Skip to content
Lost Knowledge

Book Review-Lost Knowledge: Confronting the Threat of an Aging Workforce

Knowledge management is tricky business. I’ve spent a non-trivial part of my professional career converting tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge – well, at least one kind of tacit knowledge. This is, in fact, part of the problem. Some of what we call tacit knowledge is really implicit knowledge. That is I know something but I’ve not written down the rules or steps which lead to that knowledge. For instance, I may know the roles in a software development process inherently but haven’t codified them. (You can find where I did this for a series of articles, Cracking the Code: Breaking Down the Software Development Roles.)

Over the years I’ve codified implicit rules-based knowledge and implicit know-how types of tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge – however that’s only part of the kinds of knowledge. There are kinds of tacit knowledge that we don’t know how to codify now – and others that are simply too expensive to codify. Knowledge management is therefore a tricky challenge. It comes down to not only codifying those things which can be converted from tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge but also involves those things which cannot be converted. The book Lost Knowledge: Confronting the Threat of an Aging Workforce breaks apart the problem of knowledge management and talks about the various challenges to identifying critical knowledge which may be lost in your organization as well as strategies for retaining or replacing it.

I’ve been considering tacit knowledge for a long time. Back in 2006, I was writing about how to convert tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge. This is the implicit to explicit conversion process I spoke about at the top of this article. More recently I wrote a blog post Apprentice, Journeyman, Master which speaks to the kind of tacit knowledge that cannot be codified and therefore converted into explicit information.

Some kinds of knowledge are notoriously difficult to transfer. Consider the idea of transferring knowledge about how to troubleshoot a system. Bloom would say that this is a high-order appreciation of systemic knowledge – in other words, this requires a deep knowledge of a system. The kind of learning to understand a system is considered a more difficult educational objective. Gary Klein in Sources of Power argues that good decision making – the kind of snap decisions that military commanders and fire fighters must make – are inherently based on the experiences of the commanders and fire fighters. Because of that they can’t be easily transferred from one person to another. Efficiency in Learning speaks about how experts develop schemas – and how it’s often difficult for experts to communicate with novices because experts have developed more complex long term schemas for processing the information.

Lost Knowledge also acknowledges this problem but not just from the pure learning perspective, but also from a cultural perspective. Sometimes the culture of an organization makes it difficult. Perhaps the experts don’t interact with the novices so they fail to develop a bond of trust between the groups. Perhaps the organization values innovation and individuality more than reuse. (i.e. Cowboy culture) Perhaps the organization is in a place where changes are common place and therefore older experiences and knowledge are discounted in value quickly.

Whether an organization struggles with the culture of knowledge transfer or not; there activities that can be done to improve the transfer of knowledge. Lost Knowledge creates clarity around the types of activities and the kinds of knowledge attempting to be transferred in Figure 6.2:

Let’s take a quick look at the types of activities – or tactics that can be used to transfer knowledge:

  • Interviews – Speaking with experts and recording the results. This could be in the form of audio recordings, video recordings, or transcriptions of audio recordings.
  • Documentation – Obviously this is the conversion of tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge and for that purpose it’s exceedingly effective.
  • Training – Training is attempting to teach the knowledge. (See Efficiency in Learning and The Adult Learner for more about that.)
  • Story Telling – For thousands of years humans have communicated and passed down information through stories. We’re relatively hardwired to learn from stories. Story telling involves retelling of important experiences by experts.
  • Mentoring/Coaching – Mentoring and coaching is what it sounds like. The expert mentors a replacement – or coaches a set of less experienced individuals on their learning.
  • After Action Reviews (AARs) – These “Post Mortem” reviews are about the gradual transfer of expertise through the development of shared experiences and review. Experienced employees may share similar stories there by allowing junior employees to develop more abstract schemas (See Effective Learning)
  • Communities of Practice – These communities are designed to bring together the best practices for a topic area. By bringing together different ideas and having a group of experienced employees talking about it, novice employees will be able to extract knowledge.

With that let’s take a quick look at the types of knowledge the book identifies:

  • Explicit – Things that are specifically coded. Things that can be transferred without context through a book or other documentation.
  • Implicit Rule-based – Information that can be made explicit but hasn’t been.
  • Implicit know-how – Information that can be made explicit but for which there is some contextual connectivity and so therefore is more difficult to convert to explicit
  • Tacit know-how – Beliefs, Intuition, and other knowledge that is difficult to codify. (See Sources of Power for Recognition Primed Decisions)
  • Deep Tacit – Cultural knowledge; “how things really work”

But I’m well ahead of myself, let’s take a step back and really describe the problem. Well, it’s employee turnover. However, it’s not just any employee turnover. It is employee turnover of mid-career and late career employees and particularly turnover due to retirement. Those who are the most valuable to the organization are going to retire at some point. When they retire they’re going to take a ton of knowledge with them. In order to reduce the loss of knowledge there are numerous strategies that you can take:

  1. Lock older employees in – Make them want to stay past retirement age. This can be additional compensation, education about what the needs typically are in retirement (many employees retire without fully understanding how they will meet their financial needs), or flexible work arrangements.
  2. Develop knowledge transfer programs to transfer their knowledge to other employees. As the figure above shows, some kinds of knowledge are resistant to transfer.
  3. Kidnap the workers and don’t let them out. (Perhaps this isn’t a viable option.)

