Organizational adoption

Lately, I have been thinking about the adoption of technologies by organizations.

Fred Wilson’s blog post raised related issues for consumers and stimulated a lively discussion about what characteristics are important to adoption. My interest is similar for organizations, but is more related to the channels of communication used for this purpose then in the characteristics which determine selection.

How does your organization discover, evaluate and select new technologies?

And do you expect them to be the best choice, or is it enough that benefits have been demonstrated, or even that they just do something useful?

What services would assist you with this?

(Posted this here on FriendFeed too.)

Learning and social networks

My interest in learning, and in the ways in which we can enable it, makes conversations like this really interesting.

This is my (very rapidly composed) take on it. I write it here because my intended comment in that conversation grew in size so fast that, before I could get it out, it seemed to have become too large for a comment; that, also says something about the medium/channel communication!

So here goes …

Effective learning requires effective communication. The communication experts tell us: 1) that all communication takes place in a conversation; and 2) that all meaning is situated in context. They also tell us that the more complex the meaning to be communicated, the “richer” the channel that is required; that is, more bandwidth and more opportunity for interaction and feedback.

After 17 years of experience of delivering “instructor led training” and some contact with eLearning, my take is that eLearning has a very long way to go. There is a big gap between the effectiveness of learning from the narrow bandwidth of electronic systems and being in a room with the door closed, your phone off, a group of like minded people and one or more instructor. At this point, eLearning appears to be most useful for self-contained messages and for refresher or extension training for experienced people. The leading eLearning people are interested in “serious games” because they see how engaged people can be and how rapidly people learn when playing games; this is an interesting avenue, but there are other avenues such as social networking.

We learn most from what we hear other people asking and telling other people; this is not because we are not getting answers to our questions, but because we do not know all of the questions to ask and, even for the ones that we are interested in, we do not know all the ways to ask them; also, in both cases, we do not necessarily know whom to ask. It is a numbers issue: a group of people ask each other more questions and give more answers than we are individually able to generate.

For the purposes of learning (and, actually, any real communication) the main things lacking from most social networking services are in the ability to manage conversations and the context of them. This is why, at first sight, Google Wave strikes a nerve, because the central concept (a wave) is a conversation.

Services like Twitter benefit from the shortness of the messages because this encourages interaction and feedback at a level which is commensurate with the (very low) richness of the channel, this in turn stimulates conversations.

More on this over time, no doubt!

Chaos and GTD

As a fan of David Allen’s GTD for more than 3 years, I am always interested in his observations and explanations, especially when they pop up in new places.

So, for a UKite, it is particularly interesting that David has published Be creative amid chaos in Wired UK. While my personal application of the GTD approach continues to be variable and, often, too tentative, it forms the basis for much of my thinking and implementation of what I do.

His point is that “the chaos is” and it is worth concentrating on, and at the same time relaxing about, one’s own reaction to it.

This is consistent with the major aspect which continues to underlie the struggle with the GTD approach for me. This arises from a discovery which is: undoubtedly known to many people; only reached me because it had been unearthed by David Allen and his mentors; and, for me at least, forms the basis for much of GTD. I find it a struggle because it stands directly contrary to assumptions that I have made for decades and to the basis for a wide range of my habits which now need to be broken/replaced.

It is this: the complexity is at the bottom, not at the top.

How could I have been duped into thinking that “long term” and “top down” issues were more complex than everyday living? As soon as one thinks about this, and compares the number of factors, interactions and choices that are involved at different levels, it becomes obvious. How could I have believed that walking across a room, driving to the shops or writing an article were less complex than deciding whether to buy a house, or where to go on holiday? Many of the high level decisions and actions are simple choices between a small number of options; most low level ones are multi-dimensional with considerable complexity in each dimension!

For some reason, I believed that I must concentrate on the big important, high level, long term issues and ignore the trivial everyday, short term chaos. I was operating on the basis that by applying more and more effort to reaching further and further ahead for the long term things, that somehow the short term mess would be dragged along and would sort itself out. It was the typical example of feeling that “everything will be fine when … “, pick any of: “I have understood this new ABC”, “I have bought XYZ”, or “other people have finally realised what I have to offer”! And these feelings are still there, because they were deeply engrained. But the elephant is turning (see this great article)!

