For the umpteenth time, I yelled up the stairs to my teenaged daughter – the most unflappable human I knew.  “Did you put the garbage out?”  “Ok,” came the laconic response.  “Ok?  How is that an answer?  Why do I have to remind you every week?”  Minutes later, she bumbled down the stairs with a sigh, and went about her task.  Uncomplaining, but judgmental in the way only teenaged girls can carry off.

In calmer times, I asked her a deeper question.  I’d like to think I was calm, but I’m likely being kind in my historical rendering of the conversation.  “Why do I have to remind you every week about the trash?  You don’t seem to even know what day is trash day!”

“I know what day trash day is. It’s the day after you yell at me to take it out.”

That one stunned me, and has stayed with me in the intervening decades.  It was the most honest expression of distributed cognition I heard, although I didn’t know the term at the time.  Because I could be relied upon to remind her, she never took on the task to remember the day of the week that contained her chore.  I would like to say that this behavior is not repeated in my marriage, where certain cognitive tasks are embodied in our relationship – often to the exasperation of my Bride, but I heard once that blogs should reflect truth.

A 2009 article bemoaned our shrinking hippocampus, the area of our brain that allows us to navigate spatial landscapes.  The speculation is that our reliance on smart phones and vehicle GPS means that we are offloading cognitive processes into our environment – embodied cognition that is demonstrated when someone asks if you have the time.  You say yes, even though what you mean to say is that you know how to learn the time.  You say, ‘Yes, I know what time it is, as you look at your watch to learn the information.’ Even this example is dating me; how many still wear a watch when a time-keeping device connected to an atomic clock is sitting in our pockets (or in, gasp, holsters)?

It’s not just about navigation or trash.  A friend yesterday used some email-to-text magic to ask if I had plans for this evening.  I immediately texted back to indicate my lack of a social life.  Midday, I noted there had been no response and texted again – “Plans?  Thoughts?” No reply.  It never occurred to me to try an alternate mode – he had texted, and I was unconsciously respecting that communications mode.  When I considered the lack of response, I determined that he had good reason to be incommunicado.  Talking with him this morning, I learned that through some glitch in the matrix, he never received my multiple replies.  I presumed the communications channel was without flaw, and presumed a social reason for the silence.  When did I forget how to dial a phone?

And no, I will not be attending a wine dinner this evening after all.

Fortunately, the brain is constantly re-wiring, re-writing its code.  Microglial cells navigate our brains to prune redundant, poorly wired and obsolete synapses.  I am making a logical leap here, presuming that these pruning cells are engaged in the process of distributed cognition (or the recovery from it), but it seems likely microglia play a part.  This microglial cleaning is done, I should add, without your intervention. This is an ongoing Spring cleaning, but unlike the one where you stand on the stairs demanding your spouse reconsider trashing your old Yes album covers.

As a result of this constant re-wiring, for example, the hippocampus of the London cab driver is larger than yours, because of their onerous training: the requirement to memorize a 6 square mile patch centered on Charing Cross such that they know the optimal path between any two points therein, in any season. The requirements of their job led to a re-structuring of their brain.  They cannot rely on a map or GPS, but must internalize this knowledge.

So you can expand your navigational sense, you can regain the ability to find your way from Shady Grove to Adams Morgan.  You can re-learn what day the trash is picked up.  But first, you need a strategy.  What cognitive processes are best embodied in your environment, leaving your efficient brain to focus on ‘higher-order’ tasks?  Perhaps GPS is a trustworthy object to replace your hippocampus. However: What processes have you offloaded, without thinking about it?  And is that distributed cognition in good hands?  Are you trusting the best objects/interactions with helping you to know?  What did those Spring cleaning cells trim away last night as you slept?  This last thought, without too much explanation, may give some of us reason to pause and reflect this weekend.   Do enjoy.

I enjoyed a pleasant email exchange recently with someone who referenced an earlier (infamous?) blog posting regarding what I witnessed as the death of Knowledge Management in the U.S. Department of Defense.  Without rehashing that work, I was interested to see that the post was circulating again. I’m happy to be updated on what I saw in 2009, and welcome any opportunity to update that observation.