The book enumerates a great number of strategies for retaining employees, which I won’t repeat here. Instead, I’ll offer up that the process of onboarding new employees is expensive. Programs to reduce turnover of all employees, not just those with important knowledge, is a good way for organizations to protect its velocity in the market.

I want to leave with a parting comment. I vividly remember early in my career how difficult it was to find a job with little experience. I can remember thinking at the time that drive, tenacity, quick-wittedness, and hard work should outweigh the benefits of experience. After all, I had seen numerous people with experience that couldn’t compete with me. (Or at least they couldn’t compete with my delusional visions of grandeur.) However, I’ve begun to realize how experience can be an invaluable shortcut. Once you’ve solved a problem you don’t have to solve it again. You can review your previous answer – which can save a ton of time.

If you’re curious about how to retain and protect the knowledge that your organization needs to be successful, you should read Lost Knowledge.

Love Acceptance and Forgiveness

Book Review-Love, Acceptance, and Forgiveness

In my Sunday school class at church, we’re watching an old series by James MacDonald titled “Lord, Change My Attitude.” During one of his sessions he mentions a book that he refers to as being out of print – Love, Acceptance, and Forgiveness. At the time he made the comment it was true, but in the intervening years the book was revived and republished so when I went searching for it, I found it.

The book carries the subtitle “Being Christian in a Non-Christian World” but that’s not why I read it – nor do I believe it does justice to the key truths that are contained in the book. (In short, I’m encouraging my non-Christian friends to read on – and read the book.)

Above all, the book shares a striking clarity of what love is. It goes beyond the magnetic draw that pulls two teenagers together. You can call that lust, or chemical reactions, biology, evolution, or what you will. The book calls love a decision. Few of us think about love as a decision – as a choice we make. We believe that things like marriage are a choice – but love? Don’t I just love the people I love? There’s no rhyme or reason to it – or is there?

There’s some research to explain that some of our desire is triggered by scent – that makes sense because our olfactory senses are tied to our basal brains. However, there’s also research to show that the more time with people the more we tend to like them. There are, of course, notable exceptions of the people that we develop a dislike for. So there are rules to whom we like and dislike – but love is different.

Popular music, tv, and the rest of culture talk about the emotional kind of love – that’s triggered by biology – but we don’t hear about the decision that people make to love. The problem with the emotional love is that it will fade. You simply cannot sustain the same sort of feelings for your spouse as when you first met, we’re not wired that way. Biological love – for lack of a better term – triggers the release dopamine – one of the same chemicals that is released with the use of illegal drugs. And just like addictive illegal drugs, high levels of dopamine cannot be sustained indefinitely.

So you have to replace biological love with a choice. It is a conscious decision to put someone else in your life first. I don’t mean this in a platitude sort of way – agreeing to put them first but not agreeing to get up and take the trash out because they’re not feeling well. I should also caution that I don’t mean this in a way that means that someone can never stand their ground with their spouse, instead, I mean that you must do all things in love to your spouse but know when to protect your rights and needs. (I probably wandered a bit off the book’s central point here but it’s a realization that I find helpful.)

Acceptance is an interesting bit because it seems like we’re hard wired to not do it well. We don’t trust those who do things differently than us. We don’t like people who don’t dress like us, talk like us, or think like us. Eastern philosophies speak of detachment and being OK with any observation as long as that observation is true. We as humans are notoriously good at dismissing any information that doesn’t match our preconceived ideas. We’ll ignore opposing positions and dismiss people who share them because their views don’t match ours.

Acceptance – for me – is realizing that truth is relative to everyone’s experience. I cannot change others. I can only influence them. I can influence them best when I try to understand them better. So if I want to reach someone I need to understand them, which means accepting that at this moment they are who they are. I realize this is a long chain. In my experience, accepting people as they are – not how I want them to be – has reduced a great source of stress.

The last headline topic is forgiveness. This is hard because I’ve seen grudges carried in my family for decades. There are family members who simply don’t (and didn’t) talk to each other because of a misunderstanding decades ago. (No, this isn’t a hyperbole.) In those cases I’ve applied significant pressure to try to reunite the factions and have seen more than a bit of success. Through helping with the understanding of acceptance it became possible to forgive them.

The book describes forgiveness as an environment, a lifestyle. I believe that – even though I won’t say that I live it every day. I know that research has demonstrated that maintaining negative emotions has a negative impact on your health. I know that research shows that people who “harbor grudges” are less happy than those who don’t. However, I’ll share that the line between forgiveness and placing yourself in a place of vulnerability again is frighteningly narrow.

