Ellsberg

A few weeks ago, this documentary on Daniel Ellsberg was shown on Australian TV. Two moments stuck in my mind.

1. The first is this warning that Ellsberg gave to Henry Kissinger when the latter went to work at the White House. The behaviour that Ellsberg describes is a kind of intellectual arrogance based on access to privileged information. This might be possible to paraphrase (in the manner of Lord Acton) as: All secrecy tends to corrupt and absolute secrecy corrupts absolutely. This does not mean that we can abolish secrecy (any more than we can abolish power), rather that we have to put in place safeguards against its power at both the personal and institutional levels. Easier said than done.

2. Later on in the documentary, after Ellsberg has gone public and faces trial, he expresses dismay that the newspaper and TV journalists were not talking about the documents that he had brought into the public domain but rather the "Ellsberg saga". He had ended up becoming the news, which is the last thing that he wanted. The soap opera of capture and trial was easier to write than the murky history of American involvement in Vietnam. Of course, that would never happen today.

Hiding in Plain Sight

The internet geeks among you may have heard of this web site called "Wikileaks". I only heard about it the other day through my hair stylist. The things the kidz* get up to these days.

Everyone seems to have become very excited about it. Julian Assange holed up in an English mansion, Bradley Manning losing what's left of his mind, various American politicians calling for the assassination of a foreign national**, web commentators saying why Wikileaks is either brilliant or terrible. The contents of the cables themselves seem to have faded from view and we are left with the soap opera - which, let's face it, is so much more exciting than trying to understand geopolitics.

I tend to come to things a bit late. I'm a bit slow, a bit "special needs". However it now seems to me that Wikileaks is a red herring. A massive and spectacular red herring - more of a red whale in fact - but a distraction none the less.

It's generally assumed that governments hide stuff from their citizens. And this assumption is correct. Governments hide stuff because: some information might allow other states (or commercial entities) to take advantage of them; their citizens have a right to privacy; it might make senior officials and politicians look bad; it's simply what they've done for hundreds of years. Some of these reasons are more justifiable than others. We should have a long conversation about that sometime but not here, now.

What is interesting to me right now is that governments aren't always very good at hiding stuff. In fact, most democratic governments have to make copious amounts of information available by law. You don't even have to trudge to a dusty library these days, it's there on teh interweb. It may not be in an accessible format (*cough* Marrickville Council) but it is there. Now there is still plenty of important stuff kept locked away but we should begin with the information that is publicly available.

In contrast, the media has an obsession with hidden information. This obsession is akin to lazy students who want to break into the filing cabinet that contains the answers to the exam. The answers must be hidden away somewhere, written in a document entitled "Our plans for world domination and public deception", probably formatted in comic sans. And if they aren't, well it just sounds like too much work. Better still, governments could tie us to a nuclear weapon and then recite their evil plans at length, before a minion's ineptitude*** allows us to escape and foil their dastardly plan. And then we can get laid to the soundtrack of Shirley Bassey****. I blame Watergate but what do I know.

For me, the work of Open Australia and Planning Alerts is more important than Wikileaks*****. What can we do with what is hiding in plain sight?

*And by "kidz", I mean men in their late thirties.

**Julian Assange seems to be a fairly extreme anarchist/libertarian. As such he is profoundly anti-government. He probably has more in common with those on the US hard right, the very people who are calling for his death, than they realise.
***An inept public servant? The very idea...
****I have no idea if that would work in practice.
*****Perhaps we should call Open Australia terrorists. With their "Apache" servers and their "HTML".

cold case rondel

The signs are better set in stone
Than memories that fizz in glass.
First as tragedy, then as farce -
A light laugh cut into a groan.

A single moult of hair, not mown,
Found in among the buds and grass.
The signs are better set in stone
Than memories that fizz in glass.

I broke each tooth but lost a bone.
Send me to the back of the class.
Because of you, sharpeye smartarse,
I'll end my days in dark alone.
The signs are better set in stone
Than memories that fizz in glass.

What is a rondel?

not dead yet

Wonderers Heart is a blog that doesn't shy away from dark stuff. Depression. Suicide. Grief.

