Steve Barth | Reflexions

Trust Pays Off in Productivity

Is trust important in the workplace? More than you think. You'll perform better when you trust you managers. But it makes even more of a difference when workers know they are trusted.

"A Closer Look at Trust Between Managers and Subordinates: Understanding the Effects of Both Trusting and Being Trusted on Subordinate Outcomes" by Brower, Lester, Korsgaard and Dineen in the Journal of Management, March 1, 2009

Despite previous calls to examine trust from the perspectives of both the manager and subordinate, most studies have exclusively focused on trust in the manager. The authors propose that trust in the subordinate has unique consequences beyond trust in the manager. Furthermore, they propose joint effects of trust such that subordinate behavior and intentions are most favorable when there is high mutual trust. Findings reveal unique relationships of trust in manager and trust in subordinate on performance, organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), and intentions to quit. Furthermore, the interaction of trust in manager and trust in subordinate predicts individual-directed OCB in the hypothesized direction.

The Neuroscience of Insight

"In our fables of science and discovery, the crucial role of insight is a cherished theme. To these epiphanies, we owe the concept of alternating electrical current, the discovery of penicillin, and on a less lofty note, the invention of Post-its, ice-cream cones, and Velcro," writes Robert Lee Hotz. "In today's innovation economy, engineers, economists and policy makers are eager to foster creative thinking among knowledge workers."

I spend a lot of time looking at how information overload is largely a matter of forcing cognition into conscious and explicit processes rather than leaving them at the level of sub- or pre-conscious sense-making, where bandwidth is about 800,000 times greater. "A Wandering Mind Heads Straight Toward Insight," a great article in Friday's Wall Street Journal, covers new discoveries in the neuroscience of insight.

Sudden insights are unconscious shifts in perceptions or perspectives about something or someone. What research has discovered is that insights are also the result of brain activity that is more intense and patterned differently from the neural resources used for deliberate, conscious analysis.

By most measures, we spend about a third of our time daydreaming, yet our brain is unusually active during these seemingly idle moments. Left to its own devices, our brain activates several areas associated with complex problem solving, which researchers had previously assumed were dormant during daydreams. Moreover, it appears to be the only time these areas work in unison.

Studies cited by Hotz also found that people in a positive mood were more likely to experience an insight.

Cathedrals as Knowledge Artifacts

Recently I tried to leverage Eric Raymond's metaphor of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" to talk about how informal networks and formal hierarchies coexist symbiotically in healthy systems, with infinite variations on the theme. Letting the network flourish gets you Wikipedia; while a stubborn and singular vision gets you the iPhone. Or so I thought.

I first saw the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Chartres, when I was about 13—a time when I saw everything through the lens of a camera. I remember slipping out of the hotel at dawn and walking around and around the outside of the church trying to comprehend the impossible geometry of the flying buttresses and towering spires. The next time I saw it, in 1999, I was seeing everything through the lens of knowledge management, and Chartres struck me as an encyclopedic articulation of knowledge more than an artful engineering of stone. So for 10 years now I've been mulling over this idea that, perhaps like a space program, building a gothic cathedral was an ultimate exercise to "know what we know" at a moment in human history 800 years ago. Essentially completed in only 26 years, Chartres is hardly the slow realization of a patient designer that some think characterizes (or criticizes) the cathedral metaphor.

Now I'm reading Phillip Ball's new "biography" of the famous French cathedral, Universe of Stone. I'm also discovering that at the same time I was visiting 10 years ago, David Turnbull was writing brilliantly on exactly this aspect of Chartre's history—as a way to reconsider our assumptions about the evolution of technoscientific knowledge—in Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers: Comparative Studies in the Sociology of Scientific and Indigenous Knowledge. He compares the endeavor to a modern laboratory—a collaborative knowledge space of experimental practice.

"The power of laboratories derives from their being sites at which people, practices and the diverse but amorphous materials can be shaped, manipulated, assembled, and transmitted beyond the laboratory," Turnbull writes. And intriguingly, he suggests, "There are three essential components in the transmission of the mix of knowledge involved in the construction process: talk, tradition and templates."

More to come…

Connecting the Dots at Homeland Security

"Connecting the Dot-Govs" is a new article on knowledge sharing in the Department of Homeland Security I wrote for the June issue of KMWorld. Available HERE.

It was perhaps the most ambitious reorganization in the history of government. In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, 22 agencies were wrested from their traditional places in the U.S. government hierarchy and reassembled block by block into a massive new pyramid with over 200,000 personnel and more than $50 billion in resources. Created by the Homeland Security Act of 2002 and officially inaugurated March 1, 2003, to great fanfare and greater controversy, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) incorporated federal functions as disparate as border patrols, customs, immigration, disaster relief, emergency response, anti-counterfeiting, presidential protection, transportation safety, health inspection, cybercrime, nuclear detection and maritime rescue. All of those components, moreover, are still tasked with their original missions, but prioritized on one goal more than any other: anticipating and preventing terrorist attacks on U.S. soil.

