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Wed, Jan 03, 2007

Parable of the Juggler    #

GettingThingsDone helps you juggle more effectively, but as MarciaConner reminds us in this parable, you may want to consider whether it's necessary to juggle that many balls in the first place.    (LQY)

/collaboration | Posted at 8:11pm

Power Relationships and Collaboration    #

At the OpenCollaborativeServicesInitiative meeting three years ago, I met DavidHartzband, who at the time was VP of collaboration technology at EMC. We had several fantastic conversations, including this thought-provoking claim: True collaboration cannot exist in a hierarchical relationship.    (LQK)

I disagreed with him then, and I disagree with this now, but I think I understand why he made this point. I was reminded of it again a few months ago, when EugeneChan and I were having a conversation about the foundation world. He said that he wished fundees would be open with their program officers about the challenges they faced, but that the natural power relationship between funder and fundee discouraged it.    (LQL)

This, I think, was the essence of David's argument. Would you approach someone with a problem if that person was in the position to punish you for being in that predicament in the first place? This scenario applies to both hierarchical relationships within an organization and relationships between competitors. It's further complicated by the presence of money.    (LQM)

Even if your answer is yes, the fact remains that power relationships affect interpersonal dynamics. When you're trying to improve collaboration, it's better to be explicit about these relationships than to wish them away.    (LQN)

A great example of this phenomenon emerged from the CIA workshop last September. Upper management there both encourages internal blogging it and are some of the most active practitioners. However, as the workshop revealed, there is still a tremendous fear of blogging amongst the analysts. The roadblock? Several people blamed middle management, whom they claimed actively discouraged blogging, even while upper management said and did the opposite. Many also cited an incident where an analyst got punished for writing something. (Others insisted that this was an oversimplification of what actually happened.)    (LQO)

In response to these and other comments, JerryMichalski (my hero when it comes to pithy wisdom) said, "Familiarity and fascination trump fear." The fear in this case was a consequence of the power relationships. A more accurate (although less alliterative) word for "familiarity" is "trust."    (LQP)

Today's SanFranciscoChronicle reported the following stats from a recent Florida State University study:    (LQR)

• 39 percent of employees surveyed said their supervisor failed to keep promises.    (LQS)
• 37 percent said their supervisor failed to give credit when due.    (LQT)
• 27 percent said their supervisor made negative comments about them to other employees or managers.    (LQU)
• 23 percent said their supervisor blames others to cover up mistakes or minimize embarrassment.    (LQV)

The problem isn't that power relationships are inherently bad for collaboration. The problem is that most organizations do not have enough trust. Building trust is hard and takes time. But it's possible.    (LQQ)

/collaboration | Posted at 7:59pm

Group Information Hygiene    #

Last August, I wrote:    (LPS)

Poor PersonalInformationHygiene can often interfere with group trust, and trust is a prerequisite for good collaboration.    (LPU)

In an ideal world, everyone on your team would be masters of PersonalInformationHygiene, but in reality, that's rarely the case. Frankly, I'm not sure if it's always desirable. People have different kinds of intelligences, and it may be that certain kinds of intelligences are critical to a high-performance team, but are also orthogonal to good PersonalInformationHygiene.    (LPV)

Is it possible to have good GroupInformationHygiene if people on a team have poor PersonalInformationHygiene? Moreover, is it possible for the whole to be greater than the sum?    (LPW)

You all know what my answers are.    (LPX)

Part of the MGTaylor facilitation philosophy is to offload all potential distractions so that the participants may focus entirely on the task at hand. When you attend an MGTaylor DesignShop, there are several KnowledgeWorkers present, who are responsible for managing the distractions (among other things). They set up and reset the environment. They scribe your conversations. They manage the clock.    (LPY)

The philosophy is not exclusive to MGTaylor. The AspenInstitute follows a similar process. So do high-level politicians and actors in big-budget films, where their schedules are minutely managed so that they can focus entirely on acting... er, and policy-making. So do fancy restaurants. The food at Gary Danko in SanFrancisco is fantastic, but the service is unbelievable. There are literally six servers hiding in the shadows, anticipating your needs and making sure your table space is always pristine. Your glass is always full. Your napkin is always folded. If you're about to go to the bathroom, a server will pull out your chair and point you in the right direction. Remarkably, they pull this off without being overbearing and creepy.    (LPZ)

We can debate whether or not this is always a good thing. (I think the answer is no.) We can certainly agree that this level of service is not always practical. What's indisputable is that in a collaborative situation, these things need to be done by somebody. The question is by whom?    (LQ0)

