Networks, Complexity, and Relatedness

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

The Year of Personal Net Work

Chris Brogan writes about his strategy for deepening his personal networks. He starts off his list of tips with this one:

"Devote two hours a week to this effort. If, out of the 60 hours an average person works, you can’t find two for this, reconsider how you’re running your day.

This is not the only new year's resolution I've seen along this line. As we become more and more connected through social media, the more we are aware of what those connections mean.

My new year's resolution? I'm resolving to share more of my thinking, especially about personal networks. Here's a slide show from this past October I hope you will enjoy.

Personal Network Management Km Forum Oct 2009

View more presentations from Patti Anklam.

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Thursday, December 31, 2009

The Three KMs, Redux

A few months ago, I posted a series of blogs on theAppGap on what I called the "three KMs:"

(I also followed these with one of my latest themes, Personal Net Work.)

These 3KM blogs were picked up on by the folks over at InMagic, who were kind enough to asked me to do a podcast with them. You can listen to it now: "Today's collaboration imperative."

If you do have the time to listen, I would be happy to hear your comments. Perhaps we can get that conversation restarted here.

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Monday, December 28, 2009

Women actually say things

Catching up -- and trying to get ahead of 2010. Some interest bits from latest reading.

Saba, a company that specializes in enterprise-wide human capital management, has created 8 predictions for how social computing will improve the enterprise value chain. A key thread in the predictions themselves is the importance of supporting the ability of people to learn from and work in informal networks:

"Learning connections will matter more than learning transactions."
"Connecting people to expertise will begin to matter more for organizations than traditional learning management programs."

From Understanding Users of Social Networks (HBS Working Knowledge), research by Mikolaj Jan Piskorski looks at patterns of behavior on Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. An interesting read as it differentiates how women and men use the sites. Most interesting (to me) in early results of research is in the use of Twitter: "Women actually say things, guys give references to other things." It must have something to do with relatedness, and women's needs to establish context and relationships, mustn't it?
Andrew McAfee (whose work I've been following for some time, though most of my blogs on social media and Enterprise 2.0 have been done on theAppGap) provides a nice summation of the current state of Enterprise 2.0 in a Financial Times article, Enterprise 2.0 is vital for business. In addition to citing some early results from McKinsey on the benefits of E2.0, he makes the case that what E2.0 does is to bring technological support for the informal organization, as they can support the emergence of structures and new patterns of coordination. This is grist for the ongoing complexity conversation.

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Friday, December 04, 2009

Fernando Flores, Speech Acts, and Networks

One of the most powerful learning experiences in my time at Digital Equipment included immersion in a set of practices for effective communication. What I and my colleagues called "Contextual Management" was derived from philosophies articulated and propagated by Fernando Flores. At the heart of these philosophies are speech acts, a linguistic concept identified by John Searle and refined by Flores into a communication structure for effective management. These same speech acts are at the foundation of Landmark Education.

To me, the concept of speech acts is about being mindful that our language -- what we say and how we say it -- is creating the world we live in, as we live it. If we can identify -- just think -- about how we are being heard and the potential results, we can work more effectively. Speech acts include:

Declarations: statements about the world as it might be, that create a powerful future, and for which there is no evidence. "The US will put a man on the moon and bring him back before the end of the decade," famous words from President John Kennedy, are an example. At the time he spoke this, NASA did not have the technology to accomplish this, but by saying it, Kennedy created the future in which this happened.
Requests, or offers: a request can also create the future, in that it is possible to ask someone to do something that they do not know how to do. But in daily work life, we make requests all the time. We do not often enough, however, make well-formed requests, which are in the form, "will you please do x-action BY time-y?" The specificity of x-action and time-y make it clear that the requestor is asking for something that is important.
Promises: promises are commitments to do perform specific actions by specific times. Obviously, a goal of a request is to acceptance (a promise) to respond to the request, in its specificity, by the designated time. (One may also respond to a request by negotiating the deliverable, the time that is is requested for, and so on; or may decline it, respectfully.)

