Public Strategist

The Pew Internet and American Life project regularly publishes  interesting reports on various aspects of American internet usage.  They have a new report out with the not wildly snappy title, A Typology of Information and Communication Technology Users.  Not directly relevant to us, but certainly indicative of some significant trends.  The first thought which jumps out from their categorisation is that the early adopters aren’t any more – they have become the mainstream:

Elite Tech Users (31% of American adults)

Omnivores
8% –They have the most information gadgets and services, which they
use voraciously to participate in cyberspace and express themselves
online and do a range of Web 2.0 activities such as blogging or
managing their own Web pages.

Connectors 7% — Between
featured-packed cell phones and frequent online use, they connect to
people and manage digital content using ICTs – all with high levels of
satisfaction about how ICTs let them work with community groups and
pursue hobbies.

Lackluster Veterans 8% — They are frequent
users of the internet and less avid about cell phones. They are not
thrilled with ICT-enabled connectivity.

Productivity Enhancers
8% — They have strongly positive views about how technology lets them
keep up with others, do their jobs, and learn new things.

Middle-of-the-road Tech Users (20%)

Mobile
Centrics 10% –They fully embrace the functionality of their cell
phones. They use the internet, but not often, and like how ICTs connect
them to others.

Connected But Hassled 10% — They have invested
in a lot of technology, but they find the connectivity intrusive and
information something of a burden.

Few Tech Assets (49%)

Inexperienced
Experimenters 8% — They occasionally take advantage of interactivity,
but if they had more experience, they might do more with ICTs.

Light
But Satisfied 15% — They have some technology, but it does not play a
central role in their daily lives. They are satisfied with what ICTs do
for them.

Indifferents 11% — Despite having either cell phones
or online access, these users use ICTs only intermittently and find
connectivity annoying.

Off the Network 15% — Those with neither
cell phones nor internet connectivity tend to be older adults who are
content with old media.

"The success of planning in conquering both intellectual and popular opinion is really rather remarkable, particularly if one bears in mind that the idea of planning … only surfaced in the second decade of [the last] century.  For the previous hundred years it had been ‘liberty’ which had been emblazoned on the banners of the international socialist movement.  In the twentieth century, it is no exaggeration to say that planning has displaced liberty as the key slogan of socialism."

Peter Rutland, The Myth of the Plan (London:  Hutchinson, 1985)

We tend to have two contradictory assumptions about new channels – particularly online channels. 

On one hand, they are the self-evident future, mores straightforward in every respect than the cumbersome, time-consuming and bureaucratic processes they will replace – and so wholly unsurprisingly, our customers will seize on the new opportunities just as soon as we can make them available.

On the other, they are mysterious, unfamiliar, and a profound challenge to the channel conservatism which runs deep in everyone, and in our customers more than most. At best, online channels will be largely ignored; at worst they will generate so much confusion that they will increase the load on conventional channels, as we have to field vast numbers of phone calls triggered by the incomprehensibility of the online experience.

It is, of course, easy to forget how unfamiliar new things can be – which is the power behind my favourite definition of technology.  Even the book was new once, with user interface requirements very different from those comfortably familiar scrolls.  Some enterprising Danes (?) have imagined the help desk call…

Scott Rosenberg makes the link between the video and some of the wider uncertainties which come from the introduction of a new format or channel.  He cites a conversation in which Geoffrey Bilder makes the point that the first instinct is to make the new look familiar to users of the old:

People were clearly uncomfortable moving from manuscripts to printed
books. They’d print these books, and then they’d decorate them by hand.
They’d add red capitals to the beginnings of paragraphs, and illuminate
the margins, because they didn’t entirely trust this printed thing. It
somehow felt of less quality, less formal, less official, less
authoritative. And here we are, trying to make our online stuff more
like printed stuff. This is the incunabula of the digital age that
we’re creating at the moment. And it’s going to change.

So much of the apparatus that we take for granted when we look at a
book – the table of contents, page numbers, running heads, footnotes -
that wasn’t common currency. It got developed. Page numbers didn’t make
much sense if there was only one edition of something. This kind of
stuff got developed and adopted over a fairly long period of time.

If you treat Vannevar Bush as Gutenberg, we haven’t even gotten to
Martin Luther yet, we haven’t even gotten to 1525. In fact, whereas
people stopped trying to decorate manuscripts by 1501, we’re still
trying to replicate print online. So in some ways they were way ahead
of us in building new mechanisms for communicating, and new apparatus
for the stuff they were dealing with.

As Rosenberg concludes:

It helps to think that what we’ve been doing here on the Web for several
years is slowly, by trial error, inventing the online equivalents to "the apparatus that we take for granted when we look at a book." And
we’ve only just begun.

