Planning for the Last War

They say that military strategy is a slow learner. They say that the battlefield is the only classroom where any educating happens and any real learning passes into the lessons of history. The other truism is that the more palatable the war effort, the sooner the next conflict will follow.

This is the lowest hanging rationale for accepting the inevitability of Surge the Sequel (as opposed to Gulf War II) which we only officially won after a fake news host declared it so on an overseas telecast last summer.

This winter season GI Joe will once again be sporting the road jerseys against the hometown Taliban, suiting up in their olive drab fatigues and black turbans. Perhaps it's the war on terror under the guise of the rule of law. Maybe it's Obama eating a campaign pledge to the tune of a Dick Morris re-election strategy. Whatever the rationale it is an enemy of the rational. I am immune to its allure. I can't pretend to understand all the thoughtful partisan elites who throw up their hands and say: "there's no good option!"

Even the term "option" suggests that this is a question best massaged by delicate hands and answered by a middle ground between retreat and aggression -- the greatly nuanced least-objectionable path where no leader is completely wrong, close-minded, or surprised by what happens next.

I don't believe propping wobbly, pro-Western extortionists in what our military planners call our AfPak foreign policy is what our military families are counting on when we claim our future dead. Their bodies and their passions are buying us indecisive time. What we can't conclude is that a lost battle is not ours to lose.

I do believe that American civilians like myself find it far too comfortable to hide behind the friendly lines of our brave soldiers and special effects weaponry. That's the national security that an occupation of Afghanistan provides. That comfort is not a recipe for victory but the last defense against the slippage of our powers of reason for unleashing such force.

And that's the point. Is it about proving those eight deaths at Fort Hood were not in vain? Or is it making certain that we can carry the fight of our choosing to whoever stands to gain by hosting the war preparations they legitimize? The answer is more fickle and sinister than the no-good option folks have factored in.

Collaborators' Dilemma

Have you ever been witness to a rear-end collaboration? It isn't pretty and the traffic slows to a crawl with no clear reason why a perfectly smooth ride turns into a gaggle of abandoned bumper cars in the breakdown lane.

The rear-end refers less to orifice that we use to insult the bad collaboration actors. It's not even about going stealth or secretive in the one-way exchange of participation-free online lurkers in the shadows of online collaborations. It's really more about fear of being perceived as an ass than any backwards thinking now in vogue. It's more about standing out for the wrong reasons. It's an anxious place where the reward for participation is the absence of penalties.

Some of us like to stand out. Most of us would rather pick the time and the place. In the age of closed circuit camera phone reality exceedingly few of us see any form of personal recognition as positive recognition.

It's that bridge from stilted collaboration to the exquisite melding of group minds that we crossed over at last Thursday's meeting of Boston's SIKM chapter. Sometimes it was about wikis or listservs or task-based or even competitive collaboration. But in each case we all took in the collective smell test and passed our own versions of what's applicable to our own teams and projects. We also played bumper cars in a freewheeling, agenda-defying forum. I don't remember any drivers slowing down to inspect the damage.

My favorite part of this meeting was that the majority had no prior SIKM meetings from their calendars. The notion that we could all steer the same rudder over two hours of unscripted ideation was the glue that held our experiences up to the light of peer review. Unimpeded by PowerPoint and the flimsiest of agendas, the most contestable of assertions was made by Ken Cundari: that the road to bad collaboration is paved with riffing on ideas untethered to concrete tasks and goal-setting.

My contention is that dynamic applies to teams but not individuals. That's because this model puts motive in the spotlight. Most clients desire outcomes devoid of their own personal reasons for wanting it. Yes, productivity unmasks the poker face when the same team is playing to win with the same playbook. But the productivity argument falters under the weight of the fuller disclosure that a stated purpose requires. Besides, I (client) will pay more if you (consultant) really know the worth of your deliverable.

Laurie Damianos and Lester Holtzblatt also contributed some firsthand feedback on their own user communities, including the insight that would-be wiki collaborators need to know the circulation numbers (ocean wiki or pond-sized wiki) before they take the plunge.

