Adventures are not adventures if there isn’t a degree of danger and uncertainty about them. – Ewan McGregor

Adventure

While in Blackwood this weekend, we drove into Trentham for a visit.

There was a group of motorcyclists in town, and I struck up a conversation with one (who was riding a very nice touring BMW). He was preparing to take part in the “2010 Long Ride”, an event to raise funds for prostate cancer research in Australia, in which he and others will be riding from Melbourne to Darwin via New South Wales and Queensland – a distance of over 4,000 km.

I talked about my 1980 trip across the Nullarbor from Melbourne to Karratha, WA. On this trip, I travelled 5,000 km in six days on a GSX 750 Suzuki (and home again at a slightly slower rate).

This put me in mind of “Long Way Round” – Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman’s epic 2004 motorcycle ride across Europe, Russia and North America. I have recently watched this on DVD, and have now just started reading the book. Inspiring stuff!

Thinking about this on the way home, I also thought about some of the other things I had heard about adventuring from Nick Farr at a recent CPX meeting.

Climbing Everest is pretty serious stuff. Here are some of the thoughts that I tweeted from Nick’s presentation:

• The number of deaths on Everest is 8% of the number of summiteers.
• A dream becomes a goal when you start actively planning it.
• Success requires taking risks.
• Failure teaches that taking risks is crucial.
• Failure provides an experience you can’t buy.

Sort of makes my adventuring pale into insignificance. My 2002 ascent of Mt Kosciuszko (2,228 m) isn’t much in comparison. And then most of my ascent was by cable car. Maybe a riskier achievement was hiking to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and back up in the one day in 1983. That was a round trip of over 25 km, with a fall and rise (in that order) of around 1,400 m. This was on the way home from six months backpacking around Europe with a 20 kg pack; that was probably the fittest that I’ve ever been in my life. The signs there now apparently warn:

“Danger! Do not attempt to hike from the canyon rim to the river and back in one day. Each year hikers suffer serious illness or death from exhaustion.”

Nick Farr’s key principle in his (more serious) mountaineering is “entitlement”. If you have done the preparation, then you are entitled to achieve your goal. In the “Long Way Round” book, Charley Boorman quotes the former SAS officer that took them through survival training: “If you can survive the prep, the mission will be fine”.

Business

I have been operating AcKnowledge Consulting for nearly 2 years now, and greatly enjoying the experience of being a freelancer. I also had the luxury of starting out with a fairly comfortable package from my former employer. I have worked with some great clients, and had some interesting projects. Things were a little tight in early 2009, but I have generally done a lot better so far in this financial year than in my first full year of business.

However, this can be a feast or famine game. I am working on some new potential opportunities to pick up after my current major project finishes, but there is nothing locked in yet. There is not as much of the original package left as a backstop now, either.

As much as I have enjoyed the business so far, I am now also realising that I have not had any major projects that have been focussed on my main consultancy offering – knowledge transfer to a non-technical audience.

So it occurs to me know that I am feeling a bit like I did when I arrived at Northam on the Suzuki in 1980.

Getting past the two-thirds barrier

Northam is a town 100 km from Perth in Western Australia. When I reached there at the end of the fourth day’s travel out of Melbourne, I was on schedule to reach Karratha in the planned six days. I had covered two-thirds of the distance. This was the point where I turned north for the trip up the west coast via Geraldton and Carnarvon.

However, it had been a difficult day. The first two days through Victoria and South Australia were fine. The third day started well, but as I was riding over the Nullarbor Plain, I was heading into increasingly strong head-winds. Once I crossed the border into Western Australia, the road edges were wider than the South Australian side, and much clearer of vegetation. The wind was picking up loose sand and throwing it at me.

I tucked in under the windscreen on the sports fairing, and tried travelling a little faster to get through this stage a bit quicker. This actually seemed to make it even more demanding, however. I camped that night in the tent for the third night. The gravel tent site at Balladonia roadhouse was so hard that the alloy tent pegs would not penetrate it at all. I tied one rope to the centre-stand of the bike, and used a screwdriver for another peg.  The bathroom was unpleasantly dirty and shabby, with a door hanging off its hinges. The water was hard, and my soap would not lather. (I learned about soap for hard water later in the trip.)

