KM in the Jerkplace: Episode Three – Technophobia in the Knowledge Department

(c) www.angelaeames.com

Installment Summary: Keen Core’s search engine bake-off smolders into thin air. The dream of a unified Keen Core recedes on the news that a knowledge-centric nonprofit consultancy is looking to implement a topflight KM system. These consultants are decidedly not engineers or accountants but change agents with designs on tackling the rougher edges of social issues – daring to lead in messy, resolution-defying places that don’t pass the white glove test of more corporately-inclined consulting firms.

Technophobia in the Knowledge Department

My move to GSM (“Global Social Maze”) seemed right for so many reasons. What could be a better mix of big picture agenda-setting working hand-in-glove with pragmatic KM?  That marriage could harness, cultivate, and inevitably scale the adoption of GSM's winning ideas across professional, institutional, and national boundaries.

I was moving from a trial balloon to the sanctuary of a department with a mission in support a firm with a vision. Instead of hoping to hit someone’s budget and apologize later, I was on boarding with one, and had the resources to make it happen.

And the most intoxicating news of all was that the reasoning was coming from the prospective employer – not from my wish-list of everything I’d been longing to implement since the great knowledge Diaspora of the Big Four absorption conquest.

KM was not just the flavor of the month or a passing placeholder. I actually received dozens of emails from perspective colleagues, imploring me to take the position:

• A self-generating cheering section!
• KM Manager for President!

From day one what charged my imagination was the challenge to fire an idling knowledge operation. I felt uniquely qualified to fill the gap between the firm’s value proposition and its cheerful but underwhelming KM platform – an application better at socializing water-cooler gossip than propagating lessons learned. 

This reluctance to embrace the best technological fit was evident throughout GSM: 

1. Conference rooms whose dedicated laptops could not be over-ridden
2. Knowledge transfer sessions that went unrecorded on fears that the play button could disconnect the conference
3. Whiteboard doodles of siloed databases which resembled a Daddy Long Legs thumb wrestling a paraplegic octopus. 

This was not a high-achieving technical organization.  

Manager’s Remorse

The increasing prestige and responsibility of the senior manager role included two direct reports. Besides the summer interns we’d hosted at System Wisdom, this was my first supervisory role in over a decade.

It didn’t take long to realize my managerial instincts were rusty and perceived by my boss as an overstretch of the leadership he saw me lacking. Regardless of the leader and leadership qualities in question, my focus channeled past information flow to the padlocked doors of damage control. I was managing stress levels and deadline shifts – a far cry from directing the discourse of the firm’s vaunted “knowledge exchanges” or actually mentoring junior level KM associates.

The first indications this was the wrong fit were written into the terms of acceptance. I was to be physically present in the firm’s Back Bay offices five days per week. That was not in itself a deal-breaker.  My lifelong lifestyle choices have led to living in the sticks and working in office parks. I knew I could rev my intrepid jets to support a second residence via Craig’s List. I could even do it for an upfront commitment of one review cycle. I would live from suitcase to cubicle. I would see my family on weekends. Down the road lay the expectations of a more balanced and sustainable telecommute. 

Here’s what I didn’t see coming: my boss basically comported to the same 5 day in-office work week. That was a level of attentiveness far beyond my prior exposure levels to “managing up.”

(More on boss jerk in next week’s episode).

Stepping Around the Big KM Shoes

Management consulting is an industry that caters to the insatiable need of corporate chief-doms for external validation in the shrinkage of prior commitments and the growth of bottom lines. The nonprofit version sounds the same themes with one important difference – the bottom line is measured by community betterment over earnings statements. In other words it’s not the rationale for profit-taking but what’s to be done with the spoils – the residues of capitalism known as philanthropy.

For a former Hampshire College grad steeped in sustainable economies and social justice, this assignment was just what the do-gooder doctor ordered – not just doing the right thing to surmount the moral high-ground but because the greater social good was being served by capitalism – not in spite of it. What greater calling could there be to share the gospel of such GSM-branded practices as “collective value” and “shared impact” through the edifying lens of Knowledge Management?

That same conclusion did not escape my predecessor, Ralph Chasticio who began GSM’s KM practice in 2010. Ralph positioned his zeal as a firebrand by leading bona fide KM pep rallies at the annual retreats. He threw birthday parties for the KM system he initiated. His untimely death in 2013 left a gaping hole that included his oversized personality as well as his stamp on KM. I never expected to the replacement for the former and was inspired by the loose-ends of the latter. For those reasons I saw his legacy as a welcome mat to his successor – not as a bar too high for hurdling.

Full-time Visitor Badge

Mondays through Thursdays, the headquarters of most management consulting groups are pulsing with the sounds of air ducts ventilating and elevators shooting past their reception areas. These are mostly thriving, barren places. A profitable and desirable place to work in this industry is an office of rural library-like decibel levels and empty offices – at least those staffed by absent partners and their consulting teams. The intrepid consultant catches the red eye fly flight home on Thursdays to reclaim their personal lives, collect their dry-cleaning, and reconnect with the rest of the firm.

The non-billable office staff earn their keep by making problems wait, if not disappear, prior to the casual Friday homecoming. Marketing, Finance, IT, KM ... most functional innards get baked into the booking fees with the same invoicing logic as reimbursable travel costs. We are the cost of doing business -- not the value.

Those expenses were less padded and more scrutinized at GSM. Not only were GSM consultants out to save the world but they did so largely from the interior of our offices. That’s not to cast doubt on the sincerity of mission-focused consulting or the commensurate sacrifices (pay-cuts, no bonuses, and a slower promotional track). There are many instances where project teams exceeded the visitor badge status of what an onsite assignment means. I was honored to meet and support project teams who worked with refuges and underserved populations. No matter the client, assignment, or budget, the goals or determination to reach them never wavered. 

The distinction here is that those in the pedestrian roles of support staff also forgo creature comforts, consolations, and even workplace conventions. In my case this meant assuming a consultant lifestyle at support staff sustenance.

Another was an emphasis on process. In more conventional settings I was surrounded by engineers with MBAs whose move rationalized the bottom-line justification for the results they deliver. At GSM I was surrounded by project managers who were chess-boarding the interdependencies of moving pieces across a sprawling array of events, engagements, and non-billable projects, (a.k.a. the slippery stuff that’s hard to track).

I still remember the dumbfounding realization that my direct reports were not interested in tinkering with the interface or noodling around the peripheries of the “undo” function. They wanted an expectation of scheduling – the where and when. “How” was off the agenda. It was not a role they welcomed. In hindsight it was my failings as a boss to own their lack of initiative and the “how” of the planning.  This was illustrated in a single-spaced 30 page rollout plan, top-heavy with micro details. I don’t remember a point-of-return once I sent that roadmap to the printer. I don’t recall a single approver or accomplice even read past the table of contents.

A third unexpected challenge was how the emphasis on process played out in the negotiating of commitments and resources to projects. On the surface this meant there were “pre-reads” to consider before the actual holding of the meetings they addressed (sort of a book club meets budget planning scenario). And those meetings were as scripted as they were scheduled – no scribbling outside the margins. No unplanned digressions. No Q&A without some certainty there was a consensus on where the ‘A’ stands before the ‘Q’ sits down.

