Okay. All right, cool. Sorry I had to switch zoom accounts and I've never done that before so that's new skill acquired.
Great yeah finally with us Thank you. Morning
sorry then the cat has certain requirements at this time of the day and I'm not managing it properly. It's called the Blofeld moment winning cognitive edge. Your cat is gorgeous but I've had to shut mine out of the room. And if I did that, I never be forgiven. I mean, we have two of these. There are two white cats and their twin sisters and you do not want to offend them.
I mean freedom
All right, there's at least one other person coming in. So just give them a second.
Go grab my coffee.
Yeah, people can introduce themselves in chat. That will save us time.
In two seconds.
Okay.
Now have caffeine so I feel able to get started. Okay, first of all, thank you to everybody for coming on this. Yeah. If you haven't seen, we had about 178 volunteers. And there have been 350, signups for individual sessions. So that's, that's fairly impressive. In terms of the size of the community, all right. So I'm so reminded people go along this is to effectively generate a codify body of knowledge in the wiki, right, and that is open source, Creative Commons, share and share alike attribution. So anything you put on to the wiki? Yeah, just be aware, it automatically goes out under that licence that says Creative Commons, share and share alike.
The only exception slightly on that is that part of the knowledge mapping process is one of the options for diary keeping, uses sense maker, which is our software, but we're going to put that up with a standard licence fee for that application. And generally, for all of the methods with I think one exception, you don't have to use the software in order to use them, I there are other options that you can go through. And we'd expect those to be built. Yeah.
The other thing to say by way of background here is we employ professional designers for the first time this year. So the idea is to use the content on the wiki, which will actually produce better design materials. We're looking at things like facilitation kits and other material that we're going to put together on this. And I think the goal here is to move a lot of this into the wider open space community to give you an idea for because some evolution, the Agile community,
we're also going to be starting to look at extension packs on the core cognitive edge methods. So for example, breaking down various agile methods, making them defining their interaction with our methods, and putting those out as well. So the idea here is effectively to create a distributed body of participation in new ways of working is kind of like the vehicle.
So the way this is gonna work is I think we're probably have two or three sessions per module.
We haven't booked the section sessions. Yes, yet. All right. So that's going to be there's the Skype chat is available for communication. I've got two I've got a second session a repeat of this this afternoon in order to hit the US timezone. Yeah. So there are roughly two sessions a day, one morning, one evening, that will be the start. And then after that, we'll get into work assignments and working together and that will almost certainly require further calls. But we'll schedule those and agree those with people using doodle and the slack slack space. Yeah. We got a good set of people volunteer to be cat herders. So each group has got one or two cat herders assigned. So they're going to start to take responsibility for chasing people down, driving people and make things happen because I can't do that across the full range of what we've got. And if you don't know how to use a wiki, or if you haven't used The Canadian wiki there are two sessions set up today, there will be more sessions set up throughout the week, right, including clinics. I don't want to spend all my time correcting people's entries or that I am doing a bit of that at the moment. But that's how Wikis get started, to be honest, it takes time to learn how to use them and learn the conventions. The only thing I would say up front is please don't create new articles without double checking the article doesn't already exist. Yeah, there's a full directory of them, you can look at them, but I'll take people through that on the training courses. Okay, before we jump straight into knowledge mapping and decision mapping, any questions on what I've said so far that anybody wants to raise? Yeah, cool. Okay, wiki IDs, per the previous email. At the moment, we're still waiting for the wiki to be set up so anybody can join it. That will be the case before too much longer.
