Most read posts for 2010

This has been another wonderful year on this blog. Thanks for all your visits here and reading what I've been writing. Besides a jump in the number of subscribers to the RSS and email feeds, the number of visitors and pages viewed grew. Among all I wrote this year, here are the top twenty:

1. How colleges are bad for our brains Our brains have not evolved to sit still in classrooms, to listen to lectures or to cram for tests. Most of academia works against how our brains function. This mismatch produces a wide spectrum of symptoms that are presumed to be isolated deficiencies of the learners. 
2. A process for growing a new venture The process for growing a new venture is not something I could have written off the top of my head prior to now. It has emerged from writing about pitfalls in planning a new venture over the past two weeks.
3. Tribal activity theory In his book Network - Theorizing Knowledge Work, Clay Spunizzi introduced me to Activity Theory. I was previously familiar with Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development and some facets of dialectical materialism, but not their combination in Activity Theory.
4. Doing the wrong thing correctly When we're creating something new, we have a lot on our minds. It can be as small as a new web page or as comprehensive as launching a new start-up. Our minds naturally fixate on solving the immediate problems. 
5. Wendell Berry's solving for pattern When I read the book Ecological Literacy several years back, I did not anticipate that Wendell Berry's essay on Solving for Pattern would stick with me endlessly. It remains one of the most profound essays I have ever read.
6. Learning to formalize informal learning When we don't already know how to formalize informal learning, there's a lot to learn. We can welcome the challenge if the process of learning is informal enough to engage us. We can dread learning how to formalize informal learning if the process is too formal.
7. Pitfalls in planning a new venture There are many ways for a business plan to be inadequate, ineffective or simply flawed. I intend to write up these pitfalls over the next two weeks, to clarify my own thinking about them and make sure I hold my evolving business plan to these standards.
8. Open minded irrationality and Cynefin This morning I've been pondering how to overlay the Cynefin model with my new model of open and closed minds. It only took a slight rearrangement to access the explanatory power of the combined models. Here's some of what the mash-up revealed to me:
9. Mind of a control freak - redux The last time I explored the mind of a control freak, I looked through the lens of inner turmoil and problematic self control. That write-up remains one of my most read posts in the past four years here. My current exploration of closed and open minds gives me a more detailed way to take a look at the mind of a control freak. 
10. Setbacks in social business creation Last week on PBS I watched The New Recruits. Jeff Trexler, consultant to the production, has given us a valuable perspective on the "warts and all" documentary about Acumen Fund fellows launching social businesses. Last week, I also finished reading Muhammad Yunus's new book: Building Social Business. 
11. Evaluating ourselves informally Informal learning makes it nearly impossible to give fair grades to process or outcomes, to score accurately or to objectively compare informal learners. When we adopt informal learning as I explored in Learning to formalize informal learning, we will also need to adopt informal evaluation schema.
12. Emotions vs. feelings One of the many reasons we keep our minds closed is to keep a lid on our emotional turmoil. We've had bad experiences of our uncontrollable outbursts which teach us to suppress those urges diligently. These experiences give our irrational side a bad name. 
13. Collaborative learning communities in health care In Chapter Six of The Firm as a Collaborative Community, contributing author: Michael Maccoby, explores a key premise of the book applied to health care. The book polarizes several distinctions, which remain unresolved by conventional models of organization , but could become integrated by collaborative communities:
14. Funeral for higher ed Yesterday, the students at CU Boulder held a mock funeral as if all of higher ed is dying. They constructed a coffin and many protest signs with ingenious commentary like "higher ed is too young to die". They will take their demonstration to the state legislature in Denver later this week in hopes of turning the tide against the students who are drowning in soaring cost increases.
15. Learning in 3D hits a home run Welcome to the thirteenth Blog Tour stop for Learning in 3D: Adding a New Dimension to Enterprise Learning and Collaboration....  I'll be focusing on the superb structure of this book from an Acquisitions Editor's viewpoint. What Karl Kapp and Tony O'Driscoll have included in this volume is going have wonderful effects on its readers. I can already speak from my own experience: 
16. Measuring immeasurable learning In a comment worth reading in its entirety on my previous post: Solving test scores problems, Virginia asked me: "So what do you think would be an effective measure of student learning that could be used as they move from state to state?"
17. Issues in the reform of higher ed ... Here's a laundry list of issues that I think need to be addressed to successfully provide our societies with higher quality, post-secondary educations at a much lower cost. I'll cover each of these in more detail in the coming weeks.
18. Evolving into P2P strategies Over the weekend, I finished reading a wonderful new book: What's Mine is Yours - The Rise of Collaborative Consumption. Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers show us how we're actively migrating away from our excessively ownership-oriented economy. Michel Bauwens and Massimo Menichinelli raised my curiosity about this book which is deeply aligned with the P2P Foundation's trajectory. 
19. Cognitive mobility Another way to picture open mindedness occurred to me today. What if our minds experience degrees of freedom, much like the variations in the movement of objects in space? As I reflected on this possibility, I realized how much mental phenomena gets explained by this metaphor. Here's how some of this possibility played out for me:
20. Network - Theorizing Knowledge Work Yesterday I finished reading Clay Spinuzzi's latest book: Network - Theorizing Knowledge Work in Telecommunications. Last night I brainstormed insights I gleaned from the book that I want to explore further here. I usually get between six and ten ideas from a good book. My list from reading Clay's book has 21 items on it. What a treasure trove of inspirations I've found!