Next week: The ghost of a former KM founding father casts a longer shadow as a pending KM rollout is tripped up by an intractable IT peer and my own unwillingness to renegotiate the terms of project success.

***

The blog series KM in the Jerkplace is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

KM in the Jerkplace: Episode One -- Knowledge Factory Settings

Installment Summary: 

We focus on the friendly acquisition of my knowledge-centric consulting shop by an accounting giant in 2011. A first glance, the giant’s knowledge systems and practices casts doubt on the ability to integrate the know-how of my former firm into my new firm’s service offerings and value propositions.

Copyright The Ubyssey 2014

I was the lead knowledge manager for a small, enterprising consulting firm that we’ll call System Wisdom. System Wisdom owed its success to two factors:

• A steadfast mastery of operations management – the nuts and bolts around improving production cycles and supply chains.
• The glue holding that mastery together – the knowledge transfer needed to sustain these practices.

There was no original jerk at work in the swallowing of this intrepid, forward-leaning consulting firm. It wasn’t motivated by any personality really. I attribute the post-merger fallout to a blind-spot inside the acquirer – a Big 4 accounting colossus we’ll reference as Cover Your Assurances (“CYA”).  

This was not an aggressive overreach by CYA, but a presumption really that success factor #2 was somehow implicit in the first. In this transition all the operational smarts would flow into CYA’s bottom line as easily as the bookings of former System Wisdom clients.

CYA admired System Wisdom as a small, dependable outfit. Our allure was  based on: (a) the complementary nature of our tinkering engineers to their bankable legion of accountants; and (b) our outsized profits. When one dialed in System Wisdom:

1. First you got cool, informed analysis of your current operational state
2. Next we broke down your operational innards
3. Finally we pieced them back together with the rationale for strengthening them over time.

The miscalculation was the presumption that System Wisdom’s success formula was as transferable as the financial assets used to seal the deal. Is knowledge (like the capital used to produce it) reducible to transactional units? In our case, the outputs were the documents generated in our case work. As client deliverables they were both solutions to prior problems and reusable frameworks for addressing the new work to come. 

CYA treated the exchange as largely a rebranding exercise:

1. How many offshore editors does it take to redact all specific references to System Wisdom’s former case work?
2. How many search and replace macros will reappoint the respective logos and color palettes?

This kind of knowledge refactoring scales well for reproducing sets of static artifacts, say for booksellers? Not necessarily so when it comes to social and iterative pursuits like building management practices inside massive bookkeeping juggernauts.

When these ingredients are purged from the original work and the context is removed, it compromises  the consulting teams’ ability to absorb the lessons, rethink the approach, and determine its applicability to the case at-hand. A stripped down relic of an ex-client of a former firm is disconnected from…

• The insights of authorship,
• The learnings from the unforeseen consequences, and
• The breakthrough thinking of a pressure-tested innovation
  
  – In short, the particulars that evolve the practice.

These were not the flagrant aggressions of a subversive jerk. These are but sins of misunderstanding and omission from an institutional perspective. On a personal level the jerk war path was paved with malevolent intentions: The fully intended disruptions, the pulling of political ranks, and performance review sucker punches were yet to come.

Three Keywords and a Cloud of Dust

I had barely decamped in CYA’s Knowledge Services fold when I learned of this branch’s eminent demise.

At its peak Knowledge Services consisted of 300-odd former librarians, reporters, PhDs, and trainers that CYA had been advised to assemble as an expansive storehouse of thinker-bees. Regrettably this deluxe busload of bright, non-billable folks was thrown under an even bigger bus – a caravan of metrics that calculated knowledge by the dump-fill and justified the number of sanitation workers required. The answer was not many. The main task involved sorting the number of deliverables and the tags needed to locate, if not find them. This distinction is a scream-out to CYA’s suboptimal search. Each query approached every new information request as an isolated pursuit. 

Keepers of the knowledge fold consisted of three camps:

1. The captains, 
2. The doomed, and 
3. The campers groomed for the lifeboats by their knowledge captains
   
   – None of whom were ticketed to go down with their knowledge crews.

System-wise the enterprise content supply lines were unresponsive to the knowledge demands of consulting staff. Rather than align them, CYA leadership aborted dysfunctional search for the leaner and trendier social media platform. The new system required none of the care, feeding, and expense of the system maintained by the brainy, unbillable folks of the knowledge fold.

The cost savings rationale joined forces with the demographics. The argument was that junior staffers were more apt to engage Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, etc. than CYA’s intranet. Here was a knowledge bone we can throw them to retain them a cycle longer before shopping their wares to a rival firm.

The ruse all along was that corporate-styled Facebooks would make the home team more collaborative on the inside, and once externalized, and more competitive. In reality here’s what happened:

• No governance structures led to dozens of redundancies and missed opportunities for community-building. Each new site was in a confused state of collaboration-readiness: some open access sites, some in lock-down, and some slightly ajar (invitation-only).
• All engagement deliverables were treated as potential liabilities and were fire-walled away from the economies of learning and reuse.
• “Likes” and shallow salutations were socialized like the upturned grin of a ginormous smiley face. Attachments leading to actual work product were frowned on. Substance was a non-starter.

Bottom-line: the competitive edge for leveraging knowledge was used for personal gain – not for organizational advantage.

Disabling the Knowledge Store

I played the expected role of the knowledge giver on social media. I did this by reproducing the archived threads of past problem resolutions – the iterations of practitioners collaborating within a community of experts. Each posting was credited to me even though the know-how being traded was exchanged by the consultants – not the copier/paster/curator.

Contributors to these community sites were rewarded by a scoring system designed to tally their peer influence.  My point totals were inflated by reposting the work of others. Then there was the approval seeking which demonstrated the conformist pressures of social media. Why hypothesize or test a rationale among your peers? It’s far easier to win followers by pandering to the pep talks from the C-suite?

Perhaps that’s why the social engine runs on the breathy validations of the leader-led. Point totals lead to accruing badges. Attaching iconic credentials to more substantive discussions was not part of the rewards package. But one could argue that the enterprise knowledge store was never open for business – before or after the brown-nosing and patronizing began.

In the fishbowl of corporate Facebook what’s always an open proposition is not the latest posting, comment, or like. It’s the variation on the question of what I’ve done for you lately to solicit favor.  The surface details on social media are sounded through the same immutable timetable. Annual performance reviews are an orchestration set to the grand pause of musical chairs. And no one knows better which notes to play or how to stop them cold better than the CYA reviewer elites.

***

The blog series KM in the Jerkplace is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

The Sky Has Its Limits

[caption id="attachment_2108" align="alignleft" width="300"] A sample of Cymfony's Brand Dashboard.[/caption]

I commemorated 9-11-2014 in a strange, improbable way. I met with the same guy I was scheduled to meet with 13 years earlier in the hopes of accepting my 9/11/01 consulting proposal. Like a lot of pre 9/11 plans this too was destined for the recycle bin. The best laid, evidence-based calculations lost their logic that day and remained speechless in deference to the victims of the alternately bright blue, pervasively dark morning.

