knowledge productivity.com - Suzanne Verdonschot on everything that's Knowledge Productivity

Database with tools and reference material

suzanne — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 13:17:18 +0100

Description

Browsing the internet in search for articles on the use of critical friends, I came across this great website from ICVET. This group promotes new ideas and practice in teaching and learning. You can find numerous topics: from appreciative inquiry, action research and evaluation to workplace learning and working with groups. For every topic they give a short introduction, a selection of related websites and articles. These links contain practical tools, ideas for ways of working (see for instance this list of 'icebreakers').You can access the A-Z-resources via this url: http://www.icvet.tafensw.edu.au/resources/index.htm.
Enjoy!

Rethinking our educational system

suzanne — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 10:20:46 +0200

Description

My colleague drew my attention to this video. Creativity expert Ken Robinson challenges the way our educational system is set up. He makes a plea to change our system in such a way that it provokes creativity, rather than kill it. His talk makes you aware of some of these strange things embedded in our educational system. For instance, says Ken Robinson, we tend to see our body primarily as a form of transport for our heads. And what to think of the story in which a doctor needs to tell the mother of a small girl that couldn't sit still at school "Your daughter isn't sick, she's a dancer. Take her to a dancing school)". This talk is on the website www.ted.com, a site with a rich collection of inspiring video's by 'the world's greatest thinkers and doers'.

Personas to guide your design process

suzanne — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 19:52:38 +0200

The atmosphere was very relaxed and lively at the EXPO. At this exposition students from the faculty Art Media and Technology (Utrecht school of the arts) presented their graduation projects. There were fun and innovative things. One group designed an INStable. A table that shows how often each of the persons sitting there, talks in comparison to the others. Another group made a tool to facilitate the working process of a multi disciplinary design team. They used a method of goal directed design that was developed by Cooper. What I found particularly interesting was the use of personas. It is a method used by software designers but I see opportunities to apply it in other design processes as well (e.g. the design of learning programmes). This is how it works: you define different characters that represent users of your product. Each person in the team 'is' one of these characters. When making decisions about the design, you don't say 'well, I think we should make an extra module here..' but you look at it from the perspective of your character (you are the character): 'Jennifer would definitely need some extra support here, it would make her, being a starter in the field, insecure having no...'. I think this method could help in design to:

focus
come up with new ideas
make decisions based upon future users instead of on a particular designer's preference
stand strong when you come up with a radical new solution for something

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personas
Cooper's blog 'about design, business and the world we live in': http://www.cooper.com/journal/

Interesting new weblog...

suzanne — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 22:33:55 +0200

My colleague in South Africa Mark Turpi n has started a weblog on learning and social capital in South Africa (an interesting combination with a lot to learn from). He makes interesting and sharp observations, it is great that his thoughts are now made public via this blog. The url is: http://markturpinsblog.blogspot.com.

Inspiring Ideo Method Cards

suzanne — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 09:57:53 +0200

I bought myself this cool box filled with cards. On the front of each card there is a picture that makes you curious, the back shows a method that can be used as a source of inspiration during an innovation project. Ideo is an organisation that helps companies to innovate. They explain their success as a design and innovation firm by their habit of placing people at the centre of the design/innovation process. These cards show some possible ways of doing that. The cards each belong to one of four categories: 'learn' 'look' 'ask' 'try'. And that's what makes these cards so useful and interesting I think: all methods actually rely on powerful research activities. Observing ('look') and Interviewing ('ask') how people do certain things, how they experience them, is just so interesting and it enables you to really understand new points of view. Analysing these results ('learn') will lead you to the design of an experiment ('try') that will help you to move along in the innovation process.

