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November 13, 2008 by Patti

Blogging

The more I immerse myself in the flow — increase my addiction to the Internet, some would have it — the harder it is to focus and collect my thoughts in a blog. I’ve always tried to use my posts to synthesize ideas that come from different places, so it’s sometimes a long time before things gel into a coherent concept. Lilia Efimova’s blog this morning brought my process into focus.

Her PhD thesis is on the blogger community and blogging. She has continued to blog throughout her research and now in her dissertation-writing phase. Here’s how she divides the process of writing into phases:

• Awareness and articulation — starting to get ideas on the radar
• Sense-making — when the connections among the ideas and a possible meaning become clear
• Turning the ideas into specific product — the dissertation chapter

Here is her perceptive map of the process:

Here are the bits I am collecting (somewhere between the two left-side states):

• Understanding what collection of Web 2.0 tools to use in different contexts (this will go on the AppGap)
• Information overload in the flow (more on the topic introducing this post, also AppGap)
• Uptake of net work in the nonprofit world (here)
• Understanding the transition between an emergent, self-organizing state and the close-knit structure required for a team to produce

Actually, the last item will need a graphic that looks very much like the one above.

Thanks, Lilia!

October 12, 2008 by Patti

Grace Happens

We had an extraordinary theater experience last night at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, MA. Let Me Down Easy is an Anna Deavere Smith “play in evolution” that begs the audience to inquiry about the nature of grace. If you are not familiar with Deavere Smith’s work, you can find her on Ted. Her solo performances are based on interviews with people she seeks out in order to learn how the world occurs to them. As she talks with them and records the conversations, she acquires these people as characters who then inhabit her play as she inhabits them. Barefoot, so as better to “walk in their words,” she expresses their thoughts and emotions as she speaks their words verbatim.

It’s the weaving. In Let Me Down Easy, she mixes the views of theologians (including a Buddhist monk and an Iranian imam) about the concept of grace (which is a uniquely Christian concept) with the actual experience of grace as it visits or people’s lives. Reverends James Cone (“Grace is Power”) and Peter Gomes (businessmen are disinclined to practice the golden rule until after are successful) provide glimpses into different worldviews and experiences, one following the other at the beginning and both reappearing throughout.

But the play is as much about “Disgrace” as it is about grace. Her explorations of the genocide in Rwanda and its impact on survivors provides one powerful theme. A second theme is in her critique of the U.S. healthcare system which, in the words of Phil Pizzo, is very close to reaching equivalence with healthcare systems in 3rd world countries.

Practical experiences include a doctor who waited five days for FEMA to evacuate the Charity Hospital in New Orleans during Katrina and its aftermath, amid the black patients and nurses who knew that no one would come for them. In a touching conclusion, an orphanage director in Johannesburg talks about how she sits with children dying of aids.

You can hear Anna Deavere Smith doing some of her characters (including the wonderful Ann Richards, former Texas Governor, talking about her Chi) with Christopher Lydon here. (Many thanks to Craig DeLarge for picking up on my tweets and then searching out the two clips linked above and sending them to me. Also thanks to Jessica Lipnack, who inspired me to start going to the A.R.T. in the first place.)

October 8, 2008 by Patti

Generations

You know you’ve been touched by a powerful idea or theory when it keeps coming back to mind, and begging you to apply its perspective to other ideas you encounter or read about. I’ve been touched by the Strauss and Howe theory of generations.

Deb Gilburg, of the Gilburg Leadership Institute introduced the idea (first described in the 1991 book Generations) to a recent meeting of our local idea network Gennova. The theory has it that there is a cycle of generational patterns that repeats every four generations (approximately 22 to 26 years). Strauss and Howe have characterized the four patterns and have mapped these patterns to 350 years of American history. Each pattern both shapes and is shaped by the historical context of its time, but the underlying characteristics of each pattern remain the same.

We are now accustomed to thinking about our three primary current generations, Boomers (the first generation to actually identify and name itself), GenX, and GenY. There are, of course, still many members of the pre-boomer “GI” generation that took us through WWII and its immediate antecedent, the generation that Strauss and Howe call the “Silents.” The archetypes that typify these generations are the Hero, Artist, Visionary and Nomad. A “turning” occurs after each cycle of four generations. The 2007 HBR article, The Next 20 Years: How Customer and Workforce Attitudes Will Evolve, though a bit scarily prescient in that it lists both Barack Obama and Sarah Palin as exemplars of Generation X. There’s also a lot of free stuff on the web site linked above.