Everyone has the right and need to protect themselves from harmful, toxic people. Forgiveness doesn’t mean continuing in a bad situation just because you forgive the other person – however, it means letting go of deep-felt feelings of anger or hurt towards another person. You can simultaneously forgive someone and create barriers between you and them to protect yourself.

Efficiency in Learning

Book Review-Efficiency in Learning

I recently wrote an article for TrainingIndustry.com titled “Everything You Think You Know about Learning Retention Rates is Wrong” which is perhaps a bit of a hyperbole but it’s based on the discovery that the traditional thinking about how people learn is wrong. It’s based on Edgar Dale’s Cone of Experience which didn’t have research to support retention rates and was never intended to be used as it has been. In the article I made the assertion that there’s not been a great deal of research on learning rates differing between different modes of instruction – which I still believe. However, in the research for that article I stumbled across the book Efficiency in Learning: Evidence-Based Guidelines to Manage Cognitive Load – and I’m impressed. Ruth Clark, Frank Nguyen, and John Sweller did a great job of converting the research studies that are available into a set of guidelines for developing content that are both easy to understand and are on a solid research foundation.

I’ve read more than a few books on instructional design and they have had two problems. First, they didn’t provide clear direction on what the rules were for making design decisions and second they didn’t address situations where the guidelines were in conflict – Efficiency in Learning describes the rules (or guidelines) and what to do when they guidelines are in conflict. In short, the book takes the relatively fuzzy world of how we learn and breaks it down into chunks that can be understood and applied.

The foundation for the book is the theory of cognitive load – that is humans have a relatively small and fixed capacity to process information. We overcome this by building schemas to make complex topics operate as a single unit in our thoughts. We can thereby function in complex situations because we’ve simplified large groups into single things in our thinking. Learning is, in a sense, creating these schemas so that we can process more complex – and interesting – scenarios. Those who have studied Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives might see learning as a continuum from recognition through recall and up to the higher levels – however, most learning scenarios today aren’t focused on remembering simple facts, they’re based on being able to use the information – those things on higher levels in Bloom’s taxonomy. (I first talked about this on my blog in 2006 in a post on Recognition vs. Recall.) The way that we learn simple wrote facts is different than the way we learn how to think about our world differently.

Within in the context of the book cognitive load is broken into three distinct types:

  • Intrinsic – the mental work imposed by the instructional goals.
  • Germane – the mental work imposed by the instructional activities that benefit the goals
  • Extraneous – the mental work not related to the instructional goals or activities (in other words, noise)

The book shares a total of 29 guidelines designed to minimize extraneous cognitive load and creating some germane cognitive load to further the goals. I’ve reproduced the goals below to give you a sense of what you can expect. Each of the guidelines is supported by research. The ones that I find the most interesting is those which go against “folk wisdom” about how you should design a learning course. For instance, generally we believe that repetition is a good thing and therefore if we deliver the content multiple different times and ways will lead to better results – except the research seems to show that this isn’t true. (Thus why I mentioned Bloom’s above – we know that simple repetition helps with simple facts, however, it doesn’t appear to work for procedural content.)

I also found interesting the awareness that some of the strategies that help novice learners actually depress learning in experts. In other words, the way that experts need to learn is different than the way that novices need to learn. Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) often deliver content in a way that assumes users know basic concepts and because of this the user can collapse those concepts so that they don’t need to be actively considered – however, often novice users can’t collapse these concepts and as a result end up overwhelmed because they are unable to process all of the variables –in the way that they’re delivered.

If you’re serious about creating good instructional materials, I recommend you give Efficiency in Learning a read.

The 29 Guidelines:

  • Use Diagrams to Optimize Performance on Tasks Requiring Spatial Manipulations
  • Use Diagrams to Promote Learning of Rules Involving Spatial Relationships
  • Use Diagrams to Help Learners Build Deeper Understanding
  • Explain Diagrams with Words Presented by Audio Narration
  • Use Cues and Signals to Focus Attention to Important Visual and Textual Content.
  • Integrate Explanatory Text Close to Related Visuals on Pages and Screens.
  • Integrate words and visuals used to teach computer applications into one delivery medium
  • Pare Content Down to Essentials
  • Eliminate Extraneous Visuals, Text, and Audio
  • Eliminate Redundancy in Content Delivery Modes
  • Provide Performance Aids as External Memory Supplements
  • Design Performance Aids by Applying Cognitive Load Management Techniques
  • Teach System Components Before Teaching the Full Process
  • Teach Supporting Knowledge Separate from Teaching Procedure Steps
  • Consider the Risks of Cognitive Overload Before Designing Whole Task Learning Environments
  • Give Learners Control Over Pacing and Manage Cognitive Load When Pacing Must Be Instructionally Controlled
  • Replace Some Practice Problems with Worked Examples
  • Use Completion Examples to Promote Learning Processing
  • Transition from Worked Examples to Problem Assignments with Backwards Fading
  • Display Worked Examples and Completion Problems in Ways That Minimize Extraneous Cognitive Load
  • Use Diverse Worked Examples to Foster Transfer of Learning
  • Help Learners Exploit Examples Through Self-Explanations
  • Help Learners Automate New Knowledge and Skills
  • Promote Mental Rehearsal of Complex Content After Mental Models Are Formed
  • Write High Coherent Texts for Low Knowledge Readers
  • Avoid Interrupting Reading of Low Skilled Readers
  • Eliminate Redundant Content for More Experienced Learners
  • Transition from Worked Examples to Problem Assignments as Learners Gain Expertise
  • Use Directive Rather Than Guided Discovery Learning Designs for Novice Learners