On day four, I thought I was going crazy. The road and weather conditions were fine, but I was talking to myself, and shifting position on the seat every five minutes; moving my feet to the pillion foot-pegs and back again.

Guessing that I would have had enough of camping by this stage, I had planned to stay at a motel in Northam. It was a relief to arrive there, and sleep in a real bed for the night. At this point, I was just not sure how I was going to cope with the rest of the trip.

I woke refreshed in the morning, and headed off happily. Regardless of my fears, I just ate up the distance all that day, and covered the 950 km to Carnarvon as if it was a jaunt down the road to the shop. It was probably the most enjoyable day’s ride I have ever had. The last 650 km to Karratha on day 6 was even easier.

So what had happened at the end of day four? It was like I had broken through some sort of barrier of pain and frustration, and come out the other side. I had prepared for the trip, and faced the barriers and the risk of failure – so I was entitled to achieve the goal I had set.

I can take the same approach to my business. I have been working towards this point for some time, preparing my path, building the network, and addressing the risks. Now is the time to face the uncertainty, move forward and achieve the goal.

Time to get back on the bike.

The topic of organisational change – and getting people more involved in it – is something I have been becoming quite passionate about for a while now.  This presentation at trampoline will be the first time I have presented on the topic. I intend to develop this work, and its linking themes, in time to come.  I am currently playing with a new term for this – “orgsourcing”. You heard it first here!

OK, so it’s not original – but I rather like it. Received by email from my son:

A boat docked in a tiny Mexican fishing village. A tourist complimented the local fishermen on the quality of their fish, and asked how long it took him to catch them.

“Not very long.” they answered in unison.

“Why didn’t you stay out longer and catch more?”

The fishermen explained that their small catches were sufficient to meet their needs and those of their families.

“But what do you do with the rest of your time?”

“We sleep late, fish a little, play with our children, and take siestas with our wives. In the evenings, we go into the village to see our friends, have a few drinks, play the guitar, and sing a few songs. We have a full life.”

The tourist interrupted, “I have an MBA from Harvard and I can help you! You should start by fishing longer every day. You can then sell the extra fish you catch. With the extra revenue, you can buy a bigger boat.”

“And after that?”

“With the extra money the larger boat will bring, you can buy a second one and a third one and so on until you have an entire fleet of trawlers. Instead of selling your fish to a middle man, you can then negotiate directly with the processing plants and maybe even open your own plant. You can then leave this little village and move to Mexico City, Los Angeles, or even New York City! From there you can direct your huge new enterprise.”

“How long would that take?”

“Twenty, perhaps twenty-five years.” replied the tourist.

“And after that?”

“Afterwards? Well my friend, that’s when it gets really interesting,” answered the tourist, laughing. “When your business gets really big, you can start buying and selling stocks, and make millions!”

“Millions? Really? And after that?” asked the fishermen.

“After that, you’ll be able to retire, live in a tiny village near the coast, sleep late, play with your children, catch a few fish, take a siesta with your wife and spend your evenings drinking and enjoying your friends…”

And the moral of this story is: know where you’re going in life – you may already be there!

“We go on being children, regardless of age, because in life we are always encountering new things that challenge us to understand them, instances where a practiced imagination is actually more useful that all laboriously acquired knowledge.” – Milan Kundera.

This is quoted from an essay by Shaun Tan – PICTURE BOOKS: Who Are They For?

C S Lewis has also written (in the Narnia chronicles) on the importance of retaining a child’s view of the world.  (Not to mention the biblical injunctions.)

I have recently completed the StrengthsFinder assessment.  The accompanying book by Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton provides a brief description of how the human brain develops.  We are born with “a hundred billion neurons”, and we keep “about that many up until late middle age.” More importantly, these neurons form connections – synapses – with each other.