The logic of DHS was that government responses could not be delayed or diluted by failures of communication or coordination between federal agencies or between federal efforts and state and local governments. In other words, share knowledge and information. A new administration is a good time to look at what DHS has learned in its first six years by pursuing both the social and technical aspects of knowledge management. Sharing of such massive scope and scale brings tremendous opportunities and challenges in equal measure—complicated by the disparate organizational cultures in DHS and further by the sensitive and secure nature of information in many of the agencies’ jurisdictions.

Wolfram|Alpha Confuses Answers and Facts

Everybody's googley-eyed about the long-anticipated first-coming of Wolfram|Alpha, launched yesterday. Already, the system claims 10+ trillion of pieces of data, 50,000+ types of algorithms and models, and linguistic capabilities for 1000+ domains. But can it cook?

Stephen Wolfram gives a very impressive demo. He should: he's both an acknowledged genius and simultaneously a guy who acts like he's pretending to be a genius. W|A stands as a milestone in The Quest for Computable Knowledge and is based on Wolfram's single-handed invention of A New Kind of Science (irrespective of previous work in chaos and complexity research).

A man of realities. A man of facts and calculations. A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over …. With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to. It is a mere question of figures, a case of simple arithmetic…

Now, a Message from the Minister for Digital Engagement

This blog doesn't normally reprint press releases, but this was pretty engaging as is:

Cabinet Office names Director of Digital Engagement M2 Presswire May 13 2009

The Cabinet Office has appointed Andrew Stott to the new role of Director of Digital Engagement, a position created to take forward the Power of Information agenda. The Director of Digital Engagement will be based in Government Communications at the Cabinet Office and will work across Government departments to encourage, support and challenge them in moving from communicating to citizens on the web to conversing and collaborating with them through digital technology. The Director will:

Does Corporate Failure = PKM?

Nick Milton posted a critique of personal knowledge management, "PKM=Corporate Failure," in which he called PKM a distraction (seems so, since he took time to write).

Having written about questions of PKM for almost 10 years, I wanted to refute his article point by point. But it turns out that I agree with him in almost every way. I'm interested in PKM precisely because, like Nick, I'm interested in building better teams, communities, organizations and societies.

I have to admit, it's something that I find a little disturbing. You see, for me, Knowledge Management is not a personal thing; it's a communal thing.

Clearly, Nick and I don't define PKM in the same way.

Koan Zero?

Learning is breathing in

Creating is breathing out

Knowing is holding your breath

I've always been most interested in how knowledge management can facilitate personal and organizational learning as a way to improve understanding, decisions, actions and outcomes.

Although I've never seen it defined that way, I think that's the good intention behind most of our efforts. Too quickly, however, expedience redefines KM as analysis and explication, economics reduces KM to technology, rhetoric deludes us to believe that rules can change cultures and behaviors, and we forget that the quest to master knowledge is as old as consciousness itself.

Without being able to articulate the reasons why, I was increasingly uncomfortable with the goal of "knowledge creation" (so creating, above, would be creating value, I suspect). In fact, using the word "knowledge" makes me uncomfortable. For one thing, I don't think people actually act on what they know so much as on what they believe to be true (objectivity is overrated). But more importantly, I've come to believe that knowledge and learning are less interrelated than opposite and mutually exclusive concepts.

Novice and Master

Reading today about "conscious competence" made me cranky. But then I stumbled on this in my own slides:

The difference between the novice and the master is simply that the novice has not learnt, yet, how to do things in such a way that he can afford to make small mistakes. The master knows that the sequence of his actions will always allow him to cover his mistakes a little further down the line. It is this simple but essential knowledge which gives the work of a master carpenter its wonderful, smooth, relaxed, and almost unconcerned simplicity.

Christopher Alexander A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction 1977

Intelligence Unplugged

Robert K. Ackerman at SIGNAL Magazine has been tracking how virtual collaboration tools and methods are faring in the intelligence community.

Users set free to explore these new cyberspace systems have uncovered new capabilities and have driven the introduction of still more collaborative systems. The result is that finished intelligence reports now are richer than before virtual collaboration was adopted. An issue is viewed through more than one perspective; and the overall effect is timelier, more agile and more accurate intelligence reporting to decision makers.

He notes that projects based on instant messaging, social bookmarking and enterprise blogging have developed quickly because of only limited upfront structure, forcing users to take responsibility and adapt the tools to their needs.