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Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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Learning From Our Mistakes
Cheater's Guide to LinkedIn
Three Keys to Motivating Personal Change
Friday, October 14, 2005
Byzantine Generals - How Many Liars Can You Tolerate
I came across this paper at the National Institute of Standards and Technology while following links looking for something else. I wonder if anyone is working on a way to apply this to politics?Byzantine generals
(classic problem)
Definition:The problem of reaching a consensus among distributed units if some of them give misleading answers. To be memorable, the problem is couched in terms of generals deciding on a common plan of attack. Some traitorous generals may lie about whether they will support a particular plan and what other generals told them. Exchanging only messages, what decision making algorithm should the generals use to reach a consensus? What percentage of liars can the algorithm tolerate and still correctly determine a consensus?
Terry Frazier at 10:38 AM
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Saturday, September 10, 2005
Learning From Our Mistakes
Ex-Microsoft project manager Scott Berkun has written a very good article on how to learn from your mistakes. The article was written in July, well before the Katrina disaster, but is even more pertinent now:[...] 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.Found via Denham Grey.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 wont see all of the contributing factors and cant learn all of the possible lessons. The more complex the mistake, the further back youll 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. Youd never have a suspect in a crime lead the investigation, right? Then how can you completely trust yourself to investigate your own mistakes? [...]
Terry Frazier at 10:37 PM
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Thursday, August 25, 2005
Cheater's Guide to LinkedIn
This comprehensive, practical, how-to guide for networking via LinkedIn is chock-full of techniques I would never think of myself. LinkedIn is a great tool for those who live in and around Silicon Valley. I’m not at all sure how valuable it is for those of us who live in the remaining 99.999% of the world, but even if you don’t use LinkedIn this guide is full of ideas applicable to both online and offline networking. [Thanks to Atlanta PR Madame Jeneane Sessum for the link.] Terry Frazier at 4:36 PM
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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.
Vinsons observation comes while considering Dave Pollards 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 Vinsons 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 dont often succeed because we dont 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 dont show a clear, simple path or dont 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 colleagues perspective, and too supply keys that have been carved to fit their circumstances.
Terry Frazier at 4:22 PM
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