Mathemagenic

Julian Elve [Synesthesia] points to the interesting connection:

In today's Observer magazine Andrew G Marshall writes about his application of ideas from Malcom Gladwell's book The Tipping Point to the field of couples counselling.

He believes that the systemic explanation given by Gladwell of how ideas suddenly infect a whole population can also explain how a relationship can appear to go sour overnight.

I'm happy that my own copy of The Tipping Point  is shipping, so I can read the original and "reconstruct" the connections with my NLP experiences. Following the links I also found something to read - How Meta-States Enriches Logical Levels in NLP.

Was browsing around and found out that Jay Cross' Internet Time Blog has got RSSfied, so now I can read it regularly (I can hardly cope with blogs without RSS).

Jay also points to new Learning Circuits Blog:

We're recruited a hearty band of thought leaders and contrarians to speak their minds on the blog: George Siemens, Clark Quinn, Bill Horton, Harvi Singh, Jane Knight, Julie Witges Schlack, Lance Dublin, Peter Isackson, Richard Clak, Sam Adkins, and Scott Newman. If you'd like to join the throng, show us your stuff with some incisive comments -- and then drop me a line. 

...we all have in common the need to broaden and to fundament our ideas about how we view Knowledge Management as a field. We can do this thought reading and attending conferences though there is a level, which neither books nor lectures may address, and that is the dynamic process of freely expressing less clear and even confused thoughts that bring  new lights and new perspectives through their communication with the reasoning of others [Angela's process story]

We discussed yesterday night that best ideas seems to emerge from total mess and it seems that you need that mess to have ideas. What if we exploit it: we can have a session discussing not our findings, but our confusions or mistakes. This should help to move from presenting and refining existing ideas to supporting the emergence of new ideas.

[Sorry if this is not clear. It's because the context is in my head. Probably, reading about content and process stories can help to understand.]

It's nice to have a laptop with me: 4,5 hours by train give a lot of time for thinking. I'm reading Angela's process story and thinking about it, schemas, and our passion to discuss process rather then content at Quaerere Dialog:

• It seems that Angela and Geri talk about very similar things using different languages. But Geri has something down to the earth: free discussion as a method to challenge our schemas.
• Somehow what they research is very close to what we want to do in Quaerere group: double-loop learning, reflecting on how we come to our ideas as well as challenging and changing our assumptions. If others agree with it, it would be easier to search for a method to organize our next meeting.

So, let's assume that we would like to focus on reflection upon our experiences. In the research context experience is an evolution of ideas. Ideas are content, process is how and why they evolve. So, there is one question that is teasing my mind: can we focus on process without content?

There is another angle of this issue as well: can we jointly reflect on individual experiences? I guess yes, but then each has to present "evolution of ideas" first. This takes time. Another option would be to reflect on our joint experiences, as in this case they are already "shared". In this case we will gain a lot as a group, but it's not clear how such a reflection will contribute to our individual research.

My points are:

• We need shared experiences to reflect upon as a group
• We can share our individual experiences with others by presenting them during f2f meetings or between them (e.g. by using blogs)
• We can also create shared experiences during f2f meeting or between them by doing something together
• Most of us are busy, so those "created shared experiences" have to be highly relevant for our individual research

Finally my suggestions for the next Quaerere Dialog are:

• find out (existing or easy to create) shared experiences that highly relevant for our individual research
• find out method(s) we can use to reflect on those experiences

Using free discussion to discuss common readings seems to be one good example, but we definitely can find more.

At the end we brainstormed about our results and future work.

What did we get out of this meeting?

• leaning, new perspectives on our ideas
• an "agreement" on research topics
  • emerging understanding, but not common language yet
  • who knows what
  • who thinks what
  • how to deal with each other
• spontaneous
• good "chemical" mix for the future "reactions"
• open atmosphere, trust, "dog eats dogs, but dog is not here"
• great potential
• presentations, notes, reading list (we are planning to post them on-line)
• remain open to others (one or more time in a year)

What was missing?

• booze or "mixing informal activities" like it
• time (we can save traveling time by being smarter with logistics)
• "structure", "force" to achieve more
• time for distractions that need priority
• evolutionary approach
• intermediate evaluation (e.g. reflection after each session)

Emerging activities

• reading groups + free discussion
• get our own domain
• in January and in the next future:
  • joined bibliography ?
  • list of conferences ?
  • collection of case studies --> can be within readings
  • write articles together
• future face-to-face Q-Dialog meetings
  • next meeting proposal: Italy or UK in May/June
  • before or during KMSS03
• individual blogs
• Quaerere group blog
• work on our ideas within Knowledge Angels initiative

Comments

Funny: we were scared of not having enough people, but even with this group we could hardly fit our schedule. Now we are scared of large numbers: we don't know if this working style will scale.

We had an interesting discussion about group evolution. All of us agree, that process could be more important than content, so we don't want to make regular "conference" from Quaerere Dialog. But this time we spend a lot of time presenting and discussing our research. So, we assumes that this is "introductory stage" is necessary to get to know each other better and to build trust. Something like that:

• First: content and context - who, what, where, related to whom
• Next: process - next step, how, when