Misguided Adventures in Stale Knowledge Repositories

Greg Bloom, the founder of the Open Referral project, recently published a project Year in Review. He opened by succinctly telling the story of Open Referral:

We started Open Referral to address a systemic problem: it’s hard to find trustworthy information about the health, human, and social services available for people in need. We have many sources of community resource directory information — with more emerging all the time — but they all struggle to sustain themselves while trying to meet the diverse needs of their communities, and competing with each other (by default or by design) along the way.

We know that it shouldn’t be technologically hard to solve this problem by enabling community resource information systems to cooperate with each other — but it will take a movement to make it happen.

Not only is this a very clear description of the problem Open Referral is trying to solve, this is a very clear description of a problem that many communities have.

Many communities of practice that I work with have a simpler, but no less nefarious version of this same problem. Sharing resources and articles seems like high value, low-hanging fruit. This often takes the form of sharing information in-flow — on mailing lists, Slack, whatever the group’s primary messaging system might be.

This generally works well enough. Contributing and consuming are both easy, and there’s no cost to the information going stale, because you’re using a channel that’s essentially disposable. Sometimes, the channels even include searchable archives, which give you some measure of persistence.

At some point, someone almost always has the bright idea to compile a repository of resources on the web. This almost never works well. People are rarely thoughtful or — more importantly — iterative about figuring out how to contribute, curate, and consume these resources. And so these projects fail.

There aren’t good turnkey solutions for this. The reason is that it’s a hard, context-dependent problem. Good solutions are possible, but you have to commit to being iterative and experimental. If you’re not already iterative and experimental, you can get there through commitment and practice. Doing so is, ultimately, a social challenge, not a technical one.

Greg is grappling with a harder problem, but he’s doing it the right way — by treating it as a social problem, and incorporating technology in a thoughtful way. It’s really cool to see a lot of hard work start to pay off.

Perspective

For the past four weeks, I’ve been doing a little experiment as part of a cohort in which I’m participating. Every week, I’ve set aside three hours to write about lessons I’ve learned from different people (Doug Engelbart, Jeff Conklin, Chris Dent, Gail and Matt Taylor, and Kristin Cobble) and projects. I’m doing it primarily as a bottoms-up exercise to surface the core principles of my work, but I’m also curious to see if the stories themselves help people better understand my own story — why I do the work that I do and the core principles underlying my practice.

It’s been challenging and fun. It’s definitely helped me get clear, and I’ve also gotten good feedback from peers. I’ve benefited from decently organized notes over the years, several of which I published on this blog.

At times, I find myself flummoxed by how long I’ve been doing this. I “officially” started focusing on collaboration in 2002 — 15 years ago! — and I started this blog the following year. I’ve been pulling up lots of posts that I wrote a decade ago or longer, and while it’s been fun to revisit work that I was doing and questions I was exploring, it also leaves me wondering where the years have gone.

Then I think about my mentors. Jeff had been doing this work for 20 years when I first met him, Matt and Gail for almost 30, and Doug for 50! One of the many things that all four of these good folks had in common was that they were still curious, still learning. They had strong points of view that they had earned through many years of real practice, but they never let that interfere with their hunger to learn more and from anyone, regardless of age or background.

Compared to my mentors, 15 years still squarely places me in the beginner category, which is good, because that’s about how I feel. Maybe I’m in second grade now. It’s firing me up for what I’ll learn in the next 15 years, at which point maybe I’ll graduate to third grade.

More importantly, it reminds me how lucky I’ve been to have important mentors in my life and how important it is for me to pay it forward.

Dealing with Bullies

I was a small, skinny kid for most of my childhood, which meant I occasionally had to deal with bullies. My mom had a little twist on the Golden Rule she instilled in me at a very early age, which helped me deal with these bullies.

“If they hit you,” she advised me, “hit them back twice.”

The best way to deal with a bully is to punch him in the mouth. Given that physical violence is generally (maybe even appropriately) frowned upon, I later realized that there is an equally effective technique that amounts to the same thing: Find his source of power, and neuter him.

Hysterically expressing moral outrage, however valid, is a waste of energy. It exhausts you and your allies while feeding the bully and his supporters. I’m not suggesting that you suppress these feelings. Find ways to channel them into things that the bully cares about — taking away his status, his power, his audience.

Turning his audience means that you have to take the time to understand them and be disciplined in how you communicate with them. If you listen, you might be surprised to learn that you actually have common ground. Put everything else aside, and focus on that common ground.

Finally and most importantly, have the backs of the people you care about and who care about you. Solidarity is strength.

Le’Veon Bell and the Power of the Pause

Today was a very good day for football, including a game that featured one of the most exciting and unusual running backs in football, Le’Veon Bell (who had 30 carries for 170 yards in today’s Steelersplayoff win over Kansas City).

What makes Bell so interesting to watch, especially for the non-football fan? His patience.

Football is a game measured in seconds. Even though the average game lasts over three hours, players are actually playing for only about 11-minutes. Time is of the essence in this brutal game, and so most running backs (typically the best athletes on the team) make their initial move immediately. You’ll occasionally see a hesitation move, but it’s the exception, not the rule.

Bell pauses practically every single time he carries the ball. It almost looks like he’s sauntering to start. He’s not; he’s a ridiculous athlete. But he lets the play develop before he makes his move, and he’s often thinking two or three steps ahead.

This is strategic action personified in the most extreme, violent conditions. One of the core muscles in my Collaboration Muscles & Mindsets program is the Pausing muscle. Simply doing a collaboration workout in the middle of the work week exercises the Pausing muscle. Additionally, every workout kicks off with a minute of silent breathing.

Moving without pausing to think and see is one of the most common strategic deficiencies I see in other knowledge workers, including many leaders. I’d love to show clips of Bell play with everyone I work with.

Lots of commentators, coaches, and players have commented on his style, although you don’t have to be an experienced football fan to notice this. This Washington Post piece on Bell’s patience is excellent (and also touches on his love of chess). This video features clips and interviews with his peers about his patience:

I particularly loved this next video, where Jerome “The Bus” Bettis, Bell’s Hall of Fame predecessor and one of my favorite players, talks patience and strategy with Bell. Not only is it fun to watch to great players talk about their craft, but in the previous video, Carolina Panthers linebacker Luke Kuechly breaks down why Bell is so hard to stop. In this video, Bell talks specifically about the cat-and-mouse game he often plays with Kuechly.

Photo by Brook Ward. CC BY-NC 2.0.

Emile Zola on Poetry and Craft, Nature vs Nurture

Viola Davis’s introduction of Meryl Streep for the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award last Sunday was a highlight in its entirety, as was Streep’s powerful acceptance speech. But one thing that stood out in particular for me was Davis quoting Émile Zola:

If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, I will answer you: I am here to live out loud!

Because I am anal, I double check quotes I like before I save them, and the best source for citations is often Wikiquote. While scanning Zola’s Wikiquote page and affirming that he did indeed say the above, I also ran across this quote that I love in a letter to Paul Cézanne in 1860:

There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.