The SacrificialLamb (stolen from JimCoplien and NeilHarrison's SacrificeOnePerson pattern) is both a pattern and an antipattern. Most of us are familiar with it as an antipattern, where someone "takes one for the team" and essentially does someone else's job because that other person isn't doing it. (We discussed this in great detail at last year's StLouisCollaboratory workshop.)    (LQ1)

When it's a result of broken trust, SacrificialLamb is short-term positive, because the job gets done, but it's long-term negative because it hurts your working chemistry and often overloads your most productive team members. When it's intentional and explicit, it's net positive, because it's not breaking any trust relationships. The essence of Jim and Neil's pattern is that instead of dividing the necessary but dreary tasks among multiple peers, you designate one person as the SacrificialLamb and that person handles all of those tasks, at least for one cycle. You increase the likelihood of the tasks getting done and getting done well, and you increase the productivity of your other team members. If done right, the whole will be greater than the sum. The KnowledgeWorkers in the MGTaylor process are essentially SacrificialLambs.    (LQ2)

The role of the SacrificialLamb is most often to maintain good GroupInformationHygiene. Project managers will find this role familiar. For example, when scheduling meetings, you send frequent reminders, both to compensate for others who are not good at maintaining their own calendars and to correct potential miscommunications. These tasks are laborious, but they're necessary for HighPerformanceCollaboration.    (LQ3)

Collaboration can be a difficult thing to measure, but measuring GroupInformationHygiene is relatively easy. I used metrics associated with GroupInformationHygiene extensively with a client last year as one indication of the state of collaboration within the community and the potential for improvement in the future. Poor GroupInformationHygiene is a natural obstacle to scale.    (LQ4)

/collaboration/patterns | Posted at 3:58pm

Getting Things Done    #

Last year, I reached a point where I wasn't managing my time and tasks to my satisfaction, so I decided to check out the GettingThingsDone bandwagon. I went to Green Apple to buy DavidAllen's book, but I couldn't find it in the business section. I asked a salesperson for assistance, and to my horror (and amusement), they suggested I check the self-help section.    (LPB)

GettingThingsDone is indeed a self-help book of sorts, but it's also full of good advice on information management. More importantly, the philosophy it espouses not only has important implications on task management but also on collaboration.    (LPC)

The problem it seeks to address is, how do we manage our day-to-day, overcommitted lives in this age of information overload? Allen's solution is simple. Keep your mind in a relaxed, ready-for-action state, which he compares to the "zone" that athletes often experience. In martial arts, if the body is tense, it will not react quickly or powerfully. Keeping your body relaxed is what separates the masters from the novices.    (LPD)

Easier said than done, right? Allen's method for getting your mind into this state is two-fold. First, get things out of your head into a system you trust. Second, frame tasks as something actionable. Starting with managing the nitty gritty in your life will free your mind to do the higher-level thinking we all wish we had more time to do.    (LPE)

The ready-state and trust are critical concepts. Much of our day-to-day tension is the result of trying to balance all of the things we need to do in our head. The brain is not good at this sort of thing. Once you move all those tasks into a system you trust, you relieve your brain of that stress.    (LPF)

Allen cited one of his clients, who said that she never stressed about forgetting about a meeting, even though she had a lot of them, because she knew that information was in her calendar. Whenever she scheduled a meeting, she immediately off-loaded it into her calendar, so she knew that it was always current. She wanted a similar trusted system for managing other types of tasks.    (LPG)

Allen also noted that just as we feel guilty about breaking agreements with others, we also feel guilty about breaking agreements with ourselves. If you tell yourself you're going to eat a salad every day, but you keep eating cheeseburgers, you've broken an agreement with yourself, and you're going to feel bad about it. Even worse, you'll lose trust in yourself, or at least, your system, and so continued use of that system will make you even antsier.    (LPH)

How do you resolve this? By acknowledging that you are in fact making an agreement, and treating it as such. Just as you would call a friend to reschedule, you need to explicitly renegotiate the agreements you make with yourself.    (LPI)

Explicitness is critical. The act of framing a task as an action is an important, but oft-neglected step. "Eat better," is not actionable. "Eat fish three times a week," is. The act of writing down an action item makes it both real and subject to renegotiation.    (LPJ)

In keeping with his philosophy, Allen's book is full of concrete actions you can take to improve your information management. These have been covered in great detail elsewhere, so I'll just point out a few that I've found useful:    (LPK)

• Keep your file cabinets two-thirds full.    (LPL)
• Use a label-maker on your file folders.    (LPM)