Based on the steady stream of inputs from our collective exchange it seems the improvised brainstorming and the orchestrated roadmapping blended into one. To my best recollection here are the testifiers:

Patti Anklam

Paula Cohen

Ken Cundari
Deborah Devine
Laurie Damianos
Lester Holtzblatt
Michael Koffman

Kate Pugh

Sadie Van Buren

Dave Wallace

Joe Wehr

Personal Knowledge Solos and Siloes -- the Uncooperative Side of Collaboration

The most accusational word in the language of KM is "hoarding." This is a label that us true KM believers afix to the folks on the periphery of our SharePoint deployments who don't call or write or reciprocate our calls to pool resources and know-how:

"Don't be a star, be a galaxy," we implore with our open minds and empty SharePoint sites.

Last week one of the directors at my firm posted a simple and direct request to his peers through the our community of practice lists. These email accounts are often called upon for information requests and rarely repatriated when some helpful responses materialize. In other words it's culturally okay to spam your colleagues. But it's not cool to close the loop with the learning you pick-up along the way.

The welcome change in this outcome was that the director saved each response and posted them to the same inbound email list within SharePoint. The result was that lots of undocumented experience was now referencable in a single folder and worth more than all the PowerPoint pile-ons one could ever dump off the deep-end of an abandoned fileshare.

The promises and the perils of community-based discussions are best summed up by Dave Snowden, KM deity and sense-maker of complex adaptive systems. Snowden seems to have the knowledge capital culture of small, elite professional service firms down cold when he posits the all-or-nothing proposition of knowledge requests versus knowledge requirements:

“If you ask someone for assistance in the context of real and immediate need it will rarely be refused. Ask someone to share knowledge in the absence of that need, or in a form or manner determined by a centralised function then it will nearly always be refused.”

The lesson for knowledge-minders is to design their KM systems around the noninvasive ways that service professionals seek collegial guidance. Even the artifice of re-posting a response is preferable to broadcasting a list of "best response practices" or requiring participation. As Snowden intimates there's no more reliable way to deaden a live discussion.

Here's the link to some of Snowden's other renderings.

High Innovations and Misdemeanors

"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."
- John Maynard Keynes

As a card-carrying taxpayer I thought I should check in on my blindsides and trundle into the sense-making machine. I would hear the analysis needed to talk the next pendulum swing into a softer landing than the dead stop of last fall's meltdown. Something well-argued, reasonable. Unlike climbing out of a recession with unemployment cresting past 10 percent. On the day the Dow resurfaced above 10,000 I'm thinking -- better revise my reasoning downward -- and buy oil futures before tanking up for my next trip to Western Mass.

According to Paul Krugman his brethren (mild-mannered B-school professors) were launched into rocket science stardom by their serious math-making and sparkling financial models. Rare was the request for the macro-perspectives they were schooled in -- an assessment to compare asset prices to real world fundamentals, e.g. reality-based earnings?

Instead they did what any investor or CEO or Rotisserie League Commissioner would do. They compared assets to other assets (and the more you pay, the more it's worth so bubble-up, econ man...) How do you know it's overpriced? Whenever the appraiser's fees are set by the appraisal. Put another way -- the market holds a monopoly on what to price things. This is not just a blinking black eye for a job poorly done. It's an abdication of the job itself by a profession that prides itself in standing apart from fiscal gravity -- not from being pulled in by it.

What's that awesome and universal self-policing curb on prices? It's fear that trumps greed and pushes demand off the price-setting tables. This is not advanced macroeconomics talking. This is primordial worst case behavior kicking in at no extra charge.

When their macroscopes were placed under the full light of day and here's what Krugman saw:

* They concocted new recipes (fuzzy math, real dividends) to feed a hungry market. Their ratio-making rode atop the eyebrows of Greenspan as works of genius that perfected a recession proof set of market forces and pacified the social forces that might disrupt this state of perpetual growth.

* They rationalized away the insatiable appetite (the savage force of our material natures). So what if this equilibrium nudged the distribution of wealth off a precipitous ledger? The middle class still held down a job, even if it was two jobs. Now there is no easy credit. There is no steady work. And the world economy is learning how to run clear of the maxed-out American consumer, XXL edition.