Article: Everything You Think You Know about Learning Retention Rates is Wrong

We’ve all seen some sort of numbers or graphics depiction about how we retain what we learn. The story goes that we retain 5 percent of what we see/hear, 10 percent of what we read, 20 percent with a visual, 30 percent with a demonstration, and so on. The problem is – this is a fabrication. The root source of this information is attributed to Edgar Dale and while the cone of learning – where the hierarchy is covered — is his, it didn’t have percentages on it – and he cautioned about overly generalizing its use.

So why do we continue to see these set of numbers?  Most likely the problem is really that there hasn’t been good research studies on the effectiveness of different delivery modes in education.  There are some good reasons for this since changing the delivery mode means redoing the instructional design, and in doing so doubling the work. Further, instructional designers will have more experience with some modes than others leading to greater effectiveness at some forms of instructional design – and ultimately delivery.  That means that the instructional designer themselves may bias the results.

The other aspect is that the materials change so there’s no good way to do a direct comparison of effectiveness between two different modes – even if both modes are created by the same instructional designer.  That’s bad news when you’re trying to create a reliable study of how things differ because you have to eliminate as many extraneous variables as possible.

Of course, you have to deal with the fact that different kinds of content are more conducive to some delivery modes than others – try teaching someone how to ride a bike by writing it in text only.  Try to teach someone how to do math without written text.  So the type of message being conveyed must be isolated.

Read More…

Duct Tape Marketing

Book Review-Duct Tape Marketing

It’s hard to think of something that’s more practical than duct tape. Whether you’re a fan of the TV show MythBusters or you’ve got your own stories about what you’ve been able to do with duct tape, you know it’s pretty amazing stuff. Duct Tape Marketing promises to help you put together marketing with a limited budget – as other books like Guerilla Marketing do. I stumbled across the book from a friend of mine having forwarded a seminar – that I couldn’t attend but I decided to invest in the book anyway.

The book clarifies some difficult concepts. Having watched the corporate search and workflow markets grow up over the past several years, I’m intimately aware of how difficult it is to build a market. Building a market takes time, patience, education, and luck. Duct Tape marketing makes it clear that it’s easier to differentiate your offerings in a competitive market than it is to create a market. This truth applies to every marketing situation whether it’s SharePoint or Comedy. I know that the biggest challenge I have in helping people understand the power of the Shepherd’s Guide is that I’ve got a model they’ve never seen before – licensing content for use on their network. Creating that little sub-market inside of the SharePoint space has proved to be more challenging (and rewarding) than I could have imagined.

There are some pretty classical messages in the book like finding your unique market proposition (what makes you uniquely valuable), finding your ideal client (creating a picture of the perfect client so you can always keep them in mind as you’re seeking clients), and an elevator pitch (a 30 second verbal commercial you give to folks when they ask you what you do.) – just to name a few. If you’re looking for some fundamentals of marketing you’ll find that the coverage is there.

In addition to the classic content, you’ll find some fairly progressive thinking in Duct Tape Marketing too. There is practical advice on how to create content and pointers to some services that can help you in your content creation journey. Fundamentally John Jantsch believes that the key to success is the creation of content. This shouldn’t be too surprising from a book author, however, the conversation is very pragmatic. I loved his coverage of objections – “No one reads blogs” with the honest truth – search engines love blogs and if you’ve searched for any topic on the Internet it’s likely you’ve seen blogs in the results.

In the end, Duct Tape Marketing is a nice balance between theory, approach, and practice. If you’re looking to step up your marketing game, it’s worth a read.

tools

Finding a Business Connection

In my blog post, “The Nine Keys to SharePoint Success” I called out Business Connection as the number two key to success. In this blog post we’ll delve into what makes a business connection – and how to create it.

Bustling Business

How hard could it be to solve a business problem? A walk through the break room will provide snippets of the latest frustrations of your coworkers. Getting into your car of an evening will reveal more challenges as someone is on their cell phone desperately trying to get home – and address some urgent business problem at the same time. It seems like business problems wash over us without any effort to try to find them.

The challenge is that these problems may not be the most pressing problems that the business has, so how do you find the business problems that matter? There are a few key ways to sniff them out – and to solve them with SharePoint.

