Steve Barth | Reflexions

Viva Max

One of the happiest days of my life was being stuck with Max Boisot in the back seat of a Range Rover on a fiver hour drive from Heathrow to Durham.

I've met billionaires who are so casually generous that you never feel embarrassed when they treat you to a $500 per person meal. Max was like that with his incredible wealth of knowledge. Sharing so clearly made him happy.

Whenever I told him what I was reading or working on—regardless of what the project was—he always had insights and experiences that were incredibly relevant and useful. Even when you realized how wrong you had been, you never felt stupid for it.

My wife, who only met him twice (in Barcelona and at our home for dinner) nevertheless declared him her "favorite person ever!"

I cannot pretend that there isn't a selfish aspect to my grief. I treasure every conversation I ever had with Max (which was really only a handful) and I had hoped there would be many more.

My heart goes out to his family and friends around the world. Dave Snowden blogged a lovely remembrance with many tributes in the comment section at Cognitive Edge.

PHOTO: Working in Durham. From left: Pierpaolo Andriani, Jeff Goldstein, Steve Barth, Peter Allen, Bill McKelvey, Max Boisot, Dave Snowden.

Daedalus Flew On

As the Space Shuttle program comes to an end with this final flight of Atlantis, I've been thinking again about the value of such lofty endeavors. I published this short essay in KM Magazine in 2003 after the Columbia tragedy.

ICARUS, FALLING

Why are so many of us so deeply affected by those searing contrails?

Is it possible that—about suffering—they were wrong, the Old Masters? Brueghel painted Landscape with the Fall of Icarus to suggest that even magnificent failures are just a peripheral splash on the vast canvas of disparate industry. "It takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along," WH Auden wrote. But perhaps Brueghel assumed that Icarus fell unnoticed because he flew unnoticed.

Should we soar so high? That question is inevitably asked this week in articles and conversations around the world. We know that there are innumerable innovations with terrestrial applications. We know, too, more about ourselves and our ability to work together in large and small teams despite differences of profession, gender, culture and politics.

But there are larger lessons, as well. Most valuable of these is simply that it can be done. We look up at the blue meadows of the moon and see footprints. We look at the red speck of Mars and see the tracks of a little erector-set robot. We look up when we hear the sonic booms and see men and women commuting to space the way we take the carpool lane, living lives as mundane and as uncertain as the rest of us.

The real knowledge value of programs like the shuttle and the space station are not scratch-resistant Ray-Bans or electronic noses. It's understanding that "impossible" is one of those words (like "hate") that we probably use more often than we should. We are only just beginning to understand how collective forms of confidence and accomplishment impact on an organization's ability. That, too, is knowledge that floats gently to earth.

Yes, Icarus fell. But Daedalus flew on.

(See the original poem and painting HERE)

Are you a tourist or traveler?

The difference between travel and tourism is simple. A tourist experiences disconnected sights and sounds and enjoys them without drawing meaning. A traveler roams the earth, digests what he sees and hears, and collects them in a framework of understanding, which he both brings to his travels and deepens with travels. The former is a pleasant interlude in your life. The latter is about life itself. —George Friedman, STRATFOR Founder & CEO

via app.response.stratfor.com

Is there learning “beyond science”?

Recently, but not for the first time, I found myself struggling to articulate why something as useful and reliable as science could sometimes be a dangerous distraction from the real answers to important questions—and why, as a visible and explicit process, science often requires too much bandwidth for effective communication. Then I came across this passage from Francisco José Ayala's 2007 Darwin's Gift to Science and Religion:

Science is a way of knowing, but it is not the only way. Knowledge also derives from other sources, such as common sense, artistic and religious experience, and philosophical reflection.

In The Myth of Sisyphus, the great French writer Albert Camus asserted that we learn more about ourselves and the world from a relaxed evening's perception of the starry heavens and the scents of grass than from science's reductive ways.

The anthropologist Loren Eiseley wrote: "The world without Shakespeare's insights is a lesser world, our griefs shut more inarticulately in upon themselves. We grow mute at the thought—just as an element seems to disappear from sunlight without Van Gogh."

Astonishing to me is the assertion made by some scientists and others that there is no valid knowledge outside science. I respond with a witticism that I once heard from a friend: "In matters of values, meaning, and purpose, science has all the answers, except the interesting ones."

KM Platforms and Programs in International NGOs

Large international non-governmental organizations face extra challenges in knowledge sharing and organizational learning.

1. They pursue important goals that are simultaneously urgent and elusive, such as maintaining peace and security in conflict zones; alleviating poverty, hunger and disease; or building sustainable economic and political structures in transitional or post-conflict societies.
2. NGOs often operate in harsh or hostile environments and with constrained resources, ad-hoc multicultural teams and complex interdependencies between actors and agencies.
3. The largest of these organizations achieve economies of scale by operating globally in diverse locations.
4. NGOs typically enjoy exceptionally committed employees, leading to strong informal networks, but internal and external dynamics can create highly bureaucratic organizational structures that discourage use of formal knowledge-sharing systems.
5. Above all, NGOs constantly need to demonstrate results based on intangible outcomes.

