I go to Nancy’s blog to look for the Pear & Cranberry Chutney recipe to cook for tomorrow and then remember that I have a blog too and that it had been silent way too long. So here I am :)

The truth is that I feel a bit like a caterpilar in a cocoon – hiding from everyone and in a process of a transformation. I never thought that I would think of stopping blogging here – so much this blog was me. What I didn’t realise is that identities change or, to be more specific, some of those many identities in each of us take leading role for a while. Or, to be even more specific, I didn’t realise how much my professional identity was leading in my life. Untill I stopped working :)

Letting go professional identity gave time and space to all others that were also in me, hidden. It’s an interesting process to reflect on – letting go parts of your old life to give space for new things to emerge. And scary at times (enough not to write about it :)

As for the online writing – it feels funny to see how social media is getting picked up by lots of people I know and, at the same time, not to have much of the need to do it myself. I do write online – under a different nickname, mainly private and in Russian. Somehow that fits better what I need now (and helps building very different networks). Hopefully writing in Dutch will come as well (as I need it too), but I’m not there yet.

So, what I’m busy with now? All things “green” and local, sewing, house and kids, as well as alternative educational modes. There are a lot of things to write about there, although I’m not sure anymore that this blog is the right space for it (well, if you want to hear about my compost worms let me know :). The last topic would fit pretty well here, but at the moment writing about it feels a bit like writing about internal corporate issues while being employed there – it’s a thin line to navigate and I’m not there yet.

I do miss many of you with whom I connected via this space. Unfortunately letting go work also means that lots of shared activities and shared spaces where you connects with your network go to the background. So, I just send all of you my best wishes for the coming year – strength to go out of your comfort zone and time to enjoy life :)

When we discussed safe-fail probes at CE accreditation course I was struck by the parallels between those and Roger’s characteristics of innovations that influence it’s adoption [from Wikipedia on diffision of innovations]:

Rogers defines several intrinsic characteristics of innovations that influence an individual’s decision to adopt or reject an innovation. The relative advantage is how improved an innovation is over the previous generation. Compatibility is the second characteristic, the level of compatibility that an innovation has to be assimilated into an individual’s life. The complexity of an innovation is a significant factor in whether it is adopted by an individual. If the innovation is too difficult to use an individual will not likely adopt it. The fourth characteristic, trialability, determines how easily an innovation may be experimented with as it is being adopted. If a user has a hard time using and trying an innovation this individual will be less likely to adopt it. The final characteristic, observability, is the extent that an innovation is visible to others. An innovation that is more visible will drive communication among the individual’s peers and personal networks and will in turn create more positive or negative reactions.

Now to safe-fail probes. Dave Snowden describes them as strategies for dealing with complex systems to explore what actually works in a situation where predictions do not work. Dave suggest the following stages for using the approach (bold is mine):

Before opinions harden you create a very simple decision rule. Everyone with an idea that has even the remotest possibility of being true or useful creates a safe fail experiment based on the idea. Critically this does not have to be one that would prove the issue, just consistent with the position adopted.

Next each proposal is fleshed out, costed and subject to challenge and review, but nothing is ruled out unless rationing of resource is required. This is rarely the case by the way as you keep the experiments small, designed for fast feedback/evolution.

For each experiment to be valid its outcome must be observable, not to measure necessarily but to allow the simple rule of amplification or dampening of good or bad patterns to be put into operation. There is no point in an experiment where you can not observe what is happening.

The experiments are then reviewed for common elements and resourced along with set up of monitoring and review processes.

In addition to these there is a practice criteria that suggests that the ideas for the experiment should be comparable with the current practice (bold is mine):

Note that in validating an experiment it is not necessary to prove that it will work, but ”it is” necessary to show that it is consistent with a view of what has happened and what could happen in the future.

So, if you compare the quotes (and stretch a bit ;) then there are a lot of similarities. I would think of Roger’s successfully adopted innovations are safe-fail probes that worked and became amplified…

And then the question that is bothering me is that safe-fail probes that didn’t work also show those characteristics of successful innovations :)

It could be amasing how easily you can get drawn into mistakes you made before while having necessary knowledge to avoid them…

Let me first tell you about one of the things I has been doing while not blogging :)

I’m coordinating a European project focused on supporting collaboration of innovative small and medium enterprises (iSMEs) in Russia (official title is RUSMECO – Enhancing Russian SME collaboration and business development through COmmunities of practice). It’s two year project with business/academic partners in four EU countries and three Russian regions.

The first phase of the project is focused on understanding specific problems Russian innovative SMEs have and then figuring out which of them could be addressed in via “communities” (which is a way to address solutions on information sharing/ learning/ networking/ collaboration spectrum). The original plan was pretty straightforward – start from the literature and doing in-depth interviews with selected iSMEs, use insights to develop and run survey to reach a bigger group and then invite participants for the workshops that provide feedback on the results and discussion on solutions that could work (and then work on developing them).

It didn’t work that way – we found out that it was very difficult to motivate iSME representatives to spend their time on interviews and questionnaires. Not only because they are busy anyway, manoeuvring in transitioning economy and changing regulations, but because it was very difficult to explain to them what the project is about because the whole idea of communities was new to them.

