Learning before Igloo-building

With a few weather-enforced extra days holiday last week, I persuaded my daughters to help me fulfil a childhood ambition and make an igloo.  It took a lot longer than I thought (about 4 hours!),  and the pretence that this was “Dad helping them” began to slip after a while as and my co-labourers needed a hot chocolate break or two along the way.

Not the classical dome shape, I admit, but hey – it lasted the night before an impromptu window appeared the following morning, quickly followed by total collapse.

You would think that after 41 years waiting for that perfect snow, I would have known exactly how to make an igloo. But I didn’t.

I improvised with Tupperware boxes to make my bricks, learned as I went, and bullied/bribed my daughters to hold up the walls when we got to the tricky bits. Getting the final block in the roof was an act of sheer desperation and good fortune!

There is no shortage of material, videos and step-by-step instructions on the web (my wife enjoyed pointing this out) – but I just wanted to get out there with my brick-making and build.  If I’d bothered to look at the excellent 60-year-old video, then I would have known that the whole thing is built as a self-supporting spiral, and that after my first layer of snow bricks, I should have cut a long incline up the wall to create the beginning of my spiral.
Still, never mind.  We were never going to live in it – and after all, with the weather in South East England, thawing rain was never going to be far away.  And it was a lot of fun for all of us!

It did get me thinking though.  How often in an organisational situation do we get carried away with misplaced self-belief, a little (but not enough) knowledge, a little too much ego and  an eager desire to just roll up our sleeves and get on with it – and create something that looks roughly right, but doesn’t withstand the test of time.
How often is it that we deliver a result which could have been better – not because we lacked access to the knowledge, or the time to find it –  but because we actually wanted to get out there and try it our own way – because we’ve always wanted to?

 

Target Practice

Urinals.  Do you spend much time looking at them?

This is just a guess, but for half of you, I’m assuming that the answer is “no”.  The other half of you are wondering where I’m going with this line of enquiry.

 If you have had the pleasure of using the urinals at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, you will have noticed that each one is embellished with a lifelike image of a fly, under the glaze – just near the drain.  Initially I dismissed this as merely an example of quirky humour from a Dutch sanitary-ware manufacturer, but I was too hasty. Apparently, since incorporating the fly into their urinals, airports and other public places have noticed a decrease in the amount of cleaning required. Some of these have improved to the extent that they have saved money by reducing the number of cleaning shifts.    If you haven’t figured out the link between the fly and the cost reduction, ask any small boy!

All of this got me thinking about how on-target we are in the way we exchange knowledge, good practices, worst practices and stories.  Despite our best efforts, do people sometimes miss the mark when it comes to knowledge exchange? 

As knowledge professionals, we work hard to use processes and social technologies to bring people together collaboratively.  On some precious occasions, we get to design and facilitate face-to-face knowledge-sharing events.  Occasionally, we even get to work on leadership behaviours and organisational design. 

In all of these worthy activities, we sometimes forget that knowledge management can also help groups of people to agree upon and describe their practices – and hence connect and share more efficiently because they have negotiated a common language.

Here’s an illustration.  In KM circles, we have talked for years about the value of nurturing communities of practice, and rightly so.  However, if we were to turn our “Community of Practice toolkits” out onto the table, the majority of our tools play into the notion of Community: role descriptions and training programmes for leaders and facilitators, templates for community charters, designs for launch events, no end of technology options for social collaboration and document management.

But what about the Practice bit?  Do we have anything in our toolkits to offer groups of professionals who want to agree upon “what’s important” and describe “what good looks like”?  Yes, we can provide wikis where people can discuss and build glossaries, definitions and reference material, but that’s a platform, rather than a process.

I’m advocating that as Knowledge Management professionals, we should be able to offer any group a simple process for describing their practices qualitatively, thereby enhancing their knowledge-sharing.   That could involve the creation of a self-assessment tool (maturity model) – or perhaps a knowledge asset which helps others to navigate through a distillation of past learning, current good practice, examples and key contacts. 

That’s more than installing a wiki, a Drupal community or a set of SharePoint libraries.  It requires  us to roll up our sleeves and engage with the subject  experts and practitioners.  It involves us in helping them to agree and describe their practice in an accessible way.  By helping them to produce a common model of the practices which make up their functional area, they will be able to target their knowledge-sharing far more precisely, and hence get more value from KM tools and techniques.

Or to put it another way – if our knowledge workers have something more clearly defined to aim at, then we’ll have to spend less time clearing up after them.

