This post will be a little bit more “roaming through knowledge” than the usual.
Actually, it is part of a series, first published in May 2009.
But, following the dictum of somebody else, I will make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.
What is the point? Talking about ways of representing and forecasting the expected decisions of groups and individuals, and some projects that try to build a “model” of what we are and could be- be it our DNA or our brain.
And, while doing this, recalling some useful concepts that you can apply in whatever you do in your business and personal life- including when you are on the receiving end of the results of a model.
As usual- theory is converted into (hopefully) plain English, and the examples are from real life and experience in business, politics, technology- and their impact on personal and business life.
PREVIOUSLY
GMN2009: SCRIPTING
When you create a story, you have roles.
And every role, has a script that is consistent with the role.
The behavior has to be consistent with:
- game
- execution of the game
- expectations from anybody you interact with
But the interesting part is: if you properly define the roles, you can script also the expected behavior of other participants without their knowledge.
From the concept of “script”, to the definition of roles and their interaction in real-life situations, a needed addition to the discussion about models, change, planning and all the associated activities.
GMN2009: METASCRIPTING
After scripting event-by-event, you will probably identify the need of some structure of reference.
So that each scripting is linked to a common, shared “way of scripting” that you adopt in your own organization (or for your 20-volume “novel”).
But this scripting about scripting, or metascripting, represents the environment that defines, identify, and justify your activities.
When does it make sense to script? How does scripting link with the model that you built for your reality?
And, finally, how do you represent everything together, and evolve your models, including the scripting rules that are contained within the models?
This section will by highly structured around a common thread that, without knowing, if you read through all the previous sections, you started following.
We started with a general introduction, and a pragmatic definition of the overall purpose of building Models.
Then, we moved from the preliminary steps of Change, and across all the activities required to introduce a change: Planning, Progress, up to the identification and management of Risk.
Having thus covered the “technical” side of change, we moved to the human side, or how to match Reality with your model, defining Games that convert your model into reality, following Playing rules, using Scripting to integrate the resources available in their roles, and produce the desired end results.
But in any organization, profit or non-profit, over the last few centuries we started to adopt a continuous quest for efficiency and efficacy, or how to use your available resources to achieve the best results with the minimal consumption of resources.
A couple of decades ago, I remember a partner of a company working for using the example of the bomb and the nuke to open a door.
Well, let’s say that a less dramatic example of why both efficiency and efficacy are needed and are not necessarily incompatible is a travel inside your town.
If you have be in a office 1km away within 30 minutes, you can retrieve your car from the parking lot, and go wherever you need- provided that you find a place in the nearby parking lot.
Or you can just walk 1km- healthier.
If you know know that parking space is not necessarily available, and that usually you spend 5 minutes to retrieve the car, 5 to get there, and 15 to park- it is not really efficient.
You are better off be walking 10 minutes to get there.
In both cases, you keep your efficacy (you are there in less than 30minutes), but instead of consuming few calories in 10 minutes, you consume more calories, plus the car, plus you generate exhaust- and maybe you will also need to pay for the parking, if none of the reserved ones is available.
The title of this section is metascripting, but I could have written “one-off and repeated”.
Efficiency and efficacy require that you can also avoid re-inventing the wheel, and use those available.
Also the mental wheels. So, instead of thinking from scratch about your plan, or script, or way to obtain the change approved, in any organization usually you are supposed to follow a path that has already be designed.
The larger the organization, the more you will find pre-defined paths.
The idea is to, again, balance effiency and efficacy: you can leverage on the skills of the few by following a procedure that has been designed to extract the best experiences (or “best practices”, in consultants’-speak) from tens or hundreds of people who before you tried to do something similar.
But, again, the key is on efficiency: sometimes, rules become highly complex because whoever writes the rules derives them not from experience (or “bottom-up”), but starts with a collection of guidelines/lessons gleaned from somebody else’s experiences, and tries to apply these lessons from the past to generate the structure to cover all the potential future needs.
The net result? Sometimes, in order to manage a project, I received hundreds of pages of rules and procedures- to discover that the 20% absorbing 80% of the compliance cost were designed by people not working on the activities.
Again an example from a practical activity.
You can use a standard, one-size-fits-all proposal document.
Or you can produce an empty template with the key sections, plus a document outlining the general guidelines, and referring to specific guidelines for different types of proposals.
Which one you think is more efficient?
Any system that avoid “re-inventing the wheel” generates necessarily a bureaucracy, as this ensures consistency in form and content.
But the system itself has to be sustainable.
