question I'll be joining us I try and put a 18 month old to sleep and is participate active participation required for this call.
You'll you'll be okay for most of it. I think if one is anything to go by Dave was pretty much on a roll for 40 minutes. 45 minutes or so. Alright, cool. Hopefully she's asleep by then. And yeah, we'll see. Thank you.
Oh,
I see a lot of familiar faces.
Have you been buried in exploratory all day?
Now I've did. I did this session at 6am this morning. I've had one hour off and managed to spin off on the bike for 25 minutes to at least get some exercise but other than that it has been a zoom full day as they say. But it's I mean, the enthusiasm for this is brilliant. It's just being you know, this is my fourth or fifth session. Just on this and on how to use the wiki. And we if you don't know, we had 178 signups of individuals to take part in this programme. And there was, shall we say, some controversy in cognitive edge, but I just said, right, everybody's on it. We're not selecting 20. Yeah. And yeah, don't tell me about firewalls, right. But the other good thing is that every there's 490, signups for individual sessions. That means everybody's doing about three to four on average. So that's cool. It's gonna it's critical mass to create the material. And that's, that's just really exciting.
Okay, just give it a few more minutes. Marian, do you need to go on the doodle poll and pick something a new thing for HSE? Because we we didn't go with that date. So if you tell me which you want me to select, I'll select it, because there isn't one where everybody can do it.
Okay, we have to make sure there
is whose most important or I'm not taking responsibility. You can do that.
yet? No, I was asked on Friday. And today. So I am back in the morning, and I take a look at this. All right.
Cool. What
are y'all?
Did you see i'd sent through you are not a transcript of this morning, Steve. I did. And that was brilliant. I mean, I think the more people do things like that and put it in the slap, the better because that's actually kind of like spirit of wiki as well. It's just do what you can do when you can do it and make it available for other people so that the recordings of all of these sessions or going into the slack group, and if anybody want it after transcripts will help hugely on that. And yes, it says up front, every every slack group has got one or two cat herders who I've decided I like because they they all collectively individually, just ignored me and got on and organised it, which probably proved they were the right people to self select themselves. All right, they just ignored me. So one of the key things in those groups is if you were only doing two in each section, apart from constraint mapping, which I think is next, I think that this is knowledge mapping, isn't it just to make sure I'm not getting confused. constraint mapping has got a conceptual discussion and a method discussion. But for all the others, I'm assuming we'll be setting up other groups. So the categories will organise people, people will want to work on things. If you want another session, then we'll just organise other sessions as people demand them. So that's down to each each Working Party, in effect to organise is the principal. And I've just two more how to use the wiki. So I'll set up a couple more of those for further up, probably set up another four of those this week. Yes, so people can come on and and just learn how to you if you don't, but if anybody gets confused, or a group gets confused, or you want help, just ping and one of us will come and work with you for a bit.
Okay.
There's still people popping in,
I think.
Give it a couple of seconds, and I'll get started. Can I ask a question up from that what we're going to be dealing with today is one of the oldest groups of methods within cognitive edge, which if you don't know, it started in the field of knowledge management. years ago, when I got deeply frustrated with people taking the NACA seriously. And I've had this twice in my career, he wrote the article, which created agile Scrum, and he also wrote the knowledge creating company. So a lot of the methods actually came out to the opposition to that idea, and I'll go through some of that in the middle. But if people just put their hands up if they've worked in knowledge management as a field, so I get a sense of Okay, not many, right. So apart apologies to you'll have to be nice to me, but I'm going to do some one on one stuff and feel free to jump in and tell me where I'm wrong if it comes to it. Okay, well,
I'm most of the time frustrated with what I have to do so.
Yeah, I know it's, you know, too many philosophers to be taken seriously and knowledge management circles, there's, there's this great irony.
Well, the problem for me now that it's hard for me to get to go back, you can't go back when the more you delve into this, it's harder to go back. So it's a bit of a problem for me actually.