I was holding some promising cards prior to that meeting. Earlier that summer I had joined up with a venture-funded search engine start-up called Cymfony. The company derived a lovely black box of algorithms that were based on what machines call "natural language" or how humans record their affairs. Computer scientists from the University of Buffalo had compiled code that consume large chunks of text and break them down into parts of speech that the software's creators called "grammars." The result was the ability to surface relationships and correlations lost to the more basic keyword matches and link associations that passed for relevancy in the Alta Vista search universe of the earliest 2000s.

The challenge for Cymfony was that there was no business model behind the search science. The leadership team called it "business intelligence" or BI. But to anyone outside of espionage circles that was a maturing market to tease the secrets out of spreadsheets for consolidating balance sheets and forecasting pipelines -- in effect BI was about the math of numbers -- not words.

Curiously I was working as a middle competitive intelligence manager for one of those BI firms when I got a call from Cymfony's CEO. Andrew Bernstein was recruiting potential test sites for building a proof of concept -- some evidence-based case studies they could use to springboard their go-to-market efforts. It was the fate of shifting economic fortunes that my interest in natural language search engines was peaking at the same time that my non-revenue-producing employment prospects were plummeting in the landing wreckage of the post dotcom nosedive.

Instead of trying to find the same work somewhere else I decided to pitch these Cymfony guys on a vision for sense-making that existed in the spreadsheets of analysts but nowhere on the results pages of Internet news searches -- let alone on the dashboards of influence-peddling news suppliers whose fortunes ride on those results. The opportunity as I explained to Andrew was that these guys are living from one traction-seeking distraction to the next. They put their fingers to the wind without any sense of how those winds are shifting or even taking shape within an overall news climate. Andrew found this compelling as a vision.

But the vision became the tangible game plan when he floated the idea of a media intelligence tool to an ally and image consultant who decried the need to quantify the squishy, personality-driven craft of branding management: not only who was flying higher or trending lower but where were the actual analytics to benchmark media coverage? Better still; quantify its impact on the segments carved out by the most visible agencies and advertisers.

Thus the Brand Dashboard was born and I was in the heady and somewhat awkward position of trying to carve out a role that was neither founder, developer, sales / marketing, or advisor / relationship-based. Besides helping to shape the new direction in the form of what the UX designer referred to as a "whiteboard doodle," I was the taxonomist -- the guy who could aggregate those grammars manifested in the black box so that the dashboard would contain the correct metrics for the right customer.

What I refused to see was that there were no ownership stakes for grammarians and taxonomists. I spent $2,000 on attorney fees to draft a contract that negotiated on those terms which never saw the light of its post 9/11 signature line. In retrospect I understand the basic flaws in my positioning as well as the resentments I carried well past the rejected proposal about having helped change the business model with no recognition by the business. I believe I turned down a pre IPO offer of preferred stock by Andrew. I was pissed and this was the most direct way I could maintain the dignity I could substitute in lieu of any parachute payments.

Thirteen years later I've earned my keep with as a taxonomist metadata mind. I don't run with my bedraggled tongue (where my sniffer should) be towards Silicon VC dollars. I support consulting organizations by making the knowledge donuts. That's meant a continuous cycle of SharePoint deployments and search configurations within the margins of firewalls and fixed budgets. There's no doubt it's for the best. Then again I've never met a change with no hand in changing that I didn't tailor into some kind of hidden blessing. There is no "all for the worst" in expression or in feeling when you outlive those blessed changes.

I've used the latest of these transitions to steer away from my functional headcount role as a knowledge manager to applying those tools of the trade into a more plausible business model -- doing KM work in a market-facing capacity as a content strategist. So who came to mind for testing my new content strategy idea? A series of incremental engagements I could sell to the same industry for which knowledge management is either a humbling confession of a knowledge problem, or at best, a necessary evil? An industry that gets no favors from Google in its quest for the right keyword campaigns and tends to view most marketing and design agencies with suspicion?

That's right. I dialed Andrew Bernstein up on LinkedIn. Andrew's still local to Boston and heading up Kearsarge Energy -- a project management firm that packages large solar farms for towns, municipalities, and large landowners. I asked him how it felt selling something more tangible these days than natural language-based branding barometers. He said the real liberation was the skeletal crew -- down from the hundred or so he managed at Cymfony before the first of two buy-outs.

The irony is that I goofed at the bargaining table of our last ill-fated meeting. I shoulda been making the donuts all along. It was a relief to admit that and positively cathartic to hear the 13 year response: “We could have used you.” That’s one winsome exchange that carries the lessons of the past over the boundaries of regret and a not-so-hidden blessing to commemorate this 9-11 Day.

The Philanthropilization of Commerce

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="487"] Clean-up crew descends on Great Pacific Garbage Patch[/caption]

Since our species has evolved from hunting, gathering, ducking, and unplucking, our trading systems have moved up the same maturity chain. Once cowing, plowing, and bowing to lords and kings, we are no longer judged on what we produce but how we acquire. And while we agonize over how this all reflects on our values and grandchildren, our unblinking systems patiently await our future purchasing histories.

In a couple of dozen centuries we've gone from unwritten agreements and provincial codes to the recording of every articulation and graphical utterance. From fist clenches and handshakes to security tokens and payment releases.

Our free modern markets are at the ready for setting prices and finalizing sales but speechless when it comes to processing the loss of things once valued but never priced. We lose radio contact with value at the point where cheaper is the rationale for shortening a supply chain, doing more with less, not covering preexisting conditions, and the familiar litany of "house bets." Those free market calculations designed to lower prices without regard to their costs.

The Tyranny of the Free

Any 21st Century content connoisseur will tell you that we are drowning in the social costs for making information free. Information for a price is a world in which producers compete to know the priciest information, and then trade on that knowledge, benefiting the information, the linings of of their pockets, and the trading systems that carry their instructions. The world of free belongs to all of us and we're drowning in the details. It's a fishbowl, echo chamber, and labyrinth of transactions. A ticker-tape parade of personal metadata confetti. Our own claims of privacy aboard a Texas-sized flotilla of personal information garbage, brought to us by opaque password bypassers and lax regulations (with a capable assist from our own lethargy).

Is it any wonder we can't build a consensus around a set of shared priorities in a world where everyone gets to hear themselves think and the slightest dissension is an unwelcome distraction?

I'm not suggesting we go back to a world of publishing magnets, three national TV networks, and gatekeepers who defined the public interest through the prism of their own. But just because the content spigot is more control resistant  these days doesn't mean the biggest media mouths and ears can go on smearing and eavesdropping with impunity. And that brings us back to the marketplace of ideas where we shop. In these kiosks and stalls and pushcarts anyone with a bill-supporting income can ascend to the roll of benefactor -- a supporter of sounds, tastes, looks, and priorities that amplify our sense of what counts, knowing that the dollar we spend will be counted regardless of what the counters are thinking in their calculations.

Keepers of the Analog

Being a patron of the arts is not just about buying your CDs directly from the performers as mementos of the concert experience. It's more basic than that. It's about preserving the musical worship ritual itself.