* Trouble is, when your insights are underwritten by the too-big-to-fail team the too-precious-to-share scheme loses its luster. The bubble pops and the tent comes crashing down. Fear beats greed senseless in a race to zero sum as old as scarcity and as artificial as the house of cards built on the edifice of self-correcting markets.

Cool rationality was the temptation that seduced investors into back-to-back decades of buy orders on efficient, friction-free markets -- the zipless f*ck of wealth creation. I would like to see even-handedness return to the notion that economies are not casinos, that winners don't take all, and that the goal is not to create more rich people but a stable social order. Maybe if I swap out sustainable for stable I'll sound like less of a socialist-fascist and more like the great silent desperation majority now forced to choose between pitchfork populism and disenfranchised resignation.

However, if you read the latest HBR on risk you find that aspiration to be romantic, impractical, and dissed by the enduring power of unfettered innovation. A roundtable of risk elites assure each other that the standard risk return is measured in corporate balance sheets and that the needle must nose up to systemic levels where "firms and markets intersect" and the institutional deer and environmental buffaloes play. Regulation anyone?

Harvard B-school professor Peter Tufano says that we have too many club-footed regulators overstepping on overlapping jurisdictions. "Quite a lot of risk falls in the gaps," Tufano observes with the circular transparency of one who robs banks (because that's where the money is) or frequents K Street fundraisers (where the arms of the law end and the loopholes take over).

Robert Kaplan of Balanced Scorecard fame hints that the law will always be a step behind the law-breakers. Are the expectations that low? Could a step-behind be a step-ahead of asleep-at-the-switch? It's not even clear where the moral lies within the hazard when Kaplan assures us that "regulators will always be behind innovation -- certainly in finance -- and they're always going to be regulating the previous innovation." Ouch.

So the next innovator laces a derivatives bomb to the bottom of their shoes. Sounds like we're in for some barefooted banking. No liquidity exceeding 3 ounces of gold per inflation hedge? If Kaplan is right and regulators lack imagination as much as enforcement tools then maybe the government needs to fire a spoiler salvo at the alter of next cycle innovations. Given that: (1) the Dow is up 53% for the year, and (2) that Goldman's investment banking division is responsible for much of that a pre-emptive strike might be in order.

The Autistic Genius of Microsoft

You’ll never lose an audience tearing down Microsoft, building them up, or equating their product strategy with most high functioning forms of autism. But this post is more personal. It's about Microsoft and me.

No, not "my" Microsoft or even mycrosoft. It was never about that. And we still don't share many interests. But we do share the same initials. We have spent our entire professional lives together. That's something. We don't travel in the same circles. But oh, that shared history! Not even the birth of the World Wide Web could cause us to break-up -- at least not yet.

Is it because in these cold days of flying bottomless on stimulus anxiety at least I can still toggle effortlessly between Excel and Word? Is it because I can wander into the slide shows of colleagues who respirate, fantasize, and fold their pizza box dreams into PowerPoints? Is it because my biggest trading credential is that I suit up on my virtual home turf as power SharePoint user? That's Microsoft and me. Pushing that MS office comfort zone out from the desktop to the enterprise. But not beyond. It was never about that.

Microsoft is the perpetuity of here and now. Before Microsoft perpetual motion was just a theory. But then Bill Gates changed the rules. He didn't design great products or even figure out what customers needed. He invented a new feature called "price" and he slapped one on every boxable shipment. He succeeded at this not because his products were better, faster, cheaper. They were bland, slow, and well ... pricey. They didn't even talk to one another without the next upgrade. But they were personal, like the machines that ran them. Gates franchised out the microprocessor. That's what the wealthiest person in the world does at the turn of this new century. But it's more than that.