Although many of the cards are focused on the design of products, they offer interesting starting points for all kinds of research activities. They might be used as methods that help you in an innovation or design process, they might as well serve as a perfect toolbox for the innovative researcher. Some examples:

Narration
HOW As they perform a process or execute a specific task, ask participants to describe aloud what they are thinking.
WHY This is a useful way to reach users' motivations, concerns, perceptions, and reasoning.
EXAMPLE In order to understand how food is incorporated into people's daily routines, the IDEO-team asked people to describe what they were thinking while eating.
Personal inventory
HOW Document the things that people identify as important to them as a way of cataloging evidence of their lifestyles.
WHY This method is useful for revealing people's activities, perceptions, and values as well as patterns among them.
EXAMPLE For a project to design a handheld electronic device, the IDEO team asked people to show and describe the personal objects they handle and encounter every day.

From fairytales to spherecards: Towards a new research methodology for improving knowledge productivity

suzanne — Wed, 28 May 2008 07:52:29 +0200

Description

The Forum Qualitative Social research-journal, (one of the online open-access journals) has published our article! We, that means me and some of my research-practice-colleages, are very proud of this new and unusual publication in this noteworthy journal. It is a contribution to the special issue on performative social science in which we give a new perspective on the collaboration between research and practice. In our article we combine a solid foundation on the basis of literature with msn-conversations, pictures, lively examples of innovative research methods, and we develop a new model that presents a connection cycle. The model puts into words the stages of co-production that researchers and practitioners go through when collaborating with the aim to be knowledge productive. The model connects the learning cycles of both researchers and practitioners. There are six stages of co-production: 1) curiosity, 2) approach, 3) experience, 4) ideas, 5) knowledge creation, and 6) knowledge productivity. Enjoy reading the article!

Doornbos, A., van Rooij, M., Smit, M., & Verdonschot, S. G. M. (2008). From fairytales to spherecards: Towards a new research methodology for improving knowledge productivity. Forum Qualitative Social Research, 9(2), nr 48.

We had a great time in Lille!

suzanne — Mon, 26 May 2008 09:44:26 +0200

Lille is a beautiful city, and we had a great time at the conference! Here are some of my impressions:

It was great fun to present our papers at the conference in unconventional ways: We presented the three types of supermarkets we had found in our research, by reading three stories, each written from the perspective of the researcher visiting that supermarket. We invited people to choose for one of the three shops (family/student-house/firm) to work in. The family supermarket was the most popular shop (amongst women!).
We engaged the participants to get to know the design principles by asking them to fill out a small self-test. It is quite a challenge to work with a test like that with academics... They will usually never just fill out such an instrument, they would always reflect upon the items and the test itself as well... But there was no need to worry: we had a very interested audience and it was great fun to hear all their comments and ideas!
There was a nice session where we could 'meet the editors'. Two editors (Kenneth Bartlett of Advances in Developing Human Resources and Peter Kuchinke of HRD International) told us about their journals and the publishing process. My colleague and me are very enthusiastic to do a proposal for a special issue on knowledge productivity! It was so motivating to hear that these editors are open for all kinds of new plans and ideas. There are no restricting formats (except for quality of course!).
There were some good presentations! Not only content wise but also the way they were presented. One of the presenters, George Boak, had a nice way of presenting results: he divided the results-section of his presentation into 'the expected' and 'the unexpected'. I'm going to remember that one!
Maria Cseh gave her reflection on research that produces characteristics of 'innovative leaders', 'successful change agents' etc. These researches tend to produce endless lists of all kinds of traits that altogether remind you of a 'superhuman'. She said: "Isn't it strange.. none of my friends has all these characteristics, but somehow we can go along really well, how come?". It is very true I think that these traits will never in itself make someone succesful. It is always something that happens in the relation as well.

Shop assistants as innovators

suzanne — Mon, 19 May 2008 08:59:34 +0200

Description

Later this week my I will present a paper on shop assistants as innovators. I will do this together with my colleagues Tjip de Jong and Joseph Kessels at the HRD conference in Lille. In this paper we critically examine three assumptions on which activities in traditional change processes are commonly based, and we propose an alternative approach. This new approach has three starting points:

We consider the supermarket staff as knowledge workers
Knowledge workers have an important role in developing innovations during their work.
Instead of imposing an intended change as if it were completely new management should look for 'seeds' or successful examples.