It's really funny actually, IBM is one of the ways you know, Something is is reaching the end of its lifecycle when it is when IBM adopted as a strategy. And I mean, we found this I mean, they'd have myself and Larry preset for years, and then they decided knowledge would be strategic. So they organised the workshop to produce IBM's approach to knowledge management, and we both got invited, which was nice. Then I got uninvited because I was considered too dangerous. And Larry got asked to do a 20 minute presentation then got sent away. And a group of people had no expertise or reputation in the subject produced the slide set and told us we all had to use it. I've never forgotten that. And Larry and I interest in both have the same reaction, we we learned not to fight IBM. So they sent this email saying, These are the standard slides. And we both independently replied, We promise if we ever use slides, we will use those slides. And you know, from that point onwards, we just never use slides again. So we were compliant, right? You never fight a bureaucracy use it against itself. Okay, so let's get started on this. Knowledge mapping is what we call an assembly. Now it's important you get this right. And assembly is a collection of methods and concepts. So if you go on to the wiki, you'll see there are separate pages for those. So kind of like, a method is a discrete thing, it has a set of steps you go through, it may or may not require some conceptual understanding. It may link with concepts, it may link with metaphors and things like that. But fundamentally, it's a discrete unit. And assembly is a collection of methods that you put together in sequence. Now, knowledge management is actually one of those, right? So there's a whole body of things in it. And decision mapping is distinct. So I'm going to start off with that. And then build up is also potentially links in with a key aspect of the Field Guide, which has four stages in it, which is assess, adapt, accept, transcend. Now, the Accept phase is key, because that's where in order to get out of a crisis, yeah. And Barney's on so we got another kms expert here now, so that they start to accumulate, right? What you do is sorry, is in a real crisis, you haven't got time to invent things from scratch. So you've got to radically repurpose things you already know. So knowledge mapping is a key aspect of this. And you have to map at the right level of granularity. Because if you over structure material, it can only be used for what it was designed for. Whereas if you break things down into smaller components, you can reassemble them very quickly for novel purpose. So we're gonna get to that point in a minute, right? If you think about it, the whole of organic life form comes from four basic chemicals in different combinations in DNA. So getting the granularity right is key. Okay, so the origins of this were knowledge management became really popular after the Narcos book in 1998. Which created a thing called the psyche framework, which if you haven't seen it is a consultancy to buy two weeks which says you have tacit knowledge which gets shared tacitly so tacit to tacit known as socialisation in which you observe people, you talk with people, you have conversations, you then codify that tacit to explicit codification. Yeah. So you make it explicit. Sorry, socialisation, externalisation. And then you combine the explicit sources combination, and then you read the material that's called internalisation. And that's called the knowledge creation spiral. So the idea is that you have ideas, you codify them. Only when they codify can they be shared? And if you read the material, you've acquired the knowledge No, I remember saying at the time that may work to describe the process, by which a Japanese manufacturing company produces an automatic breadmaker. But it's got bugger all to do with the wild field and a wider field of knowledge management, because tacit knowledge can't be made explicit. And it's quite interesting, the narco quotes to palani but obviously hasn't read him. Because palani says no explicit knowledge can exist without a tacit component. Yeah, which which is an important concept.
And I developed a phrase a plan a plan, he famously said, we always know more than we can say. I extended that to say not only do we always know more than we can say but we will always say more than we can write down. And that links to related work with Max brasso, which needs to be in the wiki. And I blogged on this and this is from work that Max and I did on paper tablecloths and sieges near Barcelona which is the best place to develop ideas. And basically that said, You have sort of three fundamental types of knowledge. And this is a topology, it's a gradient is kind of like the deep knowledge of a taxi driver who just knows how to drive and doesn't have to think about it. And if you don't know it, London taxi drivers have an enlarged hippocampus. Because the process of going through two years training means that their body and their brain co evolve to the point where they know things, you then have the hardly explicit knowledge of a map. And then you have this lovely thing which sits between it, which is narrative. Yeah. Which is how the different things connect with different things. Right. So kind of like that, that is a key aspect of it. And that fits in that we know more than we can say, we can say more than we can write down, there is knowledge, which is never codify this knowledge, which you can explain and there's knowledge, which is structured. And that also relates into a key thing about knowledge management, if you ask somebody for help, they will generally help you. Because your questions, give them the context and know how to use their knowledge. On the other hand, if you write ask somebody to write down all the knows, so that you can use it without their engagement. A they won't do it, because they won't trust you to use it without some supervision. But B is just impossible to do. Because you can't write down everything. You know, I used to run an exercise with IBM executives, which was cruel, but you know, with IBM vice president said that it's not really cruel. It's just some recompense for what they've done to human humanity over the years. And I used to give them a sheet of paper and a pen and say, write down all you know, and after 10 minutes, they froze. Yeah, they just couldn't cope with it. Yeah, in terms of where it works. So what you actually had is a whole bunch of consultants who offered to do knowledge mapping. And they use the classic approaches, they come in talk with the chief executive officer in his board agree that they wanted to become a knowledge creating company, because that was the lens fashion that then went on to, you know, being an agile company. And now it's been a purposeful company. These things come around every two years, and nothing really changes. It's just a surface language changes, and they degree, a set of idealised statements, and then they might do a knowledge audit. And that was entirely composed of sitting people down in workshops, or interviewing people and saying, What do you know? Now, I've said for years and say that is asking a meaningless question in a meaningless context. So I've already given you one rule of knowledge management knowledge, we always know more than we can say, we will always say more than we can write down. Another one is knowledge can only ever be volunteered, it can't be conscripted. You can never know whether somebody is really giving you their knowledge or not is kind of like you You need a volunteer type community. But the other one is key to this is we only know what we know when we need to know it. human knowledge is deeply contextual, require stimulus. And at some stage, all of you will said something like asleep on it. Now, a human being sleeping on something is engaged in a hugely complex neurological process of memory recall, and what's called conceptual blending in neuroscience of blending together different concepts to come up with novel ways of working about it. But if a computer database is sleeping on it, then it needs rebooting. It's kind of like a very different process. Yeah. And you've all had that experience of suddenly remembering something from years ago, and I had it two days ago, I was writing. I was dealing with a savage attack by a whole bunch of cybernetics fanboys, who have decided I'm dangerous and need to be destroyed on LinkedIn, which is amusing the intensity. They don't realise I like social media baffles are regarded as mildly entertaining. And it's fun, right? So I had to go and read some articles. And I was always trying to remember something from when I studied Sartre back at university, and I couldn't quite remember what it was. But I walk around the corner from where I'm sitting to the philosophy section of the library in the study. And within two seconds, I found the book, I opened the book, and I found the passage almost instantly with my original markup from 3040 years ago.