We are going to insist on we're not going to allow anonymity. And that's partly because I'm one of the group of wiki Wikipedia editors and things our limit is bad because it creates trolls, yeah. And sock puppets and god knows what else. But if somebody wants to be anonymous, then they can declare their name to an admin. So we'll allow it provided somewhere in the system. There's knowledge of who people are, the way you get it for the moment is you send me an email, it takes me about 20 seconds, and I'm setting people up, right. As soon as it's available for free, I can stop that. But I need to have an email from you, which effectively is a request to be an engineer, I can't just set you up without that request. So that that simple. If anybody hasn't got the email address, I'll put it in there now. And to make it clear, we want this thing to work synchronously and asynchronously. So the slack group is there for shared ideas, our monitor that at least two or three times a day, I'll respond in there if I can. But I want to emphasise part of moving this into open space is to make it not just one person's ideas. So we have certain constraints about what this is about. So if somebody wants to put in Myers Briggs as a valid form of psychometric test, unlikely jump all over it, yeah. But we are expecting variations in this IE that people will come in with variations. And we're also developing this really key idea about what's called a coherent method. So there are methods which do not completely comply with the principles of anthro complexity, your stance making, but can be used with it. So these things can interact in different ways, right. And again, were things that hopefully will get out to this pop initial populate this initial sprint is a sprint, is that people will add in other links and other things of interest that people can use. And this is the first of many, I mean, this, this has been as successful. So I think every quarter will probably have a series of sprints around specific subject areas, yet to build that body of knowledge. So that's the plan. Okay. And Slack channel, if somebody could, if one of the cat heard his take on telling people about that, that would that would be great. Yeah. Somebody's done it for them. Okay, so we're now going to talk through two sets of methods or bodies of methods. And what I will do is put up in a Slack channel, which articles are therefore effective, one of the key principles of a wiki is you don't write twice. So you don't put everything into one place if it can be broken into modules, because then the modules can be picked up somewhere else. So identify what those components are. And this is actually one of the oldest bodies of methods within cognitive. He actually dates back to IBM days. In fact, some of his date backs to before I was in IBM Knowledge Management took off in the 1990s. based around the Narcos book, through a personal point of view, I've encountered NACA, NACA twice now once in agile and once in knowledge management. Each time he's written something which has triggered a movement, and he wrote a book called a knowledge creating company, published I think, in 1998. And that introduced the whole concept of tacit and explicit knowledge into the wider community. I don't think he ever understood Pilates original use of tacit because one of the key things palani says is no explicit knowledge can exist without a tacit component. But in an ARCA second model says that you collect tacit knowledge together it's called sechi. socialisation. You observed If people you talk with people, you have conversations, that's tacit to tacit, you then codify that material tacit to explicit, you write it down. Then other people read that material explicit to it. Now they share that material, it combines explicit to explicit. And other people read that material explicit to tacit. And that's called a knowledge creation spiral. Now around about the turn of the century, I and others said that was fundamentally flawed. I there are whole bodies of knowledge which could not be made explicit or by be made explicit, they're inherently compromised as a result. And that was when I first created three principles of knowledge management, which extended to seven. But the one relevant here is we always know more than we can say. We will always say more than we can write down.
And that links into a body of knowledge I subsequently did with Max price. So we've looked at a knowledge of taxi driver has which is deeply intuitive, is highly tacit, with a map, which is highly explicit. And then with narrative, as the bit between narrative becomes the ambiguous state between highly qualified and unco definable. And if you think about it, you have a real expert, you know, it tells stories about what they do, it's much easier to understand what they've written. And that leads into stuff. So there are a link blogs, articles on this, and a lot of the key blogs and the key posts need to come across articles. Yeah. So yeah, these will come across as they come. Either way. What then happened is, I looked at what was happening with knowledge mapping and mapping worldwide. And what you saw happening is people it was a classic sort of systems dynamics approach to things would happen when these executives would be got in the room and asked to define what sort of a knowledge based company they wanted to be something which is carried on with everything else right up to purpose in the current day, it always starts with the executives. So defining an idealised future state, and then the consultants rolled in to make it happen. Why people carry on with this after it's successively failed virtually every two years for the past 30 years, I don't know. But there are many things they don't understand, including anti vaxxers and young earth creationists and putting it in that category. Sorry, I'm early in the morning, glad to be slightly pejorative is a way of waking up properly. The so what we said is the problem and then the second thing would happen, they would go around and ask people what they knew. Now remember, the first time I said this Thursday, I said, You're asking a meaningless question in a meaningless context. Coming back to a second rule, we only know what we know when we need to know it. Yeah, human knowledge is deeply contextual, it requires circumstances to trigger it. And you probably all at some stage in your life said, Thank God, somebody has started to record this thing Selma. You've all probably all said it. So somebody said in their life, you know, I'll sleep on it. Now, if a human being is sleeping on something is actually a highly sophisticated cognitive task. I mean, sleeping about something is story old memories, recovering old memories, dreams are part of this. Yeah. Whereas on the other hand, if it if it, you know, and that a database or communities of practice, or one of these systems is sleeping on something, and it's just died, and it needs to be rebooted. So, human beings have this much more complex, then we require Association. you've all had that experience of looking at something and suddenly remembering something you could forgotten. And I was, I was vaguely investigated an area the other night for a vlog and I have remembered I'd read something about that at university. And I have to remember which book it was. So I went to the philosophy section of my study. And the book sort of stood out. And I picked it up. And within two seconds, I was on the right page, and I could see the underlining in the marks and the stuff I wrote. Yeah, about 40 plus years ago, I could never do that with a text based search. And one of the reasons is human beings do not just process text, we have far more complex forms of memory. Now in terms of the way it works, and that's part of the sort of background concepts and theory which we'll also see where you look on the wiki where we need to summarise that and get the sources together so that everybody can see it in one place. Yeah, that is, this is kind of like out there. And sorry, Anna has volunteered to be a resident gnome. Yeah, this is sorry, if you don't know. gnomes in Wikipedia, do all the details of stuff here. One of the things we all say you'll see it all the method templates is what's the what's the underlying theory Whatever the background papers that people can reference, or the background books, and we want that within the system as well, so people can see, this is coherent. Remember, the essence of this approach to sense making is to base what we do in natural science, not in people's experience. And that that's been a whole principle of naturalising sense making people's experiences subjective natural sciences objective. So what we started to do is to look at two things. One is, what would be a meaningful question. So and what would be a meaningful context?
