Reading an old copy of Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, looking for ideas on how cognitive science is liberating the workforce, I liked an idea he had of how to put into practice whole … Continue reading 6 Links Of Separation: A Learning Experiment
A complete stranger to me – Wouter Ijgosse – asked me to share “some of the strategies you apply to make your life or business antifragile.” Sure. Off the top of my head, I replied back to Wouter: I read widely, and … Continue reading How Are You #Antifragile?
We all know Big Blue can beat anyone at chess, based on parsing billions of calculations and having a dedicated team of people at its side, soothing its fears and oiling its parts. We have seen the Japanese robots that can … Continue reading The Automaton Hordes Are Here! I Hope you Are #FutureOfWork Ready
I visited Tate Modern at the weekend for one of their shows in the magnificent Turbine Hall. It was something to do with immigration and Notting Hill and the carnival and modern London life, maybe. I captured a little video … Continue reading One Moment, Art Installation; The Next, A Fight For Survival
Boomers have finally got used to the fact that their kids will not have a job for life; they accept that people move around jobs, looking for new challenges, whether by design or out of necessity. Now, Gen Xers have … Continue reading Fiendish Child: Get Used To It, Grandad
I spend a lot of my time studying, considering, activating in the area of ESNs (enterprise social networks). It has been my entrance to the world of net work (sic). A key issue I face with ESNs is that it always becomes a conversation about technology, rather than about people (deploying that technology). As I an oft to say: the ESN is just a tool. So, I spend quality time reading and exploring around the theoretical and practical edges of ESNs, and lo! what do I find but PEOPLE…everywhere! Inside the firewall, I spent a week working out loud under … Continue reading TRANS-Enterprise Social Networks: Hive Vancouver
Early on in the blog, I wrote a few posts about manifestos that proved quite popular. I reviewed them at the end of the year with this thought: People like directions. Me too. I like simple, evocative calls-to-action; they stir the Head-Heart-Hand. Manifestos drive conversation – it is not necessarily about believing everything in them; but using them as a riff / filter for your own thoughts and ideas. In the interim, I have found a few more manifestos. Let’s continue the series, and also continue to use them to riff on our own thoughts and ideas… I discovered The Cloud … Continue reading Manifestos…To Understand: The Cloud Revolution
Reading a recent Harold Jarche post – Ten Years, Ten Thoughts – thought 7 reminded me of a few posts I wrote last year that are worth revisiting, not least because redundancy and repetition are good for you! Jarche reminds us that: An informal professional learning network, with its redundant connections, repetition of information and indirect communications, is a much more resilient system than any designed professional development program can be. I made a few tangential points in this direction. In How we learn, channeling an older version of the Jarche post: [Repetition and redundancy] sounds luxurious, but it is not. Digital, networked … Continue reading Redundancy And Repetition Are Good For You: Revisited
Writing down my thoughts here on the blog is both a record, an exclamation; and also an iteration. These words are a marker, that creates a line of sight to other thoughts and words. Now I have a frame of reference in which to work. Working out loud is the same process. I move out into the world, and stake a claim, then I observe what happens as I am also participating in the next iteration. It is quite the experience. Very meta. Living in this iteration, like a scene from Being John Malkovich, things can get a little confusing. … Continue reading When You #WOLyo! You Recognize Confabulation When You See It
I often get myself tangled up in the conversation about complexity, because I prefer things to be simple (I consider myself a simple fellow at heart) yet I recognize the (increasing) complexity of work/life and I am determined to manage it insofar as I can, embrace it proactively, and benefit from it. So, I am stuck with a conundrum. The ambiguities inherent in complex, complicated, chaotic, chaordic environments seems to point in a different direction to simplicity, that place I call home. How can I square this away? By looking to those who have trodden the path before me, more … Continue reading Simple / Complex. I’m Confused.
Fellow CAWWer Catherine Shinners has a good review of recent thinking on what organizations need for breakthrough performance via the Conference Executive Board: read her article for some detail. I will suffice here with listing the CEB checklist of differentiating competencies for high performance: prioritization, teamwork, organizational awareness, problem solving, self-awareness, proactivity, influence, decision-making, learning agility and technical expertise. I like! All of these are in reach of all of us. Attitude, and forward momentum is all that is required to get us on this road… Shinners also shared a Future Work Skills 2020 study that sees successful trends to be: sense-making, … Continue reading There Are Change Agents, And There Are Change Agents. It’s #FutureOfWork Checklist Time! #CAWW
Here is a short video that illustrates the amazingness of flocking – the ability of birds (and other animals) to work together in a network with only very limited, local sets of rules. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUkjC-69vaw Graphic designer Craig Reynolds developed this computer modeling called a Boids model many years ago; wherein randomly moving objects are given three simple rules of engagement in the network: Collision avoidance – cohesion Velocity matching – alignment Flock centering – separation and, lo! a flock is formed in real time, with absurd coordination and cooperation, yet without any central controls. This, friends, is how we need to … Continue reading How To Flock In 3 Easy Steps
This Much We Know 