Application Backlog

If your organization is very large you’ll have a team of software developers – or several teams – working diligently against a never ending list of applications that the business wants. The pressure to complete their work is managed through the application backlog. That is the list of applications that the business wants but there aren’t resources to get them done – yet.

The application backlog is very formal in some organizations, having to be pruned, tweaked, and reconfigured every quarter, every year, or for each reorganization. In other organizations the application backlog is written on the development manager’s whiteboard. Whatever the process to keep the backlog, it’s a gold mine for key business problems. These are the visible problems that the organization believes are the most important. Cherry picking a few items off the backlog that might be able to be solved – or mostly solved – with SharePoint can help to ensure that you’ve got a real business connection to what you’re doing.

Help Me Help Desk

If you can’t cherry pick from the application backlog – or you can’t figure out how it’s managed in your organization – you aren’t out of options. Another key source for business problems – in this case undiscovered ones – is the help desk. The help desk answers calls when systems are having problems and also when internal customers need help knowing how to solve problems.

Systems with disproportionally high numbers of calls or calls with long resolution times might be candidates for retirement. In fact, these solutions are often on their “last legs” just waiting for things to break completely so that someone will try to find a solution for the problem that they solve. So, why not preempt the process and try to find a SharePoint solution to the problem before the old system fails completely?

Requests for help are useful to as they tend to indicate areas of solutions where the business is exceeding the design criteria. Sure you can use Excel to close the financials for a global organization – but that may not be the best approach. Searching through the service requests can often expose key needs for the organization that aren’t being addressed in the best way.

Ask for Directions

Perhaps asking for directions from management is too obvious, however, often I find that folks are timid when approaching a business person to ask what challenges they’re facing. Sure you can infer the business problem by looking at the application backlog or the help desk call report – but wouldn’t it be easier to ask about the business challenges?

The Business Doesn’t Know What They Want

Occasionally I hear an objection from a well-meaning CIO or IT director who admonishes their staff for wanting to – gasp – talk to the users about what they need. The argument is that IT knows better what the business needs than they do. This is positively dangerous thinking.

On the one hand, I can agree that the business doesn’t know the solution that they need – that’s not their world. On the other hand, they know the business problems, challenges, and opportunities they are facing better than anyone in IT will ever be able to know. It takes both the intimate knowledge of the problem that the business brings and the technical skills of the IT team to propose and explore solutions which may fit the problem.

The best solutions come from listening to the problems that the business is struggling with and proposing solutions which may solve those problems – or at least part of the problems. One of the reasons that the classic waterfall model of solution development doesn’t work and why agile approaches are so in vogue right now is because waterfall doesn’t encourage the same single-team mentality that agile approaches do.

Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon

One of the challenges that SharePoint projects often face is that the problem that the solution solves isn’t directly a problem that the business is having – at least not tangibly. One of my favorite conversations is “Why are you using SharePoint?” The answers are often “To collaborate” or “To share” — which is fine, but it doesn’t really tell me much about the real business need that SharePoint is solving.

Usually when I press on this point I hear “we have to collaborate better.” Of course, no business needs to collaborate better just to collaborate better. There’s an implied with collaborating better. It could be improved efficiency, reduced cycle times, or fewer mistakes. The problem is that we need to get to the real reasons for the SharePoint platform. If we can’t get to the real reasons for SharePoint – beyond the platitudes of efficiency and better service – then we don’t really know what problem we’re solving.

The further we are away from the real tangible problem we’re solving for the business the harder it will be to get resources, to get users engaged, and to make the platform successful. It’s difficult to take a platform and really connect it to business problems – unless you recognize that you deploy the platform and then engage the business with the specific examples of how you’ve improved processing by leveraging the platform

Throughout this process struggle to get to the real answers on how the business is benefitting. Maybe it’s a reduced response time to a RFP by a day. Maybe it’s improving the closure rate of proposals through better quality deliverables. Maybe it’s something else. Whatever it is try to get your numbers as close to the actual business impact as possible. You may have heard of SMARTer as a framework for getting things done. It’s a way to make things concrete so they can be effectively measured.

You don’t want the business problems you’re solving to be six degrees of Kevin Bacon away from the problems the business wants to solve.

Return on Investment

In most cases a request for an ROI is a barrier because the person asking for it doesn’t “see” the benefits of the solution. At some level this will be the case at higher levels of the organization – but often the ROI is a smokescreen barrier that’s inserted to force folks to clarify their thinking around the real value to the organization.

As I said in the SharePoint UnROI, the real goal of an ROI isn’t the bottom line numbers. The goal is the clarification of the plan for how the business will be successful with the solution. In the case of selling SharePoint’s ROI, it might be that you have to bundle a few solutions that you intend to deploy immediately and compare the cost to deliver on SharePoint as compared with the cost to deploy a solution without SharePoint.