The highlight of this past gift-giving season centered on buying two albums at Newbury Comics for my wry-witted, macro-analytical, and culturally clairvoyant step daughters. It felt both odd and compelling that the $40 for the two works equaled ten LPs back in the golden days of Disc-O-Mat, Sam Goody's, and Titus Oaks. It was also a trifle under the $40 more that I've managed to spend on downloads through the 2013 music season. But I'd be just as mistaken to confer a 1979 dollar value on the post record label musical food chain as I would for labeling the LP, its fluffy sleeves, luxuriating foldouts, and epic cover art as mere "packaging." Behind that hedonistic splurging of harmonic layerings lies a tactile immersion that focuses the mind on the concept behind the album, the liner notes behind the lyrics, the devotion to the vision in the sound.

If vinyl makes a comeback, can other pay-for-content packagings be revivable? Printing and reading text on paper instead of screens has a way of marshalling the concentration that is otherwise claimed by the labors of a competitive world, i.e. memorizing answers to tests. Another clarifying benefit of paper-based information is that it's static, doesn't beep or flicker, and awaits the scratching within the editorial margins to activate the reader. Print on screen is content that never sleeps. It's resistant to reflection, analysis, and the perspective-taking carried by the authority of definitive works.

We've lost that one big time in the online.

The Future Makes a Comeback

The question of getting it back is not reducible to whether there's a business model for offline content or a marketing edge for self-referential authority. The answer is to pay for the information whose usefulness will grow with time.

That doesn't mean a pointless retreat into a nostalgic past of argument-settling finality. It does mean cultivating the restraint, introspection, and deference given to containers that not only preserve the original contents but reveal that larger framework for committing positive and memorable change in our unyielding and inarticulate age. A time where the present is no better suited to take in the future than the haste and prejudice of our own self-selection.

Question: When the last time you picked over the hidden messages and visual nuances of the art on a CD cover? If you're like me you're harkening back to a time that never passed because it never happened. It's funny what choices the free, modern marketplaces make for us. Especially the choices it takes away that were never counted in the first place.

The Better and the Worse of the Most of Us

[caption id="attachment_2031" align="alignleft" width="249"] 15 year-old David Oats speaks as the Westinghouse Time Capsule is lowered into the former ash heap that bore two World's Fairs.[/caption]

Jerry, my soon to be 21-year-old son recently found his inner blogging voice. He's come to channel his love of myth and legend into literal interpretations from comic books to the episodic depictions of super and sub-heroic versions of Hollywood films.

The strictest of his guidelines is that the antagonist should cause pain, suffering, and hold no redemptive qualities (other than serving as the vanquished prey of the superhero). To Jerry, if they're not 100% certifiably devil-made, it's not just the good guys who are threatened:

• It toys with the plausibility of the characters.


• It messes with the plot twists.


• How can good triumph over evil when we have to continually reassess who has which power and in what supply?

Remembering the Good
That same purity restriction is rarely lifted for the non-fiction twists of the life narratives we eulogize for absent family and friends. Their departure is enough of a presence to strike even the suggestion of disrespect from any eulogy. It's etiquette the living rarely need to remind us to practice. It's a simple grace. It's a lowering of the guard in the intimidating face of the eternal. Death strips the adornments we carry as standard-bearers and role models. That naked soul we praise at the memorial service will favor the way our loved ones wanted to be remembered -- even when we have no memory of their instructions. But the best remembrances leave open the unfiltered sincerities of the people they were, not the stations they rose to, not the positions they held.

If anyone in my life is up for challenging my son's purified formulations, that person is David Oats (1950-2008). A recent Internet search casually slipped in a series of his obituaries. That buffer of time provides a rare opportunity to remember David as an extreme example of heart-melting communion and shadowy behavior. I remember David as being better and worse than the most of us.

I knew him for a short, intense period nearly 30 years ago when I was transitioning from the Neverland of a self-designed college curriculum to the externally imposed demands of adulthood. The turbulence of that transition was spiced by his capacity for open-ended generosity and stone-faced obstruction. The fact that I stumbled into his passing obliges me to put his influence into perspective without confusing wholesale rewrites for an undignified burial.

Political and Guileless

David's irrepressible charm was his most glaring foible. He was willing to tell you not only what you wanted to hear. He had an uncanny knack of convincing you he'd held the same wish -- even the same belief system. For a 22 year-old college grad this was shear intoxication: not just the chance for a pay check, or even meaningful work, but a dream job of working for David. Simple naiveté can't explain away that wide a gap between a life imagined and the one being lived. But when you and David shared a core belief, that was no self-delusion. That was a plan of action!

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="410"] Hillary Clinton and David Oats at a press reception in the early 2000s.[/caption]

One of those plans vice-gripped my imagination for the better half of the two formative years between when I started my Div. III (a.k.a. senior thesis) and when I moved out of David's apartment. The theme of my academic studies (the history of the New York World's Fairs) was the proverbial message in the bottle. In those days the bottle was addressed to the President of the 1989 New York World's Fair to be.

Camera Ready

My final project with Andrew Morris-Friedman was a video documentary starring David Oats as the community-organizer, consensus-building answer to the impervious kingpin, power-brokering Robert Moses who ordained the '39 and '64 Fairs as a means to secure his park legacy.

David's legacy consisted of trespassing through a construction site fence. And like some page out of Mayberry RFD the apprehended junior citizen punk was brought before Emperor Moses himself. After making some gruff noises about neighborhood safety, Moses assures young Oats that his park will be returned to his community with amenities 'o plenty once the fair ended. The fact this account of their unlikely meeting ran in David's New York Times obit says more about the journalism instincts of a future and failed promoter than the actual guest list for calendaring in a visit to meet that day with Bob "Fair Chairman" Moses.

To Andy and me, the exploratory nature of staging a third New York Fair wasn't a tribute to David's powers of self-invention. It was the generational realization that ginormous spectacles spoiling for sponsorships found their way to Flushing Meadows. We were just lucky enough to hitch a ride on the next repeating cycle.

And Forgive Us My Trespasses

On a more grounded note, I had no job lined up, or plan B, or even a post Hampshire place to crash. The notion of "home" was a waning option. I couldn't go home for as many reasons as there were no home feelings lost in that acknowledgement. After a prolonged viewing session of David's political video catalog I asked what the prospects were to continue in both video consuming and producing roles while figuring out how to land on my untested feet. My wish was granted.

In retrospect that's where I should have stopped taking wishes come true for granted. This is an arrangement that exceeded the imaginings, let alone the realities of the move-onto-anyplace-but-where-I-came from post liberal arts degree crowd. I should have seen this simple kindness for what it was -- a temporary respite from the workplace pressures to come.

But the trance-induced allure of the future-leaning '89 Fair is where I dwelled. That fixation held my unwavering focus through the tentative first steps into a dead-end internship at a media journal and onto a wedding / Bar Mitzvah video gopher at the Film Center on 9th and 45th -- shouting distance from the sound stage run by Liz Dubelman, my first fiancé.

