1 – Aesthetics and Dimensions: a companion robot’s height and aesthetics must be designed such we are happy to have them as a member of the family.

I like this.

Sidebar question for all authors: why would I buy the book after I've seen this? This already makes perfect sense to me - there are bits I agree with and bits I disagree with and reading the book is unlikely to change any of that. Unless it's chock full of 'sticky' stuff, I'll likely get little out of it.

Like this. Click through to have a look at their Venn analysis of the importance of segmentation (which I'm not even sure I understand in this context) - it made me snicker.

Most of us will recognize the phenomena: actually sitting down to write out a response to something makes you see it in a new way, often with greater complexity. And that of course is the crucial flipside to the decline of long-form reading in the digital age: the increase in short-form writing. If we are slightly less able to focus because of the distractions of electric text, I suspect it is more than made up for by the fact that we are much more likely to write out our responses to what we do read.

I don't know about the rest of you, but this one's certainly true for me.

I have been thinking about The Shallows a lot, though. One of the things it's made me realise is how little fiction I'm reading these days. Do people like Gladwell, Shirky and, yes, Carr fulfill a sort of semi-fictional role with their tub-thumping dilettantism?

I can always tell when I've written something a bit silly because I get a warning sign of pleasure. Seriously, I have no idea what 'tub-thumping dilettantism' even means. So much for the 'crucial flipside'.

I can picture this going down well...

Works for me, mostly.

I'm not sure I'm that bothered about 'measurable goals', apart from my personal ability to refind materials and get involved in conversations with strangers.

Hello!

After Action Review poster - making it human and engaging. And perhaps avoiding the dreaded rabbit ears of forced irony?

A true theory of meritocracy would acknowledge that we all have multiple talents and motivations; and that we all can learn and improve in most of the roles in which we are placed — though how much and how fast will vary from person to person.

It would recognize that we live and work in a dynamic and uncertain world. For optimum efficiency, motivation, and well-being, we should be constantly reviewing the fit we have with our positions and making adjustments.

And it would recognize that it's increasingly effective for organizations to adopt more of a lattice than a pyramid structure — flat with broad opportunities for reward.

While I was reading this it suddenly struck me:
In every job I've ever had, it's been much easier to get a promotion than it has been to move sideways (or even downwards).

This is insane, surely?

The organisation that cracks this one will be the 'employee engagement' benchmark.

Luckily the "fix" for these kinds of programs is really quite simple: Require that participants come to the program with a specific business challenge (either individually or as a team); build time into the program to create a plan for addressing that challenge based on the content that is presented; and then insist that managers execute against these plans after the program. Firms such as GE, Honeywell, Siemens, and many others have used this approach for years with great success — and have documented many millions of dollars of benefits. In essence they have transformed their leadership development activities from a "cost center" to a "profit center" — which makes them much more difficult to dismiss when budgets get tight.

Saved for refinding.

Training done just-in-case usually fails. Training done just-in-time succeeds more often and is more effective.

Is training done 'just-in-time' still 'training' or some kind of facilitation or collaboration exercise. It is if that's what rocks participants' boats and it isn't if they start with the rabbit ears of forced irony.

Dave Snowden reimagines DIKW based on some of ohn Poindexter's ideas. And removes the 'W' (for wisdom) entirely.

And links it to the OODA loop. I'm a big fan of the OODA loop as it's the framework that best encapsulates Karl Weick's idea of intuition as 'compressed expertise'.

Dave Snowden puts the model out for discussion in the comments and nitpicking - inevitably - ensues. Which I guess is the whole point.

My take on the model:
Models are the world encoded. 1:1 maps are useless and you have to remove information for them to be apprehendable. Your apprehendable will never be my apprehendable, not exactly.

Encoding must be essential. It must strip ideas down to essences and we must do it, whether consciously or sub-consciously. Better to do it consciously so the results are open and accessible to others for critique. To bemoan the 'simplicity' of models is - there's no other word for this - pompous idiocy unless you can come up with something better.

Models are Boundary Objects. That is, they are shared objects that are viewed differently by different communities/individuals. (Actually, I'm not sure about the 'community' part - but then, clearly, the term 'Boundary Object' is itself a Boundary Object.) The validity of most models is contingent. In this respect, they are exactly like art.

In my experience, people are more comfortable with fuzzy definitions of words than they are with arrows, contiguity and position [PDF]. Perhaps this is because these processes work subconsciously? Removing the arrows (we infer order/hierarchy effortlessly, even when it's not intended) and adding a bit of wabi-sabi to the layout might help?

The idea of Knowledge as 'pathfinding' and, particularly, 'deciding what to do within constraints' is worth the ticket price alone.

If there was a right way to teach math, we would have found it by now.

This is easy to apply to just about any subject/technique. Or Knowledge Management:

If there was a right way to 'do' KM, we would have found it by now.

A phrase of Dan Meyer's. We need to help out students develop into 'patient problem solvers'.

