Last Sunday, Phil Wolff asked the question “What’s the link between blogs and action?”. It’s a good, and important question. And the more I think about it, the more I think, in many ways, the answer is “None”.

My knee-jerk answer to the question at the time was that blogs help decisions (in the Japanese sense) not actions. That is, they’re an aid to “sensemaking” - getting an aggregate view of an issue, understanding the landscape, education not training.
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Back from Vienna and BlogWalk 3.0. Bit miffed I could only be there for some of the day. I had to catch an early (i.e. at the airport at 4.30am) flight in for the morning and leave just as conversations really seemed to be hotting up (and my brain shutting down) but, it was still very much worth it. Very friendly, bright bunch of people who I wish I could have talked with for longer. So thanks again Lilia, Ton and Seb!

As Anu has mentioned, the early bit of the day was less structured and more “getting to know one another” - the meat of the matter seemed to happen after the stroll round Vienna. Ton later said that 3.0 was a different beast to the ones previously - more people, and more people who didn’t know each other from beforehand. That said, had some very interesting conversations, felt buoyed by the enthusiasm and breadth of the group, and as much as anything else found it useful to get a feel for how people were thinking about this stuff.

by the artist

Topics I thought of note (and people I spoke with/heard from on them):
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July 05th 2004 | Comments(2) | Life on BlogWalk, events, People Vienna

Here’s a thing: the way Westerners make decisions is very different from the the way Japanese make decisions. I’ll admit now, I don’t know as much as I’d like to know about Japanese culture, but as far as I understand it the difference is this:

Western “decision making” focuses on answer, and systematic approaches to arrive at these.

Japanese “decision making”, by contrast, focuses on “defining the question” - things like “Is there a need for a decision?” or “What is the decision about?”. And that requires consensus. What interested me is that during this consensus forming stage no mention of what the answer might be is made. The “answer” (the Western decision) follows from the question definition (the Japanese decision).

Now, I think there are some tentative inferences you can draw from this re blogs, ontologies, semantic web, user modelling etc. Number one being that blogs seem to fit into the “question consensus” camp, and ontologies/task models, the whole “semantic-web-turning-the-web-into-a-large-expert-system” thang fit the answer camp. And my gut feeling is that consensus is something that IT can support, but mechanics is something IT can do - the two should perhaps not be confused.

July 02nd 2004 | Comments(1) | Notes on consensus, decision, definition, Japan PeterDrucker