All Life Is Problem Solving

(From http://www.obamamites.com)

At his first 100 days news conference this evening, President Obama received the following question from Jake Tapper of ABC News: “Thank you, Mr. President. You’ve said in the past that waterboarding, in your opinion, is torture. Torture is a violation of international law and the Geneva Conventions. Do you believe that the previous administration sanctioned torture?”

Now, I can’t imagine why Jake Tapper didn’t ask the President whether his Administration will fulfill its obligation under US Law and International Treaty to prosecute those who planned, enabled, and committed the crime of torture, but since he didn’t, Mr. Obama was able to answer in the following way: [Read more →]

Recently, in the actkm group, my friend Stephen Bounds raised the question of the relationship of KM to conflict in the context of a specific situation in which excessive conflict behavior within a project team was threatening successful completion of the project. This led to a pretty vigorous discussion and a great variety of opinions and comments about KM and conflict. I made one myself. But I didn’t feel it really did justice to the question of the general relationship between KM and conflict behavior. Hence the present blog in which I look at the issue from the viewpoint of the KMCI three-tier model.

Knowledge Management is activity intended to enhance knowledge processing including: problem seeking, recognition, and formulation; knowledge production (or problem solving); and knowledge integration (communicating knowledge to others). Knowledge processing, in turn, results in new knowledge and information which then influences decisions and actions in the context of business processing. And that’s the three-tier model. There’s a bottom tier of operational business processing, activity, and outcomes; there’s a middle-tier of knowledge processing activity and knowledge and information outcomes; and there’s a top-tier of knowledge management activity and its outcomes including its influence on knowledge processing. [Read more →]

Today, Stephen Bounds offered an important blog post entitled “KM and Monte Carlo Simulations” and an attached paper entitled: “Using Monte Carlo simulations to predict outcomes of KM interventions.” In the paper, Stephen uses Monte Carlo simulations along with the assumption that across-the-board KM interventions have a probabilistic (propensity) effect on “knowledge failures,” to show that if the interventions have a moderate effect on reducing knowledge failures of, say, 10%, then the intervention may still “. . . have a negligible effect on bottom-line savings over a sustained period of time.” In addition, in a related list serv post at actkm.org, he says further: [Read more →]

Today I have but three questions to ask of the defenders of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” or “torture” as the opponents of using these techniques would prefer to call them. [Read more →]

In a recent Newsweek column, after pointing out both the immorality and illegality of the Bush Administration’s use of torture on prisoners, Howard Feinman asked:

”What is Obama’s explanation for not strictly applying the law, American and international? It’s not moral, it’s practical: We need to move on; we have bigger, more urgent issues to face; we have the morale and potency of the CIA to protect as it tries to deal with treachery and terrorism. But none of that evokes or connects with the stirring moral vision with which Obama started his candidacy only a few years ago. Asked about Obama’s philosophy of government, the official said that the president views himself as “a devout non-ideologue. He wants to do what works.” And that is undoubtedly true. The problem is, he said something more when he launched his campaign.” [Read more →]

Recently, John Ragsdale offered his view on the top five reasons for KM failure, in a blog post currently being discussed at AOK’s Future Center. My reaction to Ragsdale’s blog is that it seems to assume that a KM intervention is primarily about technology. So he gives us reasons like: “Expecting the KM technology to create a process where none exists”; don’t hard code “broken processes into new technology”; “lack of participation”; “lack of adoption”; and “lack of maintenance.” In my view, these are not the primary reasons for KM failure. In fact reading the article, I received the distinct impression that Ragsdale is talking about IT systems directed toward content management, rather than interventions designed to enhance knowledge processing. In short, from my standpoint, he’s not writing about KM at all. Of course, I have my own thoughts about the relative success or failure of KM initiatives, and here are a few quick ones, in the absence of a serious attempt to compile a list of primary reasons or factors. [Read more →]

The Obama Administration worries about the consequences of taking over the big banks, re-structuring them, and then, once they’re “cleaned up,” re-privatizing them. They’re afraid of giving Republican charges of socialism credibility, and they’re afraid of possible consequences for the International Financial system if the big banks have to go through this process. So they’ve selected the middle way of using public money to subsidize the banks and help them to create a market for what presently looks like their “toxic assets.”

However, is the middle way really the best course? Keeping the Banks in place also has its costs and these include: maintaining the present concentration in the Banking system; allowing the continued existence of excessive compensation of bank executives, this time at public expense; allowing the continued existence of bank political influence in Congress including activities by the Banks to defeat the pending EFCA legislation, so important to the American labor movement; and enduring the gross unfairness of banks on the public dole raising credit card interest rates to usurious levels to the very public that is bailing them out. This is a pretty heavy set of costs when you really think about it, and one may well be permitted to wonder whether the risks of the “socialization” alternative are greater or less? [Read more →]

Recently, I’ve been having a good bit of fun with Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan, a book I’ve been meaning to read for awhile but only recently have gotten to. Taleb’s book is mainly about the difficulty of predicting the future due to the weakness (partially based in evolution) in human abilities to predict the occurrence of “Black Swans,” or “unknown unknowns.” Taleb’s writing style is engaging. I would characterize it as that of an erudite “smart aleck” (I’m from New York, and I love smart alecks, so I don’t intend this pejoratively) frequently delivering humorous parting shots at the end of paragraphs and also elegant paragraph-long rants and diatribes against “conventional wisdom” and common practices in the social sciences with a strong emphasis on economics. “Black Swans” (pp. xvii-xviii) are events with three attributes. First, they are “outliers” in the sense that they fall outside of the realm of common expectations. Second, they carry an extreme impact. Third, even though they are outliers, after they occur human nature makes us formulate explanations for them so we make them explainable and “predictable” retrospectively. Examples of “Black Swans” might include such events as the rise of Hitler, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Enron scandal, World War I, the stock market collapse of 1987, the current crisis in the world financial system, the length of modern wars, and the Harry Potter books, to name several. [Read more →]

I had hoped to blog a bit about a KM issue today, but so much is going on in Washington relating to the issue of accountability for the torturers, that I can’t really leave it alone. In my last post, I pointed out that the President’s decision to refrain from seeking prosecutions of the officials who actually committed torture was beyond his authority, and that if he proceeded along these lines he would be engaging in a lawless act beyond his authority under the constitution. Over the weekend, the situation turned for the worse.

First, on Saturday, Marcy Wheeler, a blogger at Firedog Lake broke the story that Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded on 83 occasions and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on 183 both within a single month. Then, on ABC’s This Week on Sunday, Rahm Emanuel, the White House Chief of Staff, revealed that the President also would not seek to prosecute any high level CIA, Department of Justice or White House officials who approved torture or who provided the quasi-legal justifications for it, that provided cover for those performing torture. Following this disclosure, today (Monday as I write this), White House Press Secretary, Robert Gibbs confirmed Rahm’s view, and it looked like the Obama Administration was lining up behind the lawless view that acknowledged crimes under international law and treaty would not be prosecuted by the United States of America. [Read more →]

President Obama has now released the Justice Department “torture memos,” providing legal opinions approving the use of interrogation procedures that many other observers and legal authorities view as clear instances of torture. In releasing the memos, the President has implemented his commitment to transparency in Government. But, at the same time, in asserting that his administration is interested in “looking forward,” and therefore will not prosecute CIA officials who performed “acts of torture” provided these acts followed the policies, guidelines, and procedures laid down by the Bush Department of Justice, he has denied the principle of individual accountability, grounded in International Law and Treaty and applied by the Allies, including the United States in the post-war Nuremberg trials. [Read more →]