The archive to this blog also continues to provide lots of value to readers in 135 countries and territories. Here are the top twenty pages viewed by 13,964 visitors who've looked at 1329 of the posts written since 2006:

1. What is emotional baggage 1875 times
2. Resolving emotional baggage 1517 times
3. Two kinds of change 727 times
4. Outgrowing reflexive thinking 588 times
5. Learning from feedback 410 times
6. The mind of a control freak 374 times
7. Vertical and horizontal networks 365 times
8. Four kinds of comprehension 310 times
9. Taking things too personally 308 times
10. How colleges are bad for our brains 299 times
11. Different kinds of ignorance 281 times
12. Benefits of collaborating 277 times
13. Effects of blogging on communities 275 times
14. Two kinds of freedom 209 times
15. Third and fourth order change 181 times
16. A process for growing a new venture 170 times
17. Empowered entrepreneurs 159 times
18. If this is your first PLE 150 times
19. Non-judgmental awareness 134 times
20. Do we still need teachers 123 times

Thanks everyone!!

What do I think I'm doing?

This is a perfect day to reassess all the blogging I've been doing here. This is my 1000th post to growing changing learning creating. Here's what I currently think I'm doing by all this reflecting, reading, writing, linking and sharing.

Self expression for sanity - Karl Marx and others have claimed that our self expression is essential for keeping us sane. Getting stifled, silenced or pressured to conform makes us crazy. Without self expression, we overeat, overspend and over consume without finding personal satisfaction. We now realize that this insanity also depletes non-renewable resources while doing lasting damage to the environment. So my blogging is green living that keeps me sane.

Synergistic flow - If all I did was sit down to write and hope that something came to mind, I would have abandoned this blog after 45 posts or so. There's more to this than self expression. I spend a couple hours every morning reflecting on what I've read, written, watched and discussed with others recently. I get 2-5 pages of new thoughts written down in that process. Each day I do lots of reading of blogs and several books that I'm reading concurrently. I rarely experience a shortage of what to write about. The challenge is finding a voice and viewpoint to organize my jumbled thoughts. When I find it, the words come to me easily. I know from experience, there are no shortcuts here. It takes all my reading and reflecting added into the mix.

Articulating possibility space - I realize that I can go where others cannot in the realm of what-if?, what-for? and why-not? We each can explore small portions of the vast possibility space with our unique set of lenses. There are lots of places we cannot go because they don't begin to make sense to us, seem very irrelevant, appear inconceivable or remind of us a painful past experience. When we can go there, we're in a position to care about others who cannot get there, and share what we're seeing. When we give, we get back in return. We get paid intrinsically. In my experience, I get rewarded with more access to possibilities, more understanding of changes in process, more connections between ideas and more pattern recognition.

Beyond the walled city - During the Middle Ages, a few settlements emerged as the beginning of modern-day cities. Each built walls around its perimeter to protect inhabitants, buildings and inventories. There would be periodic market days when the gates would open and outsiders could enter to buy and sell. This led to the outsiders establishing encampments outside the walled cities where every day was an open market day. The cities eventually tore down those walls and incorporated the thriving markets outside its boundaries. Nowadays, there are pay walls in the space of authoring and publishing that keep outsiders from messing with inside intellectual property. Meanwhile, those of us blogging for free in the open market are creating the thriving market of authoring/publishing with Creative Commons licenses rather than copyrights. Eventually the walled city will see their pay walls are costing them dearly and will take them down to incorporate this thriving market beyond the walls.

Thanks for reading me!

In the works for future posts

As you may have recently noticed, blog posts are coming at less than my usual one-per-day pace. I'm in the midst of several big landscaping projects at the house are consuming tons of my physical and mental energy. So that you don't think I've fallen off the map, here's what I expect will appear here soon:

I'm currently reading Richard Florida's latest book: The Great Reset - How New ways of Living and Working Drive Post-crash Prosperity. The book emerged from an article he created for Atlantic Monthly which generated lots of buzz. I'm thrilled with the first 8 chapters. His perspective on the creativity that flourishes during economic depressions will sharpen by forecasts about the next economy.

I've started to read Dan Ariely's new book: The Upside of Irrationality - The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home. This will tie in beautifully with my ongoing explorations of cognitive neuroscience that appear under the tag: use your brain. Concurrent with that, I'll also be reading John Ehrenfeld's Sustainability by Design - A Subversive Strategy for Transforming our Consumer Culture. That book looks like a gem for implementing a wide variety of large scale disruptive innovations, like I've considered for higher ed.

My recent posts exploring business models have me thinking again about David Ronfeldt's TIMN model. I've playing with a new premise that is not yet formed into more than a few words. I suspect we draw the line between Institution and Market epochs in the wrong place. That then makes it nearly impossible to foresee what the Network epoch will change, provide and replace. This may help me return to the argument I was developing in my post Changing forms of mediation. I got stuck when I tried to delineate the Network version of mediation. By redefining Institution and Market, the problems with defining Network may disappear.

Stay tuned!

Is blogging changing?

