I recently heard a presentation that mentioned the truism ‘if you can’t measure it you can’t manage it’. It reminded me of how uncomfortable I have always been with this statement and the way it gets touted like a mantra in some organisations. If we view the functions of management as ‘plan, organise, lead, control, direct’, then […]

Seth Godin relates a story about breakfast on his blog. Except its not about breakfast but about how compromise insidiously erodes your intent and how one compromise can lead to another, and so on. I read Seth’s story and immediately thought of one of the the themes we have been pursuing about losing the humanity […]

Sensemaking is described as how we make sense of the world so we can act meaningfully in it. One of the ways we make sense is to apply simple rules of thumb (heuristics) to common situations. I was re-reading The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul by Douglas Adams (of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy […]

One of the concepts of Appreciative Inquiry is to identify the positive deviants in a system and to find out what it is they are doing that works. The Positive Deviance Initiative has put this approach to the test in development projects since 2002. The concept is to identify the things/people that are successful in […]

I was reminded earlier this week of an event in 2000 when I was working for SMS consulting that demonstrated the dramatic and adverse impact that inappropriate management can have on a community of practice. A small group of consultants interested in knowledge management had started meeting regularly and over several years the group had expanded […]

Last week, I was sitting in a hotel room in Sydney with Shawn and Andrew following a workshop by Brenda Dervin: sense-maker extraordinaire. The workshop re-confirmed our conviction that sensemaking really does matter and that it is time to expand our little company … We would love to work with someone passionate about people; you love working […]

For centuries (until the 1950’s), scientists believed that the left side of our brains (the rational, analytical, logical side) was the crucial side; the side that made us human. All sorts of evidence was collected to support this view.  Our organisations are often reflections of this type of thinking: obviously we needed all sorts of […]

Shawn’s series of posts on finding expertise has reminded me of one of my favourite quotes: an anthropologist’s description of an agricultural North American tribe from David Bohm’s book On Dialogue: From time to time, (the) tribe (gathered) in a circle.  They just talked and talked and talked, apparently to  no purpose.  They made no […]

Individuals and organisations have many ways of tackling problems. A paper ‘Describing 16 Habits of Mind’ describes the following perceptual orientations that one can take when engaged in problem-solving: Ego-centric: perceiving the problem from our personal point of view. Allo-centric: perceiving the problem through another persons’ perspective through empathy, predicting how others are feeling and […]

The actKM list has a discussion underway to collect stories of how people have (either successfully or otherwise) tried to get management support for their KM activities. The story below is the one I submitted. An engineering firm I worked for had a number of management-initiated communities of practice that were languishing and I was […]