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

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.

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.

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.

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.