When I first started attending programs hosted by the New England Asperger's Association (AANE) at the onset of the oh-ohs (2000s) one of the favorite guessing games was "celebrity Auspies." That's where someone would flag the New York Times article where comedians, actors, and captains of industry admitted to the diagnosis. The implicit conclusion in these confessions? That high-functioning autism was as much the driver in their success as an impediment to their playing nice with the rest of the species. Gates was always the biggest prize:

"Do you think he has Asperger's?" AANE's founder Dania Jeckel would speculate. We'd wonder about his languid speech and his stilted eye contact. We still do.

I'm still on the fence. But I'm not waiting for the lab results to come back on the culture he cultivates. I am certain that Microsoft is Asperger's certified. And I know that because as much as the web grows exponentially from one wireless village to the next there are even greater piles of documentation that will never see the light of 24/7 Internet Day. And those documents are written in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, etc. Each one is a personal information silo designed to keep my ownership of each work free and clear of the unruly crowdsourcing that passes for wisdom on the web. It strengthens porous borders against the same hackers that live to disrupt Microsoft code. It guards personal knowledge territories against the globalist elites. It's always been about control. It's never been about communication.

Get inside the heads of users? Actually figure out what they're thinking? That would mean hitting the help key and not having to retell your story to the help index. That would mean that "search" would have never been supplanted by a word that didn't exist before Gates landed at the top of the Forbes list. That word is Google. That would mean expanding the customer base beyond the fringe of IT managers who look down on their internal customers as much as Microsoft does. Communicating like there's some kind of mutual dependency between users and vendors? That would be an original idea. Therefore it will never come from Microsoft.

Gates and me? We're like this. That's Microsoft on the top and me on the bottom.

We Hold These Truths to be Transparent

Last week the Boston chapter of the SIKMers riffed on a recent op-ed polemic by David Weinberger, one of KM's most lucid and original explainers. His case that transparency is the new objectivity argues that objectivity and objectives part company as soon as the subject climbs into the ring to greet the predicate.

This false god of objectivity has a familiar din in the blogosphere where the only distinction between a PR hack and a venerated journalist is whether they count a media conglomerate on their pay stub or the client retains them directly. Weinberger moves smartly beyond the tired trashing of media elites to the more complex unpacking of what it means for: (1) defining the boundaries of context, and (2) ultimately the quality of information grown and cultivated on the public web.

He notes that "fair and balanced" is unattainable for reporters and all second-party relayers of primary events. From fact collectors to checkers and from theory rejectors to truth selectors we hold this truth to be transparent -- that all humans create subjective realities. But then Weinberger sources the downstream implications for retiring this myth: (1) Its tendency to overstep its own authority, and (2) its coercive power to mislead those it seeks to inform with its self-referential perspective.

Can reasonable people seeking the refuge of a higher ground still find their way to a common, middle ground? Weinberger goes onto conclude that the achievement of objectivity is not only widely questioned but dismissed as an agreed-upon goal between senders and receivers (or what used to be called "the media" and "the public.") Yet the myth lives on. Why?

Even our well-intended skepticism cannot conceal another gaping need once (and still) serviced by the myth. And it has little to do with column widths, how many people still read newspapers, or how many of us document what we say and think based on what we see and hear. That insistent need in the mind of the news beholder is credibility -- the emerging gold standard of information overload. Only through the lens of credibility can we buy arguments, accept a premise, or decide who's right between the fraying edges of our national discourse.

Now that the limits of objectivity are on full display in our search results and our cable systems Weinberger argues that transparency is the new surrogate for credibility, ready to step in and referee for the brave and free inquirers and deciders of all spectral stripes:

That’s one sense in which transparency is the new objectivity. What we used to believe because we thought the author was objective we now believe because we can see through the author’s writings to the sources and values that brought her to that position. Transparency gives the reader information by which she can undo some of the unintended effects of the ever-present biases. Transparency brings us to accept ideas as credible the way the claim of objectivity used to.

This change is epochal.

In this world the biases are stripped away. Don't take the reporter's word on it? Click through to their sources and question what was pursued and what went begging. The blind-spots blink right back at us. The truth is stripped down to its naked accessories, made all the more discomforting by conclusions reached before any reporting ever takes place. Of course that level of open documentation assumes an audience as active in their news consumption as the reporter in the production of their story. Only a third-party with a firsthand stake of an outcome proposed or influenced in the reporting would exercise their full transparency options.