ROIs are notoriously bad at showing the impact to the organization for platforms and tooling like SharePoint. It’s difficult to get valid assumptions about how much time is wasted each day because of poor information, the number of sales lost due to late, incomplete, or unprofessional responses, or how improved communication would help to transform the organization’s productivity. Because the assumptions are hard to make, the problem turns into the Drake Equation. It’s an interesting exercise but the confidence in the answer is pretty low.

If you approach the ROI as an opportunity to clarify your thinking and to reduce the uncertainty of the outcome – then it’s a good process. The ultimate output of the ROI may not be anything like the real return on investment but at least you’ve improved your understanding of the business impact.

Rational or Emotional Decision

The final point to consider when delivering a business connection is to realize that as much as we really want to believe we make rational decisions, we actually make emotional decisions and then rationalize them. If you don’t believe me, try to cost-justify the purchase of a hybrid vehicle. For most of us it can’t be done. I took list prices for a Toyota Highlander and a Highlander hybrid and then planned a fictional 6,000 miles of highway driving and 6,000 miles of city driving and gas at $4 per gallon to determine that the hybrid would pay for itself in 23 years. The life of the vehicle isn’t even that long. And yet folks buy hybrid vehicles and flaunt their gas savings.

We’ve discovered that the lowest cost bid for contracts isn’t always the best deal. The intangibles are often weighted such that a higher priced big can win – for good but emotional reasons.

If you’re looking at creating a business connection and believe that it’s as simple as an ROI, you might need to take a step back and remember that the root of politics in your organization is emotion.

Action

If you’re looking to better understand the nine keys to success or how to deliver a business connection, take a look at our DVD.

Creating Shared Vision

In my blog post, “The Nine Keys to SharePoint Success” I called out Shared Vision as the first key activity – in part because it’s one of the first things in the process and in part because it’s so often missed. In this blog post we’ll delve into what shared vision is, why it’s critical, and some techniques for how to build it.

Defining Shared Vision

We all like to believe we’re going to build the same solution but invariably there will be a conversation where your understanding and the understanding of someone else on the team differ. Clearly they’re wrong – or are they? One of the most difficult things we do is to reach a shared understanding with humans that have completely different experiences, desires, and ways of thinking than we do.

Our communication is based on notoriously bad language where words don’t have the same meaning for two people – and in some cases the words can have opposite meanings depending on their use. Consider the word dust. As a verb it can mean to cover with fine particles – as in dusting a donut with powdered sugar. It can also mean to remove fine particles (dust) from a surface.

A little closer to home I often hear people say that they’re using SharePoint for collaboration but when I press them as to what that means I’m often presented with blank stares. When I suggest that one definition is “to conspire with the enemy” I am shown shock – right before the awareness sets in that they don’t understand what they mean by collaboration and should get details.

Why Shared Vision?

At some level we’ve come to expect that we won’t understand exactly what someone else is talking about. However, we fail to recognize how much energy is wasted by the lack of alignment. Alignment is what happens when we’re pulling in exactly the same direction. Alignment can only be had when we know and agree to the same goal.

Consider the idea of a bon fire that can light up 30 feet – maybe. Now consider a lighthouse beacon that can be seen for 30 nautical miles (~35 miles) – with roughly the same amount of light energy. Taking the light analogy to the extreme, a laser (which is simply focused light) can be seen bouncing back from the moon – slightly more than 35 miles.

There is not a small percentage of better results that are realized through alignment – the differences are spectacular.

Building Shared Vision

Shared Vision may be hard to generate and important to get – but creating a shared vision seems particularly challenging in SharePoint. SharePoint’s flexibility is – in this case – its curse. Because you can do so much with SharePoint – and in so many different ways, it’s difficult to get everyone to agree on the same objectives – solved in the same way. However, it’s not impossible. It can be done if you focus on three things: Personas, Use Cases, and Visual Design.

Personas

If you’ve not been close to marketing you may not have heard of a persona, it’s a description of a class or type of user. Marketing folks use a persona to get a clear understanding of the people they’re targeting their efforts to – you can use a set of personas to understand the different types of users that you’re supporting. Personas should be created with a name (like Sally Sales, Sam Shipping, etc.), a picture, and a backstory. The photo (some stock photo that you acquire) and the backstory are easy to skip over but they’re important to help fill out the character of this person to make them less fictional and more “real” – Yes, create more fiction to make the person seem more real. Creating shared vision is layers. You must clearly understand the needs of the people that you’re serving to clearly articulate the goals of the solution. The backstory should include how many kids they have, their pets, and their hobbies. Again, the goal is to create the sense that this is a real person that you’re working with – not just some convenient label.

In most cases creating a handful of personas won’t be that hard for a group with experience in the organization. The biggest challenge will most frequently be filtering to the important personas and deciding when two or more personas can be merged. Ideally you won’t have more than 4 – 6 personas, any more than that and you may have a hard time balancing too many competing personas.

