Knowledge Management

A hotchpotch or ragbag

By Dave Snowden  ·  January 25, 2013  ·  Knowledge Management, Musings

I ran through the various papers on narrative yesterday.  I spent longer than I planned on that post as I ended up reading several of them and taking notes.  We are looking at the overall training programme at the moment and I am thinking of bringing back a two day course on narrative.  I used to run that a lot a decade ago in IBM days, often in the Boat House at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark.  We involved cartoonists and actors in the event which was a mixture of theory and practice.  IBM Denmark got a bit stroppy...

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You can’t create a craft by committee

By Dave Snowden  ·  July 8, 2012  ·  Knowledge Management, Polemic, Reflections

From time to time in knowledge management circles the cry of standardisation is raised. It's just happened again with a new KM Linked In Group with the banner ...accreditation association delegated to make decisions by the global KM community. A brief investigation indicates its a variant on three men and a dog, or in this case two men seeking jobs, a woman and a cat.  When challenged on the pretentiousness of the title they say its just aspirational.  Since inviting people in, they have managed to alienate  the three people with...

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Fast falls the even tide

By Dave Snowden  ·  May 7, 2012  ·  Knowledge Management, Reflections

When we put CalmAlpha together back in January I was somewhat shamed by Joseph Pelrine talking about his use of ABIDE, something that I developed as a pairing for ASHEN the best part of a decade ago, but then left it to go into decline.  Others, Viv Read for example, argued that it should be brought back into the mainstream but it wasn't until a month or so that I started to realise why I was blocked on it, and how to use it.

But I get ahead of myself, I should explain what ABIDE is.   It is a mnemonic for the things that can be...

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Architecture not application: an opportunity

By Dave Snowden  ·  January 19, 2012  ·  Innovation, Knowledge Management, Intranet Technologies, News

Around two decades ago I was arguing that object orientation was not just a way of creating reusable code, but was a more profound shift to enabling architectures that could combine people and technology in evolving systems. The first part was generally accepted, the second more controversial. I then seemed, in the words of Mark 1:3 to be The voice of one crying in the wilderness. Mind you I have been there a few times before and plan frequent visits in the future.

Around a decade later having left IBM I sketched out a text based...

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New Movement, New Mastery: Perceptual Dexterity in the 21st Century

By Noah Raford  ·  July 22, 2011  ·  Knowledge Management

In my last post, I drew upon lessons from the psychology of visual perception to reflect upon how we understand peripheral threats and opportunities in the 21st century. I wrote that, “the only way to translate the sensory inputs of diffuse signals into meaningful patterns is through movement, i.e., interaction.”

In the savannahs and jungles of our past, this literally meant physical movement. Our eyes, brains and bodies evolved to detect minute differences in shapes, sounds, smells, visibility and patterns. Today, however,...

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