Right, so if to ask somebody what they know, in abstract is, yeah, that's never gonna work. And when I was in IBM, I used to have fun, I used to get executives to sit in a circle and ask them, I give them a piece of paper and a pen and say, write down everything you know. And after about 10 minutes, they just stall, they just couldn't cope. Right. The reality is, you just can't, you can't do that, right. And then the third rule of knowledge management is knowledge is only ever volunteered, it can't be conscripted. You can't make people surrender their knowledge. And you all know this, if somebody comes to you and says, could you help me with this, it'll generally help them. If somebody says, Put all your knowledge into a database, so anybody can access it without talking to you first, you're probably not going to do it. Because if somebody asks you a question, you get a rich context. So you can work out what they know, and what they need to know. It doesn't take long to answer it. But to answering abstract independently of the question is almost impossible. So that's kind of the background drivers on this. That moves me into the first of the core methods, which is decision mapping. And, by the way, I will put some slides in in the slack group as well. But I'm trying to get people to listen to the concept and the thinking, because I don't want to do the code of vacation. The idea is to get different takes on this. So I'll put some slides up and things like that, but they don't define it. So we said we had to do two things. One is we have to ask a meaningful question. And the other we have to create a meaningful context. So that we look at the meaningful context first. And that was when we got into narrative. That was that was where it all started all those years ago, we didn't get into narrative is a form of communication, we got into it as a form of discovery. Because what we said is, well, people know what they know, when they make decisions. Decisions are the primary point. Yeah, when you make a decision, that decision is based on knowledge of some type. And so if I can ask you, when you made that decision, or that type of decisions, what did you know, I've created a meaningful context. And that, then that got us into what actually if people tell stories about things that they've done, we can identify the decisions from those stories. Yeah, and then we can look at those decisions. And we can ask a meaningful question. So that led into two approaches, and two sets of methods. One was anecdote circles, which is getting people together to talk about projects, talk about things that they've done, you really want people in the in the concrete here. And we also then discovered, it's not just about what people have done, but it's what they might have done. And that gave rise to a method called future backwards, which is pretty well documented, yeah, on the system. And that works on a couple of principles, including the idea of counterfactuals. If you take people through a project, and they've learned things on a project, for example, you take people through a project who've succeeded. And you ask them to create a counterfactual story about how they failed, you get actually a lot more data than if you carry that on with them talking about how they succeeded. And vice versa, a team that failed can create a counterfactual about how they succeeded. And you can do that over multiple timelines. And it's why storytelling has a double meaning it means to tell a story, but it also means to lie, but you lie in order that the community can learn. That's what storytelling does. It's often what if so might have beans or speculative type stories. So that's, you know, future backwards was one technique on that counterfactuals, where you deliberately take a point and say, What would have happened if this had happened instead? Now, there are lots of good examples on that in history. I mean, the one you'll all be fully aware of, because you know, your Welsh history is when so adding the last failed committees troops to support Simon De Montfort at the Battle of ition Yeah, and if he if he had done that, we would have had a parliament not King Edward and Wales would still be independent. And so that's pretty obvious that one for you, but you can take some other less obscure ones right?
