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The Distillation of Wisdom
We included the Street Smarts feature in the very first issue of Directions, imagining it as a place where we'd
publish little nuggets of wisdom in their most elemental form. They’d be rules of thumb for KM and communications, which would embody Knowledge Street's common sense philosophy and provide good advice
for our readers.
We thought of the tips as the end result of a distillation process, in which something we'd learned was boiled down to its bare essentials. This wasn't hard for the first few
months, but after almost six years, coming up with a new tip is often the most challenging part of the newsletter.
That's why we were particularly impressed to find a single blog post with not one, not two, but 15 good tips for sharing knowledge. More than a year's worth in one place! These tips came to us in the RSS feed from the website of Lucas McDonnell, a Toronto-based KM practitioner who writes thoughtfully and well about Knowledge Management and technology. His
point of view is very much in synch with how things look to us at Knowledge Street, and we highly recommend that you pay him a visit. Better yet,
set yourself up with a subscription.
Beyond the List: The Map!
In our tip last month, we considered the humble checklist as an information management tool and suggested how it
could be expanded into a kind of visioning system. Making a list of long-term goals could be a way to focus your attention and support incremental progress. That idea drew a comment from one of our
readers, who does something similar, in a more sophisticated way.
Frank Leistner, Chief Knowledge Officer at SAS, feels a mind map is better than a list here. He uses one as a kind of "Life Map" and revisits it regularly to check off goals accomplished,
revise assumptions and otherwise plot his course. Mind maps are diagrams designed to help visualize relationships among different concepts. The idea is to let your own understanding determine how one
thing connects to another, so the map becomes a representation of your personal conceptual structure. You can see an extensive (and entertaining) collection at TopicScope.com.
Mind maps aren't new, and all you really need to build one is a pencil and paper. But there are also software tools for managing them, if that's
your inclination. The Wikipedia has a convenient directory of same, as well as a nice overview article on the topic. Not for everyone, of course, but perhaps a good addition to your tool box.
The Eve of Distraction
We've written a number of times about the concept of multitasking, an activity that kids seem to
take for granted today. Just in the past week, it's been a subject of discussion at Stan Garfield's SIKM leaders group (particularly as to the generational aspects of multitasking). Now, a new book by Maggie Jackson suggests that multitasking might be leading us to a new Dark Age, as human beings lose their ability to pay close attention.
The book is called Distracted and it cites a number of disturbing findings. For example, the average knowledge worker switches tasks every three minutes, and once distracted, takes nearly 30 minutes to resume the original task. According to Jackson, humans can't really multitask. Whatever we may think, we can only do one thing at a time. Our new culture of continual distraction is teaching us to exist on crumbs of insight, and wreaking havoc with our ability for focused thought. If you're interested, you can listen to a radio interview with the author, recorded in late June.
The Know How of Hard Times
Knowledge Associate Don Riemer pointed us to an interesting article in a local paper, wondering if recent advertisements were evidence of a disturbing type of brain drain. As the economy continues to deteriorate, what happens to the affluent children of affluent adults who don't know how to be poor?
The ad in question was touting spaghetti as an "anti-recession meal," feeding a family of four for under $10. One assumes some sort of market research determined there were heads of
households out there who didn’t already know that spaghetti is cheap. They may not know Wednesday is spaghetti night because it's the last night before payday. They may not know you can drink water right
out of the tap instead of buying it by the bottle.
Every generation loses the knowledge it no longer needs, and there aren't many folks of our acquaintance who could set a trap or skin a bear. But
it's depressing to think there may be a population of Newly Struggling, who don't know how to economize when times are lean.
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