The Uncollected Rent

My daily presence in David's inventive and unpublished life came with its own set of constraints and expectations. My guesswork is based on what he must have anticipated on the day I moved in. Over those summer weekends Liz would drive in from Jersey on the weekends. Just the simple arranging of it prompted a reshuffling in his shadowy preferences for floating out of range and below the radar. For instance, delivering dial-tone to his Kissena Boulevard kitchen only occurred after Liz voiced her concern that phone service was not an opt-outable preference in pre-cellphone society. David's penchant for cash-only transactions suggested a level of privacy that regarded the mundane transactions of the market as outside and unwelcome intrusions. His unwillingness to give references or open his networking doors for Andy and me meant three things to Liz:

• The 1989 New York World's Fair was a no-go


• David would never admit so much, and


• His intransigence hinted at a fundamental truth about a President of an Enterprise that was not to be: he was a fake -- not a con artist per se, but a serial bluffer nonetheless.

I'm not sure history would be as reproachful as a future spouse crashing a cloistered bachelor pad, glass-enclosed floor models of former fair pavilions, and VHS-enabled broadcast archive. One need not peer too closely into David's fantasy constructions to find only facades behind the blueprints and fabrications acting as placeholders for actual ground-breakings.

The real history lesson here is not that the sunny disposition David carried was concealing a diabolical nature. It's that his personal nature of "taking me in" was a selfless act, not some kind of an investment or quid pro quo. My being "taken in" was a reflection of my inexperience and compromised living situation. What made this so difficult to accept was the stiff exit price he exacted when Liz and I moved to our first Manhattan studio the following spring. That move precluded my own smaller scale alternative universe -- one that I'd cultivated, leveraged, cataloged, and squirreled away since the age of 5. Unlike most lost childhood collections, this one was repossessed by a rent-free landlord.

That remittance transpired without threats, confessions, or basic forms of cooperation. From one obfuscation to the next busted plan, my lost collection represented the same control fantasy that filled David's postwar garden apartment stocked with television histories, one-of-a-kind recordings, and Fair memorabilia. The aftertaste of his deception took as long for me to cycle through as a whole drumbeat of shoulda coulda woulda charades: the fate of the '89 Fair, the run of an '88 Cuomo for President campaign, the vagabond fairground buildings fallen into decay, and all those lost NYC Olympic bids to come.

It sounds juvenile, I know. But it runs a course deeper (than I imagine) when your mom's the culprit for tossing your cards out (along with your comic books and matchbox cars). I wouldn't know. I never collected matchboxes or comics.

[caption id="attachment_2033" align="alignleft" width="250"] Robert Moses and David Oats outside the Chairman's office in the Administration Building (now the Queens Museum).[/caption]

Post Scripts

About six months after my cards were banished to memory, I got in touch with his former partner at the Queens Tribune and local Congressman (until this year) Gary Ackerman. After I shared some of my gratitude and misgivings I asked for some insight about David -- a perspective I couldn't possibly gain from such a shielded and specific view of his old friend -- distorted by the short, intense time we had shared together.

With hints of frustration, admiration, and humility, Ackerman said a curious thing: "It's a good thing David wasn't born a girl, because he'd never stop being pregnant."

I should have realized that this observation from a well-regarded politician was about as sincere a rationale I was likely to receive for closing the books on David as my adopted and short-term older brother figure.

I suppose in the movie version, David Oats would be the hero and villain. He would be played by the same character. Which side of him wins out, I cannot say. But if the movie were true to the person the audience would forgive him for putting the world he wanted to believe in ahead of the one we live in. Maybe if we understand that about David, we can free up our own narratives where our real world superpowers can do the most good.

Who Was That Masked Persuader?

Before last Friday an Imperial-leaning President was expected to take Syrian President Bashar al-Assad out to the woodshed. He was to brandish the whip of American missile bruising with the reluctant enforcer's decree that this corporal spanking was going to hurt him more than it hurts Assad. And before Labor Day he would have been right. But now we know better.

Obama needed Congress like a hole in the head. Then the British Parliament silenced the alarm clock before Prime Minister Cameron could set it. No point in going it alone when the constitution provided ample cover in the form of a full up or down vote. Regardless of how the votes line up, it is a remarkable thing. The public has so little appetite for war now that it's no longer relevant whether the investigations prove that the evidence was cooked or credible unlike the run up to those elective American wars when it was theories in heads and not facts on grounds that justified the propping up of dictators, dominos, or pipelines.

But the queasy factor hastens another more welcome removal from Congressional deliberations and that's the middle-man who brokers the retail side of a political system that sends anyone who can't afford a lobbyist to the black market for political favors. That's the up-and-up about having the straight up-and-down. There will be no horse trading. We're filibuster free. It is as close to a politically neutral political act that we're likely to see on this side of any foreseeable cycles to come. That's what happens when support for bombing Syria is running neck and neck with Congressional approval ratings. You get one rep, one vote. You get the House leaders voting with their conscience, not with blocs, or caucuses, or factions, or any groups that would threaten not to have them as a member. That’s not a character assassination, a smear campaign, or the guy further to the extreme in the next primary. That's the clout our leaders have when casting a vote for or against this evolving role of American leadership.

President Obama has decided to externalize the arguments in his head, making us all raging argumentarians. Buffering the time-span between the atrocity, the debate, and the pending response could drag on all the way through the upcoming debt threshold season. We may have to DVR those episodes while we stay glued to this wider and more unscripted stage. And here are the fall previews as channeled through a South Park chorus of militant-leaning Sims family combat scenarios:

• Are we only implicated when the shooter takes out our loved ones?
• Does self-interest reside closer to the speculations of cavorting diplomats?
• Are these future gassings are any more predictable if we do the unpredictable and stand down?
• We can’t nurse our veterans or feed our hungry. Can we really afford this? (Queue debt ceiling…)

The President is drawing this out for a reason. He's dragging the entire cast across that red line which marks all borders, colors, and demarcations. He drew that red line in response to having no response for the first hundred thousand or so Syrians being taken at the hand of their fellow Syrians. He drew it on the calculation that he wouldn't need to honor it. It was an election year placeholder. Perhaps a posturing he didn't expect to hold? After all, why would a despot invoke sarin pellets on oxygen-consuming civilians?

Certainly the Iranians who knew the open air gas chambers unleashed by Saddam Hussein in 1980 have a closer affinity to the Auschwitz death camps than any rationale for the one visited on the Damascus suburbs last week. Perhaps these are remnants of the same caches that were used on the holocaust-denying Iranians? In both cases the U.S, turned a blind eye to these weapons of gas destruction. Red lines tend to be made on shifting red sands it seems.   

But argumentation is cheap and Obama spends lavishly, knowing that a week buys him a maelstrom of speculation from decampments of munitions deployed within Syrian population centers to a Republican party united in blame only. If there is to be blood the new calculations on circumscribed warfare is not over munitions, territories, natural resources, or even casualties, but on whose hands their blood will be stained.

During the summer recess Obama was going to be impeached for implementing Obamacare. Now he's melting our soft civil war for the harder one waging on in a fractured, displaced, and stressed out corner of a global neighborhood the “right side of history” was never supposed to enter.