And if you want to know this, there's all sorts of things about the way human beings remember things which involve rituals and physical feel. You can leave through a book and find something, whereas you can't do a keyword search. So that concept of creating a context was key. So what we started to do and this method is called decision mapping. So this is kind of like one key component of overall knowledge mapping is we said we have to ask a meaningful question. And then we have to ask it in a meaningful context. So I'll start with a meaningful context. And as we start to look at it, we said, well, knowledge is revealed when people make decisions. Right? So kind of like if you go to people, when they make a decision and ask how they make the decision, they'll know what they know. And by the way, it needs to be at the time if at all possible. Because the way we recollect things even a day later is different from the way we recollect we we actually do things like I can give you some experimental data on that. So what we decided to do was to basically interview people but not ask what they knew, but asked what decisions they made. And we'd sort of prompt that with take me through a typical day, what decisions do you make on a day? What decisions do you make in a week? What decisions do you make in a month? What decisions do you make in a quarter? What decisions do you make in a project? What decisions do you make when a project is going wrong? So there's a whole series of interesting questions that you can ask. And we need the sort of listed within the wiki of questions you can ask which will stimulate people to remember things. And that allows you to identify decisions or types of decisions and contexts in which you can ask people what they know. And I'll talk about how we ask that in a minute. That's called ash. After we did that, we also did a series of experiments in IBM and this was on outsourcing projects. So these are the days when outsourcing was huge. In fact, it was the bulk of IBM service revenue. And if you don't know it, outsourcing bids are massive. So a big cost can be 1015 $20 million. And then one day, you've either won or lost. So the bid team, are they heroes or villains? Yeah, these are, these are huge bids. And for two years of my life in data sciences, I was actually one of the three lead negotiators. So you'd end up we were one of one of three companies bidding against CSC or Accenture. And literally, I'd have a team in a room and I knew Accenture in the next room and CSC we're in the next room. And the client would be negotiating with us in parallel, and you have double guests, what the other guys were offering. And I used to thoroughly enjoy this. By the way, if it's not your money, it's highly entertaining. And if you treat it as a game, it works right. It's like Ender's Game if you if you try and take it too seriously, it will work right. But if you if you if you don't know Ender's Game, they think they're playing a game. So they do this average things, right? Don't talk about the film, because that's a travesty. So we then decided, so what happened is we did the lessons learned process the day before a team knew whether they won or lost the contract. And then we repeated the identical scripted process that they afterwards and you would think you were talking about different universes. So what people said before they knew whether they won or lost was highly contingent that was actually the richest material. After they knew if they won, all of a sudden, it became a hero's journey in which they made all the right decisions. And they were brilliant, and they forgot about all the luck. And if they failed, it was a wonderful story of lack of resource unfair competition. Yeah, the client didn't make the right decision. So it was excuses. And it was exactly the same process separated literally by 24 hours max. And that sorry, sidebar on that one things which came out of that which we did in Europe, but the states refused to implement this, they said it couldn't be true. Because the states have this belief that if you had a successful team, it would always be successful. And what we said actually is successful team has to be broken up because they become complacent. So if the team succeeds, they always get broken up, if they failed, and they don't have excuses. You keep them together, because they'll always succeed the second time. And we proved them. And if they basically got excuses, well, those are the ones you find. And after three years, and it was hugely successful, the US candidate, because it didn't fit the way they fought, things should happen. It was quite fascinating to hear the conversation, right when it came down to it, either way to come back to the point. So we decided if at all possible, we should capture knowledge at the point of contact. So that was where we got into knowledge journaling. Now, you can do this with with books. And just to be clear on this.
There's nothing in any of our methods you can't do manually, but there are aspects of it where you can use sense makers. So we're making sure those are distinct, right? So you can just get people to keep diaries every time they make a decision. You pre print these. And what you want to know is when I make a decision, what information did I have information in what information did I communicate because you always give information out at the end of a decision what would have made it better And then questions like, what tools do they use? How did I feel about it? Yeah, with sense maker, we can make this much more sophisticated because we can put in decision triangles. The other thing we're now doing around COVID, and that's going to be announced next week is, and I think we were may make this free to use individually, up to a certain limit is a lessons learned during COVID. Because actually, when you learn a lesson, that's a type of knowledge capture. And if people can put that into an app, as it happens, that's much better. And by the way, we're doing this with the NHS, because nobody wants to take part in a wellness survey anymore. So for the first time, in 10 years, the wellness people are prepared to talk with me, because everybody's refusing to fill in their bloody surveys or come to their workshops. And they're all upset for some reasons. So what we're actually doing the same Well, actually, we can detect many early indications of mental health in the way that people interpret a lessons learned. So by doing the lessons learned, it's meaningful. And we can use that to create indications of mental health, which is a massive problem. And it also allows us to use apprentices. So we've done things famously in the North Sea. You can't get engineers to keep diaries, because they consider that something that people in the humanities do and engineers can, like despise the humanities, and the mildly more than they despise real scientists, right. So what we did is we sent engineering students out to shadow them for two weeks. And the engineering students kept the diaries for them. And we're doing that now in the NHS with second year medical students, they're deploying third and fourth year medical students onto real tasks. But second year, medical students can't, but they know enough to stay out of trouble and to ask interesting questions of doctors and nurses. So you can use proxies to capture material. But what you're doing is you're basically spending a month or two months or whatever or a week, capturing the actual decisions made and how people made those decisions at the time. Now, and that that's far more valuable. Now, what you then do is information into one decision is information out to another. So basically, you cluster the decisions, because you'll, you'll have lots of them, right? And some of them are almost identical, so you cluster them. And then I normally do this with Mexicans. So Mexican post it notes on a big wall. And you basically put them up and get people to sequence them and then draw lines and say what sort of information flows in or out of them. And of course, you've got that data anyway. And if you get a decision with no information out or no information in, you know, you've got to go back and investigate again, because you miss something. There is quite a good disclosure mechanism. And then we use concept mapping software. But some of you may know better software, in which case, put it in the wiki. And we capture all the stuff on the wall and what the concept mathema software does it can nest it can nest decisions or hold them separately, is it adjacently produces the neatest possible diagram. So it sort of optimises the firm produces it. Yeah. Now, the one thing I can tell you is any decision inflammation map always looks after a spider's web early in the morning on a wet day, after occurred of cows have gone through the field I sort of messy and deeply entangled is not structured. And then remember the first time I did this with with Virgin our price group, I thought, well, this doesn't look like that process map I saw in the financial directors wall. So I got his process map and blew it up. And I sent the whole board version, our price into a room with a process map on one wall, and the decision information map on another. And I said that's what you think happens. That's what actually happens. And nobody could challenge it. Because I as a consultant can produce the map, the maps have been produced by all of their staff producing diaries over a month. Now, and that allowed us to identify effectively three types of project where the formal said where the informal way of doing things is better than the formal system. Now we're seeing a lot of that at the moment in the health sector because the crisis has meant that people have kept bureaucracy.
