slower (perchance to dream)

I was at the Dave Gurteen / NSW KM Forum brekkie on the topic of "Is KM social?" with many of the usual suspects and some new faces.

One thing that stuck with me, while social software tools allow you to record experience as part of people's work, they can't fully solve one of the key challenge that knowledge managers face. Whilst embedding stuff and making things easy for people is very important, we've actually got to be wary of making things too easy for people.

Sometimes it's our job to say "Stop".

A key part of learning (individual or collective) is reflection. If you aren't willing to stop and reflect on what you have done (and its consequences), then you do not get the full benefit of that experience. We all probably need a weekly thinking time.

Just as our bodies need time to process the events, thoughts & emotions of the day (which may well be a key function of sleep), so we need time to process. Sometimes we do need to be asleep on the job (metaphorically).

One symptom of sleep deprivation is psychosis. If we cannot process our lives, we risk going insane.

Join the dots.

Creativity: reflections

I've done the creativity & innovation sessions 3 times now. Twice @UTS with ACT-KM in between (slides here). I kinda stumbled into doing them and each time, I've played with the format - cutting, tweaking, exploring. Some of it works well and some of it less so.

The way people have engaged with this material has been very heartening. It touches on things that everyone can relate to. And it suits the light style of facilitation / teaching that I favour.

It comes in two halves - one section on creativity and one on innovation (& clocks in at somewhere between 2-3 hours for the lot). The creativity half is nearly there. The basic structure is: exercise - theory - personal reflection - theory - discussion. I'd like to delve into the theory a bit more (most of it is currently based on Theresa Amabile's work), possibly bring in a few more perspectives. And the exercise is currently an odd hybrid of improv & brainstorming. If I get to do it again, I may play with other exercises.

The innovation half I am less happy with. In some ways, that topic is bigger and harder to get into. Using things like the Cynefin model confuses people as much as it helps. I also think it lacks an overarching structure. I'm going back to the books for this one.