The ramifications of the reversal of these assumptions are enormous on a personal level. Luckily, I have had some experience of seeing them in action in a couple of specific, but isolated, fields of activity; without that experience, the probability of my uprooting this thing, inverting it and planting it again the right way up this time, would have been much lower!

I continue to be an illustration of David’s observation that most people need to get into a state that is quite uncomfortable before they make a small change which make things slightly better!

Thanks, David, keep up the good work, and keep pulling on our common sense so that we have less and less choice but to apply it!

Things counter-intuitive

“That makes no sense!” … ”How can that possibly work?” … “There is no way that I am trying that!

Are these the kinds of comments you have heard from beginners at … well anything that they consider “counter-intuitive”?

And how much experience does it take before the “counter-intuitive” becomes “intuitive”. (And, by the way, “experience” is the stuff that you get, when you don’t get what you want!)

In a recent CNN article, Penn Jillette draws parallels between:

• dealing with the banking mess
• correcting a skid while driving
• eating fire
• … anything “counter-intuitive”.

This is very interesting, because there are many things which are counter-intuitive.

Even more interestingly, some of them are not only counter-intuitive to “beginners”, but also to “intermediates” in the relevant skill or field … and, according to Alan Cooper in “The Inmates Are Running The Asylum” most of us spend most of our time as “perpetual intermediates”!

Have you sailed offshore and encountered weather which is worse than you expected? When inexperienced, your instinct is to return to the safety of the harbour. If you are lucky, then … you are lucky and you make it in time. But if the weather deteriorates rapidly, then you may find that, by the time you reach the harbour, it is too dangerous to enter it. More experienced sailors head for the open sea when the weather deteriorates because, out there, it is less likely that you will run into large objects, such pieces of land (as well as other vessels)! For the less experienced, this may be counter-intuitive; but experience has the effect of reversing the reaction.

Similarly when pilots are relatively new to flying, their reaction to deteriorating weather (particularly reducing visibility) is to descend so as to attempt to maintain visual contact with the ground. With more experience and training in additional skills (particularly instrument flying) comes the realization that as the visibility deteriorates it is safer to climb than to descend; as with sailing, this takes one away from the hazardous terrain. Again, experience has resulted in a response which, to the inexperienced, can appear counter-intuitive.

Not only does this apply vertically, but also horizontally. When contemplating flying when there is bad weather in the area, inexperienced pilots are inclined to fly away from the weather; whereas experienced pilots are likely to do the opposite and fly towards it.

Flying away from the weather puts the airfield between the aircraft and the weather; this risks ending up trying to race the weather to the airfield, which is not a healthy thing to do (as with sailing back to a harbour). Flying towards the weather means that the aircraft is between the weather and the airfield and can always return safely, although this may initially seem counter-intuitive.

There are many other counter-intuitive things in aviation. Perhaps the most specific example is, during an approach to land, the use of power to control height and pitch attitude to control speed; this even eluded early designers of automatic landing systems who omitted to ask pilots about this well-known model! Another example relates to safety: there is a joke that, when a young man joined the air force, his mother said: “Be very careful up there, Johnny. Don’t fly too high! And slow down for the corners!”. Well, flying low and slow is a notoriously dangerous combination; and to be turning at the same time risks a spin from which there may be too little height to recover! Clearly something which, it seems, Johnny’s mother would find counter-intuitive. And talking of spin recovery, the use of the “opposite rudder” can also be initially counter-intuitive; for many years, it seems to have eluded early pilots for whom entering a spin was likely to be fatal.

Where else do we find examples of counter-intuitive behaviour? Of course, it does depends on what one finds “intuitive”!

In parenting, the instinct to protect one’s children can have the effect of making them more vulnerable. First-born children seem to be less at ease with their surroundings than children born later; this seems to be a consequence of parents being more protective of their first child; they see and imagine every possible danger and strive to prevent the child being harmed by it. By the time that they have had three children, parents are more relaxed and realise that the minor bumps on the head are likely to help them to learn not to bump their head and decreases rather than increases the danger. It is better to make small mistakes and learn from them, than to be protected from them and, therefore, not to learn. Whether this is counter-intuitive depends on one’s experience of parenting!