The terms of that entrance will be diluted by the party line progressives (formerly “pinkos”) once, if ever, such a resolution passes the house. And Obama will be publicly circumspect and privately delighted by those constraints. It may sound devious to foes and shrewd to benefactors. But it's certainly a lot less abstract than gassing one’s “own people.” And it’s a lot more achievable than any notions of victory in Syria -- for anyone.

 

Three Strikes and You're In

I've been married three times. I don't know anyone else who has their names on three divorce decrees. And as improbable as it may be to have been undone by three declarations, eyes, hearts, and futures wide open. Three former wedding anniversaries. Three former mothers-in-law. Three former wedding toasts. It almost sounds exotic by the enormity of its dimension. Reminds me of my father's legendary request for his second wife to marry him on the same day as his first marriage so he'd only need to remember one date. With practicalities that impulsive, who needs secret valentines?

I am just now starting to appreciate the majesty of living in an unwavering state of love. I am stilled by the calm and quivering in the excitement of this very same love. It's an exploration of a mutual understanding that begins in adventure and carries me to a place I had only dreamt of before I met this love. That place is home and I'm surrounded by a nest that exudes anything but emptiness.

It's easy to overthink the role that destiny plays within the prism of possibilities that form the backdrop of a flowering romance. Easier still is to over-reach the emotional lift of falling in love. That it will bring stability to all we hold onto and change to every temptation we can't resist for letting go.

In retrospect each marriage was a reaction to a prior commitment -- not the right expression of a passing courtship, no matter how lasting or genuine the nature of these friendships. In but one of the disolutions was there someone else to spark the break-up. The truth is that I could no more ask my first three wives to honor their marriage vows than I could ask them to change their own guiding path or true nature. I accepted divorce not as a judgment of faith or commitment but the simple admission that three people had tried to maintain an appearance, to be something they were not. I accepted they were no longer in love with me as the rejoinder of an inertia-laden descent into a calculation best approximated as Bal's law of "diminishing returns."

It's a bit like the Central Square Payless shoe store I was shopping in last night. I tried on the 9.5s and they were too wiggly. I went down to the 9s. They were overly snug. I walked away from marriage with the sinking feeling I was walking on 9.25 feet in an unpaved world of unwearable fashion. That feeling only persisted when I went back to online dating -- especially when I tried to explain to potential dates the sincerity behind not wishing to walk directly into marriage #4.

Check Box of Open Questions

The first time I dated Patty I had checked the open relationship box. At the time it was hard to see how monogamy was going to expand my experiential horizons. It almost seemed a bystander, a pattern that held fidelity hostage to a lifelong quest for home and family. The more I played by the rules, the more they played me, boxing me into a corner of choices that found their voice in the language of rejection:

• Marriage 1: "The harder I try to make things easy, the less of a difference it makes."


• Marriage 2: "I 'have' to work three hours away to support us."


• Marriage 3: "My son 'lives' in Western Mass."

The sentiment feeding all these lines comes from a Matt Pond PA song called Locate the Pieces. It describes the isolation of a break-up when a couple's feelings for each other can't outlast changes in their relationship:

"Lately, I don't know what I could want from anyone."

That was my idea of holding on: to ask for nothing and expect less in return -- not exactly the cry for help that might inspire reaching back to Mister Solo-mon! Could I accept the uncertainty of a sputtering journey, a makeshift arrangement? All I could offer in exchange for hard-stop choices was the gentle acceptance that these misgivings were exception-proof. I can tell you through experience that loving someone for whom they are (apart from the best laid wedding plans) is not a marriage-preserving separation. It's a deal breaker.

Relationships abhor placeholders even worse than nature has it in for vacuums.  Whatever hurdles real or imagined would be cleared in time for a love to rekindle is one hope I have learned to extinguish. But the hope I held out for is the most intoxicating rush a spouse-worthy love scout can fathom: one where we're loved for who we are -- no matter the rawness of our wounds or the staleness of our circumstances.

In the Cards

It was that promise I heard being answered when Patty looked down at her plate on that first date and told me she could not abide by open relationships. I folded my cards almost as quickly as my dinner napkin. I'm one clumsy negotiator -- and proud of it. The pride lies in knowing my forte is in setting scenes, not in telling stories.

Patty and my story is a marvel of reverse engineering. Every tender adversity is an affirmation that we have something right and true to share. Our respective experience resonates through every loose end and unkept resolution. It's like we met in the relationship repair shop -- and we were both minding the store!

If I haven't already said it plainly there is all give and no rebound at work here. I can tell because...

* I ask things of Patty and she responds by spoiling me.

* She asks things of me and I'm honored.

* I laugh. She laughs back.

* We don't share a 50:50 split. It's more like a 100 all inclusive.

* When I leave to work in Eastern Mass she supports my travel. That's an inescapable presence in a drifting void for most of my adult life. I acknowledge this and call each night we're apart.

I pour my life into hers. I do it with the gratitude that I won't die with this replenishing love still inside me. I give it without qualifiers, conversions or justifications. On this Valentine’s Day, I give it to us. Measurement free.

The truth is that for all my passing grades and failing marriages all these lessons together add up to a smidgeon of why I found my life partner while I'm here. The rest is luck. It's purity diluted somewhat by my appreciation of the past as prologue. The rest is just an inkling of probability. There is no deserving this but a simple grace uncoerced in the heart.

On Living Solitary and Small

Here's what it's like to move into a new and empty home by yourself when just the idea of it delivers a serious buzz:

* I can walk the boat to the pond or run the fan or fan the incense or un-run a color choice or the number of napkin boxes I opportune. And that's not even messing with the cabin zoning as the AC can be as noisy or as borderline lukewarm as I want.

* I can bump into bumpable unpacked boxes and not have to explain the noise or wonder if I'm bumped up to noisy neighbor status.

* I can agonize over a soap dish at Cedar Chest. I can play out the cleaning habits of the three women I've co-starred in the preening of house. These three women will have agreed on little except that Alan Rickman is the pinnacle of sexy and that their co-star was raised by wolves.

So which civilizing influence will tilt the battle to burnish my OCD credentials in the cracks of my early post polyurethane floors? Is it the Dust Vac or the Swiffer? Am I persuaded to visit the Murphy's Soap upon the soft, placid cork in the kitchen? Do I Lemon Pledge the electronics? Where will an all-purpose generic suffice? Do I suck down moths in mid-flight or wait for the dust-up in the morning glare? When are spiders the enemies of my enemies and when do I have to vanquish the suspect in a potential spider bite case? When is it time to dispense with dry mops and play whack-a-mole in the stubble of the backyard? I turn my ADD shopping list to the insidious weeds that require my train wreck brand of root canal and trunk piles.

I'm beginning to understand why I revel in these minutiae flare-ups. This house was built by men. However unlike in most cases, a woman's hand is not present in the expression of the home. I'm free to second-guess my own interior decoration in the privacy of this creation. I have amnesty blankets of permission to make up my mind. This act holds certain unintended consequences. Sometimes this contains savage consequences in my marriages -- especially when I saw the choices as two avoidable extremes:

(A) Making a fuss about it or,

(B) Complete suppression.

