Steve Barth | Reflexions

Workshop: Accelerating Decisions and Innovation

UPDATE: Unfortunately, this workshop has been cancelled. Stay tuned for future dates.

Richard Marrs and I will present a half-day workshop, "Accelerating Decisions and Innovation through Sense-Making" at the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals' 2007 International Annual Conference and Exhibition. The meeting will be in New York City April 30-May 3.

Supporting better, faster decision-making is a major imperative for CI practice. Organizations in many industries and markets face more dynamic and complex environments than ever before, driven by accelerated change, globalized competition, unexpected technologies, complicated sociopolitical influences and disruptive business models.

New Coffee Buzz

Coffee doesn't just make you smarter, it can also make you more open minded, according to research.

Hearing important voices online

"Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism:" is a brilliant and important essay by Jaron Lanier published last month in Edge The Third Culture.

Autism in its own Words

Via reddit, found this fascinating profile of autistic savant Daniel Tammet. "A Genius Explains" by Richard Johnson, from the February 12, 2005 issue of The Guardian.

He can perform mind-boggling mathematical calculations at breakneck speeds. But unlike other savants, who can perform similar feats, Tammet can describe how he does it. He speaks seven languages and is even devising his own language. Now scientists are asking whether his exceptional abilities are the key to unlock the secrets of autism.

Why are online game environments so much more compelling than our office collaboration environments?

Last November I offered a session about online games at KM World 2005 in San Jose. It has seemed to me that the question the knowledge management community needs to consider is this:

“Why are online game environments so much more compelling than our office collaboration environments?”

Clearly the session hit a nerve. In fact, I was surprised to see the room completely packed when I began my presentation.

Turning Information Overload into Intelligence Advantage

I will be speaking at Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals’ 2006 International Annual Conference & Exhibition Thursday, April 27, 2:15 PM-3:15 PM in Orlando, with co-Presenter Richard Marrs of Coemergence, Inc. Attached is a brief article from a related talk at another conference last year (a longer white paper is in the works).

'Mental typewriter'

Will Knight of NewScientist.com news service reports on a new interface that can control computer programs by the power of thought. Excerpts:

The machine makes it possible to type messages onto a computer screen by mentally controlling the movement of a cursor. A user must wear a cap containing electrodes that measure electrical activity inside the brain, known as an electroencephalogram (EEG) signal, and imagine moving their left or right arm in order to manoeuvre the cursor around.

cognitive architecture for information

Charles Cole: "A human information behavior approach to a philosophy of information" Library Trends; 1/1/2004

Foraging Cultures Then and Now

Spent the afternoon rereading a very cool 1999 strategy + business article,
"Hunter Gatherers of the Knowledge Economy: The Anthropology of Today's Cyberforagers."

Writer David Berreby lifted description of today’s Gen X “cyberforagers” out of mainstream business magazines and overlaid their psychological and sociological behaviors with anthropological scholarship about prehistoric and fourth world hunter-gatherer societies.

The Liabilities of Abstraction

An aspect of several problems I'm working on right now is the liability of abstraction. That is, whenever you have to simplify or abstract something in order to communicate it, you run the risk of losing the very value of the idea...sort of like evaporating the baby with the bathwater.

So I was intrigued by this article by Ricki Lewis in The Scientist about approaches to describing and identifying sources of pain. The relevance is only tangential, but it's interesting to learn about how the body deals with the subjectivity of pain signals and interprets their meaning as either threats or distractions.

Drinking from the Firehose: Upcoming Presentations

Converting a firehose of fragmentary information into actionable intelligence is really more about issues of human culture and cognition than business technologies and organizational structures.

Together with Coemergence, I'm in Naples, Florida May 23-24 at Frost & Sullivan's Competitive Intelligence Executive Summit exploring new approaches to counterintelligence and how "intelligent cultures" can make sense of information overload.

Tunneling Out

Found a fascinating Seattle Times magazine article from last November 28. "Life Interrupted" wonders about the "cognitive overload" of our highly efficient connected age.

"Technology helps connect us to friends and, on occasion, soul mates. It prevents phone tag. It sorts and recalls massive amounts of information, simplifies writing, and even aids those who want to mellow out by working from the boonies," writes Richard Seven.

Should Web Page Layout Inform Search?

Page Layout Drives Web Search

John Seely Brown has made the point that we seem predisposed to view information at about the size, scale and layout of a daily broadsheet newspaper. Recent research, reported yesterday by Technology Review, suggests search engines might be taught to do the same.

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?

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.

Implicit Query Toolbar

Has anybody been playing with Blinkx? I checked it out after Sam Marshall mentioned it in his blog, Intellectual Capital Punishment.

Blinkx looks to be another example of the quest for “implicit query” along the lines of Autonomy’s extinct toy, Kenjin.