And what's interesting, that's always been the case. And in that really weird period, I have a rear view. Now my parents both died within 10 days of each other. Which was a really bad period. I was just turning 50 at the time. And I've never forgotten the Welsh speaking nurses who spoke northwell so fast and I'm not a native speaker I can just about understand some of it. But I couldn't even get I think even though it was they were using Visio so fast that they would have very rapid conversations with district nurses and friends of theirs in Anglesey yeah and next time minute, some person would turn up at my mother's house and build something on the shower. And we'd be told not to say we have it for at least three weeks, because that's how long the formal process took. So basically, the nursing staff had found ways to make life easier for people yet by using their informal networks, and that's you typically find that sort of stuff out. So then you have to ask, is that a better method? Because actually, it was properly controlled, there was no fraud involved. So actually, that method may be better one than a formal process. Or you may say, actually, that isn't proper, I won't go into procurement decisions by the EU, UK government at the moment, which ourselves so we say verging on Latin American levels of corruption in my opinion. So we have to go back to a more formal system. Or maybe we fuse the two. So what that maps I've got a decision information map, which is really useful and maintaining that continuously is also useful. I compare it with the process map, and that generates a whole series of projects. And they're not huge projects, which require massive investment. There are lots of small projects where I can see what I should do. And I've got the background narrative to explain it and give context. Now. So that's decision mapping. And then another method compare decision mapping with processes to create projects. And of course, those projects can then be mapped onto the Canarian framework and clustered there. Yeah, and that's when you also make decisions about technology. So you don't decide to create a community of practice because everybody else has created a community of practice. And the CEO heard about it from another CEO on the golf course. So he thinks it would be a cool idea, you only build a community of practice if actually you need it for the project is kind of wet. So you the technology is a secondary choice. Now, as kind of like one component another component on this is starting to match is starting to look at how we this is kind of a meaningful question. Now to ask people what they know it's it's all over the bloody place. So we developed a mnemonic which is called ashen as HTM and it's critical to understand this is a typology not a taxonomy. Now, if you don't know this distinction, it's vital for virtually everything we do. A taxonomy puts things into categories, a topology looks at things from different perspectives. So a topology forces you to ask a question from different perspectives, if you find something you don't worry about which the types of fits in because of the purpose of the topology is to find it by forcing you to think in a divergent way, yet not to categorise things. So action star stands for artefacts, skills, heuristics, experience and natural talent. So artefacts are things you know, from the Latin artists, in fact, and things which are manmade. So that can be spreadsheets, tools, instruments. Yeah. And there's a lot of those around, you know, they're actually part of our extended consciousness. Don't underestimate the power of a well crafted tool. Yeah. You know, I used to be an enthusiastic amateur carpenter and I had eight different types of saw. And having the right tool makes a huge difference to doing the right job. Because a body of practice over the centuries has built knowledge into the tool. Now, in terms of the way things work, so that's kind of like one what tools or artefacts to use? What tools? Yeah, show me them. Yeah. And that will get the data. And of course, you can ask that in a knowledge diary. It's kind of like a form that can be filled in. Yeah. Second thing is skills.
