“During the listening session exercise, instead of concentrating on what question to ask next, I focused on visualizing what the person was describing to me.” This advice describes more clearly the tip I always mention: look out the window while you’re on the phone with a listening session participant. Visualizing what the person is detailing is a much better way to describe how your mind could be occupied. You’re not supposed to be analyzing what you hear. Instead you’re supposed to be making sure that you’re breaking through the crust of preferences, opinions and explanations to the rich reasoning, reactions, and guiding principles within. A great way to keep your mind from either analyzing or panicking about what to ask next is to imagine what the person is telling you.
Email from Indi Young
And now we have chatbots and the “chat interface.” Chatbots have tremendous potential but they are not some magical cure. They are not some plug-n-play technology that doesn’t require us to have a navigation and classification.
How exactly are these chatbots going to chat? From what magic-magic land will they access their answers? Chatbots will require an extremely rigorous information architecture in order to ‘chat’ in a useful way. Otherwise, they’ll pretty quickly become gibberishbots.
From: http://gerrymcgovern.com/information-architecture-still-vital-to-digital-design/
In the modern workplace knowledge can define a company’s unique proposition and is a key source of business value.
Source (not working): http://towardsmaturity.org/article/2017/02/14/press-capturing-and-sharing-company-know-how/
In the modern workplace knowledge can define a company’s unique proposition and is a key source of business value.
98% of organisations want to increase the on-going sharing of good practice through the use of technology-enabled learning, however, only 1 in 5 are achieving this goal – with the finance and IT and telecoms sectors being amongst the most proactive.
Data from 600 L&D leaders and 5,000 workers has been examined in this new research led by Towards Maturity and sponsored by Crossknowledge to identify the tools and tactics of those successful in capturing and sharing company know-how and the impact this is having on their staff and business goals.
Those successful in capturing and sharing company know-how are twice as likely to report that the capability of their organisation to solve problems has increased and that they have doubled the drive in business innovation.
Jason Hathaway, Director of Content and Learning Solutions, Crossknowledge, says:
‘Organisations today tick and prosper thanks to the breadth and depth of their employees’ combined knowledge and expertise. Retiring senior workers are leaving behind massive gaps in expertise so how organisations capture this critical knowledge and know-how before they disappear is crucial.’
Tools are critical to facilitate sharing and those that actively encourage learners to collaborate in building knowledge resources use tools such as wikis, forums, podcasts and videos.
As well as the tactics and tools used to encourage sharing, the new research identifies the behaviours of the employee. One in five staff members are proactively sharing what they know with peers, one in five are not willing to share what they know, and the rest need to be provided with an opportunity to share and help getting started.
Sharers are three times more likely to involve classroom trainers and twice as likely to have content curation strategies in place to help staff make sense of the resources available to them.
Indeed creating a culture where staff feel safe to share and contribute knowledge plays a crucial role.In organisations that share knowledge managers are four times more likely to encourage their staff to make time for social and informal learning and in sharing organisations people are twice as likely to contribute their own learning resources to share with others.
Commenting on the report, Laura Overton, Founder and CEO of Towards Maturity said:
‘Organisations and individuals are facing rapid change. Everyone is looking to encourage the sharing of good practice but fewer than a third are using tools that will help staff share and access knowledge and less than a quarter have the skills they need to facilitate social learning.
This report shows that the successful will not be holding on to their knowledge but actively sharing it with their peers. Modern people professionals have a critical role to play, having high hopes is not enough, they need to harness new tools and build new skills.’
“How on earth can you have a seamless customer experience without a seamless organization?”
Gerry McGovern http://gerrymcgovern.com/new-thinking/complexity-demands-collaboration
This is one of those books that confounded my expectations, and left me with real uncertainty when asked to rate it out of 5 for Amazon and GoodReads. At the time of writing, I have left no score.
On the whole, the book is well-written and becomes a very easy and pleasant read. Its fantasy world is a curious mix of medieval technology and magic, and has been thought through with an astonishing level of detail for not just the exciting stuff, but also cultures, religion, drugs, plant life, animals and history too. The lead character is appealing, and I feel sufficiently flawed.
Ultimately though, and there’s no getting away from it, this is a story about a boy wizard in a wizarding school. It is dressed up in a delightfully mysterious setting, where an innkeeper who’s clearly hiding something, not least because he knows a lot more about the demonic creatures roaming the nearby forests than the locals, starts telling his story to a passing scribe. Tales of an idyllic childhood where he learns all kinds of skills as part of a band of travelling entertainers and befriending a tinker/magician, blend into different lessons living on the streets of the big city, before moving to “The University” and chums, enemies, japes, dealing with girls, and so on. It then heads into the back of beyond to a more cinematic finish.
There is so much of The Name of the Wind that I like, and believe is done well. I’d be delighted to spend more time with the varieties of magic, life on the nasty big city or on the road, or in the initial setting of demon-infested village life with flecks of heroic past-lives. I just don’t want to hear bad-luck stories of an extraordinarily talented young man that don’t really live up to the world that’s been created.
It’s amusing that this was the first fiction book to follow Rivers of London, and perhaps I wasn’t ready for more wizarding lessons in spite of this being a considerably better book, although perhaps less entertaining. Whereas I decided Rivers of London was a low 4-star book because it exceeded my expectations, I feel The Name of the Wind is a high 3-star book because it didn’t live up to them. I feel tempted to get the next book and hope to feel vindicated by choosing to read books under the name “the Kingkiller Chronicles”, I’m currently inclined to leave it for a while and see how the book settles on me.
I was really quite surprised at how much I enjoyed Rivers of London, the first of Ben Aaronovitch’s Peter Grant books. It was one of those books I pick up for £0.99 on an Amazon Kindle deal because it sounds interesting, but by the time I actually get to read the book, I’ve forgotten any hint of the synopsis. So, a page or so in, when Pc Grant is approached by a ghost witness to a murder, I was amused, puzzled, and a little delighted.
Aaronovitch is quite aware of the potential silliness of the whole concept, but has delivered a book that really feels set in the London I came to in 2001. He seems to bring together coherent ideas of life in the Met Police, of the mythologies and geographies of London and the South East, and importantly science and the supernatural. At times, especially early on, some of the asides feel too glib, but more often than not they’re well observed and pithy.
My rating of 4/5 on GoodReads still feels overgenerous, it’s probably as low a 4/5 as one can go. As a piece of sub-genre fiction, it is very enjoyable and also a lot of fun.
Engagement phase
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