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How Do Rocket Scientists Learn?

Rocket scientists, software developers, systems engineers, and all the other people that work at Goddard helping us better understand the earth and space are smart. That’s a given. But how do they improve their practice, learn from each other, and continue to improve on overwhelmingly complex tasks?

In a huge and complex organization such as Goddard, Knowledge Management is usually a core component of organizational learning. I’ve done some work in Knowledge Management in the past, and obsessively read Harvard Business Review articles on the topic, but I was really excited to dig into it in the context of space exploration. I spent a few weeks reading as much as I could on the topic, and was fortunate enough to attend an internal workshop led by the extraordinary Ed Rodgers, head of Knowledge Management at Goddard.

Here’s what I learned.

Knowledge Management at Goddard is About People

NASA creates things that don’t exist yet. Doing that takes incredible talent. At NASA, the talent lies not in its complex technologies, shuttles, spaceships, or intranets, but rather in its people. The products are certainly breathtaking and wondrous, but the success of the things that come out of NASA are a reflection of the knowledge of and collaboration between thousands of brilliant people. This point was really driven home at the Knowledge Management conference I attended…according to one participant:

“we didn’t hire smart people so we could tell them what to do; we hired them to tell us what to do.”

NASA’s work is organized around Missions. When a Mission is stood up people from across the center are brought together to work on the project. In theory, people with similar backgrounds and skills should be interchangeable. That’s where knowledge management comes in – to make sure that anyone from a particular unit that is assigned to a project has all the skills and knowledge developed in that content area within the unit. Each mission should get the knowledge of the whole department when you work with an individual.

The case study ”Goddard Space Flight Center: Building a Learning Organization (B)”[1] summarizes this point really well:

Knowledge Management is “better application of collective knowledge to the individual problem. So we need to develop some systems and do a little more work to share collective knowledge and make us smarter.”

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Thom’s Top Ten #g2e 2010 edition

Back in May I wrote about attending Gov 2.0 Expo, in that post I promised to share some of what I learned. In short, it was an intense three days, lots of great presentations, and more importantly dozens of interesting and insightful conversations.  Here is my report.

1.  Top quote

I thought this was a very mature statement.

” web 2.0 tools are not something we need to learn to use, but environments we need to learn to live in.” Jack Holt, Dept. of Defense

For other things I thought were cool at the time you can check out my twitter feed from the conference.

2. Thou shalt engage

There is a ton of civic and employee consultation going on south of the 49th parallel. It seemed like every second presentation was about some form of engagement, mostly using the tool made available by GSA to all agencies, a good example is GSA’s own consultation.

With all this activity going on I expect we will see some more lessons learned in the next few months at WebContent.gov, but two early conclusions appeared in my mind:

  • A broad national conversation is difficult if not impossible and of limited value.There are simply too many voices. Maybe when semantic analysis improves it will be practical but for now focus is essential.
  • Follow-up is critical. You need to know what you are planning on doing with the input,  be transparent about your intentions and follow through. Be sincere and prepare for the unexpected.  See this post from David Eaves for some perspective on what can happen.

David also had a wonderful keynote at the show about open data, baseball and government. You can watch it here.

For a Canadian perspective on engagement check out what the folks at Ottawa based Publivate are up to.

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Five Recommendations for Training Leaders in Technology and Government 2.0

In September I attended the Belfer Center’s Conference on Technology and Governance 2.0. The conference featured amazing attendees – Ellen Miller (Sunlight), Mike Klein (Sunlight), Karen Gordon Mills (US Small Business Administration), Mitch Kapor (Electronic Frontier Foundation), Paul Sagan (Akamai), Susan Crawford (Cardozo), Jonathan Zittrain (Harvard), Nicco Mele (Harvard/Echo Ditto), Archon Fung (Harvard), Tim Berners-Lee (W3C), Clay Shirky (NYU/Harvard), Zephyr Teachout (Fordham/Harvard), and a bunch of other amazing people in the field of technology and governance.