Now I'm defining this skill is something whether I can measure whether somebody has got it or not. And that means that they can execute to a quality standard within a defined time limit. And that's key. The The example I normally use is a plastering. Right so over my life, I think I've rebuilt three houses. I've installed central heating once. Yeah, I've rewired two houses. I've done a lot of that stuff. Many times. The thing I've only ever done once is the plaster wall and I am never ever going to do it again. Right and I remember buying a book called The seven easy steps to plaster in a wall and I've gone off any book which says any number with easy after it ever since right and I've yet to find any reason to take any of them seriously. And he basically said you can't have the skill body of a plaster. So what you do is you put these wooden battens on the wall vertically and you line those up with screws so that's easy. Yeah, and get that right. Then you buy these tools and you mix the plaster up and you you put it all on this hook and you get your tray you slap it into the space and move it around. You know the video is wonderful. Then you get this big steel rule and you run it down the wooden batten so it's perfectly smooth. Yeah, and then when it's all dry, you move on to the next one. When it's dry, you put thinner wooden battens on the original wooden battens and then you put the finishing coat on the same way. Then when it's dry, you take the battens out and fill it in. So that looks perfectly good. Either way, after half a day to plaster we're sticking to the wall and not falling over me. Yeah, and you don't want you know, past the literally peeling off the wall and falling on you. And eventually after a week, I got the kitchen plastered and I hired an industrial sander to sand it off. So it was smooth enough so I could tile it. And then I went down to the local pub, which was called the rats castle. This was a working class area becoming gentrified, and the rats castle was a good name for this purple right here. If you went in covered in plastic, you were kind of like bombed in and you bought beers. And I asked the landlord if there was a plaster there. And he pointed this one guy out, and I did a barter deal. So I swapped all my tools, because I was never going to use those tools again. Yeah, and he came in and he plaster the next one, he spent two hours including the CD and it was perfectly flat. Now that's a skill. I can measure a deviation from the plane, and I can measure the time taken to execute it. And I know the process for somebody to acquire the skill. So that's a skill and also using narrative, by the way as a way of explaining it and embedding it in your memory because you will remember that story. Yeah, we remember stories, we don't remember facts. The second one, the third one sorry, hate stands for heuristics or habits. Now habits are actually quite useful. They're a process of cognitive efficiency, the same heuristics. If you actually talk with people, I remember doing this in nuclear power. And people would have really weird rules like, you know, if I hear this sound, and those three dials are beyond that, I need to go and look at something now, and that they weren't written in manuals that were just sort of understood. Yeah. It's the famous story of the guy who sort of, you know, gets called in to repair an industrial boiler, hits it with a hammer and tells them what's wrong, and then charges them $10,000. And they say that's ridiculous. So he charges them $1 for hitting it with the hammer. And 9999 pounds. Yeah, you know that story? Yeah. So basically, expert communities develop heuristics, rules of thumb, and they develop habits, ways of working. Now, you all know this. Yeah. I mean, I, you know, I did before COVID, a lot of public speaking, I have a whole routine I go through before I go on the stage. I didn't realise I did it till somebody told me I was doing it. It's kind of like a loosening up exercise. And that changes me from what I was before to a public speaker is part of a process of transition. We did work on this. And yeah, I can't rituals, rituals, or heuristics or habit habits, they go into the same category. So basically, if you change your clothes, you think differently. Yeah, about life. I mean, I was forced at an agile conference in Portugal three years ago to put on a dinner jacket. I hammered on dinner jacket for years. Yeah. But with interesting, by the time I finished putting it on, I was a different person.
Yeah, the reason you have all these rituals on building sites is actually habits and heuristics and rituals are all ways that we do things on automatic pilot, but in a controlled way. So making that explicit is actually really valuable. One of the big projects we did with one of the leading fashion houses, is to identify the heuristics their buyers made. We then codify the heuristics attach them to teaching stories. And that became a form of distributed decision making. It was an authority structure. Yeah, the famous one is the US Marines. If the battlefield plan breaks down, capture the high ground, stay in touch, keep moving. And if you do those three things, and it fails, you won't get blamed. But if you don't do those three things, and it fails, you will get blamed. Yeah. Yeah, I like the sloppy melons, right? That there's there's all sorts of rituals about food procurement, right? And if you ever get involved in bartering in Lebanon, which is something I did until I realised it was a fundamental mistake, and it was better to get the Lebanese to do it for you. Because they're just so good at it from birth, I think, right? There's a whole ritual to moving into some sort of bargaining process. So this is in the 70s. And I was working with supporters of the PLO who were Maronite Christians, so they were minorities in both groups, right. And they learned to survive in a very hard Where I ended up making the mind negotiators for finance, because I just said, What do you want, and then you can sort out the other guys, and they were just really good at it. So there's a lot of stuff in that category, then move on to experience. So there are some things unless you've had the experience is actually very difficult to do it. Yeah, it's no coincidence. I remember when I first learned, I was learning how to climb on the evil slabs in North Wales, which is quite fun for climbing. I'd sort of 14 years old. So I said to clamber up to the top, I'm on the rope. I'm feeling really, really good about life. And the guy just pushed me off. I just got to the top and next minute, I'm sort of falling down and then the rope arrested me. I don't think they'd be allowed to do it anymore, because it was it be considered abuse. But after that, I kind of like knew that the rope would arrest me and I knew what was needed to do it. And I sought to gain that experience. I mean, before lockdown, I was up on Hill Valley and with an ice axe and crampons and looking at all these people. And you could tell by the way, they held the icex, they hadn't actually got experiences slipping down a slope at high speed because they weren't holding it for instant arrest. By the time they repositioned it, they'd be dead. And if you think about it, there's a whole body of stuff where you have to train people, and they have to gain the experience. Otherwise, they can't apply it. Yeah. And the final one natural talent. Well regrettably, some people are just better at doing things and other people. Now it may be an accident of birth, it may be is the famous phrase, nature may deal the cards but nurture plays them. So we know if you don't get certain types of empathetic care, by the time you're three or four parts of your brain literally don't develop and you don't get a second chance at it. There are aspects of experience you have to have before puberty, if you don't have them, you'll never be able to fly an aeroplane because you won't pass the test. Yeah. So regardless of why this is the case, some people are simply better at doing things and others. Now you'll notice that that progression there. Yeah. Which goes through is increasingly going from explicit to tacit. Yeah. And therefore what you do once you've got the decision clusters is you ask people, when you make that class of decisions, what artefacts you use, what skills are necessary, what natural talent, you ask the Ashman question. And of course, you can ask it in the dark knowledge, diaries as well. And then you cluster the material from that. Now, this is actually one of those divergent convergent things, which has been rather denigrated by God and bloody double diamonds, which are driving me insane in design movement at the moment. But what we've done is we diverged, and now we converge, so you get people to group, the artefacts, the action elements into what are called knowledge objects. And the criteria for a knowledge object is something coherent enough that we know what it is, and we can manage it. So some of those may stay as artefacts or skills, but some may be combinations.
