Online life these days seems predicated on the advantages of the knowledge economy, the value of knowledge management and the assumption that social networking and sharing is a great idea. Ellybabes has a very interesting post (and accompanying PowerPoint presentation) on Death and Divorce in the Digital World. In which she says:
In this new technological age, we are only beginning to notice some recently emerging issues caused by deaths and divorces amongst both geek and non-geek couples and singles.
Nearly everyone these days has large amounts of personal information stored online, whether this is their own websites and complex businesses down to simply e-mail and internet banking at the lower end of the spectrum.
In previous days, when a loved one died it was simply a case of notifying the relevant businesses (banking, service companies, etc) and details of savings and other important possessions were most often held with a solicitor or detailed in the person’s will.
She's asking some interesting questions about the difficulties presented by having so much of our lives online. In the case of death accessing password protected files and accounts can be hugely problematic. Adversarial separations can sometimes result in compromising material being published in cyberspace as an act of revenge.
Ellybabes gives a snapshot of the kinds of digital information that may need to be managed in the event of a separation (of either kind) and they include:
Shared e-mail accounts
Online calendars
Online subscriptions
Expensive PC’s and Display Screens
VOIP numbers
HTPC recordings / VOD accounts
Online DVD rental accounts
Blogs – Advertising revenue
Digital Photographs
Gaming Console profiles (Xbox 360, PS3, Wii)
Intellectual Property
I'm quaintly old fashioned in that I keep passwords for online accounts etc in hard copy format (remember those quaint things called notebooks!). But I haven't seen too many articles and blog posts on the difficulties presented by so much private activity now taking place in encrypted environments. I'm wondering what provisions you have made in the event of an untimely ending?
What happens when you combine Mindmapping with Wikipedia? You get WikiMindMap a tool that presents the information you are looking for in Mindmap form. I searched for information on "psychoanalysis" and got this series of branches.
Clicking on any of the branches then brings up more detail which means you can keep all of the information in one place. I love this "whole system in the room" approach to managing information and this is one gadget I'll be coming back to again and again.
Matt Moore continues to write really engaging posts and his latest one The Technology of the Secret really piqued my curiosity. He's writing about the process of telling and keeping secrets and how much of his work (and indeed my own) revolves around secret keeping.
Simply hiding something makes it more desirable to others. We may hide it for any number of reasons. It may be shameful, boring, illegal, hurtful. Whatever it is, we don't want people to know about it. We manage & maintain our identities and the exposure of a secret threatens that. Our secrets make us vulnerable. And because they are a part of ourselves that form us that we cannot publicly acknowledge, they can be a heavy burden. Many cultures have developed rituals & roles for the entrustment of secrets to others. The catholic confessional, the psychiatrist's couch.
Secrets (of ourselves & also of others) are powerful tokens of exchange. The secrets of others might be exchanged for material gain but our own secrets are offered to people to build trust between us. We often start with little vulnerabilities and then move on to the bigger things. And in a world where random connections are increasingly common, we sometimes fell happier giving our secrets to complete strangers instead of those close to us.
In my experience there are 4 reasons why someone "tells" their secrets to someone else.
1. I’m telling you a secret because if I say it out loud in the presence of another person then I can begin to hear it myself for the first time.
2. I’m telling you a secret because I feel lonely holding this and I want some company in my isolation.
3. I’m telling you a secret because you can then have the worry about what to do with it and I can absolve myself of that responsibility.
4. I am telling you a secret because I need you to “mind” this for me until I can work out what to do about it.
I'm ambivalent about secret keeping primarily because there is an assumed contract around confidentiality which is rarely negotiated. It's fairly clear if someone is breaking the law but outside of the legal requirements to disclose what about the moral or ethical issues?
I remember one consulting assignment where 10 people revealed their (competing) views about the organisation and made it clear that they expected me to keep their stories confidential. At the end of the few days they were relieved to have told someone and I was burdened with the content and the expectation that I would miraculously come up with a “solution” to a problem nobody was prepared to talk about.
In the end, I gathered the group together, told them I’d maintain confidentiality around their stories but I wanted to talk about the formal and informal ways in which communication was conducted in the company. The assignment turned out ok in the end because my interpretation of the balance between container and contained was a good fit and we had a very meaningful discussion but what I learned from that assignment was never to take confidentiality for granted so now it’s an ongoing part of my contracting with clients.