 First Published in the October Edition of Inside Knowledge

 

No More Consultants. We know more than we think.

At last!  After over a year of blood sweat and tears, a small forest of paper,  a well-used box.net collaboration space and far too many late night emails, Geoff Parcell and I have written another book together.

To the alarm of my wife and children, not to mention my mortgage lender,  this one is entitled “No More Consultants.  We know more than we think.”

So are we really saying that there is no need for consultants?

Jon Theuerkauf, MD at Credit Suisse answers that question perfectly for me in his endorsement on the back of the book:

“Look, of course we need outside input, if not we might as be staring at our belly-buttons.  The point that is being made in No More Consultants is companies spend pennies in mining their own internal knowledge and expertise compared to the multi-millions spent on going outside first!  How does that make any sense or cents?”

And that’s exactly it.   We really do know more than we think.  But we don’t think enough.  Geoff and I wrote the book to guide organisations towards making smarter, more purposeful, more targeted use of consultants.  After all, nobody ever got fired for hiring <<insert your favourite management consultancy here>>.   That might be true – but a whole lot of your staff might have become disenfranchised.  The same staff, who (after the glossy PowerPoint presentation has been delivered, and that large invoice has been submitted) will be expected to help implement the recommendations.  Recommendations which perhaps they could have come up with themselves.

If only they’d been asked.

As Jon so neatly puts it.  How does that make any sense or cents?

Hope you enjoy the video. And the book. And the Ning Community!

 

The heAARt of the Learning Hospital…

I had the opportunity to visit University College London Hospital (UCLH) last week (but not as a patient!). 

Two years ago I blogged about their visions to become University College Learning Hospital, and the efforts that they were making to introduce  After Action Reviews into the culture of the Hospital.  Two years later, they have developed their Learning Hospital – an environment where full simulations  – administrative, board meetings, clinical situations  – could be carried out with actors.

This very real experience is then the basis for staff to conduct after action reviews, to be videoed, review and discuss with their colleagues, together with the Learning Hospital expert staff.  So far, 400 staff have become “AAR Conductors”, carrying out reviews in a variety of situations.

I was struck by the sheer quality of the Learning Hospital and also their innovative marketing approach.  I liked the take-off of “being John Malkovich”,  in which a selection of AAR Conductors had their fifteen minutes of fame.

It’s a real credit to Steve Andrews and Professor Aidan Halligan – and I’m not doing them justice in such a short blog.  I’ll  write  a more considered piece with them and post it in the future…

Of all the marketing posters though, I loved the IKEA After Action Review instructions the most – perhaps because I could identify with them so well!

Inspired, Steve!   The US Army would be proud of you!

 

Chimps, Grapes and the cultural power of social learning

Came across this article on the BBC website today. 

Interesting to read the interpretation that power of “social learning” in the chimp community is so strong that  the chimps stopped innovating and adapting, and complied with “what they had learned” – however inappropriate and suboptimal that approach was.

Now we can all smile at the chimps with their sticks and grapes – but I can see some parallels here with how culture develops in organisations, and what we learned once about something which works, left unchallenged becomes a barrier to future adaptation. Which in turn, is why I have such a struggle with the term “best practice”.

Reminds me of the old apes, the banana and the water spray story.

Here’s the BBC article:

Copycat chimps build their own tools after watching video demonstrations.

During a study, the animals were shown footage of a trained chimp combining two components to construct a tool that enabled it to reach a food reward.

When given the same two components, the chimps made their own tools and used them to drag over a tasty treat.

Reporting in the Royal Society journal Proceedings B, scientists say this demonstrates what a “potent effect” social learning has in the primates.

Elizabeth Price, from the University of St Andrews in Scotland, led the research.

“With video, we can control exactly how much information the animals see, so we can understand exactly how much information they need to work out how to do the task,” she explained.

This type of behaviour is very rare in the wild Elizabeth Price St Andrews University

Dr Price and her colleagues put the chimps into five groups during the test.

One of the groups was shown the whole demonstration – where a chimp was handed a rod and a tube that it slotted together. The demonstrator then used this longer composite tool to retrieve a grape from a platform outside its cage.

The other groups were shown progressively less information – with one group just shown the chimp eating its grape.

The researchers then recreated the set-up for the subjects.

They placed a grape on a platform against the outside of each chimp’s cage, and handed the animals a rod and a plastic tube.

“Those chimps that saw the full demonstration learned better how to construct the necessary tool (to reach the food),” Dr Price told BBC News.