The production of knowledge – or of insight – is often seen as a rational and linear progression.  There are various expressions of it.  One widely used version is:

Data -> Information -> Knowledge -> Wisdom

A variant developed closer to home is:

Data -> Information -> Insight -> Action

The second of those is, to my mind, an improvement on the first, not least because (as Marx didn’t quite say) the goal is not simply to understand the world, but to change it.  But it still strongly implies that the process is linear and that data exists independently of the insight and action we want to develop.

A moment’s thought makes clear that the world doesn’t really work that way:  without a framework for understanding the knowledge-wisdom/insight-action end of the process, there is no such thing as data, which is why it should not be surprising that when we change our desired insight or our intended action, the data and information needed to help us navigate proves simply not to exist (or not to be collected, organised and managed, which in practice comes to the same thing).

Some alternative ways of thinking about this come from the same sources which lie behind my post a few weeks ago on the three generations of knowledge management.

Read the rest of this entry »

A dreadful, but no doubt utterly normal support call to HP – posted with captions commenting on what is going on.  It’s probably most depressing for being completely unsurprising.

Call summary:

• proportion of call spent listening to hold music:  16%
• proportion spent talking to a computer:  15%
• proportion spent looking for and reading out serial numbers and model numbers:  44%
• proportion spent talking about the customer’s problem: 16%
• progress made towards resolving customer’s problem:  none

As ever, embedded video visible from proper computers, but not from DOI.

• Knowledge can only be volunteered, it cannot be conscripted
• We only know what we know when we need to know it
• We always know more than we can tell, we will always tell more than we will write down

Dave Snowden – from his slide in the previous post.

Thinking about story telling reminded me of Dave Snowden.  Dave is a pioneer in knowledge management, who played an inadvertent bit part in an earlier post on social network analysis – activity, betweenness and closeness, but more pertinently was one of IBM’s most unlikely consultants, using approaches he had largely developed himself based more on anthropology than on the Taylorist approaches which are the foundation of much conventional consultancy.  He was also the first – but by no means the last – consultant I came across who was addicted to very distinctive (and very expensive) hexagonal post-it notes.

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It’s been a while since I glanced through the posts on Slow Leadership.  Lots of good stuff, but three particularly caught my eye:

Occam’s razor - which basically amounts to the proposition that explanations shouldn’t be more complicated than they need to be – is applied to management by targets:

Demming’s basic message was that quality is a management responsibility, and poor quality is almost always the result of imposing systems and objectives which thwart people’s desire to do high quality work. He also said the role of management was to drive out fear, something best done by eliminating quotas, numerical goals, and merit ratings. A good part of the overwork and pressure that infects business today comes from people either collecting data to satisfy the organizational mania for measurement, or facing objectives that have been produced by the statistically illiterate.

You Can’t Be Innovative and Risk-averse Too – which argues that innovation intrinsically entails risk, based on a report of a survey which, surprise, surprise, found that "having a culture that does not foster risk taking was the biggest impediment to innovation".  Building on that, Slow Leadership argues that

Many organizations get risk completely wrong, because they focus entirely on the risk of being wrong. What about the risk of being right—maybe even more right than you ever dreamed? It’s the continual focus on the downside of risk that leads executives to institute whole books of rules to limit their exposure to it, and to punish those who take risks and get them wrong. But much—maybe most—of success in the real world has to do with chance, not design. That’s how evolution works, for example. It puts out changes into the world and sees what happens. What works, survives.

The suggested solution – or part of it – comes in the form of six rules of innovation, culminating in the exhortation, "A failed idea is far better than no idea at all. Remember that.

The stories we tell ourselves – which argues that our grasp of our own past and present is pretty shaky, and that our grasp of the past, present and intentions of others is shakier still.  We understand the world through a set of stories which we tell others – and tell ourselves.  And in a tradition which no doubt goes back to the very first telling of how big the fish was that got away, we embellish and adapt stories in the telling.

People constantly tell one another stories, at a bar, in the office, at home around the dining table. Marketers tell stories about products. Newscasters add human interest stories to enhance dull, factual news. Hollywood and television entertainment are nothing but stories. Of course, we tell ourselves stories too—about what things mean, what other people must be thinking, about why we did, or said, things that worked out or failed us. Memory isn’t a filing cabinet of facts. It’s a library of stories we’ve told ourselves about the way life was and the part we played in it.

Our heads are full of creative fiction, loosely based on real events.

The power of story comes up in other contexts.  I was going to add a sentence here about one of them, but following a couple of links to pin down something I half remembered suggests that stories and knowledge management deserve a post in their own right – to follow soon.

For those of you who may – just perhaps – have seen one too many communications via the medium of powerpoint recently, you might like the recent story from one of America’s finest news sources: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/30903

To give you a flavour and decide whether to go the extra mile and click that hyperlink:

Project Manager Leaves Suicide PowerPoint Presentation

NB – this is not a cry for help

From the new (to me) strip CEO Dad.  More, much more, here.