So the famous thing when the British defeated the French, the Battle of Quebec, yeah. And they had Highland troops. So they could actually send those up what was considered an unclonable cliff face, they took montcalm from the back, the war was over, the French surrendered. Now, if that hadn't happened, and it was a close friend thing, then you wouldn't have had the American War of Independence because the French threat to the colonies would have existed, therefore, they couldn't have declared independence, you see how a counterfactual works? Yeah, you take a specific event where there was a turning point or a small decision point where somebody did something different from something else, and you extrapolated, and human beings love this type of storytelling. I mean, the amount of books which have been published about what would have happened if Hitler invaded, invaded Britain during the Second World War, Allegiant we love these sort of books. By they, there's a lovely one by Peter Davis. They're called Welsh girl, which is one of the best workings of Canadian as a concept I know, you actually build it on Canadian is the theme of the book. And Beto Davis is fascinating guy, Welsh, Chinese background. And you can see that in the right either way. So we developed a whole body of methods, which are about alternative history back histories. That was then when we started discover that the way people remembered things after the event was different from the way they remembered in that time. So famous case on this, we're doing a massive project on IBM lessons learned in outsourcing. And outsourcing them was a big thing for IBM, it was kind of like where all the money came from and services. And outsourcing is is a pretty significant sales effort. And it's very absolute, you either won the contract or you haven't. But in some cases, you might have spent 15, or $20 million on the bid. So if you fail, you got a problem. In fact, two years of my life was negotiating outsourcing contracts, where I was lead negotiator, and literally, I'd be in one room with CSC and another room and Accenture in another room. And the client would negotiate with us simultaneously. And you had to guess what they were conceding It was a lot of fun. Actually, I really enjoyed it. It was it was like a hugely sophisticated Wargaming. Right, then provided you didn't take too seriously. You generally weren't I found that you got into game mode. And you're prepared to sacrifice that's kind of like the Ender's Game strategy, you could always win. Yeah, if you actually worried about it, you generally didn't succeed. So we did a lessons learned process. And what we found there is, so we took a variation of future backwards, and we ran it the day before teams knew whether they won or lost the contract. And then we repeated it the day afterwards. And it was absolutely scripted. Your facilitator couldn't change anything. And when you compare the two stories, you thought you were talking about different different projects completely. There was no correspondence even within 48 hours, yeah, there was some common events. But before they knew what they were lost, the stories were highly contingent, and were quite rich. If they weren't, the stories became a retrospectively coherent hero's journey, in which they made all the right decisions at the right time. And they were a wonderful team. And if they'd lost the story was all about bad luck and bad judgement and lack of resource. And it was kind of like human beings change their stories in the present of the past to meet the political requirements of the President. So you could see that big time. And from that, by the way, we developed a really interesting process, we always broke up successful outsourcing teams. We did this in Europe, the saints just couldn't understand it. And what was interesting, even though it was very successful, they killed it, because it didn't match the way they wanted things to be successful. I found that a few times in my life in IBM. Yeah. So basically, if you're a successful team, you're broken up and people will split into other teams. Because the successful teams were arrogant and stop learning. If you're an unsuccessful team, and you didn't try and explain everything away, we kept you together, because they always want the next time. If you were trying to explain things away, well, that was when you went into the firing category. So I say future backwards counterfactuals, anecdotal circles, running projects forwards or backwards. But we said that the key thing here was to focus people on micro level actions, not grand visions. We didn't want to talk about why the project succeeded. Or did you know did the team have an agile mindset or, you know what, what did it have inspired leadership? All of that sort of stuff was was eliminated. You weren't allowed to make any evaluate The artist statement whatsoever.
And that that was kind of like a facilitation rule, no evaluative statement, all you can do is say this happened. And these things happened, everything had to be descriptive. And that was also by the way, the first time I use ritual humiliation, so I was working with one of the New Zealand ministries. And if you don't know it, and this is sensitive at the moment, because we're playing the English next weekend, New Zealanders feel about the Australians, like the Welsh feel about the English and the Canadians feel about the United States, right? So large aggregate next door neighbour who thinks you're part of them. So there's just sort of common tradition there. And so we basically said to all of these New Zealand educational officials, and they had three Australian rugby jerseys, if anybody breaks this rule, they have to wear one of these rugby jerseys. And then you have to find somebody else breaking the rule, and you can hand the jersey over to them. But if it's still on you, after 20 minutes, we'll take your photographic history right. Now, that was a very effective technique. And I was looking at a couple of people in IBM, New Zealand who didn't watch rugby. I mean, believe it or not, there are New Zealanders who do not understand rugby, mainly South Island Presbyterians, which probably explains it, right. So what we actually did is we got them to make this mistake first. So people took it in good humour. And by the way, that's kind of like an old facilitation trick. If you're not used, get get yourself humiliated up front, then you can get away with murder downstream is one of those two key roles. Yeah. So what that allows us to do is to get actual events or descriptions of things. Yeah, which we and as you go to a more micro level, you get more truth. The danger with evaluation is that's where lies creep in. So that that was kind of like the truth. And that then led us to another body of methods, we said, well, this is quite cool in your workshop. But what happens if for the last three months, all the key decision makers diarized their decisions? So every time they make a decision? Yeah, they write the decision up in a diary. And they also write it what information they use to make the decision. what information they communicated, because decisions are always information in information out. Yeah, I had that this material available to me, I made this decision, he got communicated in this way. So there's an information information out link on that. I'll extend this in a minute. And we also at the same time, we're like, well, what would have made it better? Or could I have communicated better, so you might as well capture that at the time. And so if over three or four months, all of your decision makers do that, that's very powerful. And if the decision makers that won't do it, one of the other options you have is to get an apprentice to do it. So I'm currently doing that within the health service. So we're putting in second year medical students to follow around senior consultants, and capture lessons learned in the field under fire. Yeah, and that's another option on this, you can capture decisions, but you can also do micro lessons learn as they're happening. And by the way, these are things that people found find relevant, whereas they don't find it relevant to turn up to yet another workshop or fill out another questionnaire. So those were decision diaries or lessons learned journaling, what all of that does is it gives you a huge accumulation. And you can do this manually, or we can do it with incense maker, your you can just do it with Google Forms, if you want there are various ways to do this. And we should have all of those sort of in the wiki is basically you had a huge cluster of decisions. But you also had information flows between decisions. So now we can very specifically on to decision mapping. So what you do with decisions is you say this is decision information out from one decision generally becomes information into another. So the first thing you do when you've got all of this material is you cluster the decisions because a lot of them are very similar. And ideally, you get the group themselves to do it. Now, so you have to take the material, cluster it, put it together, give the clusters a label. And by the way, for those involved in complex facilitation, you'll know we always use hexagons for this because people cluster hexagons differently from the way they cluster squares. So you basically get the hexagon cluster you then peel out the middle hex you can put it on the edge because different hacks again colour in the middle and say give that as a collective label. And once you've got that out, you then take those labels and you start to show the information flows between decisions.
