José Mourinho and knowing

Image via Wikipedia

I'm not a follower of football, but have always been impressed by the wide knowledge and eclectic interests of José Mourinho, Real Madrid's manager. Seb Coe, guest editor of the Boxing Day edition of the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 invited Mourinho to talk about his approach to his career. Reflecting on those who had been the greatest influence on him, Mourinho recalled his university philosophy lecturer telling him that "a football manager who knows only about football, knows nothing about football".

Let's leave aside for now how a university philosophy professor knew that a young José was destined to be a great football club manager.  Mourinho's success is evidently founded on taking as wide a perspective on collaborative working and team dynamics as possible. In the interview he eschewed a focus on individual technical ability, statistics and tactics.  These things "mean nothing without man management... football is a human science". 

I was reflecting on how true this is in all walks of life, including how we use expertise and individuals' knowledge in organisations. Too often firms focus on technical solutions for organisational learning, at the expense of the 'human science'. A holistic view of why a team would work together as well as how and where is often overlooked.

I heartily recommend that organisations aspiring to move to the Premier League listen to the BBC Radio 4 interview.


This is probably the last KIN Bloggin' post of 2012, so Phil, Erica, Dawn and I would like to wish all our readers a happy and healthy New Year.

Virtual Training

Sometimes inspiration can come from some of the most unexpected places!

When I invited Bex Ferriday to come and present to the KIN Winter Workshop in 2010, my main concern was that maybe a foray into the virtual world of Second Life was just a step too far for most of our members. Would it be really relevant to them?
And so I was delighted to find that one of our members was sufficiently inspired that his organisation have now reached the prototype stage of virtual training ‘game’ that came about as a direct result of the presentation given that day.

The extract from the flyer for the day read:

“Bex Ferriday of Corwnall College will showcase their work on the use of virtual worlds for training and education using Second Life to bring Bloom's Learning Taxonomy and Wenger's Community of Practice model to life. Students can move about the diagram, voting literally with their (virtual) feet about where they (or their chosen topic) stands on the taxonomy – and so remember the model with their spatial and episodic memory, as well as their semantic memory".

It turns out that the member in question, Dave Holley, is quite a story teller . So here’s Dave’s story in his own words.

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Dave:

I’m not a knowledge manager as such. In fact I’m what every knowledge manager hates, a technical expert in a subject who’s managed to keep what he knows locked in his head for the past thirty years and not written anything down. It’s true I’ve managed to pass some material onto others the way it was passed onto me - via a mixture of practical teaching and coaching. But the opportunities for teaching in a hands on fashion are getting few and far between. You’re not allowed mistakes anymore!

I learned because my bosses took the time to teach me. Good fellows, all of them. And I had the good grace to listen and remember. The sorcerers taught their apprentices who in turn became sorcerers in their own right and trained yet more willing volunteers, expanding the knowledge in the domain as we went. We also learned by getting it wrong and were given sufficient rope to do so. It seems in this litigious business driven age both time and rope are in short supply.

A man from Rolls Royce had told us that you may know what the ingredients are in a cake but you may not possess the knowledge to turn the ingredients into something that is a delight on the palate. It’s a similar thing when making pyrotechnics, my particular field of expertise. It’s a matter of understanding the mixing of powders and using the tricks of the trade to install them into a device that works.

Story telling has always been a favourite method of mine for getting the message across and one or two horror tales with something of a funny twist will help some of the lessons learned over the years stick in someone else’s head. There have been various knowledge hubs, wikis and ask the expert concepts presented by other KIN members but the written word can be so, well, bland!

I’d started to write down my stories and tales of the unexpected. So far they are some 85 pages long, each hyperlinked to the 160 odd lessons generated. The stories tell of escaping purple smoke grenades, an accidental call out of the coastguard in the Largs Channel, the mischievous use of thunder flashes, and fitters with their trousers alight but how do you get this across to the audience that needs it?

Then came the “light bulb” moment.