And to top it all, it's a little awkward. It tackles topics that evade comprehension and easy answers and Anne does not present neatly wrapped insights into pain, loss and occasional act of inadvertent arson. It is someone thinking/feeling in public. Reflecting in a muddy mirror.

If you ever get sick of blogs with lists of the seven things for blah blah blah then please pay her a visit.

the hunt of the unicorn

They clattered down the high street in their chain mail, spitting forth hoarse cries like rotten teeth. Everyone was looking for a myth, not a toy.

random numbers

Random Numbers, darkmatter

The dice have wings. They are little insects of chance, scared away by a sudden movement, a wreckless decision. I see gamblers running around with oversized nets, distended surfaces of hope whose holes gape as they scythe the air.

The dice rest on the flat of my hand and for a moment they are still. Then I cup them between my palms and they start to buzz. To shake and sting. Little stabbing pains in my skin. I let them go.

There is a swarm of dice now, stripping the pleasant green certainties of leaves. A probable desert is all that remains on this land. I hide somewhere between and one and thirty-six.

live and direct

Tim "Mumbrella" Burrowes is over live blogging (or tweeting) and Katie "GetShouty" Chatfield is feeling the same way.

It's important to note that this kind of activity is still limited to certain events full of "webby" people. Many of the events I go to have no live blogging nor tweeting (and varying proportions of live attendees). So this is a bit of a minority issue but let's assume these behaviours will spread over time.

Rather than seeing tweeting and blogging as potentially distracting activities and so a disaster, I think they may be an opportunity to improve the event experience - if used with a bit of thought by the savvy presenter.

I am not really a fan of straight "presenting". My short attention span means that I'm getting bored of my own voice just after the first slide. I would much rather have others play with and critique or extend my ideas rather than have them received as so much cognitive junk mail - and these new whizz-bang "Web 0.2" technologies allow this to happen. If you build twitter-based activities into your session or offer 3 questions you want to invite the audience to blog about at the end, then you are creating a space for this interaction. At other times, you can invite participants to put down their devices and briefly give you their full attention.

This does require those with a "speaking" role to act more like facilitators than presenters. It means that you probably have to learn improv as well as voice projection, posture, storytelling and visual design to be good at this. It also means that speakers have to accept a more humble but ultimately more powerful role than "the sage on the stage". The only justifiable reason to get on a stage is to change the world a little bit, everything else is ego. And if you want to change the world, that means that the action is out there in the audience - they are the future and you, as a speaker, are the past. You have to go where the action is and tools like twitter can light up the action for you like a flare.

So what else can we do to make events better?

books offer

Who wants a copy of the following?

• American Gods by Neil Gaiman
• The Iliad (Robert Fagles translation)
• A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari
• Rip It Up & Start Again by Simon Reynolds
• I Wouldn't Start From Here by Andrew Mueller
• The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge

For pick-up only in the Sydney area.

michael sampson in canberra & melbourne

Michael Sampson will be bringing his world of Sharepoint sanity to Melbourne & Canberra in February. Catch him while you can!

the guy in the polo shirt

When you're at a business IT-related conference or an exhibition, each vendor stand will have a bunch of guys (& maybe a chick or two) in expensive-looking suits. There will also be a guy (maybe slightly overweight) in a polo shirt, fiddling with the demo. I always go for the guy in the polo shirt because most of the stand personnel will be sales people (with the occasional marketing manager thrown in). The guy in the polo shirt is generally the pre-sales guy. Sales teams hunt deals. Pre-sales exists because most sales staff don't have the deep product technical knowledge and can't run anything but the simplest of demos.

Generally I am not interested in the sales pitch. I want to know what the actual strengths & limitations of the product are. Pre-sales guys are far from unbiased but their pride in their technical knowledge means that you tend to get a slightly more realistic view of the product.

kissin' babies - trying to get to boston for enterprise 2.0

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference running in Boston this June has decided to allow an open submission & voting process. I have three submissions entered & I'm focusing my efforts on this one relating to RoI getting through. So if you could register on the site & vote for me before 20 January, I'd be much obliged.

