I saw weird stuff in my search query logs today – at first I thought it was funny and a bit crazy that people were finding me through “beastiality”. I tried to think where I’d mentioned (and mispelled) such practices. Then, I happened to look back at an archive post and realised why – although I’ve managed to throttle (I love that word) the comment spammers with Chad Everett’s MT-Approval (Now v1.0!) btw they don’t seem to be at all discouraged and keep trying to post away.

Anyway it turns out that now I’m getting trackback spam and had been pinged about sixty times in the last fortnight with really nasty stuff. I’ve cleared it all out but it does make me mad – I don’t want to put anything in the way of people pinging me, but I don’t know what else to do – I’ve set MT to e-mail me when I get pinged.

Grrrr….

Day 2 (of about 50 over the next three months) of my time with Newham Social Services, leading the Performance Team (the guys who collect performance information about services and report it to senior management) while a permanent person is recruited.

Getting some sense of perspective today of what’s actually possible in 3 months and accepting that if the client says what they want is a maintenance job then what I should give them is a maintenance job. However, I think maintaining the team’s outputs without the previous team manager is going to be difficult without changing how things get done. He clearly had a lot of knowledge of how reports were generated and carried a lot of the analysis himself. This isn’t something that you can just pick up in three months – even if you’re me 😉 The systems for collecting the data are just too complex to get your head around well enough.

I think the best thing I can do is help them to spread some of the knowledge around, document what’s possible to document and do something about some of the obvious errors in some of the reports.

Something fell into place for me today. In management reporting we often talk about “just getting this report at the click of a button”. But it’s rarely that simple because the information people carry the complexity of matching the reporting requirements to the data that’s available.

I do think that many senior or service-side folk think that all we have to do is click a button and get it and because we want to look cool and keen and effective we often let them continue to believe that (and then go away muttering because they don’t appreciate the complexity of what needs to be done to get decent management reports from a system that’s been designed with user requirements pretty much restricted to data-entry tasks). So when we make them wait for something, they think we’re pissing around because surely all you have to do is “click a few buttons”.

I don’t normally partake, but hey it’s New Year’s Eve and this is spookily close to the truth.

Take the Polygeek Quiz at Thudfactor.com

Sitting in Guildford Starbucks with the Prince of Pod, Adam Curry. Wow!

We’re surrounded by young(er) people but we just managed to get a seat next to the power point and now both in net-mode hunched over respective laptops. Adam just paused to geek-drool a little over my tablet pc. I’ll let him see more in a minute.

But couldn’t let this moment pass without popping it into the blog – Pictured here Adam does his bit for *$$s world domination by ensuring the logo is in full view.

[UPDATE] Just to clear up this geek-drool thing – yes it’s a PC, not a mac and and no foodstuffs were involved. Yet there were clear signs of geek-drool (or at the very least the pre-drool widening of the eyes and slackening of the jaw that is widely associated with an oncoming drool attack.) Being a well-brought-up English chap, I chose to abstain from snapping another picture of the great man in mid-tech-trance and anyway, Adam’s attention was gradually diverted back to the glow of his 17″ iBook and the growing crisis that was the falling-over of ipodder.org

A lovely lunch with the delightful Suw Charman (and several thousand OAPs it seemed) at the Tate Britain cafe.

We shared a lot about the trials and tribs of being a poor down-trodden self-employed consultant: clients from hell (present employers/prospects excepted of course!); fees that hardly pay for lunch; but most of all the difficulty of being the sort of person for whom life is about carefully choosing a new jar of hot chocolate, taking the lid of with anticipation building, and ponk-ing the seal (with or without the aid of a teaspoon)as opposed to the boring day-to-day warm and tasty beverage making.

It was particularly nice for me to be able to relax and think of nice things that Suw could do instead of playing my usual role in such lunches of going “pleeeeeeeez heeeeeelp meeeeeeee”.

I didn’t take many pictures at all at KM Europe. In fact I ended up with only 3 that can be published here and 1 of Ton & Lillia at the workshop that I could show, but they would never speak to me again so I shall keep in my private collection.

For the KB PKM workshop at KM Europe yesterday, I provided a teaser to get conversations going that originally was entitled “trust vs suspicion, faith vs fear…aaaaaagh the feelings” to get us talking about emotional responses to Knowledge Management and the implications for Personal Knowledge Management.

My motivation was really to get the conversation going at all as I’ve so often found that fear ends up being the ultimate barrier to change and to knowledge sharing but even talking about it is taboo in many corporate cultures.