Within the email exchange, I was asked a question – what do I see as the difference between Information Management and Knowledge Management?  I thought I would share that answer here, offering it up to the gods of Google, in case I need it again someday.

The difference between IM and KM is the difference between a recipe and a chef, a map of London and a London cabbie, a book and its author.  Information is in technology domain, and I include books (themselves a technology) in that description.  Digitizing, subjecting to semantic analysis, etc., are things we do to information.  It is folly to ever call it knowledge, because that is the domain of the brain.  And knowledge is an emergent property of a decision maker – experiential, emotional framing of our mental patterns applied to circumstance and events. It propels us through decision and action, and is utterly individual, intimate and impossible to decompose because of the nature of cognitive processing.  Of course, I speak here of individual knowledge.

First principles, don’t lose sight of how we process our world.

The difficulty is applying this understanding to organizational knowledge.  Knowledge is only in the brain, but organizations have a shared understanding (referred to as ‘knowledge’) as well – humans gathered in groups fit themselves into artificial decision constructs (“collaboration,” “consensus”) in order to leverage the collective individual knowledge to make decisions for the group.  My approach is to understand cognitive science, organizational theory, and information science to understand ways to improve group behaviors.

I was confronted today by a checklist posted by a friend – 10 questions that “should be asked before your wedding day.”  I found the questions absurd, as someone with 29 years of marriage under my belt, and suggested she pass these before long-married couples, and count the ones who say, “yeah, that’s what we did!”  The friend then challenged me to respond in a blog, revealing what I see as the ‘keys’ to a good marriage.

I understand the culture engendered by the Checklist Manifesto, where every task can be decomposed into simple lists to ensure quality.  Like all management fads, it has its place, and becomes farcical when applied beyond its utility.  Marriage is not a 50-50 proposition, it’s a 100-0 reality, unevenly distributed over time.  If that idea is an unfriendly one, reconsider the whole marriage idea.

This blog challenge gave me pause, as those 29 years represent time spent with two different spouses (8 years and then 21 years and counting).  Who am I to challenge these ideas?  I have no keys to a good marriage, because they don’t exist.  The notion that we can approach this as a business plan is silly. As a father, I counseled my daughters to consider four questions with their respective intendeds. (I managed to help Daughter the Younger reconsider a potentially disastrous engagement using this technique – but really can’t kid myself into believing anyone took me seriously otherwise.)

So rather than a checklist, I asked that they consider four big questions, and see if their intended had similar answers. This was a simply exercise in compatibility, certainly not a recipe for a successful marriage.

Ok, those four questions – again only getting at compatibility for a person with whom you’re thinking of sharing a bathroom for the next 60 years. Insufficient, but a start:

1) What is perfect entertainment?

2) What is perfect relaxation?

3) What is perfect sex?

4) What is sacred?

There are no keys, there are only conditions. We can’t plan, we can only influence and adapt – based on a core bond that is nurtured and prized. All else is negotiable. (E.g., you can agree to a child ’strategy,’ but if one of you becomes disabled and unable to accommodate, is that a ticket to your ‘exit strategy?’)

Nevertheless, the blog challenge remains on my laptop.  I summoned the Bride, and we answered these as a couple.  I took the liberty of challenging the question – some may consider our answers as non-responsive.  As with every other observation of our marriage, thanks so much for your observation:  but it’s working for us.

What is our “mission statement” as a couple?

We did not have a social mission or a business plan when we decided we no longer wanted to live apart.  As a couple, we considered our vows as the “mission statement.”  But let’s recover the language – the vows were our initial promises to one another.

To what extent are you willing to go to have a family, medically?

We had a family, already.  I brought a son into the marriage, she brought two teenaged girls who lived with us.  Family planning is a core decision to make together, no question.  But one never knows how far you are willing to go ‘medically’ to do anything.  No amount of planning prepares the father who confronts an unconscious wife, whose life depends on endangering their unborn child.  Deeper issues abound here, the checklist fails utterly.  This is a reasonable question, which resolves the bare minimum in terms of planning.  Deeper convictions will be called upon when the unexpected confronts us.

What will we do if we find out our child has severe disabilities?

