequence, more fully articulated thought precedes feeling. More complicated emotions, like embarrassment or apprehension over an upcoming exam, follow this slower route, taking seconds or minutes to unfold—these are emotions that follow from thoughts.

The results reported in emotional intelligence seem too good to be true. Children in Oakland were found more responsible, assertive, popular, helpful, understanding, considerate, harmonious, and democratic. Kids in Washington had better social cognitive skills, self-con troll, effectiveness resolving conflicts, tolerating frustration, working with peers, sharing, socializing, etc. kids in new york city were less violent, more caring, more cooperative, more empathic, and better communicators.

RELATIONSHIPS Getting Together

-- a framework for improving relationships...

The goal is a relationship that can deal well with differences. (For some, the goal of a relationship is a make-believe world without any differences.) To achieve our substantive goals, we need effective working relationships, relationships that have a high degree of rationality, understanding, communication, reliability, non-coercive means of influence, and acceptance.

Be unconditionally constructive. Follow guidelines that will be both good for the relationship and good for me, whether or not you follow the same guidelines. Beware of partisan perceptions; don't forget how differently people see things. ("Where you stand depends on where you sit." We remember information so that it fits a coherent story.)

Accept responsibility and apologize. We often fail to take responsibility for our feelings because we blame them on the other person in a relationship. Emotions likely to have a constructive impact: security, optimism, confidence, acceptance, respect, concern.

One way to instill a constructive emotional state in ourselves is to recall a time, place, and circumstances when our morale was high -- and then mentally step back into that situation....

In some cases, our understanding of a situation creates a problem in our heads that is not there in reality.

Ongoing relationships often need a fresh look.

HOW GOOD IS OUR RELATIONSHIP? A Checklist

GOAL Am I trying to win the relationship or improve it? How well do we resolve differences? How often do I think about improving the process of working together over the long term?

GENERAL STRATEGY Do serious substantive issues disrupt our ability to work together? Do I tend to retaliate by doing things that weaken our ability to deal with each other in the future? Do I ignore problems or sweep them under the rug rather than deal with them?

pp. 178-79 for more

CONGRUENCE

Don't just think about them -- care; they matter.
Understand their views before judging them.
Speak with them, not about them.
Deal with them to reduce the risks.
Respect their right to differ. Take them seriously.
Use emotion to persuade, not to coerce.
Understand them in order to persuade them more easily.
Acknowledge good points. Speak for ourselves; don't put words into their mouths.
Avoid overstatement and deception.
Don't let emotions make us unpredictable.
Assess the actual risks of trusting them.
Be honest; disclose areas we are not discussing.
Acknowledge feelings. Be aware of others.
Consult. Inquire. Listen actively.
Understand empathetically.

* * * *As mediator, get each side to present the other side's point of view until the other side agrees they've got it right.* * * *

Great place to work is defined by relationships: trust of those worked for, enjoyment of those worked with, and pride in the job done.

FUNDAMENTAL HUMAN DESIRES AND VALUES

Curiosity: desire to learn
Food: desire to eat
Honor (morality): desire to behave in accordance with code of conduct
Rejection: fear of social rejection
Sex: desire for sexual behavior and fantasies
Physical exercise: desire for physical activity
Order: desired amount of organization in daily life
Independence: desire to make own decisions
Vengeance: desire to retaliate when offended
Social Contact: desire to be in the company of others
Family: desire to spend time with own familySocial
Prestige: desire for prestige and positive attention
Aversive Sensations: aversion to pain and anxiety
Citizenship: desire for public service and social justice
Power: desire to influence people

http://www.newswise.com/articles/GOALS.OSU.html

MBTI

At least 12 of the 15 fundamental desires seem to have a genetic basis, Reiss said. Only the desires for citizenship, independence and fear of rejection don't appear to have a genetic component. "Most of these desires are similar to those seen in animals, and seem to have some survival value," Reiss said. "This indicates they are genetic in origin." Myers-Briggs Types I'm an INTJ; Uta is an ESFP.

Source of Energy

E Extrovert 75% of the populationenergized by people, need lots of contactshoot from the hip, spontaneouswants to change the worldgeneralists, lots of interest, lots of balls in the air, superficialedits on the fly

I Introvert 25% of the populationenergized by thoughts, need time to reflectthink twice before they talk oncegreat actorswants to understand the worldspecialists, depth, focusedneed time to preparethe "internal messenger"...wannabe correct

according to the Chronicle's Grab Bag on 4/27/91, time passes quicker for the introvert

How Things are Found Out

S Sensing 75% of the populationexperience things from the senses, practical, need lots of datanow people, grounded in reality, focus on the actualfacts, just the factsinductive/Edison

N Intuition 25% of the populationintution, inspiration, innovation, want little datadeductive/Einsteinfuture-oriented, speculative, hunchesideas, not factsimagination

The Deciding Process

T Thinking 50% of the populationlogical, objective decision-making, impersonalprinciples: laws, policy, justice, standardsdoesn't show feelingsfocus on task

F Feeling(s) 50%subjective decision-makerlikes harmonyvalues: social values, extenuating cirucmstances, devotionfocus on relationshipshows emotion easily, warm

How We Structure Our World

J Judging 50% of the populationsettled, seeks closure, decisivefixed, quick to judge, get show on the roadwork ethic, outcome-orientedplanner

P Perceiving 50%pending, keep options open, tentativeflexible, plenty of time, gray areasplay ethic, less seriouslet it happen

Exercises to Develop Extraverted Preference Skills

become actively involved in a grouptalk out an idea with someone as it's being formulatedintroduce self to strangersshare a private thought with a non-friendshare process as it is happening--feelings, thoughts, desires, fantasies

INTJ's order of preference is intuition, thinking, feeling, sensing. In other words, feeling and sensation are de-emphasized.

Common pitfalls are appearing so unyielding that others are afraid to approach or challenge me. Criticizing others in their striving for the ideal. Ignoring the impact of my ideas or style on others.

To develop, I need to solicit feedback and suggestions, learn how to appreciate others, learn to give up impractical ideas, focus more on the impact of my ideas on people.

Topic 95: Re .design the sdc conference?# 57: Tue, Sep 8, '92 (19:17)

Introverts and Extroverts...

Introverts essentially feel their internal worlds (and the internal worlds of others) are relatively static, and the external world needs to be "adjusted" in order to compensate for discrepancies between their internal state and the outer world. That is to say, an introvert feels that changing the outer world is easier than changing their inner world. This compensation can often occur simply via withdrawal, which is why the introvert is commonly thought to be inward .directed, though this is somewhat misleading, as my wife noted later. Extroverts, on the other hand, view the external world as relatively static, and their internal worlds (and that of others) as essentially dynamic. In the face of external pressure their first assumption is to either adjust themselves, or attempt to convince others to adjust themselves (usually via dialogue or debate of some kind).

To my mind, introverts and extroverts can have successful interactions when and if both types respect the other's dynamics. Introverts often find extroverts to be insensitive and painful to interact with; this is because the extrovert is often asking the introvert to change themselves, something seen often as almost a physical threat to an introvert, and they perceive the extrovert's request for change as a fundamental lack of respect. Extroverts, on the other hand, find introverts to often be stubborn and "selfish"; an extrovert may feel that the introverts' attempts to control their external environment as insensitive in itself. However, both perceptions are simply misunderstandings. The introvert is not being selfish, but simply reacting to what seems to be a direct threat to their personal integrity and self .image; the extrovert is not being insensitive, but simply asking the introvert to do what seems to them to be quite reasonable (something they are able to do themselves quite easily).

introverts prefer to interact with people who either already share their views, or with other introverts who will respect the sanctity of their internal worlds and not "invade" them (or "violate" them) with invasive ideas or presentations.

Introverts have a hard time accepting the behavior of extroverts as anything but invasive and rude; extroverts have a hard time accepting introverted behavior as anything but selfish and stubborn. Both concepts have to be thrown out the window before real progress can be made. Extroverts have to cool it, introverts can try to ignore the more annoying aspects of extroverted behavior.

reading david keirsey's please understand me II, I'm glad to see him both build on and distance himself from isabelle myers and her jungian theory trip.

