Steve Barth | Reflexions

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