I was there as an attendee, but also had the privilege of participating on a panel with Aneesh Chopra (CTO of the U.S.A), Ian Freed (V.P Amazon kindle) and HKS students Seth Flaxman (he’s also the founder of TurboVote) and Philip Schroegel, moderated by Mary Jo Bane, Academic Dean and Thornton Bradshaw Professor of Public Policy and Management.

Our topic was what “Kennedy School Students Entering the Digital World: A Discussion with Aneesh Chopra & Ian Freed.

In general, I think the Kennedy School is an excellent institution in most ways. Great professors are teaching in the field; there are several centers (Shorenstein Center for Press, Politics, and Public Policy, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation) that support efforts in this areas; students are demanding more courses in gov/tech (as evidenced by the enrollments in Nicco‘s and Clay‘s courses); there are great speakers series, there’s a vibrant gov20 student community; and a committed external community (including alums) interested in engaging with the school to push it forward in this field.

However, the Technology and Governance 2.0 conference convinced me even more that you need academic institutions in this debate.

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Meet the Six Villains of Gov 2.0

I recently came across this funny (and too true) post by Todd Heim on social media villains that piqued both my long-time interest in super-heroes and super-villains and all things Government 2.0 too. While we pump up the Gov 2.0 Heroes (and even had an entire Day dedicated to them), and we hold conferences to highlight the work done by these heroes, I haven’t seen the opposite side get its due. Well, I’d like to dedicate this post to the people who make government innovation so difficult, the people who have stood in our way for years, the people who have been classified as hurdles, obstacles, and barriers – the Villains of Gov 2.0. Link to entire post on Steve Radick’s Social Media Strategery blog

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Where Malcom Gladwell Left Off: Social Media & Next Generation Democracy

Last month Malcom Gladwell wrote an article in the New Yorker: “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not be Tweeted.”

I’ve been thinking about this article ever since it came out, and people have asked me to respond on several occasions. When I read Next Generation Democracy and BYO started helping the author (and now friend) Jared Duval, I realized it was the perfect opportunity.

It’s not that Malcom Gladwell is wrong in his article. It’s just one sided.

He starts the article by describing a lunch counter sit in that took place in the Woolworths in Greensboro North Carolina in February of 1960, and that spurred a movement in which 70,000 students eventually took part.

These nonviolent actions were a core component of the civil rights movement, and although the protesters advocated peaceful solutions, their lives and limbs were often in danger.

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The Long Tail of Internal Communications

I assume you are already familiar with the long tail; if so proceed directly to flipping through my slides below, if not it might be worth reading the Wikipedia article, the book by Chris Anderson, or watching this video by Clay Shirky, as the long tail forms the basis of my entire line of reasoning below.

The Tail

The bulk of communication within the organization – perhaps its very life blood – is informal. If you look at the examples I’ve charted you begin to understand how the long tail grows as new communication tools emerge.

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Letting go for high performance leadership

© Chris Lamphear, iStockphoto

In Gov 2.0 circles I often hear that organizational culture needs to change. If you think about that you will realize that people need to change. If you think about that you will realize that you have to change. Last year I heard the story of a public servant leader who discovered that sometimes by letting go, you get better results. I think it is a good example of the transformation many of us need to consider for ourselves.

Two years ago, Angelina Munaretto took leadership of the Applying Leading Edge Technologies (ALET) working group within the Canadian government. This horizontal, mostly voluntary group was established to explore ideas around the use of social media and Web 2.0 tools for the government communications community.

At the outset, the group was structured in a traditional way and using government hierarchy: a Project Manager, two sub-working groups with co-chairs, and an advisory committee. Work began on defining the deliverables, finding members for the working groups and then working towards meeting the needs of this defined structure.

