Category: Creativity

BYOD and Personal Knowledge Management

Not so long ago people would go to work at a set time and work exclusively on equipment and applications provided by the employer. At the end of the day they would go home and do whatever they wanted to do using their stuff. But now the line between work and life is now a complete jumble for many.

Wintry Walk on Fare Snape Fell(I am going to refer to work-and-life in this post as if they are two distinct things as a way of contrasting the challenge, but that whole concept is also going through significant disruption which I may cover at a later date)

Personal knowledge management used to be similarly straightforward with work stuff in one place, life stuff in another place. Take diaries as an example, I used to run a home diary and a work diary. If truth be known, Sue used to run my home diary and I would focus all of my energy on the work diary. This situation was only complicated when either the work requirements or the life requirements would break into one of the other’s area. School plays during the day would require a special entry in my work diary to make sure I was there. Likewise overnight business trips would need a special entry in the life diary.

This situation was never ideal, but worked quite well with few issues. One of the huge advantages of this situation was the people at my employer could see my availability and schedule meetings with me because my availability was visible to all.

In a BYOD world it would be, just about, acceptable to make both my diaries available on all my devices, but that’s not really resolving the challenge or addressing the changing culture. Running multiple diaries has never been ideal and leads to all sorts of issues when things clash.

The real requirement is for me to see a single diary, I don’t mind whether it’s made up of a number of diaries, but I need to see it as one. That diary needs to be embedded into my mobile experience so that I can use all of the functions of my mobile device. Portions of my availability need to be visible to different interested groups. I need to be able to set parameters on my availability for those groups because I don’t want a completely blended lifestyle where I’m available to everyone 24 by 7. I want event information from one group (project team) to be available to another group (family) so that sensible decisions can be made. In other words I want a completely blended diary experience which has been personalised to my requirements and way of working.

I could just opt out and run a single personal diary with no visibility to others but that would not be very helpful to people who want to schedule time with me. I used to have a boss who did that and it was impossible to schedule anything with him, particularly as the only diary that he regarded as truth was the paper one in his hands at all times.

Another alternative is to run two diaries and to copy everything from one to another. The natural choice for doing this would be to make the life diary the master and to copy everything from the work diary into it, but that just leads to another challenge, what to do about data privacy. Would my employer really want my family to have access to a report with sensitive financial information in it? A diary entry isn’t just about the scheduling information; it’s also about all of the associated content.

My purpose in this discussion is to use diary information as an example of the complications of running any form of personal knowledge management system in a world where work technology and life technology are the same, and where the separation between them is a complete jumble. The same challenges apply to to-do lists, note taking, reading lists, document stores, and all manner of personal knowledge management techniques.

These challenges are multiplied when we want others to collaborate with us in our personal knowledge management system.

We are going to see many ways of resolving these challenges that break the current paradigms and move us to a far more personal way of working. Doodle is an example of a different way of thinking about team scheduling that works across personal diaries. There are many people thinking about the to-do list and note taking most of which are being delivered as cloud services built to interact with personal applications. This continued shift to personal is going to significantly change the way that individuals and teams interact, collaborate and do work. As always the technology shift is the smaller part of a much larger cultural shift.

As a person I’m the one who is enabled and approved for access to all sorts of data. In the future I am expecting to be able to have a personal life assistant which is going to need access to all of my sources of data to enact upon them, but that’s another challenge requiring another paradigm shift.

Dilbert on useless corporate rules

Dilbert on corporate rules – brilliant.

PowerPoint, the Bullet Points and the Story

Does the bullet point enhance the story, or destroy the story – the choice is yours.

Many things are best communicated through humour and Rowan Manahan has a great way of communicating the absurdity of much of what I see every day.

Rowan Manahan at Ignite #6

I’m not one of those PowerPoint bashers who blame the tool for the things that people create with it. People need much more help than they currently get with presentation skills. In the hands of a good presenter the tool can make the experience wonderful. I sat in a breakfast session on Saturday morning where a friend amazed us with an overview of the sun. It might not sound like the most exciting subject, but believe me, we were all transfixed. The experience simply wouldn’t have been the same without the wonderful videos and picture, there wasn’t a bullet point in sight. The point that people miss time and time again was that the presentation was complementary to the story, enhancing our experience.

