2009 March | Dave's Whiteboard

Work worth doing, questions worth asking

Mar 232009

It is better to know some of the questions
than all of the answers.

— James Thurber

When you work independently, sometimes the project you accept wouldn’t be your first choice, but you don’t have much in the way of other choices. Some of my work last year fit into the latter category. For quite a while I was writing or rewriting standard operating procedures in a manufacturing facility–not as exciting as it sounds.

Opportunities lately pique my interest more, either because of the client’s business itself or because of how that business connects to the outside world. That’s the “work worth doing” part–when what you’re working on seems to have a larger value than the compensation you receive for that work.

Someone who seems to enjoy his work is Jeffrey Levy, a On a different track, I’ve been finding out more about government and social software tools. On Twitter, I follow Jeffrey Levy (@levyj413). He’s director of web communications for the Environmental Protection Agency.

I’m very interested in how the government will make use of new tools, and Levy’s approach makes a lot of sense to me:

Remember: mission first, choose the right tool,
measure and evaluate, and then teach the rest of us.

Thanks to Levy’s messages, I find useful ideas and smart people like Gwynne Kostin, whose blog, Gwynne on dot-gov, asks, “How do we use technology and communications tools to make government more useful, more efficient, and more transparent?”

As with her post, Open data: compare and contrast. It highlights some of the constraints government works under–for example, implications of the Privacy Act, which bars agencies from releasing records without a request from, or the consent of, the individual to whom the record pertains.

No answers, but good questions to think about before everyone’s entire data history is available online to everyone else.

Consulting at a distance, or, the real article

Connecting, Tech tinkering

Mar 202009

The Canadian Society for Training and Development’s 2009 Symposium will be in Halifax, Nova Scotia, May 20-22. I’ll be making a presentation on getting real work done with 2.0 tools.

CSTD invited me to write an article related to my presentation. It’s just been published in the Canadian Learning Journal’s spring 2009 edition. (You can download a pdf of my article.)

I decided the best way to write the article was to ask a group of training and learning professionals what tool worked for them. I haven’t met any of these people; in fact, I’ve only spoken with one of them by phone. I know them through virtual connections: blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and similar tools.

Within 48 hours, I had seven replies. So the article wrote itself, thanks largely to:

One of the points in my presentation will be how people and organizations solve workplace problems using web 2.0 tools (as opposed to, say, raving about how cool the tools are or how cute the fail whale is). Each of these seven people had a different angle. And a bonus for those who read the article is that they can go visit each person’s web site and find a lot more than could possible fit into 1500 words.

Thanks, guys.

Speaking about collaboration, or, a horse IS a horse

Connecting, What I read

Mar 182009

I’m (still) reading Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. In chapter 8, Games People Play, Pinker highlights a set of “cooperative principles” that people use in conversation–principles that you could follow if you wanted to collaborate more effectively with others, especially at a distance.

These principles come from the philosopher Paul Grice, in a 1975 paper, Logic and Conversation (pdf).

My personal bias is that many philosophers pay so much attention to logic that they get mired it it in a way that ordinary people don’t. To the hyper-logical, “a horse is a horse” is a tautology. As Pinker notes, though, in ordinary conversation that’s simply a way of saying “horses will act the way you expect horses to act.”

Here are Grice’s principles for cooperating conversationally:

Quality:

Say no less than the conversation requires.

Say no more than the conversation requires.

Quality:

Don’t say what you believe to be false.

Don’t say things for which you lack evidence.

Manner:

Don’t be obscure.

Don’t be ambiguous.

Be brief.

Be orderly.

Relevance:

Be relevant.

This, argues Pinker, is how we converse.

Is he nuts?

No. As he says, things could be much worse (“Press 1 for English. Press 2 for tech support. Press 3 for existential despair…”). When you converse with someone, you both have these general expectations. If you ask about my new project, you’re not expecting me to start with the founding of my client’s company in 1954. And depending on the context, my update could be “pretty good,” or could be a one-minute recap.

Exceptions to these principles also play a part in conversation. Politeness can act as a social lubricant or as “fictitious solidarity,” as with John McCain’s constant expression, “my friends.”

“People are not just in the business of downloading information into each other’s heads but are social animals concerned with the impressions they make….the literal content…and the intended message…”

Pinker underscores a point that’s easily lost in online conversation: not everyone shares the same understanding of the terms of conversation. Humor can get lost; politeness can get overlooked. That’s the point of the joke he cites:

Four people are walking down the street: a Saudi Arabian, a Russian, a North Korean, and a New Yorker.

A reporter rushes up to them and says, “Excuse me, can I get your opinion of the meat shortage?”

The Saudi Arabian says, “Shortage? What’s a shortage?”
The Russian says, “Meat? What’s meat?”
The North Korean says, “Opinion? What’s an opinion?”
The New Yorker says, “Excuse me? What’s excuse me?”

The paradigm: a road map to a job aid

Basic training

Mar 172009

This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series Figuring Things Out

An aside: if you need a little Irish diversion to get through the day, try last week’s side-trip post:
No ‘Danny Boy’ and Not Much Guile.

