Learning Alliances

Very nice to see a photograph that I took a month ago doctored up in such a way as to make its meaning even clearer and more amusing.

I wonder whether we get better at multi-tasking? It certainly does have an adictive power. At the same time I find that focusing on one thing for a long time is very productive.

When you work across many time zones, you do time arithmetic in your head, counting on your fingers and very roughly if need be. Portugal is 8 hours ahead of Portland, etc. However, when it comes to publishing the time for a meeting that can involve people from all over the world, I always use http://www.timeanddate.com/ to check the time. Also, I always write invitations with UTC (or GMT/Zulu)-time, plus New York or San Francisco just to support the intuitive side. In fact, usually I go the extra mile and provide a link to a specific time for the meeting, so people can just click to see what time it will be for them.

How very nice that tonight is the night for changing daylight saving in such a synchronous fashion! Europe and the US fall back and Australia springs forward on the same date. Would that it were always so easy. When next spring comes around, it all happens on different dates, so your short-hand calculations don’t work for the last week in March / first week in April. And a year from now the US changes at a different time, so there will be a few “gotcha weeks” when planning meetings will be more difficult and your rules of thumb won’t work. How about a little global integration for such things?

Anyway, I find that adding and subtracting time zones is hard for me, but a good rule of thumb, supported by a widget like Foxclocks, to keep my intuitive mental clock as accurate as possible, seems to work pretty well. It’s still a lot of work. This quote from Jean Lave certainly applies very much to doing time-zone arithmetic: “Activity such as arithmetic problem solving does not take place in a vacuum, but rather, in a dialectical relationship with its setting.” Change the setting and problem-solving is likely to change, too.

We’re just wrapping up the September 2006 Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop and one of the things that seems to bend the minds of so many participants is actually working intimately with people in distant time zones. Part of the magic of the workshop is that all of a sudden the hassle of working across time zones is worth the effort. The October 12th, 2006 issue of The Economist has a survey of telecoms convergence that suggests that, “even if the traditional telephone is not quite dead yet, its business model certainly is: metered telephone calls whose cost depends on the length of the call and the distance covered are becoming an anachronism.” And yet time zones persist and they are not necessarily managed in a coordinated fashion (well, at least Indiana now conforms with the rest of the US, but what about coordination with the time in Mumbai or Moscow?). More and more of us have to deal with more and more time zone calculations, thanks in part to the falling cost of a phone call (and of synchronous interaction in general) but it’s not as easy as it should be.

Although the whole technology for communities project comes out of our practice with specific communities, during gestation and birthing it’s easy to start worrying about how our thinking may have gotten far removed from actual practice. It’s easy to wonder, “Maybe we’re just talking to each other… (Maybe we’re having too much fun.) Maybe it’s a bunch of words that don’t have traction or actually refer to anything that’s real.” Fortunately, to keep ourselves going we’ve gotten some feedback from a friend or two along the lines of “this is great stuff” and “makes sense, but you’ve got work to do bridging between deep theory and practice…” On another level, Nancy White is using some of the ideas about tensions that we’ve been talking about in her Australian speaking tour (see Melbourne Presentations where she reports on some interesting feedback).

I guess that’s the great thing about practice: it involves feedback. And feedback keeps a project like this going. (Now to find the time to work on Chapter 7!)

I used to use The Economist as a measure of how busy I was. Ever since I began reading it in 1989, I’ve always read it from front to back, one issue after another. I’ve chuckled at myself, comparing myself to the Joseph Conrad character who lived in the Congo and opened up an issue of The London Times every day from a bale of newspapers brought up the river by boat — very methodical, never peeking further down into the bale to find out what happened in the end. And I’ve always felt a bit guilty whenever I skip articles (or whole sections,
like finance and economics, which I have found less interesting than the rest of it). So last night I finished an issue and today I am two issues behind.

But now I have a new intuitive clock to measure how “behind” I am: blog reading — and writing! What fun! (Although it might be productive to turn a clock around to give myself positive strokes about how much I’ve read and how much I’ve learned from reading, in daily life I find it a useful spur to focus on what I want to read or accomplish that I haven’t yet got to.)

I’ve been thinking a lot about intuitive clocks — how we set them up for ourselves and how we use them, either individually or in communities. I think that communities of practice come to have intuitive clocks that keep them in synch. Here are some questions on the subject that I’ve been thinking about:

• During a conversation we all have a sense of time — that the conversation has more time to go or needs more time. How do we do that? As leaders, how do we read that clock precisely?
• If the sense of time is shared — there’s some kind of shared clock, somehow — the conversation seems more satisfying because we’re “in synch.” How can we make the clock more visible to more participants?
• Experienced community leaders develop a sense of pace — knowing when it’s time to push and when it’s not worth it. What clock are they using?
• In very organized communities of practice, such as Toastmasters, an elaborate set of progress measures tells members and leaders “what time it is.”

One thing that seems clear is that articulating an important question is a way of offering an intuitive clock against which a community’s conversations and activities can be measured. Of course, the person who offers the question needs to have a certain amount of status and respect for the question to be considered and it has to be articulated in a way that makes sense to the community. And a good question is a good clock only for people who speak the same language — so it may not make much sense to people outside a given community.

The view outside my window this week reminds me of the Klauder style of architecture at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where I worked as an intern after finishing a masters degree in architecture. The Prato Dialog is over and I’m now at the CIRN Conference, which is held within the electronic boundaries of Monash University. Among other things that means I can’t upload email. But, just like CU, it’s very beautiful here.

I’m sitting in the Portland Airport enjoying the calm between storms: all the packing and harried traversal of to-do lists is behind me. The Portland Airport has free wi-fi, which seems very civilized and changes waiting for a late departure into a chance to slow down and do some more electronic catching up. During the nextt two weeks I have some work in Utrecht, some time with friends in The Netherlands and then two events in Italy: our Prato Dialog which is actually in Florence and the CIRN Conference which is actually in Prato. These two events follow the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference (EPIC 2006) directly.

I’ve been thinking about Beth Kantor’s comments about blogging presentations at conferences and related (like, Capturing Collaborative Knowledge from Nonprofit Events: Your Event’s Tag ). There are several variants here:

• For the Prato Dialog, we’re trying to make part of the event happen in public on the event’s blog and inviting participants from the Foundations Workshop to observe and participate.
• For the EPIC conference, there was a lot of fascinating material, but I was too busy soaking it up to be able to take notes, much less publish them. I hope to write about the experience soon, including an interview with Brigitte Jordan.
• For the CIRN conference, I will try to report what I hear here. I’m thinking they’ll have wi-fi, just like home and so all the challenges of reporting will be social and intellectual, not logistical!

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