Use Cases

Once you know the “who” of the solution, you’ll want to figure out the “what.” Use cases are what the users will – and won’t be able to do with the system. The most popular cases should be mapped out – and those which the key stakeholders believe are important. If you don’t document it as a use case, it’s not something guaranteed to be in the final solution.

It’s not just the “happy path” use cases that should be considered, it’s important to create “negative” use cases where items are supposed to fail due to business rules, technical limitations, or security. Having the negative use cases makes it easier for people to completely conceptualize what they’re doing. Research has proven that having folks actively try to identify potential areas of failure improves the probable success rate for a project – so don’t be stingy with the time to understand the negative cases.

Visual Design

Visual design is the one area of Shared Vision that most organizations believe they’ve got down. The organization may create wireframes to discuss the placeholders for content. Typically mockups are created to get the basic look and feel, however, one area that most organizations fall down is in the development of prototypes.

Mockups are good at showing the pages that they depict but all too often organizations only do mockups for a handful of pages – way too few to be able to articulate the way that users will navigate the system – and complete their use cases. By leveraging prototypes it’s possible to demonstrate the actual system behavior that will happen for different use cases. By demonstrating the actual use it becomes easier to identify misunderstandings and to coalesce around a single understanding.

Bringing Vision into Focus

Reaching a shared vision is difficult – but it’s just a process of taking the right steps to drive understanding. The better you execute a set of simple steps the more you’ll end up with the same shared vision. If you want to learn more about Shared Vision or the other 8 keys to success check out the DVD.

The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption

Book Review-The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption

Most of the time when I read a book that I have problems with – or that I don’t like most of it – I simply don’t write a review of it. I generally think that there’s little value in telling people what not to buy – it’s a habit I picked up from my days of writing magazine reviews.  However, the book The Information Diet is a bit different – because there’s some things that I agree with strongly and a few things that I vehemently disagree with.

I’m going to let you in on a secret that many of my closest friends know. I’m quirky. Yep. I admit it. I do things that make little sense from the surface. One of my quirks is that I almost never turn on a TV at a hotel while I’m traveling. If I’m in the breakfast room I won’t go over and turn it off – I’m not rude. However, I don’t turn the TV on in my room. This has led to some interesting conversations about how great the TV or the channel selection is where I have to respond with “Um, yea. Sure.” The heart of this quirk is the heart of The Information Diet book. That is, you should be choosy about your information diet just like you should be with your physical diet.

The precept is that we’re consuming highly processed information that has embedded biases that we won’t be able to detect. Advertising sections with editorial content in a magazine is a really good example. Those Amish heaters which are purportedly Amish-made is another good example. The heat source isn’t Amish made… of course that makes sense if you spend time tearing apart the idea that they’re electrically driven heat sources – but who thinks that much about a space heater? (By the way, the Amish heater is my example, not the authors)

A key message is that you don’t have to consume information, any more than you have to consume a slice of pie placed in front of you. However, how many of us have the will power to resist a delicious slice of grandma’s apple pie that’s placed in front of us? We’re leading our elephant down the wrong path – and the rider is simply not strong enough to steer him back in place – for long. (See Switch and The Happiness Hypothesis) So it’s true that you don’t have to consume information but it’s also true that you’re wise to influence the information that you put in front of you. Unfortunately, the forces of commercialism are driving news outlets to seek to entertain and affirm us – because those are the things that keep us coming back. It’s sort of like the high fructose corn sugar and other sweeteners silently added to our foods to make them more appealing to us.

Before I talk about what bothers me about the book, I need to talk about another really important distinction that’s touched on lightly in the book. We tend to wire ourselves in one of two basic operating modes. Mode 1 is constantly connected, constantly distracted, and constantly confused as to what we’re doing. (I might be editorializing a bit.) In other words, we’re always looking for the next email popup, the next tweet, the next IM. We spend all day chasing one shiny object then the next. There are some jobs where these skills are absolutely essential. If you’re monitoring a chemical plant – I want you trying to take in every piece of information. So to be clear this isn’t a bad way of operating. It’s the way that our ancestors used to operate. They were constantly vigilant about the threat of a lion. However, they dealt with substantially less interruptions.

Mode 2 is completely focused. This is the cone of silence – although I actually find that having a cone of music is instantly more helpful. This is Flow. This is focused concentration leading to the ability to move a single thing forward. Peopleware talked about how it might take 15 minutes for a developer to regain the productivity they had after an interruption. (This is consistent w/ Csikszentmihalyi’s research.) Today we’re overwhelmed with interruptions. It’s not just email or twitter but a desk phone and a mobile phone. Text messages and knocks at the door.

The biggest issue I have with the book is that it advocates a 5 minute working, 1 minute break approach for helping folks deal with distractions. The concept is you have to focus for five minutes and then you can take a break and getup and stretch for a minute. Um. Wait. If it takes 15 minutes to get into flow … you’ll never get there. So the approach to the day that is recommended is awful from a productivity standpoint. The author admits that he extended these windows once he got discipline about staying focused. I appreciate the need to program yourself to be focused – to block out distractions – however, in this case I believe the medicine is worse than the disease.