You can do this As well with a tool called concept mapping, I mean, there are probably other tools, you may know them, let's put them in the wiki. I normally did it literally are taking a massive area of wall and putting it up and allowing people to move things around and draw lines and rub outlines and change things until they were happy. Yeah. And a decision This is called a decision information map. So it's a map of decisions with information flow between them. Now these to be quite honest, a hugely valuable in their own right. And when you draw them, even if you put them through optimising software, which you can do is when these concept mapping does, so the concept mapping tool I use allows you to cluster into another cluster and then dry it go upwards or downwards. So you can have simple maps, which then become more detailed. What it ends up looking like a spider's web. Yeah. Early in the morning, after a herd of cows have gone through the forest and knocked on the spiders had to remake it three or four times. It's really messy. And I remember the first time I saw this, and I thought, I've just seen that the process map on the financial directors wall, which is how he thinks things work. So we took his process map, we blew it up, and we put it on one wall and we put the decision information map on another wall and sent the executives in and say that's what actually happens. That's what you think happens? What are the differences? No. Now again, that's a standard complex facilitation technique, but it's very powerful. Alright, so I've got my decision information map, I now compare it with the process map, all organisations have got a process map of some type, you know, this is what should happen in what sequence. And that allows you to identify kind of like, several areas. So one is where the informal the way things actually are done, is better than the way we thought they should be done. Yeah, post COVID. We're seeing a lot of that. Yeah, and I remember when Yeah, just coming on in the midpoint at the moment, my mother and father both died within 10 days of each other. round about 17 years ago, there was not an interest, am I right in that middle point at the moment. So always have a period, both and died of cancer within 10 days of each other. And I still remember well speaking nurses, yeah, investigation of having phone calls in rapid fire north Wales, which I can't remotely follow. It just goes so fast. It's unbelievable. And then somehow, magically, AIDS would appear in my mother's house, so she could stay at home rather than going to hospital. And we informally signed off things for weeks later when they were meant to arrive. So basically, the informal networks made things happen before the formal systems could respond. Yeah, and you'll find a lot of things like that. Yeah. So there are things where the informal system is actually more effective than the formal system. And for anybody on the entangled trios, stream, that's one of the more advanced techniques for building informal networks, which can carry out certain tasks for you, rather than have to formally do it. We also found areas where To be honest, the process was right. And what we had is deviant behaviour or corrupt behaviour. And then, of course, there were hybrid cases where it was a mixture of both. So that immediately creates a series of projects. So I've got decision map, what actually happens. And the key thing here is nobody can challenge what you've done. Because the process wasn't a consultancy process. It was an ethnographic process bottom up. And that's kind of like a key principle. You said, Well, everybody kept their diaries. This is what came out of the diary. They can't say, Oh, you've got it wrong, you should have talked to Fred. Yeah. And that's, that's really important thing, complex facilitation. So that gives us a series of projects. And of course, those projects can be mapped onto connecting, and re clustered on there. And either executed by experts or be subject to safe to fail probes or whatever. So that's a generation. Yeah. Going through into that system. The other thing is, how do we ask a meaningful question? Now, that was another key element. So that was when I created the thing called action.
