Links that might be useful (will add a bit more after lunch :)

• Slide 3: See On definitions: personal perspective at work
• Slide 6: Personal information management activities, slightly modified from: Barreau, D. K. & Nardi, B. A. (1995). Finding and reminding: file organisation from the desktop. ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, 27(3), 39-43. doi:10.1145/221296.221307
  • For an in-depth introduction to personal information management see: Jones, W. (2008). Keeping found things found: The study and practice of personal information management. Elsevier.
• Slide 8: Key tasks of netWORK, “an ongoing process of keeping a personal network in a good repair”, from: Nardi, B., Whittaker, S., & Schwarz, H. (2002). NetWORKers and their activity in intensional networks. Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 11(1-2), 205-242. doi:10.1023/A:1015241914483
• Slide 9: See Knowledge work framework (PKM + tasks)

First a bit of a story. Last years were a great journey into a networked world – living and working “on the network”, emerging from social connections that defy structure and boundaries. I also saw quite a few people moving from working for an organisation to becoming self-employed networked professionals (last year at Elmine’s birthday party conference we discussed it as “working in the cloud“).

However, I also feel that the networked ways of working are somewhat idealised, often in contrast to organisations with their controls, hierarchies and lack of transparency. But, if you look deeper it’s often about an ecosystem, where networked professionals feed of the “old-fashioned” organisational structures (as an experiment you take a couple of your favourite social media consultants and check their client list :)

May be it’s my preferences for sitting on the boundary (and building bridges ;), but I find important to think not in terms of polarities between networks and organisations, but about synergies. Now I picked up a new way to call it - triangulation – from conversations with Nancy White on connections between organisations and learning that happens in networks. (Nancy promised to blog about it and I’ll make sure it’s linked from here).

What is funny that if I look back at what I was thinking about over the last few years I see interest in triangulation everywhere: integrating formal and informal learning (and earliest PhD proposal about it), playing with forces in a middlespace,  connections between communities and courses, bringing blogging into work or into integrating it into research…  At my PhD defense one of the questions was about “sitting on the fence” methodology-wise and not making an explicit choice between a “conventional PhD” and “blogging PhD”. Guess what – I talked why triangulating those is important :)

The Cynefin(pronounced /?k?n?v?n/) framework is a model used to describe problems, situations and systems. The model provides a taxonomy that guides what sort of explanations and/or solutions may apply. It was developed by David Snowden and his collaborators. Cynefin is a Welsh word, which is commonly translated into English as ‘habitat’ or ‘place’, although this fails to convey its full meaning.

We didn’t have that much time for the session, so we started from introducing complex systems, the Cynefin framework, safe-fail probes as an approach to deal with complex domains, and then did an exercise, mapping the issues that come from the evaluation of KM4Dev workshop to the framework.

While I really like Dave Snowden’s style of introducing the concepts, there is something in it that makes it more difficult to explain them in my own way. Probably the engagement of the stories that turns them into a memorable experience difficult to override… I still have to invent my own examples to talk about complex systems, so I took the birthday party story that Dave tells and turned it into a three-years old birthday party story, thinking of Alexander’s last birthday as I talked :)

If you want to dive deeper into what have been discussed you might want to check:

• Wikipedia on Cynefin framework
• Video A simple explanation of the Cynefin Framework by Shawn Callahan
• Publications (those two I find particularly useful, but they are not free; for more options see list of articles by Dave Snowden)
  • Snowden, D.J. & Boone, M. (2007). A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making. Harvard Business Review, November 2007, pp. 69-76. [free .pdf that is probably not supposed to be there]
  • Kurtz, C. F. & Snowden, D. J. (2003). The new dynamics of strategy: Sense-making in a complex and complicated world, IBM Systems Journal, 42 (3), p. 462.