· the starting point for keirsey (as for myers, earlier) is delightfully humanist. we are indeed different from one another. and there's nothing wrong with that. but of course. what carter saw as weaknesses were probably my strong points. more important for me to find a fertile and appreciative environment than to try "shape up" to someone else's standards. · keirsey starts with historical roots (aristotle, plato…frank baum, pygmalion, eric fromm, etc) and goes on to identify two defining human fundamentals: how we deal with words and how we deal with tools---

		words/thoughts
		ABSTRACT	CONCRETE
tools	CONFORMIST/ COOPERATIVE	NF idealists	SJ guardians
tools	PRACTICAL/ UTILITARIAN	NT rationals	SP artisans

tools

· taking keirsey's measurement device, I come up more solidly INTJ than ever before:

I 70% N 85% T 80% J 65%. · the two-by-two matrix is sufficiently simple to use in offering different paths through instruction for learners. the same approach might offer tailored EPSS.

Professionalism

"Thinking like a professional means sticking to the basics. The basics are founded on common sense, and they include: being on time, never missing a deadline, speaking when spoken to, shutting up when not spoken to, being honest about expenses and other funds, giving your time and entry to the job without reservation while you are on the job, showing consideration for your colleagues, seeking solutions, not perpetual conflict--and last but not least, being willing to go out on a limb and push for an idea you truly believe in.

--Asa Barber

Shared Understanding "Genuine knowledge resides and proliferates where people live and work, not in some abstract formal realm. Good tools should support and augment that knowledge as it is rather than attempting to 'engineer' it to fit some model-theoretic framework entirely divorced from the work itself. We desperately need more and better software tools whose design reflects this fundamental insight, and that will therefore aid our best people in articulating, modifying and improving their understanding of the work environments they inhabit. Most crucially, we need tools that will substantially assist knowledge workers -- and today this category should include nearly all workers -- in sharing their understanding across the currently rigid boundaries of functional specialization."

Christopher Locke and John West, "Concurrent Engineering in Context," Concurrent Engineering, November-December, 1991.

Teaming and Learning

"Business is finally recognizing that division of labor is increasingly ineffective as the basis for an organization in an environment of constant rather than occasional change.... Management control is replaced by management coordination of the work of others who may know more than the manager, and decision making occurs in the team rather than in the hierarchy."

Peter G.W. Keen, Shaping the Future: Business Design Through Information Technology, Harvard Business School Press, 1991.

"The growing emphasis on high-technology production means greater demands on the competence of each individual employee. And so the element of comprehensive, life long learning for all members of the enterprise will probably turn out to be the most characteristic feature of work in the 21st century."

Robert B. McKersie and Richard E. Walton, "Organizational Change," in The Corporation of the 1990s, Oxford University Press, 1991.

Cognitive psychology--which treats people as information-processing creatures--was not a field until recently.

Personality -- from a site at the Annenberg School

"Know thyself," advised an inscription on the ancient Temple of Apollo at Delphi. But what is it that you know when you know yourself? How do you gain this knowledge, and what should you do with it? Such questions are at the core of personality psychology, which explores both self-knowledge and knowledge of others.

Some personality psychologists compare everyday life to a play in which we put on different faces or play different roles for different audiences. In fact, the word personality comes from the Latin root persona, meaning "mask." The impression we make on others-or the mask we present to the world-determines how people feel about us.

Our everyday "performances" have a profound effect on our lives, so it pays to understand how others see us. But are the acts we put on for others an indication of who we really are? Do our outward behaviors reflect our true personality? A complete picture of personality includes a look at thoughts and feelings, the unconscious, genetics, and society.

When our own opinion of ourselves is at odds with what other people think, we tend to assume that no one knows us better than we know ourselves--I must be right, and they must be wrong. This egocentric position makes little sense, especially when a large number of people all agree about what kind of a person you are. Perceptions from one observer are inherently less reliable than the consensus from ten observers, even when you are the one observer.

Metrics

2004-11-20T19:58:00.000-08:00

The shortest presentation on metrics you will ever hear, a twelve-minute overview of where I'm coming from on metrics and measurements. Macromedia Breeze.

First presented at Queens School of Business, Kingston, Ontario, in May 2004.

"It is time, once and for all, to drive a stake through the heart of traditional accounting, which is draining the life from business." Tom Stewart, The Wealth of Knowledge

The title of my next presentation was Decision-Making Memes: Putting a Value on Learning. I explained that while I've been in the training business for nearly 30 years, before that I was a mainframe salesman, Army officer, and Harvard MBA student. I'm a business guy. I understand how business people make decisions. ROI doesn't have a heck of a lot to do with it. I'm not going to recount the story here. Later I'll put it on the web in narrated form. For now, as promised, here's the slide deck I used in my presentation. For more on this topic, visit the Metrics Page in the KnowledgeBase here.

Four years ago I attended a how-to-ROI presentation at a major eLearning event and found it so misleading that I began writing about how companies really evaluate project potential and after-the-fact results.

Recently I've noticed ROI Workshops popping up. Spend a couple of days and the better part of a thousand dollars. Get a certificate. Such a deal. Unfortunately, neither the workshops nor the conference presentations cover the things I deem important:

Metrics are in the eye of the beholder. They are not simply the application of a rote formula or accounting rule. They are subject to interpretation. This is what makes them worthy of discussion.
The internal customer for metrics is your sponsor, also known as the person who pays the bills. When you talk with an executive, you need to talk about execution, not training.
The only valid metrics for corporate learning are business metrics. To converse in business terms, it helps to be fluent with the concepts of trade-offs, risk assessment, expected value, focusing on core, changing perspective, the 80/20 rule, and the bottom line.
Business goals. Strategic initiatives. Quarterly objectives. New product introductions. Figure out what matters in your organization. Then show the connection between what you do and what matters. It will make you an insider instead of an outcast.
Kirkpatrick's four levels are a history lesson, not a guide to action. Imagine telling your sales manager that the sales force was well prepared ("Levels 1 & 2") but simply hadn't sold anything ("Levels 3 & 4"). Good luck in your next job.
Most of a company's value resides in the know-how and relationships of its people. Traditional accounting assigns these intangibles a value of zero. Hence, traditional ROI has little credibility with enlightened executives.

Rather than update my various white papers and articles, I have consolidated my thoughts into a single one hundred-page eBook called Metrics. Check it out.

Read Carl Binder's review of Metrics in Performance Improvement.

Metrics 1.0 was a screed against traditional ROI and conceptual argument in favor of a broader approach. I think my readers want something more concrete. In my spare time, I'm looking into Balanced Scorecards, capital-flow assessments, managerial economics, and methods for evaluating intangibles.

My anger at seeing time wasted looking at the wrong end of ROI equations (i.e. cutting costs as opposed to taking advantage of opportunity) that I've been writing about this topic for a while. Some of the favorites:

Balanced Scorecard Collaborative - Strategy, not numbers.

Power Shift

eLearning infrastructure decisions are climbing up the corporate ladder. A few years ago, eLearning was pigeonholed as a cheaper, faster way to train employees. By default, eLearning decisions fell to the director of training or HR.

Now, functional managers are using eLearning to meet business objectives. Managers look beyond employees to customers, suppliers, and distribution channels -- everyone benefits from seeding eLearning throughout the value chain. This is where we are now, with eLearning decisions seesawing back and forth between can-do functional managers anxious to get on with it, and CIOs/CLOs who want to go the next step to enterprise solutions. Still rare but perhaps the next step in this evolution is the CEO who looks at eLearning as a competitive weapon, the way to create a nimble organization, improve customer service, move quickly, and stay ahead of the pack.

Knowledge Advisors 2005 Learning Analytics Symposium: Microsoft, DAU, Nextel, Bersin

ROI

January 10, 2003. Those of you who've read my thoughts on ROI know that I believe cost/benefit analysis is manditory and most ROI calculations are utterly worthless. Thus, I was delighted to come upon Enough Already! Getting Off the ROI Bandwagon by Kevin Kruse (mistakenly identified as Kevin Kenexa) in the current issue of Chief Learning Officer magazine.

Kevin writes that:

First came the articles, then the books, and now I see that an entire conference is devoted to the ROI of training. Obviously we're seeing a backlash against the orgy of IT spending of the late 1990s, and against e-learning initiatives that fell short of expectations. Personally, I think it's all hype, and I've had enough.

First, many senior executives don't care about ROI. In Jack Welch's book, "Straight From the Gut," he tells of his decision to invest millions in GE's new Crotonville training facility, even while undertaking massive layoffs. He didn't have an ROI spreadsheet to tell him training was a good investment; he just knew that investing in talent was critical to GE's future.

Second, ROI is an imperfect science that often involves making educated guesses at potential savings and gains. Senior executives know this, and they also know that there are many variables that can't be captured by a formula.