My work as a therapist brings up all sorts of issues about secret keeping but at a macro level I wonder why psychotherapists are so absent from public discourse when doctors, psychologists and psychiatrists appear with regularity in the media. One of the stories therapists tell themselves is that they have to maintain the confidentiality of the clients’ stories. Yes and no. Keeping secrets is also a way of colluding with the powerlessness of being unheard. Is it ethical to “fix” clients to return them to wider social systems that may have contributed to their distress in the first instance? Is it “ethical” to maintain a vow of silence about family life; relationships; abuse and all of the other secrets we are entrusted with? Who does secret keeping really benefit?
So you could say I’m ambivalent about secrets and my instinct now is to wonder what’s behind the giving of a secret to a secret keeper and how are we both being made and re-made in that process.
One incident that’s stuck in my mind was an interview I had 24 years ago for a financial consultancy. The interviewer talked about money, about wealth, about owning yachts.
Then he began to talk about the losers, the [sorry, but I’m quoting] c**** who didn’t recognise money and its importance, that in five years you could walk away, that you could have other people doing the work for you. That the world had two kind of people - people like him and the “stupid c****” who didn’t understand. He went on and on. It was like talking to low-end devil.
Finally, he let me get a word in. “Sorry,” I said. “I’m afraid I’m one of the c****.” And I walked out. One of the more terrifying experiences of my life.
At an individual level, each of us needs to do the same. I have something of an email habit, clicking "refresh" on my inbox like a rat in a Skinner Box - but I don't have a PDA/Blackberry (which is a bit like a meth addict proudly claiming not to touch heroin). I have decided I need to have one email-free day a week. The computer will stay off*.
We also need to examine the relationships that are mediated through these technologies. Are we driving people crazy with our behaviour? How do we manage ourselves to get the best out of our interactions with others? For some of us, this might be too painful. Best get back to hitting them with emails/txts/IMs I guess - that'll learn 'em.
I like this video of Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice at the TED conference talking through his thesis that too much choice results in too much misery. I'll write more about this at a later stage, particularly as it relates to my own research but for now, from the TED site:
Psychologist Barry Schwartz takes aim at a central belief of western societies: that freedom of choice leads to personal happiness. In Schwartz's estimation, all that choice is making us miserable. We set unreasonably high expectations, question our choices before we even make them, and blame our failures entirely on ourselves. His relatable examples, from consumer products (jeans, TVs, salad dressings) to lifestyle choices (where to live, what job to take, whom and when to marry), underscore this central point: Too many choices undermine happiness.
There are a number of existential questions to which I have always wanted answers..It’s a failing on my part … I know this…but for many months now I’ve tried and failed to understand what Knowledge Management is. My fantasy is that managing knowledge is akin to herding cats … wayward information systems that need manners putting on them. Like so many disciplines these days it’s the language of the practice that gets in my way trying to understand what I imagine is something very simple.
I’ve asked the question before and one commenter described KM as:
Knowledge management belongs to the management discipline. It is a comprehensive organisational routine, in which the organisation integrates Organisational culture of continuous learning, business processes, and supporting infrastructures such as technology - to maximize the organisational capability to use existing knowledge as well as creating new knowledge that will support the organisational vision and mission.
Another described it as:
KM is all about not losing the older worker's wisdom when they retire (which for our companies is a rapidly approaching, tsunami-like event). While you might call that knowledge transfer, loosely put we are seeing companies scramble to find ways to core dump the older worker's experiences, whether formally through some documented path or by mentoring. There seems to be more focus (panic?) on capturing backwards rather than plans to go forward with some sort of program that captures the collective knowledge ahead.
so it sounded like a new technology to manage succession planning? and after our recent podcast about the shadow in organisations where Mr Rant and myself got to work on Mr Moore I felt it was about time to get some answers – so to I consulted Knowledge Manger and trapeze artist Matt Moore;
There is an outdated idea, based on superficial appearances, that a patient’s sufferings result from a kind of ignorance, and that if only this ignorance could be overcome by effective communication . . . a recovery must follow. But the illness is not located in the ignorance itself, but in the foundation of ignorance, the inner resistances that are the cause of the ignorance and continue to sustain it . . . If knowledge of the unconscious were as important as those inexperienced in psychoanalysis believe it to be, then all you would need for a cure would be for the sufferer to listen to lectures or read books. However, that would have about as much impact on neurotic symptoms as distributing menus would have on hunger during a famine.
Johnnie's asking some great questions this week. On Friday he asked:
Obviously, this is too simplistic.