If you are thinking about using the Cynefin framework in a group process it might be useful to start from reading descriptions of two methods – Butterfly Stamping and Cynefin contextualisation: Four tables. The last one also provides a list of forms that help to think of actions to address items in four domains:

• Action form for Simple domain
• Action form for Complicated domain
• Action form for Complex domain (see also Safe Fail Probes and Safe-fail probes and diffusion of innovations)
• Action form for Chaos domain

It didn’t really work that way: we drifted away from blogging as social reporting tool (I’m not surprised, but that’s a topic for another post) and couldn’t practice as some other groups since wifi didn’t want to collaborate. But we had great discussions on how to make blogging work and the potentials of blogging as a KM tool. I was also very happy that Nadejda Loumbeva joined part of the session and shared her blogging experiences, telling most of the things that I’d have to tell otherwise :)

Issues we have discussed (the discussions were pretty unstructured, this is my summary of it :)

• Advantages and disadvantages from personal and organisational perspectives, social reporting with a blog
• How-tos: how to find others, to become visible, to blog on multiple languages, to find time and motivation to sustain blogging over time
• Tech: platforms, possibilities that blog software provides, linking with other tools

Ideally I’d write a few coherent stories to address these issues, but it would take too long, so I’ll just drop some notes and links here. I’m likely to add links in next few days and I do plan to write proper blogposts on sustainable blogging and blogging in a context of social reporting somewhere soon.

****

As an introduction – parts from my PhD research that say most of what I was talking about in a condensed format:

• PhD conclusions in a thousand words: blogging practices of knowledge workers
• What pragmatists might want to know about blogging
• Facilitating adoption of weblogs in knowledge-intensive environments.

See also: page on blogs at KM4Dev wiki.

Why blogging? Blogs support visible individual trajectories

• blogs make personal expertise visible – it helps with finding relevant others and relation building
• blogs are individual rather than topic centered – they provide opportunities to cross topical boundaries and find unexpected ideas and people
• blogs make the process visible, so others can learn from it and can comment on work/thinking-in-progress

Ecosystem and visibility

• why?
  • most of the effects of blogging that people are talking about come from being part of a blogging ecosystem – relations between you and other bloggers and links between your weblog and other weblogs
  • relations grow with time, attention and interactions
  • linking to other weblogs (ideally to specific posts) is extremely important
• how do you get there?
  • find a couple of blogs (e.g. via blogsearch.google.com) and start reading them; follow links and you will discover more
  • comment! make sure comments are meaningful and leave link to your weblog
  • write good stuff
  • monitor who links to your blog (if your blog software doesn’t do it take this example and put your blog address after link: + subscribing to the results via newsreader makes life easier) and continue the conversation
  • connect your weblog to other tools (add link to email signature and social network profiles, add notifications about new blog posts on Twitter, etc.)

Multilingual blogging

• at least make sure that you provide an opportunity to see blogposts and to subscribe to newsfeeds on every specific language
• read Stephanie Booth on multilingual blogging (advanced: more on multilingual online and relevant plug-ins)

It’s always nice and strange to discover a network of people who do work and think on issues close to those of my own, but were pretty invisible from my perspective until now. Always a nice reminder that my worldviews are filtered by my own network and my usual practices. Glad I went beyond those.

I don’t have a coherent story about things I’m learning, so just bits:

• lots of development work involves funding that always flows in the same direction, creating all kinds of issues around power and taking responsibility
• what happend when the centralised funding runs out? how do we find a long-term intrinsic motivation and resources or a win-win situation within the network to make it sustainable?
• how centralised and decentralised processes could co-exist? how organisational and network structures can co-exist given that their dynamics and reward structures often contradict?
• newcomers moving from periphery to the center, taking responsibility – how do you facilitate the process when the practices in the center are implicitly negotiated?

I picked up the quote below a while ago, but was avoiding writing about it. May be I should just quote it:

Matthias Kaiserswerth on Leadership and Followership

When I look what makes a company or country, it is ultimately its people. It is not only the leaders who define strategy and prescribe execution – it is all of us who actually execute and work towards the strategic goals. When things don’t go as planned (i.e., wrong) it is an easy excuse to point to the leaders – but in reality it is each and everyone of us – we’re all responsible. If we follow bad orders, act against common sense and good morals, we’re just as guilty as the people who issued these orders.