Third, ROI guesstimates are often a cop-out for tougher measurements of results. How about measuring employee engagement scores before and after management training, or doing pilot studies of sales training programs that measure closing ratios and time-to-close?

Systems Changes

Traditional ROI has suckered corporations into evaluating learning initiatives on a project-by-project basis, and this has lead to supporting each new approach as if it existed in isolation. The Meta-Learning Lab is developing ways to improve the overall learning process.

Take the old cliché of "Give a man to fish and he won't be hungry today. Teach a man to fish and he will never be hungry again." (Excuse the sexism; this dates back several thousand years.) The Meta-Learning Lab's goal is to teach fishermen how to improve their catch.

Chuck Fred and I are both obsessed with time. Chuck's a former competitive runner and the "breakaway" of his book's title is that point when the winners pull ahead of the also-rans. It worked for Jesse Owens and it works for Wal*Mart. The name of this site is a reflection of my view of time. Time has become the prime business metric. How soon can our team reach proficiency? How can we get there faster? How can we stay ahead of the game? How can we speed things up? How soon will we be ready to execute?

The genesis of Chuck's book, Breakaway, was interviews with 300 CEOs. He promised them absolute confidentiality in return for their candor. He maintains these relationships to this day.

Late last year, Chuck asked the CEOs about their levels of confidence in the ROI presentations made in suport of training expenditures. Specifically, he asked about purchases of off-the-shelf courseware, training technology & infrastructure, and training-related advisory services.

Nine out of ten CEOs said they had no confidence in the ROI of training as presented to them. You can reach Chuck at Breakaway Group.

Scientific rigor: The Baloney Detection Kit

How to draw boundaries between science and pseudoscience, or between useful metrics and pure hype. From Scientific American

1. How reliable is the source of the claim? 2. Does this source often make similar claims? 3. Have the claims been verified by another source? 4. How does the claim fit with what we know about how the world works? 5. Has anyone gone out of the way to disprove the claim, or has only supportive evidence been sought?

6. Does the preponderance of evidence point to the claimant's conclusion or to a different one? 7. Is the claimant employing the accepted rules of reason and tools of research, or have these been abandoned in favor of others that lead to the desired conclusion? 8. Is the claimant providing an explanation for the observed phenomena or merely denying the existing explanation? 9. If the claimant proffers a new explanation, does it account for as many phenomena as the old explanation did? 10. Do the claimant's personal beliefs and biases drive the conclusions, or vice versa? "Clearly, there are no foolproof methods of detecting baloney or drawing the boundary between science and pseudoscience. Yet there is a solution: science deals in fuzzy fractions of certainties and uncertainties, where evolution and big bang cosmology may be assigned a 0.9 probability of being true, and creationism and UFOs a 0.1 probability of being true. In between are borderland claims: we might assign superstring theory a 0.7 and cryonics a 0.2. In all cases, we remain open-minded and flexible, willing to reconsider our assessments as new evidence arises. This is, undeniably, what makes science so fleeting and frustrating to many people; it is, at the same time, what makes science the most glorious product of the human mind."

Corporate Learning Strategies by Dan Tobin. "If you start and end all of your learning efforts by focusing on your organization's goals, you will never be asked to do an ROI analysis to justify your budget."

There's no cookbook approach to measuring the ROI of training. Fred Nichols is so right about this. Because the definition and perception of value varies from person to person, so do the purposes of evaluation. Moreover, the various audiences for evaluation frequently act as their own evaluators. If you look carefully about you, or if you reflect upon your own experiences as a "trainee," you will quickly discover that training is being evaluated every day, but by trainees, managers, and executives -- and in accordance with their criteria and purposes.

Payback

Technology-enabled learning creates value by speeding things up. Business-school professors compare making big corporate changes to turning around the Queen Mary. Turn the rudder and in a few miles, the ship changes course. These days, organizations that lack the agility to turn on a dime can only go about as far as the Queen Mary (which is moored in cement alongside a pier in Long Beach, California.)

A Fortune 50 company used eLearning, knowledge management, and collaboration to bring new-hire sales people up to speed in six months instead of fifteen. Nine months x 1400 new hires/year x $5 million quota = $5 billion incremental revenue. To be sure, better products, sales campaigns, and a host of factors contributed to the gain but a tiny faction of $5 billion still yields a significant ROI. (Here are the details: New-hire training at Sun Microsystems.)

Ten thousand consultants at a Fortune 100 technical services company earned professional certifications via eLearning. The result? Less attrition, better esprit de corps, and $100 million revenue/year attributable to higher billing rates.

A software firm launches a new system into a $250 million global market with eLearning and virtual meetings. This accelerates time-to-market by two months, gives them first-mover advantage over a major competitor, builds a more confident and enthusiastic sales force, and gets the channel up to speed at the same time as the direct sales force. Gain? $80 to $100 million incremental revenue.

A very large retailer of personal computers realizes that customers are frustrated with their products because they don?t understand the software that accompanies them. The company offers customers free admission to an online learning community created by SmartForce. More than 100,000 customers sign up to learn Windows, Word, and Office apps online. Value of increased customer loyalty? Conservatively, $20 million in repeat business over three years.

Often an e-Learning initiative pays for itself right off the bat by eliminating travel and facility costs, but that misses the point, because in comparison, upside gains dwarf cost savings.

The eLearning Emperor Has No Clothes

Go to any major conference for trainers and you'll find many sessions on evaluating results and measuring performance. If you're a line manager with no training background, you will at first be confused when participants make statements like, "We evaluate 100% at Level 1, 80% and Level 2, and 40% at Level 3. We're going to shoot for some Level 4 next year."

The "levels" come from a taxonomy developed by a budding academic, Donald Kirkpatrick, as his Pd. D. thesis more than forty years ago. Level 1 evaluates trainee reaction (generally via evaluation forms derisively known as "smile sheets.") Level 2 checks retention (can they pass the test?) Level 3 looks at whether theydo what they were trained for. Level 4 is whether the learning creates meaningful results for the organization.

Picture this. A national sales manager is reviewing quarterly sales performance with his boss. He tells her the new sales trainees scored 95% on Level 1, 82% on Level 2, and 9% on Level 3. Unfortunately, Level 4 improvement was infinitesimal. So the sales force loved the sales training, the majority passed the test, and nearly four out of five could demonstrate great sales behavior in a role-play. The only trouble is Levels 3 & 4: they aren't selling. How long would the sales manager keep her job? In business, Level 4 is, in fact, the only thing that matters. No wonder senior managers question the value of training.

The only valid measure of training is business metrics, not training metrics.

As the Godfather said, "This is business." If you can't see a benefit, don't do it.

Jack Zigon's list of performance measurement sites

Excerpt from Ed Trolley's Running Training Like a Business

Evaluating e-Learning by Dorman Woodall

Jay's notes on making the business case, new ROI challenges

The trouble with the "four levels" is that they falter when they go outside of the limited context of training. What happens outside the box is what counts inside the box. You can guess how I see this.

BNH on ROI. Their software models simlify complex ROI calculations.

Discussion group: ROInet

The Business Case website

The Fallacy of ROI Calculations

Measuring the Success of Training

Baruch Lev

Measuring the ROI of Training, CIO

Economic Value Added (EVA)

Metrics and Web Services

Today, somewhere over Texas, I was reading John Hagel's Out of the Box, a wonderful description of the power of Web Services. The "box" of the title is actually a series of boxes, and the "most insidious box of all ... is the box that we all create in terms of the mind-sets we bring to our businesses."

Web Services = overlaying legacy systems with interoperable Internet-style concepts to enable computers to understand one another without human intervention. The next step in the evolution of computing.

Business managers are stuck in their ruts. And largely unaware of it. Sweating bullets but not knowing why. Web Services are part of the way out.

I'm also in the midst of rewriting Metrics, and I found these lines of Hagel's so appropos that it stunned me:

The advocates of business process reengineering challenged conventional business practices, but at the end of the day, they remained firmly within a mechanistic mental model. Even the language they used shaped, and revealed, their outlook. Reengineering -- could one possibly choose a more mechanistic, top-down, deterministic view of business activities?

Hagel (and I hope he pronounces it "Hegel" and not "haggle") points out that when reegineering types talked about end-to-end, the end of the world was the wall of the enterprise silo. End-to-end didn't encompass raw materials at one end and customers at the other. We don't need no stinking value chain.

