Category Archives: Knowledge Management

Finding new value in old notes

One of the journals I keep is a Daily Q&A journal, which asks the same question each calendar day every year for five years. It’s a great exercise in seeing what’s changed in your life and what’s not; where I’m moving toward my goals and where I’m stuck.

That ability to better understand the present in context of the past is one of the many things that’s valuable about old notes. I’ve thought for some time that if I was going to start another company right now, it might focus on re-surfacing new value from old notes. I love thinking about how old wisdom or information sheds new light on new circumstances. That’s a phenomenon I’d like to think about a lot more. For now, some specific examples.

Today my daily Q&A journal asks “what was the best thing you read today?”

On this day in 2014, I said it was a Chomsky interview in The Sun. Incidentally, I’m reading a wonderful Chomsky book right now that I got in a Free Library walking down the street. (I live in Portland, there’s Chomsky just laying about here.) Why did it take me four years to get back to reading Chomsky? Because the interview wasn’t that good. The book is great though! It makes me think that a great author shouldn’t be judged from one piece.

On this day in 2015, the most interesting thing I read was my own Evernote file of important thoughts recorded in the month of May. I still keep a file like that and I still review it regularly! One difference is that I now transfer those thoughts to a flashcard app called Anki for review and I record them in the first place in a private wiki instead of Evernote. My beloved personal wiki turns one year old next month, in fact.

In 2016 the most interesting thing I read on May 30th was an HBR article on five key steps for building support for your ideas: show up face to face to describe them, give a good speech about them that frames the discussion, have strong allies, have strong moral beliefs, and be persistent. That’s been in my flashcards ever since then but it’s something I could really use right now. Thanks for another reminder, old journal entry!

Last year on this date I was reading Eric Barker’s incredible book Barking Up the Wrong Tree. He tells a story about how comedians experiment with all kinds of jokes at small shows on the road, often telling jokes that fall flat, but taking note of those that land well. Then when they do a national show, that quantity of experiments provides enough proven wins that they can put together a show that’s 100% funny. That’s inspiring!

Have I produced enough content over recent years that I could piece together a really solid presentation or piece of writing where I know every item would make an impact? Not formally, but perhaps informally. That seems like a smart thing to make a wiki page about: points made that made an impact.

What did I record this year in response to the question, “what’s the best thing you read today?” I said, “my own note I took down some time ago that said, ‘when you say something powerful, stop.'”

Why you shouldn’t rely on social feed algorithms alone

“We run the risk, with social news algorithms,” Czech media philosopher Vilém Flusser wrote, “of losing our human capacity to select information, an essential part of making decisions, of being free.” (From the Society of the Query Reader: Reflections on Web Search)

That’s a powerful  way of saying it.  Making decisions is the essence of freedom, and selecting which information to focus on is a particularly important kind of freedom in an information-dense world.  As is the case with so many other forms of freedom, it’s also overwhelming and frightening.  Exercising it is a skill that we (hopefully) build.  (Mortimer Adler defines a skill as “a habit of following a set of rules,” in his great book How to Read a Book (video summary).)

I like to exercise my information freedom through source selection (following specific people, subscribing to RSS feeds), source categorization (making Twitter lists, folders in my RSS reader), reading the most recent updates from those sources, AND appreciating social news algorithms that bring selected updates to the top.  Today I retweeted my wife for the first time in a long time, because Twitter’s “You may have missed” algorithm made sure I saw her post.  I appreciate that.

Flusser’s exploration of the implications of these algorithms goes into more detail.  “For example,” he says, “redundant info isn’t removed, but highlighted, creating pressure to conform.”

If freedom is important to you, looking outside the boundaries of the algorithmic stream is important.

How to be valuable online in 2018

You know what kind of year-end blog posts are most valuable? In my mind, it’s ones highlighting the best or most successful content someone’s published throughout the whole year. That editorial winnowing down is a great value add. One good example is Marketing Sherpa’s Best of 2017: MarketingSherpa’s most popular content about email, customer-first marketing, and competitive analysis.

That thought combined with another thought or two in my mind just now and I decided it was time to update an old model I’ve been sharing with people for almost ten years: five ways to add value to social media conversations. That list is due for an update. I wrote it when I was a pro blogger and was sharing thoughts on how the bloggers on my team could get more traction with their blog posts.

These days I’m doing marketing, sales, research, business development, product leadership, influencer engagement, and more over at Sprinklr and so the blogger’s code of adding value needs to be expanded.

Why think about adding value? Few things are more important to building a career in this new, digital, post-scarcity world. You can either extract value or you can add value, and abundance-minded co-creation of value is the best way in this new world to strengthen your resource magnetism. The more value you put out into the world, the more you’ll also get yourself.