It comes down to civil courage, taking personal responsibility and accepting the risk of doing so. If my employees live up to these ideals, I know my organization will work better and be more effective, than if they were just to follow orders without reflection.

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 :)

Nancy is traveling around Europe with a stopover in Enschede. If you are around you may want to join use for a coffee and a conversation on communities on Monday, October 5th, 10-11:30 at Novay (if you are coming, please let me know since I’ll have to pick you up at the reception).

I asked Nancy to talk about the book and introduce some of the instruments that could be used when working with communities (e.g. community orientation spidegram), but you can shape the rest, bringing coffee and your questions about communities and technologies to support them.

So, instead, I’ll make a list of themes and questions around communities (and being social online :) that I’m interested to explore (and then see if something of that clicks with others and what else emerges in the process):

• Communities – networks – individuals, practice and theory
  • how they relate to each other and flow into each other?
  • artefacts moving between those
  • the role of boundaries
• Multimembership
  • managing participation in different communities – reconciling identities, dealing with fragments, making choices when time is limited
  • accidental vs. intentional brokering
• Being digital
  • work-life balance for those who work and live online
  • face-to-face vs online: what do we actually miss when we don’t meet in person? what technology does well and what not?

Next to this I’m interested to learn from the workshop format and facilitation – I believe in learning by experiencing and would like to see how it works in this case (and then think how it might translate to other cases).

I came across Dave Snowden’s work on complexity and sense-making a while ago, played with some ideas, but didn’t have time to get into it properly. Doing the workshop was one of my post-PhD treats: while there are a lot of the materials online I wanted to have guided introduction to the theory and methods (and, of course, I also wanted to meet new people and to talk about something non-PhD related :)

Random comments about the experience (coloured by my experiences of living in the blogoshpere and doing qualitative research :)

• Overall I’m happy: working through the exercises resulted in concepts and principles sinking deep enough to start using them as a frame to think about the world. Working through the methods was extremely useful, although personally I’d prefer them to be applied on a slightly different selection of themes and cases.

• What I didn’t expect, but loved was an intro to complex facilitation (more), through the exercises, explicit discussion of the facilitator roles and multiple examples.

• I would like more theory. I knew that the course was more practice-oriented than before and that Dave wouldn’t be teaching it, but still… Between other things I missed an in-depth discussion on boundaries and attractors (in particularly as a managing tool).

• I glad that I decided to go for the (optional) third day focused on SenseMaker. While it doesn’t address my hopes of finding something that would help to make sense of an emergent space in an emergent way, it might be a pretty useful instrument to make sense of big volumes of qualitative data when modulators could be discovered beforehand (cryptic, I know :)

• And there is something that I can’t articulate quite well, some assumptions behind the stories told that give me some uneasy feelings:
  • it seems that most of the experiences with the methods come from from big organisations (industry and governmental), so translating them to constellations of smaller organisations or networks (e.g. NGO world) requires a bit of a stretch
  • the methods are primarily intended to be used as instruments to serve some “centre” outside of the system, not the actors in the system
  • (SenseMaker specific) bringing primarily “why this approach is better than surveys” argumentation rather than positioning it on the spectrum on qualitative/quantitative methods

• [Update] Almost forgot about the “network” side of the course: next to connecting to the participants there was an opportunity to meet local accredited practitioners and talk about their experiences in applying the methods. What I’m very curious to see now is how the network works beyond the course.

Things to think and follow-up:

• complex facilitation (incl. more on three facilitators approach); using Cynefin for matching facilitation style to the nature of the domain/audience
• abstracting via two-stage emergence
• safe-fail probes and adoption of innovation [blogged]
• tagging as complex vs. chaotic behaviour
• alternative “innovation” trajectories (in particular open source and “bubbling” in weblog ecosystems)
• boundaries and attractors (and more on managing “the cloud”)
• ASHEN model
• SenseMaker boundaries
• social network stimulation and social objects, role of rewards?