We conducted action research in 17 supermarkets. That means that we worked in the shops, talked with the employees, sat in the canteen. One of the things that we found was that there are three types of supermarkets: one organised as a family; one organised as a student house, and one organised as a firm. Each of these types has different qualities. From the research it revealed that it is necessary to allow for diversity; that ownership and entrepreneurship contribute more to change than discipline and obedience; and that the specific role and capability of the manager seems to be crucial. Staff needs to develop competencies that match their own ability and interests in order to successfully innovate in the supermarket. In order to become innovative shop employees should be granted the authority to engage in knowledge work. In the supermarkets that we visited during the research, we found various interventions that could support the development of ownership and entrepreneurship of the supermarket staff. I've attached the paper to this entry.

Paper on the descriptive quality of the 11 design principles

suzanne — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 21:31:46 +0200

Description

Do the eleven design principles for knowledge productivity work as descriptive principles? That's what the paper I've written with my colleague Joseph Kessels is about. One of the conclusions is that the design principles do not help you in designing the process in your innovation project just like a map helps you to design a route from Amsterdam to Lille. We found that the design principles do not work as prescriptive rules that in a specific combination, applied to a predefined situation, will result in certain effects. However, the design principles each offer a new perspective on the innovation practice you are working on. This new perspective helps to get new ideas for interventions. After the design of these interventions it is mainly the facilitator who has an important role in making it a success. If he sees opportunities and is capable, then he can use the interventions to create breakthroughs in the innovation practice.

We've submitted the paper for the 9th HRD conference in Lille. The conference takes place 21-23 May. We'll be there!

Quiet Leadership

suzanne — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 19:55:57 +0100

Description

David Rock says in his book Quiet Leadership that leaders who want to improve their employee’s performance should improve their employees thinking instead of telling them what to do. Rock offers a six-step guide, the dialogues he offers as examples throughout the book make this approach very concrete. And they offer handles to start conversations like these yourself:

Step 1: think about thinking (Paul says to Sally: "I really don't know how to lift our sales right now". Sally then does what most managers do, and says: "It's important to get our sales moving so we hit our targets. I think you need to get more focused and put more time into this, the deadline is coming up fast". Here Sally is trying to help Paul to perform better by telling Paul what to do. In another approach where Paul would do more of the thinking, Sally could ask: "How can I best help you think this through?" and "When you say you're not sure about the project, which part of this do you want to discuss with me?" p. 37)
Here it is also important to focus on solutions instead of problems. In relation to this Rock introduces an interesting distinction: "Why versus Learning". He says that questions with the word 'why' in it usually do not lead to learning, the lead to reasons and justifications. Learning questions sound different. The why-question 'why did this happen?' has a learning-question equivalent: 'what do you want to achieve here?'.
Step 2: listen for potential. And that means that you concentrate on not listening for opportunities to sound intelligent, not listening to get information you want, and even not listening to see how you can help.
Step 3: speak with intent. That means: be succinct (express yourself compact and don’t waste words), be specific and be generous. In this chapter the author also shares his way of dealing with digital communications in his own company. They have several rules for sending emails: Use emails for exchanging information; if emails are longer than one screen, delete the email and email an agenda instead and use mail to schedule a phone call. Never send an email that could emotionally affect another person unless it’s pure positive feedback.
Step 4: dance toward insight
Step 5: CREATE New Thinking
Step 6: Follow up

What I like about the book is its starting point that we can’t think for others and that therefore good managers don’t offer solutions but rather help their people think. The dialogues he uses to illustrate this approach make it a very useful book.

Rock, D. (2006). Quiet leadership, six steps to transforming performance at work. New York: Harper Collins.