Twitter killed the facebook...

I have long been thinking about posting on how my twitter fetish has killed off any hope for my Weblog, but I kept myself from posting. The main reason was that I am certain that it had all been said before over the three years of Twitter's life. It is quite natural that a disturbance in the force results in a renegotiation of how to fit everything in.

What inspired this post has been the recent barrage of complaints on Facebook about the twitter updates that apparently consume facebook 'news' feeds. From what I understand, by tweeting some of my friend's walls are consumed by my activities... but isn't that the point?

What is it about web2.0 that these people aren't getting? but if I went down this rabbit hole, I would be just as bad. So instead... Things that @#$% me about Facebook:

1. Being bitten by Vampires/superwalled and poked

2. Friends' statuses about the current domestic that they are having

3. What this quiz can tell me about me

4. You can control your news feed

5. This is where your mum is now

A Diversion

HA! Boy did it miss the mark (hat tip: Dave)... as surely anyone will know that I am far from an introvert...

I have to declare that I have completed the MBTI accreditation and do selectively use the instrument in support of some of my consultancy work. I find it quite useful in drawing out some of the differences that people display particularly around communication and mostly with regard to workplace harmony. (Mind you, I make no commercial gains conducting them as I my work is internal).

I take on board the issues raised in Skepdic but I also feel some sympathy for the readers. That being said I might take the liberty of offering my own $0.02. 

The use of the instrument as an absolute or final say in something as important as whether or not someone gets a job is quite abhorrent. I use the dichotomies that the instrument draws out merely as a means to draw out the normal variations in individual preferences and then as a platform to discuss group preferences. 

The main criticism that I personally have heard about MBTI is that people use the instrument as an excuse for the worst examples of behaviour attributed to the Type. Unfortunately, this has been a behaviour that I have witnessed myself. That being said, a well administered MBTI session (i.e. not one online, which lacks the various stages required to be anywhere near useful) should show the participant the ways to realise their strengths and manage their weaknesses, no matter how they are derived.

And how they are derived are hardly that concerning when someone identifies as an Extravert they might be more comfortable in large noisy groups and their weakness might be that sometimes they exclude those who identify as an Introvert... sounds fairly uncontroversial to me

A Great Week

As I started in a recent post, this week is seeing the culmination of some big projects. The next one is an administration support review, which all but finished on Tuesday with a backlog cull.

The manager of the staff had been trapped by the sheer weight of their backlog, which had peaked at approximately 900 items ranging from emails, projects, reading etc.

Now, whilst I conducted it with GTD mindset on the recommendation of Iain. I was brought to back to earth by the comments of my supervisor that I was implementing a 2S instead of a 5S. This was only telling as I had particularly railed against some of the Lean zealots that seem to be popping up around the place.

To be fair, I have nothing against Lean or 5S and in fact think they are quite fine toolsets for the right problem or part thereof. The bit that intrigues me is that it seems to inspire cult-like followers that only ever speak of success except to note that when failure occurs that it was due to a like of higher management support... I don't think I am alone in suggesting that if failure is not publicly spoken about, it is more than a little suspicious.

In fact the Change Management Guide questioning approach was created in hope that some attention might be paid to the people (especially the ones who dared offer resistance or criticism), thus some potential to actually achieve a culture of continuous improvement.

Upon reflection, there were 4S (Shine would've been waste of time as these people were nearly OCD-style clean) used but in itself it was not a Lean intervention. There was far more invested in resolving some of the emotional issues such as stress and disengagement. I find that this merely confirms that the Lean stuff is just a hammer not everything is a nail.

Hours in a day

Ever found that you have run out of hours in a day/week/month?

I seem to have that problem at the moment, and I wonder if it is due to the approaching summer?

Or maybe it is the culmination of some projects? Whatever it maybe, I have lost my focus...

On the upside though, this week has been highly successful. Today I submitted the web version of a Change Management Guide for the entire organisation. Some of you who follow me on twitter may have heard a mention or two of it.

As a project goes, this was a hard slog and entirely different to the day to day breadwinning, so to speak. Whilst this was a properly commissioned project, I only ever saw it as a think tank exercise to deliver a resource that left our organisation a little better off than without it.