My favorite story? A customer, who was a manager on a projec where I was a “coach” on some new processes.
Eventually, he left the company.
Then, he came back.
Why? Because he said that one day he realized that that wasn’t the place for him.
Everything was so standardized and up-to-date with the latest managing consulting fad used in the most extreme fashion, that…
…he had to fill a form to justify the mission achieved by any purchase order, whatever the amount.
Including to ask for a single pencil.
And a complex system can be used by crypto-luddites to stage a protest, as when, in a large company at the beginning of my career, an employee used the new accounting system to file a transaction for, again, buying a single pen.
The transactional cost (material+time+resources used) exceeded the value the of the item.
You can imagine the phone call that his manager received from the central manager: everybody understood that transaction as an act of organized protest, not simply an act of innate stupidity.
Any system has to be sustainable. And the best way to ensure this is to clearly differentiate what is unique from what is common
As described above, rules can be build in “segments”- and, in most activities, you can actually identify rules that are a “must” from rules that are to be validated with the specific status of the activity, its environment, targets, etc.
When I am defining rules, my approach is to define guidelines.
And then, to negotiate a “contract” for each activity.
Years ago, I was called by a partner to manage a project that was in IT, but was really not in IT.
If you want, it was a project about projects.
The reasons? The customer wanted an external, independent advice on how the knowledge was managed across a certain series of programmes and projects related to some activities that were part of the core business, production.
My first task? Talk with my partner to understand the environment. Talk with the nominal buyer. And then, talk with the manager that was assigned by the customer, to understand the number of teams involved, etc.
But also to ask which offices were providing services or rules to the each one of the team involved: methodology, quality, IT, etc.
Why? Because I agreed with the approval of the customer to actually look not just at the teams, but also at how the teams communicated with these “standards” and “service” entitities, as team-based knowledge management in a large organization should always refer to the overall aims of the organization.
I had lengthy discussions with fellow consultants- but I am still unconvinced that the idea of introducing a tool and building an organization around the tool is delivering more benefits to the customers than to the suppliers.
Defining a “memorandum of understanding” between the project/activity manager and, possibly, one entity representing the “metascripting”, or “common framework” is therefore something that I wish possible to do before any activity.
I would rather call it “memorandum of understanding” than “contract”, as it should be a guideline for managing all the exchanges between the team and whoever communicates with the team.
But part of the creation of the common framework and the identification of the communication rules has to be linked to how the organization think that it will be storing the knowledge
A first step.
I call knowledge data that is organized and classified (if possible, structured data; but also unstructured data, as notes, samples, etc, can be organized and classified).
Moreover: if data are prepared to be stored in a common “memory place” (locus memoriae), then some information about the data (or “metadata”) have to be added, probably both provided by whoever produces the data and the “managers of the data warehouse”.
If the data is not simply numerical, I would still call it “data warehouse” if the informationis not really “digested” to simplify its connection with other information.
I saw many “knowledge management” systems that I would simply call “data dump”. Because the data inside, whatever its format, was accessible only to the people that managed the system, not to the originators (who, supposedly, have to update it) or the “consumer” across the organization, i.e. whoever might search for it, to avoid re-inventing the wheel.
When Frances Yates in late 1960 wrote her book “The Art of Memory” (yet another mis-titled book), the content was really more interesting than the title.
Mnemotechniques? Almost none. It was the history of the way memory was built, used, structures- not the techniques.
The most interesting point was that theatres themselves were described as “memory places”, with each symbol, bit, and piece, a “signpost” to something to remember. And if you belong to a specific “physical place”, you adopt mental shortcuts.
Because you do not need to remember the details- you need to remember the “index” to the details.
When I wrote above about the process of adding metadata is because of something whoever interviewed people about how they do something knows.
If you do something, eventually you do not notice the small details, and the connections that your mind makes between one step and what could be the next step.
Most people doing a mildly repetitive activity will describe it through its steps.
But then, if you review with them, they will start piling up exceptions to the rules, mild variations, and so on.
Also, you will discover that, within their environment, they adopted “linguistic shortcuts”- a lingo, a way to summarize concepts.
I remember that my first “culture shock” was in early 1990s, when I worked occasionally in Paris, and received material from Paris. Why? Because everybody seemed to love making up acronyms for anything.
When I went again to work in Paris, in 1998, I was already used to the approach- so I was able to get faster up to speed.
The longer a team works together, with limited contacts with others, the more “post-processing” you will need to be able not to re-use, but just to connect their knowledge with what others generated.
The easiest approach is to keep the communication between teams working- at least by identifying a “communication channel”.