(For a more comprehensive list of my GTD implementation and some other tips and tricks, see LifeHacks.)    (LPN)

These sort of tips sound trivial, but when performed with the larger framework in mind, they are extremely effective. One of the things I really like about Allen's book is his emphasis on environment, which parallels my philosophy on collaborative spaces. How you structure your workspace will have a great effect on whether or not your work processes are successful.    (LPO)

Allen doesn't spend much time on the implications of GettingThingsDone on collaboration, but he does reiterate the importance of trust in groups. When you have a list of action items, and you're not getting them done, others who are depending on you are going to lose trust. Since trust is the foundation of good collaboration, it behooves you to to be good at GettingThingsDone.    (LPP)

This is essentially the PersonalInformationHygiene point that I made last year, although I like how Allen explicitly incorporates trust into his explanation of its importance. However, I also think it's an oversimplification. One of the inherent advantages of a team over an individual, is that you can compensate for individual weaknesses. I'll write more about this in a later post on GroupInformationHygiene.    (LPQ)

/books | Posted at 2:53pm

Tue, Jan 02, 2007

Commenting on Blogs    #

MarkBernstein recently complained that the right place to comment on a blog post was by private email or by linking from your own blog, not via the blog's comment mechanism. I still agree with this view, although my belief has been greatly tempered by own experiences.    (LOS)

Several months ago, I turned off comments on my blogs because of spam. I miss them dearly. I've got enough of an active readership that folks blog about my blog entries, but I miss the quick-hit comments, which either contained nuggets of useful information or expressed humor, and which often came from non-bloggers. I still get these kinds of comments over email, but the numbers have decreased dramatically, and I keep having to ask permission to publish them. Blog comments have this just-right affordance that isn't adequately met any other way.    (LOT)

All of this is consistent with ClayShirky's theory on how blogs avoid the tragedy of the commons. (Since I've been giving Clay so much link love these past few days, it's worth noting that, "Group as User: Flaming and the Design of Social Software" is my favorite of his essays.) Clay writes:    (LOU)

MichaelArrington recently asked whether comments should be a requirement for blogs. My answer is definitively no. The distinguishing feature that makes blogs unique are the use of links for commenting. In this sense, PermaLinks are more of a defining characteristic than comment sections are, because they are what enable this blogs-as-conversation capability.    (LOX)

That said, I'm anxious to turn my blog comments back on, which will happen once I upgrade my blog software. (Soon, I swear.)    (LOY)

/collaboration/tools | Posted at 12:15pm

Folksonomy Taxonomy Philosophy    #

I love playing The Book of Questions types of games with friends and colleagues, but when it comes to answering those types of questions myself, I'm a terrible waffler. When I play these games with my friend, Steph, she often complains scornfully, "You're such a 'P'." "P" refers to the "Perceiving" MyersBriggs personality type, which refers to folks who are highly context-sensitive (also known as "wafflers").    (LNM)

Suffice it to say, I hate truisms (except for that one). You could even call me a "philosophical relativist," which according to ElainePeterson, would make me a fan of folksonomies. Also true. And in a metaphysical twist that will drive the less philosophically-inclined (and Steph) crazy, if you were to ask me if folksonomies were better than taxonomies, I would respond, "That's not a valid question." Folksonomies and taxonomies are not quite apples and oranges, but they're not apples and apples either. Debating the two is intellectually interesting, but it obscures the real opportunity, which is understanding how the two could potentially augment each other.    (LNN)

The impetus for this little outburst is GavinClabaugh's recent piece on folksonomies. Gavin (who cites Peterson's essay) argues that taxonomies are better for finding information than folksonomies. Do I agree with that? It depends. ClayShirky outlined some situations when taxonomies are better for search and vice-versa in his excellent essay, "Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags".    (LNO)

What troubles me about the claim at all is that it highlights a distinction that I find to be misleading. In ElainePeterson's essay, "Beneath the Metadata: Some Philosophical Problems with Folksonomy," the main problem she cites has to do with philosophical relativism. Folksonomies allow it; traditional classification does not.    (LNP)

What is philosophical relativism? If I show you a picture of a mono-colored object, is it possible for that object to be both black and white? If you answered yes, you're a philosophical relativist.    (LNQ)

On the surface, "philosophical relativist" might sound like another term for "dumb as hell." But, what if the picture was of a person? And what if that person had an African-American father and a Caucasian mother? Now is it possible to classify this photo as both "black" and "white"?    (LNR)