By the age of three, “each of your hundred billion neurons has formed fifteen thousand synaptic connections with other neurons.”  But from this age, these connection start to fall into disrepair.  “… between the ages of three and fifteen you lose billions and billions of these carefully forged synaptic connections.  By the time you wake up on your sixteenth birthday, half your network is gone.”

This may not be final – there has been some recent work on brain plasticity (by Norman Doidge in The Brain That Changes Itself) – but it appears that in general the connections within our brain do not change appreciably after that age.

However, Buckingham and Clifton state that our effectiveness depends on how well we capitalise on our strongest connections; the point of the book and assessment.

We have a huge number of connections while we are younger in order to soak up all the new sights, sounds and experiences.  But while we have all these connections, we are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of signals.  In order to start making sense of everything, we need to develop a way of focusing on some signals, and blocking out the background “noise” of other signals.  We do this by progressively destroying the less “important” connections.

As our genetic inheritance and early childhood environment help us to sort out our neural pathways, our natural talents – our strengths – begin to emerge.

One of my strengths is apparently “Ideation”:

You are fascinated by ideas… concepts… Yours is the kind of mind that is always looking for connections, and so you are intrigued when seemingly disparate phenomena can be linked by an obscure connection… a new perspective on familiar challenges.

You revel in taking the world we all know and turning it around so we can view it from a strange but strangely enlightening angle. You love all these ideas because they are profound, because they are novel, because they are clarifying, because they are contrary, because they are bizarre…

This all makes me wonder.  Is it just possible, then, that some of the more creative, imaginative and intelligent people among us are those that have managed to retain some of the “child’s brain”? Conversely, have the most supposedly “grown up” of us in fact shut down too many connections, and lost the ability to enjoy the contrary and the bizarre; to see and feel the wonder of the world and the people around us? 

Perhaps we need to continue to expose ourselves to the “new things that challenge us”.  Give our imagination a little more practice.  Explore the things that we haven’t made sense of yet, flex a few synapses, and enjoy some of the noise that our “adult” brain would like to block out.

Most times when we recruited new staff the process was fairly uneventful. Where it got interesting was the time that we advertised a new vacancy only about six months after a previous one.

The job descriptions for the advertised roles were pretty much the same each time. I noted that one of the applicants for the second vacancy was a guy that we didn’t even short-list for the first one. Let’s call him Mike.

Mike just didn’t seem to have what we were looking for the first time. When he applied the second time, he called me and said that he wouldn’t send me a copy of his CV, because he had: “already sent me one six months ago”.

I’m not sure that I was able to say much for the rest of the phone call. I also never found out if Mike was surprised when he again failed to make the short list…

Just this short exchange told me a lot about Mike. First, he wasn’t passionate enough about the job to be bothered sending a CV. Second, he had apparently achieved nothing over that six months that would convince me to short-list him this time. Third, he assumed that I bothered keeping the CVs of those that didn’t make the previous short list!

He made another mistake, as well. He never asked for a debrief on why he wasn’t selected for the job.

If you ever apply for a job, please don’t be like Mike.

Mistake makes ‘iPhone girl’ a celebrity

“A Chinese factory worker has become a celebrity after her smiling face was accidentally loaded onto an Apple iPhone and shipped to the other side of the world, her employer has said.

“The unidentified worker flashed a smile and made a peace sign to a co-worker whose job was to test the device’s camera in the southern city of Shenzhen, said a spokesman for Foxconn, which assembles the phones for Apple.  The woman’s colleague apparently forgot to delete the photo from the phone, which was sold to a consumer in Britain, who posted it [to MacRumors.com] on the Internet, Foxconn spokesman Liu Kun told AFP on Wednesday.”

Apparently Apple have no plans to adopt this as standard practice, but this raises an interesting question:

“As one person wrote in an Internet post: ‘It would be great for every Chinese worker who makes your iPhones to take a snap of herself or her factory friends … a hello from a person you would never otherwise meet.  Globalisation in practise.’”

A new social networking technology?

Inside the cage, hang a banana on a string and place a set of stairs under it.  Also, set up a system of cold water sprinklers over the whole cage.