Presumably, for people brought up in a political regimes in which all economic activity is controlled centrally, their familiarity with reliance on that control must make it more difficult to understand how a free market can possibly operate effectively. The idea that everyone does their own thing and the ensemble behaviour ends up being effective must seem like some like of optimistic mumbo-jumbo. The differences of viewpoint taken when describing creation and evolution might be considered to be of a similar counter-intuitive type.

There are business models which can appear counter-intuitive. For example, the eventual purpose of “lean” approaches to business processes is to generate “pull” (after having generated flow, mapped value streams and identified value in various forms). Starting from the more usual “push” messaging in the value stream, this reversal takes a leap of trust which is likely never to be undone. As with the sailing and flying examples, once “the penny has dropped”, additional experience serves to reinforce the new view; a watershed has been crossed.

How can things which actually work very effectively, not make sense to everyone? Well, it is just counter-intuitive, isn’t it?!

Disturbing medical issues

Tonight, I watched most of the UK Channel 4 Dispatches TV program “Confessions of a Nurse”. The web site for the program is here and it can be expected to be available to view on their “Catch Up” service before too long.

It raises some medical safety issues which are not only disturbing but remind me of similar medical issues that have occurred in the past.

This and other thoughts triggered me to generate an article on safety in general which is here.

Architectural advice

O’Reilly are publishing a new book “97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know”. This caught my attention for a variety of reasons. One is an interest in trying to get to the bottom of what the issues commonly labelled as “software architecture” are really all about! Another reason is that there are a couple of contributions from Kevlin Henney, with whom I have worked and who frequently comes up with a “different take” on any situation.

In one of his two contributions to this book,  ”Simplicity Before Generality, Use Before Reuse”, he argues for guarding against over-generalisation because it leads to unnecessarily complex designs which deal with cases which are probably imaginary anyway; rather, he suggests favouring simpler solutions which are known to satisfy specific cases.

This prompted me to pen an article on Alternative priorities when designing which proposes a converse view.

A question seems to arise, and one way of putting it seems to be: should we start with solutions that are general enough but overly complex and work on reducing their complexity? Or should we start with solutions that are too simple and not general enough and work on increasingly their complexity until they are general enough.

My personal instinct tends to be characterised by “interface before implementation” and “right first and fast later”, which seem to imply the former. But Kevlin seems to be arguing for the latter, and I must admit that this was worked for me too. This has already fulfilled my expectation of a “different take”!

What works for you?

Controlling the sequence of learning

Among the reactions to the article on sequences of learning is a post from Brett McLaughlin on the O’Reilly Radar blog, that poses questions about the design of the sequence.

Learning is important to us all  in so many ways; so learning (yup!) more about learning seems to be particularly important! However there are a considerable range of contexts in which learning occurs; and sometimes this causes the generic lessons to be more difficult to uncover.

If the “disclosure sequence” is the backbone of the structure of the design of a course of learning, then it is important to understand how it arises. This, as I understand it, is the area that Brett McLaughlin is asking about: how much control of the sequence is to be available to whom? This was not addressed in the original article and is certainly an important question, especially in contexts where the learning involves substantial self-direction.

The responses in the comments are already interesting!

There is, of course, a very substantial body of experience, expertise and research on the subject of learning; nevertheless, in the role that I have played in commercial training, it has not been apparent that much of this permeates through to people on the “front line”.

Maybe there is a need for models of learning which are more generally understood and more easily applicable by everyone involved in scoping, developing, delivering and learning from courses in any context.

Maybe more discussion, like this, can play a part.

Learning sequences

Over many years, as an instructor of training courses, my recognition of the importance of the sequence in which we learn things has been continually increasing. Every time there is a problem with someone learning something, the starting point is the sequence.

As we guide learners through the process of opening the Pandora’s box

“Training”, “learning” or both?

Naming is important! When we encounter overlapping terms applied to similar concepts, they often carry important differences in emphasis or meaning. So what have I been doing all these years?

Maybe it is “training”, but the world is now focussed on “learning”, let’s pick this apart?

Being amazed by children … again!

Being amazed is amazing! Children frequently amaze us. Is it that we underestimate the rate and breadth of their learning? Or is it that they know much more than us and we overestimate the rate at which they forget?!

Yesterday, I had the most amazing conversation with my youngest son,