Awhile back, Virginia asked "Is blogging changing" on her blog: Connecting 2 the World. Her many insights attracted numerous comments which all gave me much to ponder. Harold Jarche then followed up on her post last week. This is the first chance I've had to share my thoughts, having been immersed in writing a first draft business plan, completing the series on Pitfalls in planning a new venture and reading the 416 page book: Learning in 3D that I'll be reviewing here on tomorrow.

When I started this blog back in 2006, the blogosphere seemed very conversational to me. The abundance of comments I was leaving for others and receiving here stimulated tons of new learning. That pattern continued throughout 2007 and well into 2008. Then I noticed two changes. More of the traffic to my own blog was reading my archive of previous posts than the most recent ones. Also, the comments left on the blogs I read were less thought provoking. There were fewer opportunities to jump in, to add something helpful or to provoke a different direction for the exploration.

I partially buy into the widely accepted theory that the conversations have moved out of the blogosphere onto Facebook and Twitter. However, the quality of conversations in "micro blogging" platforms do not resemble the glory days of 2007 in those countless blog comment boxes. Rather than a migration to other Web 2.0 tools, I'm seeing a diminishment of thought provoking conversations throughout the panorama of social networking platforms.

I really value what remains in the blogs I read. I'm now asking different questions from "how can I jump in to this conversation?" I read blogs with questions in mind like:

• What are you currently thinking about? 
• What have you recently read/watched/heard that got you thinking about that? 
• How has that changed what you were previously thinking along those lines? 
• What does that give you to explore further, question deeper or change direction?

I regard this evolution as very favorable and valuable. I now view blogging as transparent thought processes. We share what's on our minds and how that's changing. We make it possible for others to expand and refine their thinking by "thinking in public view". Blogging first seemed like democratized publishing that liberated citizen access to the reading public from the controls of assignment editors in print news media and acquisition editors in book publishing. I think the blogopshere has evolved into platforms for following thought leaders who follow other thought leaders. The network of connections between resourceful writers makes our collective exploratory thought evolve much faster and better.

My best year of blogging yet!

Thanks to all you subscribers, bloggers and readers, 2009 broke all records for visits to this blog. Here's some of the highlights from my year end Google Analytics Reports for growing changing learning creating

• Total Number of your Page Views: 25,552
• Total Number of your Visits: 16,662
• Total Number of you as Unique Visitors: 13,330

The 16,662 of your visits came from 140 countries/territories including:

• USA 8,859
• Great Britain 1,195
• Canada 1,171
• Australia 850
• Philippines 628
• India 423
• New Zealand 319
• Japan 268
• Germany 190
• Singapore 155

You found this blog via:

• Direct connections  2,176 (13.06%)
• Referring Sites 4,181 (25.09%) Thanks for the links!
• Search Engines 10,017 (60.12%) Thanks for searching!

You read 854 different pages I have written including:

• Resolving Emotional Baggage 1,488 times
• Two Kinds of Change 1,025 times
• Quality of writing for hire 847 times
• What is emotional baggage? 809 times
• Outgrowing reflexive thinking 407 times
• Learning from feedback 397 times
• Taking things too personally 323 times

Thanks for a great 2009! Lets have another breakthrough together in 2010!!

28 inches and counting

The forecast for 18 inches of snow had me running every errand for the week on Tuesday. Once the snow arrived, I've shoveled the walks and driveway 3 times so far. The snow is expected to end after 48 hours of continuous accumulation at midnight. We've got 28 inches so far and expect another ten. At least the Colorado Rockies dd not make it into the World Series this year. I'll get back to blogging here next Monday, Nov 2nd.

Five back burners

I'm currently pulled in five different directions which defeated my writing a post this morning with any one focus. Here's what's cooking on my mind today:

Over the weekend, I started designing a multimedia presentation to summarize the 32 essays that explore Journalism 2.0. I'm planning to use the free, online Prezi software that puts all the elements on a single canvas.

I'm still working on a follow-up to the series on emotional baggage that will assist people in resolving their own issues. I'm finding a workbook format oversimplifies the complexity of all but the most basic form of baggage. I'm currently considering the use of some online interview software to deal more realistically with the complexity of anyone's unresolved issues.

Last week I learned of a call for papers for a conference next year that explores conflicts with P2P practices. Since my exploration of the Cynefin + TIMN frameworks, I've continued to develop more insights into the challenges and opportunities of peer-to-peer governance, production and property. I'm expecting to develop my proposal for the conference by writing out my scattered ideas here in a more coherent form than they current exist.

Over the weekend, I received an invitation to propose a chapter in forthcoming book on PLEs. It's been a long while since I've written any about personal learning environments. This morning I revisited what I had previously written, and captured my most recent thoughts. That proposal is due October first and may get explore here sooner than the other topics.

The exploration of Journalism 2.0 was originally intended to set the stage for my further development of ideas for disrupting higher education. There are significant parallels between journalism and academia, both professionally and in terms of disruptive innovations in their market spaces. That exploration ties in extensively with both PLEs and P2P practices.

It remains to be seen which of these will move up to the front burner next.

