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Shawn Callahan on learning from failure
From an Anecdote post on KM Australia:
During the conference I heard a some speakers recount the meme, “we learn best from failure.” I’m not sure this is entirely true. Anecdotally I remember distantly when I read about the Ritz Carlton approach to conveying values using stories and I’m now delivering a similar approach to a client on the topic of innovation. Here I’ve learned from a good practice. As Bob Dickman once told me, “you remember what you feel.” I can imagine memory being a key first step to learning. And some research shows it’s more complex than just learning from failure. Take this example. The researchers take two groups who have never done ten pin bowling and get them bowling for a couple of hours. Then one group is taken aside and coached on what they were doing wrong and how they could improve. The other group merely watches an edited video of what they were doing right. The second group did better than the first. However there was no difference with experienced groups.
Of course, I wasn’t very much of an athlete. But even if I were, I’d say that hitting can’t be taught by a book. The skills involved are too complex and subtle, too internal; they can’t be expressed in words that can be put to much use.
This is a story I tell people who insist that knowledge can be codified, that humans are interchangeable. There are still many facets of life and work that are art not science, and wise managers understand how to manage both.
We are not machines.
That being said, we can build the social processes to facilitate knowledge exchanges between people — experts and novices, and even more importantly, build a culture that values shared learning.
” - Larry Prusak: http://www.laurenceprusak.com/Lockheed Martin's Unity
Quotes from http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/whatis/what-is-unity-lockheed-martins-implementation-of-a-social-computing-platform-wows-enterprise-20-conferees/:
The crucial question, asked over and over again this week, was addressed head-on by Unity’s designers: “What is the value of social networking in the enterprise?”
Their answer was, in the end, simple: Being able to watch what other people are doing, easily, and then being able to search it and ask questions raises productivity and leads to improved collaboration and knowledge exchange. Instead of tracking what your friends are doing on, say, Facebook with a “friend feed,” an enterprise derives value from tracking an activity stream of interconnected colleagues. At any point, a worker can see what others are working on, access shared documents and ask questions on shared virtual workspaces or directly to the relevant decision maker or technologist.
And:
A crucial question that they were asked to account for again and again will be familiar to CIOs: How did they quantify the return on investment (ROI) for the dedication of internal resources and purchase of software? Each time, the traditional productivity savings of a user finding information was a factor. What really sold them, however, was the soft case of customers interested in their social computing initiative. Unity helped in Lockheed-Martin’s bidding process, especially proposals that involved knowledge managememt.
As the project rolled out, a crucial component was the in development and distribution of a “collaboration playbook.” New standards for playbook and best practices were laid out in its pages. For instance, as a team member, you should ask questions on a group page, not wander over to ask or send a broadcast email; this helps to capture questions and answers for everyone. Adding to documentation whenever possible was crucial, along with teaching people the power of linking and understanding which communication type made sense for different business cases: blog posts, wikis, email, virtual conferences or in-person meetings. In the end, the Unity team created the playbook as much for themselves as they worked as for the company as a whole…
Deloitte's Big Shift
A short blog post linking to the main Big Shift material on Deloitte’s website. Looking at the long-term transformation of business, and the impact that it will have on structures and processes. Businesses have “competed away” the benefits of productivity gains.
To respond to this performance challenge, U.S. companies will need to let go of industrial- era organizational structures (and the reporting relationships, incentive systems, and managerial processes that go with them) and operational practices in favor of the new institutional architectures and business practices needed to create and capture economic value in the era of the Big Shift. Companies must move beyond their fixation on getting bigger and more cost-effective to make the institutional innovations necessary to accelerate performance improvement as they add participants to their ecosystems, expanding learning and innovation in collaboration curves and creation spaces. Companies must move, in other words, from scalable efficiency to scalable learning and performance. Only then will they make the most of our new era’s fast-moving digital infrastructure.
Many authors, including Ronald Coase and Herbert Simon, have identified the essential nature of the firm as the reliance on heirarchic, authority relations to replace the inherent equality among participants that markes market dealings. When you join a firm, you accept the right of the executives and their delegates to direct your behaviour, at least over a more-or-less commonly understood range of activities. …
Others … have challenged this view. They argue that any appearance of authority in the firm is illusory. For them, the relationship between employer and employee is completely parallel to that between customer and butcher. In each case, the buyer (of labor services or meat) can tell the seller what is wanted on a particular day, and the seller can acquiesce and be paid, or refuse and be fired. For these scholars, the firm is simply “a nexus of contracts” — a particularly dense collection of the sort of arrangements that characterise markets.
While there are several objections to this argument, we focus on one. It is that, when a customer “fires” a butcher, the butcher keeps the inventory, tools, shop, and other customers she had previously. When an employee leaves a firm, in contrast, she is typically denied access to the firm’s resources. The employee cannot conduct business using the firm’s name; she cannot use its machinery or patents; and she probably has limited access to the people and networks in the firm, certainly for commercial purposes and perhaps even socially.
” - John Roberts, The Modern Firm (Oxford, 2004): 103-4scottberkun.com » Success factors for program managers
Maniacally focus on building a product your customers will love.
- Pound, pound, pound on the features while they are being developed all the way through the process.
- Constantly ask ‘How do we know this is good?’
- Perceive the reaction of others to your features.
- Know others will want to have an opinion.
- Recognize constraints make it hard to develop products customers will love.
- This takes energy, persistence and creativity.