Adding value to conversations of general interest builds pass-along value and widens your network.

Here are some ways to do that.

Classic ways to add value in online communication

  1. Be first. If you can be the first place someone sees some valuable information, people will notice. If you are that person twice, then you’ll start to develop a reputation. Make a regular practice of it and people will pay attention to all the things you say, post, share and write because they’ll want to see what good things you first first or early next. This is what I used to specialize in as a blogger.
  2. Say it best. If you communicate more clearly, effectively, or insightfully about a topic of general interest, that’s a big value add. Who does that really well? A few examples include Stratechery and market research firm L2, who do incredible YouTube vidoes. Gartner acquired them this Spring.
  3. Bring multiple perspectives together. Aggregating influencer replies to a question is getting pretty tired, but there are good ways to approach this tactic still. I get my politics from Memeorandum and my tech news from Techmeme, for example.
  4. Unique perspective. My favorite examples this year is long-time blogger Audrey Watters, whose perspective I wish was less rare, and Jeanne Bliss, who brings a unique practitioner/consultant/journalistic perspective to interviewing corporate leaders in Customer Experience.
  5. Be funny. This is the hardest one, and I don’t know who does the best job of it, but I do know that whenever I share this list verbally, all the other items are so serious that people laugh when I just say “be funny.” It’s easier said than done! But it is one way to add value to social media conversations online.

That’s the list I’ve been sharing for years, but lately I’ve been thinking that list deserves an update. Here are a few tactics I’m thinking of adding to it for 2018.

Cross networks. Find great things on Twitter and share them on LinkedIn. Work out your issues on Wikipedia and then write an email newsletter about it. I once asked Kirk Borne, the most influential man in data science on Twitter, how he curates such an incredible stream of high-quality data science content. His answer? “Listservs.” So smart.

Explain it differently. Narrative stories transformed into visuals. Data and tables turned into narrative sentences. Video. White boarding. As Dave Gray says in Liminal Thinking, “Drawing things together aligns people on a vision better than words. And if it can’t be drawn, then it can’t be done.”

Draw connections with symphonic thinking. Daniel Pink writes about Symphonic Thinking as an increasingly important ability to draw together disparate things into a whole, to draw connections. I realized in 2016 that symphonic thinking is one of my greatest strengths. Maybe you’re good at it too.

Abstract into a new model. Peter Drucker said that strategic decisions engage with a problem at the highest conceptual level, what’s really at the root of it? And come up with a principal for dealing with it. Mary K Greer says that when you recall a memory from your experience, examining the elements of that experience that stand out in the memory is a powerful way to better understand what’s important to you about life. I think there’s a way that we could take specific information and use it as an opportunity to explore general principles that would be a very valuable contribution to online communication.

Apply a model. I’m not sure what to say about this one, but it’s something I want to explore more in 2018. For example…

Inversion: the practice of exploring how you want to do something by asking how a situation might play out if it went 100% wrong, and then looking at the steps you’d take to do the opposite of that.

Meaning as made of a thing’s context, contrasts, and corollary consequences.

Kirk Borne again once wrote about how data scientists can wrap their minds around really complex data sets by asking which feature of the data is most descriptive, which is most explanatory, and which is most predictive. You can do that with anything.

Aiming to make a bigger impact through small steps, smartly made: focus, leverage, and acceleration. Focus = sense of destination and direction. Leverage = convincing others to contribute more energy than you have alone. Acceleration = taking time for reflection, learning, and refinement to optimize for non-linear improvement. (John Hagel)

Applying a model to an issue is a way to create, capture, or add value just like applying labor plus capital plus technology to resources.

Those are a few things I’ve got on my mind going into this wild, abundant, frightening year of opportunity. How about you?

Digital Transformation will change how we work and live together

I was asked in an interview that I hope will appear online soon what I’m excited about that’s coming in the future of social media. Based on some thoughts from Dion Hinchcliffe that I wrote about recently and some historical context from Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson’s new book Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future, here is what I wrote:

In short, I’m excited about how social media is changing the way we work. I’m excited about the coming bounty of real understanding and increased humanity that I expect to be a part of digital transformation. 20 years ago, the digital re-engineering of the enterprise brought new levels of efficiency and freed many people from their most repetitive work. Now our jobs require far more creativity, self-determination, communication, and other fundamentally human skills.

That type of transition is underway again in what we call Digital Transformation. Now it’s new technologies like social networks – both inside and outside of enterprises, new ways of working like the practice called “working out loud,” and new, network-informed ways of thinking about stakeholders, measurement, growth and management. This is an exciting time, this time of the consumerization of the enterprise. Hopefully the enterprise will have a lot to add to the mix as well – and the new capabilities of social media will be leveraged in powerful and positive ways at work.