Blog Day 2008

One of the wonderful qualities of the blogosphere is the number of different ways we are valuable to each other. Some bloggers give us great links to resources we find useful. Some embed delightful YouTube videos in their blog posts. Some get long series of comments that take the original post into fascinating, expanded territories. Others are especially good at getting me to think, which I love to do. Some are also inspirations for what I'm writing here.

Today is Blog Day 2008. I found that out just now because I got mentioned as one of the five on the blog: Maiers Educational Services. Thanks Angela! In keeping with her theme: Together We Are Smarter, I'm celebrating five bloggers who contributed to the launch of different themes I've explored this year.

• Steve Roesler (All Things Workplace) did a wonderful series on talent development which gave rise to my posts tagged: hidden talents.
• Pete Reilly's revelations (Ed Tech Journeys)about failed educational reforms inspired my series: pro-learning ecologies.
• Angela Maiers (Maiers Educational Services) fascination with the new book Brain Rules spawned the posts I wrote on use your brain.
• Lars Hyland's (Lars is Learning) comment on this blog provoked me to write a string of posts on actionable content
• Joseph Leary's (Regret is for Smart People) cry for freedom and meaning inspired my current series on finding freedom.

Among so many continual learners, it's inevitable we are all learning. Among this variety of insightful thinkers, we are bound to think in new and fruitful ways. Among all this bounty of archived, searchable text, it's very likely we will find what we're looking for. Among all these contributors of creative outpourings, we're inclined to be generous with our own freedoms. Blogging rocks my world!

Blog Day 2008

Solving for pattern

Last week, Harold Jarche wrote an inspired reminder for us to solve for pattern. Since then, I've been pondering the times I've succeeded at that and why I rarely solve for pattern. Here's some of what I've realized.

When we have one thing on our mind, we cannot solve for pattern. The challenge is too complex, panoramic and overwhelming. We can, however, take pride in how focused, determined and clear we are with one thing on our mind. No one can tell us any differently. We can open our big mouth, but cannot give a big listen. We don't get what's on the mind of the community, constituencies or big picture. The pattern is beyond us because we feel a big need to be right, to exercise our rights to be authoritative and to control who can contradict us.

When we solve for pattern, we are getting help on the inside. We've connected to that place where inspirations, intuitions and imaginative innovations come from. We cannot handle what comes to mind in a logical sequence, but we can capture it with a diagram or other imagery. We get the feeling we know this without being able to explain it precisely. We feel blessed to be answered in this way and supported in coming up with solutions.

Solving for pattern implicates lots of abstract dimensions to the problem and solutions. We may consider the context created, the strategy implicated and the premises being replicated. We may realize some of the repercussions in the short and long term. We may see ways to combine, share, tradeoff and reciprocate instead of overkill, overspend and over-react.

Solving for pattern comes up with light handed solutions. They demonstrate "a nice touch". They replace heavy handed solutions with simple, small, clean and ingenious approaches.

One example that comes to mind is blogging -- compared to literary agents, publishing houses, promotions of select titles, warehousing by the caseload and sales of individual copies. Long tail publishing makes all those elaborate mechanisms unnecessary. Blogging is clean and green.

Related posts:

Wendell Berry's Solving for Pattern

When we're solving for pattern

Solving turnover problems for pattern

The power of networks

Last night I watched the PBS Frontline documentary "The Medicated Child" that aired this week. Child psychiatrists are giving four million children (in the US) multiple prescriptions for psychiatric drugs that have only been tested on adults. They have very little data to know if the diagnosis is correct, if the efficacy is there, or if side effects are benign. They are working in isolation and only getting funds for research from the manufacturers of the drugs.

These child psychiatrists are envious the pediatric oncologists. A decade ago, a cancer diagnosis for a child was a death sentence. The success rate for attempted cures was close to zero. Now the recovery rate is 90%. There have been changes in diagnosis, prescriptions and outcomes as a result of data monitoring and sharing.

Ten years ago, the child psychiatrists and clinics joined together into a network. Any child seeking treatment anywhere in the network was entered into the system. Their initial situation, symptoms, progress, diagnosis and outcomes were all recorded. Every member of the network could access the data, combine it with their own, analyze it with different hypotheses, watch for emerging trends and formulate new clinical trials.

This approach worked dramatically. It's further proof of the power of networks. It reminds me of the blogosphere.

A forest of bloggers

You may not have a seen the memo on this. There's a forest out there. I know there's no redundancy, inter-dependency and self-regeneration inside the silo, factory, firewall or policy guidelines. That does not mean the forest does not exist outside. Every blogger is an outsider like a tree in a forest.

A silo cannot afford to maintain a forest on the inside. Forests cost too much and overextend the limited resources of the silo. There are too many trees, too many roots, too many branches and too many leaves or pine needles. All that redundancy costs a huge fortune. Activities inside the silo cannot support such extravagance.

If forests were efficient, they'd be affordable to a silo. Instead of a ridiculous number of leaves, there could be one or two solar collectors. Instead of every tree creating an absurd number of seeds, there could be one tree reproduction facility per forest. Rather than each tree responding to the conditions of the forest, a change response team could intervene when tress got in trouble. A few branches could handle the territory. When the solar collector went down, the forest could tell non-essential trees to stay in furlough. When the changes over-taxed the response team, the trees could go on hold until a solution was delivered by the specialists.