Yeah, so you might have a knowledge object, which is a carpenter, tools that they made for themselves and 10 years experience, for example, would be a knowledge object, because you know, you can deploy that in a certain way. And this may sound abstract, but actually, I've never yet a group of experts or people who have had the knowledge, you couldn't do the clustering quite quickly. So that gives me a set of knowledge objects. And obviously, the ones which are most dependent on experience on natural talent are the most vulnerable to loss and where you need the highest redundancy. Now, actually, that process, when I did this with British nuclear fuels, we ended up doubling the number of staff, whereas the Accenture at wanted to half the stuff. Because Accenture looked at the tasks or processes, the number of people required to do it. And I looked at the degree to which experience and the natural talent was necessary. And to be quite honest, if a nuclear core is melting them, you don't want to have to look things up in a manual to know what to do. All right, and you can't just take a standard equation and assume an average level of sickness because you don't know if you're gonna go, you know, you might get COVID. Or to take a Japanese example, you might get a tidal wave, at which point you're in the tails of a purrito distribution, not the centre of a normal distribution. And you need higher levels of redundancy because the consequences of losing that knowledge are high. Okay. Now, the knowledge objects are also the things that we can repurpose. This is getting the right level granularity. So these might actually be recursive, there might be multiple overlapping criteria. This doesn't have to be reductionist, you can actually, you know, recombine things as different knowledge objects, if they're coherent, and those are the things we look at to repurpose. Yeah, once they're there, if and this for those of you in the executive stream. And sorry about that I'm going to need MBAs on that because it involves a third, another software supplier. So we've got MBAs with them. So we can't share what they're doing. Yet without those MBAs, right. But basically, that's where you start to throw together things that we know with proper problems that we got at an abstract level, and see what's what's associated with what, and then you look at the association. So I'll give you the classic example on this. A Raytheon engineer in 1945, notice the chocolate bar melted in his pocket, when he was maintaining the Magneto radar machine. Now, this had been noticed lots of times, and people normally swore and just got their trousers clean. He realised the significance put a metal box around the Magneto, and we got microwave ovens. So what are we doing what is called the Accept phase of the EU Field Guide is we start to associate things that you know with problems you've got based on a high level of abstraction, so that you start to look at things because they may offer an opportunity. It's kinda like a suggestion process. So that's what's going to be going on in the executive stream. Okay, so I've talked about decision mapping, I've talked about decision comparing decision maps to process maps, I've talked about action, each of those is a separate page in the wiki. And then they get combined in the page about about decision mapping. Now we then move on to and that's also a knowledge mapping in terms of getting those knowledge object clusters, but then we can get more sophisticated. And I'll put the slide set up for this in the in this fat group. But I'm deliberately not using slides on this. I'm having conversations because I also want to see people's faces. Yeah. So once I've got that I can arrange the knowledge objects on the vertical. Yeah, access of a matrix. And by the way, these can get very big, I forgotten how big the Bank of Thailand was, but it was 1000s of rows by 1000s of columns. And this is where you get clever and having multiple versions of this. And what you do along the top is you find the things that matter to executives. And the way you do this is you go to all the main decision makers in the company, and you ask them independently, you never do this in the workshop, because that gets the dominant voice through. What are the things that keep you awake at night, in the short term, medium term and long term? you deliberately force him to think about that. And once you've got all of those in from all of your executives, you cluster them. And then you then you take it to the executives as a team and say, well, you all agreed on this, but this is an outlier. Let's talk about it. And then those problems become the column headings. So I've got knowledge objects as rows, I've got problems as columns. Yeah. And then you apply a heuristic By the way, it is a classic heuristic of sensemaking.