It's also sobering to consider the lengths that reporters have gone to protect their sources in this new golden age of transparency -- precisely because the story could stand on its own through the testimony and firsthand experience of those troubled by their own confirming observations.

That's the sniff test for credibility whether it's delivered through myth or hyperlink. When we open ourselves up to persuasion how much of our heads run interference for our hearts? How scripted is the appeal? How self-serving to the caller is the call for all good humans to come to the aid of the unaided? Bottom-line: what is this costing them -- particularly among members of their own group in untold horse trading and political capital?

We see things not as they are but as we are. The greatest threat to public credibility is 'politics as usual' -- the extent to which power protects itself regardless of the laws, morals, public trust, and, loyalties it compromises. How our leaders behave in public is routinely compared to our perception of the way they act behind closed doors. The gap between what we 'see' and what we're 'told' forms the basis of 'character'. We know them so we accept what we cannot understand. Our leader is a jerk. But they are 'our' jerk.

Public leaders with strong character are said to resist politics as usual -- sacrificing their own grip on power for the greater public good, a higher principle, and/or, the belief that such a sacrifice will prompt greater beneficence among other participants, including adversaries. That kind of trading is called integrity. It is the highest form of credibility -- and the rarest.

My hope from Weinberger's insights is not that transparency will even the playing field or cast a redeeming light in a dark corner but simply 'be' the playing field. We will not all play by the same rules. But neither will the eyes of the world look away when we're drawn to that harsh, clarifying spotlight.

SharePoint -- Suiting Up for the Sophomore Season

I'm presenting next week on a webcast hosted by Waltham-based KMA ("Knowledge Management Associates"). The venue is called SharePoint the Sophomore Year: Maximizing your investment in SharePoint after initial implementation.

I didn’t know SharePoint when I came on board in my current role and I came on-board to implement SharePoint. The freshman year was about implementing SharePoint 2003 for a business region. SharePoint 2007 was launched in early 2008. You don’t know me so I’ll focus on the ugly and the unscripted. Stay off script, come clean with your failures and people believe you -- even when they know more about SharePoint than they do about me.

Here are some the of the takeaways I'll be sharing:

Centrality: The sophomore year story is around making SharePoint the cat herder’s container of choice. How do we unify and rally around our mutual interconnectedness? It begins with shared experiences all employees cycle through. I count three: bi-weekly pay dates, bi-monthly staff meetings, and logging into SharePoint. You could set your watch to this. That's a big arrow in the quiver of the enterprise cat-herder.

Utilization: No ability counts more in consulting than billability. For cost centers like KM grunts and SharePoint administrators this means designing systems with a user focus. A user focus for us is about architecting SharePoint by actions – not destinations or cataloguing, or laundry lists. The results mean fewer arguments about what to call things and no need to memorize where documents are stored. This is a skill reserved for savants and reference librarians -- not management consultants.

Motivation: Motivation centers on the draw of SharePoint in skill-building for our consultants – not because we have it but because our clients do.

Participation: Participation bridges directly to our community of practice discussions. The end game is that there’s content supply (corpus) and demand (search logs). That’s how we remind our users that they’re knowledge producers too. When they ask for advice they have a responsibility to re-invest those assets back into SharePoint.

Payback: Payback is not about proving how many more deals go through because now we’re all on the same SharePoint page or even reducing the number of search results our users have to slog through before their requirements are met. Payback is about fitting form to function. That means addressing knowledge demands through best bets, search collections, inbound email, and expertise finders to name a few.

The metadata schema is a huge reporting payoff because it helps us understand the long tail – those queries that are specific to a set of requirements – not the common search terms that can be found in the short tail of most search logs. In the build above you can see how our metadata structure is helping the user to combine specific teams, practices, date ranges, and even caliber of results. Best of all they can subscribe to the results as an RSS feed in Outlook so they needn’t ever run the search again.

So those are a few ways of leveraging your sophomore year investment – hopefully without having to pay for your junior year in advance!