And this is a topology, you know, important distinction. topologies give you different perspectives on things. taxonomies give you different categories. It's a really important distinction. So if you ask a type of logical question, and you get an answer, you don't then worry about where it fits, because the purpose of the question is to find the things which people wouldn't otherwise have thought of, not to say things are in rigid categories. So action which is up there as a sense making framework stands for artefacts skills, heuristics. experience and natural talent. So I'll run through those five artefacts from Latin artists. In fact, there are things which are manmade. So those can be spreadsheets tools. Yeah. It is literally physical things. Yeah. Which these days would include compute computer software, or whatever. So those are artefacts. There are then skills now I defined a skill as anything, what I can measure whether somebody can do it or not. And the case I always use was plastering. I've written this up a couple of times, in my life, I've rebuilt about three houses, including putting in central heating and rewiring houses. And I'm quite comfortable with doing that work. In fact, I wish I could do some more of it, but my knees are no longer up to the work. But the one thing I'm never ever going to do, again, is plaster a wall. It's a bloody nightmare, right. And I had all these books on the, you know, the seven easy steps to plaster in the wall. I think it put me off those live books for life, right. And I did everything it followed. And after about 24 hours, the plaster stopped falling off the wall and on me and it sort of stuck on it. And I ended up you know, hiring an industrial sander to sand it flat enough, I could tile the wall, and then went around to the local pub. This is all buzz It was called the rats castle, which was a highly appropriate name for it. And yeah, ask the public and I knew quite well, I was rebuilding the house and pop it into the pub frequently. If he knew a plaster, and he introduced me to this Yeah, old guy who was, you know, look, you know, fairly nondescript, and I did a barter deal with him. I gave him all the tools that I bought to be an amateur plaster. Yeah. And he came in and plastered the room for me. And it took him one and a half hours, and it was perfectly flat. Yeah, now that's a skill. And the key elements in measuring whether somebody's got a skill or not, is some sort of performance measure, but also the time it takes them to do it. And by the way, it says there's a major problem in the Agile community, the fact you've been on a two week course doesn't mean you got the skill yet. In terms that sense, right? So scale is you should be able to do this sort of thing in that time set. And that's measurable. So these are all fairly concrete. Yeah. You then move on to the next one, which is heuristics or habits. I use the H for both. Yeah. So heuristics or rules of thumb, you'll find all experts have these. You know, if if the widget is going bright blue run, like hell, or variations on that, right. And these sort of heuristics developed within communities over time. Yeah. And there are some weird ones, somebody said, How the hell do you keep finding airing code? And I said, Well, I print the code off in 24, point tight, put it up on the wall, and cross my eyes, and I can see what's wrong with it. It is actually, by the way, an extremely good technique. Because crossing your eyes disconnects you from what you expected to see, you see things you didn't expect to see. Now that's a humoristic. Right? It's a rule of thumb, or it's a habit of work. Yeah. So we want to capture those. Yeah. And then there's experience, there's some things you simply can't do unless you've got the experience. I don't remember the first time I got taught mountain navigation. Yeah, it was, yeah, Oregon, 14 year old. And they deliberately set up the roots. So if we if we didn't bother to do the compass bearings properly, and we thought we understood the map, we ended up in tangled in dense undergrowth unable to escape. All right. After you've been through that, you learn your lesson. And next time you follow the compass bearings now, and you realise it's there for a purpose. So there's an experience of failure is quite important here. So that's one of the questions you ask is, when did you fail and learn something from it.
And that's actually when fictional statements are quite powerful. And then the final one, and this is kind of like the capsule, which is natural talent. Some people are simply better at doing things and others, it's, you know, it may be down to how they were, how they were born up. We know if you don't, don't get certain types of empathetic care before your three parts of your brain never develop. And for example, you'll never be a pilot. Right? So it may not be your fault, but the reality is the stage you are now as an adult, there are certain things which you can do and certain things you can't do and certain things you're very good at. And that also links into my cognitive diversity. By the way, most good coders are on the autistic end of the spectrum, because it requires that skill. dyslexia, which I have, is actually very closely correlated with innovation because this and I read, read a book or page at a time I don't read it, so sentence by sentence, I'm looking at a pan. Yeah. And Dyslexics make novel connections between things and just can't understand why everybody else hasn't seen it yet, because it's pretty obvious. And so it's very frustrating the ignorance of people, when you come up with a brilliant idea, and they want you to go through all the stages, you've got to achieve it and really study ridiculous, why do you have to go through, I don't even know what stages I went through. And that that's actually important when you get to the natural talent stage. So that then gave us this next key component is okay, let's look at all the decision clusters. Let's get a group of people together and say, okay, when you made this class of decisions were artefacts, what skills what heuristics? What experience? What's natural talent. And remember, at that time, you can also include the counterfactuals, or decisions which weren't made, but they think maybe they should have made, you can create fictional decision information maps with groups of users how they think it should happen. This is all a sort of rich Milan, just stuff from which you produce concrete material. So this is a two stage emergence process. I'm linking to specific methods here. Yeah. And what I now got is I've This is actually the design Double Diamond. All right, but this is from 30 years ago, what I've done is I've broken things down, and I'll pull them together again. So what you do is you take all of your action elements, and of course, each of them is written on one of these hex and composed it notes virtually or physically, without its origin clear. And you get people to cluster them into what I called. And this may not be the right name, knowledge objects. And my definition of a knowledge object is something which can be managed as a whole. So it's kind of like what I would now call about the lowest layer, the lowest level of manageable granularity will be the phrase here. If you're if it's too finely grained, you just can't manage it. So what's what's the clustering thing. And so it might be a carpenter and his tools, for example. And the carpenter has this sort of experience with this sort of training. So that's a bundle, but then it becomes something which can be named as a knowledge object. Now, that is really important. And that links in with what we call exaptation. Because if you capture knowledge at that level of granularity, then you can find ways to associate it with current problems. So you get this lateral, what's called radical repurposing in the handbook. And anybody on the acceptation stream, we're going to assume the input from your screen. So I've got these knowledge objects. Now, how do I associate these with novel problems. And just to warn you, if you're on the accepted acceptation stream, you will have to sign an NDA because that doesn't just involve our IP, it involves another software companies IP. That's actually one of the most exciting streams. But you know, I've got some constraints on this. So those are knowledge objects, just having those is valuable. It's a it's a messy chart. Now, what we then did is we started to combine it with another element. And this is where we move into what we used to call a qq matrix. But it's just a matrix, right? And so we will go to all executives in the company. And we'd ask them what's keeping you awake at night? We wouldn't sit them down and ask for a strategic assessment and an idealised future planning tool. We'd say what's keeping you awake at night, operationally and strategically? So what are you worried about? And we go to all of them individually, and not allowed them to talk to each other.