Web Services are captivating because they can be adopted for demonstrable short-term gains, all the while laying the foundation for radically more malleable business models.

All business executives understand financial leverage. Use somebody else's money alongside your own, and you grow faster. You don't leverage yourself to the hilt, for that's risky. But if you don't leverage yourself at all, that's foolish.

The flexibility brought on by Web Services creates the opportunity for operational leverage. If I want to grow my business, why shouldn't I have somebody else's assets alongside my own?

I flew across the country today to meet with a major client. They requested I book my travel through their travel department. American Express. Why? Because for my client, the travel business would be a diversion. It's not something they would ever get out-sized returns from. So they farm it out and have more assets to put behind their core operations.

When Web Services are widely adopted a couple of years hence, companies will be able to swap a lot more than travel administration under or out from under their umbrellas. Hagel suggests that the largest gains will be from transferring major business processes such as maintaining customer relationships, managing infrastructure, and creating & commercializing new products.

How does our engineering mind-set manager adapt to that? It's not the old scenario of "draw the blueprint and then manage activities to it". This is more like rewriting the blueprint whenever you see it's to your advantage to do so. We have a name for people who stick to their old plans when new plans would take them further; we call them losers.

Now I'm pondering three sorts of >strong>value that make business worth doing. You can measure the first without leaving the enterprise silo. This is value from operations. You boost value by increasing revenues or decreasing costs. You can increase revenue by selling more stuff or selling at higher prices, by selling more through agents and partners, by adding new products or by increasing prices. You can decrease costs by being more efficient, achieving higher quality/fewer rejects, and leveraging intangibles (such as customer loyalty, employee retention, effective work processes, team experience).

Shareholders are more interested in a second form of value, market capitalization, i.e. the value of the stock. Share prices are set by the market, based on investors' perceptions of the firm's earnings potential, discounted for risk and time. This in turn rests on competitive advantage as evidenced by innovation, patents, social capital, executive smarts, reputation, market position, confidence, and inspirational management. Market cap is only loosely coupled with profitability.

Hagel started me contemplating another sort of value that traverses an enterprise's traditional boundaries. Back to operational leverage. If my company's operations are interoperable with other companies', I can pick and choose what I want to focus on. If I'm truly interoperable, I can farm out just about any business process and use the capitalI would have spent there leveraging my primary business. Or I could consciously set out to capture the highest margin segments of my entire value chain.

A company whose IT is built on Web Standards by definition has more options to leverage operations than one saddled with proprietary systems. In time, the equity markets will pay a premium for such adaptability.

Three sources of corporate value are:

value from how well the business has operated in the past
value from investors' perceptions of how well the business will do in the future
value from changing what the business does -- or having the flexibility to do so

This all sounded a lot more exciting when Hagel wrote about it, but he filled a book rather than a blog entry in the telling.

Learning at home

Training magazine, the March 2000 issue: Train on your own time, not "during work."

Sure, moving training from the classroom to the Web can mean reduced travel costs, less learning time away from the job, and certainly lower delivery costs. But most corporate training doesn't require travel, says Paul Reali, president of CyberSkills Computer Training Centers in Winston Salem, NC. And, he points out, no valid study has yet shown that online delivery significantly reduces learning time - actual time spent mastering a skill or acquiring knowledge-compared with instructor-led training of similar quality.

"No one wants to tell you that the 'anytime' of online learning is supposed to be after work and that the 'anyplace' is at home," he says. Another reason: Despite yellow crime-scene tape barriers and "do not disturb" signs, the cubicle is a tough place to have a quality learning experience. And it's almost impossible to reserve the necessary time and concentration without broad organizational support--and the backing of trainees' immediate managers for regular learning time-outs.

This is so true and so short-sighted. CapitalWorks

Capitalworks' logic and findings around measuring impract are the best I know of. They inspired my understanding of informal learning and metrics. The Capitalworks material is so compact yet so eloquent that it's almost poetry. Let me amend that. It's poetry if you're conversant with the concepts of finance.

Jeff and his partners get it. Jeff contends that "Learning is the single greatest contributor in all enterprises to superior operating performance and robust value creation."

Capitalworks stalks Learning Effectiveness, defined as:

The performance of an organization's applied learning portfolio in contributing to operating performance and value creation. Applied learning includes formal learning (training) and informal learning occurring naturally in social practice.

Why is learning vital?

Learning enables flows and exchanges of knowledge through diverse intra- and inter-enterprise interactions.
Learning transcends hierarchical constraints.
Learning connects demand drivers.
Learning accelerates systemic effects.

Learning is the great enabler of flows and exchanges of knowledge. With flow, you are primed. Everyone has workarounds. Workarounds are really positive. Learning transcends hierarchical constraints. Organizations are not optimized to connect demand drivers. In fact, we're living with obsolete, 19th century organizational structures created for an illiterate workforce long before the advent of computers. Jeff points out that "Optimizing dimensions, dynamics and drivers of learning are natural means of transforming costs of coordination in all enterprises and their ecosystems." Learning itself is the ultimate workaround.

Learning is one of our primary earning assets and we should manage it that way. Looking at the flows, here's the Value Creation Circulatory System:

It's nonlinear, continuous. Process orientation. Feedback loops are critical. A single measure doesn't get us there. (Emergence, emergence....)

What enables flow? Self-study contributed as much to job proficiency as instructor-led training programs. Own volition. Regard selves as professionals. Informal learning dynamics contributed 70-to-80% of operating performance. Cohesion of social practice contributed to learning effectiveness, with informal learning as an enabler. Conversations are the primary conduit:

Read this one twice if you need to; it's important. "We see contributions by learning, like other intangibles, through value drivers. They enable us to depict causal relationships in the interactions associated with transactions, decision flows, procedures and other normal activities. Value drivers interact in clusters and sets throughout organizational work practices."

Intangibles, which we had thought of the sauce, is what it takes to drive performance.

"Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought." Albert Szent-Györgyi

Implementation

2004-11-20T19:57:00.000-08:00

Making It Work (Implementing)

Change Management

Consumer Marketing

Why this community? Organizations implement eLearning to improve the performance of their people. The successful ones gain organizational backing through change management and ground-level support through internal marketing.

We set up this site to build upon the concepts in our book, describe new findings and insights, and give our readers the opportunity to share best practices. Welcome!

Template for Developing an eLearning Implementation Action Plan

Twenty pages of forms, checklists, and text.

Fill in the form to complete your comprehensive plan.

FREE Download

Conference Presentations

Lance & Jay's PowerPoint slides from the ASTD Conference in San Diego, May 2003

Watch the video of Jay and Lance's keynote presentation at TechLearn 2002

Implementing eLearning, the Director's Cut

Find out what didn't get into the book. Typos, far-out ideas, and topsy-turvy presentation. This is unedited. From the heart. Unexpurgated.

Tips & Best Practices Examples

Communications plan for NCR University from George Brennan

eLearning Brochure for Pharmacia from Donald Oguin. Also Cafeteria table tents & Poster ( pdf )

Decades of Marketing in 5 Minutes from Internet Time Group

Customer Experience Meets Online Marketing at Brand Central Station from Boxes & Arrows

The Marketing FAQs

Survey Says? Identify Your Objectives from HBS Working Knowledge

"Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood." Daniel H. Burnham

Change Management 101 by Fred Nichols

Please contribute to our community. If you're really proud of your team's accomplishments, send your stories and artifacts to us: jaycross@internettime.com or ldublin@pacbell.net

Critical Success Factors: eLearning Solutions , Cappuccino, Deloitte

Cisco's e-learning development vision - It's a process with up's and down's.

Best practices: people

Online Instructor Competencies from Learning Peaks, Patti Shank. A good online instructor wears many hats. What's an eTrainer? & New Role: eLearning Guide , Internet Time Group 2/2000 Smile, Everyone! It's Time for Your Computer Training, Fast Company, 5/2000. Empower the learners and let them have fun!

Worst practices: people

The Training Weenie Syndrome : Five Foolish Things Trainers Do To Demote Training © INSIGHT ED Patti Shank Trainer, don't shoot yourself in the foot.

