Missed this while on my travels. Anjo, Lilia and Stephanie have been doing some interesting things analysing blog communities through terminology rather than links. [Anjo writes it up here, here and here.]

One of the upshots of it all is a map of a number of blogs organised by terminological similarity rather than links. (The key to the colours is: Knowledge Management (blue), Education (red), Internet Research (black), A-list (dark green)

So where are they going next with it? In the comments, Anjo suggests that:

The next step is to think! Two rather obvious directions are:

- Communities change over time.
- Does linking “predict” terminology, or does terminology “predict” linking?

Some things I’d be interested in are how the real world location of the bloggers affects their positions on the map, whether you can work out who the translators in the group(s) are, and where the link/language disconnects are (i.e. if you’re bang next to someone you don’t link to).

Like the way they’re heading a lot.

{And sounds like I missed Lilia’s birthday, so belated happy returns!]

Jeremy Faludi over at Worldchanging has a nice primer on biomimicry.

“Most designers, engineers, architects, and other people who build things just don’t know that much about biology and the natural world; and even when they do, there’s often a gap of capability in available materials, manufacturing methods, and economic systems … Even with existing technology, however, an enormous realm of possibilities is feasible, it just requires the right approach.”

Now, I’m a fan of biomimicry (or what little I know of it), and I like the idea of organisation as organism, with its emphasis on the interactions between organism and the environment, and its emphasis on survival. But though metaphors are a great way of seeing things from a different angle, they are also a way of not seeing things. Metaphors help you change goggles, for sure, but you’re still wearing goggles. {Jason has a great post on the same here)

Some of things I don’t see with the biomimicry/organisation as organism metaphor are:

• that organisations affect their surroundings (possibly more so than organisms?)
• that individuals in the organisation don’t always gel as smoothly as the parts of an organism. Perhaps they ought to, or perhaps the lack of gel gives the organisation a creative edge. Don’t know.

Personally, I do like the organism goggles, but it’s good to try to take them off once in a while. Anything else the organism metaphor stops us/me/you seeing?

The rather brilliant Helen Goulden is getting going with her Green Fairy blog.

“[There is no entry]…..In Wikipedia for ‘Co-operative Inquiry’ … But just about every other type of ‘inquiry’ is listed. Go on…”

Genius.

Amongst the general hoo-ha over whether Wikipedia is indeed rubbish or not, I saw this little comment by Kevin Wired Kelly, a lot of whose writing I like.

“With the steady advance of new ways to share, the Web has embedded itself into every class, occupation, and region … In part because of the ease of creation and dissemination, online culture is the culture.”

The culture? Nought out of ten. Really. Nought out of ten for that. There is no such thing as the culture. Isn’t now. Never was. Never will be. And thank heavens or whatever for that.

[For the a great start on the hoo-ha trail, try Matt Jones‘ post.

Gautam has been doing some thinking about the overlap between Knowledge management and Organisational Development.

“Eventually every KM project is an attempt to change the corporate culture of the organization and the behavior of people in the organizational systems. This change can never be sustainable unless human and organizational processes change to support this change. That is the insight that traditional OD consulting brings to KM.”

Through serendipity, I recently came across a nice entry on Saul Eissen’s Organizational Development blog summarizing how OD emerged. The results of management development courses were moot in the fifties. Managers followed one of three basic courses after them: they became change-agents (rare), they became trouble-makers (less rare), or they found it was too much of an uphill struggle to implement what they’d learned so they reverted to the way things were done (depressingly common).

“Family therapists were learning that they could treat a problem child with apparent success, but on returning to the family s/he promptly reverted to the previous problem behavior. The problem was not in the child as an individual, but in the family as a system. Similarly, an organization could be improved not by developing individuals within it, but by changing the organization as a whole–hence the shift in thinking–from management development, to organization development.”

