Innovators, imitators and idiots

Friday’s Finds:

friday2

“first come the innovators, then the imitators, then the idiots … you can set your watch to it.”@littleidea

“Sad. So many education questions now start with, “Do you know any apps for … ?” and nearly none with, ‘What outdoor games do you know … ?’” – @surreallyno

“Ninety percent of what we call ‘management’ consists of making it difficult for people to get things done.” – Peter Drucker – via @davidgurteen

serendipity: let’s talk numbers – via @jhagel

For example, my research found that, on average, people made up one third of the participants (the nodes illustrated by person thumbnails in the networks illustrated above) of a serendipity story, where the remaining participants were deemed to be either information or physical objects. This is practical information of potential value to a designer of a serendipity system: if, say, ten participants are somehow simulated, engineered or factored into a system, then it might be a useful starting point, although by no means any guarantee for serendipity—remember that control is too simplistic a concept—to allow or arrange for around three of these participants to be people.

Social enterprise tools: an industry in denial? via @sheynkman

Teens have problems like pregnancy, truancy, drug use, low grades. They also use Facebook. If I were to suggest that I can solve these problems by creating a Facebook page, I’d be rightfully laughed at.

Yet this is often the sales tactics in my industry: five bucks a month per employee and all or most of those pesky problems with productivity and barriers to collaboration magically go away. It may increase sales, but this strategy all but guarantees a blowback in the future.

From “unemployed” to unworking – via @tiacarr

“Jobs” are a product of industrial society, those typified by economic growth. However, as economic growth becomes untenable and businesses continually streamline their processes through automation, society is left with deep structural unemployment and wealth inequality. More people find themselves with less disposable income and so they consume less and have lower social mobility.

“Networked minds” require a fundamentally new kind of economics – via @eprenen

Networked minds create a cooperative human species

“This has fundamental implications for the way, economic theories should look like,” underlines Professor Helbing. Most of today’s economic knowledge is for the “homo economicus”, but people wonder whether that theory really applies. A comparable body of work for the “homo socialis” still needs to be written.

“While the “homo economicus” optimizes its utility independently, the “homo socialis” puts himself or herself into the shoes of others to consider their interests as well,” explains Grund, and Helbing adds: “This establishes something like “networked minds”. Everyone’s decisions depend on the preferences of others.” This becomes even more important in our networked world.

Have you mapped your network? Here’s some methods and tools – by @kanter

network mapping by beth kanter

All models are wrong

friday2Friday’s Finds:

“Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful.”George Box [1919-2013] passed away today – @fhuszar

“The true test of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald – via @goonth

“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” ~ T.S. Eliot – via @ethnobot

“Managers complain that employees do not think outside the box, but it is the management system…that keeps them firmly inside.” ~M.Addleson – via @janhoglund

Innovation Teams Don’t Work – via @petervan

The companies that are the most successful at maintaining cultures of innovation understand that sometimes – nay, many times – innovations fail. Those companies accept the risk of that failure and have a culture that allows for failures and encourages risk taking.

Public good or playing markets? The real reason for MOOCs – via @ShaunCoffey

In fact, though the MOOCs clearly have a potential to grow immensely, these figures are strikingly similar to what was achieved during the last wave of e-learning euphoria in the early 2000s.

Been here before

During this earlier wave, all of the US investment banks in the late 1990s and early 2000s extended the hype cycle from the adventures of dot.com companies directly into e-learning start-ups.

Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America Securities, Hambrecht and Co, Sun Trust, and many others relentlessly spruiked the e-learning industry as destined for fabulous growth trajectories and mouth-watering revenue streams.

Making sense of complexity and innovation

Friday’s Finds:

friday2Gall’s Law: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system. – John Gall

@euan : “My discomfort with case studies is the inclination to force things to make sense in retrospect when they didn’t in advance!”

@Cory_Foy“Innovation comes from slack. Slack comes from saying no. If you’re afraid of both, no startup bubble technique is going to help you.”

Deconstructing Innovation: a complex concept made simple; by @ShaunCoffey

So it is important to understand that there is no one-size-fits-all philosophy in terms of successful innovation. The one constant is that you have to be open to change and new points of view. Innovation is continuous.

Successful innovators and entrepreneurs all embrace change and the risks that they pose. In fact, innovation is the poster child of the mantra that there are no rules. Only by trying out new things, by failing, by discovering what works and what doesn’t, do you gain answers to the innovation question.