Language is highly context-sensitive. Philosophical relativists acknowledge this. Believe it or not, so do librarians and traditional taxonomists. A taxonomy attempts to make classification more useful by restricting the scope to a single context. If you happen to be operating within that context, then this works great. There are plenty of situations when this is the case (Gavin cites the medical community, which is a great example), but there are also plenty of situations when it's not.    (LNS)

Folksonomies allow for multiple contexts, but that does not make them inherently less useful than taxonomies. As Clay points out in his essay, in practice, there's a long tail of tags applied to different concepts. If something is tagged "black" by 98 people and "white" by two, you can be pretty sure that the object in question is "black." Scale essentially transforms a folksonomy into a taxonomy with a little bit of noise that can easily be filtered out (if desired).    (LNT)

Frankly, I think the concern is less about whether taxonomies are inherently better than folksonomies and more about whether so-called experts should have a role in constructing taxonomies. Gavin also alludes to this, when he describes a conversation with two friends in a SanFrancisco coffee shop. (I don't want to out those friends, but I will say that one of them runs a company named after the faithful companion of a certain oversized lumberjack from American folklore. I will also say that Gavin is an outstanding tea companion, and that we're working on a project that has very little to do with folksonomies, but that will make the world a much better place regardless.)    (LNU)

Gavin's friends suggested that folksonomies were a great way of collaboratively developing a taxonomy. Gavin partially agreed, but expressed some doubt, stating:    (LNV)

I can actually think of many situations where I would agree with this. One is Pandora, the music recommendation service built on top of the MusicGenomeProject. The MusicGenomeProject is a formal ontology for classifying music developed by 50 musician-analysts over seven years. By all accounts, the service is extraordinarily good. ChrisAllen sang its praises to me at the last WikiWednesday, and it was all the rage at the original BarCamp.    (LNX)

But having experts involved doesn't preclude using a folksonomy to develop a taxonomy. Is a folksonomy developed by a small group of experts any less of a folksonomy?    (LNY)

In 2002, KayYutChen, LeslieFine, and BernardoHuberman developed a prediction market using WisdomOfCrowds techniques for financial forecasting of a division of HP. The market was 40 percent more accurate than the company's official forecast. The catch? The people playing the market were the same people doing the official forecast. The difference was not in who was doing the predicting; the difference was in the process.    (LNZ)

I'm a historian by background. I have a great appreciation for the lessons of the past, which is reflected in my patterns-based approach towards improving collaboration. Five years ago, I reviewed ElaineSvenonius's wonderful book, The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization, where I wrote:    (LO0)

There is a tremendous amount of past knowledge that I'm afraid is being passed off as trite and irrelevant, when in fact it is even more relevant today. How many people building tagging systems know about FacetedClassification? How many of these developers know of DougLenat's brilliant research on Cyc, or that a huge subset of the Cyc ontology is open source? On the flip side, how many librarians and ontologists are needlessly dismissing folksonomies as not as good, and hence irrelevant?    (LO2)

Philosophical debates over taxonomy and folksonomy are exactly that: philosophy. I love philosophy. I enjoyed Peterson's essay, and I'd recommend it to others. Curiously enough, DavidWeinberger, one of folksonomy's foremost evangelists, is also a philosopher by background. (Read his response to Peterson's essay.)    (LO3)

However, philosophy sometimes obscures reality, or worse yet, opportunity. We should be focusing our efforts on understanding how taxonomies and folksonomies can augment each other, not on picking sides.    (LO4)

/collaboration/tools | Posted at 11:45am

Mon, Jan 01, 2007

The Varieties of Second Life Experience    #

I liked ClayShirky's commentary last month on SecondLife, along with HowardRheingold's qualifications in the comments. More than anything, Clay seemed to be lashing out against thoughtless discourse, which is a big pet peeve of mine as well. Of course, posts like these generally generate more thoughtless discourse. It's the cost of having open conversations on the Internet. The benefit is that the few gems that emerge generally outweigh the noise.    (LND)

I particularly enjoyed MarkOehlert's response to Clay and others. I had the pleasure of listening to Mark evangelize SecondLife over lunch a few months ago, and it was almost enough for me to dip my toes there for the first time, something I've resisted for almost two years now. I've continued to refrain for reasons I'll explain some other time, but when I do finally decide to check things out, you can bet I'll be asking Mark for a tour.    (LNE)

Despite my own skepticism, Clay's commentary, and the fact that I haven't played with it myself yet, I think SecondLife and 3D MMOGs in general are important, and I will continue to pay attention to them. I'm reminded of WilliamJames, who in The Varieties of Religious Experience, writes of the relationship between intense, religious experiences and our minds, how we live our lives, and truth itself.    (LNF)