The Lie of Online Learning, Training magazine, March 2000. "Let?s move learning out of the workday and into the employees? own "uncompensated" time. No one wants to tell you that the anytime of online learning is supposed to be after work and that the anyplace is at home." Learning in the Real World . Skeptics' views on why we should be cautious about putting computers into children's schools. "In the real world we can teach, explore and learn the patterns of connection which link different people, plants, animals and places. If education software even attempts to deal with these crucial concepts, the limits of the media may make the presentation inflexible, superficial, and inadequate." Much of this reasoning applies to computer-mediated training of adults as well. ERP Training Stinks , CIO (6/00). "The average ERP implementation takes 23 months, has a total cost of ownership of $15 million and rewards (so to speak) the business with an average negative net present value of $1.5 million. And the news gets worse." "But the consensus that's emerging is that the training that matters isn't techy, "this field shows this; this button does that" training. In fact, what we normally call training is increasingly being shown to be relatively worthless. What's called for, it seems, is an ability to figure out the underlying flow of information through the business itself. The traditional view of training may blind the unwary to its significance and to the tightly woven links that exist between training, change management and staff adequacy." "The first problem is that word: training . It conjures up images of dogs jumping through hoops. This is not helpful."

Motivation

Is it Time to Exchange Skinner's Teaching Machine for Dewey's Toolbox? (Yes.)

A New Role: eLearning Guide

Learntivity's Attention Links Zounds - Compelling Experiences

Motivation in Instructional Design. ERIC Digest

Emotional Intelligence

Emotional Intelligence Services Emotional Intelligence Consortium

Bringing EQ to the Workplace (research paper)

What Daniel Goleman calls emotional intelligence is the source of ROI, human happiness, responsible behavior -- well, what more could you want? It's taken a backseat to such mundane issues as IT training because its payoff is not immediate, engineers don't get it, and it's a tough nut to crack. This is a major opportunity.

Technical

Network Architectures For E-Learning Applications tells how Cisco wires things together in support of content on demand, broadcast, and virtual classrooms. Microsoft Research on Telepresence

Adoption and barriers to eLearning & Approaches to Implementation , both from David Simmonds at Forum Corporate

Change Management and eLearning by Tom Werner

Sales Knowledge Management by Carl Binder

Benchmarks for Success in Internet-Based Distance Education

A study of distance learning benchmarks at six colleges prepared by The Institute for Higher Education Policy for the NEA and Blackboard. April 2000.

While the methodology is a bit dodgy (literature review followed by ratings from administrators, faculty, and students), the study is provocative.

The benchmarks considered essential for quality Internet-based distance education are:

Institutional Support -- a technology plan that addresses security, backup, system integrity; technical reliability; and central support for infrastructure
Course development -- periodic updates, require students to engage in analysis, synthesis, and evaluation
Teaching/Learning -- interaction between student and faculty (voicemail and/or email suffice), constructive and timely feedback, students learn research methods
Course structure -- triage up front to cull out unsuitable candidates, supplemental course nfo that outlines objectives, concepts, ideas, learning outcomes, library resources (virtual is okay), common expectations for tme to complete assignments and receive feedback
Student support -- hands-on training in system use, help line, rapid turn on answers
Faculty support --- technical assistance in course development, instructor training, written resources to deal with issues arising from student use of electronic data
Evaluation and assessmen t - use several standards, learning outcomes are reiewed regularly to ensure clarity, utility, and appropriateness.

Quality on the Line

Coach Roles

goal articulation acting as a role model challenging questions achieving results personal growth gaining and keeping balance giving expert advice dealing with adversity making tough decisions social skill development improving skills inner peace and reflection lifestyle decisions finanical or economic well being

Strategies for Learning at a Distance

Morgan (1991) suggests that distant students who are not confident about their learning tend to concentrate on memorizing facts and details in order to complete assignments and write exams. As a result, they end up with a poor understanding of course material. He views memorization of facts and details as a ?surface approach? to learning and summarizes it as follows:

Surface approach:
- Focus on the "signs" (e.g., the text or instruction itself).
- Focus on discrete elements.
- Memorize information and procedures for tests.
- Unreflectively associate concepts and facts.
- Fail to distinguish principles from evidence, new information from old.
- Treat assignments as something imposed by the instructor.
- External emphasis focusing on the demands of assignments and exams leading to a knowledge that is cut-off from everyday reality.

Distant students need to become more selective and focused in their learning in order to master new information. The focus of their learning needs to shift them from a ?surface approach? to a ?deep approach?. Morgan (1991) summarizes this approach as follows:

Deep Approach:
- Focus on what is "signified" (e.g., the instructor?s arguments).
- Relate and distinguish new ideas and previous knowledge.
- Relate concepts to everyday experience.
- Relate and distinguish evidence and argument.
- Organize and structure content.
- Internal emphasis focusing on how instructional material relates to everyday reality.

Improving Distant Learning

The shift from surface to deep learning is not automatic. Brundage, Keane, and Mackneson (1993) suggest that adult students and their instructors must face and overcome a number of challenges before learning takes place including: becoming and staying responsible for themselves; "owning" their strengths, desires, skills, and needs; maintaining and increasing self-esteem; relating to others; clarifying what is learned; redefining what legitimate knowledge is; and dealing with content. These challenges are considered in relation to distance education:

"Becoming and staying responsible for themselves" . High motivation is required to complete distant courses because the day-to-day contact with teachers and other students is typically lacking. Instructors can help motivate distant students by providing consistent and timely feedback, encouraging discussion among students, being well prepared for class, and by encouraging and reinforcing effective student study habits.
"Owning one's strengths, desires, skills, needs" . Students need to recognize their strengths and limitations. They also need to understand their learning goals and objectives. The instructor can help distant students to explore their strengths/limitations and their learning goals/objectives by assuming a facilitative role in the learning process. Providing opportunities for students to share their personal learning goals and objectives for a course helps to make learning more meaningful and increases motivation.
"Maintaining and increasing self-esteem" . Distant students may be afraid of their ability to do well in a course. They are balancing many responsibilities including employment and raising children. Often their involvement in distance education is unknown to those they work with and ignored by family members. Student performance is enhanced if learners set aside time for their instructional activities and if they receive family support in their academic endeavors. The instructor can maintain student self-esteem by providing timely feedback. It is critical for teachers to respond to students? questions, assignments, and concerns in a personalized and pleasant manner, using appropriate technology such as fax, phone, or computer. Informative comments that elaborate on the individual student?s performance and suggest areas for improvement are especially helpful.
"Relating to others" . Students often learn most effectively when they have the opportunity to interact with other students. Interaction among students typically leads to group problem solving. When students are unable to meet together, appropriate interactive technology such as E-mail should be provided to encourage small group and individual communication. Assignments in which students work together and then report back or present to the class as a whole, encourage student-to-student interaction. Ensure clear directions and realistic goals for group assignments (Burge, 1993).
"Clarifying what is learned" . Distant students need to reflect on what they are learning. They need to examine the existing knowledge frameworks in their heads and how these are being added to or changed by incoming information. Examinations, papers, and class presentations provide opportunities for student and teacher to evaluate learning. However, less formal methods of evaluation will also help the students and teacher to understand learning. For example, periodically during the course the instructor can ask students to write a brief reflection on what they have learned and then provide an opportunity for them to share their insights with other class members.
"Redefining what legitimate knowledge is" . Brundage, Keane, and Mackneson (1993) suggest that adult learners may find it difficult to accept that their own experience and reflections are legitimate knowledge. If the instructor takes a facilitative rather than authoritative role, students will see?their own experience as valuable and important to their further learning. Burge (1993) suggests having learners use first-person language to help them claim ownership of personal values, experiences, and insights.
"Dealing with content" . Student learning is enhanced when content is related to examples. Instructors tend to teach using examples that were used when they received their training. For distance learning to be effective, however, instructors must discover examples that are relevant to their distant students. Encourage students to find or develop examples that are relevant to them or their community.

Learning for purposes of IT Certification must combine the motivational and social reinforcement academia is working on with the PI/simulation approach of traditional IT training.

Enabling Learning in a Digital Age, 1998

This is about kids but applies to adult learning equally well.

The model that education has used for centuries considers the student a vessel to be filled at regular intervals with knowledge. The alternative I hope you´ll strive for is seeing the student as co-discoverer of knowledge and the teacher responsible for seeing that the discovery takes place. This model may mean we don't need to be confined to a classroom if discovery can take place in different spaces, even cyberspace. The impact of today's information revolution on schools goes vastly beyond replacing the old blackboard with a shiny whiteboard. Technology is revolutionizing the very nature and dynamics of the conventional classroom experience; this new learning environment, by design, emphasizes students, autonomy and independence.Classroom learning will become student-driven, interactive, experiential and collaborative - all goals long-cherished by many educators but never before attainable. Students will no longer passively receive information but will manage and synthesize it and even contribute it.They become not only takers, but givers – creators -- of information. This level of interaction will herald new types of student communities of practice.The world need more problem-solvers. It needs more explorers.