Knowledge Leadership in the Era of Convergence -via @JonHusband

In an environment where speed, access, and tools allow workers to seamlessly collaborate across time zones, store massive amounts of data, and crowdsource the answers to difficult organizational issues, organizations that trend toward openness in the knowledge management arena will be better able to use new technologies and react to cultural and business changes. This makes leaders responsible for developing an open, collaborative culture, and suggests that inspiring these attitudes toward knowledge management will have positive individual and organizational consequences.

Friday’s Finds #189

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via social media during the past fortnight. My Friday’s Finds are a collection of what I have found of interest but have not blogged about. I have been curating these collections for several years, this one is the 189th.

“If I were unemployed, I would spend my non-job hunting time learning to code. It’s a skill that can be applied in just about any field.”Nedra Weinreich

I think the reward for conformity is that everyone likes you except yourself.” – Rita Mae Brown, via Marcia Conner

O’Reilly Radar: GitHub gains new prominence as the use of open source within governments grows. via JP Rangaswami

When it comes to government IT in 2013, GitHub may have surpassed Twitter and Facebook as the most interesting social network.

The Atlantic: Young people are desperate for learning that is relevant … without it all being mapped for them in advance

It is no wonder my daughter wants to mess around with the guitar and the Internet and pursue some interests at a pace that doesn’t feel like the relentlessly scheduled pressure of school and structured activities. For her, the Internet has been a lifeline for self-directed learning and connection to peers. In our research, we found that parents more often than not have a negative view of the role of the Internet in learning, but young people almost always have a positive one.

Three reasons to keep the name with the knowledge – “personal” knowledge management for organizations, by Nick Milton

When you’re publishing knowledge,there are three main reasons why it’s important to keep the name of the originator attached to the piece of knowledge. Whether it is a blog post, a lesson in a database, a contribution in a call centre knowledge base, or a couple of paragraphs in a Knowledge asset,  it is important tokeep the name with the knowledge.

HBR: How WordPress Thrives with a 100% Remote Workforce. via Florence Dujardin

Not all remote work is the same. To evaluate remote work as a singular idea is a paper tiger. There are many policies to choose from and those choices matter. Managers of remote workers at older companies need to make adjustments to enable remote workers to thrive, especially during a trial period when everyone is experimenting and learning what will work for them. But to try remote work without making any allowances or adjustments is foolish. Any progressive idea can be made to fail if the people in charge don’t support it.

The best ever review of standing desks why and what to buy from Wirecutter. via Robert Paterson. Here is my new standing desk :)

harold jarche standing desk

Yes, Virginia, the world is going crazy

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via social media during the past two weeks.

And now for something completely different [for my long-time readers]:

Pertussis epidemic: How Vermont’s anti-vaxxer activists stopped a vaccine bill” via @nahumg

Schools and homes are where disease spreads. And in Vermont, [Doctor] Till says there are “pockets of unimmunized” posing a threat to their communities, especially in the “hot spots of anti-vaccination.” One such hot spot lies outside the capital, Montpelier. “These young parents were born in the vaccine era and have not seen devastating diseases,” he says. Till says these parents are “picking and choosing which vaccines they give to their children.” One of the vaccines these parents are most often choosing not to give their children is against polio.

“I feel so sorry for the public.” Former chief scientist, Frito-Lay on industry’s deliberate contribution to obesity – via @TimOReilly

The public and the food companies have known for decades now — or at the very least since this meeting — that sugary, salty, fatty foods are not good for us in the quantities that we consume them. So why are the diabetes and obesity and hypertension numbers still spiraling out of control? It’s not just a matter of poor willpower on the part of the consumer and a give-the-people-what-they-want attitude on the part of the food manufacturers. What I found, over four years of research and reporting, was a conscious effort — taking place in labs and marketing meetings and grocery-store aisles — to get people hooked on foods that are convenient and inexpensive. I talked to more than 300 people in or formerly employed by the processed-food industry, from scientists to marketers to C.E.O.’s. Some were willing whistle-blowers, while others spoke reluctantly when presented with some of the thousands of pages of secret memos that I obtained from inside the food industry’s operations. What follows is a series of small case studies of a handful of characters whose work then, and perspective now, sheds light on how the foods are created and sold to people who, while not powerless, are extremely vulnerable to the intensity of these companies’ industrial formulations and selling campaigns.