“The fact that they can learn how to build a better tool for a particular task is very exciting. This type of behaviour is very rare in the wild, and it’s an essential part of human tool use.”

Watch and learn

“A handful of the chimps that weren’t shown the full demonstration learned how to make the tool on their own,” said Dr Price.

Chimpanzees usually modify sticks by stripping them of their leaves

“What was interesting about this group was that, when we presented them with the grape at different distances from the cage, they made the appropriate tool to reach it.”

Rather than faithfully copy the demonstration, these animals switched between using the unmodified tube or rod, and using the combined tool, depending on how far away the grape was.

“Those that had been shown the full demonstration, and had socially learned to make the longer tool, continued to make it even when the grape was so close that it was more awkward to use,” said Dr Price.

“It could be that social learning is such a strong force for the chimps that they apply a blanket rule of ‘go with what you’ve seen’ (rather than work out what’s most appropriate for the task).”

The team is now planning to carry out the same test in young children to find out how much they rely on social learning.

What the team still do not know why this type of tool-building is not seen more commonly in the wild.

“We’ve shown that they’re clever enough, so there must be something else at play,” said Dr Price.

“It may be that when chimpanzees reach an age at which they are… capable of performing these higher level techniques, they may be too old to have access to sufficiently tolerant demonstrators.”

 

Overlapping Social Circles

I came across this image by Joe Pemberton in Flickr the other day.  It (and the discussion attached to it) sums up my predicament of the blurring of boundaries between public and private social networks.

 

This is some thinking I’ve been doing lately about the ecosystem of social networks and the problem of managing it all and of keeping the personal separate from the professional.

Some overlap will happen in social networks but maintaining boundaries helps you keep professional contacts eyes off of your private matters, your personal goings on, your family status, your childrens’ accomplishments, etc.

[DOTTED AREA]
Public. Your personal brand awareness happens here. Create digital acquaintances. Network. Be a person, but be sure to balance out your travelogue with your sharing of insights.

[CYAN]
Professional. Limited to people you‘ve worked with. Don’t dilute this network with digital acquaintances.

[ORANGE]
Keep these limited to friends and family. These are not professional networking tools. Avoid the urge to accept every friend request. Do you really want to connect with old high school acquaintances?

[MAGENTA]
Keep these close; limited to people you hang with. Old high school buddies and people you met at conferences don’t need this layer of your digital life.

This is not a prescription for others but is pretty much a diagram of my own social network. And yes, as lame as it sounds, that’s how I have to view it, as a brand exercise. After all, careers have become brand management of your personal expertise, experience, insights and beliefs.

 As one of Joe’s Flickr respondents said,   “I have a real concern with recent professional contacts having access to some of my oldest goofiest friends”.  

But the prospect of “de-friending” a number of professional contacts out of Facebook seems pretty tough too. 

And then there are the true boundary people – the professional contacts who have become friends.  What have I got myself into!?

It’s probably far too late. 

 Perhaps it’s just a fact of life 2.0 that we have to live with?   Transparency. Trust. Thinking our loud.  

And getting comfortable that that the rest of my social-media life will feel like my big four-o birthday party would have done last year, had I had the bottle to have one that is…  and  mix family, friends, colleagues, schoolmates and clients in with alcohol for several hours! 

Perhaps I’ll save that for my 50th.  By then someone will have figured out the social media boundaries of politesse…

 

A minor case of Corporate Amnesia. US forgets how to make Trident missiles…

Came across this story via Twitter (@davidgurteen) RT KerrieAnnes Blog, via Slashdot…

I wonder how many other fogbanks we’ll look back on in a few years time, as a consequence of the current financial crisis?  Still, I guess all that investment in re-learning and re-inventing will provide the global economy with a much needed boost…

US FORGETS HOW TO MAKE TRIDENT MISSILES.

I was incredulous and had always assumed  that military types save lots of records … in the last year we had been issued with my father’s World War II Australian Army service records. And thinking back to TV shows like Cold Case and documentaries on the 1919 Influenza Pandemic tends to lull you into a belief that the USA has enormous records repositories with nothing thrown away.

The story was released to Slashdot by Hugh Pickens on March 9 2009 and within a day was  relayed across over 500 web pages globally presumably via RSS feeds and blog following.  The situation is astonishing – and indicates the cost of not maintaining good archives … it was hard to believe – but then more conventional news sites were also running the story, including Fox News on March 9 2009 . Within 3 days the 500 web pages had to grown to over 1500 covering the story. In fact initially the story seemed to be just a beat-up & re-run of a  New Scientist story covered a year earlier in its March 8 2008 issue and the UK’s Guardian also on March 6 2008. However those aspects did not seem to feature in the US Congressional Defense FY 2009 Expenditure Hearings transcripts.