I also thought I'd give you information about the other papers that stood out for me:

• In terms of "voting for your mates", I like Patti Anklam & think her 3 efforts could be most interesting: NetWork, KM & Leadership (Doug Cornelius & Jack Vinson are also involved).
• In terms of "full disclosure": I may well be on the panel for Ephraim Freed's learning culture session if it goes through.
  
• I have also liked the look of sessions by Jon Ingham, Paula Thornton & MITRE.

There are 463 proposals - vote for mine & I will kiss your baby!

book review: finding the sweet spot

Dave Pollard is a crazy-intense writer - one of the best writers on the web. One might even say that Dave thinks too much. Which is handy for the rest of us because he has written his first book - Finding the Sweet Spot. Dave brings his own mix of idealism and deep, detailed consideration to the topic of a creating a sustainable business. I used Dave's Gifts/Passions/Purpose 3 circle model when I started plotting Innotecture (I don't think I'm there yet BTW).

If you want to think about business in a different way then this book comes recommended.

book review: streetlights & shadows

As you may know, I have a lot of time for Gary Klein. So when I found out by chance on Amazon that he had a new book coming out at the end of last year, I ordered my copy straight away. Those of you that have read previous GK books will not be surprised by the contents but it takes these same ideas deeper. Sources of Power was 20 years of reseach condensed into a single book. The Power of Intuition and Working Minds were more how-to guides for the lay manager & cognitive specialist respectively.

In "Streetlights & Shadows", you get the impression that GK has had a lot of debates with people who disagree with him. GK strikes me as the kinda guy who will go off and ponder unsatisfactory discussions, sometimes for years, until he gets an answer that he's happy with.

This is an immensely rich book but it's not for those seeking easy answers or quick tips & tricks. With luck, it may even make you think as deeply as Gary Klein.

book review: information ecology

Tom Davenport's Information Ecology was published in 1997 and yet I've only just read it. This discovery came about because of some client work. We're trying get a handle on their information environment. Standard information architecture approaches felt inadequate to the task and I was left thinking "What we really need here is some kind of ecological approach to their information. If only someone had written a book on that. Wait a minute..."

So I got my copy and it pretty much lived up to expectations. It should be compulsory reading for all knowledge and information managers. It hasn't really dated, the issues it describes have if anything gotten more severe and its proffered solutions provide food for thought (whether you go with them or not). Plus second-hand copies are stupidly cheap.

When I start my own KM degree, it will form part of the core reading list.

i only have 2 problems with the term "design thinking"...

...And those are the words "design" and "thinking".

It's the New. Hot. Thing. Over the Christmas break, I read Change by Design and The Design of Business (having consumed The Ten Faces of Innovation a couple of years ago) - and there are several other books on the topic available.

So what is design thinking?

Well, according to Roger Martin, it's abduction - which is all very clever but not especially helpful. More helpful is the chapter in TDOB devoted to P&G's attempts to become an innovative organisation.

So is "design thinking" just a another phrase for "innovation" then? It will probably be used that way. Expect organizations that want to look good in their annual reports without actually doing anything new to create "Head of Design Thinking" roles and then axe them 18 months later.

For those of us who wish to take this opportunity more seriously, design thinking seems to be made up of the following:

• A human-centred (rather than technology-centred) approach to innovation & improvement.
• A systemic concern with the total user experience rather than a narrow focus on a particular product or service.
• A focus on unarticulated needs rather than articulated wants requiring immersive research techniques.
• A willingness to visualise & prototype solutions rather than relying on words alone.
• A willingness to iterate solutions rather than expecting them to be immediately fully-formed.
• An appreciation of the power of storytelling, theatre and emotional communication in general.

Now designers do not have a monopoly on these attitudes and skills (in fact some famous designers exhibited them quite poorly) and this is primarily about doing, about practice, rather than thinking*. But we now seem to be saddled with this term so let's make the best of it.

*Of course it is thinking but in a Damasio style not a Cartesian one.

enterprise 2.0 book review: is an andrew mcafee a communist?

I've just finished Andrew McAfee's Enterprise 2.0 book*.

There are two good things to say about the book and one criticism:

Good thing 1: Having a Harvard (now MIT) academic talk about the use of social software in the enterprise (plus a handy label) gave it respectability. The book continues that process of maturation. it doesn't hurt that from the opening sentence, it's well-written.