And once we captured that material, we cluster it and represented them as a group. And that itself was actually hugely valuable, because you could say, well, you're all agreed on this one. But this one's an outlier. Why do you think that's an outlier? Right. And from that, we would effectively get an agreed set of real world issues, which have to be addressed in the short term or long term, again, you can see this, nobody's allowed to talk about how things should be you need to be deeply concrete in what you're doing. And then we create a matrix with executive problems on the top knowledge objects. Yeah, on the vertical axis. And we'd send that out to the whole workforce and say, you know, in this matrix mark, the ones where you think there's high dependency, and we might limit them to 20 or 50. And we might have multiple different matrices. The Matrix in bank of Thailand was I think, 5000 columns by 8000 rows. But that was the aggregate everything was broken down into smaller components then put back together and by the way, I think there's a is an interesting sideline there for somebody to write Excel processes to do that sort of thing and automate it. Yeah. But what you've then got is you've got this lovely matrix. Yeah. And then you use the cross line text technique. Again, you look at that you look at the material. Yeah. And you see where there are patterns. And there tend to be vertical patterns, which is where a single problem can be addressed by better management of a whole bunch of different knowledge objects. And horizontal programmes where managing a single knowledge object better would impact on many business problems. You'll see this when you look at the slide set. And of course, there's vertical and horizontal stripes, you never get a single point you never get if I manage this object, I can solve that problem. And that itself is revealing. It shows into dependencies. And that creates another set of projects, which again, you put with the projects you got from mapping the decision map to the process map. And those go into connection, they get clustered and grouped. And only then do you make technology decisions. So you don't start your knowledge management programme with we need a community of practice. You start off by defining a whole bunch of micro projects. And if those need a community of practice, then you do one. And you can see the inherent pragmatism, a set naturalising sense making in that approach. So there are a whole series of sub methods in this. So action is an article, right? decision information, mapping the matrix finding out the all of these things become separate articles. Because they're separate methods. Knowledge mapping is what we call an assembly. So it's where the where methods are put together in a workflow. So in terms of wiki construction, all of the elements need to be articles in their own right. And then the knowledge management assembly article shows how they all flow together, but links in with the original articles. And I actually manage that with one minute in only one minute more than I plan to. Now, as I say, I'll send you a single slide which shows the whole of that on it. Yeah. But again, this is me using the cognitive neuroscience. If I give you a picture, you'll start to extrapolate on the picture and you won't listen to what I'm saying. Alright, so we've recorded this. Yeah. Has anybody tried that new software? Everybody's advertising to transcribe zoom? What's it called? After That's it, okay. Is it and is it worth it? Because if it is worth it, I'll get it and start to use it on us?
Well, it depends what you want from your transcription. In short, if you just want the text, then it's sort of Okay, you'll need to tidy up some of it. If you want any nuance at all, you're going to have problems so it doesn't handle overlaps and like fluency and that sort of thing. Well,
so your rabbit will grab a reasonably accurate transcription.
Yeah, I mean, 95 96%.
That's okay. What I may do is, is may do that, then because I think I'm going to do this twice. I'm going to remember things next time. I didn't remember this time and vice versa. Yeah. Yeah, I probably won't, because I've done eight, eight other sessions, including another bloody session with us lawyers, which I'm not looking forward to mid afternoon. It's okay, you can win cases, but then you've got to collect your damages and know just how badly off they are. So that's the problem. Okay, so open forum now questions, things, whatever.
You said about putting in like the supporting theories. So like, where there's papers that support a particular idea? Would you also want to include things, almost the counterfactuals of that. So if there's a paper that suggests or which you've said, No, I'm ignoring that, because do you want the whole thing documented? Or?