Child or fetus? What’s the real question here?  Do we have a view of life as disposable, casting aside the inconvenient gifts?  When does life begin?  Under what circumstances do we institutionalize our crippled child?  The language here is a bit too bland for me, let’s use real nouns and compelling language to chip away at the emotions that will rule that day.

Who should I have on speed dial for the days when I just can’t figure you out?

Each other.  Unless you are pondering a polyamorous relationship, why would you invite another to help you understand your life partner, your helpmeet?  The friend I vent to about my Bride is not someone I want on her speed-dial.

Can you name two couples that you admire and would hope to emulate?

No, because the whole notion of best practices is a discredited one in business, and even more of a failure in relationships.  You never know the reality of relationships you observe; your goal should be to become the model to emulate, carve your own path.  You can’t know what it truly takes for relationships you admire to work, it’s a fool’s errand to pretend otherwise.

How do we stay sexually engaged with each other?

Have a lot of sex.  Also, expand your definition of sex.  Touch throughout the day.  Compliment one another constantly.  Flirt ceaselessly.  The Bride and I have had satisfying bouts of foreplay that last for weeks, while never losing any clothing. Sex is a communications channel, for those who insist on business language.  Find out what turns your partner on, and devote yourself to that end.

Will we share our credit reports with each other?

We will share our credit reports with our creditors.  We will merge our futures, and therefore discussing how we think of money goes much deeper than our past.  Discuss purchases, talk about the value of material wealth, the emotional response to debt, and hold hands while you pay the bills.

Should we have an exit strategy for the marriage, and if so, what would it be?

While you’re at it, write up an exit strategy for your relationship with your children.  Exit strategies are relevant when considering land wars in Asia.  While a marriage can seem more stressful and destructive than war, it is supposed to be a cleaving of souls.  If confronted with this checklist, I would seek an exit strategy for the engagement.

If married previously, why did it end and what did you learn from that relationship?

Definitely discuss why the marriage ended, and be certain to share how your ex-spouse would answer this question.  That perspective will be much more constructive than the well-rehearsed narrative that helped you exit the previous commitment.

What are our conflict management styles, and are they compatible?

Why do conflict management styles need to be compatible?  Is there a 2×2 matrix that indicates which styles are compatible, and a personality test we can take to determine our style?  And where do we go to forget the fact that we evolve throughout our lives.  Here’s my answer:

Don’t hit each other.  And don’t use sex as a weapon.

For the rest, seek pre-marital counseling, where the facilitator will help you explore deeper questions that will reveal the style of your partner.  If you’re determined to make it work, you will 1) adapt yourself and 2) help that person grow – ever mindful of the balance between these two activities.

The calendar tells me this is a Valentine’s Day blog.  I’m thankful to the friend who convinced me to pen this.  In April, I will officiate at my 10th wedding (for those keeping score, I’m 8 and 1).  (One of those weddings was not recognized by the state of Virginia, but it counts in the hearts of all who matter.)  The decision to merge identities, while embracing the paradox of individual identity as whole, is not one that lends itself to a checklist.  It is not a business partnership, it is an emotional ocean into which we plunge from great heights.  Our only plan should be to cling to one another, to form a raft from our shared memories, and to nurture friendships and children as our legacy – enjoying each wave that washes over us.  It’s about the journey, and if you’ve found someone who wants to share yours, then celebrate.  Every day.

More research indicating that our inner capabilities for perception, understanding, and imagination are not three separate activities in our brains – but rather an intertwined set of abilities directed at prediction.  We have an efficiency unmatched by any computer: we notice and process only that information about our world that does not match our predictive assumptions.  If the environment around us is unchanging, we are spared the banal status report.  Compare this to mind-numbing staff meetings, where “we go around the table and update everyone.”

But wait.  While mind-numbing as so many organizational rituals can be, aren’t these status meetings a chance to think?  To question status updates that may contain a hint of shift?  To think is to learn.  To think is to be intentional about questioning our predictions.  If the world around us presents us with unexpected information, it gains our attention.  This is how we are wired, but our attention is generally focused only on this ‘exception handling.’  We have to exert ourselves to devote attention to the status quo, to look for minor signs of shift.  Our brains are fantastic at predicting the effects of our movement through our immediate environment, most likely the purpose for this predictive ability, but are famously also able to trap us in bigotry, mistaken assumptions about abstract concepts such as economics or love, or to help us miss out on opportunities to learn.