Court of Appeal seems to ban Bayesian probability (and Sherlock Holmes) – via @undunc

… when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth
(Sherlock Holmes in The Sign of the Four, ch. 6, 1890)

In a recent judgement the English Court of Appeal has not only rejected the Sherlock Holmes doctrine shown above, but also denied that probability can be used as an expression of uncertainty for events that have either happened or not.

US Dept of Justice DOJ Admits It Had To Put Aaron Swartz In Jail To Save Face Over The Arrest - via @wikileaks

Apparently the DOJ thought it was a reason to throw the book at Swartz, even if he hadn’t actually made any such works available.

The “Manifesto,” Justice Department representatives told congressional staffers, demonstrated Swartz’s malicious intent in downloading documents on a massive scale.

Some may agree with that, but it seems like a jump towards “thoughtcrime” since he hadn’t actually made any move towards making the JSTOR data available. It’s possible that he planned to only make the public domain works (of which there are many) available. It’s also possible he planned to leak the whole thing. But, really, you would think that there should be a bit more evidence of that before prosecutors throw the book at him.

More importantly, it suggests that Swartz was arrested and prosecuted for expressing his opinion on how to solve a particular problem. You may or may not agree with it, but I thought the US was supposed to be a place where we were free to express ideas. There’s even some famous part of our Constitution about that…

Finally, on a lighter note:

@Cmdr_Hadfield we found your space to-do list! Just one item left.” @davyay

to do list

 

Notes on learning and working today

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via social media during the past two weeks.

The Value of Personal Knowledge Management (PKM):

@LucGaloppin – “If we’d look at digital communities as a life insurance for our own learning, exactly how would that influence our participation?

@NielsPflaeging – “Learning is that process that continuously makes you think: How could I have been so dumb 14 days ago?

@DavidGurteen – “PKM is actually what KM is really all about.

Our Work Structures:

10 years of lying up the hierarchy – via @PeterVan

We should have taken our managers, chief executives, politicians, civil servants and funders to see what was actually going on. We should have persuaded them to sit on council receptions for days at a time, to listen to hours of phone calls from the public and to understand service users in their own contexts. Only then would they begin to understand the true performance of the organisation. Performance officers do not need to spend whole days tinkering with text and formatting reports, mediating reality into something palatable. There is no need for an expensive bureaucracy between the decision makers and the truth.  Confronting the brutal facts is free.

What does a ‘No Fire’ policy change? Everything. – via @StoweBoyd

Probably the biggest impact was the effectiveness of performance evaluations. Development discussions were usually wrought with skepticism from the employee standpoint — are you really trying to help me or just documenting material to potentially fire me? Since getting fired wasn’t an option, everyone became more open to talk about their real problems. Performance evaluations became what it was always intented for – development discussions, open, honest and often real and raw conversations on what people are struggling with. Since people could voice real concerns at work, they left those toxins there and didn’t take them home with them. Home life improved as well. – Charlie Kim

The Guardian: Increasingly, corporations and politicians treat the poor with distrust. 

Inside Amazon’s flagship factory in Rugeley, Staffordshire, a new way of working is evolving. There is a strong topnote of distrust, evinced by the full-body scanners that workers have to pass, every time they leave, to prove they haven’t stolen anything. The profound insecurity built into the employment model is dressed up as discipline – which is to say, Amazon expects huge seasonal fluctuations in the number of people it needs, yet likes to mask their dismissals behind a misdeameanour, so a lot of people get axed for crimes like being ill. There’s a lifesized blonde lady made of cardboard at the entrance, with a think bubble coming out of her head that says, “This is the best job I’ve ever had!” If that detail alone is enough to make your blood run cold, marry it to the testimony of the chairman of nearby Lea Hall Miners Welfare Centre and Social Club: “The feedback we’re getting is that it’s like being in a slave camp.”

company hierarchy

Global Guerrillas: Life in a Networked Age

So, what’s going to replace bureaucracy and markets?

We don’t have digestible names for them yet.  However, let’s just call them few to many (F2M) systems and P2P systems.   F2M systems are run by a few people and delivered to a great many people.  In contrast to broadcast, these systems are interactive and smart.  Many use software bots to gather and process data 24/7.

P2P systems allow ad hoc interaction between indepedent individuals.  Every node in this type of system is an equal to any other.  They are not dependent on each other.

Both types of systems have value.  Both have problems.  Both are immature.  As we move to an information based global economy, we’ll see these systems increasingly dominate the playing field (to the detriment of bureaucracy and markets).

