AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Blogging Jim McGee

Jim McGee has come to Seabury tonight to talk with us about “knowledge management”; I’ll be live-blogging his talk, of course. You, in turn, will be stuck with my notes.

Jim begins by citing (and showing a clip from) John Cusack in The Sure Thing; a young woman tries to stop him from entering a room, saying, “You can’t go in there,” to which John Cusack replies, “Of course I can — This is America. I can go anywhere.”

Jim argues that most people in organizations have been trained not to think, and especially not to think in public, whereas seminarians are presumably being prepared to go out and preach week after week. But Jim points out that in organizations, the system gets clogged if everyone tries to think; much of the same applies to the educational system in general. Jim asserts that now, increasingly, it’s imperative for people to know how to think in public.

“When is thinking important in organizations?” Jim asks. Why is that? Because they need 5% making decisions about where the ship is going, and everyone else pulling on the oars.

Jim asks what happens to the guy who thinks up the sail; in this system, thinking upsets the established order. The system as designed works as long as everything remains stable, but when the oar-powered boat shows up to fight a sail-powered boat, the old system breaks down.

The time balance the modulates from innovation to a new system has compressed considerably. Much of twentieth-century economic growth has come from (Taylorism, Fordism) extracting more productivity out of a single factory model. That’s reached its limit; now we have to learn what to do when everyone in the organization thinks. We now live in a world where innovation has to fit in as a part of the economic process.

Jim poses the question of what’s real thinking and what’s people pretending to think. He instances political talk shows; someone suggests business staff meetings, and Jim cites Jack Valenti on DMCA, and promotion committees in academic settings. A lot of things pass for thought, but not much thinking; we have, largely, forgotten what thought looks like.

More people in the organization need to be thinking, through the whole organization. Jim’s next example seems to come from a Back to the Future movie, where one character expects another character to write his reports for him.

Jim asks, “Should we talk about knowledge workers or about knowledge management in organizations?” He argues against the idea that only the elite in an organization should do all the thinking, bringing a clip from the Hepburn/Tracy film Desk Set (which according to Jim has some of the sharpest insights into the way that technology intersects with people — Jim laments that hardly anything has changed in the ways technology is marketed and adopted).

Jim cites several illusions expressed in the clip. The first is that knowledge management is about precise answers to exact questions. But knowledge, yoiu can’t touch; you know you’re a knowledge worker if (a) 80% of your time is spent doing things that “aren’t your job”; “It’s not my job” is no longer a reasonable excuse; (c) Your mother doesn’t understand what you do; (d) Your boss doesn’t understand what you do; (e) You don’t understand what you do. Knowledge workers don’t fit onto an assembly line.

But Jim says we all live in this world. How do we even begin to observe what we’re doing in order to improve it under these conditions? What we typically do is to measure productivity with knowledge workers in the same way that we measure the productivity of industrial workers. Can you walk into an organization and see somebody of importance reading a book? Reading a book doesn’t look like you’re busy; we can’t measure the output.

Jim presents a big schema for process in knowledge work. Sorry, no way can I even begin to describe this diagram here. There aren’t very many boxes in knowledge work, and they’re all connected in feedback loops. Well, okay, here’s a try:

Indetify and Frame Problem
Specify Stopping Criteria
Select Appropriate Tools - - Identify and Collect Data
Create Work Products and Deliverables
Evaluate and Assess

(and all these are connected with interwoven arrows)

Douglas Adams’s definition of understanding technology:

1) It’s everything that’s invented before you’re born;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make your fortune out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things;

And Jim changes the slide before I can get number four.

He’s modulating to blogging, now. Weblogs make the process of thinking visible. They’re chronologically ordered, relatively short, categorizable, and available for others to react to. This technology introduces the possibility of beginning to narrate work in project settings that opens up thinking within organizations.

Jim suspects that we have a set of illusions about what thinking looks like. For instance, maybe we get a bright idea and instantly turns into a Harvard Business Review article. Jim applies a business model to his experience of writing a book; the writing process involves experimentation, deletion, reconsideration, and so on, in ways inimical to a linear business plan.

What about blogs in, for instance, parish administration? Jim observes that blogs open up and build community in a new way. They contribute to building a trusted persona; it adds depth and texture to your persona, especially in a parish environment. They offer a way to discover commonalities, shared interests, and make possible personal and community links.

Jim also cites news aggregators as a connection device. Aggregators are the secret amplifier: they bring the new materials all to one spot, and Jim can track his organization as his workgroups split off and tackle various aspects of a problem.

Blogs constitute a tool for an individual knowledge worker: they’e a contemporaneous account of knowledge work activities, a way to increase personal visibility in knowledge work. They make a sharable space for making knowledge public, eliminating barriers to publishing to the web, so that sharing becomes the trivial byproduct of doing. They make a natural fit with communities of practice; weblogs plus aggregators support self-discovering and self-organizing communities of practice.

At this point, the presentation shifted toward a free-for-all discussion. Trevor, in one comment, describes Jeff and Tripp as “the two über-bloggers of the Seabury blogging movement.”

Posted by AKMA at April 10, 2003 07:45 PM | TrackBack