New Agora

This is a bit of a diversion from my usual posts, but I think it's important. Jay Rosen recently wrote a ripper article dismantling many of the ways that political journalists tend to distort, rather than promote, quality political debate.

The New Yorker has a fantastic article about the history of universal health coverage across the world.

Set in the context of Obama's health reform bill, of course, it makes the excellent point that where we have come from determines where we can go next:

Knowledge Management is still a young discipline that often suffers from a lack of consensus about its meaning and goals. To avoid holy wars, much of KM focuses on the "what" and the "how" of KM (ie immediate activities to undertake) while being weak on the "why" (long term objectives). Without a strong "why" though, it has been easy for skeptics to dismiss the importance of KM.

But I'm beginning to sense a shift in the wind.

With an increased recognition of the complex nature of organisations, there is a turn away from command and control approaches to managing knowledge by demanding individual changes in behavior. Instead, people are embracing a more holistic and integrated view.

When organisational and community knowledge becomes indivisible, focus shifts from whether any individual "possesses" knowledge to how well patterns of organisational interaction act to enhance institutional learning and preserve institutional memory.

The success of institutional knowledge is measured like any other knowledge: by how well it helps the institution survive by enabling it to be adaptable, resilient and innovative.

There's a great story in The Boston Globe about work being done to improve a children's hospital's capacity to help people without a single additional dollar being spent.

The thing that really struck me was that I'm sure everyone in the hospital was genuinely trying to deliver the best service to their patients:

Recently I have been thinking a lot about the impact of collaborative tools on workplace interruptions.

In the old days of computers, PCs could only work on one task at a time. This naturally discouraged task switching, since there was a cost of setting up and quitting the application. Instead, people completed the task they were on before moving on to the next one.

Not coincidentally, this habit also closely mirrored the traditional "in-tray" approach of business. Take the first piece of paper; deal with it; move on to the next. The only difference was that it encouraged "clumping" of tasks. Deal with all tasks requiring Application A, then move to all those requiring Application B.

Once multitasking became widespread with Windows 3.1, this approach no longer had to hold. People could partly complete one task; switch to another task on demand; and switch back. However, my memory of these early days is that multi-tasking was generally reserved for reference purposes. You might run multiple windows, but generally the new task supported the completion of the original, "master" task.

The advent of email and the internet changed all that.