Hmm. The problem for me is that if you really want to advocate a systemic approach, you need to focus on individuals and the organisation. If you’re environment is changing, the more foragers, scouts and guides you have the better. More importantly, perhaps, the more these front-line people can talk to each other the better. So yes, the insight that OD brings to traditional KM is crucial - cultural change is darn tricky - and it needs support. But aren’t the insights KM bring to OD just as valuable? If you focus on the organisation and process too much, then don’t you squeeze the creativity out of your people, and with that, your ability to adapt?

October 26th 2005 | Comments(1) | Notes on bottom up, business, Creativity, KM, OD top down

Holiday reading quote #3, from Ziauddin Sardar’s Desperately Seeking Paradise. On the one hand, it’s an autobiography detailing one moderate Muslim’s struggles to find paradise; on the other, it’s a fascinating view of the some of his struggles with fundamentalists, whether Islamic or secular. It’s funny and surprisingly moving.

Anyway, Ziauddin talks about his life growing up in Hackney in the early 50’s, with parents who spoke no real English. And the following, I thought, applied to more than just immigrants, but any group having to adapt to any change in their surroundings.

“The adaptability of children pushes them to the forefront of the struggle to make a home in a new environment … I had the language of the land and thereby acquired responsibility as negotiator …

The growing child I was had to quickly master the rules of the new game plan of survival. It is immigrant children who bring home the vital information about the strange new world. Unlike adults they take the new and wondrous for natural phenomena, and therefore see them in a more rounded fashion. Parents, whose normality was fashioned otherwise, are more resistant to new influence. Effortlessly, children bring the norms of the public space … to the established pattern of domestic usage … They add bangers and mash and fish and chips to sag gosht and parathas, not noticing the joins …

I was the newest kind of explorer because I existed across so many worlds of belonging. But the worlds I lived in barely recognized each other, and knew precious little about each other. From all sides there was pressure to compartmentalize, to make exclusive each of the worlds I belonged to and thereby deny their profusion of possibilities.”

October 25th 2005 | Comments(1) | Notes on books, children, community, Islam, outsider Quotes

Well not quite. But am playing around with the styles and templates after an upgrade to 3.2 so things might look a bit wangy in between lunch breaks…

Holiday reading quote #2, from the I thought disappointing Freakonomics. (Steven Levitt is clearly frighteningly clever, but I felt that the “rogue economist” label, and the profusion of hyperbrilliant, superintellectual and ultragenius tags actually detracted from what was being said. Ho hum.)

“It was John Kenneth Galbraith, the hyperliterate economic sage who coined the phrase ‘conventional wisdom’. He did not consider it a compliment. “We associate truth with convenience,” he wrote, “with what most closely accords with self-interest and personal well-being or promises best to avoid awkward effort or unwelcome dislocation of life. We also find highly acceptable what contributes most to self-esteem.” Economic and social behaviour, Galbraith continued, “are complex, and to comprehend their character is mentally tiring. Therefore we adhere, as though to a raft, to those ideas which represent our understanding.”"

“Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid. Human beings are incredibly slow, inaccurate, and brilliant. Together they are powerful beyond imagination.”

- Einstein

Holiday reading quote #1, from Carl Honore’s brilliant In Praise of Slow:

“The Slow movement is on the march. Instead of doing everything faster, many people are decelerating and finding that Slowness helps them to live, work, think and play better…

Yet the Slow movement is not about turning the whole planet into a Mediterranean holiday resort. Most of us do not wish to replace the cult of speed with the cult of slowness. Speed can be fun, productive and powerful, and we would be poorer without it. What … Slowness offers is a middle path, a recipe for marrying la dolce vita with the dynamism of the information age. The secret is balance: instead of doing everything faster, do everything at the right speed. Sometimes fast. Sometimes slow. Sometimes somewhere in between. Being Slow means never rushing, never striving to save time just for the sake of it. It means remaining calm and unflustered even when circumstances force us to speed up…

Of course, the Slow movement still faces some pretty daunting obstacles - not least our own prejudices. Even when we long to slow down, we feel constrained by a mixture of greed, inertia and fear to keep up the pace. In a world hardwired for speed, the tortoise still has a lot of persuading to do.”