Talk about no one being vested in a sunk cost situation.

Playing out scenarios like juggling calendars is one such hazard. I’m traveling too far over too few hours and I misplaced a few priorities along the way: Especially when my sense of obligation and devotion are locked in private competition.

This sounds like a simple case of arguing over control. But to be more concrete here, the conflict is fundamental. It’s the appointment-cancelling version of a gagging reflex. That’s a reference to our impulsive aversion for event planning – namely who’s the sponsor and what are the attendance requirements:

• What do I say to whom?


• How do I listen in a sincere, attentive way?


• Where does non-verbal dialog outflank both of these channels?

Another is my mastery of the self-limiting nature of failed relationships that go on for too long. Show me a reason to avoid an argument and I'll show you another expectation that I could learn to live without.

In place of this master miscasting I have an open and not so fragile invitation to live in a state of generous communication. Anyone who opens the bulkhead to the basement of their brains has free and welcome access to my attic whenever the sump pump forgets to take its allergy meds. I really mean that.

Yes, I am both the kind and queen of my castle. And that's just the warm-up for the ultimate victory here. I attain the unnatural born rite to exercise a woman and Governor Romney's prerogative -- the right to change my bleeping mind.

The Silver Linings of Graying Temples

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="101" caption="Ruthellen Pollan, 1941-2004"][/caption]

When mom's demise began to lay claims on her speech, she gathered her neighbor Jill. In halted and fraying tones, she dictated the love she was carrying from this life to my brother and me. A lot of it was gratitude for her many joys. A lot was about her wishes for our futures. It was obvious she wasn't going to mention the burdens -- those were present in the ritual itself.

But she did  confide her sadness of birthdays and weddings and graduations to come that would escape her presence. She was missing a future that she had visited before she was to leave us. I don't know if either of us realized it at the time. But evoking future memories all but guaranteed her poignant and ceremonial presence not only in our future gatherings but our lasting togetherness.

Sometimes though, when I fathom my own removal from the guest lists yet to come, I assemble these fragments in a more detached state than our boundary-crashing mom. I won't be dragged kicking and screaming if the world around me remains in a benign state of oblivion. It's not that shuffling off the pier dignifies the modesty of a studied release. It's not fatalism. It's a comfort that the species has a replacement at the ready. And I'm not replaceable. And neither is my replacement. So long as those parties are still in the planning stages I can let go, perhaps a little less grudgingly than mom.

I took solace in April's Wired piece on Escape from the  Memes by Mary H.K. Choi. Choi admonishes us to vanquish our participatory narcissism or FOMO -- fear of missing out. That's the darkest corner of cosmic isolation. Or, as Choi points out, where memes get their power. That's where oblivion deserves to steal back some thunder while the memes are preening in the mirror.

Is it even possible to see the reflections of fading memes any more?  We live in a place in history where even our closets have windows. The memes have escaped before we know we're even under surveillance. Just when we're about to catastrophize a shakedown, who should come to our rescue but our old pal oblivion. His advice? "Ignoring it will only make it go away."

That's what I try to tell Suzie the sales woman at the local Sleepys. She's about to convert me from an idle mattress speculator to a triumphant bargaineer. I assure her that I'm positive nobody can match her on price today and that I wouldn't be sliding my plastic in to meet her monthly quota. And as for the unresolved purchases in our cash-strapped futures?  I insist that I'm oblivious to brand. Caught sleeping with a Simmons instead of a Sealy? Not a reason to lose sleep over. I still might be registered up on Suzie's watch just yet.

Whether vagrant futon or pillow top halo, I can rest easier knowing this: I live in a community where every wrong turn has the potential of turning into the right direction. And there's an unformed mound in my new backyard with my mother's insatiable need to propagate and nurture.

That's uncertainty I can believe in.

Yes, Some Questions are Better Left Unasked

We've been told since we were old enough to test our merits and theories that there are no dumb questions. The urgency of this instruction tends to increase not with the caliber of the questioning but with the size of the group. Frowning on any inquisitive form is akin to the inquisition of Oliver Twist and his empty gruel bowl. Nobody wants to be the public silencer of curiosity. No one wants to discourage debate -- at least while the cameras are rolling. That kind of instruction happens more naturally behind closed doors (and minds too ... one insinuates).That said, most public forums for open questioning happen virtually these days. From email group lists to Facebook walls there's a whole lot of prodding and posturing around what we're trying to pursue that we feel more comfortable asking our fellow humans than the sequestered confession chamber we have come to know as the Google search box.

These garden variety crowd-sourcing drills are routine in my firewall where domain experts and junior staff alike are more comfortable with receiving pointers and attachments from peers than plowing through an unvetted pile of search results. Sometimes an uninformed question is so basic that tree-in-the-forest physics kick in: No response is not the same as being ignored, though admittedly it's hard to spot the difference in cyberspace.

One way to avoid the open stares of disbelieving colleagues is to press for currency -- a great face-saving defense by inferring that we know our stuff -- just not the latest stuff. Another is to watch the zealousness of the responders. Are they dispatching their personal stashes of best practices or giving the requester a number to call? Is the responder as secure in their answers as they are in their positions? There is a tendency for junior-level people to over share expertise because: (1) they're eager to jump in, (2) they prefer texting to face-to-face problem-solving, or (3) they need to get with post merger realities of a changing power structure.

But enough about me the responder. How can I make your questions more informed without becoming too pointed? How can they expand and advance existing discussions without becoming too open-ended -- too tenuous to invite followup?

For starters, let the question breath a little. Don't put practitioners on the spot with "is it this" or "is it that?" Reducing all the complexities to a multiple choice outcome tells the gallery you really can't draw the distinction between talking to machines or people. Secondly, how the question gets asked supersedes the topic or our learning objectives. Owning up to where we've been, the walls we hit, and the loops we're trying to cycle through means we're paying our dues and respects -- not to any one obstacle or expert but to the community of practice we're addressing for its collective problem-solving intelligence. As hacker Eric Raymond writes in his online manual for How to Ask Questions the Smart Way, there is more than a subtle difference between demanding “an answer” and requesting collaborators. The presumption is that there is a scarcity of definitive answers and a wealth of lessons waiting to be drawn from a pool of experience.

Another crowdsourcing pleaser is to summarize the responses both as a form of gratitude to the participants and respect for the process. A brief write-up of the investigation also validates the commitments of the community to building know-how, not merely revisiting the same knowledge on our domain of experts. That's because the summary integrates the responses into a shared output. It's the interplay of an unfolding conversation -- not a scripted, one-sided and static one. Unpacking responses is conducive to wikis so long as the formating remains simple enough to foster and contain further problem-solving as the community evolves.

Then there's the powerful allure of motivation: why I'm asking. Divulging one's incentives for knowing will disarm the most overconfident know-it-all. That means not competing for smartest guy-in-the-room. The burden of proof is shifted towards a common purpose around a shared understanding. Of course it will take more than case summaries and deference to practice members for junior-level requesters to pick the brains of the more seasoned practitioners. The purpose of the question is key. It's not that answering a question makes us instant and equal partners in the same outcome. It's the faith in knowing that the wheel will turn. As casually as a requester can speak their inquiring mind, the sincerest way to complete this virtuous loop is through reciprocation.