Good thing 2: Although much of the book seems to pull together the thinking & comments of others, AM does have something to contribute - the bull's eye model of strong/weak/potential/no ties. This provides an important perspective on how different social software tools work in different contexts.

Criticism: The last chapter in the book is entitled "Looking Ahead" and draws on Model 1 / Model 2 of Chris Argyris**. Although AM states: It is critical to stress that Enterprise 2.0 alone will not move people and organizations from Model 1 to Model 2 theories-in-use, he believes that they have a major role to play.

In this, he reminds me a lot of Karl Marx. Marx believed that human beings were corrupted by the economic system in which they operated (i.e. capitalism). Remove them from the bad system and everything would be OK. The thing is that environments & institutions can make human beings better or worse but hierarchy & social gaming are built into human nature. We are constantly in competition and co-operation at the same time.

So I personally think that Enterprise 2.0 technologies will have a comparatively small impact (but nonetheless one worth paying attention to) in how organizations work and workers collaborate. I think their combined historical impact will be less than email and other forces will actually drive more corporate openness (or indeed closure).

Of course, the thing about technology & social change is that you never can tell. Enterprise 2.0 is worth putting in the risky end of a barbell strategy.

*I wanted to link to the HBSP info but their site is screwed.
**This morning I was rereading chapter of 6 of Changing the Conversation in Organizations, where Patricia Shaw very carefully takes apart the tradition that Argyis comes from.

facing the swarm: the coming obsolescence of the big idea

Educated people in business love The Big Idea. Generally this is a heroic idea that will change everything. I am falling out of love with the Idea of The Big Idea. I think the problems were face as a species are so complex, are so wicked that just a few Big Ideas won't do.

We need a swarm of lots of Small Ideas small ideas. Micronotions that propogate across the memescape. Like any small, fast-breeding creatures, many are poorly adapted for their environment and doomed to die but many will reproduce and mutate and colonise.

Of course, careers are not built on small ideas nor are awards won. But the world is changed by small ideas.

I call for a profligacy of conceptulets.

Think small!

muhammad yunus - strategic doer

MY: See making money is an exciting thing. You can find a lot of pleasure in making money. Changing the world is the most exciting thing in the world. We have to make a decision that I will not live my life in a way that will take away the enjoyment of life for another person - that simple decision, that's all.

AD: It's a powerful thing that you are talking about. I mean I am just thinking probably one of the most popular shows on television round the world is called "Who Wants to be a Millionaire", it's about the desire for money.

MY: There should be another show, "Who wants to change the world?" But that show you are not promoting, because those who made the "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" makes million out of it.

I absolutely love this interview with Muhammad Yunus. A high-point of my year. As I read it, tears of joy are streaming out of my eyes.

There are many smart people in the world. But very few genuinely strategic doers. People who not only see the fine grains of detail but the big picture, the whole globe floating in space. And who not only see it but choose to act in a positive way to change it. Whatever your feelings about Grameen Bank, Yunus counts as one of those strategic doers.

PEITSD

Have you ever met a victim of Post ERP Implementation Traumatic Stress Disorder?

How can you tell if someone has PEITSD? Here are the signs:

• A belief that IT salespeople are liars and only want to get as much money out of you as possible.
  
• A belief that all IT consultants are sadists and only want to get as much money out of you as possible.
• A disbelief in RoI figures based on headcount reduction through efficiency gains.
• A morbid fear of consipulation*.
• An overwhelming sense of process-based persecution.

What other symptoms have you noted?

*consipulation = consultation + manipulation

book review: sharepoint roadmap for collaboration

I have been recommending Michael Sampson's book Sharepoint Roadmap for Collaboration to everyone I know who is working with Sharepoint (and that's a lot of people). It's a down-to-earth, practical guide to using Sharepoint to support (rather than hinder collaboration). I prefer it to Seamless Teamwork because that book was mostly aimed at end-users of Sharepoint rather than us poor bastards collaboration experts who have to manage the overall implementation*. This second book is much more for us.

One gripe: No pictures. Not a single one. Something for the visual thinkers in the next book please Michael.

*Apparently SP 2010 will solve all the problems that have bedevilled previous releases. My advice: Trust but verify.