This intriguing theory shows up, of course, in my current work to understand how to implement social tools in the enterprise given the distinct differences between the Boomers who fill the top management ranks, the GenXers coming up to management, and the GenYers who we look at as group-oriented, network-and-tool-savvy, and eager to be assigned important work. The tool part is an instance of history (in this case, the march of technology) influencing the generation. But, the group-oriented nature of GenY as this generation gets down to work, in the same way that the previous “Hero” generation, the GIs, got to work to organize and defend the world against tyrannical and mad dictators.

Previous Hero generations came of age during wartime (Revolutionary, Civil, and WWI) and we are of course at war on many fronts. But the challenge that unites a Hero generation does not need to be war. It could, for instance, be a planetary threat — like global warming — that will need people to set aside politics to accomplish bold endeavor.

This notion of the generational styles shows up for me in many ways recently. In a blog over on theAppGap, for instance, I reflected on current criticism of why managers do not think deeply. I wonder if there is a generational aspect to this. Reading about Daniel Goleman in a recent strategy+business article, (perhaps a blog on this anon) I wonder if the organizational development movement is an aspect of self-introspective generational pattern coming of age.

And, in looking at notes provided to me by KMWorld speaker Peter Andrews of IBM, I see the the pattern anew as he distinguishes the current state and future state of workers, saying of the future state “Workers identify with peers” and “Work centers around the endeavor.” Take this out of Andrew’s organizational context, it’s not hard to see these terms being applied to the GI generation.

Last, this past weekend walking my visiting cousins around the Revolutionary battlegrounds and the homes of Transcendalist writers (who, like us Boomers were of the “Prophet” archetype) I thought again about generations seized by ideas. Later, around the kitchen table with my cousins I thought of our own GI-generation mothers and of our grandmother, Alma, who raised ten children and who’s laugh I can still hear. Alma, like many Americans (the work is decidedly US-specific) doesn’t quite fit her generation — the Lost Generation — as she was born to Danish farmers in Wisconsin and married an immigrant Dane who shod horses.

Generations is a long and fascinating read and I suspect that when I finish I might start all over again. Having some fresh perspective will do odd things to you. As long as you keep your perspective about it.

August 27, 2008 by Patti

Powerful new tools for Value Network Analysis

Value Network Analysis (VNA) is one of the sense-making tools that I emphasize in my book, Net Work.
I have had the privilege of working with and learning from its inventor, Verna Allee, and have internalized the mapping of value exchanges into my consulting practice. Whether shared or created with the client or not, it’s how I make sense of how a network of actors (inside an organization, or across multiple organizations) gets work done. The units of analysis in a VNA are (1) a role, for example, technical writer, software developer, or end user and (2) exchanges. Connections among roles represent exchanges of value that are either tangible deliverables (proposals, contracts, invoices, payments) or intangible (reputation, trust, well-being). In a VNA for an economic development engine for a Canadian province, we mapped the roles of the development engine, local ICT companies, schools, government agencies, and so on:

This mapping represents the first step in a VNA. Subsequent work would analyze the overall balance of the exchanges and for each of the exchanges, determine its current strengths/weaknesses and steps required for improvement, if any.

Translating this first output (which is almost always done with the stakeholders who represent each of the roles present) into readable and modifiable images for report or presentations, has been difficult, tedious, and mostly manual.

Which is why I am really excited about the announcement of the ValueNetworks.com application. Starting with a simple spreadsheet, I can now type in the roles and exchanges and let the hosted application create a VISIO file, PowerPoint slides, and the outline of a project report. Here’s the VISIO from the above:

Now, I did have to tweak it somewhat, but the hard part was done for me.

Getting to a visual map quickly is just the beginning:

• You can assign people to deliverables, establish relationships between deliverables and assets in the organization, and indicate the perceived value of a transaction to its recipient.
• If the map represents a process, you can sequence the exchanges and get an animated view of the process.
• It generates a report that tells you how the network is balanced (for example, number of tangible vs intangible exchanges, or how balanced each role is with respect to number of exchanges in vs exchanges out)

VNA will still need the human interaction required to build the base map, and now the tool has really been enhanced (it’s like a new tool) to help projects with a detailed analysis and development of an action plan.

It’s always nice to have a new tool for net work.