Steve Barth | Reflexions

Triggering Immune Response

For a lot of reasons, it's worth learning how the immune system works--from staying healthy to managing organizational change. I came across a very interesting fact about how just a "scent" of a feared threat is enough to trigger an immune response, even if the threat itself isn't present.

Has Kerry Been amBushed?

Many polls suggest the swift boat ads attempting to discredit Kerry's military record are actually backfiring against Bush among some voters. But Bush isn't doing damage control--he's leaning on Kerry. Why risk more backlash? Here's a thought...

Wishing Away the Plague

It happens all the time--attempting to make a problem go away by pretending it doesn't exist. People do it all the time. So do political institutions. In Sunday's LA Times Opinion section, Wendy Orent, offered a chilling example.

New Olympus Voice Recorders

In June, Olympus introduced the DS-4000, latest in a long line of incredibly useful little digital recording devices.

"an extremely flexible world-class audio recording device with several Olympus "firsts" that can dramatically enhance the workflow of all professional users who demand top recording quality and simple, reliable functionality. These Olympus innovations are housed in an attractive, ultra-compact metal body with a brushed silver finish that exhibits a sophisticated, all-business style and fits comfortably in the hand or pocket."

Questioning KM's Key Assumptions

It seems to me that ultimately, knowledge management applications invariably share one fundamental, absolutely fatal flaw. They are designed to facilitate rational, conscious cognitive and collaborative practices. But that's almost never how humans really work.

The point of the Coemergence Project is to reconsider how knowledge workers interact with their information environments and how to design KM applications that would really help them accomplish the knowledge work they actually do, by exploring the following assumptions.

Is generosity good for you?

Dave Snowden once commented that a knowledge economy is a gift economy. That is, we share what we know in anticipation of eventual reciprocation, rather than on a direct barter basis.

A brief article in the April 7th, 2004 issue of the The Economist details a study reported in the Academy of Management Journal that demonstrates how knowledge workers who do favors for their colleagues are more productive than those who focus only on their own tasks.

Keeping Collaboration in Context

In "Collaboration in Context" Stowe Boyd gives a good example of how knowledge sharing tools such as collaboration need to be integrated directly with those apps knoweldge workers spend most of their time with, such as MS Office.

What is Cognitive Ergonomics?

From Ergonomics Today : "What is Cognitive Ergonomics?" June 11, 2001

Ergonomics is sometimes described as "fitting the system to the human," meaning that through informed decisions; equipment, tools, environments and tasks can be selected and designed to fit unique human abilities and limitations.

New Research Project: KM & Forest Metaphors

I’m in the middle of a really fun research project that questions some of our basic assumptions about “managing” knowledge. The work is sponsored by Coemergence, a company based in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

If the metaphors of nature were applied to the world of information technology—instead of the other way around, as typically happens—what might we see differently about how knowledge workers interact with their environments and how to design KM applications that would really help them accomplish the knowledge work they actually do?

Frightening Patterns

I'm fascinated by stories of the recent “dry run” scare on Northwest flight 327, when passengers became convinced they were about to be overrun by terrorists.

The Seed's Eye View

Here is a brief excerpt--the opening lines, actually--of an essay, "Secrets of the seed bank: Tiny clues to a landscape's past and future," by Thomas Rosburg, assistant biology professor at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa.

In a very basic sense, there seem to be two sides to the world of nature. One is conspicuous, visible to us as a hawk waltzing with the wind high above, a noisy katydid making a chlorophyll sandwich out of big bluestem leaves, or the deep jug-o-rum from the baritone voice of bullfrogs in an oxbow wetland. As long as we open our senses, we find this side of nature all around us.
The other side of nature is all around us, too, but in a world that is much less conspicuous. It's the leaf miner tunneling through the heart of a sunflower leaf, or the tangle of fungal threads penetrating and feeding on a decaying log, or the community of dormant plant seeds tucked away in the soil beneath our feet.