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 Wednesday, March 12, 2003
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Back in August I commented on some work that had been published regarding the ability of some people to see the patterns in chaos where others only saw random noise. A story written by Michael Helfrich, a worker at Groove, started me off on that topic. I reread his story and was struck again with some of its points. Although Groove's current interactions with the Dept. of Defense have caused it some recent controversy, there are some very good points here. I've talked about what it was like at Immunex, how we used a very adaptive network of people to rapidly reach decisions faster than our rivals. Michael describes the same thing: In business, it too is about forming, making a great decision, and executing at the expense of the competitor. The path to decision superiority is rooted in people who gather in the form of small business teams, pulse, and then disband. Real edge phenomena. He breaks this into 4 patterns, all of which are very difficult for most organizations still built on the Industrial Age, GE, Command-and-Control, hierarchies structure. His final words are absolutely true:What I suggest is a massive shift away from deterministic, structured, permission-based interaction. An even bigger hurdle is the one we faces as managers: Can we embrace human chaos with as much zeal as we embrace order? The organizations, either public or private, that fail to embrace chaos will not be as successful in the coming years as those that do. Since the study I cited found that 25% of the people examined COULD embrace chaos and find the pattern present, maybe we should try to identify those people and let them run amok? That sort of process sure would fit well for those members of the hierarchy that can not embrace chaos and it would give those of us who enjoy chaos the freedom we need to create novelty. 10:40:21 PM 
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Really nice discussion of the best time to start a war. The next New moon is April 1 (not a propitious day to start). There is also an excellent satellite picture of Baghdad on the page. 4:43:54 PM
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The government is trying so hard to find some major violation that it is treading awfully close to farce and giving Iraq plenty of photo ops to make the US position appear more and more extreme. This is one example. It is starting to look a more and more like a bad X-files episode. 4:34:35 PM
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Azeem digs up an essay by Paul Saffo on information overload and new organisational structures, written 14 years ago, to make a case for generalists.
We are in a pickle today because we are trying to manage 21st century information overload with 19th century intellectual skills. For example, we still prize the ability to recall specific information over the skill of making connections among seemingly unrelated information. We have become a society of specialists, each knowing more and more about less and less.
[Ross Mayfield's Weblog]
Ross keeps the hits coming. Read this. He is right on target. We need tools that support generalists, the people with a wide range of interests. They are usually the ones who love to push information around. I have met some full-on geniuses in my life (i.e.. Richard Feynman, Murray Gell-Mann, and Sydney Brenner) and ALL of them were generalists. That is they knew a lot about a specific area but they had the ability to learn a lot rapidly about almost ANYTHING. I sat in with a small informal group and Gell-Mann just talked about trying to decipher Linear B, an ancient language. Sydney Brenner has been at almost every single major biological discovery in the last 40 years (with Crick he demonstrated the existence of mRNA and the genetic code, he developed a novel method to visualize viruses, and provided science with not 1 but 2 major animal models - C. elegans and fugu). The polymath talents of true geniuses can be daunting but there are a tremendous number of people who have similar talents (maybe not as prodigious) that useful tools can amplify. We need more of these. 4:26:08 PM
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Keep It Simple, Stupid. John McDowall on the unnecessary complexity of groupware and knowledge management tools [Ross Mayfield's Weblog]
Ross makes some very important points. The tools need to be simple with a rapid learning curve. Or else they will not be used. I watched it take 2 years before you could be certain that an email sent to a fellow scientist at Immunex would actually be read by them anytime soon. People had to learn how useful it was. And this is something like email that is 'obvious' now. Everything is obvious after your paradigms have shifted. The key is making it as easy to cross that transition as possible. Simple tools helps, as does continuing education. 4:07:44 PM
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Really good article by David Weinberger. It discusses David Reed and why there is no such thing as interference or why it is idiotic for the government to regulate the radio spectrum. The main reason for regulation today has more with maintaining the business models of TV and radio stations than actually helping the people of the US. 3:31:37 PM
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