But I have this question for anyone who's got some process to manage human beings in organisations. You know the sort of thing... a process to set and manage coaching; a format for efficient meetings; a form for 360 feedback, an assessment "tool" for interviews.
Does this process bear any resemblance to how you actually relate, in your own life, to anyone whom you love? (eg how you chose your spouse, how you treat your children etc etc)
I think a lot of organisations create complicated processes in an effort to systematise human relationships. These processes generate what a friend calls a "corporate nod", the kind of assent that really means "yeah, I'll play along" and not "yes, I love that idea".
Of course, any organisation needs its procedures but there seems to be an impulse to create too many of them, and too complicated. A personal peeve of mine are "evaluation forms" at the end of events. These seem to encourage an evaluative rather than participative mindset - where people are invited to assess whether it "worked" (on a 5 point scale) instead of engaging live in making it work at the time.
One fine day, I'll announce that I won't read those feedback forms - to emphasise how much more valuable it is to get live engagement from people taking risks to make things work in the here and now. Probably on the same day I'll kick off a creative thinking meeting by saying, "Could we all embrace the possibility that nothing useful may come of this meeting? That way, we can all stop trying to control what happens, relax and probably create an atmosphere that's actually more likely to see something useful emerge."
The comment stream is just as interesting and to the latter one I added the following:
I'm with you on the evaluation forms for all of the reasons you outline, and because they take no account of the responsibility people have to participate or not - as if it is all in the hands of the facilitator/trainer to produce the goods. However those of us who are process consultants/facilitators have to be able to talk about what we do in ways other than just 'trust me' which I see a lot of consultants reverting to in the absence of something more robust...I am thinking out loud as I write this but there has to be something in between 'trust me' and '10 sure fired ways to control anything that moves so you can guarantee certainty' kind of approaches...
I've been having this conversation on and off with several people in the last few weeks - the certainty/uncertainty paradox..clinging to a defined outcome rarely delivers what it promises because most of the time the problem isn't the problem. Then how do we talk about what we do if we're not talking about what our clients want to hire us for? All of a sudden I feel the need to talk to a Knowledge Manager.
Doris Lessing’s Nobel Prize speech is a wonderful and impassioned plea for the importance of education and telling our stories. In her speech she talks about illiteracy and the lack of books in Africa and compares the passion for learning with our comfortable complacency here – which is particularly apt at this time of the year.
The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise ... but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us – for good and for ill. It is our stories, the storyteller, that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, what we are at our best, when we are our most creative.
That poor girl trudging through the dust, dreaming of an education for her children, do we think that we are better than she is – we, stuffed full of food, our cupboards full of clothes, stifling in our superfluities?
She’s not a fan of the time spent surfing and wonders
How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?
But of course the irony is, that blogging and social media have become important ways of telling stories – and Lessing’s words will permeate many imaginations by virtue of bloggers picking up and sharing what she has to say. But I take her point – I love books - I love the kinaesthetic experience of holding a document in my hands – and while others herald paperless books – they miss the point. Reading is not a delivery mechanism, it’s an emotional and spiritual experience and that can certainly be enhanced by the digital revolution but not supplanted by it. Unlike Lessing I'm hopeful about the future of literature, and the book, and can only hope that digital and traditional ways of telling stories can continue to co-exist.
And we, the old ones, want to whisper into those innocent ears. "Have you still got your space? Your sole, your own and necessary place where your own voices may speak to you, you alone, where you may dream. Oh, hold onto it, don't let it go." There must be some kind of education.
I've mentioned this video before - A Vision of Students Today - from a working group of Kansas State University students and faculty and now Professor Michael Wesch has outlined in detail the process that went into creating the piece and it's a fascinating example of reflection, reflexivity and participant observation in action. He outlines a five step process which includes inquiry, formal research, and my favourite aspect of it all is the open ended questions he used to start the process such as:
What is it like being a student today?
So the basic idea is to create a 3 minute video highlighting the most important characteristics of students today - how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime.
We already know some things from previous research (and if you know of any interesting statistics, please list them along with the source). Others we will need to find out by doing a class survey. Please add whatever you want to know or present.
The data were captured in a Google document which he has made available here and of course the final video is a masterful piece of work.
The more I consult and the more I'm embedded in my own research the more I know that finding the right question to kick start a process is where the energy needs to go. Finding a creative way of engaging a client unlocks so much energy and very often that means flinging our own hypotheses about what's going on out the window.
This page contains an archive of all entries posted to Interactions - Creative Strategies for Business in the Knowledge category. They are listed from oldest to newest.