The product was essentially a Change Management Guide which well and truly surpassed the intimidation point at 10,000+ words and 14 steps to success... Not to mention the language!

Actually, to mention the language is better... My own engineering/project management background combined with a colleague with a business/logistics background coupled with a particular academic interest in Change Management. If it is not obvious, we spoke diametrically opposed dialects which when painfully combined resulted in some indulgent verbosity. 

But why am I happy about this? Well there was a moment in the project where we introduced a second gateway. Like an Index to a Table of Contents, this second gateway offered a set of questions rather than a designed and stepped approach. The real bonus of this is its ability to embrace the power of the cynic, as noted by Dave Snowden as being so vital.

This is where the website (intranet only at this stage, unfortunately) comes into its own... although I still think that there is a need for a low-fi pamphlet for people to hold in their hands... With both of these in place, Change can be about improvement despite the best effort of some folks to make it about the process. 

On Sensemaker

I am drafting this in the QANTAS Lounge in Melbourne as I wait for my flight back to Adelaide in an 90mins. 

The reason I am in Melbourne is that I have spent Thursday evening and Friday at the Victorian Police Academy doing the Cognitive Edge Practitioner network catch up and Sensemaker Session which was fantastic to discuss some of the lessons identified from applying the Cognitive Edge Methods with new 'graduates' and also to meet some faces behind the blogs.

The Sensemaker session, I found to be quite straightforward and expect that the real learning points will be in playing with the data. I have in my mind a few applications in mind that I will be seeking to exploit (for want of a better word), the key will be getting funding to pay the licence fees.

A couple of criticisms of the day would be that the demo data had a major flaw which detracted from the logic in the conclusions in the case study. The other would be that the Ritual Dissent was limited in value due to the predominance of inexperience with the methods and software, thus not allowing much in the way of meaningful criticism. This latter criticism is of course the minor factor as it is merely a demonstration of concept.

All in all, a worthwhile event and I will definitely add my case study to the Ning Site, Steve

The Future, Backwards

Yesterday I ran my second Future, Backwards  in my role as an internal consultant. The day was focussed on developing a plan of action in a changing environment.

The day was scheduled to conduct two simultaneous 'Future, Backwards' then to take the Turning Points from both as Sensemaking Items for use in the Cynefin Model Creation by Social Construction (corners method). The result was to role directly into a Domain-based Strategy Planning Session. There is nothing overly exciting about this as a methodology but it was my first attempt.

It is probably timely to recognise that I was assisted by team members that are not accredited practitioners, which had some impact but was not really the biggest learning point. There were a number, particularly the cognitive load that it places on the participants needs to be managed and exposing the executive to so much ambiguity does not necessarily lead to great results. 

The real take away for me was finding myself frustrated at the lack of imagination and extremely limited vision in the description of possible future states. On thinking about this I wonder if the issue is a 'dominant organisational narrative' in the form of a mantra. Namely, 'more people', 'more money' and  'more resources'...

I am particularly interested to know if anyone has come across a similar issue in their organisation or am I dealing with something peculiar

A funky tool

I can see a use or two for this in consultancy...

KM Freestyle

I have fielded a few queries on KM recently through work and social network, so I thought I would blog on some of the ideas out there that I like...

The traditional approaches irk me, I have found that then tend to focus on document or artifact management systems. Unfortunately, the information in these documents are highly codified and only have context for that experience. Dave Snowden is quite brutal on the production of these documents focussing on their retrospective coherence and the fundamental attribution error.

Personally, the thing I dislike about this form of KM is that the document is stored based on what it was related to and stored in that place and only linkable through that structure. Now I am aware that there are better systems out there and supposedly on their way into our work network. But is Sharepoint the silver bullet?

A completely integrated way of capturing experiences (and their meaning) as they occur is far more useful.

I have recently undertaken a job that will look at Organisational Health and Sustainability when I introduced the concept of using the AVT Comparison Workshop, it was joked by the client Could you put it into a Comic so that the Aircrew could read it?

I think the only risk is if it becomes too popular