October 24th 2005 | Comments(3) | Notes on balance, books, philosophy Quotes

Back from a great two weeks of reading, relaxing, exploring, mint tea and fearless driving in Morocco. A week ago I was a couple of miles outside Merzouga, in the desert, under a full moon, and staying in a Berber tent among the 300 foot dunes. Away from it all, it’s easy to draw a veil of schmaltzy naffness over it - “Oh the stars”, “It stripped me down to my bare essentials” etc. But it really was awesome, in the fullest sense of the word.

Two things the experience made sense of, and vividly so, were:

“Holiness in the desert is silence, in the crowd it is conversation”

(or something not too far off)

And probably my favourite line of verse, and top of my “Now That’s What I Call Poetry” compilation

“Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.”

Of course, I’m glossing over the fact that the donkey had piles or something hee-hawed from about 2am till dawn, and the fact that the camels seemed to have shat everywhere, but testament to the whole thing is that when you’re there you really don’t mind. You’re a million miles away from everything.

That’s it … event done. It was a little nerve-racking, as doing anything is for the first time things is I suppose. And I certainly fluffed the intro. But at least am beginning to get some ideas making it better next time around.

Running around before going off on my holidays to Morocco for a couple of weeks, so don’t have time to put my scrappy notes in order. From what I can see,
Lloyd has posted some typically great notes on the talks, and Theodore spurred Euan into action. There’ll be mp3’s of them when I get back, so I’ll post those then.

[If the summaries of Theodore’s talk make you want more, you should definitely read Conversation: How talk can change your life - he’s one of those rare academics with a first-class brain, and a clear, jargon-free way of explaining the thoughts that come out of it]

Actually managed to relax and enjoy the dinner. We had “Conversational Menus”, written by Theodore - essentially questions to spur richer conversations. And it works. Once you’ve started being open with someone, and that’s listening as well as talking, it’s hard to switch back to being guarded. Even for me …

As Theodore said, if you give a lot, you get a lot back. It’s a risk, but one worth taking.

Put another way perhaps, openness is the only way to a sustainable advantage.

Anu points to Deloitte’s decision to say no to blogs last month. Briefly:

- Ryf Quail, Deloitte’s director of digital marketing and communications, made the proposal to blog. He describes himself as “an extreme outlier”.
- Chief Marketing Officer David Redhill suggested that their

“holding pattern should be risk-averse and watching how it develops”

- Because, essentially, they need to be discreet about their clients.
- And monitoring the blogs would mean they were untimely.

None of my business what they do, but it’s kind of sad. Risk aversion and watching how things develop. It is possible to be risk-averse and active. To paraphrase, I wonder whether “small steps, loosely” joined was mooted as a policy?

Jason’s back blogging over at Can’O'Worms - definitely worth a read, I think, for his curiosity, openness and for gems like this

“Ch’ing the chief carpenter, was carving wood into a stand for musical instruments. When finished, the work appeared to those who saw it as though of supernatural execution; and the Prince of Lu asked him, saying, ‘what mystery is there in your art?’”

‘No mystery, Your Highness,’ replied Ch’ing. ‘And yet there is something. When I am about to make such a stand, I guard against any diminution of my vital power. I first reduce my mind to absolute quiescence. Three days in this condition and I become oblivious of any reward to be gained. Five days, and I become oblivious of any fame to be acquired. Seven days and I become unconscious of my four limbs and my physical frame. Then, with no thought of the Court present in my mind, my skill becomes concentrated, and all the disturbing elements without are gone. I enter some mountain forest, I search for a suitable tree. It contains the form required, which afterwards is elaborated. I see the stand in my mind’s eye, and then set to work. Beyond that there is nothing. I bring my own native capacity into relation with that of the wood. What was suspected to be of supernatural execution in my work was due solely to this’”

– Chuang Tzu