All in knowledge management
Clarke Ching has posted a chapter of his ever-in-beta book on Agile / TOC in software developmetnt. His comments ring true and remind me of things that Dave Snowden talks about frequently.
"Knowledge is a treasure chest and its keys are questioning." -Ibn Shihab
Collaboration is important to buisness, but it isn't the only thing. And it can't be forced by merely rearranging the deck chairs. Peter Vander Auwera gives me incentive to think about these things.
How can we take advantage of what Theory of Constraints teaches as well as bring in thinking from other disciplines to learn? Specifically, how do we learn from a single occurrence - an occurrence of something going awry? This was the question that Eli Schragenheim tried to answer in his talk this morning on "Learning from ONE event: A structured organizational learning process to inquire and learn the right lessons from a single event."
"We've just killed the buzzword of collaboration" is how Manager Tools close their recent podcast on the topic.
The Boston Globe, David Allen and Farhad Manjoo all have me thinking about personal productivity, and how to go about creating the necessary focus.
"Problem Solving Knowledge Transfer: An Expert's Perspective" by DeAnna Myers is a Capstone research report from Northwestern's Master in Learning and Organizational Change (where I was on faculty for a few years).
PEX Network has some useful thoughts on best practices and benchmarking. Best practices are only indicators of what you really want - results. Don't confuse the two.
Project management and knowledge management are about getting things done. I attended and spoke at the Center for Business Information (CBI) 6th Annual Forum on Knowledge Management this week in Philadelphia. Rather than talk about knowledge management directly, I opted to speak about managing projects - whether they are KM or other types.
We need to do a better job of helping our colleagues - and helping ourselves - see the whole picture when a change is at hand. What are people really trying to DO?
Thomas Friedman has noticed some differences in the way people think about collaboration and pulls on the dictionary for some assistance.
Some interesting quotes today: Metadata is the stuff you know. Data is the stuff you are looking for. -WeinbergerInformation is the answer to the question asked. -Goldratt
"The High-Velocity Edge" was given to the attendees at the Lean Software & Systems Conference this year, as Steven J. Spear was one of the keynote speakers. I enjoyed the book and have dog-eared pages and underlined throughout.
I just finished reading David Byrne's somewhat autobiographical research, How Music Works. I found Talking Heads and some of his other projects playing on the stereo much more frequently than usual.
Collaboration is all around us. But so too is active disengagement of people we might expect would want to collaborate. Tom Graves provides some thoughts about this through the metaphor of a kids' train set.
Thoughts inspired by a Clay Shirky keynote talk from 2003.
The 2012 World's MAKE has been announced with Apple as the overall winner.
Are there different types of communities? And does that suggest that we have to approach them differently in terms of community management?
If you hear someone say that their organization is great at collaboration, what behaviors do you expect to see? If they say they are struggling with collaboration, what behaviors are missing? What is happening instead? And then there is that last question - maybe this should be first - why is collaboration important to you?