Thinking Aloud is now Cognitive Noise

After a prolonged acceptance of the clunkiness with blogger, I have given up on blogger.
I am moving to wordpress.
Thinking Aloud is Cognitive Noise on wordpress.
New feed here http://feeds2.feedburner.com/cognitivenoise
Update your feeds etc, see you there...

Notes from Story McKee

I bought the excellent book Story by Robert McKee 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.

Context Switching

This is something K Manager job demands.
Making sense of a business demands in depth understanding of context. You do this once, twice, every day. And then increasing scope just means you have increased the number of contexts that you will cater to. That results in gradual loss of relevance to customers and lack of depth in adoption, now all your services are only lip services. Success then on is left to serendipity and that rare person to make sense of a what the "KM people" are saying.
Choice is simple to limit/not the contexts.

Inherent Capacity

Each one of us have an inherent capacity to do something well and when done, feeling happy and satisfied about it. The conditioning, education, brought up, or corporate job has this effect of making you forget or move away from that inherent capacity. When your day job caters to that your working hours becomes a joyful experience.

What is your inherent capacity?

Business Relvance for KM

Can we get business relevance as the first step of creating a KM program?
Is the top management ready send a directive that the time needed for the company to get ready for a change in market scenario is way too much (say 1 year) and need a knowledge strategy to help make it quicker?
Strategy group (central function/think tank) decides based on their research, there are several knowledge needs (competence) that the organization lacks even to enter certain markets and geos. Can KM help the organization get there?
Our positioning in a market is too low in the value chain (body shopping / customer managed team augmentation) and the customer businesses are going down (say like point 1 or other super system reasons), as a vendor is there a systematic way to innovate and create new markets for your customer or grow the existing one or cut their costs or whatever that has a $ +. Is this any role of KM?
As the company operations are wide spread across multiple cultures, geos, technologies, markets is it still logical to believe that a centralized decision making function possibly remote will be able to take those decisions quickly and also the right ones?

When I say KM I am not referring "the central KM function" but rather the act of managing both the knowns and unknowns of the company.
Secondly I think it is time we move away from looking at KM as a cost center and all the associated measurements and rather head into making relevance to business and operations.

Triputi on 9 Windows

The concept of Triputi (observer, observed and the act of observing) was made famous by many thinkers like J Krishnamurti among many others, actually dates back more than 3000 years.
What am I trying?
Applying this on a Systematic Innovation Technique called 9 Windows.
How
When I used to create 9 windows or facilitate to create 9 windows I was limiting my self to one thing which is the observed. So I was only interested in the adjective /adverbs of the system around which the 9 windows is drawn.
E.g. Withdrawing cash from an ATM would have at its sub system level
Instrument: Card
Identity: PIN Entered
Instrument Verification: Over Secure Network and Payment Gateway
Transaction Verification: Generated from ATM

But the power of the technique only comes to surface when you add the other 2 dimensions of the triputi viz. the act of observing and also the observer.
You can view this as an account holder, a bank, a thief, a security guard in the atm, etc.
The action itself can be viewed at different levels like interaction with the machine, system, account, bank etc.
Add all these then you see the real 9 windows.

I also had in mind a thought on trends within 9 windows, may be later in another post.

Lead, Administrate or Manage

I wanted to be clear myself on the etymology of these words.

administer
c.1374, "to manage as a steward," from O.Fr. aministrer, from L. administrare "serve, manage," from ad- "to" + ministrare "serve" (see minister).

minister
1297, "one who acts upon the authority of another," from O.Fr. ministre "servant," from L. minister (gen. ministri) "servant, priest's assistant" (in M.L. "priest"), from minus, minor "less," hence "subordinate," + comp. suffix *-teros.

lead (v.)
"to guide," O.E. lædan "cause to go with one, lead," causative of liðan "to travel," from W.Gmc. *laithjan (cf. O.S. lithan, O.N. liða "to go," O.H.G. ga-lidan "to travel," Goth. ga-leiþan "to go"). Meaning "to be in first place" is from c.1380. The noun is first recorded c.1300, "action of leading." Meaning "the front or leading place" is from 1570.

manage
1561, probably from It. maneggiare "to handle," esp. "to control a horse," from L. manus "hand" . Influenced by Fr. manège "horsemanship" (earliest Eng. sense was of handling horses), which also was from the Italian. Extended to other objects or business from 1579.