Hugh Pickens  wrote “The US and the UK are trying to refurbish the aging W76 warheads that tip Trident missiles to prolong their life and ensure they are safe and reliable but plans have been put on hold because US scientists have forgotten how to manufacture a mysterious but very hazardous component of the warhead codenamed Fogbank.

 ’NNSA had lost knowledge of how to manufacture the material because it had kept few records of the process when the material was made in the 1980s, and almost all staff with expertise on production had retired or left the agency,’ says the report by a US congressional committee.

Fogbank is thought by some weapons experts to be a foam used between the fission and fusion stages of the thermonuclear bomb on the Trident Missile and US officials say that manufacturing Fogbank requires a solvent cleaning agent which is ‘extremely flammable’ and ‘explosive,’ and that the process involves dealing with ‘toxic materials’ hazardous to workers. ‘

This is like James Bond destroying his instructions as soon as he has read them,’ says John Ainslie, the co-ordinator of the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, adding that ‘perhaps the plans for making Fogbank were so secret that no copies were kept.’ Thomas D’Agostino, administrator or the US National Nuclear Security Administration, told a congressional committee that the administration was spending ‘a lot of money’ trying to make ‘Fogbank’ at Y-12, but ‘we’re not out of the woods yet.’”

And it might have all seemed like  a conspiracy story by the Anti-Nuclear Fraternity … however in fact it is all officially reported in a March 2009 US GAO (Government Accountability Office) Report - viz

“At the beginning of the W76 life extension program in 2000, NNSA identified key technical challenges that would potentially cause schedule delays or cost overruns. One of the highest risks was manufacturing Fogbank because it is difficult to manufacture. In addition, NNSA had lost knowledge of how to manufacture the material because it had kept few records of the process when the material was made in the 1980s and almost all staff with expertise on production had retired or left the agency. Finally, NNSA had to build a new facility at the Y-12 plant because the facilities that produced Fogbank ceased operation in the 1990s and had since been dismantled, except for a pilot plant used to produce small quantities of Fogbank for test purposes.

 To address these concerns, NNSA developed a risk management strategy for Fogbank with three key components:

(1) building a new Fogbank production facility early enough to allow time to re-learn the manufacturing process and resolve any problems before starting full production;

(2) using the existing pilot plant to test the Fogbank manufacturing process while the new facility was under construction; and

(3) developing an alternate material that was easier to produce than Fogbank.

However, NNSA failed to effectively implement these three key components. As a result, it had little time to address unexpected technical challenges and no guaranteed source of funding to support risk mitigation activities.”

Interestingly, some sort of solution must have been found as one refurbished W76 has just gone back into the stockpile, according National Nuclear Security Administration’s February 23 2009 media release. 

 

Ultimately a new facility was built at the Y-12 National Security Complex near Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to begin production of Fogbank once again, but was delayed by poor planning, cost overruns and a failed effort to find an alternative to Fogbank, and so the project overran by a crucial year costing at least an extra $US69 million  according to the GAO report.

 

Elvis has left the Forum…

Elvis McGonagall - Performance Poet

I had the pleasure of meeting “performance poet” Elvis McGonagal at the annual Henley KM Forum meeting last week. (Yes, he did wear that jacket.)

Elvis did a fantastic job of summarising the inputs from the likes of Bill Lucas from the Centre for Real World Learning at Winchester (who was inspirational), Leif Edvinsson, Raj Datta from Mindtree and Verna Allee, plus a number KM Forum projects from the last year – in a uniquely delivered poem.