It needs more rough edges.

Enable learning, don´t teach. a good teacher doesn´t teach at all. They enable students to teach themselves. And it´s not just symantics. Enabling learning is entirely different from teaching.

While a significant part of learning certainly comes from teaching, much comes from exploration, from reinventing the wheel and finding out for oneself. Until the computer, the technology for teaching was limited to audiovisual devices and distance learning by television, which did little more than amplify the activity of teachers and the passivity of children.

The computer changed this balance radically. Suddenly, learning by doing has the potential to become the rule rather than the exception. Since computer simulation of just about anything is now possible, one need not learn about a frog by dissecting it. Instead, children can be asked to design frogs, to build an animal with frog-like behavior, to modify that behavior, to simulate the muscles, to play with the frog.

The opportunity is an unrealized potential.

The Future File

Learning Standards

2004-11-20T19:55:00.000-08:00

If you're looking for information on XML and Web Standards, try the Workflow Learning Institute. This page addresses learning object metadata. Rather than reinvent the wheel, you can find descriptions galore in:

Making Sense of Learning Specifications & Standards : A Decision Maker's Guide to their Adoption (2nd edition)

Eighty-two pages of cogent explanations, history, processes, and reference sources. This is one of those reference works, like a good dictionary, that you need at your fingertips for answering questions about standards you may be a little fuzzy on.

Philosophically, standards for learning object make an awful lot of sense. They have the potential to bring to learning design the efficiency of using component assemblies to build houses or computers. Standardized objects are interchangeable parts that can be combined to create non-standard, personal learning. Perhaps they can be recycled.

In practice, several issues remain. How large is an object? To some it's a course, to others it's a paragraph. Wayne Hodgins foresees objects like grains of sand, taking the form of any mould they are poured into.If objects are the size of sentences, will we ever be able to string them together into something meaninful? Assemble all the film clips in your repository, and you still won't get Citizen Kane.

The Emerging Standards Effort in eLearning by Ed Cohen, eLearning Magazine, January 2002:

Torrents of tags Much of what SCORM has assembled is preoccupied with the tracking, tagging, and storing of content objects. The standards dwell at length upon "metadata," specifying the identifying tags that all learning objects in a course should carry-be they graphics, text, animations, or simulations (see "A Primer on Metdata for Learning Objects," e-learning, October, p.26). For those who envision a future in which users wander through vast content repositories filled with such objects-plucked from various courses, each of them immaculately categorized and easy to use-SCORM is a dream.

This focus on metadata labeling is understandable, given that we all believe reusing course content will be crucial in the near future. Oddly though, this standard may be both too demanding and not demanding enough. If SCORM is ultimately dominated by a giant catalog of tagging requirements, it would pose a daunting hurdle for companies with large amounts of legacy content for dubious gains. And it would ignore important principles of instructional design-which, if they were established as a uniform standard, would help trainers and teachers get the most out of their courseware.

Online Learning, November 2000:

"Web-based training standards entered a new era in June when the major developers agreed to make learning management systems (LMSs) and content from different vendors work together. The agreement between the Aviation Industry CBT Committee (AICC), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Instructional Management Systems (IMS) Global Learning Consortium is not an official partnership ? yet. And because it is informal in nature the responsibilities of the respective parties haven?t been clearly defined. But it was determined that the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative of the Department of Defense, which was the catalyst for the new spirit of cooperation, would act as a coordinating body."

Standards: The Vision and the Hype, Learning Circuits, by Tom Barron The drive to create industry-wide technology standards for e-learning is gaining momentum and adherents. But some see perils--and posturing--amid the promise.

All about Learning Technology Standards, LINEzine, Wayne Hodgins. Learnativity has the articles, presentations, and links of standards visionary Wayne Hodgins.

Achieving Interoperability in e-Learning, Learning Circuits, by Harvi Singh.

In today's Internet economy, achieving integration and interoperability in digital systems is increasingly important. Such integration is possible with open protocols, which allow an organization or system to exchange information with suppliers, partners, and customers in a format that accommodates each organization's system. The same approach is being applied in the e-learning arena, where a new breed of software application frameworks and approaches seek to enable true interoperability of separate systems. This article examines trends and enabling frameworks for making true interoperability a reality.

An Intro to Metadata Tagging, Learning Circuits, by Harvi Singh. Get ready for the Dewey Decimal Classification system of e-learning

The Instructional Use of Learning Objects, an online book on the topic

Standards Groups

Advanced Learning Infrastructure Consortium (JAPAN) -- Objective is to establish an active society by reasonably and effectively providing a learning environment which enables anyone to learn anytime, anywhere, according to the goals, pace, interests and understanding of individuals and groups. Also, to foster experts who will be the origin of global competitiveness. Targets: Advanced learning infrastructure that are from Primary and secondary institution to high school, company training, and tertiary school; Technology and Service; Learning system and contents that use information technology, such as network. Examples: e-learning, Web-based training, technology-based training, computer-based training, long distance learning.

World Wide Web Consortium -- Develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential, specifically XML.

Learning Technology Standards Committee (LTSC) of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) -- Formed in 1996. The mission is to develop technical standards, recommended practices, and guides for software components, tools, technologies and design methods that facilitate the development, deployment, maintenance, and interoperation of computer implementations of education and training components and systems.

Alliance of Remote Instructional Authoring and Distribution Networks for Europe (ARIADNE) -- Develops the results of the ARIADNE and ARIADNE II European Projects, which created tools and methodologies for producing, managing and reusing computer-based pedagogical elements and telematics supported training curricula.

IMS Global Learning Consortium, Inc. (IMS) -- Developing and promoting open specifications for facilitating online distributed learning activities, such as locating and using educational content, tracking learner progress, reporting learner performance, and exchanging student records between administrative systems. IMS -- Meta Tags and Knowledge Bits

Advanced Distributed Learning Network -- Purpose is to ensure access to high-quality education and training materials that can be tailored to individual learner needs and made available whenever and wherever they are required. This initiative is designed to accelerate large-scale development of dynamic and cost-effective learning software and to stimulate an efficient market for these products in order to meet the education and training needs of the military and the nation's workforce of the future. It will do this through the development of a common technical framework for computer and net-based learning that will foster the creation of reusable learning content as "instructional objects." Check out Plugfest 5.

The Aviation Industry CBT (Computer-Based Training) Committee (AICC) -- An international association of technology-based training professionals. The AICC develops guidelines for the aviation industry in the development, delivery, and evaluation of CBT and related training technologies.

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative -- An open forum engaged in the development of interoperable online metadata standards that support a broad range of purposes and business models. DCMI's activities include consensus-driven working groups, global workshops, conferences, standards liaison, and educational efforts to promote widespread acceptance of metadata standards and practices. (If you're invited, don't get out your passport. That's Dublin, Ohio.)

BUILDING BLOCKS. HOW THE STANDARDS MOVEMENT PLANS TO REVOLUTIONIZE ELECTRONIC LEARNING, a good overview from University Business

Judy Brown's home page

SCORM is mil-spec. It will probably work in military apps where standards can be rigidly enforced, and where performance outweighs price much more than in the commercial sector. SCORM comes from the same place as $1000 hammers and $10,000 toilet seats.

Corporations may find it easier to standardize learning as part of the Semantic Web. It's XML, interoperable, flexible, and will soon be the underpinning of business transactions. What better way to integrate learning and work? The Semantic Web would enable us to build performance support directly into the job (rather than as an add-on.)

Knowledge Management

2004-11-20T19:32:00.000-08:00

Knowledge management is a high-fallutin' buzz phrase for creating and sharing know-how. A hot item circa 1998, overuse watered down KM's popularity as a category (although it's still a hot item in Europe). To vendors, KM became "whatever I want to sell you," be it document-tracking or warehousing good ideas or building web pages or reinforcing innovation or focusing on intellectual capital.