I'm trying to give the example on this. So yeah, kind of thought of the perfect one this morning. I forgotten it now. Yeah, I have a habit if I forgot a lot of material of putting it all up on walls. Yeah. And then I cross my eyes. If you cross your eyes, you see patterns. Because what you're doing is you're disrupting the normal pattern of perception. Now, it's an old trick, it's used a lot. It's used to reorientate people in I got it when I was did field ethnography with. If you ever flying to Helsinki, I did the UX design on the air traffic management system. So it's my fault if it goes wrong. Alright, and I spent three months working with the air traffic controllers, just understanding how they did things. And they actually use cross in their eyes as a way to reorientate on a screen. Yeah, so I sort of picked that up and used it. So that's it. So you look at this big matrix or sub matrix, you cross your eyes, and you'll see two patterns, and vertical patterns where a single problem requires you to address multiple knowledge objects. So these is different knowledge objects. And those are easy projects to sell because the problem is known but they're difficult problems to implement, because you got to deal with lots of things to solve the problem. And then you get horizontal ones where get it improving one knowledge asset would hit many problems. They're more difficult cells, but they're easy to do. You very rarely get a one for one match. By the way, that's almost never the case. And then that becomes another big portfolio of projects which again, you put with the other projects you have coming in From the decision information map to process map, you cluster those on connecting you group them. And only then do they become things you commit resources to. Now, again, if you look at this, this is building knowledge management programmes bottom up. So it's starting with where we are and what we know and what problems we got and how we can make a difference, rather than idealistic and state design, and I've blogged about that recently. Yeah, as the real problem. In fact, I've never seen I made that one quote on LinkedIn about, you know, the biggest problem of the last three decades is people design an idealised future goals. Nothing has ever been retweeted or re posted on LinkedIn in my entire career so much as that. Now five or six years ago, I think I've been derided. But that, to me was an indication people have realised that the systems thinking approach, which has always been defined where you want to go and engineer a pathway, people are realising that doesn't work. So that is kind of like overall big picture. Decision mapping action decision map to process map comparison, use of kinetin for project clustering. Yeah, executive problem identification. Yeah, mapping knowledge to problems creating knowledge assets, which can be used in acceptation. And if you've been through the wiki course with me, you'll know you'll never write won't never asked more than once. So something is going to be using different articles, you write it as a separate article, and then it's there. Okay, everybody's been very good and very quiet. But thanks for all the verbs of nonverbal clues you've been given me that makes life a lot easier. Questions, comments, things you want clarified? I getting really nervous. And having agreed to do two a day people may start to compare the two. So if that's probably a good thing to do, because I'm not using any numbers in the second presentation, just in case I think of different ones.
I have a question for also, with regards to filling the wiki. Do you have examples of this, like, for instance, pictures you've taken from sessions or something like this?
There may be some Michael may actually have some because Michaels done this, or he's got access to works original stuff from Bank of Thailand. And the wiki does allow pictures to be loaded, right. The other thing we're probably going to do fairly soon is is basically offer everybody's populated the wiki, some sort of mentored assistance to do a project with the methods so that we can generate some more material. And at the moment, what I'm trying to do strategically, I mean, this is me, we haven't got factious curves up there yet. This has worked so well, I'm probably going to do another sprint in two months time. And I'll probably do it around factious curves, because it's a great way of getting more people involved here. But if you look at that, which is the strategy approach, when a market is ready to take off, what matters is that the market grows quickly, you don't hide things. So that that's that was the other reason for putting the methods in open source. And creating the field guide is a real good trigger mechanism. Because it's the European Commission endorsement of the approach. Alright, so at that point, the last thing you want to do is to lock things up or make them difficult to access, you make everything open source very fast. And you just make it easier for people to come to you for training and artefacts, but you don't stop other people doing the same thing. Because what matters now is the market grows. And for me, the EU Field Guide and COVID they came together. Yeah, it's a trigger point to switch from systems thinking about which I really mean systems dynamics and cybernetics, which is dominated the last three decades into complexity. In fact, we switch from engineering to ecosystems. And it's quite interesting when I did one presentation the other day to one of the leading public sector consultancy groups, I mean, these are big guys are big, they can walk into the Prime Minister's Office anytime they want. And within 48 hours, they agreed to work with us to create an assessment centre, and they're going to take all the methods and techniques. So I think you know that that's good news, because that wouldn't have happened some years ago. So this rapid rapid expansion is now what we're looking for. It's the other reason, by the way, when you go onto the wiki, it says the first thing you should do is to create your user page. Because then we know who you are, and your user page link with cases that you should put up so we can actually create teams from that very quickly. And for those of you in large companies, if you want to try the method for the next couple of months, I'm really open to actually working with you with the methods and the tools to create the cases. Yeah, rather than treating those as commercial projects, because at this point, the more we can build the material, the more we can build the cases. Yeah, the whole goal at this moment is to grow the market quickly. The other thing to tell you is we're, as soon as the new Canadian Centre website is up, which will go up on the first of March, we had to scramble because we thought that was a publication date for the new field guide, but it came out last week. As soon as we've done that, we're going to produce method cards and facilitation cards. And we got a unique design on that. So we're not producing playing cards, we're producing something which is more, take methods take concepts and assemble them together in different combinations rather like the cell structure. So that's kind of like trying to make people chefs rather than recipe book users. So rather than follow a rigid recipe, we always do it this way. Well, we got these methods in these concepts and these tools, so we can put them in different sequences, different orders, we can define the input output. And we're going to create extension packs for that. So for example, I'm working on the Agile Extension Pack by which we break Scrum down into things like sprints. And we create cards for that. So you can actually take other methods from other sources and assemble them into the same structure. But of course, we won't have you know, we'll be slightly careful about that. So if somebody wants to put up Myers Briggs type personality, then that's not going to go in. Now, because that's a pseudoscience. And now the essence of what we do is we're natural science based. So Myers Briggs is designated as a pseudoscience. I can op so that doesn't fall within the bailiwick.