I need a final word of criticism for the book before I encourage you to buy it. The author has some serious biases relative to his political background and spends an inordinate amount of time talking about political situations and information in that context. This was just annoying to me. This is coupled with the real undertone that the author was attempting to lose weight immediately before or during the writing of the book. As a result some of the analogies and ties are a bit too much for me. (Even as I’m trying to lose a few extra pounds myself.)

Still, understanding how the information you consume leads you to think differently, and how those thoughts can be a serious issue over time is an important thing. (We’ve all met the closed minded person.) If you’re interested in learning more about how your information forms you – you should read The Information Diet.

Announcing the Comedy for Professional Presenters Workshop

I’m bearing down on two weeks from the first ever Comedy for Professional Presenters workshop – and I’m excited because it’s been a journey to find the right people, the right place, and the right time to help my fellow presenters learn how to integrate comedy into their work. You can find out more about the workshop at http://comedy4presenters.eventbrite.com but I’m getting a bit ahead of myself, let me first start with what I mean by professional presenters.

Professional Presenters

Sure, you can imagine Tony Robbins or former President Bill Clinton when I say professional presenter – but that’s a pretty narrow view. I view a professional presenter as anyone who has to present to any group of two or more people for their job. This definition includes sales people, marketing folks, and even those in full time ministry. It’s nearly everyone who works in a professional setting. Whether you present every week, once a month, or just once in a while, a professional presenter has to communicate with spoken word.

Fear Not

Even with 20 years of public speaking there is still the odd occasion when I get a little anxious before I get up to speak. Sometimes it’s the size of the audience, sometimes the make-up of the audience, but honestly it’s mostly about what’s going on in my head. No matter what has me sideways, I know that a good laugh will fix it. We’ve heard that “laughter is the best medicine.” That applies to more than just physical ailments.

If you can convince an audience to laugh, you’ve created a connection that you can use to communicate your real message. Every good speaker, nervous or not, will seek out the laugh to help build that connection. We’ve heard the over simplified “start with a joke” advice which is a good start – but how do you get comfortable with the group with a single joke? You need to be able to weave it into the conversation so they know you’re there with them.

My Journey

As I said, I’ve been speaking professionally for more than 20 years. In that time I’ve spoken at dozens if not hundreds of conferences all over the world. So last year when I was trying to figure out how to take my presentation skills to the next level, well finding a place to start was a daunting task. Luckily I stumbled across an Introduction to Standup Comedy class at Morty’s Comedy Joint. The instructors, Chris Bowers and Todd McComas were intent on trying to help comedians be better. That’s great, except the kind of comedy that works in a club while folks are drinking and relaxing on a Saturday night isn’t exactly the same kind of comedy that’s appropriate for a professional environment.

During the Introduction to Standup Comedy course I started reading including: The New Comedy Writing Step by Step and Step by Step to Stand-up Comedy
which I blogged about. In short, I was trying to learn what I could about taking comedy and applying it to business – extracting the dark, blue content and reforming it into something that could be used professionally.

I followed this course up with an Improvisation course taught by Michael Malone. Improvisation is about knowing how to make a scene better – and how to be comfortable with being there.

Since late last year my comedy journey had been put on hold until I caught back up with Kate Thomas – one of my fellow students in the Introduction to Standup Comedy class.

Formation of the Workshop

I’ve got a ton of things on my plate right now – that’s pretty normal – but it means that I’m not able to really extend myself into creating a workshop on Comedy for Presenters – without help. When I ran into Kate Thomas at Morty’s one night, we started talking about the course, and what we each wanted to do with the skills. The result was a decision to build a workshop (and our ultimate goal of creating a DVD.) Kate would be the primary author for the content and I would commit to help during the production of the workshop. Kate, by the way, has taught students in the US, Europe, and Asia. There’s no real way to convey the confusion of hearing her say that she taught math to Asian students.

With Kate onboard, Bowers and McComas agreed to join us. That’s the instructors for the workshop – an educator with experience the world over, a 20 year veteran of public speaking, a comedian and educator for the state police, and a motivational speaker and comedian. There’s going to be a crazy amount of experience at educating, presenting, and at comedy assembled to teach the students how to integrate comedy into their presentations.

Registration

So on April 21st at Morty’s Comedy Joint at 9AM we’ll start our six hour journey to share our experiences and to teach folks how to be professional presenters who’ve integrated comedy. The cost for the workshop is $99 and seats are limited. Go to http://comedy4presenters.eventbrite.com now to get your ticket – before they’re sold out.

Article: Top 10 Technical Mistakes in SharePoint

I’ve seen plenty of technical mistakes when implementing SharePoint, particularly in larger environments when the risks of failure are higher. Here’s a countdown of my top ten “favorite” SharePoint mistakes:

Read More…

Recent Posts

Public Speaking