The staggering redundancy of tree components is supported by the trees and forest because these components are contributors. They give what is needed in greater quantity than they take to sustain themselves. They bring simplicity of operations into the equation with the redundancy. Their demands are small and few. Their contributions are essential, timely and balanced. Problems are resolved inter-dependently. The network does it's thing.

Unlike forests, silos harbor dependent parasites. Silo components take more than they give. Silos are always on the brink of collapse because their components defy self-sustaining designs. The replication of silo components breed more consuming without more supplying. What it takes to keep the silo going is very costly within the confines of the disconnected system. Redundancy has to be eliminated to sustain the parasitic components. Isolation from networks is essential to control the near-collapse. The networking of parasites keeps the growth of the silo in check. Functioning in opposition, a tenuous equilibrium is realized with vicious cycles.

Fourteen million active blogs. Seventy nine million total blogs. Blogging looks like a forest to me. There's a staggering redundancy and simplicity of contributors. Watch us provide nutrients for growth, convert one form of understanding into another, replicate our functionality naturally and distribute seeds of change across vast landscapes. Please continue as you were.

Avoiding professional development

Bloggers like us are immersed in online professional development. The blogs we read are full of great ideas, better ways to see problems and different approaches to try out. When we think of blogging, we think of learning more about ourselves, our choices, and our conduct in our worlds.

We learn all this by writing our own blogs, commenting on others and quoting some of what we find provocative. We may not work in learning organizations, but our blogosphere is a place of continual learning. We are learning from what happens, what got said, and how others react. We resemble a "community of practice" that practices learning from happenstance.

Naturally, we are amazed when wanna-be bloggers consider the read/write potential while avoiding the professional development dimensions we treasure. Will Richardson, Tony Karrer and Patrick Higgins have each expressed this consternation recently. It's obvious to us that professional development is inherent to blogging. Why can't they see it? Why don't they get the power of this tool? How can something so useful and enticing appear hidden from view or personally useless?

Perhaps they cannot see the learning potential because we don't see their potential through their eyes. Maybe they won't get the power of blogging for their own professional development until we develop further ourselves. Perhaps the thing they are not learning gives us something to learn about them and our ways of relating to them.

Something is not working here that needs us to troubleshoot what's really going on. Here's a checklist of potential trouble spots to scout for whenever we're facing an avoidance of professional development.

1. Are their plates already full from over-extending themselves as if they are always playing catch up ball and never getting a sense of accomplishment?
2. Are they trapped inside a "nothing for me" martyrdom story that necessitates thankless heroics, inevitable sacrifices and perpetual suffering which defies awareness, growth or change?
3. Are they serving a prison term, captivated by bureaucratic policies and accountability measures which punish deviance, exceptional efforts and creative escapes?
4. Are they going through the motions of a meaningless chore, appearing like zombies who have lost their connection to their personally soulful purpose and unique talents?
5. Are they conforming to group pressures, infected with the toxic culture, appearing as an offspring of a breeding ground for contempt, cynicism, mistrust and passivity?
6. Are they misunderstood, starved for respect, or branded as traitors by the administration for empathizing with students, understanding their complaints, respecting their passions and valuing their non-conformity?
7. Is our status as an outsider with our detached, insightful perspective being framed by them as a dangerous invader, spy or insensitive critic?

As we run through this list, we may learn what we were not seeing in others. Perhaps we'll appear more understanding and then get understood. Maybe we'll show more interest in them and get more interest from them in our outlooks. We might even come across as someone who's professional development includes learning from signs of a something not working.

Technorati tags: professional development, blogging

Selling the benefits of blogging

I've been to two picnics in the past week where I heard myself describe the enjoyments and benefits of blogging to others. I watched people try to deal with something so different from email in their experience. Yesterday, Tony Karrer got me thinking again about the value of blogging with his: Writing, Learning, Knowing - Help Needed. The comments added to Tony's post are full of insights into the value we are realizing from this read/write process.

As I thought more about "selling blogging" to others, I realized it's an easy sell to people who share its purposes. It's like handing people the keys to the car they've already bought so they can drive where they want to go. People who don't buy the underlying purposes of blogging are a tough sell. We're handing them keys before they have a car.

What are the purposes of blogging? Here's a start. If this was a separate web page, I could make it longer and more detailed. If it was a wiki page, WE could assemble a comprehensive list together.

• Formulating better questions to be asking, exploring, researching
• Integrating opposing viewpoints, unfamiliar frames of reference
• Making sense of turbulent changes, mixed messages, confusing signs
• Identifying "the real problem", underlying issues, hidden purposes
• Recognizing emerging trends, patterns, change models
• Giving to a community of shared interests, concerns, problems
• Strengthening one's "voice & viewpoint" by getting read, quoted, comments
• Gaining confidence as a valued member, worthy contributor
• Becoming more creative, innovative, unique

These purposes don't grow in hostile environments. In situations rife with office politics, conformity pressures or shortages (of time, attention, funds) blogging will serve no apparent purpose. Blogging may appear as a contrivance that only pretends to be useful or connected to desired outcomes. It may look like an indulgence that would be nice to do with more free time. Blogging may even show up as a threat to stability, staying on mission or survival.