As I wrote above, the purpose is not to build a “data” (or “knowledge”) dump, but to build a system that allows anybody to retrieve information, provided that they have a basic information on how the “retrieval system” works.
Incidentally: if you search in google for “roberto lofaro 100073.777″ (the latter part is my Compuserve e-mail address in early 1990s), you will obtain few links, including this one, listing that I attended at a conference on Network Information Retrieval held in Milan by the CILEA two workshops, on virtual library and OPAC.
This funny personal example is here for two reasons: to explain that “retrieve information” after Internet has a new meaning.
In old systems, information was supposed to enter and exit the system.
With the Internet, whenever you publish something online, it stays there. Forever.
Any knowledge management system is as good as its retrieval system.
You can spend as much as you want in building your own virtual or physical library.
But if you then lock it away, is not really that useful.
In most of my examples I refer to Google as a search engine.
Somebody called long ago Yahoo a search engine- but I rather compared the first version of Yahoo to a “library index” (I remember a posting once that said that your submitted link had to be reviewed and therefore it would take time before it would appear).
But if you are interest in the “information retrieval” subject, refer to my posting XXI century libraries and search engines, that contains also a discussion on alternative approaches on information sharing and retrieval, including free online libraries.
Whatever technology (also paper!) you use to retrieve the information, it is important that your knowledge management and retrieval system allows to provide feed-back so that your aggregated knowledge store and your “metascript” are constantly updated.
Moreover, as this feed-back will be reviewed by people whose job is “just” to process and classify knowledge, being about the fray of daily activities, they can actually spot and identify trends.
As an example: they can identify an increase in requests for certain subjects, or a consistent series of errors in preparing the requests to obtain the information- something that could imply a need for further or additional training.
what matters is that your knowledge management practices are consistent with your specific needs, your knowledge environment
The real keyword is “environment”.
Any environment has its own “normal” state- when its own internal resources can manage to amend, repair, and why not, evolve without disrupting the existence of the environment.
In the human environment known as “organization”, it was trendy in late 1980s/early 1990s to talk about “Corporate Identity”, as composed from the visible, self-defined image (corporate image) and the “normal way” (culture).
Just twenty years passed, and we have a brave new world: it is not the technology itself, it is its side-effect of enabling new activities that completely short-circuit the usual communication channels.
In early 1990s, it was still quite difficult for “Mr. Smith” to go to Washington (yes, an old movie).
All the communication channels had intermediaries.
Nowadays, if you know enough, it is quite cost effective to mount a campaign for or against.
In my view, the corporate identity now should consider not just the image and the culture, but also the perception, at least by the stakeholders.
On a weekly basis, some corporation or government has to apologize and amend its acts for doing something that, not so long ago, would have been easy to get over with by feeding something akin to generate a media frenzy- like in the movie “Wag the dog” 
Nowadays, you will always have few people here and there that will keep being focused, and create their own media frenzy.
If you want, our e-world is more democratic that it ever was before, and when you build a framework of reference you have to consider that lessons learned from ecology are more relevant now in the corporate/organizational world than ever.
Yes, every month there are dozen of new books about the impact of the Internet, offering a new “paradigm shift”.
At least, the old 1990s concept of “a new philosophy” is gone- a step forward in communication
But, really, do we need to re-invent the wheel to explain the evolution of our society? I cannot we simply get to the basics.
When in mid-1990s I read Adam Smith’s “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” (available on Gutenberg for free), I found that most of the people that kept talking about Smith, when I checked beyond the title, had not really read it
Interestingly, some of his descriptions are closer to a “knowledge economy“, and its micro niches:
The real price of every thing, what every thing really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it. What every thing is really worth to the man who has acquired it and who wants to dispose of it, or exchange it for something else, is the toil and trouble which it can save to himself, and which it can impose upon other people.
The price, in a knowledge economy, is not necessarily measured in money- a volatile representation of value.
Years ago, the British pound was on a roller-coaster, oscillating in a short span between 1.3 and 1.7 EUR/GBP.
Whatever your business, it is unbearable, if you have any contact outside the areas where the British pound is accepted.
I remember a Japanese company, that said that it was moving from UK to France, despite the less appealing labour laws, because most of its customers were in Euroland, and most of its component suppliers were in Euroland- therefore, managing an oscillation of 40% was… unmanageable.
When you shape a corporate identity (as I said often also to startups: sorry, but you can shape the identity, you cannot build it; corporate communication is nowadays a two-way process), you have to consider the new environment.
