Group items tagged

"Visualization is often used interchangeably with sensemaking-making sense of the world we live in and then acting within that framework of understanding to achieve desired goals. Thus visualization or sensemaking is not just a shared (social) image with intent, it also implies ACTION. This sensemaking framework is composed of seven basic steps as shown below (Leedom, McElroy, Shadrick, Lickteig, Pokorny, Haynes, Bell, 2007):"

People who have already sifted through online information to make sense of a subject can help strangers facing similar tasks without ever directly communicating with them, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft Research have demonstrated. This process of distributed sensemaking, they say, could save time and result in a better understanding of the information needed for whatever goal users might have, whether it is planning a vacation, gathering information about a serious disease or trying to decide what product to buy.

We are swamped with data - even our movements are tracked by mobile networks, and stored. Our web tracks are everywhere and our purchasing habits both online and offline are fully traceable. Businesses and security agencies are swamped with data, and yet there is widespread dissatisfaction about query tools and data analytics. Ask the right questions and you will get the right answers. That's all well and good with SQL, but it has failed us. Knowledgebase tools have failed us too.

We are swamped with data - even our movements are tracked by mobile networks, and stored. Our web tracks are everywhere and our purchasing habits both online and offline are fully traceable. Businesses and security agencies are swamped with data, and yet there is widespread dissatisfaction about query tools and data analytics. Ask the right questions and you will get the right answers. That's all well and good with SQL, but it has failed us. Knowledgebase tools have failed us too.

What do we do when we don't know what to do? - and how do we ensure that whatever we do is the right thing to do? How do we make sense fast, at business-speed?

Online insights are as liquid as currency, their velocity of circulation - incredible. Insights are no plaything, forming and acting upon them effects industry structures at the core. Their mere utterance gels prior assumptions and triggers a succession of indirect and direct mimicry. Why? People are genuinely curious and suffer from time pressure to be accurate and objective. Which has resulted in an insights market and industry that rewards accuracy over ingenuity. Insights by nature are descriptive and reflective - retrospective of lived experiences. Insights are the past. They have been separated from life. To exist as unpredictable patterns the may or may not fully characterize the "real world" or persist as perceived. The list of problems and challenges organizations and consultancies face in managing and applying insight continue to grow. This list is by no means definitive but intends to describe what we have been seeing around us lately.

In the Double Freytag model of narrative decision-making, analysis-paralysis corresponds to getting stuck in the sense-making phase. Why does this happen? The problem has to do with the nature of the insight (or cheap trick) that triggers a gear shift from exploration to sense-making.  If it is an appreciative insight, it will help you make sense of what's going on in the situation without necessarily creating the focal point for action. But on the other hand, it is not a purely manipulative insight either (i.e., it is more than a mindless hack).  I covered appreciative versus manipulative knowledge in the last post.

"How do you start something new? Whether it's an exercise program, a simple task you've left on the back burner, or creating a new business from scratch-how do you get started? Doing so can be very intimidating. And it's the lack of starting that kills most projects. In his now classic article, "Small Wins," Karl Weick argues that when goals seem overwhelming, they sap our intrinsic motivation. Here are three timeless rules for starting something new."

"The emerging science of 'collective intelligence' - and the rise of the global brain"

"Yesterday, I was inspired by a great post by Chris Wilson on How to Survive the Teacher Apocalypse.  I thought about it all afternoon especially as it touched upon thoughts I had had on the cost of knowledge.  The interesting turn for me came when I started reflecting more on the Value of Knowledge because realistically the costs of knowledge have and will continue to drop rapidly (despite the efforts of gatekeepers) due to digitalization and other market factors, but something is rising in counter weight…"

"Thinking. The capacity to reflect, reason, and draw conclusions based on our experiences, knowledge, and insights. It's what makes us human and has enabled us to communicate, create, build, advance, and become civilized. Thinking encompasses so many aspects of who our children are and what they do, from observing, learning, remembering, questioning, and judging to innovating, arguing, deciding, and acting."

"In today's world employees often must deal with tasks and problems that require much more that simply following a predetermined step by step procedure - the problems require the exercise of judgment. Judgment is needed when we are faced with thorny questions about which there are no right or wrong answers. When asked one of those thorny questions we often say, "Well, it's a matter of judgment." Soldiers, for example, face many situations in which one correct course in not clear, as in this example from one of the US Army on-line communities, PlatoonLeader."

