All Life Is Problem Solving

Neil Olonoff recently asked this question on LinkedIn:

“How can we stimulate knowledge sharing and collaboration in government?”

I’ve provided an answer to this question in three posts here, here, and here. Whatever I say in these posts about enhancing knowledge sharing assumes the adoption of a clear definition or specification of knowledge allowing a measurable distinction to be made between knowledge and just information. Without that we’re all really talking about “enhancing information sharing and collaboration in government,” not “enhancing knowledge sharing.”

To Be Continued

Having discussed both the difficulties in evaluating KM activities and different approaches to KM, in my last two blogs in this series, I’ll now consider the implications of the approaches combined with the difficulties for the proper organization of the KAO’s evaluation function. The Decision Interruption Approach greatly alleviates three of the four difficulties and makes evaluation more straightforward. In that approach, the problems motivating interventions are problems related to a history of specific operational errors or deviations from expectations. In the Partners Healthcare case serious medical errors in terms of fatalities and serious side effects resulted from errors in prescriptions. The impact of the KM effort in this case can be described by noting that: (1) serious medical errors in order entry were reduced by 55%; (2) use of beneficial drugs increased 7-fold; and successful dosages increased 11-fold. [Read more →]

Here’s a bit of hysterics:

Private equity company Blackstone Group LP CEO Stephen Schwarzman said on Tuesday that up to 45 percent of the world’s wealth has been destroyed by the global credit crisis.

“Between 40 and 45 percent of the world’s wealth has been destroyed in little less than a year and a half,” Schwarzman told an audience at the Japan Society. “This is absolutely unprecedented in our lifetime.”

Clearly, Schwarzman, like so many others, equates wealth with money and market valuations expressed in monetary terms. But almost the first thing one learns in basic economics is that money is a medium of exchange and that wealth is to be found in one’s real assets. Now, it is very doubtful that 40 – 45% of the real assets owned by humans have been destroyed over the past year and a half. In fact, it is probable that increasing productivity has increased these assets, if not their market evaluation. [Read more →]

Cable Media anchors and hosts, with a few exceptions, have been making total fools of themselves over the $7.7 Billion in “earmarks” included in the $410 Billion Omnibus spending bill just passed by Congress. They have manufactured a protean conflict between the “good government” types, many of whom are suddenly many of the same Republicans who turned the country over to the corporate and financial interests who have manufactured the current world wide deepening economic crisis (I no longer know whether to call it a recession or use the dreaded “D” word), and the “big, bad” earmarkers; and have given these folks every opportunity to make the case that the President should be vetoing the Omnibus “spending” bill because it is “chock full of earmarks.” These efforts are particularly amusing when the “chock full of earmarks” charge is delivered while the message along the bottom of the screen reads “2% of the total.”

Well, let me see if I understand what these cable media types are trying to say to me. [Read more →]

In my last blog, I filled in some of my thinking about the evaluation function of the KAO, by presenting four difficulties associated with KM impact evaluation that would figure prominently in KAO operations. The four difficulties vary in importance depending on the approach to KM used in KM programs and projects. In this blog I’ll specify the three approaches and begin to discuss their relations to the four difficulties and the relevance of the combination of approaches and difficulties to the organization of the KAO. The three approaches are: the Decision Interruption Approach; the Expectations Gap Approach; and the Ecological Approach.

The Decision Interruption Approach designs and implements KM interventions introducing strategies, policies, programs, techniques, and tools that enhance knowledge processing by creating systems for interrupting ongoing decisions people make in order to integrate further information or knowledge into the decision process. In the paradigmatic Partners HealthCare case, a system was developed to examine Doctors’ prescription orders after they were entered into the system, but before they were implemented, to match the orders against a knowledge base developed by a committee of experts recording the track of previous experiences with patients having symptoms similar to those being treated by Doctors entering the new orders. [Read more →]

In Parts Two and Nine of this series, I talked about the “strategy exception error,” and the need to overcome it in the quest for quality knowledge processing across all areas in the Federal Government including the strategy function itself. Another important aspect of reaching this goal, as well as ensuring the quality of knowledge processing itself, is the Knowledge Accountability Office’s (KAO) function of evaluating the impact of KM and knowledge processing activity across the decentralized, partially self-organizing clusters of KM activity in the Federal Government. In this evaluation function it would serve as the mechanism of Government-wide KM performance accountability to the legislative fiduciary (the Congress). In this blog, I’ll discuss some of the difficulties the KAO will have to cope with in evaluating KM impact.

Conceptually the idea of KM impact is clear enough. Here’s a visual. [Read more →]

Warren Buffet said today that the leaders of this nation need to treat the President as the commander-in-chief of an economic war because that’s what we’re in right now, and he characterized the economy as falling off a cliff. Well, I’m not sure I’d go that far, since we’ve so recently gotten into far too much trouble treating a President as though he were a commander-in-chief beyond criticism. Having said that, however, I do think that the public at large needs to recognize that the President is engaged in a sustained effort to re-create an economy that will work for Americans and that his effort to do so will take continuing support beyond just patience with his early attempts to “get ahead of the curve.” [Read more →]

Well, the chorus has now started singing “too small, too small” about the stimulus. What was obvious to Paul Krugman, Joe Stieglitz, Dean Baker, Jamie Galbraith, Robert Reich. Robert Kuttner, and a host of other economists is now becoming so clear that the MSM, which not very long ago, wouldn’t even cover the opinion that it was too small, preferring to cover the stimulus story as a two-valued conflict between the Administration’s inadequate proposal, and the ridiculous views of the Republican tax cutters, can no longer ignore it.

So now the problem is, how can President Obama get another $800 Billion or larger stimulus through a Senate that requires 60 votes to pass a bill, when roughly 35 probably want to see him fail, and when perhaps as many as 15 – 20 others are controlled by Republicans and Democrats who are more worried about the Federal debt our children and grandchildren will have to pay off than they are about the destruction of jobs, wealth, careers, and hopes, they are seeing every week? [Read more →]

(Co-Authored with Steven A. Cavaleri)

In our last post, we began a review and commentary on Steven Spear’s post on out learning and out racing the competition. we concluded that post by pointing out that Steve’s conclusion that high velocity organizations institutionalized inductive/deductive problem solving cycles and built new knowledge faster in this way than their competition was quite similar to our own view that open enterprises, or organizations with Open Problem Solving Patterns are more adaptive than others because they initiate and implement Knowledge Life Cycles (KLCs) more frequently that other types of organizations. Steve ended his post with a short discussion of the four capabilities of high velocity organizations, presented in much more detail in Chasing the Rabbit. We’ve already discussed these capabilities once here. In this blog, we want to add to our commentary on his four capabilities. Here’s his statement on Capability 1. [Read more →]

(Co-Authored with Steven A. Cavaleri)

I recently alerted Steven Spear, author of Chasing the Rabbit, to Parts Two and Three of this series which discuss his very important book. I guess my posts prompted him to post a blog on how high velocity organizations out learn and out race the competition. Since Steve’s blog post is directly related to the problem solving pattern in both high velocity organizations and open enterprises, my next two posts will provide a close but appreciative analysis of his views. He begins with a statement about how knowledge is created.

“Knowledge of what to do and how to do it is created by building theory, testing theory, and building new theory when the old ideas fail. High velocity organizations build the creation of useful knowledge directly into process design and process improvement. As a result these organizations out improve, out innovate, and out invent their rivals. They out learn them, so they out race them. How they do so is a vital lesson now, when old answers on how to compete no longer apply.” [Read more →]