News and conversations are filled with challenges that cross disciplinary divides: climate change, poverty and effective education to name a few. In my consulting practice, I work with leaders who are struggling with complex, knowledge-related challenges. As a researcher, my scholarship hovers around the intersections of leadership, complexity theory and knowledge management. Increasingly, I appreciate […]
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Assumptions about Assumptions
I had an interesting airport experience yesterday. Realizing I was flyng with a U.S. based airline, I planned ahead to take advantage of oversold flight perks. Wouldn’t it be great to have a free flight for a writing session with the co-author of a book we’re hoping to write this year! So my plan was […]
Metadata on Steroids
Recently, Lisa Petrides posted this tweet: “listening 2 interesting talks on metadata (really!). we have 2 get away from narrow def of it, to include user-generated, annotations, etc.” This reminded me of a work I had done with Andrew Faulkner in which we used data warehouse infrastructure (his specialization). I created views of data integrated […]
On Synchronicity
We’re trained—as Rupert Sheldrake points out—to treat what we might call synchronicity (or coherence, or connection and alignment, or the power of the mind as something larger than the brain, or the power of attraction) as coincidence. That may be true. Yet I have had that experience that many of us have had, where if […]
What makes a blog post/tweet valuable?
I am working with a group of talented and respected leaders, most of whom have not worked with technologies such as forums, discussion groups, blogs, wikis, communities of practice platforms, etc. They have an online space in which they are starting to post some questions, comments and resources. Several have asked me what makes a […]
Knowledge Management Research in Africa
I noticed on twitter that “elmi” was trying to assemble a list of South African KM publications. The community KM4Dev could be helpful. I also thought it would be interesting to see what would come up in a quick search using the more generic term “Africa” for KM work. I found more than expected, and […]
Public engagement & social technologies
Today, Nancy White joined one of our calls for leaders in park and protected area systems. Our focus was on how their public engagement efforts might be enhanced through use of social technologies and related tools. A common challenge for these professionals is maintaining the relevance of systems developed with a European-shaped North American perspective […]
Continuity Alchemy
Good knowledge management efforts often flounder because senior champions move on. I am thinking about what sorts of positions and structures can provide effective, high level continuity–or the appearance of high level continuity–during periods of disruption.
Horizontal & Vertical Collide
As I was fine-tuning my dissertation about how respected leaders work in horizontal, boundary spanning environments, I read a story in the Washington Post. In Staff Finds White House in the Technological Dark Ages, Kornblut writes “Two years after launching the most technologically savvy presidential campaign in history, Obama officials ran smack into the constraints […]
The Scope of a Blog
I hear colleagues talk about the importance of scope decisions in a blog. Some create separate blogs–or separate twitter identities–for different topics. Others write about a wide range of professional and personal interests in the same forum. I assume these decisions involve several elements: What is my identity as a writer, communicator or blogger? What do […]