Before long, a monkey will go to the stairs to climb towards the banana.  As soon as he touches the stairs, spray all of the monkeys with cold water. The monkey will leave the banana alone and try to get away from the water.  Turn off the spray.

After a while, another monkey will make an attempt with the same result. Pretty soon the monkeys will get sick of getting wet, and will stop any of the monkeys from attempting to climb the stairs, even though no water sprays them.

Keep this up for several days.

Now, remove one monkey from the cage and replace it with a new one.

The new monkey sees the banana and wants to climb the stairs. To his surprise, all of the other monkeys attack him. After another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the stairs, he will be assaulted.

Next, remove another of the original five monkeys and replace it with a new one. The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked. Even the previous newcomer takes part in the punishment with enthusiasm. Likewise, replace a third original monkey with a new one, then a fourth, then the fifth.

Every time the newest monkey takes to the stairs, he is attacked.

Some (and eventually all) of the monkeys that are beating him have no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs or why they are participating in the beating of the newest monkey.

After replacing all the original monkeys, none of the monkeys in the cage have ever been sprayed with cold water. Nevertheless, no monkey ever again approaches the stairs to try for the banana.

Why is this?

Because as far as they know that’s the way it’s always been done around here…

———————

This story appears in a few places on the web – one is on the Wow Zone site.

The thing that I would really like to know is whether or not this was ever performed as a real experiment, or if it has only ever been a thought experiment.  Either way, though, it seems to be a powerful illustration of the pitfalls in standardised work practices and bureaucracy.  This is another topic that Shugg wrote about recently, too.

When will we learn to keep a constant eye on the things we do to ourselves in most organisations?

“Every really good creative person in advertising whom I have ever known has always had two noticeable characteristics. First there was no subject under the sun in which he [sic] could not easily get interested – from, say, Egyptian burial customs to modern art. Every facet of life had fascination for him. Second, he was an extensive browser in all fields of information.”
 - James Webb Young in A Technique for Producing Ideas (1965)

There have been a number of discussions on and off about what makes a good knowledge manager.  In various discussions, I have always been interested to note the amazing range of backgrounds people come from – and usually a somewhat chequered career path – to get to this point.  Personally, I have come via an IT degree, Project Management, Telecoms Consultancy, with a dash of adult learning and communications thrown in.

As “knowledge management” is such a broad church, there are a range of disciplines such as librarianship, information management, content management and IT that you would expect to see, but why are there so many zoologists now working in KM?  I must admit that I haven’t met too many in the field from an advertising background (as per the quote above – highlighted in actKM a while ago), but these fields may well share a preference for diversity – and creativity. 

Many KMers do seem to have a creative flair.  In fact, I have just learned about a group called the Creative Skills Training Council through a KM colleague.

“It is essential for an entrepreneur to be curious.”
 - Amanda Gome

Does managing knowledge give you a thirst for knowledge?  Or is it the other way around?  Maybe it is just an innate curiosity, which I must admit to always having.  How many KMers have appeared at Trivia nights or on TV quiz shows?

Patrick Lambe made a distinction between different types of knowledge acquisition a while ago:

“To me, one of the strengthening demands is the ability to pay attention to and process “fast knowledge” (peripheral awareness of what’s going on around you, staying abreast, managing many fast-moving information sources) as compared to “slow knowledge” (expertise and technical knowledge built up and consolidated and leveraged continually and repetitively). This is partly I think a shift in the balance between the two (increasing “fast knowledge” demands) and partly a matter of managing the balance optimally (managing the balance between depth and breadth of knowledge).”

This perhaps highlights a potential difference between “knowledge worker” and “knowledge manager”.  Not that one is superior to the other, just managing a different type of knowledge.

As many have been turning away from the title “knowledge manager”, maybe we should coin a new term – “meta-expert“?

“Innovation occurs in the white spaces between disciplines.”
 - John Seely Brown

Much has been written about innovation and knowledge.  One example of the need for more cross-disciplinary thinking that I love to relate happened to me in the early 90s in Telstra.  I was working in a team managing the internal telecoms function in the company, but we had been set up organisationally adjacent to some of the more traditional IT functions.  One day, I was chatting to one of the email guys.  He said: “We are working on this great new idea!  We have set up a special email address – if you send a message to this address, it will use your employee ID to look up the HR system, and send you back an email with your annual leave credits!”