During Bex’s presentation I found myself visualising what could be a serious advance in the training of staff who handle explosives and other hazardous substances for a living. Could I obtain the same degree of communication and knowledge exchange with an “Ask the wizard” type game? The building blocks would be different but the thought of building an interactive asset with the power to virtually link the apprentice with the sorcerer became very appealing. Sorcerer here, meaning any technical expert, manufacturing expert or safety official. I’ve seen this type of character in some of the kids’ adventure games. If your progress up to the next level is blocked you can “go and ask Gandalf” how you move onto the next phase. This was one facet of the proposed game but we needed to get our “apprentices” exposed, albeit virtually, to some of the hazards and manufacture and rules of the game.

I drew on another link for the next part.

I coach cricket and sort of made the connection with ‘having an incident’ and ‘getting out’. The kids who played virtual cricket on the X-box, Wii and Play Station were actually getting better at the real game. The shot selection in particular (even the “leave”!) was improving. They had “made” themselves as avatars in the games and were progressing well as a result. When it came to a real net they were imitating the shapes made by the avatars in the game to good effect.

There were rules to obey. Just as there are when handling explosives. There were precautions you’d take so you didn’t get “out” - just as you do with handling explosives - and equipment that protected you if you did get hit. So how do you put the game together? I started by playing with some fault tree software building up a fault tree for the cricket scenario. Play the wrong shot to the wrong delivery and you increase your chances of a mistake and you end up getting out.

Similarly with explosives and other hazardous materials. Each has a particular set of sensitiveness characteristics and if mistreated and handled inappropriately they will catch you out - sometimes with disastrous consequences. Now I can build my fault tree for a particular handling process.

Our initial forays into the game proper have taken us as far as the Serious Games Institute at Coventry University. A demonstrator has now been created and we move on from there, developing each scenario as we go.

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I recently saw a demo of the application and it's looking very impressive. It just goes to show that sometimes even the most left-field of presentations can spark a flash of inspiration.

Thanks for sharing, Dave!

"Quirky" Innovation

Image via CrunchBaseUp to this week, Jake Zien had earned nearly $36,000 in profit from his PowerCurl Apple Cord Wrap. For a $10 stake. Zien's is just one example of an idea bought to market through the unique 'Quirky' process.


I just love this approach to innovation, not just because it has come up with winning products, but the model itself is so innovative.  Initially developed with US retailer Bed, Bath and Beyond in mind, Quirky takes the best from Crowdsourcing, social networking and entrepreneurship.


Zien's $10 represents the standard submision fee. However 850 people had a say, and a stake, in the success of his product. 


The Quirky principle is fairly simple:
Submit an idea > the Community votes > influence the design > Quirky manufactures > everyone cashes in.


The community is 70,000 members strong, growing by 20 percent a month and includes fellow enthusiasts, hobbyists, professionals and students. Potential inventors submit their concepts online - they must retail for less than $150. Quirky has a large team of professional product engineers and others that can make the ideas that make it through the process a reality, and fast. Amongst it's toolkit, Quirky makes use of one of the largest 3D printers available.

Some of the smartest aspects are:

• The community is involved in every stage of the process; voting for ideas, design, naming and logo.
• Those whose improvements are accepted, get a financial stake in the product
• The idea does not go into production until enough items are pre-sold
• Risk, always a problem in bringing innovative products to market, is managed in a transparent way, at every stage, for all parties

To find out more about Quirky, read the article in Entrepreneur Magazine.

Related articles

• Invention site Quirky finds Edison in the masses (pbpulse.com)
• Quirky: The Solution to the Innovator's Dilemma (empwaynek.wordpress.com)

Six little words

Image by Funky Shapes via Flickr
"For sale: baby shoes, never worn"

Last week Carissa Bub ran a KIN Masterclass on 'Journalism Skills for Knowledge Sharing'. One of the exercises demonstrated the art of succinct story writing (rather than story telling). We were asked to pen a tale of only six words, chosen from a list of only one hundred.

We quickly found that the maxim 'less is more' is perfectly true. What to leave out? What's the narrative? And most importantly, the question every editor asks; 'so what?'

'Lunchtime gossip; wrong friends, no job" was my meagre effort.