I will be leading a workshop at KMWorld 2010 called KM Platforms and Programs in International NGOs on Monday, November 15 from 1:30-4:30pm at the Renaissance Hotel in Washington, DC. My colleagues and I will bring lessons learned from three prominent organizations: the Open Society Institute, Oxfam Great Britain and UN Peacekeeping.

We are inviting other NGOs to bring their experiences to share in an interactive, facilitated session and collaborate on shared sense-making and knowledge creation about effective knowledge and learning strategies optimized for their activities.

Coping with Complexity and the Sensemaking Paradox

Coping with the complexity of today's business environment is not about predicting the future or reducing risk. It's about building the capacity, in yourself, your people, and the organization to adapt continuously and learn speedily, in order to maximize the chances of seizing fleeting opportunities.

Three articles in the May/June 2010 issue of Ivey Business Journal are devoted to the tricky issue of managing complexity in today's global business world. The above quote is from "Coping with Complexity" by Niels Billou, Mary Crossan and Gerard Seijts.

As business leaders, policy makers, the academic community, the media and an outraged public search the rubble of the global economic crisis for clues as to what went wrong, all fingers point to a common perpetrator, poor risk management. But while risk management, or lack thereof, played its part in the disintegration of the world financial system, we contend that another culprit played an even bigger role: complexity, and an inability to cope with it. The unpredictable, unstable, non-linear, and fast-paced nature of the complex interrelationships between nations, firms, and persons that shape the global economic landscape are at the root of today's risk-management challenges.

In "Managing under complexity: Where is Einstein when you really need him?" Gokce Sargut and Rita Gunther McGrath highlight the dangers of reacting to complexity with simplification and warn of the "sensemaking paradox." Instead, they say, managers will need counterintuitive practices and no small amount of humility.

The reality is that to understand any situation at all, we have to make sense of it. We do this by imposing filters on the noisy signals of messy reality. Filters serve the purpose of telling us what is important and what we should pay attention to. Sensemaking is vitally important – without it, we would have no framework for viewing and understanding the world. Sensemaking is also, however, a potential trap. As we filter information through the lens of our existing experiences, key interrelationships and new pieces of data may be missed, leaving us with a poor interpretation of reality.

Confirmation by Complement

A nice message in my inbox today both complimented the time I've spent (often lonely) focusing on personal knowledge management, but also confirmed my conviction that individual, independent efforts are critical if any of us hopes to make a contribution to the collective.

Dear M. Barth,

I've read your work for 10 years now and I want to thank you for this. I recently published a book (in French) about information management in organizations and the last chapter is completely focused on PKM.

Psychological Safety and Team Learning

A critical key to learning from experience is the ability to openly and honestly discuss the risks, errors, mistakes, variations, surprises and even failures that inevitably occur in any complex or difficult activity. Such honesty requires courage in any organizational setting, especially if people are afraid they'll be fired for either screwing up or speaking up. The question is, what can you do to facilitate, stimulate, protect and reward such courage so that knowledge workers can trust that their honesty will not be used against them?

Harvard professor Amy Edmonson developed the concept of "psychological safety," to explain how individuals perceive the consequences of interpersonal risks in the workplace. Psychological safety governs specific, short-term, micro-behavioral decisions based on self-preservation. As such, it complements related concepts such as trust (giving others the benefit of the doubt over time), group cohesion (maintaining a comfortable social ambience), or emotional intelligence (productively managing one's own or others' emotions). Edmonson boils these down to three elements: the timeframe (immediate), the object of focus (self), and the level of analysis (peers and supervisors).

Guest Blogging at Cognitive Edge

I'm honored to again blog at Cognitive Edge Feb. 14-28. The pioneering ideas of Dave Snowden and collaborators such as Max Boisot, Bill McKelvey, Cynthia Kurtz and Pierpaolo Andriani—about the real-world implications and applications of complexity theory, cognitive anthropology and other sciences—have been invaluable in my practice and I'll be reflecting on how my own understandings and interpretations have evolved over the past 11 years. The work centers on "pragmatic ways to manage under conditions of uncertainty, understand the power of business narrative and discover new ways to use human networks."

In particular, I'll be sitting in on the San Diego accreditation course and SenseMaker™ workshop Feb. 17-19 and posting my notes. It will be interesting to compare how the theories and methods have changed since the first sessions in 2003.

http://www.cognitive-edge.com

Managing Knowledge across Borders

A recent discussion at The Braintrust Knowledge Management Group asked how cultural dimensions affect learning and knowledge sharing. I really like Hampden-Turner and Trompenaars' book "Building Cross-Cultural Competence" as a basis for understanding the challenges and opportunities you face and Hall's "Values Technology" approach to leveraging the differences.

This issue is further complicated, complexified and/or mitigated by the uniqueness of organizational, professional and departmental cultures—and don't forget that there are often nested subcultures to these as well. For example, Japanese are said to have a very unique and cohesive culture that permeates their corporate behaviors. However, when I studied Japanese corporations invested in the US, I found huge differences between, say, Hitachi, Ricoh, Toyota and Seiko. I also found every site and subsidiary had unique attributes based on the character of the managers, the local staff, the region, etc., as all these agents and communities "co-evolve."

I used to write extensively about such issues in global business and focused on the KM angle in a 1999 article for Knowledge Management magazine called "Managing Knowledge Across Borders," which I will repost here.