I think so. And I think I mean, first of all, I don't I mean, I'm, I spent many hours with Jimmy Wales over the years, largely in Singapore, talking about this and with great reluctance, because he's a bloody Ayn Rand supporter. And he was on the wrong side in the EIN Rand debate on Wikipedia, for which I got blocked for three months. Yeah. It's all right there. And I was allowed to, I was only blocked from the main page. I wasn't I was allowed to contribute to the talk page, but the RAND investors were banned for a year or two years each. So I consider myself an acceptable sacrifice in the ongoing war against evil. Right. But I think one thing, see, I mean, what Jimmy does is he sort of, he is an ultimate sort of check. It doesn't get out of hand and he does a particularly good job on what are called biography of living persons. I mean, my own article gets savagely. I mean, it hasn't been trolled for a year ago, that you'll find if you're remotely controversial, the trolls just appear So the goal on here is if something is clearly not actualized in sensemaking, then it may belong in the wiki. But Mark does such. Yeah, I this is a coherent technique which links into it, but it's not one of the core techniques. Yeah. So for example, I'm breaking Scrum down at the moment. So sprint is a coherent technique. It's actually quite interesting when you take Scrum into its lowest decomposable elements, and you combine it with other decomposable elements, like for example, time boxes, you can suddenly create a whole new methods on the fly, which is what we're planning to do with a facilitation pack is getting down. So as people start to assemble projects, they don't follow recipes. They're putting together different ingredients in different combinations. So it's to realise the chef concept. Yeah. So I think that's it. I mean, if you search on any of the keywords, you'll find what I've written on the blog, and the blog search is now really good. Thanks to me, you can find things fast. The trouble is you find 15 articles, and you look at one you can't go back to the 15. You got to do the search again. But we are hoping to fix that, aren't we only right? Sorry, I've just seen she's there. So and I think, you know, Lincoln, for example, has a section on the method for blog posts, because the evolution of the methods is quite interesting in its own right. Yeah. And related or other articles. So yeah, I mean, it's all there. Right. And as I say, I mean, the nice thing from my point of view, and the reasons I like the wiki is I can I monitor 1500 articles on the main Wikipedia. Yeah, it's really easy to do, but you can just look at it. See the the last editor was if it's somebody you know, they know what they're doing, you don't look at it. If it's a new editor, you check it. So you're not having to constantly review documents, you can always see the latest changes. Yeah. And that's really good for the community here. Because if you're about to use a method, you can look at the history of the changes. Yeah, and and see what happened, because nothing is ever lost on a wiki. And remember, the talk page is where you have discussions. So the main page is always the page. Yeah, and what we'll do when we publish this into facilitation kits, it was it will simply grab the latest version every quarter. That's a nice little programme at great it grabs the markup script, it translates it into whatever format we use and bang it out. But anyway, yes. kathina. Okay.
Sorry. So we are documenting things that are already documented. What about, for example, methods that were created, let's say for a workshop, or instead of an organisation that were never like, written down as a white ad, and you have to document
them, you'll actually find not everything I've talked about today is documented yet. That's why it's a sprint. So it's grab this is
a place that
that's the right place. And that's what the cat is, the cat herd is here to get you clustered into groups. Well, I'll work on that your work on that, then we'll come together. Okay, we got two minutes before I have to move on to constraint mapping.
There's a couple of interesting questions in the chat, I wanted to draw your attention to by Sicilian oma, not by me. One is about basically people who are sceptical about sharing details on decision making. And the other is about the level of awareness of the information people used when making a decision. Okay.
Now, I think that those are important. If you look at the method it has, each method has a two column, it has a two column table, which is what you do on the left and notes about it in the middle, we may need to introduce a third, which is what you do if you're doing this virtually. That's where you start to do this, and you start to give tips about how to handle that. So one things I'll say up front is micro level decisions. You don't have to you don't have the confidentiality issue, you have a macro decisions. So people are far less fussed about it. Right? The use of fictional spaces rather than factual spaces is another way. Yeah, that's what we created after simulation. So you entirely work in a counterfactual universe. Yeah. So that nobody and that was when I found fascinating if you tell people to lie, they would tell the truth. And if you told them to tell the truth, they would lie. That literally if you created a counterfactual thing and you kept the pace up and this is a tip, you didn't give them any space to think they fell back to what it actually happened, but they expressed it in a fictional form. And we got a lot closer to reality that way. So there are tips and topics on that. But again, I think this is an important point to city. If you don't know you asked that question on the talk page. Somebody else will pick up the talk page and may give an answer. And then that can go into the text. The key thing about a wiki is it's a living body of knowledge. So if you're running a workshop and something works, you just put it in the wiki there and then it then it doesn't have to go into change release cycles or anything else. It's a collective effort. And yeah, we will put up the recorded versions. Okay, all right. We're on the hour. Yeah. slack group is where we organise follow up groups. I'm doing another group this afternoon. Cat herders are responsible for putting things together but feel free to do it yourself. If you haven't got an ID email me and you'll get an ID sometime later that day. Okay. Right.