So you are offering Innovation as a Service

What we talk of services, when we talk of services differs from person to person. When you talk of Innovation as a service here is what I am looking for

1. About your service and the service terms

2. Team that delivers this service, preferably with photos of real people and their profiles

3. Contact details of a non-sales support person and his role

4. Follow options from a mutually convenient place say Facebook, twitter, blogs if any

5. Best and Worst customer story so far

Let me also add, I am NOT looking for a brochure with platitudes around the concept of innovation and why it is important for my organization or about another innovation management tool or technique.

To Indianise a Cartoon, please dont

I saw 2 curious editorials about importing Archie to India in Point - Counterpoint in Times yesterday.

If I were to take sides, mine will be on the side of not trying to Indianise anything.

Simply because of the variety and colours that India offers, cannot do justice on any “Indianise” process however clever.

Secondly my personal experience with 2 of my kids with Cindrella, which they just don’t relate.

While fables are most easily transferable across cultures, (see how Panchatantra got the reach and derivatives across cultures)

stereotype transfers (like this Archie transfer) from another culture will fail to convey anything or even be mildly entertaining.

Archie will be in for a rude shock in India…

Org Vocabulary

All jobs include a vocabulary exercise, be it responding to a prospect need, or writing your appraisal or coming up with a methodology/strategy or just speaking publicly for a change especially KM jobs. What differentiates departments/companies is not their vocabularies but their stories and it takes long time to catch stories from different contexts.

Anyways problems of attrition in my industry gave rise to other problems as people migrated from company to company with their vocabulary.
To such an extent that even slidewares and pitches (to specific egos) across vendors started to sound same. I have heard vendor selectors claiming “that just changing the master layout of your presentation will make it exactly same as what I saw with the last vendor prospect”. I also know of some real stories when people moved from one large vendor to other with their slideware, actually confused these selectors because it was exactly the same “methodology”.

Second of the problem that arises from vocabulary is, for those that stuck around and got older in parent companies without switching. These seniors were stuck with limited stories in a restricted vocabulary/language of the company they are loyal to. That in itself is not the problem, it becomes one if all they have is old stories to make new changes in the enterprise, because nobody feels that story (distant in space, time and intent) and language itself has shifted to something else that these seniors cannot speak.

So sparking action internally or selling to your boss or prospect almost becomes impossible just by changing vocabulary or being stuck with one for too long.

What do you think KM Managers should do? What story should be listened? retold?

More Maps

After joining my current job, when I started "Knowledge Mapping" I have encountered and applied several other maps. I want to leave a record here of a few that I have been practicing.

Mind Map to Concept Map

Mind Map is basically a flowery diagram that helps you remember a "linear" hierarchy of concepts but without any cross linkages. Tony Buzan made this famous with case studies like "when I was a student, I had this hard course I had to take and when I started adopting mind maps for taking class notes it became so much more easier and recall just before exam was so good I became the university topper". This is great and there are so many tools available including the clunky but popular FreeMind

and tools like MindMeister available over the internet with a simple registration or as device apps.

As I said Mind Map is linear hierarchy that does not allow cross linkages, so to represent a domain that is complex you need support for all hierarchies and relationships, which is what concept map does. You can form meaningful propositions and make sense of a complex domain easily. My faith in concept map was reinforced specifically by 2 sources

1. Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA) work done by Gary Klein and others who have been propagating concept map as a standard way to represent knowledge domains

2. Ed Rogers CKO NASA who visited us last year, was doing the entire presentation from a single concept map and NASA also applies concept map internally a lot.

Nowadays all my presentations have at least one concept map (around 6-10 slides get represented in 1 concept map) , I use VUE in rapid prototyping mode to create the representations quickly

Here is a reproduction of a concept map (on concept map) from Working Minds

that is one of the greatest references for CTA.