Jobs and work

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via social media during the past two weeks. [Note: It seems that if you look in enough places, certain patterns begin to emerge.]

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers. -Thomas Pynchon.” via @johnsonwhitney

Bert van Lamoen (@transarchitect) “If the old rules are left in place there are no new behaviors and the new model fails and nothing changes.

Hugh MacLeod (@gapingvoid) – “The rush hour @starbucks crowd has this nice bourgeois desperation about them …”

TechCrunch: America has hit peak jobs – via @sardire

Paul Kedrosky recently wrote a terrific essay about what I call cultural technical debt, i.e. “organizations or technologies that persist, largely for historical reasons, not because they remain the best solution to the problem for which they were created. They are often obstacles to much better solutions.” Well, the notion that ‘jobs are how the rewards of our society are distributed, and every decent human being should have a job’ is becoming cultural technical debt.

If it’s not solved, then in the coming decades you can expect a self-perpetuating privileged elite to accrue more and more of the wealth generated by software and robots, telling themselves that they’re carrying the entire world on their backs, Ayn Rand heroes come to life, while all the lazy jobless “takers” live off the fruits of their labor. Meanwhile, as the unemployed masses grow ever more frustrated and resentful, the Occupy protests will be a mere candle flame next to the conflagrations to come.

Disposable worker syndrome is killing us - by @michelemmartin

In the past, through this blog, I’ve focused on how we as individuals need to keep renewing and recycling ourselves through a process of lifelong learning and adapting to change. I still believe this is true. But I also believe that, through our institutions, we are doing great spiritual and emotional damage to ourselves by consistently communicating to people that they are disposable and that they are on their own in the process of recycling and renewing.

To torture my metaphor, we are treating people like garbage–throwing them into landfills and just letting them waste away there. We are doing nothing to provide them with the structures and resources and emotional supports that would help them go through that renewal process.

NYT: The Rise of the Permanent Temp Economy – via @jerrymichalski

The temp industry’s continued growth even in a boom economy was a testament to its success in helping to forge a new cultural consensus about work and workers. Its model of expendable labor became so entrenched, in fact, that it became “common sense,” leaching into nearly every sector of the economy and allowing the newly renamed “staffing industry” to become sought-after experts on employment and work force development. Outsourcing, insourcing, offshoring and many other hallmarks of the global economy (including the use of “adjuncts” in academia, my own corner of the world) owe no small debt to the ideas developed by the temp industry in the last half-century.

Being paid for a task decreases intrinsic motivation (PDF)Edward Deci’s original experiment from 1971 – via @dougald

It appears that money – perhaps because of its connotation and use in our culture – may act as a stimulus which leads the subject to a cognitive reevaluation of the activity from one which is intrinsically motivated to one which is motivated primarily by the expectation of financial rewards. In short, money may work to “buy off” one’s intrinsic motivation for an activity. And this decreased motivation appears (from the results of the field experiment) to be more than just a temporary phenomenon.

The Guardian: Payment by Results – via @JohnQShift

Payment by results is a simple idea: people and organisations should only get paid for what they deliver. Who could argue with that? If your job is to get people back to work, then find them a job dammit … and they make people lie …

… This lying takes all sorts of different forms. Some of them are subtle forms of deception: teachers who teach to the test or who only enter pupils for exams they know they are going to pass; employment support that helps only those likely to get a job and ignores those most in need; or hospitals that reclassify trolleys as beds, and keep people waiting in ambulances on the hospital doorstep until they know they can be seen within a target time. In the literature, this is known as gaming the system.

Does your company culture compare even remotely to this? (Netflix)

Question everything

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via social media during the past week or two.

@paulbogush : “Needing to motivate a student is equivalent to jump starting a car. If you have to do it every day, something is wrong.” via @surreallyno

The Atlantic: The End of Labor: How to protect workers from the rise of robots – via @RichardFlorida

The big question is: What do we do if and when our old mechanisms for coping with inequality break down? If the “endowment of human capital” with which people are born gets less and less valuable, we’ll get closer and closer to that Econ 101 example of a world in which the capital owners get everything. A society with cheap robot labor would be an incredibly prosperous one, but we will need to find some way for the vast majority of human beings to share in that prosperity, or we risk the kinds of dystopian outcomes that now exist only in science fiction.

Hacker in Residence – by @robpatrob

A tiny Trojan Mouse, such as Andy Carvin at NPR, Euan Semple or Peter Rukavina, can make a huge difference and move the entire organization.  Tiny new things that contain the seeds of change.