My reason for participating was that I intend writing some new KIN case-studies and wanted to learn how to communicate more effectively using the written word. I suppose that should be the typed word.

By the end of the day even those responsible for communicating dry, technical stuff saw how stories can engage rather than just convey. For example, what's the story behind the change in policy?

In case you were wondering, the 'baby shoes' story was written by Ernest Hemingway. When you stop and think about the nuance of those six words, the man was a genius. Have a go yourself and you will see what I mean.

Here are a couple of good websites on storytelling using six words:

http://www.sixwordstories.net/

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/sixwords.html

Related articles

• "Can we ever really know Ernest Hemingway?" (salon.com)
• A picture worth a thousand words? (gilshalev.com)

So where was I?

Recent attendees at the KIN 10th anniversary workshop may have noticed that I was not there. This is a somewhat unusual occurrence since the KIN facilitators always attend every quarterly workshop and this one was a biggie. So why wasn't I there and where was I?
Well I was in sunny California attending the first Google Top Contributors Summit.

Background
As you are may be aware, KIN decided last year to migrate their online MemberSpace to Google Sites. To facilitate this migration, I immersed myself in Google Sites to learn as much as possible to ensure we built an online repository that provided KIN members with what they needed. In the early days of this, I found the Google help forum for Sites and asked a few questions. Very soon, I found I was answering more questions than I was asking. One of the side benefits of answering other people's questions - and looking at other people's answers - was that I learnt more about the product. And it became a bit of a hobby. I was enjoying the learning experience and sharing knowledge with other Sites users. I even built my own website to help with answering frequently (and some not so frequently) asked questions. After a few months, I was invited by Google to become part of the Google 'Top Contributors' community. This gave me direct access to a 'Google Guide' for Sites, some moderation 'powers' in the help forum and some advance warning of and exposure to forthcoming changes to Google Sites.

The TC Summit
And then earlier this year, out of the blue, Google decided to invite  all of its Top Contributors (TCs) to a Summit meeting (expenses paid) on September 13/14th, part of which was to be held at their HQ at 'the Googleplex' in Mountain View, California.

Fortunately for me, Gary and Erica agreed that this was too good an opportunity to miss and that they could manage without me at the KIN workshop (and so it proved!)

Day 1 was held at the Santa Clara Marriot (right next door to Yahoo!) and was a full day of presentations and demos by Google employees including Senior VP of Knowledge, Alan Eustace and VP of Global Advertising and Product Operations, Francoise Brougher.

Day 2 was at 'the Plex'. Breakfast on Google's terrace was followed by product group breakout sessions. Naturally enough I attended the 'Docs and Sites' session where we were given demos of things to come. This was probably the most interesting session of the two days for me. Google are notoriously reticent about telling anyone what product developments they are working on so to have sight of what's in the pipeline (and some pure experiments that may never see the light of day) was a real treat. I am pleased to say that I am even more convinced that moving the KIN MemberSpace to Google Sites was the right decision! (Unfortunately I am bound by the same NDA that all TCs have to sign before they are allowed to be TCs, and so I can't tell you what I saw. But it was cool!)

In the afternoon was a tour of Google's campus, a stop at the Google store and a party on the terrace with loads of wine, beer and great food.

The best part about the whole event (apart from the free beer!) was the opportunity to meet and talk with people whom I had only ever interacted with 'on-line', both Googlers and non-Googlers. The level of trust and understanding just sky-rocketed! (Another highlight has to have been experiencing one of Google's 'space toilets'.)
The Googlers I met were all bright, enthusiastic (and so young!) and were plainly enjoying working for Google.

They're already talking about whether they do it again and I sincerely hope they do! (And, of course, that it doesn't clash with another KIN conference)

If you are interested, all the pictures I took at the summit can be seen here, and other photographs I took while I was on holiday with my family on the days either side of the summit are here.

Related articles

• Saying thanks - in person - to our Google Top Contributors (googleblog.blogspot.com)
• Google Recognizes Top Help Forum Contributors (marketingpilgrim.com)