The notes I scribbled before standing up to introduce the conversation went like this:

Fear as a barrier to change

Fear of: Discovery; Making mistakes; Ridicule; Victimisation; Loss of power; Loss of control; Telling the truth (where this is not the norm)

Isolation vs Connection

As I’ve often found with Open Space type events, it’s very difficult and probably not desirable to try to report in detail what we talked about. While we talked people were also putting thoughts on post-it notes which Ton promised to transcribe on the wiki, so the conversation might continue there.

The big insights for me were:

• Very few people actually go to work intending to inspire fear in their team.
• Some uber-gurus are quiet, shy and deferential
• A lot depends on what your reward and value system is like (and I don’t mean PM Systems etc, I mean the more informal personal ones – how do I know from people around me whether I’m doing a good job)

What I wasn’t prepared for was for my definition of PKM to become the focus of the discussion and we ended up in a bit of a trial of my ideas on PKM rather than a broad discussion and I felt (perhaps wrongly, but I’m not sure) that people wanted me to give them the answer. I think this is entirely understandable in a situation where people are constantly bombarded with presentations where people stand up and say “I have the answer” I’m happy to say I don’t have *the* answer, but I have some possible answers and I’d love to keep having the conversation.

The bit I entirely forgot about – but perhaps we can talk about next time is how expressions of fear are not acceptable but expressions of anger are. I can’t remember which guru said that when people are being angry in the workplace s/he always asks “what are they afraid of?”

For the KB PKM workshop at KM Europe yesterday, I provided a teaser to get conversations going that originally was entitled “trust vs suspicion, faith vs fear…aaaaaagh the feelings” to get us talking about emotional responses to Knowledge Management and the implications for Personal Knowledge Management.

My motivation was really to get the conversation going at all as I’ve so often found that fear ends up being the ultimate barrier to change and to knowledge sharing but even talking about it is taboo in many corporate cultures.

The notes I scribbled before standing up to introduce the conversation went like this:

Fear as a barrier to change

Fear of: Discovery; Making mistakes; Ridicule; Victimisation; Loss of power; Loss of control; Telling the truth (where this is not the norm)

Isolation vs Connection

As I’ve often found with Open Space type events, it’s very difficult and probably not desirable to try to report in detail what we talked about. While we talked people were also putting thoughts on post-it notes which Ton promised to transcribe on the wiki, so the conversation might continue there.

The big insights for me were:

• Very few people actually go to work intending to inspire fear in their team.
• Some uber-gurus are quiet, shy and deferential
• A lot depends on what your reward and value system is like (and I don’t mean PM Systems etc, I mean the more informal personal ones – how do I know from people around me whether I’m doing a good job)

What I wasn’t prepared for was for my definition of PKM to become the focus of the discussion and we ended up in a bit of a trial of my ideas on PKM rather than a broad discussion and I felt (perhaps wrongly, but I’m not sure) that people wanted me to give them the answer. I think this is entirely understandable in a situation where people are constantly bombarded with presentations where people stand up and say “I have the answer” I’m happy to say I don’t have *the* answer, but I have some possible answers and I’d love to keep having the conversation.

The bit I entirely forgot about – but perhaps we can talk about next time is how expressions of fear are not acceptable but expressions of anger are. I can’t remember which guru said that when people are being angry in the workplace s/he always asks “what are they afraid of?”

Tired and a little anti-climactic for being at the airport, waiting for a long time for my plane, while everyone else is off eating & chatting together, continuing the session from earlier at some Australian place in Rembrandtplein.

A very good afternoon for me – the session was the Knowledge Board sponsored session on Personal Knowledge Management led very smoothly by Ton and featuring teasers from Lillia, Ton, Martin, Piers, Heiko, yrs truly and Florian. I introduced the subject of emotional response to KM & PKM, in particular the issue of fear for all knowledge workers. The wiki on which Ton, Lillia & Piers planned the session will also be used for recording results and I will probably go there to describe in detail the conversation that we had as a result, but the big things for me were a clearer understanding of what I’m talking about when I say PKM and reassurance that this is a subject that’s been ignored because it’s hard rather than it being irrelevant. To summarise what was said about fear: we recognised that it’s part of everyone; that part of being a good manager is about helping your people deal with emotional issues; that a solution lay in giving people something to believe in, something to be inspired by, because, as eny fule no wot has red enything by Carole Caplin, faith is the opposite of fear.

New people for me to e-mail & stay in touch with:
Sari
Piers
Heiko
Magdalena
Gabriela
Carla
Sam
Andy
and others drifting in and out of short-term memory.

This morning to a presentation on Rewerse (semantic stuff including a tool to do smart screen scraping – not sure about this, will blog later).

Then a warm and dull hour with Factiva on taxonomy yawn – had a mad dash to find some food that I could eat – everything here was bread and cheese.

Now dashing into the Knowledge Board workshop