On a deeper level, below this question about work, I’m excited about the ongoing democratization of communication and self-awareness that social media offers. It continues to face criticism, for example recently from some of the people who helped create it, as “short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created [that] are destroying how society works.” But I think that’s just a sign that we as individual participants need to take more responsibility and use social media more effectively. History will be the result of both structural and macroeconomic trends and our individual decisions, together.

How to read 3X more than you do today

The democratization of the printing press (by that I mean the internet) has led to a new problem: information overload.

A related problem is the shortage of time we have to read the internet.  If you are someone who makes money or participates in the world otherwise, your work will be more effective, producing more value per labor hour, if it’s informed by the best thinking from your peers around the world. Right? Right.

But how? Who has the time to read very much?

For the past several months I’ve been reading 3 to 10 articles online everyday, some very long, by using a new tool. I don’t know how much you read but that’s a huge increase for me.

I tell people about it every day and everyone is amazed. It’s Pocket! Specifically the text-to-speech function in Pocket. It’s life changing.
Continue reading →

How good are you at predicting things? Here’s my Brier Score for the week

HBR ran a great article about improving the forecasting abilities of teams this week, (Superforecasting: How to Upgrade Your Company’s Judgement) I highly recommend it, and one of the most interesting tools discussed was something called the Brier Score. It’s an easy way to quantify how well you are doing at accurately forecasting the outcomes of your actions.  It’s pretty simple.  I kept track of my predictions at work and home over this past week and calculated my score, I’ll be excited to see if I can improve it week over week.

I scored a .78 this week over 4 predictions.  You want to get as close to zero as possible. I was wrong about one thing and it really dinged me.

Here’s how you do it.  Write down a forecast about something you can be either right or wrong about, and a degree of confidence you have about your forecast.  For example, I predicted that I was probably going to be invited to join my wife at dinner last night after an event she’s participating in.  We’d discussed whether that would be the case, and we left it open ended – but I had a 60% level of confidence that’s what was going to happen.

And I was right!  So when you’re right with a 60% confidence level, you calculate your score like this: (.60-1)^2 = .16

Now I also predicted this week that a certain woman I admire a lot on the internet was going to be lukewarm about a suggestion we collaborate on a project.  In part just to experiment, I gave that prediction a 70% probability!

And I was wrong!  She was pretty open to it and we’re doing a little experiment together that’s super cool.   I’m really glad I was wrong – but that dinged my Brier Score badly.  When you’re wrong with a 70% confidence level it’s (.70-0)^2=.49.  And we’re looking for as close to zero as possible.  Ouch.

So this week I tracked 4 predictions with confidence levels ranging from 60% to 80% and I was right about the other two, so I added them up and my total score for the week was .78.  We’ll see if I can get it below that next week.

I gave myself some feedback on them where I could, and next week I’m going to think a little harder before committing to predictions.  I’d like to see if there are variations of the Brier Score, or if I should adapt it, to take into consideration the significance of the predictions.  Some of the things I made forecasts this week were much more important than others.

A few other thoughts:

  • Putting more thought into predictions so I’m more confident in them will make my score better when I’m right.
  • Without some normalization, every prediction you make impacts your score negatively.  I want to be thoughtful and keep track of many things throughout the week, so maybe I should say my score was .195 across 4 predictions.
  • There’s more to this but I haven’t drank enough coffee this Saturday morning yet to go much more in depth
  • The HBR article suggested you do this kind of thing with groups of people and figure out who’s best at forecasting.  It also suggested that groups collaborate and receive as little as an hour of structured training on avoiding faulty thinking patterns.  The authors found that those conditions dramatically improve success.
  • I love models like this – they are so powerful and useful!

Meeting Prep, on Your Own Time: A Template Google Doc

After feeling frustrated that I wasn’t prepped as much as I wanted before a meeting called by one of my co-workers at Plexus Engine, I came up with the following Google Doc template to capture all the info we needed before meeting with someone from outside our company. I really like this system and thought I’d share it.

The procedure we’re experimenting with is to create a copy of this Google Doc, edit it to fill it out, then paste the URL to view it inside our company calendar listing for said meeting. I’ve been experimenting with changes; just tonight I added the field for “confirmed within 36 prior hours” because I try to email people the day before a meeting to confirm and set the stage.

This system helps us communicate explicitly about meetings, but on our own time. It doesn’t take too much time to fill one of these out – generally less than 5 minutes. We’ll see how it works, we’ve only just begun doing it. If you’d like a copy of that same template, I posted one here. I have a link to that master template doc bookmarked in my browser toolbar. If you can think of any other ways this could be made more useful, please let me know.