Weltanschaung - definition: “wide worldview”

Introduction of Dave Snowden - Chief Scientific Officer of Cognitive Edge - KM for many years, co-founder of IBM Centre for Organisational Complexity, leading thinker about advances in the use and “management” of knowledge

Focus on effective system design and project management - a look at existing methods and also emerging methods

Forecasting systems - often require high degrees of human intervention

Cadbury Schweppes forecasting - Two-Bin Replenishment (not so long ago)

Case study - depot managers … wary of “perfect” black box systems that forecast perfectly … have and hold secret stocks that can be pulled out to replenish in emergencies

Co-creation of human intervention and functioning-of-systems to arrive at optimal overall functioning

Dave moves into a story (he often conveys his messages via stories that demonstrate extremes of poor sense / logic countered by good sense (and vice-versa)).  The story is about the “good ole days” of It and linear thing .. to set up his core message today about cvo-evolution

The brain and language have co-evolved (brain structures have changed and evolved over time as a function of language .. and of course language changes and grows over time).

No deep structures in language … The brain does not have a grammar gene.  And brain chemistry has also shown us that we never remember things quite the same way twice

Key concepts

- “everything”" is fragmented (summaries often made too shallow and general)

- RSS feeds are fragmented raw material

- Why in KM are we trying to put more and more summarized material into portals

Pattern-based decisions (humans are pattern-recognition animals)

- only machine like, linear and logical humans that process information in linear, logical ways are autistic

- most of us are “messy” .. in the ways we do things, the ways we navigate and use information

- most of us work in cycles between mess and order (which Snowden suggest is a very effective way to structure one’s life .. provides the means of refreshing to meet current context and conditions)

- example of choosing a new RSS reader to match current way of thinking and working (rather than being forced to use what IT thinks it is best for you to use)

Complexity & constraint

Children’s party story … (Summary here from last year’s Snowden keynote blogged by Stuart Henshall … “Looking at a children’s party story. Imagine organizing a party for 12 year old boys. My notes are a little cryptic on the description here. First how will you manage? A chaotic approach buy drugs and alcohol so they can go on a journey and so what if the house is destroyed. A social approach will have a mission statement, a project plan for the party , and clear milestones.. and the senior adults should start the party with a video and then use ppt to demonstrate their personal commitment etc. so it will conclude with an after action review and mandate future….

Let’s approach it as if we create an environment that we know has both good attractors and bad attractors. We can create an environment and see what they play. Then we have to have a scanning capability to see what happens. If you manage an ecology you can amplify and disturb but you most stand aside from the system and watch. You cannot have a fail-safe design approach. You must take a safe-fail approach. This is very similar to serious play and prototype to action and beta type approaches.”

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Boundaries and safe-fail systems, amplify what works and manage for emergence, dampen what doesn’t work or is offering negative outcomes … manage the emergence.

Another example of daughter’s 16th birthday party … setting of boundaries and design constraints (Dave used on-loan British government-supplied electronic surveillance system)

Scanning is critical in complex environments … need to be able to see the patterns emerging

Move from fail-safe design to safe-fail experimentation

Distributed cognition (add layers of meaning to existing content) 

Natural Numbers (5, 15, & 150)

- 5 … natural limit of what someone can remember (actually, 5 plus-or-minus 2)

- 15 … maximum number of people who can trust each other simultaneously (correlated with size of nuclear family in society in which you grow up) … dave introduces age-stages of neuro-plasticity

- 150 … Dunbar’s number - maximum size of social grooming effectiveness (number of people you can have some kind of effective relationship with)

Existing Methods

Narrative-based capture methods 

- after two or three interviews, massive problem with cognitive bias from those first interviews

- meaning not contained in the content, but in the metadata associated to the content

- Dave mentions “fitness landscapes”, a key capability of his Sensemaker suite of software

Cross silo self-forming teams 

Managing Emergence

Emerging methods

Crews

- establishing clear roles based on patterned behaviours, in order to set, manage and work from expectations

- crews can delegate authority without loss of status

Coherence Mapping

- capture user requirements in narrative capture form, and then go and capture all capabilities in existent software, and the merge / compare / contrast to identify patterns that suggest where there are matches and coherence.