(I suspect my friend wasn’t using PowerPoint, but using Keynote instead, the point still applies though. I’ve seen some pretty dreadful Keynote presentation too)

I've put the pictures back

As part of trying to resolve some performance problems on this site I got rid of the pictures in the header.Over the last couple of days I’ve put them back along with some new ones because some people commented that they missed them.

You might be wondering where some of them are, others are a bit more obvious:

This is San Francisco harbour.

This is Grasmere taken from a beach at the Rydal end. It was taken just before we went swimming on a lovely summer evening.

Lavender in our garden which is a favourite with the local bees.

Another garden picture.

On holiday in Italy we were at the top of the Tower of Pisa as the sun set. This is the view back towards the duomo.

A more local picture this time, taken at Cobble Hey gardens in the Through of Bowland.

From north west to north east, a lovely sunset taken from the beach at Banburgh.

One of my favourite places is Borrowdale in the Lake District.

More lake district, looking across Derwentwater towards Borrowdale.

One summer we decided to try out a Maize Maze. This was the sculpture in the middle.

More sculpture, this was on display at Chatsworth, and on sale – we decided not to ask about the price. They are contemporary terracotta warriors designed by Yue Min Jun.

Another sunset, this time at a local nature reserve called Brockhole.

More lake district and more swimming, this time it’s Buttermere, it’s late spring and the water hadn’t really warmed up yet.

From Lindisfarne looking back towards the mainland.

Finishing off with a view from the far north of Scotland at a little hamlet called Tarbet which is the place where you go to if you want to visit Handa island.

The pictures are configured so that you will get a random one for each page and post that you visit. If you want to see different ones then you need to click around a bit.

There are some others and I’m likely to update them from time to time.

Back online now

If you tried to access this site yesterday you would have received all sorts of errors.

The reason for this was down to a problem at the organisation where this site it hosted.

I’m told that the problems are all now fixed, and everything seems to be available again.

Teenagers still prefer face-to-face

In an age of highly connected teenagers you’d think, according to the popular stereotype, that young people were living their lives as bedroom recluses unable to be parted from Facebook.

GraffitiA recent study by Ericsson ConsumerLab of US teenagers paints a different story:

In an era of online social networking, it may come as a surprise that teenagers’ preferred form of communication doesn’t rely on technology. Asked what form of communication they would miss most if it were taken away, the vast majority of respondents replied “face-to-face.” Less than half as many said they would miss texting the most, putting it in second place. Meanwhile, Facebook use came in as only the fourth most popular, after talking on the mobile phone.

Graphically it’s quite stark:

image

The report goes on to say that although teenagers have a huge array of communications available to them they see them as tools to create real-life interactions. I quite liked the diagram of how Ericcson envisaged how these tools fit into the Teenage Dating Timeline:

image

Speaking as a father of a couple of UK teenagers it correlates quite closely with the way that I see interactions happening around here.

A fuller summary of the report is here.

Think About the Story

It’s a simple question: "What is this document trying to say and to whom?"

Fell Foot Tree HousesI regularly ask this question to myself as I’m reviewing documents.

Most of these documents have followed a template which has been defined through a methodology. Much of the time people have written a document that fulfils what the methodology requires, but fails to communicate the story.

They’ve missed that the fundamental part of any decent methodology is that the document template is there to assist in telling you what the framework of the story needs to be. the methodology is rarely any good at telling you what the story is.

We should all regard ourselves as story tellers.

Without the story we aren’t communicating, if we aren’t communicating then we aren’t adding and value, if we aren’t adding any value then we ought to change so that we are.