If I was a CEO and wanted to create value from Big Data or from Social Media, I would set up a small office that reported to me and look for my own hacker in residence to be the agent and chief hacker. I would let them have a lot of space and time to discover things and I would give them access to everyone and to everything.

If I was the CEO of a big data firm or a firm that offered Enterprise Social Media, I would have a stable of such hackers and I would lend them out on yearly terms to my clients.

@DonaldClark : Failure led, spaced practice is better than training

Over nine months, 500 people in Booz Allen were initially given three types of training:

1.       Placebo
2.       Page-turning
3.       Interactive

All three groups were then given surprise:
Three simulated phishing emails with remedial help if they failed i.e. spaced practice, learn through failure exercises.
>Based on actual simulated attacks, they discovered no significant difference between training and no training!

Pursuit of Everything: Question everything. Be deliberate. Sojourn beyond the boundaries. - via @boydjane

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element of democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country…’We are governed. Our minds are moulded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of’.” - Edward Bernays (1928)

Start the new year hacking

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via social media during the past week or two.

Christian Wiman: “At some point you have to believe that the inadequacies of words you use will be transcended by the faith with which you use them.” – via @JohnnieMoore

The Icarus Deception: “if you blame your lack of job prospects on the tepid demand for hardworking, competent, but replaceable workers, you haven’t told us anything we didn’t already know.” via @RichardMerrick

Stupid Management Tools, by Niels Pflaeging @BetaLeaders

#787 - Standardized job titles and salary ranges – produce pseudo-objectivity & transfer power to HR bureaucrats

#788 - Competence and Development Planning – unavoidably lead to behavioral control, another HR folly

#789 – Development Programs – If personal growth isn’t fostered, your organizational model is broken. HR plans don’t fix that

#790 – Employee Ranking and Classifying, e.g. ABC-style: it’s reductionist, context-free, unfair, self-fulfilling

Given tablets but no teachers, Ethiopian children teach themselves – #hacking – via @zecool

Elaborating later on Negroponte’s hacking comment, Ed McNierney, OLPC’s chief technology officer, said that the kids had gotten around OLPC’s effort to freeze desktop settings. “The kids had completely customized the desktop—so every kids’ tablet looked different.  We had installed software to prevent them from doing that,” McNierney said. “And the fact they worked around it was clearly the kind of creativity, the kind of inquiry, the kind of discovery that we think is essential to learning.”

Design Is Hacking How We Learn - learning in action in a very different way – via @C4LPT & @CharlesJennings

Friday’s Finds 183

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via social media during the past week.

Leadership: To survive a shock to the system, become an unplanned organization - by @rbgayle

We see this again and again throughout history, as well as in our most entrepreneurial companies: the person who is best suited for dealing with one sort of shock (war, raising capital) is seldom the best for dealing with another shock (peace, shareholders, etc.) Since we cannot know what shocks are in store, nor what is really fragile in an organization, a robust solution to a world of shocks is to create a group of diverse and somewhat redundant talents with leadership dispersed in a way to allow the right talent to rise up when a particular shock hits the system.

Compounding Intelligence: learning social skills leads to better decision making – by @quinnovator

The point being that learning social skills, using good meeting processes, and emphasizing diversity, all actions similar to those needed for effective learning organizations, lead to better decision making. If you want good decisions, you need to break down hierarchies, open up the conversation channels, and listen.  We have good science about practices that lead to effective outcomes for organizations.

“microblogging is the closest we have to human conversation” – by @RossDawson

One of my most consistent messages is that high-performance organizations are increasingly driven by the quality of their networks. Microblogs, through their ease of participation and the breadth of their visibility, are excellent facilitators of organizational networks. Staff can easily get a better sense of activities, capabilities, and personalities across the firm. After 15 years of ‘expertise location’ being on the agenda, microblogs are proving to be one of the simplest and best ways to find the relevant expertise in the organization to address a problem or opportunity.

BBC News – Nokia decline sparks Finnish start-up boom – via @tar1na

Miki Kuusi of Start-Up Sauna – a non-profit programme that coaches entrepreneurs before connecting them with investors – likens Nokia to a big tree in a very small forest.

“Now that Nokia is doing worse the ecosystem around it is developing,” he says.

“Some people even say that the current downfall of Nokia is the best thing that’s happened to this country because it’s challenged us to come up with new ways to have a foundation for our welfare.”