Cynefin model

Formal - waterfall, time and resource -based project management (nothing wromg with this in complicated but known situations )>150

Expert - expert-based research, prototyping, testing and modelling, <150

Informal (complex) - SNS, reward to solve problem, parallel working (approx. 15)

Crisis - rapid assembly of SWOT teams (< 5, Crews can be used here)

Lincoln - “We need to think and act anew”

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This is somewhat out-of-date … Dave is elaborating on this in the “hot-seat interview” at KMWorld 2008 … but the main points are still pertinent and highly relevant.

One of the more popular posts I have made in the last several years contained an interview with Dave Snowden, in which he looks forward to issues regarding the construction and use of knowledge in an era where social computing tools, services and dynamics are beginning to be adopted for use in knowledge-intensive workplaces.

Additionally, there are two versions of the podcast out there … one of so-so quality and the other much better (thanks to the magic of my friend Brian Moffatt (BMO).

So, for posterity, here is a (good quality) recording of Dave Snowden of Cognitive Edge holding forth on some the important ways social computing is affecting the ways we work with knowledge.

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Dave Snowden - KM and the Impact of Web 2.0

From the keyboard of Jay Cross …

Dave Snowden kicked off KM World & Intranets in San Jose this evening with a exercise based on learning from KM’s failures.

We wrote PostIts describing the state of KM today. Then we built a time line of the things that got us there, going backward step-by-step. Telling a story backwards forces you to tell the truth. (Trying to tell a lie backwards produces cognitive overload.) With the backward logic chain in place, we went to work describing two alternative futures: KM heaven and KM hell, and assessing their antecedents in our time line.

Dave finds this sort of process superior to scenario planning, which limits your options, thereby increasing the risk of missing the future.

KM … Hmmmm 

Narrative assessments of the battlefield are 40%-60% richer than analytical assessments.

Stories of failures can be used to generate “worst case scenarios.” People learn more from avoiding failure than from affirming success. This is why Dave does not go along with Appreciative Inquiry: it’s all uppers.

Dave recounted a teaching story about creating an atmosphere for accidents at an oil company. The message: “Coffee kills.” Floor coffee safety officers patrolled the halls. People were forced to carry their coffee on two-handled trays. Ridiculous? Yes. But the rate of accidents from liquid nitrogen spills was cut in half.

Getting it wrong can be quite instructive. That’s why Dave detests “Sick Sigma.” All hail failure!

This was a great kick-off for the conference. Dave is a fantastic storyteller and wit. We left the room scratching our heads about the future.

Here we go.  KMWorld 2008 is kicking off tomorrow morning.

There’s a great roster of sessions and speakers this year, coming at a time of massive and rapid changes coming thick and fast to the knowledge -based workplace of this first decade  of the 21st century.  Web 2.0. Enterprise 2.0, SaaS, Cloud Computing, advances in algorithm-based contextual enterprise search, a growing understanding of social computing and the ways people share and exchange information to build effective and flexible responses on a dynamic basis to demanding customers and markets.

Last year at KMWorld 2007 several bloggers kicked out a few posts that helped highlight and spread awareness of some of the thought leaders on offer at this major conference.  This year we’re kicking it up a notch … we’ve asked a number of key contributors in the KM domain to offer up one or more blog posts, either on sessions they are attending or offering, or that offer a glimpse of an interesting session they’ve attended.

We’ve asked leading lights Dave Snowden and Dave Pollard to offer up some of their thoughts.  We’ve asked Jenny Ambrozek and Patti Anklam to weigh in.  Stuart Henshall will, we hope, bring his considerable blogging skills to bear in a couple of posts.  Learning maven and guru Jay Cross of the Internettime blog has agreed to weigh in, conference organizer Jane Dysart (also an active blogger in her own right) will pitch in, and I’m going to do my best to provide you with an over view of some of the interesting sessions I attend.

We also have a Twiiter account that these bloggers will use to “tweet” issues of interest and once Stuart helps us make sure we know how to use it correctly, we’ll have the Twitter channel Phweet-enabled so that people can connect and talk easily.

The conference opens up first thing tomorrow morning with a keynote speech by John Kao, the author of Innovation Nation and a serial innovator who is widely acknowledged as one of the world’s leading authority on the future of business. He will explore the intersection of innovation and transformation to help define the landscape for enterprise—and knowledge workers—in the years ahead.  John has a proven record of identifying circumstances long before they coalesce into trends and is a highly qualified voice to help us set a course for the next decade.  

You’re welcome to check on, give us feedback and ask questions - we will do our best to respond quickly in a useful way.