b.cognosco

Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.

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Saturday, September 10, 2005

Learning From Our Mistakes

[...] An illustrative example comes from the book Inviting disasters Inviting Disaster: Lessons from the edge of technology. It tells the story of a floating dormitory for oil workers in the North Sea that rolled over during the night killing over 100 people. The engineering experts quickly constructed different theories and complex explanations that focused on operational errors and management decisions.

All of these theories were wrong. It was eventually discovered through careful analysis that weeks earlier a crack in a support structure had been painted over, instead of being reported and repaired. This stupid, simple and small mistake caused the superstructure to fail, sinking the dormitory. Without careful analysis the wrong conclusion would have been reached (e.g. smacking the Atari) and the wrong lesson would have been learned.

Until you work backwards for moments, hours or days before the actual mistake event, you probably won’t see all of the contributing factors and can’t learn all of the possible lessons. The more complex the mistake, the further back you’ll need to go and the more careful and open-minded you need to be in your own investigation. You may even need to bring in an objective outsider to help sort things out. You’d never have a suspect in a crime lead the investigation, right? Then how can you completely trust yourself to investigate your own mistakes? [...]

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 10:37 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 
Categories: Learning, Strategy

Thursday, August 25, 2005

Cheater's Guide to LinkedIn

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 4:36 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 
Categories: Business & Finance, Strategy

Three Keys to Motivating Personal Change

Knowledge Jolt author Jack Vinson captures three keys to driving change in personal behaviors:

One motivation to rule them all

Is there a core problem that explains all of these behaviors? What motivates me to do anything? Conviction that it is important to me. At the same time, I need to see a path to change, and have some confidence that the path is going to lead me the right way while not creating any additional problems (or that I can overcome obstacles). But without that critical conviction, I am not going to be interested in making the effort to change.

Vinson’s observation comes while considering Dave Pollard’s Nine reasons we don't do what we should do, an excellent summary of tendencies, traits, and trends explaining why we never seem to accomplish as much as we think we should.

I like Vinson’s three keys. They apply to all personal change, whether directed at ourselves or others. One challenge many of us face, as working professionals in knowledge-based industries, is getting our companies, colleagues, and customers to embrace the many new collaborative tools – blogs, wikis, IM, presence, etc. – that we have found so beneficial. We struggle to explain this new paradigm and toolset, but we don’t often succeed because we don’t successfully turn all three keys.

We can generate some initial motivation, because we have a critical conviction that the tools are good, right, and will help them. But we fail on the other two. Conviction is contagious, but fragile. When we don’t show a clear, simple path or don’t have a believable plan to remove or overcome obstacles our most impassioned arguments lie fallow and die.

Clearly then, the work must be done to better understand the customer or colleague’s perspective, and too supply keys that have been carved to fit their circumstances.

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 4:22 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 
Categories: Productivity, Strategy

Sunday, May 15, 2005

Another 'Broadcasting is Dead' Story

This article, Piracy is Good, over at Australian site Mindjack, is a good description of the effect technology is having on broadcast television. Author Mark Pesce discusses, in some detail, the use of p2p filesharing technology BitTorrent and, more importantly, proposes some interesting business models for how producers and advertisers can collaborate to create a viable business.

Mark uses a couple of good case studies, including recent download scenarios for Dr. Who and Battlestar Galactica, to make the case that downloading does not necessarily equate to lower viewership. He also offers good analysis of the economic situation broadcasters face – after 50 years of training viewers that TV is free, trying to suddenly convince them they should be paying for everything isn’t going to work.

This, of course, is not news to anyone who regularly reads weblogs, RSS feeds, or uploads pictures to Flickr. But Pesce’s is one of the first articles I’ve seen to dig into the figures around p2p distribution, broadcast viewership, and the relative impact for popular TV episodes.

I’m not ready to concede broadcast is dead – even the latest bittorrent clients are too geeky for mass use – but Pesce’s case for advertisers is compelling. And if one thing is certain, it’s that advertisers follow the market. A commericalized, ad-supported p2p distribution network with viewer tracking can’t be far away.

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 1:14 AM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 
Categories: Business & Finance, Copyright, Strategy, Technology

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