Tim Childs uses this as an example. How could you use the above to get a bunch of kids to infer some of the rules of grammar and punctuation? And how would this reduce the sense of arbitrariness of it all?

For many kids, it's the arbitrariness of it all that's the real killer (of interest, ambition, effort, curiosity). I speak from personal experience.

It's got a picture of brains, so it must be true.

Easy to be cynical about this and ask for more evidence (click through to see more information) but I guess this falls into the 'actually, that makes kind of sense and what the heck let's give it a go' category.

Now, your job is to work out how to include this in people's workday. . .

Love this.

I've always found myself frustrated whenever I hear a sentence beginning with 'there are two types of people...' I always thought this was probably because I rejected the possibility of it being that simple.

For some things, though, it probably is. Here's some examples.

I think what I was really rejecting is the notion of our character/perception being fixed. I'm the individual > society type, I guess. These gestalt shifts are more common than we'd ever allow ourselves to imagine.

Nice idea, as usual, from Dave Gray's team.

I like 'module buiders' as an idea - it's very non-obvious.

Kuhn thought that a way to explain these jumps was in terms of Gestalt switches like the duck-rabbit illusion. One scientist could look at the evidence and ’see’ one theory, while another might look at the evidence and see something completely different. This might explain why scientific communities can shift from one theory to another quite quickly but it doesn’t really explain the extended periods of stability that Kuhn observed in the progress of science. However, Kuhn had a provocative explanation for this too. Have a look at this video of the duck-rabbit illusion for children.

With the static image of the duck-rabbit we can choose to see which image we want but when we have someone telling us what to see and reinforcing the image with other information, it gets a lot harder to make the choice. Kuhn was of the opinion that scientists become socialized into a community through learning to be legitimate scientists, so that they are trained to see phenomena in particular ways that support the dominant paradigm. Changing paradigms happens with great reluctance, not just because it requires a great number of people to see something in a different way but also because careers and authority are established upon the paradigm. Seeing things differently is a threat to the hierarchy.

Great post over Innovation Leadership Network on one of the implicit dangers of (over-)specialisation.

Goes well with another of their posts on lessons learned from Tasmania (this is really good) and the Twin Peaks analogy.

I like this diagram, particularly how it doesn't chuck the Foundational Knowledge baby out with the bathwater.

I'd be interested to see this information presented with weighting - I suspect the weighting changes over time and is situational. I also suspect there is an 'order' to these things, blah blah blah integrated social learning real-life simulation meaningful andragogical imperative etc be blowed.

The Foundational Knowledge stage also includes the idea of the Teachable Equivalent (see this post for expansion on the idea of a 'right' order).

More on Teachable Equivalents over at our my Amplify mini-blog.

Brief overview of the survey:
Size = 74
76% of respondents said their organisation had a 'lessons learned' system in place
39% of these rated it as 'good' or above.
54% of these rated it as moderately or slightly effective

Full results are in a PDF document here.

And Nick Milton'sa href="http://www.nickmilton.com/2009/09/lessons-learned-survey-results.html">summary is here.

I have a couple of observations:
Research that focuses on 'effectiveness' of interventions without any reference to the relative value of the intervention in comparison with others is useless. We can do anything but we can't do everything (so, I like this chart).

This chart is a pretty good demonstration of most people's instinctive knowledge of Mooer's Law:
"Having information is painful and troublesome. We all have experienced this. If you have information, you must first read it, which is not always easy. You must then try to understand it. To do this, you may have to think about it. The information may require that you make decisions about it or other informtation. The decisions require may require actions in the way of a troublesome program of work, or trips, or painful interviews. Understanding information may show that your work was wrong, or that your boss was wrong, or may show that your work was needless. Having informtation, you must be careful not to lose it. If nothing else, information piles up on your desk--unread. It is a nuisance to have it come to you. It is unformfortable to have to do anything about it. Finally, if you do try to use the information properly, you may be accused of puttering instead of working. Then in the end, the incorporation of the information into the work you do often may not be noticed or appreciated. Work saved is seldom recognized. Work done--even in duplicate--is well paid and rewarded.

Thus not having and not using information can often lead to less trouble and pain than having and using it."

Lastly, I can't help but think there's an element of Windows Crash Reporting to Lessons Learned processes. It makes no sense that you can turn a computer off and on again and have it work, if you think of it as an electrical circuit. It's the epitome of Einstein's definition of insanity. Most of us, instinctively, still think of it as a collection of electrical circuits.

Because it seems so random, few people press the button to report the error. (I doubt many people have confidence Microsoft will actually 'do' anything either.) I wonder what 'types' of lessons people consider worth learning? Do we have a good instinct for which things are results of a fault in a circuit and which we might as well just turn the machine off and on again?

I'm guessing we don't FWIW.

Had a depressing day today with my client organisation. Too much training and not enough changing. Training's too often a sticking plaster of a solution.

The work I did today would have been far more appropriate for this kind of approach (or a Service Design approach). Analyse users, look for 'anxiety moments', look at 'touchpoints'.

But that would have meant changing things. And we don't want that, apparently.