Necessary detour. Many KM concepts and practices still have not reached Russian business world (and academia as well) – apart from a few exceptions most of the KM talk there is still about why it could be useful to invest in something like that, rather then deciding what and how to do. Communities of practice, while there as a reality, is not part of conceptual thinking about management and not a format that organisations would deliberately support with some business gains in mind. [more on this]

While dealing with the problem I realised there is something we overlooked during the planning stage: the relation between the degree of understanding the value of communities in business settings and project planning we had laid out. At that moment I thought of a similar mistake I did 6 years ago while planning for e-learning introduction in a university. Similar to 6 years ago I thought of an instrument that could help to prevent it – stages of innovation acceptance by Diane Dormant.

The framework is simple and it’s one of the most useful leadership instruments for me (I blogged it three years ago ;). It suggests that in their acceptance of an innovation people move through several stages and that if you want to promote new practices you need a strategy that corresponds to the stage where people are (check the original post for more details on stages and strategies):

In our project most of the planned efforts were focused on demonstrating-training-supporting communities for innovative SMEs while people in our target group were hardly aware of what a community could be for them. After bumping into a number of problems we had to adjust our strategies to advertising and informing, but it would be much smarter to think about it in advance.

So, given that it’s a repeated mistake I should make a note to myself to think in terms of innovation acceptance stages for every new project I start. Hopefully it will become a routine while working on planning…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/12/16.html#a1714; comments are here.

This is the topic that surfaces again and again: heated discussions about ‘pushing’ people into self-organised learning with Sebastian Fiedler, recurring “personal KM is about taking responsibility” with Ton Zijlstra, one more “parallel thinking” line discovered with David Gurteen last week… And finally this line from an article on adult learning pointed by Cindy Hoong:

Efforts to lure people to new educational technologies and to promote a culture of life-long learning resemble a case of preaching to the converted, according to a new UK study.

Familiar?

Why there is such a high degree of autodidacts or self-employed people between bloggers I know?

Do we put put the cart before the horse providing people with great methods and tools when they don’t have a need for them? Not surprising that methods and tools stick only with those already converted.

I don’t know how to put these things together in a coherent text, but I can make a bulleted list:

• There is no “sponsor” for my research on PKM as there is no “sponsor” for life-long learning. Organisations want agility from their people, but they care more about today’s and tomorrow’s profits than about employability of their employees in 20 years.
• The change is up to an individual.
• Change starts from a need more often than from an opportunity (= unless you are an early adopter having good tools is not enough to change way of doing things).
• Change is painful and unless there are visible threats not many people would go out of their comfort zone.
• If you want people to take responsibility for their own lives you have to respect their choices. Including the one about not taking responsibility :)

Coming down to personal KM:

• Taking responsibility for one’s own life (or work :) is a main challenge for personal KM: it’s both rewarding and risky (more).
• It’s not about methods and tools, but about attitude change. Attitude change is difficult and there are many ethical issues around (more).

Fun of playing with forces of middlespace :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/11/01.html#a1407; comments are here.

If you want some inspiration read My Life as a Knowledge Worker by Peter Drucker about experiences that taught him how to grow (found via Gurteen Knowledge-Letter).

Just two quotes. The first one is about perfection:

It was at about this same time, and also in Hamburg during my stay as a trainee, that I read a story that conveyed to me what perfection means. It is a story of the greatest sculptor of ancient Greece, Phidias. He was commissioned around 440 b.c. to make the statues that to this day stand on the roof of the Parthenon, in Athens. They are considered among the greatest sculptures of the Western tradition, but when Phidias submitted his bill, the city accountant of Athens refused to pay it. “These statues,” the accountant said, “stand on the roof of the temple, and on the highest hill in Athens. Nobody can see anything but their fronts. Yet you have charged us for sculpting them in the round–that is, for doing their back sides, which nobody can see.”

“You are wrong,” Phidias retorted. “The gods can see them.” I read this, as I remember, shortly after I had listened to Falstaff , and it hit me hard. I have not always lived up to it. I have done many things that I hope the gods will not notice, but I have always known that one has to strive for perfection even if only the gods notice.

The second is about conversation between Peter Drucker’s father and Joseph Schumpeter who were old friends:

By 1949 Schumpeter had become a very different person. In his last year of teaching at Harvard, he was at the peak of his fame. The two old men had a wonderful time together, reminiscing about the old days. Suddenly, my father asked with a chuckle, “Joseph, do you still talk about what you want to be remembered for?” Schumpeter broke out in loud laughter. For Schumpeter was notorious for having said, when he was 30 or so and had published the first two of his great economics books, that what he really wanted to be remembered for was having been “Europe’s greatest lover of beautiful women and Europe’s greatest horseman–and perhaps also the world’s greatest economist.” Schumpeter said, “Yes, this question is still important to me, but I now answer it differently. I want to be remembered as having been the teacher who converted half a dozen brilliant students into first-rate economists.”