When blogging appears to defeat the work of an enterprise, something is missing:

• The epistemic ground may not support risk taking, speaking up, honesty or deviating from group norms that are inherent in blogging
• The value networks may overemphasize tangibles at the expense of intangibles that: build in personal capabilities, empower individuals and reward intrinsic learning
• The learning may only be formal with an absence of mentors, communities of practice, after action reviews, PLE's, etc.
• The process of innovating may be confined to unconscious replication, thinking inside the box, incremental improvements, trying harder, etc.

Thus a sales pitch about the benefits of blogging will fall on deaf ears if the audience is working on hostile ground. Change the context by filling in what's missing, and blogging will sell itself. When blogging does not make sense, talking about blogging is futile. Talking about "fulfilling your purposes" makes sense.

Technorati tags: blogging, bloggers, blogosphere

Content for our consideration

The content of this blog is offered for your consideration. The blog feeds I choose to subscribe to are there for my consideration. All blogs are offering content for our consideration. We consider what we read as giving us more to consider, not telling us what to think or submit to.

What we are reading in blogs is miscellaneous, as David Weinberger uses the term. We know it's a point of view that considers us all having varied viewpoints. We are not purporting to announce "one right answer", "my way or the highway" or "my expertise overrules all your clueless contradictions".

This consideration of our context allows for the content we offer getting tagged in many different ways, linked inside of all kinds of postings and found via a vast variety of searches. By being considerate of this context for our content, what we say in our blogs enters into our collective wisdom. It's filed under miscellaneous and accessed by each person's reasons to consider it. We enrich each other's understanding by putting it out there. Instead of each of us getting it right from books, we are collectively getting it appreciated from outlooks.

This is a big change from offering inconsiderate content. Official truths, policies and categories are not offered for our consideration. There is no discussion that can alter the facts. The structure is provided for acceptance without question, adoption without whining, and adherence without critiques. "Rocks are hard; water is wet. Any questions?"

This change to offering considerate content is deep. We are changing the premises for educating, employing and entertaining us. We are developing contexts for mutual benefit instead of delivering inconsiderate content.

Technorati tags: Everything is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger, content developers, blogging

The effects of blogging on communities

In my experience, blogging is "delightfully disruptive". The bloggers I read regularly disturb what I was already thinking, raise new questions in my mind and send me off pondering in unforeseen directions. There are days where this abundance of great thinkers is like "drinking from a fire hose". Since last February, I've been emailing myself posts to contemplate at a later date. That strategy works great to manage the flow and "drink from a garden hose" instead.

My own writing for my blogs is equally disruptive. I'm saying things I never said before, discovering new outlooks in the process of formulating what to write and how to express it. Yesterday Tony Karrer got me thinking about the effects of blogging on communities. Of course I considered this in terms of a taxonomy of four kinds of communities. I also made sense of the different effects I see in terms of my own experience of blogging being delightfully disruptive.

Communities of collusion: In "The Different Drum - Community Making and Peace", M. Scott Peck described a phase of community building he called "pseudocommunity". This is the most common kind of community I see inside corporations, institutions and academia. These "communities of collusion" practice "thought control" and " enforced collusion". They function like brainwashed cults that think alike and stifle dissent. They maintain a policy enforcement context I described previously. These communities admire the "Emperor's non-existent new clothes" and shoot the messenger who says otherwise. The higher ups would likely shut down blogs among pseudocommunity members. Blogs would appear to be a "waste of time" or a "deviation from teamwork". The "powers that be" don't know what they're missing -- literally!

Communities of practice: Gatherings of practitioners bring out the "unconscious competence" and "tacit knowledge" of its members. The discovery of their own viable shortcuts, useful heuristics and valuable "tricks of the trade" need to be captured for others to use. Blogging could bring out the expertise of its members like listservs and F2F meetings have done for years. Blogs could also serve as archives of the emergent best practices, but a wiki does this better. Blogs are not this focused by their very nature. Forcing blogs to benefit CoP's makes only partial sense.

Communities of ideas: Blogging is ideally suited for communities of ideas. The exuberant diversity of bloggers fuels the emergence of better possibilities, questions, strategies and collaborations. Visionaries come together with others "in the trenches", synthesizing pragmatic upgrades to current practices. Rethinking, reframing, and renewing are the stock in trade of these robust combinations of RSS feed subscriptions, comments and trackbacks utilized.

Communities of process: There are countless group processes that elicit the contributions of each member: open space, future search, world cafe, etc. The personal realizations that occur by convening biases together need to be "harvested" as Chris Corrigan calls it. Blogging seems ideal to me for capturing the thoughts and changed outlooks of each participant. The expectation that each blogger be unique, share her/his perspective and contribute to the whole -- fits the nature of blogging. The ability to combine the feeds and digitally reconvene the group allows for maintaining contact, delayed realizations and continuing dialogues after the members have returned home.

In short, the type of community has a significant impact on the range of beneficial effects from blogging that can be realized.