And apply not the laws of the industrial, top-down world, but the ecological-savvy rules of the bottom-up world that the Internet enabled, by destroying the old centralized communication channels’ exclusive access to the public.
By adopting an ecological model, you accept that you exercise, not even inside your organization, the level of control that a Henry Ford could adopt.
But you can retain the shaping control, directing the interaction of your organization, and its culture, with its extended environment.
We are moving from William Whyte’s 1956 book “The Organization Man” (key chapters available here for free), to a model where potentially each person in the organization is not simply inside the organization- is an organization.
What is the difference? It all began with affordable mobile phones.
In the pre-mobile-phone world, you could expect your employees to belong to multiple networks outside the business walls.
But, as they spent the best part of the day and week away from them, in most cases they really limited their social interactions to their workplace, family, and few “circles” outside. All while being almost without connection during the week.
With mobile phones, the system started changing. I do not know if I would call an evolution when I see a bus driver using one hand to drive, and keeping the mobile between head and shoulder while he is turning a bus with some 50 people on board and quarreling with his girlfriend on the phone, but it is certainly a change.
With messaging services (not just text messaging- also mobile MSN, Facebook, Twitter, etc), it is a next step. And get ready for “The Next Generation” of Internet services.
People now vent their frustration via messaging services- with SMS, to people they know; with the other systems, to anybody who bothers to read what they write.
And they can get instant, unmediated feed-back- from well outside the circle of friends and family.
To somebody raised in the 1970s (like me) or before, this is a management hell.
But if you try to look at a distance, you recognize something really familiar: a complete system that includes the interaction between all the entities (real or virtual ) that are part of that environment- an “ecosystem”.
From our friendly Wikipedia:
Central to the ecosystem concept is the idea that living organisms interact with every other element in their local environment. Eugene Odum, a founder of ecology, stated: “Any unit that includes all of the organisms (ie: the “community”) in a given area interacting with the physical environment so that a flow of energy leads to clearly defined trophic structure, biotic diversity, and material cycles (ie: exchange of materials between living and nonliving parts) within the system is an ecosystem.”[4] The human ecosystem concept is then grounded in the deconstruction of the human/nature dichotomy and the premise that all species are ecologically integrated with each other, as well as with the abiotic constituents of their biotope.
A personal example, that I already quoted in other contexts.
While I was working in Italy for a banking outsourcing company in the 1990s, to define and deploy their methodology and associated processes and activities (yes, corporate culture), I was contacted by somebody working with them.
There was an high school whose purpose was to help increase the number of children who completed their secondary school studies, and continued their studies.
They had different issues, but two were: attracting pupils (marketing, if you want); and retaining them.
My fees were steep, but as it required a limited amount of time, I proposed to do it “pro bono”.
What did I do? An interview with the director. A review of their promotional video, after watching it with the director. And a final report of suggested solutions.
Yes, I suggested how to restructure the existing video footage to appeal the MTV generation (remember- it was pre-Internet), with an attention span of 30/45 sec, not that 2-3 minutes that they expected. While dumping some of the material.
But the real “marketing” was on the corporate culture: identify ways to involve the parents in their children education, by organizing activities to help their parents be part of it, and understand that their children were not just going to get a piece of paper, but a new way of seeing and doing.
If you want- they had designed the promotional material by targeting themselves as the audience; and they had forgot that you cannot remove people from a certain environment only for few hours a day- you have to shape the environment.
Creating an ecosystem can be quite manipulative- but beware: when Vance Packard in 1950 wrote about the occult persuaders, it was in the old era, when communication was controlled and centralized.
In the “instant messaging” era, I think that if what I see on my twitter and facebook walls is a reliable test, most people will regret what they posted a couple of months or years from the “now” when they wrote it, but publishing online is a one-way street.
Therefore, manipulating to create an ecosystem is troublesome for both the employee and the employer, as the usual “self-interest” rules do not apply. They would not send to hell their boss, but they will probably twitter about it.
It is funny. We began this journey with models, and it will end with models.
The next section will talk about Genome and Mind mapping (I mean brain, really) activities to build “the” map, and of other similar projects.
NEXT
GMN2009: GENOME AND BRAIN MAPPING
The visible title of this section is “Genome and brain mapping”.
The link is named “cathedrals”.
It is not a criticism: it is a realistic assessment.
Beside the human genome and brain mapping, this section will discuss also how these and other mapping initiatives could affect not just science and medicine, but our everyday life.
Tags: contract, ecosystem, game, genome, gmn2009, man, meta, model, organization, roddenberry, scripting, smith, star, sustainable, trek, wealth