The picture here represents one of the great corporate slogans from over 100 years ago: Think.  In all things, focus the mind on questioning its assumptions, its expectations.  Our world is famously unpredictable, thinking moves us from reacting to the potential for proactive change – to a place where we notice the quiet signals in our environment that deserve our attention and imagine change.

Today we honor a man who shared his Dream with humanity.  Who demanded we think about our actions, our assumptions, and to change the nation’s ways towards a moral path.  To dream is to think.  To think is to question.  What do you question today?

I stumbled across an interesting perspective this morning – one that argues perhaps we are “over thinking” the notion of a social enterprise.  “How different I wondered was the social capital I build up when I share a Word problem work-around on the company social network from when I lend my neighbor the proverbial cup of sugar.  In both instances, I’m sharing because it’s the proper social thing to do and because I likely believe the next time, that person might help me when I need it.”

The author goes on to posit that our social capital management is probabl y the same offline as offline.  All these efforts to identify behaviors and set expectations for enterprise social behavior is misguided, we’re making things too complicated.  Invariably, (although not in the piece I reference here), we come to impugn the motives of those who are “making things complicated.” The author, as I say, does not fire that bullet, but sums up thus: “Maybe we are just doing what we’ve always been taught to do, to share and cooperate with one another.  If we tap into these simple ideas, all enterprise social software is doing is taking advantage of the way most of us were brought up.”

Ahem.  In addition to reflecting almost none of the case studies of enterprise social software, the author of this piece misses two critical points: your workplace is not your neighborhood, and the cup of sugar examples fails because sugar-sharing is a 1:1 endeavor, while the Word problem work-around sharing is 1:n.

Taking the second point first: You are much more likely to share assets, resources, knowledge, etc., when approached and asked within the context of an individual’s need – than you are to “share” with no immediate reciprocity or other statement of value.

In other words: you may give your neighbor a cup of sugar upon request, but I doubt you place cups of sugar outside your door on a regular basis.  Nor would you drive to the mall and leave a cup there.

The mall?  To my first point: Yes, the mall is another created social construct, just like your workplace, that drives certain behavior.  When we place ourselves into purposeful social constructs, such as a mall or a workplace, our identity / role / time management (etc.) all change.  The mall is designed to facilitate retail commerce; dropping bags of sugar hither and yon would, among other things, violate the intention of the sugar merchant therein.  Similarly, in your workplace, you are motivated by what is measured and valued. For many reasons, there is a gap between the rate and quality of what is should be shared for organizational value and what is actually shared.

Understanding the organizational incentives, and the degree to which they force us away from our natural good nature sugar-sharing selves, is critical to solving this gap. Social constructs and contexts matter, and comparisons invariably fall down when they ignore the context.

A few years ago, I answered the phone.  I’ve since learned my lesson and silenced the landline.  When someone leaves a message there now, the tiny blue light flickers forlornly until I log on to the interwebs to listen and laugh at the voice mail.  For those particularly entertaining, I forward to my wife’s email for her bemusement. 

But on this day, I answered the phone.  On the other end I found an individual conducting a survey on behalf of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.  For reasons I can neither recall nor fathom, I listened and agreed to participate.  Once told of the subject, I told the person that I had no connection or experience with these organizations.  It turned out, that did not matter.  She continued to ask me questions about the firms (whose names she read en toto for each question for the next ten minutes); probing all around my completely vacant perception of them.  I wondered aloud how useful this information was, and briefly considered making up outrages or plaudits just to make her day more interesting.

Today, there are new stories about these firms’ attempts to improve their branding and message.  I suspect my interview was part of that, and no doubt rolled up and considered insight into the public mind.  Some unnamed (and named) consultants made serious coin analyzing these results and suggesting ideas to improve the numbers.