Design thinking is basically "a way of approaching a challenge" - it is not a radical new methodology. Design Thinking encapsulates prototyping, convergent and divergent thinking, customer research, and is a holistic approach to management and leadership. It enlivens the gift of curiosity along with the power of observation. It takes data and places it in a given point of time.

In business, everyone keeps confusing information with knowledge. They're different. Even the dictionary says so: Information: Facts provided or learned about something or someone. Knowledge: Information and skills acquired through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject. Information is ones and zeros. It's raw data, or a list of facts. It's instructions on filling out a business license, or the instructions Google provides when you sign up for Adwords. The obvious stuff. You can often acquire information for free: Go to the Associated Press for raw, un-analyzed news. Or read a 'how to' on building your own car. Knowledge is something else entirely. It's what you get when you combine information with _analysis_ and _experience_. Knowledge is information distilled down to actions. It can and should cost you money, or time, or something else. If you want real analysis of the news you just grabbed from the Associated Press, for example, you might go to the New York Times and pay (at least after 10 views). To learn AdWords tricks that can actually help you profit, you'll buy a book, pay for a seminar or hire a consultant.

AMHERST, Mass. - As computer scientists this year celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of the mathematical genius Alan Turing, who set out the basis for digital computing in the 1930s to anticipate the electronic age, they still quest after a machine as adaptable and intelligent as the human brain. Now, computer scientist Hava Siegelmann of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, an expert in neural networks, has taken Turing's work to its next logical step. She is translating her 1993 discovery of what she has dubbed "Super-Turing" computation into an adaptable computational system that learns and evolves, using input from the environment in a way much more like our brains do than classic Turing-type computers. She and her post-doctoral research colleague Jeremie Cabessa report on the advance in the current issue of Neural Computation. "This model is inspired by the brain," she says. "It is a mathematical formulation of the brain's neural networks with their adaptive abilities." The authors show that when the model is installed in an environment offering constant sensory stimuli like the real world, and when all stimulus-response pairs are considered over the machine's lifetime, the Super Turing model yields an exponentially greater repertoire of behaviors than the classical computer or Turing model. They demonstrate that the Super-Turing model is superior for human-like tasks and learning.

Somewhere around the early 1990s, MRIs-the technique of magnetic resonance imaging-tiptoed out of the pall of cancer wards into the sunnier campuses of universities, and forged a melange among the departments of psychology, neuroscience, management and economics. The result of this academic straddle is a literary niche called pop neuroscience, into which science writer Jonah Lehrer's newest offering, Imagine: How Creativity Works, neatly slots itself.

"Non-reading is not just the absence of reading. It is a genuine activity, one that consists of adopting a stance in relation to the immense tide of books that protects you from drowning. On that basis, it deserves to be defended and even taught." At first blush, a book titled How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read (public library) sounds at once sacrilegious in its proposition and wildly meta-ironic. Then again, it gets to the heart of a painfully familiar literary bind - that book about a fascinating sliver of science, written by a breathlessly boring academic; the fetishized Ulysseses of the world, reluctantly half-read and promptly forgotten; the Gladwellian tome that could've been, should've been, and likely at some point was a magazine article. Must we read those from cover to cover in order to be complete, cultured individuals?

For most of us, it usually occurs at the most inopportune times; never when we're searching for it. To Archimedes, it happened in the bathtub. Newton experienced it while wandering an apple orchard. Arthur Fry: church. Each encountered an epiphany, that powerful moment of spontaneous insight. Archimedes shouted Eureka! upon realizing how to calculate density and volume; to Newton came the law of universal gravity; to Arthur Fry, Post-it notes.

A ZURB fan recently passed along a nifty video after reading our recent post about the importance of iteration. Just to recap, we said that to get an aha moment, you have to get there incrementally, through iteration. In other words, there are no shortcuts to an aha moment. The video features bestselling author and journalist Jonah Lehrer, who writes mostly about psychology and neuroscience. Here he's taking about aha moments and how they don't happen by focusing too much on the problem.