Perception Map

Recently we did a conversation based training on Perception map. This is a powerful technique when it comes to dealing with perceptions on highly sensitive or people oriented issues within teams. It lets you define the core issue more clearly, as people problems gets cloudy when the number of perceptions gets beyond 3 (another limit of our pre-frontal cortex)

I am particularly interested how the teams actually do the mapping, after perceptions are collected and de-duped. In my opinion, you can enforce a lot of rules into this, or you can simply let it emerge by constraining the leads to step (one perception can only lead to one other perception not more). All sorts of collectors, loops and conflicts surface and it is fun to watch as this happens in groups. Making this step anonymous helps, with managers or other leaders excluded from the meeting.

Tree Map

When you look at a visual there are only 3 cues actually, 1. relative size of the object 2. the color of the object in relation to others and 3. the text that is there in the object. If it is a representation of some form of flow then you will have connectors, but tree map is not suited for those. Tree map is suited when you have a hierarchy of data elements and you want to drill down layer after layer in that data set. I use it for parsing our internal MIS reports and make sense and to decide where to put the focus effort.

I think I encountered tree map first in Many Eyes but started using the tree map application of UMD

Story Map

I got interested in story maps when our user centric design community http://mindtreeux.blogspot.com/

floated a session. The concept is as simple as a time line on a specific user action (I will call this The Spine) and you will have multiple user stories that is mapped against the spine. Key take away is not just that, you can actually classify based on user need and from this plan which story will be developed in a Sprint cycle.

Assorted Coll of Links from 2009

Story Methods and Culture

Thanks to Bob Sutton for quoting this awesome story about the Naskapi Indians and the lessons on sensemaking

Bob again Confirmation from pyschology research on how accurately people evaluate others even when time slices are as small as 30 seconds. So applying STC when time needed for evaluation tends to zero which means you are in the “present moment” aware your responses/evaluation are all the more accurate. Well beware of the induction approach here. My friend Sajeev  had this idea long time back about being able to predict how loyal an employee would be based on such time sliced behavior

Social math is just a new jargon for telling stories with data. But the examples are great starters.

Story telling resources from anecdote.com.au through Karen

More and more video sharing from folks at Green Chameleon specifically
this practical contribution to the CE open source methods. Covers both Anecdote circle and archetype extraction  also check out other videos like telling tips from Shawn in the site

Story colored glasses blog is booming and this is becoming an important reference point and a brilliant starter kit for those entering  narrative research.

I need to dig into SouthWest stories more, and see how it got embedded in the culture

One of the popular cultural records of a live company netflix

Piece from Seth on Cultural Wisdom very relevant even within organizations where different practices and functions are running with different cultural norms. And if KM has to succeed you better be culturally wise.

Knowledge Strategy

Knowledge Strategy from Cory may be a business relevant KM strategy can come forth

Been grappling with bringing business relevance to km as part of day job. Key problems cited here are not necessarily solved by appointment of CKO but a willingness to see problems through the knowledge lens at a top management level.

Other Methods and Misc

I had this AAR poster on my desk for quite some time till I recently shifted my desk, the IKEA analogy poster works

Wenger’s original Learning is social CoP paper   from Library clips
It still serves as reference to Key interventions that a community facilitator reporting probably to a central function should at least be aware of.

Loved  the list of lies from Kawasaki and it only becomes truer by the day. I see more CEOs in my company now than I did in my entire career.

Dysfunctions list from Jack Vinson Abilene Paradox was interesting.

Must have collection on dystopia/utopia from Dave

From part 1 on the training series at another domain, but the broad problems of training or the lack of it remains the same in my domain as well

Ideas Dec 2009

As usual ideas are plenty and free and usually the best thing to do is share the idea and may be inspire a couple of people. You know this trait becomes a pathology if you happen to be proficient in generating ideas with a few innovation methodologies. Eventually with every opportunity you end up with numerous ideas and unable to pick the one to run with. That said predicting success or future is not my thing, still there are several selection methodologies as well, possibly in another post later on.

