“If you go into a grey concrete box with one little window, it’s claustrophobic, it’s cold. If you put a skylight in it and you make the window bigger and put a tree outside and put wood on the floor, it gets better. And it can get better and better until it becomes a humanistic […]

My colleague Hugh Bathurst is currently working for an engineering firm helping one of the divisions develop a knowledge sharing culture. Hugh has been collecting stories, eliciting how things get done and encouraging peope to contribute to developing of a range of knowledge resources. Yesterday I had the pleasure of meeting the manager who’s sponsoring […]

Here’s a great ABC documentary on Network Theory: How Kevin Bacon Cured Cancer. It illustrates the six degrees of separation phenomenon using the idea of synchronization, the paradox of small worlds, bacon numbers – a game showing how every hollywood actor is linked to Kevin Bacon, the structure of the internet and its hubs, how […]

From talking with people who are trying to improve their collaboration capability, I’m detecting a scepticism with the practice of getting your team or community together to decide, up front, how they will behave and treat each other. The feeling seems to be, “we can spend time talking about our agreed behaviours but then something […]

In case there are still people out there who believe we act as rational decision makers, take this scenario. You’re in a shop to buy a new ipod and you hear from a friend that two blocks down the street you can get the same one $50 cheaper. Do you go? Yes. Of course. It’s […]

I went to KM Australia this week and the issue of trust was mentioned many times. I noticed, however, that very few people went beyond generic statements like trust is essential for knowledge sharing, trust is the bandwidth of communication etc. I find these high-level statements unhelpful in practice and so I suggested to the […]

“Credit is infinitely divisible. Give it away every chance you get, and there’s always plenty left for you.” Don Berwick, Head if Institute of Healthcare Improvement 100,000 lives campaign (I see it is now 5 million lives), quoted in Influencer p 164. praise, recognition, feedback

Dave’s written a excellent post on how to make progress in a complex environment. It’s excellent because it comes at a time when I’m working with a client where their staff have come up with a range of initiatives yet there is a feeling among some of the project members that the initiatives wont make […]

David Drake and I have written a new white paper describing a narrative approach to successful organisational change. We’ve built on our three journeys metaphor, which you might remember was inspired by the epic exploration of the the US West by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Apart from describing the three journeys we’ve drawn a […]