How does my experience resemble political polls, which today make up approximately 67% of all news stories? (Statistics are fun to make up, try it yourself!)  How do people respond to questions about how they will vote in a little less than a year?  How many of them take that call as seriously as I took my Fannie Mae / Freddie Mac survey?  How is it so many people still use landline phones, apparently the only method by which these survey firms reach people?

A student of mine opined recently on the qualitative method by declaring it inferior, only useful for setting up the hypotheses for more grownup quantitative methods.  These quantitative methods feature, often, scientific polls with established margins of error.  Far better to consider the aggregate of poll results, careful diced and analyzed; over the anecdotes and full narrative of experience.  Such is the domain of the soft science.  Where “data” relies on those people who are eager to give honest answers to a stranger interrupting their day with a ten-minute questionnaire.

I don’t mean to impugn completely the survey method.  I just wonder how much of what passes for ‘data’ should be taken with a few grains of your favorite seasoning.  Layering time-honored mathematical models on top of an individual’s representation of their thoughts and intentions may not affect, it turns out, the quality of that information.

On occasion, I am honored to present a three-hour course on decision science as part of a regular seminar for senior feds who are in important jobs.  I once heard a comedian remark that absolutely nothing is worth doing for more than two hours, but while the gentleman obviously is not a football fan – in general I have to agree.  I always approach these speaking engagements with some trepidation, knowing how little I enjoy sitting through multi-hour training sessions or other Festivals of Talking Heads.  One of the compelling things about the Ignite series is the fact that speakers have to be off the stage in five minutes.  TED talks are worthwhile partly because their speakers take up no more than twenty minutes of your time.

Plenty has been written about PowerPoint etiquette, how some styles actually prohibit retention.  This comes about when you put a lot of text on a slide, and then compound the injury by reading the text to your audience.  This almost guarantees low retention, as the brains in your audience do not know whether to focus on reading or listening.  More often than not, they tune out.

Relying on the good work from Garr Reynolds (“Presentation Zen”) and Nancy Duarte (“Slide:ology”), as well as other research on how brains behave, I try to follow a few rules when I can.  One is to surprise the audience every ten minutes or so – although I can’t promise I always succeed at this one. The other is to use eye-catching photos and very little text.  My presentation at this seminar consists, for the most part, of embedded videos (it’s always nice to give your audience a break from you) and slides that are mainly a photo with a pithy phrase.  I don’t even read the phrase on each one, preferring to tell a story or anecdote that demonstrates the point of the slide – or sometimes offering the dry theory with a pointed reference. “Emotion plays a central role in decision-making, when we ask an expert to relate the decision logic they used in a specific situation, they lie. They don’t mean to, they can’t help it because so much of their personal decision process is unknown to them.”

What drives me to write this on a rainy football Sunday?

Well, I wanted to share with you the result of an experiment I ran this past week.  Mindful of the retention theory, I chose to demonstrate it in practice.  Since I didn’t think of it until the morning of the presentation, I went without a net.  At the end of the three-hour presentation, I showed photos from the course without any text.  One at a time, five in all. “Tell me what you learned while this slide was up.”

During the breaks, a few students asked if there was a reason for the strange approach to PowerPoint (I didn’t have the heart to tell them it was Keynote).  I had set this up perfectly, and the disappointment would be crushing. I dreaded silence, blank looks.

The class knew every slide.  By the third one, they were answering in unison.  This wasn’t just the eager students at the front of the class; every one of the 20 or so in the audience could speak to the message given on slides they had seen once, briefly, and then not again for over two hours.

I had a conversation last week with someone on Facebook who argued for the ‘standardized’ project brief format.  We all know this one.  The position was that every project used a standard brief format, the information was on the slides, and the briefing team did not spend excessive time creating unique content.  I sympathize with this approach, but cannot escape the fact that my little experiment demonstrated the theory.  If you think the ‘creative’ approach to slide-ware is not worth your time, so be it.  But if you are briefing people with some interest in having them retain your information, I dare you to repeat my experiment.  Be careful if you do, however.  Now that I’ve seen this work in person, it’s going to be hard to go back to boring my listeners.

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Photo from Rob Lee’s collection on Flickr: www.flickr.com/photos/roblee/374517948/