From these, and other speech act building blocks, a number of communication patterns unfold. I'd like to take some of these up in future posts, but my inspiration for starting this thread is a terrific article about Fernando Flores that has just come out in strategy+business, "Fernando Flores Wants to Make You an Offer."

In the article, Lawrence Fisher provides a biography of Flores, whose life represents a journey from a Chilean prison to work at Stanford with Terry Winograd, developing a successful consulting business, and ultimately a return to Chile as a statesman. The book he co-authored with Winograd, Understanding Computers and Cognition, describes how software programs could be used to enable more productive relationships in the workplace -- using the speech acts as a basis for communication.

It's a rich article (you will learn more about speech acts) that comes at a time that Flores is shifting into a new phase of his life and work, returning to business consulting to bring his perspective into how we work in networks. His concern is that:

“How do you educate people for the future world, in which an important part of activity is going to be networks?” he asks. “In my opinion, we human beings are not prepared at all for the explosion of new practices the Internet will produce. Education is going to be in networks and it will not be about knowledge. It will be about being successful in relationships, about how to make offers, how to build trust, how to cultivate prudence and emotional resilience.”

I'm excited about the possibilities in net work thinking opened up by the questions Flores is raising. The social web is opening up entirely new ways of communicating -- both means and modes -- and my head is already spinning at the thought of integrating these past and new ideas into my work.

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Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Engage with Grace

Last Thanksgiving weekend, many of us bloggers participated in the first documented “blog rally” to promote Engage With Grace – a movement aimed at having all of us understand and communicate our end-of-life wishes.

It was a great success, with over 100 bloggers in the healthcare space and beyond participating and spreading the word. Plus, it was timed to coincide with a weekend when most of us are with the very people with whom we should be having these tough conversations – our closest friends and family.

I don't need to have this conversation with my Mom. She has had a rough bout with cancer that is, at present, at bay. Last year, she hand wrote a note to each of her five children expressing her wishes about her end of life. It was hard to read, but it's good to have it explicit. We will of course honor all of her wishes but one: we will hold a memorial service to remember her.

The Engage with Grace "one-slide" format for questions is below. Cherish your family.

(To learn more please go to http://www.engagewithgrace.org.)

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Thursday, October 29, 2009

Emotional responses and decision-making

Yesterday I received an email announcement from Tom Davenport via the BabsonKnowledge email list (no current web site to be found, sorry. Tom was announcing the publication of his newest HBR article, Best Practice:vMaking Better Decisions. While I am not the audience for this piece (I have not, for a long time, been called upon to participate in strategic decision-making), Tom's email included a table from the article:

Since I had just blogged on the human emotional response, I was very interested in how Davenport saw neuroscience as a decision-making approach. His list of approaches includes:

1. Small group processes ("making effective decisions with just a few people")
2. Analytics ("using data and quantitative analysis to support decision making;" analytics is Tom's current area of research)
3. Automation ("using decision rules and algorithms to automate decision processes")
4. Neuroscience ("decision makers know when to use the emotional brain")
5. Behavioral economics ("incorporating research on economic behavior and thinking into decisions")
6. Wisdom of crowds ("using surveys or markets to allow decisions or inputs by large groups")

I can see #1, #2, #3, and #6 as approaches that incorporate methods and hence processes for making decisions, but I interpret neuroscience and behavioral economics as filters rather than methods. I am probably splitting hairs, but if someone said, we are going to use the neuroscience method to make this decision, I'd wait for instructions.

Using the wonderful phrase from Claire's comment on that previous post, "...understanding this aspect of neuroscience helps us understand "the limbic brain as being the gateway through which we need to move to get to the neocortex [which makes it] so important to focus our leadership development work there." Being able to know which part of our brain we are using in the decision process can only help us improve that decision.

Nice to see so much of this thinking converging and starting to mainstream.

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patti anklam. How to make networks work.

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Boston KM Forum, Waltham, MA October 21, 2009.

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