(This is also one of the reasons why I dislike long lists of things in tables. They might be full of information, but they don’t tell a story)

Weird English #3

I live near to a place called Fernyhalgh Lane and after more than 25 years I am still none the wiser as to the correct pronunciation for it. Even people who have been born in the vicinity pronounce it differently. One thing is certain though halgh is not pronounced halgh. This got me thinking about all of the other places that are pronounced in a different way to the way that they are spelled.

Haighton PathA few years ago we went on holiday to the North East of England and stayed near to Alnwick which is pronounced without the l and without the w. I’ve listened to countless America tourists struggle with the word Worcester. Then there’s Magdalene College at Cambridge University which is pronounced Maudlyn.

So I wondered how many places and things there were that required some level of local knowledge to aid you in the correct pronunciation. After a little bit of searching I came across what is possibly the longest Wikipedia entry I have ever seen:

List of names in English with counterintuitive pronunciations

How does anyone stand a chance of getting it right?

Writing Limits

The other week I wrote about how I’d tried to change the balance of my writing so that I was Writing Less to Write More.

Fell Foot Tree ArtThe challenge was to spend less time on Twitter and Facebook so that I wrote more consistently here.

The lesson I’ve learnt from this experiment is that there are limits to my writing output. I don’t have enough capacity to allow me to contribute in all of the places I’d like to, I have to be selective.

Over the last few weeks I’ve allowed myself to put the experiment in reverse and to deliberately get sucked back into Twitter and Facebook. This unsurprisingly precipitated a drop off in writing here, it wasn’t a conscious thing, it was just the way it was.

If you are a keen observer you will have noticed that I still wrote the occasional post, but nothing of any quality, or with any consideration. I wrote the easy stuff mainly in the Because it’s Friday category.

So I have a choice, I can contribute lots of little bits to all sorts of social media places, or I can contribute in a considered manner – I can’t do both. It’s a personal preference, but I think I’d rather be more considered, so it’s back to Writing Less to Write More.

The Talk Normal Challenge

One of my favourite blogs is Talk Normal.

Jimmy and Grandad got to Tarn HowesI work in a business that has a wonderful ability to use and abuse words. Tim Philips’ work is a wonderful antidote to the rubbish that assaults my ears every day.

He’s recently published a podcast which everyone who works in the IT industry should list to and take stock.

On answering a question about how this has become a problem Tim has this answer:

When the Internet came along there were all these exciting companies, run by people who really had never lived in the real world, but they were presented as the business innovators for the next generation, so we liked to copy them.

He then goes on to link this observation with the rise of email and other IT communication technology to produce the perfect setting for the plague of word abuse to spread.

Perhaps we should also be the ones to take up the challenge to talk normal?

http://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F22276469&g=1&color=ff7700&show_comments=trueTalk Normal Podcast 1 by Abby Coften

Update:

Episode 2 and Episode 3 are now available also.

http://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F22276507Talk Normal Podcast 2 by Abby Coften

http://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F22276651Talk Normal Podcast 3 by Abby Coften

Because it's Friday: Danny Macaskill

I’ve never had a highly developed sense of balance and have always marvelled at those that do.

What Danny Macaskill does with a bike absolutely amazes me:

Danny Macaskill – Industrial Revolutions

The videos are so well produced too.

Telling Stories

I’ve often thought that schools should spend much more time teaching people to tell stories.

Universities should, in my opinion, have story telling as a basic requirement for all courses.

I sit in so many meetings where someone stands up and talks through a set of slides. I use the word ‘set’ to describe a random collection of information.

The slides themselves aren’t coherent, the order of slides isn’t coherent, in short there is no story.

People connect with story, stories travel and live on beyond the event itself. Tell a story and you’ll be memorable.

One of the best lecturers I ever had at university was my ‘Stress’ tutor. He regularly started lectures with a broken component. He’d then tell the story of how this component got broken. This story would always be told with glint in the eye and an air of mystery.

Our job was to solve the mystery in order to complete the story. He’d then tell us the real end of the story. I still remember one of the stories about a tow bar component that had actually led to someone’s death – that’s nearly 25 years ago.