One of the most productive uses of a paradigm (the task-analysis technique this series of posts has dealt with) is to suggest the content and even the form of a job aid for the task in question.

Here’s a paradigm that was part of a large inventory-management system. The task involved setting a a code to kick off a data extract that in turn would generate an electronic data interchange form. (You can click the image for a larger version.)

There’s a simple chain, then a discrimination between four possible choices. You chose one code depending on the type of output you want. Regardless of the code you type, you press enter to put the new status to in effect (which, in the less-than-clear language of this system, meant you’ve finalized the replenishment order).

Here’s the job aid. Notice how it reflects the analysis in the paradigm. (Click for a larger version.)

The simple-chain steps become cookbook steps. The discrimination becomes a decision table (if X, then do Y).

I’m working up a more complex example based on a more complex paradigm. For the last post in this series, I’ll highlight how different patterns of activity result in different kinds of job-aid steps.

So: if you’ve got a complicated job, could you end up with lots of job aids? Sure.

It’s not a given that you’ll want to build job aids–but it’s pretty likely, and it’s more efficient (as I noted here). Doing the kind of analysis that the paradigm calls for, you learn enough about the task to look for the usual create-a-job-aid suspects:

Infrequently performed tasks,
Tasks with many steps
Tasks with complicated steps
Tasks with a high penalty for error
Tasks likely to change,
Tasks without a significant need for speed.

Job aids don’t necessarily take the cheat-sheet form you see above. In the real inventory project, yes, they did–a bunch of job aids in a spiral-bound book the inventory manager kept near the computer. They could just as easily come in digital form, like embedded, context-sensitive help.

The real point is that you can’t decide whether to teach the task (try and have people memorize the steps) or to support performance with a job aid until you know what the steps are, including discriminations and generalizations. One way to capture those is through a process like paradigming.

Working/Learning carnival: the latest session

Carnivals

Mar 162009

The Irish word seisiún means a casual gathering where people play (mostly traditional) music. Sessions are often instrumental, but there are singing sessions and mixed sessions.

As The Field Guide to the Irish Music Session says, it’s a way to celebrate a common interest together in a relaxed, informal setting. You don’t fret about what’s the right thing to do–you pick it up along the way.

Sessions are at least as much for the musicians as for anyone who happens to drop in to listen. Which is as good a way as any to think about this edition of the Working/Learning blog carnival:

Karyn Romeis starts with “a bit of a rambling romp” (her words): Learning? Work? Her own passion for learning is such that she doesn’t think it should be separate from her job, and even prompted her to form her own consultancy.
Manish Mohan has taken up a new instrument and shows what he knows in Twitter, Twitter Everywhere…
The anthem of Ireland is Amhrán na bhFiann (The Soldier’s Song)—martial, but less thoughful than Richard Nantel‘s post, Dinner Conversation Turns to War. In part he’s examining a dilemma: preparing people thoroughly to build skills they may never have to use.
Clark Quinn’s post fits right into the spirit of a session: Do What You Love, Love What You Do. One thing he examines is the question of what makes learning fun, and therefore someone you want to do. He’s not talking about rubber chickens or noisemakers.
Jane Bozarth builds on a 24-year tradition: a group of people who are determined to “stamp out bad training.” In asking Wherefore Passion?, she’s looking at what makes people passionate about their profession.
Shanta Rohse is aware that you don’t read sheet music during a session. Digital Literacy: Reading Signs along the Way is her exploration of what skills learners need if they want to join in successfully. Workplaces should take note: if you don’t encourage engagement, people may go elsewhere to engage.
Cammy Bean has a great title for her contribution: Learning to Work, Working to Learn. She’s got a rare break between urgent projects and is using the time to see what she can see. There’s tinkering, inspiration, revisiting, documenting–she’s busier than when she’s busy.
Joan Vinall-Cox‘s A Little Learning Is… looks at the path she’s followed thanks to “little learnings” over time. Colleagues, like the other musicians in a session, help us learn more and see how much more we can learn.
Ken Carroll considers early-career epiphanies leading to An Enduring Insight. Not “what are the structures of the English language,” for example, but how can we help people learn a language?
Tradition is an important part of a session, as is the renewal of the tradition in today’s world. Dave Lee joins the carnival with My Grandfather’s Advice, where he looks at how his own career has developed in no small part because of that advice.
Sessions aren’t supposed to be complicated, but they benefit from skill (which can include the mastery of complexity — like Davy Spillane on the uilleann pipes). My own post, Analyzing Tasks with Paradigming, gives examples of techniques I’ve used to make complexity…well, if not less complex, then easier to grasp.

CC-licensed photo of a seisiún at O’Neill’s in Manhattan by JimmyOKelly.

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Work worth doing, questions worth asking

Consulting at a distance, or, the real article

Speaking about collaboration, or, a horse IS a horse

The paradigm: a road map to a job aid

Working/Learning carnival: the latest session

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