He must have seen an amazed look on my father’s face, because he continued, “You know, Adolph, I have now reached the age where I know that being remembered for books and theories is not enough. One does not make a difference unless it is a difference in the lives of people.”

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/05/12.html#a1202; comments are here.

I was very happy to listen to Dave Snowden‘s keynote. I tried to follow some of his writings, but listening is much better way to grasp complex ideas. This speech provided a good initial framework to glue pieces together when I’m reading again.

Below are some of my notes. They are quite random and text-only: I’m too lazy to make something of my drawings. If you want some background there is enough articles by Dave Snowden on-line. The one I can link without much searching is The new dynamics of strategy: Sense-making in a complex and complicated world (.pdf).

KM is about:

• Content management – managing what can be written
• Narrative management – managing what can be spoken
• Context management – managing the rest (what is the rest?)

Rules vs. heuristics. Rules tolerate no ambiguity, so they are difficult to apply then context changes. Heuristics are more flexible, but there is lack of consistency in applying.

Retrospective coherence – in advance it doesn’t make sense, but looking back it makes a good sense. The final pattern is clear only once it formed and can be explained

Why people are different from ants

1. We never make decision based on rational grounds
2. Human beings have multiple identities
3. Free will

Random quotes

• When people change between groups (re: size) they change identity.
• People are very good in managing serendipity.
• People know that databases are dangerous.
• Human beings are brilliant in gaming explicit systems.
• All innovation processes are work on incremental innovation. True innovation is achieved by seeing the world in a different way.

Categorisation and sense-making

• Categorisation is about fitting ideas into an existing frame. Exploitation. (Good example here: asking people to allocate things into 2×2 matrix with 2/3 things designed to be not fitting –> people squeeze all of them into 2×2).
• Sense making is about pattern recognition and discovering emerging frame from the data. Exploration.

Managing chaos (managing a party of 12 years old as an example)

• gain different perspective
• create, modify, remove boundaries
  • permeable
  • rigid
  • elastic
• create, modify, remove attractors
  • single point attractor
  • multiple points
  • “strange” attractors

With my system dynamics roots I’m used to think about the world in terms of boundaries and attractors, so I’m definitely interested to learn more. Dave said that there are some kinds of training programs for students. Will find out.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/11/15.html#a835; comments are here.

Thanks to George Siemens for just-in-time reading, Managing Yourself Through Change. Worth reading if there is any slight change happening with you. For me it was just-in-time.

When we are in Chaos, we are uncertain about what we can do to make things better. We try a variety of responses. We do more of what we have been doing, or less. We try behaviors that worked at some other time and place. We try things we have never done before, hoping that something, anything, will work. We search frantically for information, though we are uncertain about what information will help us. We yell, or cry, or shut down, or run away. We may try each of these things, one after another. Our behavior becomes very unpredictable.

To express this in a different way, we become very creative. Our stress jolts us into extraordinary creativity. We generate a great variety of possible things to do, and we try them.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/09/26.html#a770; comments are here.

New pointers to ideas about change.

1. Mike Lee about Patterns for Introducing New Ideas into Organizations [via James Robertson]:

Over the weekend, while revisiting some citations on patterns, I landed on Mary Lynn Manns‘ and Linda Rising‘s Introducing New Ideas into Organizations, which is a web page of papers and resources on the patterns of practice they and many others used over several years to introduce the concept of patterns for software design in organizations. As you might imagine, any radically new way of thinking is a tough sell, and their collection of patterns (123 page PDF) for introducing patterns is really a comprehensive cookbook of tactics that can be used to sell any new technology-related ideas in an organization.

2. Dave Pollard summarises Places to Intervene in a System by Dana Meadows (in increasing order of power/difficulty):

• Change the Measurements & Formulas
• Change the Inventories and Flow Rates of Resources
• Regulate Negative Impacts and Vicious Cycles
• Sustain Virtous Cycles
• Provide New Information
• Change the Rules, or Who Makes and Enforces Them
• Create a New System That Makes the Old One Obsolete
• Change the Goals
• Change the Mindset
• Be open, yourself, to new ideas and ways of thinking

I liked both the summary and the original article that brought me back to my last year in university – reading Forrester and thinking about world in terms of leverage points. The following two pieces are from the article by Dana Meadows:

Folks who do systems analysis have a great belief in “leverage points.” These are places within a complex system (a corporation, an economy, a living body, a city, an ecosystem) where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything.

[at the end] I don’t think there are cheap tickets to system change. You have to work at it, whether that means rigorously analyzing a system or rigorously casting off paradigms. In the end, it seems that leverage has less to do with pushing levers than it does with disciplined thinking combined with strategically, profoundly, madly letting go.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/08/31.html#a733; comments are here.

Robert Paterson’s :

The paradox is that in a turbulent time, the greatest risk is in hanging onto what seems safe. The greatest safety – to reach into the unknown. This is surely not only true for each of us as individuals but also for organizations.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/08/12.html#a720; comments are here.

Volker Webers Quote of the Day [via Martin Roell]

It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.

— Charles Darwin, The Origin Of Species, 1859

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/08/04.html#a702; comments are here.