Regardless of what the actual numbers of users are, regardless of the sum impact these environments have actually had on the world today, one thing that we can't dispute is that some nontrivial number of people have had intense, important experiences within these environments. This fact alone suggests that there is something transformational there, something that is worth further exploration.    (LNG)

/collaboration/tools | Posted at 7:29pm

Engelbart's "Whale" Slides    #

I call my favorite set of DougEngelbart slides the "whale slides." He calls them the "Coevolution Frontier." They show a graph of collective tool utilization versus human systems development. His first slide shows our typical view of the distribution among organizations around the world.    (LN2)

   (LN3)

Looks like a sperm whale, huh? The x-axis shows how effectively organizations are using tools. The y-axis shows the corresponding effectiveness of human systems, such as organizational design and processes. A few observations. There is a broader spectrum of effective tool usage than there is of human systems. The spectrum of tool usage effectiveness is approximately the same for those on the cutting edge of human systems development as it is for those on the trailing edge. However, the spectrum of human systems development is significantly larger for those on the cutting edge of technology than it is for those on the trailing edge. The red square indicates the most cutting edge organization today. The dotted lines indicate where most organizations would like to be, both in the near future and twenty years from now.    (LN4)

Stop for a moment and think about this picture. Think about what an organization representing the red square looks like. Think about what it would be like to be on the dotted lines.    (LN5)

Overall, the graph is weighted more heavily towards the cutting edge of both axes. It's an optimistic view, based entirely on Doug's perception of the world, or more accurately, his perception of other people's perceptions. But it doesn't particularly impress Doug, who thinks this is more accurate:    (LN6)

   (LN7)

The only difference is that the dotted lines have moved much further out. The message? When we think about what's possible, we're thinking too small.    (LN8)

But this still doesn't impress Doug, because he thinks we're still thinking too small. His vision looks more like:    (LN9)

   (LNA)

Now think about what an organization on the dotted lines would look like. Compare it to your earlier thoughts from the first slide. How are they different?    (LNB)

What I love about these slides is that they force you to raise your expectations and think much, much bigger. We can always do better, much, much better.    (LNC)

/collaboration | Posted at 6:27pm

Standards of Education    #

Last November, SunlightFoundation organized a meeting in SanFrancisco centered around Open Data / Open Government (dubbed "ODOG"). As what might be expected at a gathering of excellent people facilitated by AllenGunn, it was a terrific event. While we covered tons of interesting ground, the thing that stood out for me the most was something that SalimIsmail said.    (LMP)

Salim suggested that the two prerequisites for an effective democracy were access to information and educated citizens. He then noted that he had lived a third of his life in the U.S., a third in India, and a third in Europe, and of all three locations, the U.S. had the least educated citizenry.    (LMQ)

I found myself citing Salim a week later in a spirited conversation about the state of the world with a friend, who challenged me to define exactly what I meant by an educated citizenry. I thought for a moment, then responded, "I will consider our citizenry educated when over 90 percent of Americans can identify the U.S. on a world map."    (LMR)

I don't know what the exact metric should be, but the essence of the metric should be clear. Last year, the National Geographic Society sponsored a study of geographic literacy in this country. The results?    (LMS)

• 63 percent of Americans aged 18 to 24 could not identify Iraq on a map of the Middle East.    (LMT)
• 50 percent could not identify New York on a map of the United States.    (LMU)

A few years ago, I learned of another horrifying stat. 52 percent of Japanese primary and secondary students have never seen a sunset or a sunrise. That's up from an equally horrifying 41 percent in 1991.    (LMV)

Folks in my business like to draw distinctions between information and knowledge, or knowledge and wisdom. Whatever you call the ends of the spectrum, the pattern is the same. As you move towards knowledge and wisdom, the secret sauce is context, meaning, and actionability.    (LMW)

Context is a funny creature. I can use all sorts of data and rhetoric to justify or oppose war, but the fact that my grandfather was kidnapped and killed by North Koreans during the Korean War certainly colors my judgement. I don't claim any moral superiority in my opinions, but I certainly have context that not everyone has, and the essence of that context is very human.    (LMX)

I'd like people to have at least some human context before making judgements of import. At minimum, I think people should be able to identify a country on a map before expressing opposition or support for attacking it. At maximum, I think people should know others from that country, or even better, have spent time there themselves. I think people should experience at least one sunset or sunrise before expressing judgement about environment policy.    (LMY)

/collaboration | Posted at 5:22pm

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