Personal Intellectual Capital Management Blogging for Business How E-Learning Professionals Learn About E-Learning The Value of Learning About Learning Converting Intellectual Capital into Competitive Advantage

KM Blogs of note:

Lilia Efimova's Mathemagenic Blog
Denham Grey's Knowledge-at-Work (and his KMwiki)
Stuart Henshall's Unbound Spiral
Jim McGee's Musings
Judith Meskill's Knowledge Notes
George Siemen's elearnspace
Jack Vinson's Knowledge Jolt with Jack
David Weinberger's Journal of Hyperlinked Organization and JOHO Blog
Ton Zylstra's Interdependent Thoughts

Knowledge is like the sound of the tree that falls in the forest when no one is there: it doesn't exist unless people interact with it. Nurturing innovation and rewarding the sharing of ideas fertilizes seedling ideas. Setting up processes to highlight what's worthy and weed out useless undergrowth help grow heathly trees.

While it may carry a different name in the future, knowledge management anchors one end of the learning/doing continuum and is vital to improving organizational performance.

"Knowledge is information that changes something or somebody -- either by becoming grounds for actions, or by making an individual (or an institution) capable of different or more effective action." -- Peter F. Drucker in The New Realities (The same might be said of learning.)

"If HP knew what HP knows, we'd be three times more profitable." Lew Platt

Information and knowledge are the thermonuclear competitive weapons of our time. Knowledge is more valuable and more powerful than natural resources, big factories, or fat bankrolls.? Thomas A. Stewart, Intellectual Capital

Jack Welch of GE: We soon discovered how essential it is for a multibusiness company to become an open, learning organization. The ultimate competitive advantage lies in an organization's ability to learn and to rapidly transform that learning into action.And, in GE's boundaryless learning culture, the operative assumption is that someone, somewhere, has a better idea; and the operative compulsion is to find out who has that better idea, learn it, and put it into action fast.

In 25 years, knowledge will double every three months. What will that do for learning requirements? Doug Engelbart

"Knowledge Management is the broad process of locating, organizing, transferring, and using the information and expertise within an organization. The overall knowledge management process is supported by four key enablers: leadership, culture, technology, and measurement." American Productivity and Quality Center

A wealth of knowledge exists and can be generated among people with a passion for learning and a willingness to explore connections across traditional boundaries. Meg Wheatley

To Verna Allee, it's all a matter of making connections. I think she's got it. KM=BS? An abstract of T.D. Wilson's The Nonsense of Knowledge Management Life On The Internet: Could Blogging Assist KM? from Amy Wohl Knowledge Blogs Are Tough Denham Gray's amazing KM Wiki What's knowledge?

Knowledge maps, knowledge architecture, taxonomies, and more from KAPS Group

On the rebound? Peter Martin, writes in CLO:

The Market Is Coming Back to Knowledge Management In hindsight, knowledge management was a recklessly defined initiative. Companies were going to be able to empower the intellectual capital of their enterprise--with ad hoc software purchases. Over time the initiative lost its cachet, very much like the "portal" -- a key element of knowledge management. As the meaning and value of the portal has risen from the ashes, so has knowledge management. The comeback for knowledge management can be traced to the economy, consolidation of vendors, technological advancement and enterprise software vendor buy-in.

Knowledge Management is a case of the blind men and the elephant. KM refers to one or more of these activities:

creating and populating a repository of in-house knowledge
measuring the dollar-value of chunks of knowledge
facilitating the transfer of knowledge
creating a knowledge sharing environment
building a corporate culture focused on innovation and knowledge creation

At a minimum, do these things:

Databases:

Corporate yellow pages
Best practices system that captures lessons learned
Competitive intelligence

Infrastructure:

Groupware
Empowered Chief Knowledge Officer

Culture:

Top-down belief
Spirit of sharing and collaboration
Experimentation encouraged

Five Basic Principles of the Mind

Minds are limited.
Minds hate confusion.
Minds are insecure.
Minds don't change.
Minds lose focus.

Jack Trout

From an interview in mid-2004: Where do you see the difference between collaboration and knowledge sharing on the one hand and professional knowledge management on the other? "Professional knowledge management" is a fuzzy term. I will assume you mean formal, traditional, top-down approaches. Most of the attempts I've looked at are failures. They don't focus on what workers need to know, they don't change with the times, and consequently, they are rarely utilized. Knowledge "management" isn't as important as what David Snowden refers to as "knowledge exchange." Informal, bottom-up approaches work better because they provide answers at the time of need, are structured for rapid access, contain advice on how things really work rather than how they work on paper, and are continuously adapting to fit new circumstances. The better informal systems offer multiple means to get answers: search, chat, mentoring, prompts, phone, simulation, etc.

Come together

Tom Barron, drawing on the ideas of GartnerGroup's Clark Aldrich and others, presents an astute view of the impending merger of e-Learning and Knowledge Management in A Smarter Frankenstein, lead article in the August 2000 issue of Learning Circuits.

Take an eLearning course. Chunk it into discrete learning bites. Surround it with technology that assesses a learner's needs and delivers the appropriate learning nuggets. Add collaborative tools that allow learners to share information. What do you get? Something that looks a whole lot like knowledge management.

Just In Time	Embedded Help Performance Support EPSS Wizards	Knowledge Management Traditional KM Combined eLearning/KM
Just in Case	Classroom Replication Self-paced courseware Virtual classes	Simulations Skills-building sims Games
	Connvergent (Discrete-path)	Divergent (Infinite-path)

The training function is accustomed to limiting its scope -- offering a curriculum that provides grounds for assessment. KM is open-ended, encouraging participants to share whatever works without an intermediary to translate things into lessons. Oil and water? The accelerating pace of business is already obsoleting the authoring function -- there's not enough time for lengthy development cycles; intitutive authoring systems are replacing middleman authors by taking content directly from the expert's mouth.

An obstacle I've personally never overcome to my satisfaction is countering the hoarding of knowledge by those who believe knowledge is power, or are perhaps too self-motivated to contribute to the good of their organizations.

What to Blogs have to do with it?

Weblogs (AKA Blogs) are important. If you're not familiar with Blogs, read Rebecca Blood's excellent Weblogs: A History and Perspective.

1. Blogs are a free authoring tool that enables anyone with a net connection to publish content on the web. The doors are open.

2. You cannot keep up with the raw flow of information being posted to the web without a lot of help. The Blogs of people you trust point the way to the good stuff. For example, I read Camworld because it has proven worthy of my time; I've grown to trust Cameron Barrett -- I know where he's coming from.

3. In time, organizations will encourage in-house Blogging.

Tacit & Explicit Knowledge

Nonaka's Knowledge Creation Spiral

In an economy where the only certainty is uncertainty, the one sure source of lasting competitive advantage is knowledge. When markets shift, technologies proliferate, competitors multiply, and products become obsolete almost overnight, successful companies are those that consistently create new knowledge, disseminate it widely throughout the organization, and quickly embody it in new technologies and products. These activities define the knowledge-creating company, whose sole business is continuous innovation. (source: Ikujiro Nonaka, The Knowledge-Creating Company, Harvard Business Review, November-December 1991)

	Explicit Knowledge	Tacit Knowledge
	You can write it down. Easy to share.	It?s tough to explain. Tough to share.
	Left brain, pragmatic ? learned. Think classroom.	Right brain, idealistic ? internalized. Think watercooler.
Theory of organization =	Machine for processing information	Living organism with a purpose
Knowledge =	Formal, systematic, quantifiable	Know-how and ingrained mental models and perspectives. Subjective, hunches, intuitive, highly personal.
Metrics =	Quantifiable: increased efficiency, lower costs, improved ROI	Qualitative: increased effectiveness, embodies company vision, expresses management aspirations and strategic goals, builds organizational knowledge network.
Impact =	Increases immediate capabilities	Profoundly shapes how we perceive the world around us.
Communicated =	Via words, textbooks, CBT	Via figurative language and symbolism, metaphor, analogy, modeling.

Other sources

The Economics of Knowledge, Eric E. Vogt. "Knowledge is a perspective shared by a community which allows for some effective action. ...the economics of knowledge dictate that we think in terms of creating collection systems that allow for the instantaneous sharing of these new perspectives. Collection systems allow us to listen to the needs and concerns of customers. Collection systems allow us to tap into the global flow of creative ideas and fuel the imagination of our knowledge community."

Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization (JOHO). David Weinberger has the most level-headed approach to knowledge management you'll find anywhere. He's also a laugh riot. JOHO is one of my favorite reads on the Web.

Weinberger? He's a commentator on NPR, and co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto. "Jay of InternetTime.com, has put a link to JOHO on his site, www.meta-time.com. We hereby declare www.meta-time.com to be the new Finest Site on the Web."