A short while later, I was talking to one of the voice comms people.  His story was: “We are working on this great new idea!  We have set up a special Interactive Voice Response system – if you make a call to this number and key in your employee ID on the phone, it will look up the HR system, and send you back a fax with (guess what) your annual leave credits!”

Hmm… Neither of these people knew that the other was working on a solution to the same business issue.  They were each using company resources independently.  Could we have benefited by having them work together?

Which one of them came up with the “right” answer? In fact, neither of them.  What was put in place (some years later) was direct staff online access to the HR system, via web browser on the Intranet.

Apparently, Bennett looked at the “Made in China” tag in his new undergarments one day, and decided to find out more.  This led him on a rather strange journey to China, and into Chinese history.

The thing that caught my attention was a story he told of one incident during the journey. 

As I remember the story, he was eating in a small restaurant in a lane-way in a Chinese city.  He was the only tourist in the restaurant, among 30 or 40 Chinese customers. The others in the restaurant fairly quickly noticed his entire lack of ability to eat with chopsticks.  He was “spreading food all over the restaurant, and not eating anything”.  Everyone was very good-natured about it, and some began to laugh at his predicament.  He laughed with them.  One came over and gave him instructions on eating with chopsticks.

By the end of the meal, even though he spoke almost no Chinese, and the other diners little English, they were all laughing and joking together. When he left the restaurant, everyone said goodbye to him.  The waitress even followed him out onto the street to return his tip.

Now here’s the good bit – as Bennett said, imagine reversing the situation.  A 50-something Chinese man goes into a restaurant in Sydney (or Christchurch, New York or London).  Would the same thing happen?  Would everyone in the restaurant say goodbye when he left?  Would the waitress chase him to return his tip?

How much of our behaviour and responses to other people is determined by our context and culture, and how much can we change?

“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door.  You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”  – J. R. R. Tolkien

Where does the KM function ideally belong in an organisation?  This is the topic of a recent discussion on actKM.  I have been working in KM in Telstra for about eight years.  The role of my team is to make it easy for our business sales people to access the knowledge they need to sell our products, services and solutions.  Over this time, the migration of the team through the organisation has been as follows:

• Sales (in a specialist sales/technical area)
• Marketing
• Sales (in “Sales Programs”, with the communication group)
• Marketing (with the Campaign Build function)
• Business Operations (for six months, where I was the only member of the original team remaining)
• Sales Excellence (with the Sales communications, training and other support groups)
• Enterprise Learning (over the last six months or so)

All of these have had benefits and disadvantages.  At each turn, functions have been added or taken away – but the core capability and deliverables have remained.  It’s been an interesting ride.  Regardless of where we sit in the organisation, I believe that we are at our most effective when we are close to our target audience – in this case, the sales force.

And now, for me, the latest move – out of the company.

Yes, my position was recently declared to be redundant.  The team goes on, with acknowledgement of the success of the work, and recognition of its importance, but without me.  I am now in transition – I have moved out of my position, and my last day with the company will be 30 April.

While this announcement did come as somewhat of a surprise to me, the timing is good.  I have effectively been preparing for this step for some years now, and it feels like the basic training  I have been doing all my working life until now has finally come to an end, and real life is just beginning!

While I am looking at some possible opportunities in employment elsewhere, I am most keen to get my own business on to a more commercial footing, and offer consultancy services based on my skills and experience.  This could include providing advice, driving projects, facilitating or speaking.  This could include areas such as:

• Knowledge Management
• Business Improvement
• Change Management
• Knowledge sharing tools and techniques
• Organisational communication and culture
• Learning strategies
• Use and benefits of social media tools (Web 2.0 & Intranet 2.0)
• Content Management and governance strategies
• Document Management

As things take shape, I will be updating this site to provide full information.  In the mean time, if you have any enquiries, or are aware of suitable opportunities, please contact me via the comments area below!