He picked up from Vanessa Randle, of Thinking Visually, who has provided a brilliant visual summary of the conference for the last two years.   This year Vanessa taught the forum participants how to draw- one of these days I’ll post my attempts up here…

Here’s the final offering from Elvis, entitled Mister Know-it-All:

I’ve eaten all the fruit from the tree of knowledge

I know what’s what, I know who’s who

I know my onions, I know the ropes

I know a thing or two

I know the way to Amarillo

I know the way to San Jose

I know who let the dogs out

I know the time of day

I know what happened to The Likely Lads

I know what happened to Baby Jane

I know what’s eating Gilbert Grape

I know the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain

I know who’s been eating your porridge

I know who ate all the pies

I know which side my bread is buttered

I know the wheres, the whens, the whys

I know a hawk from a handsaw

I know chalk from cheese

I know they know it’s Christmas

I know “thank you very much” in Japanese (“domo arrigato gazaimas”)

I know where the bodies are buried

I know whodunnit, I know the score

I know what it’s all about, Alfie

I know the capital of Ecuador (Quito)

I know how many roads a man must go down

I know where we go from here

I know why birds suddenly appear

Every time that you are near

I know the known knowns that I know I know

I know the unknown knowns that I don’t

And as for Mr Rumsfeld’s unknown unknowns -

Will I admit I don’t know I don’t know? No I won’t

I know that unlike Barack Obama

Most politicians don’t have a single scruple

I know that one of the speakers today

Used to be a roadie for Mott the Hoople

I’m a walking wikipedia

I’m a mobile reference library

I’ve got more knowledge than a London cabby

I know the quickest way from Highgate to Highbury

But little do you know that I know that you know

That I know what I know is no use

Unless I pass it on, put it over and get it across

There’s no mileage in a mastermind recluse

For facts are fine as far as they go

As long as new ideas come from what we glean

Just knowing stuff is not enough

We gotta innovate – know what I mean?

And even if we know who wants to be a millionaire

We know they know that others must cooperate

That they’ll have to ask the audience, they’ll have to phone a friend

Communicate, convey, collaborate

We’ve got to work as a team, pull together

Join forces, pool resources, play ball

We gotta sail in the same boat baby

It’s all for one and one for all

So – I know who put the “ram” in the “ramalamadingdong”

I know who put the “bop” in the “bop-sh-bop”

But the best piece of knowledge I’ll share with you today is -

I know when to stop

by Elvis McGonagall

for the KM Forum Conference

January 2009

 

Learning in the NHS – from Pilots and F1!

Great to see the National Health Service looking beyond its boundaries for techniques to improve its learning…

From bbc.co.uk last week:  The lessons pilots can teach surgeons

Which reminded me of this great story from Great Ormond Street: Ferrari pit stop saves Alexander’s life

I wonder what lessons surgeons can teach pilots?

 

A trip to the Zoogle…

I can’t believe how long it’s been since the last blog. When you wait this long, you feel as though you need to post something profound to account for the radio silence!

This isn’t particularly profound, but it was a lot of fun.
I had the privilege to visit Google’s European HQ in Zurich last week, known by the local as Zoogle. I’d heard a lot about how creative the office environments were, but I was still unprepared for what I experienced in Zurich. The full-sized pool table and multi-coloured soft furnishings in the reception were a shadow of what was to come. Firstly I was greeted by a spiral metal slide (similar to the huge ones exhibited by Carsten Holler in the Tate Modern last year) , used by Googlites as an alternative to the lifts. Then came the coffee bar, which was actually the PC repair zone. “Oh yes”, said my friend – “If we have a problem with our laptops, we just bring them here for a new one, and have a latte whilst we’re waiting”. Nothing gets in the way of creativity and productivity. Needless to say, the Latte –and all of the food and drink – is free. Oh, and if you’re too old for the metal slide, there’s always the fireman’s pole!

Passing a room full of Wiis and other major game consoles, with Googlites playing RockStar, we went upstairs to what almost looked like a normal office environment with meeting rooms. Except that the meeting rooms were stranded cable cars (ski gondolas)! Only in Zurich! My friend assured me that it can get a little warm, so meetings tend to be to-the-point. A number of other creatively shaped meeting room igloos and egg meeting pods which would be the envy of any self-respecting Tellytubby also greeted me, but I was still carried away by the cable cars.

Picture courtesy of Andrew Archy

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Up to the next floor, I was taken through hanging silk threads into the quiet “water lounge”. As my eyes adjusted to the bluey darkness, I took in the exotically populated long marine aquariums, and a row of reclining chairs facing them, interspersed with the odd Victorian bathtub, filled with pink sponge cubes.

The top floor, which I didn’t get to see on my short visit, apparently has an antique-looking library with leather chesterfield chairs… Next time perhaps?

I couldn’t help but ask my friend whether Google ever employs consultants. “Why would we do that?” he responded. “That would be too traditional for us – it just wouldn’t be Google”.

Despite my love of independent consultancy, I had to admit – corporate monogamy rarely looked this good…

http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=zurich+google+office&page=2

***Update!  Video posted on BBC website:  http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7292600.stm