Technorati tags: blogging, community formation, learning

Positioning our blogs as valuable

Chris Cree created a wonderful post to wake us to our use of the words "blog", "blogging" and "blogger". He suggests that we are plagued by "that goofy word thing" among people who don't blog. That's too much fun for me to resist -- as I imagine talking with people I know who don't comprehend what blogging is:

"Tom, I didn't know you were into some kind of medieval torture? Do you take turns blogging each other or does one person get blogged by everyone? How long have you been folk dancing? I've never seen you in wooden shoes or hear you mention you're a blogger before now. Isn't a blogsphere that big round thing the plumber brings to the house every time somebody blogs the drain pipe? Did you read where foods high in transfats blog the arteries with little bloggers that increase the chances of a heart attack?"

When we want to be understood or positioned as valuable in other's eyes, we need to consider the customers' frames of reference. Chris suggests other ways to describe what we are doing without using those "B" words. Of course his recommendations tie into this ongoing taxonomy of blogs I'm developing.

Technorati rankings: Quantity is crucial when quality is superficial. When we have no close friends, we impress others (and ourselves) with how many so-called friends we have. Technorati counts the number of links to a blog and the number of bloggers who "Favorite" that blog.

Archive size and search stats: Quality products and services segment the market and serve a smaller niche. The quantity metrics mislead the buyer who is searching for expertise. Google analytics (and other) stats that measure archive searches reveal the value of a blog's expertise.

Comment and Trackback Stats: Our customers, subscribers and fan base don't care how much we know until they know how much we care. That show of concern comes through comments we give/get and trackbacks from links and quotes we give/get.

Google page ranking: When our impact extends beyond the blogosphere, our presence while show up in more places. Google searches will find where else we get mentioned and are making a difference. How high our links rank on a particular search page measures our contribution to changes in the world.

With these different metrics in mind, we can discern how we have positioned our own blogs to be valuable. We can change our approach to be more valuable by rethinking which ways we measure our success and count our blessings.

Technorati Tags: blogging, Technorati, Google, positioning

Blogs defy categorization

Both Roger von Oech and David Armano added postings to their blogs last week about my taxonomy of different blogs (Thanks!). As I've read the comments both received on their posts, a dominant theme has emerged: blogs defy categorization. Nearly everyone is seeing how they experience several different motivations and blend the different value propositions. Using the taxonomy to "put their blog in a box" is not working.

I mentioned how I prefer to use taxonomies as "learning curves" which value each kind as a stage of growth and passing phase. The feedback I'm learning from suggests this is also too confining to capture what's really occurring for us active bloggers. Here's some alternative ways to appreciate the process and benefits of blogging that transcend any taxonomies, categories or learning curves:

What if blogs are better understood with chaos theory? What if another blogger's posting and the blogger's own personal experiences function as strange attractors that organize the field of diverse blogs into temporary patterns. What if one posting has a "butterfly effect" that transforms the next several postings on any number of blogs? What if the blogger's mind goes "far from equilibrium" to self-organize a new posting or comment on another's blog?

What if blog postings are emergent outcomes? What if we don't make blogs happen, they simply happen to us and through us? What if our blogs are really out of our control? What if blogs are co-created with every other blogger interdependently? What if the boundaries between blogs are illusions? What if blog postings come about synergistically: by the countless interaction effects between all the blogs we subscribe to and read (and blogs that link to those). What if blogs are fallout (side effects, unintended consequences) from intentional processes of thinking and writing?

What if blogs come about naturally? What if our blogs have a robust, healthy life of their own? What if blogging is organically ingesting and digesting other blogs to create new cells, growth and movement? What if blogs grow from seeds and ultimately flower when cross pollinated sufficiently? What if blogs have an immune response to repel toxic content and fortify their defenses against destructive influences?

What if blogs prosper amidst innocence? What if our best blogging comes out of not-knowing what blogs are? What if blogging is about the questions we are playing with, rather than the knowledge we are sharing? What if it works to be unfamiliar with blogging because it defeats the purpose to become too familiar? What if blogging is extremely sensitive to analysis paralysis (writer's block, creative constipation) and requires an empty mind for inspirations to come to mind?

Technorati tags: bloggers, blogging, blogosphere

Questions before blogging

What were you thinking when you added that to your blog? Where were you coming from when you wrote that post? What did you have in mind when you got the idea to compose that? -- These are questions about the questions we ask ourselves while blogging.

Different questions yield different outcomes. Yet another way to understand the differences between blogs (and between blog postings) is by the questions inherent in whatever approach we take. When we change our questions, our blog changes accordingly.

What can I say today? - When all we're thinking about is what to say, the value of our words will be insignificant. We are showing off to get attention or relief of some kind. We are implicitly self-absorbed and insensitive to others.

How can I help others today? - When we think about caring for others, we will write different words. We will wonder about how to offer a better perspective, lower other's anxiety, offer a different solution or save others the trouble of a long search for answers.

Where can I jump in today? - When we see blogs as intangible conversation threads, we wonder how to contribute. We realize what has not been said, what needs clarification, what others are not seeing yet and what direction the dialogue could be headed.

What can this blog do to help? - When we use our blogs to make changes in the world, we put the blog to constructive use outside the blogosphere. We wonder how the blog can help formulate a consensus, build a constituency, gain support for a change or facilitate a complex decision.

The first three questions are enamored with blogging tools. They have us under their spell online. The fourth question turns things around so we are tooling around. Instead of being beholden to the tool, we put the tool to our uses in the real world. The value of blogging is increased exponentially when its premise is reversed like that.