If you cant spark action at least clarify the concept to make it more marketable.

1. Social entrepreneurs or the citizen sector professionals are increasing widely. Much data available elsewhere on the growth of the sector. Innovative use of social media for information exchange is growing and is evident across several popular networks. First idea is to create a matrix of functional features for the sector along the lines of wikimatrix.
2. Second idea is create a framework (I realise the cliche effect that this word has) for measuring impact of change. Change measurement in the citizen sector in my opinion can be modelled along the lines of Human development index and can be further extended for specific changes. Core competency in development of trackable parameters, reliable measurement mechanisms and associated methods are needed. Narrative methods have huge applicability here.
3. Testing a series of stories with  and making a campaign that will solicit preferred behaviour is the third idea. This has both sensing side and synthesis side for actually creating the right stories for marketing.

Stories and Community

In my organization we did ”joy of giving” week, and a community within our organization used these specific stories below to inspire giving to an NGO called Goonj. The community (Dhriti: the woman’s network within the company) did an awesome story campaign based on unsung  heroes  from ibnlive

Campaign images are below

H1 2009 Round Up

Here is a 2009 first half year round up. Not much as I see it, but I could still be happy that I am a great filter.

Marketing

A great pitch will look like this when built with popular social objects, in this case Hugh‘s cartoon base.
Also of note is the Grabowski ratio in action M/E costs.

CoP

• Within the CoP context I think desigining such spaces will energize and commit more people to the cause of knowledge. It is better and possible to design spaces for social interactions in your current context than blabber about knowledge eco-systems in ppts. Thanks to Kim for the hat tip.
• In addition to Stephen P. Borgatti and Jos´e-Luis Molina paper , Toward ethical guidelines for network research in organizations
  this post will help kick start action in SNA if you are thinking of conducting one. Thanks to Graham Durant Law.
• Interesting interpretations on network types and underlying SNA Methods. Great example on how easily we can misread a network diagram from Connectedness.
• Though many people adopt NPS for analysing customer satisfacion scores longitudinally, I am seeing NPS in the context of communities for the first time
• As unusual as it can get, community based km at SAP

Social Media Examples

• Guy Kuwasaki shared some great Social Media examples from the industry, well if you have an idea on how to make twitter earn money look for a VC.
• From the FastForward blog here are enterprise social media round up from the open source world. All new set of tools catering to all media platforms.

Narrative

• We have been hearing stories get you jobs, make people change, spend more, trust more etc, here is a nice example from an eBay sale.
• The classic story archetype of J Campbell more movies this summer and the next and the next, you never get bored it is that good an archetype.

Is there any another way to allow people make sense than by narratives so variations can fit to context?

Knowledge Representation

I have this fetish for information visualization and flowing data has been my primary solace, here is Fusion Tables from Google. This I think is a direct take on ManyEyes from IBM.

Random KM

• JP made a great post on Complete heuristics on how to pick a book/author 
• It will be a shame if NHS KM site is taken out, Help needed dont let it happen.
• I marked this for finding out what symbols exist in IT industry that can help me represent a flow of events and also in a easily comprehensible manner,

Yeah I hear this big picture missing thing a lot.

• From Dave Snowden, lists facets on opportunity scenarios in recession times. I need to apply trends and its system evolution laws for articulating the opportunities within an industry. I have been using STC (Stands for Size, Time and Cost) from the TRIZ toolkit for quite a while now and it is very powerful for scenario thinking.
• In a way organizational knowledge base system is very similar to these online giving markets. Giving part means the existence of trust both by the giver and taker.
  Great pointers on the success elements for such a market. 

Notes from Story McKee

I bought the excellent book Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting
an year ago, it was worth the investment. One thing that I would love having as a appendix/reference is may be an youtube channel with all the referenced scenes and acts. I played around with VUE to create the following picture from my notes.

Notes from Story