What nobody counted on, but in retrospect is not surprising, is the level of interest, passion and commitment exhibited by the entire government community in response to the global trend towards Web 2.0. All areas — not just communications, but programs, IM, IT and human resources — wanted to participate in some way. Those who were involved in applying the tools on a day-to-day basis started suggesting new projects that would help advance their programs, communications and use of Web 2.0 tools. The community grew into 150 people and 36 departments and agencies represented. Five departments seconded employees to work on deliverables for the community at no cost to the project.

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Citizen networks – What can we learn from the science of epigenetics?

Not all that long ago, the scientific community was justifiably ecstatic about having achieved mapping of the human genome – The Human Genome project. The promise was that by understanding genetic mapping we could find cures for disease, disability, and perhaps enhance longevity.

But an interesting development has occurred. Scientists are now learning that understanding of human genetics goes far beyond mapping genes. Two people – for instance identical twins – can have identical DNA sequences– but can nonetheless experience very different health. Why?

This is where the science of epigenetics comes in. It seems that the environment, life conditions, our experiences, and perhaps the experiences of our ancestors can all affect how our genes express themselves. Epigenetics, a combination of proteins and markers affected by environmental conditions and life experience, can turn genes on and off. So even though two people have identical DNA they can still live very different lives.

So what does epigenetics have to do with citizen networks? Assume that two governmental agencies have similar networks – a similar number of members, compelling content, and exchange between citizens and agency. Assume also that we support the networks with similar component technologies. Why would we experience different results – different levels of citizen participation?

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Eat or Be Eaten

Earlier this year I happened upon a blog post from Geordie Adams via a tweet from Tim O’Reilly. In it Geordie explains what he thinks is the major issue facing social media enthusiasts in the public sector:

“Cultural change [is] the biggest impediment to a higher adoption rate of social media in the public sector… [it] gets mentioned, everyone agrees, and then conversation turns to a technical or implementation discussion. To not [dig into culture change] is robbing important momentum from public sector social media evolution.” – Geordie Adams, Publivate (full article)

Geordie’s right, I can’t even recall the amount of times I have heard variations of the phraseCulture eats strategy for breakfast”. Essentially, even the most well thought out strategic approaches are vulnerable to the workplace culture. It would seem that when social media meets the public sector it is culture, not content, that is king. Culture is eating breakfast in plenaries, in tweets and in blog posts on a daily basis all over the world. Initially I thought it was a great line, its retweetable, to the point, and when I hear it I implicitly understand the connotation.

Over my dead body

As catchy as it is, I would hate to see it on my tombstone. If we don’t do a better job tackling the problem we might as well give up, call the undertaker and order our tombstones with that very inscription. I can see mine already:

Here lies Nick
He went quick
always circled by a vulture
its name was culture

While Geordie’s list of cultural problems (failure, engagement, and transparency) is a good place to start , I prefer to start with what I think underlies all of them: complacency. It would seem that over the years many of us have earned the fat cat stereotype; even those who haven’t earned it directly are now guilty by association.

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The How and Why of Leveraging Internal Social Networks

How do you feel about influence? Do you actively try to map it in your organization? Over the last few months, I’ve begun to hear this theme come up more and more in the workplace. To me, this is like the puzzle piece we’ve been missing. I became more personally interested in it when I met Josh Letourneau of Knight & Bishop earlier this year. Today I’m at the Conference Board’s Senior HR Executive Conference and it appears to be a theme they are picking up on as well.

Eric Mosley, Chief Executive Officer of Globoforce presented one of the finest sessions I’ve seen all year. I’d like to share some of the items he covered regarding the internal social networks in organizations and the impact of tracking the relationships.

Analysis by J. Letourneau of knightbishop.com

The discussion began around how the word “social” means different things to different companies. It’s one of those words that is everywhere lately, much like innovation. So, the first step has to be defining what the word social means in your organizational culture. For purposes of his discussion, social did not just mean social network platforms. It mainly meant the internal network that we each have in our organization in order to share information. Link to full post on Trish McFarlane’s HR Ringleader blog

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