Technorati tags: bloggers, blogging, blogosphere

Evolutionary blogging

There are several different ways to think about any taxonomy. When taxonomies are used with categorical reasoning, they are used to label people. This usually has the effect of starting wars, arguments and conflicts. Labeling puts people in boxes instead of framing them in growth processes. Describing a taxonomy has this effect until the labels are understood enough to see the growth processes between them.

My post yesterday -- that added three transitional forms to the taxonomy of blogs -- reveals my favored approach. I've found that each of my many taxonomies in this blog work best as "learning curves". They offer a map for the movement between initial and highly evolved stages of development. The taxonomy gets used to see the value in each stage and the challenges involved with growing into the next phase. Here's the way I see each kind of blog supporting a phase of personal growth:

Silenced -> voice: Controls freaks and conformity pressures have a silencing effect on us. We lose our outspoken voice, awareness of what we're feeling and permission to be our unique selves. While silenced, we presume that we have nothing to say or that we dare not speak up. We outgrow being silenced by finding our courage and self confidence. We get in touch with what we are feeling, what we really want and how we really see things. We transition from "saying nothing" to "saying anything". Distraction blogs, with their socially insignificant archives, are a perfect vehicle for this personal growth.

Illegitimate -> Legitimacy: The next phase of development cultivates "having something to say". We search for content that is valued by our world. We want to say things that are useful, significant and valid in other people's experience. We may venture into this legitimacy by sharing links and quoting news items. We move from purely subjective self-expressions to more objective solutions, methods and analyses. We morph from being loud-mouthed to gaining respect as an authority. We adopt the role of an author and knowledgeable expert. Archive blogs with their persistently useful archive provide a wonderful means to this end.

Aloof -> Interactive: Having a lot to say may come across as distant and controlling. The words "talk at" our audience rather than "talk with" them. Our expertise becomes over-bearing. We need to soften our voice and see other points of view. We transition from a "sage on stage" to a "guide on the side" that serves others' journeys and self realizations. We may tentatively explore this development by making "fan club" comments on other's blogs. When we become fully engaged in others' thinking, our minds go through remarkable changes. Conversations have transformational effects on our identity, perceptions of others and ways to make a difference in the world. We interact with other outlooks in ways that "burst our bubbles" and expose our shortcomings. We learn a staggering amount of insights and perspectives that differ from our own expertise and subjective awareness. Conversation blogs prove to be an ideal vehicle for joining this larger community.

Abstract -> Actionable: This final phase of personal growth gets down to the business of changing the world. We get our bearings in the panorama of conceptual possibilities before venturing out into the dysfunctional systems. We may cross this threshold by reporting on incidents in the world and alerting others to actual changes. By previously developing a deeper sense of the challenges in abstract, we now handle them competently when they get in our way. Rather than get stuck in the idea stage of idle speculations, we enter the entrepreneurial phase of strategy formulations. We launch ventures, experiments and prototypes to discover what works, endures and catches on. We engage others in projects and collaborations that get results and meet objectives. Democratic blogs contribute to the ways that things get done among us as we create a better future.

Technorati tags: bloggers, blogging, blogosphere

Three transitional forms of blogs

Ray Sims is another "thought leader in my blog reader". As he pondered my Four value propositions post, he struggled with how to categorize blog postings full of links or news tidbits. They do not fit the Archive or the Distraction categories. Ray said:

A potential fifth category is the "link blog" that primarily passes along "quick links" (as some call them) without any deep analysis. Or, perhaps "news blog" would be a more generous category label. I tried to get myself to say these fit within Archive; however, the level of original thought (low for link blog) and long term value (again low) seems to separate them into something else yet.

As I developed this taxonomy, I briefly considered transitional forms between each of the four types of blogs. Ray has inspired me to spell those out in detail.

Links Summaries: Blog postings full of links and news items are more valuable to others than the "cathartic process of relief" offered by Distraction Blogs. They are usually not as valuable as the archives of an expert. The value proposition is less permanent than the tangible value of a product. It does take some expertise to assemble the link summaries or news items, like an editor or a maven. But the content is perishable like the predecessor forms of self indulgence.

Fan club comments: Archive blogs tend to share expertise without the professional growing from all the writing. It's easy to generate posts for the archive because the material has been expressed in other venues previously. An intermediate form of blogging often occurs where the expert's posts get incidental praise and validation or personal remarks: "Great post!", "This helps a lot!" "Welcome back from Mexico!" or "Say hi to your kids for me". These "fan club comments" put the "guru" on a pedestal and look up to him or her. They offer adulation rather than eye-to-eye conversations. They introduce a glimpse of relating, reciprocating and growing interactively without getting into the Conversation type of blog full bore.

On site Blogs: There are US soldiers blogging from inside Iraq. There are political activists blogging from the sites of demonstrations and interventions. There are citizen journalists reporting news first hand -- from the scene of crimes, politicians off camera or grass roots meetings. These bloggers also function as watchdogs, whistleblowers and fact checkers. All this reporting is proto-democratic. It harbors the last vestiges of elitism and privileged access. It's the free press that enables democratic processes of decision-making and change. It does not function as every citizen's right to speak, vote and organize movements. It comes before that and makes democratic action possible.

Technorati tags: bloggers, blogging, blogosphere