They very nice to see you. Thank you. Thank you for the session. It's funny, I just I want to find out, you know, how are you you suggesting us to, to, to share the methods that we have created on the wiki. And then with
that there are methods we just put in a slight control they have and seen three categories? All right. So there are methods which are developed around the principles of naturalising sense making. Yeah, so that's not using cases to derive method, but using natural science to create a method and then refine it in light of cases. So that there's that category. There'll be another category of methods which are coherent to it. So there's a whole body of stuff which has come out of, for example, the coaching movement. Yeah. Which is based on really bad science, I mean, basing anything on Freud anism. At the moment, he's like, why would you do that. But it doesn't mean the method doesn't have validity. So we can put that method in. Yet we can read speech, there's a coherent, and there are basically things that will just get excluded, because they're pseudoscience, right? Or that they don't have that we can't validate them against the science. So I'll give the example on that. We know that people will only scan 5% of what's available, and they'll do a first fit pattern match when they make decisions. Right? So if you create any method, which says we'll sit everybody down in the workshop and do a situational assessment together, that's not in the method that's not in the pack. Because you're not you can't do it, you physically can't get a small group of people to do a situational assessment with any degree of accuracy.
Got it understand. And then you talk about for those of us in large companies, and obviously, like myself, I've tried different methods, but not at the same time, not, you know, from top to bottom.
So when some more freebies and cheapies that you can just check in here.
Just curious how it's all all put together, it's basically saying
is, we've gone completely open source in the wiki, right, we're prioritising the methods, which are listed in the EU Handbook, which you can download for free. And by the way, if you don't know, they put that through. It's a book not a paper, which is good news for us. But I was worried visit with that would normally be two months of peer review, and it would get beat up and I knew what would happen then we'd have a whole bunch of it, send it out to people I complexity in their CVS, and we'd end up with a whole bunch of arguments. They didn't do that they actually went through peer review in 48 hours flat. And they're printing off two and a half 1000 copies, and they'll print more of the demand. So in fact, I think from fourth of April, you'll be able to go on the website and request a copy. And they'll just send you a hard copy of it. Yeah. So that from a point of view of you're not doing anything while than the usual Look, it's in the handbook on how do we manage the crisis, so we should play with it? Yeah. So any method or tool in the handbook, I really want to build some cases quite quickly, provided you prepared to go public on the cases and the cases can go on the wiki so other people can use them. We're going to be fairly flexible about how we do that, including uses of sense maker instances.
I have a conditional offer, Bonnie, it's a conditional offer.
Thank you. Thank you. I will be in touch.
Hello.
Hi. Hi, I'm sorry, I was late a little bit. I couldn't login. And it probably you told about it at the beginning. And I lost it. But I would like to ask about the definition of the decision. Because we can distinguish decision action choice and and other stuff. And I would like to be sure. What do you mean by when we make decisions? What decisions are, but we haven't actually covered them?
And I would say it was a good question, right? I tend to have a 3030 Catholic attitude to them. So whether it's an action or a decision or change, if you want to look at it like a script, right, and look at it as a point where the arc of the story changes. So it's where something different happens as a result of something is what I would say, and or whether you want to call them something else, but decision, that's okay. So for example, lessons learned or turning points, techniques like future backwards techniques, like counterfactuals. So one of the ways you can identify decisions is to use counterfactuals. Because what's interesting is you allow people to tell fictional stories about what might have happened. Yeah, they tend to actually come up with some really good ideas, which you might not have got otherwise infections as important as fact, when it comes to mapping knowledge. Yeah. And people love counterfactuals they really love them.
Thank you.
anymore. Hey, I wouldn't be accurate to say that the weakness, kind of a way of mapping Dave snowdens knowledge. If that is that is true. We actually applying some of the methods we are mapping in America method. Yes. And there have been a lot of those methods have come from other people or other people that work beyond them. So we're trying to broaden that community now. So the idea is, it's time to expand this and get more people involved. All right. But not just anybody who's got the this this key concept, naturalising sense making acknowledged as one of the five schools of sense making and how some principles. Yeah, so the art is growing up. But yeah, I mean, what I'm doing at the moment is based on the principles that amazes me how many people don't eat their own dog food, they like complexity. But then the minute you get them to do something, they sort of go back into old style methods. Yeah. So at this stage of the market lifecycle, we need to open up we're opening up. It's open participation. Yeah. Lots of people working on something. The great thing about this group now is, yeah, there's 20 or 30 people working on each method. That means once it's codify it, it's codify it in a way that more people will understand it than if I codify it, or one of my research assistants codifies it. Yeah. And you also, I mean, when the interesting Anna, for example, is decided she's a wiki gnome. And she gets bonus points for knowing about what he knows. All right. So wiki gnomes are people who run round everybody else's articles and get their references sorted and sorted out the grammar because it matters to them. No, and that's the great thing about a wiki is lots of people do different things. Some people are illustrators, we need animators on try optical. So somebody can actually create the animation. Yeah, and you know, providing the basic principles, anything you put on the wiki is Creative Commons. You can put something on the wiki and make it Creative Commons. Not. So the standard wiki terms is Creative Commons share and share alike attribution. Yeah. Which means anybody can use it. But you could actually put on an original piece of work you contributed Creative Commons, non commercial. And yeah, then people couldn't use it without asking you. Right. So there's, there's a lot that I'm trying to create an ecosystem here. I mean, and yeah, the role models I've got about what not to do, or things like safe and six sigma, and anything to deal with Peter sanghi. Right, because those those lack diversity to be resilient, right.
And everything is going in the slack group, by the way, so all the transcripts and everything else is going into them. Okay, guys, we're coming up to the RNA to close this and open up the next one. Yeah, from concept mapping. And after that, possibly have something to eat Yep. Any other questions, raise them in the slack group. I'll be monitoring that. You've got cat herders in your group, right? They'll start to organise you into groups. And we're assuming there will be follow up sessions around this. Yeah. Okay.