University of Denver: Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management

ASTD on KM -- an overview of what's going on in the field

The Knowledge Management Paradox: How to Manage Your Most Strategic Asset, CPT

BRINT -- exhaustive and exhausting links and essays. More is more? Thinking Business -- the document tracking end of KM

Leverage the Value-Hierarchy of Knowledge

Different skills produce different levels of impact. (Stan Davis)

Difficult to replace, low value added

Staff jobs, skilled factory workers, experienced secretaries

?Know the ropes but don?t pull the strings.? Don?t directly impact customers.

INFORMATE à

Difficult to replace, high value added

Irreplaceable role in the organization; nearly irreplaceable as individuals

Create the products and services that draw the customers in

CAPITALIZE

Easy to replace, low value added.

Unskilled, semi-skilled labor.

Success not dependent on these individuals.

AUTOMATE ¯

Easy to replace, high value added

Designers

Work is valuable but not this particular individual.

DIFFERENTIATE or OUTSOURCE ¯

Often, the value added is the information subtracted.

A hired hand is not a hired mind. Routine, low-skill work, even if it's done manually, does not generate or emply human capital for the organization. Unleashing the human capital already resident in the organization requires minimizing mindless tasks, meaningless paperwork, unproductive infights. The Taylorized workplace squandered human assets in such activities.

'Informate' = change the work to add more value to customers.

Outsourcing frees resources to continue developing high-return expertise.

Capitalize means providing opportunities for learning. People need to feel they?re ?in the game,? and not ?being kicked around by it.?

How to Capitalize on High-Value Knowledge

Structural capital company property builds on corporate yellow pages, knowledge maps, speedy transfer. Do enough and no more; many overinvest. HP and others find that demand-driven approach is more effective than pushing information into people?s emailboxes. Avoid overinvesting by making it okay not to know everything ? leverage the expertise of specialists. When a manager brings in a problem, the experts teach her how to apply the lessons of a module to solve it.

Customer capital, the relationships of the company with its customers, is measured by market share, customer retention and defection, and profit per customer. This is the most valuable capital of all it's where the money is but ironically, it's also the least well managed. Tom Stewart has a wonderful line, The customer today can call the tune because he knows the score. The goal is to maintain an increasingly intimate relationship. Empowered customers deal directly with companies' databases.

Ten Principles for Managing Intellectual Capital

Companies don't own human and customer capital. Companies share the ownership of human assets with employees. They share ownership of customer capital with suppliers and customers. An adversarial relationship with employees destroys wealth.
To create human capital it can use, a company needs to foster teamwork, communities of practice, and other social forms of learning.
To manage and develop human capital, companies must unsentimentally recognize that some employees, however intelligent or talented they are, aren?t assets. Invest in proprietary and strategic knowledge workers; minimize all other costs.
Structural capital is most easy to control because companies own it, but customers are where the money comes from.
Structural capital serves two purposes: to amass stockpiles of knowledge that support the work customers value, and to speed the flow of that information inside the company. Just-in-time knowledge is more efficient that knowledge stored in the warehouse.
Substitute information and knowledge for expensive physical and financial assets.
Knowledge work is custom work. Mass production does not yield high profits.
Analyze your value chain to see what information is most crucial. The knowledge work is generally downstream, close to the customers.
Focus on the flow of information, not the flow of materials. Information once supported the real business; now it is the real business.
Human, structural and customer capital work together.

Source: Thomas Stewart, Intellectual Capital

Ideas @ Work

Diane McFerrin Peters (Harvard Management Update, Vol. 5 #3, March 2000) Most companies underestimate the importance of intangible assets such as knowledge, creativity, ideas, and relationships. All these account for more value in our economy than the tangibles. Yet it's difficult for companies to get their arms around intangibles, so they rarely protect them as carefully as they do bricks and hardware. What would you do if your smartest people suddenly left? How can you ensure that what one department or division learns is widely shared throughout the company? 1) Create a setting for sharing knowledge. Access to knowledge breeds more knowledge, and the best KM techniques ensure that everyone's involved. Try an open meeting policy. 2) Eliminate communication filters. Politics, turf, and implementation responsibilities can squelch ideas in traditional communication channels. Going outside the channels, for example, by allowing people to skip levels--leads to more ideas on how to do things better. 3) Prioritize the tasks. Most companies' to-do lists contain twice as much as they could ever accomplish. A prioritization process can align brainpower and effort behind what's truly strategic. Senior leaders get together to rank all vital activities first to last, no ties allowed. The process lets people challenge assumptions about the value of long-running projects, share knowledge about what is being accomplished, and break down the departmental barriers that bottle up ideas and creativity. 4) Keep time budgets. Few individuals and fewer organizations get a true read on where their time and effort really go. Picasso had a collection of masterpieces in his home. They were hung slightly crooked, and visitors couldn't resist the temptation to straighten them. But Picasso felt that when a painting was straight, the observer focused on the frame around it. When the frame was crooked, the beauty of the image jumped out. It's the same with knowledge. Instead of trying to put boundaries around it, we should be letting it jump out of its frame.

Enlightenment Magazine on Collective Intelligence

George Por's Blog of Collective Intelligence

Relections on KM

All or nothing, the bi-polar rant of extremists, is alive and well in the world of KM. "The knowledge management industry (if you can call it that) has always taken a pretty high-falutin' attitude about 'the enterprise,' and it's possible that its well-documented image problems stem from that strategic flaw," writes Andy Moore, editorial director at KM World in the ironically named Best Practices in Enterprise Knowledge Management.* He continues, "KM has long been touted as an all-or-nothing proposition.... The evidence is mounting that the famous 'departmental point solutions' that many of us thought were mere baby steps to a greater goal, are, in fact, the end game." Makes sense to me. Rather than try to boil the ocean, KM needs to apply the 80/20 rule and focus on things that make a difference. Most of these thngs are bottom-up. Many of the vendors at this year's KM World Conference don't see it that way. Commissions on enterprise deals pay off a salesperson's mortgage; departmental sales cover a month's car payments. On the all-or-nothing spectrum, the next author in Best Practices in Enterprise Knowledge Management is in the all camp. He tells us "...total knowledge management is driven by the need for organizations to have a unified access and view to all business content across an enterprise.... The ultimate goal of the total knowledge strategy is to enable an organization to have one single version of the truth; unified access to all enterprise content...." It's all or nothing. This raises some thorny issues. First of all, the only organizations that have a single version of the truth are sole proprietorships, and even one-man shops change their interpretations of reality on the spur of the moment. The third writer in this pamphlet says "...the primary difference between information and knowledge is relevance." Presumably, the all-or-nothing guy (who in real life markets "a state-of-the-art integrated enterprise content management platform") would have us index and store irrelevant information alongside knowledge.

Internet Time KnowledgeBase

Introduction

First Principles

PEOPLE

THINGS

ECONOMICS

TECHNIQUE

Drivel, BS, and caution signs

The Principle of Materiality

Words to Live By

Simplicity

Hubris

Perspective

The Law of Raspberry Jam

Focus on core

Sunk cost

Setting Personal Goals

Getting Things Done

Dee Hock on Organizations

Selling your ideas

Design

Design

I am a designer.

The Psychology of Everyday Things by Don Norman

Instructional design

User Interface design

Graphic Design

The Master

CSS

Community

Communities of Practice: The Organizational Frontier

It's Not What You Know, It's Who You Know

Blogs

Semantic blogging.

Customer Blogs

Blogs

Blogging to learn

Sample blogs

Bottom line?

Visit the New Learning Circuits Blog

Blogs about blogs

Will businesses blog?

Blogging as Knowledge Management Tool

Blogs for Education

Presentations

Articles

Visual Learning

Center for Visual Learning

Time

Why Time Matters in Business

"...so I decided to have plenty of time."

Faster, faster...

String Theory

Social Software

Psychology

Psychology

THE 16 Cattell PERSONALITY FACTORS

Bruce Tuckman's FOUR STAGES OF GROUP DEVELOPMENT

Stage 1: Forming

Stage 2: Storming

Stage 3: Norming

Stage 4: Performing

Stage 5: Adjourning

DeBono's SIX THINKING HATS

Transactional Analysis

LIFE POSITIONS

TRANSACTIONS

STROKES

GAMES

Left and Right

The User Illusion

Don't worry. Be happy.

High IQ Clubs

Notes from Zimbardo's Shyness

Emotional Intelligence

RELATIONSHIPS Getting Together

-- a framework for improving relationships...

FUNDAMENTAL HUMAN DESIRES AND VALUES

MBTI

Professionalism