In sum the most incisive question can lose its smarts if the questioner:

• asks unblinking yes-or-no questions that require a back story to move forward


• is not forthcoming about the path that led to their request, and


• fails to disclose what they hope to gain by involving the larger community.

Conversely, the burden falls on the responder to: (a) trust that the collaboration can run both ways, or (b) rediscover the rapture of learning the same advice they're giving; that giving is its own reward. The teaching becomes the ends as well as the means.

As an online research educator I consider myself lucky to fall inside this second camp.

Any questions?

 

News Radars: Target Practice for Web Curators

What you don't know may hurt you.

What you don't need to know WILL distract you.

Content is no longer king. At least that's what I read in the news paupers.

There is no longer a premium on being the first to know. The future lies in being the first to understand in a way that draws others to that same understanding and their own conclusions. That's the manifesto for curators.

Content is a stammering, mucus-laden umm among the miscellany of unfiltered search results and anonymously authored web posts. In a world where pocket devices are publishing platforms, scarcity isn't measured in speed, access, or being connected but in making connections. Enter the sense-making territory of the web curator.

Imagine you're on the exhibition floor of the social media event of the century: information surplus? Meet knowledge deficit! That introduction is being brokered by a knowledge planner -- someone who can reconcile information supply with knowledge demand by anticipating:

• how news travels


• in what circles, and


• where that impacts most

The cultivations of web curators are based on the three pillars of interpretation: context, context, and context. Tell me who said it, who heard it, and where and what they said becomes immaterial. Tell me the way in which an appeal was made and the call to action falls by the wayside. Show me the eye-witness who lived through the event she's recounting and I get her authenticity implicitly as well as the emotional investments that would lead me to question her disinterested bystander status. An accomplished curator is not simply a message interceptor or retransmitter but a temperature gauger who positions the bursts and slowdowns of message traffic within the frame of reference of the personal radar.

We operate on a need-to-know-basis. If it lands off radar, our attentions don't shift.

In this tree-falls-in-the-forest scenario a Web curator is the best defense against the maladies of information fog such as A.D.D., insomnia, the blurring of professional and personal affairs, and absent presence -- the anxiety of device-enabled availability. That doesn't mean you farm your calendar out to a personal attention manager. That happens in a decade or two. But it does mean answering to the contextual value of our personal mental space: WIIFM (What's in it for me)?

The Market for Curators

So how does the curator find their niche? Being all things to all content consumers is about as relevant as trying to bury a subjective point of view. The new transparency isn't about leveling the playing fields of opinion. It's about linking to sources.  Unlike the ad-supported models of SEO campaigns a curator is not a human lynchpin for converting click-happy consumers. Idea people are not buying merchandise so much as arguments -- the kind that support the rationales for the advice they sell. Perhaps the killer app here is rediscovering the art of disengagement: finding no surprises when we reconnect because the curator has your back at all times:

She tries to communicate a need for balance to employees who report to her, too. “I worry about the speed at which they are going,” she says, adding that she wants them to “shut down” when needed, for the sake of their families and their health.

- Mickey Meese, Who's the Boss, You or Your Gadget? New York Times, February 5, 2011

Assuming we know what keeps our clients up at night, what kind of radar-building equipment serves the needs of curators?

That's where a grounding in advanced search commands and even some grasp of tired, ol' traditional media segments can come in handy. If you use a custom search tool like Google Coop Search to bundle sources you can see highly differentiated takes on your pet peeves, hot stock tips, and celebrated rumors on the news horizon.

Run those queries in the form of event-based trip wires and the daily counts form the aggregated patterns of what blows hot and cold in terms of news coverage. Google Trends runs the media pick-up patterns in tandem with the same terms in Google searches -- in effect we have that same handshake from the trade expo: media supply meets (or misses) user demand.

These radar constructs are good for high visibility issues that soar and plummet from year-to-year. But many of our search targets would go undetected on such a public radar. For that we need to scale down to a more street level view through localities, community members, and more niche or locally based organizations. That's where an RSS reader like Feed Demon shines as a personalized approach to event tracking and the aggregated coverage patterns -- the IPhone of Google Trends, if you will.

The Value of Curatorship

Finally curators should sell their quantifiable benefits to a confused and distracted market. That sales pitch starts with single examples:

Abstractions like what the best-known are best known for might be a starting point for idea people. For more grounded folks it boils down to this -- one purposeful, unitary artifact that reveals the telling quote, table, framework or footnote -- diamonds in the ... umm ... content rough.

The bigger picture benefits will emerge once these evidentiary building blocks become ingrained in our web-based discovery process. That might be sweet music to sleep-deprived crisis managers. It may be a threat as well to the scientists of external risk assessment who traffic in the language of hysteria; the paranoid leading the parablind down an alley of would-be prowlers and invaders. No one likes to depart from the script. No one makes time for interruptions. They arrive unannounced. Their departure comes in its own time.

The impulse to panic is an age-old temptation not restricted to unsuspecting widows or defenseless victims. Is the concentration level thick with anticipation or diffused through false alarms and unmet expectations? Is it a wave of consensus or a squeaky wheel? A whistle in the dark or a charging stampede? What are the measured responses that address tangible perceptions -- not last night’s nightmares but tomorrow’s business realities.

A curator can discern the strength of association and tell you where you are in your crisis – floating near the bottom of a deep-sea or being washed into shore escorted by the storm surge itself.

Sound like answers you're not getting from today's Google? If you want a crowd, start a fight. And when you do, hire a curator who can point out who's in the audience.

Red Flag Conditions

What are some smoking guns? Where does our sniff test take us? Here are three red flags that are cited by Andrew Campbell, Jo Whitehead, and Sidney Finkelstein in their piece entitled Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions in a 2009 issue of the Harvard Business Review. The occasion? Here are some common lapses in the calculations of misinformation providers:

1. Inappropriate self-interest — The limits of our own personal experience prevent us from seeing how our actions impact others and their interpretations for what we do. Self-preservation erodes our ability to see our own biases, even when we petition on behalf of others. It is not by accident but design that in most high level negotiations we hire brokers to do our bidding. But when personal loyalties blind us to impartial observation we lose the confidence of our professional peers – especially those group leaders who see that the “greater good” should prevail above the privileged concerns of the well-connected.


2. Distorting attachments – Personalizing adversity is an honest, authentic, and entirely human response to our own vulnerability. It is also nearly always unprofessional. Whenever we experience an emotionally-charged event we are prone to raising the specter of that same threat in the future. Holding on to past grievances can often lead to future blunders. Instead of looking at the big picture or taking the long view our search target fixates on some slight or wound inflicted from a feuding enemy.


3. Misleading memories — It’s a standard assumption that someone with a track record of success is a better risk to build on that success than someone with less experience or a mixed record. The red flag rationale argues that success can breed overconfidence. If prior decisions turned out well our target is blinded to key differences as conditions change and new conflicts arise. If the rewards of past smear campaigns eclipse the downsides those approaches are likelier to repeat – if not the successes.