... a beginner at something

Emergent Eclipse and Probable Professions?

Kirstin asked, I hope everyone enjoyed the solar eclipse yesterday!

So, I've been musing on what the next popular fields of work will be. The most recent wave we have seen rise is that of the Computer Programmer. What field of work do you think or hope is next? And what will disappear, as did thousands of carriage-makers with the rise of the automobile?

Well, yes, I enjoyed the eclipse. The clouds broke just enough to let it shine through for a minute or so, allowing the lens to catch dramatic lighting, unfiltered. The purple tint was not in the original picture. Unretouched photo set on flickr.

The Culture Game

Daniel Mezick's new book for the agile manager due out in March. He was so kind to offer me a preview, from which I quote.

 

CHAPTER 01: INTRODUCTION

Everything is changing, and changing more rapidly than ever before. The rate of this change is increasing like never before.

In 1978, Chris Argyris & Donald Schön published Organizational Learning.

In 1990, Peter Senge published The Fifth Discipline.

In 2001, a tribe of pioneering people in software wrote The Agile Manifesto.

In 2008, Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright wrote Tribal Leadership.

Everyone is a beginner - at something

Together with fail faster, this sounds to me like a license to get shift done. I hope this invites experimentation. That is why I shifted the title of this blog a little.

From:  

Purple Pointr (selected to be just short and unique)
cope, connect, cocreate

Might as well blog

Have you been strolling and chatting a little too long on the digital market square? Did it feel like oversharing? As on twitter, facebook, or even one of the newest beta apps for curating, that invite to share and say why, such as scoop.it (thanks, Jan and Robin)  or for sharing beautiful bling better, such as pinterest (thanks, Seb and Jan). A rush of beginner's experience brought me back to reading blogs and blogging. Here is why.

Co... -mpeti, -opera, -llabora, -crea ...tion?? Collaboratory Learning!

This riff on learning together is (i) inspired by Michelle James: From Competition to Cocreation - and Back Sometimes. 

Image: Second Life: Eduisland II: ISTE Collaboratory & Idea Library: Tour: Right of Front Door by rosefirerising

 

What we know to be true

co mpeti tion		I win you lose
co opera tion		conditional love
co llabora tion		more than the sum of our parts
co crea tion		open space for creative emergence

Sarah Kay: Hiroshima

Seth Godin released her other famous poem, the first in her riveting TED talk about spoken word poetry, on the Domino Project as a beautiful hardcover book.

 

Slow down and experience

the second poem. (Video starts at 15:08, may start at 0 on portable devices.)

 

Why Work Products Matter More Than Procedures

Aiming to transparently learn from competence and passion.

 

Too often, well-meaning people think ...process improvement is about creating, training, and implementing detailed processes or procedures. If they just build the perfect procedure, using all the right words and having a perfect format, engineers and project managers will recognize the intrinsic value of the procedure, pick it up and use it, right? Most of us recognize this outcome is unlikely. But why?

Purpose, Principles, Process ... Progress

Thanks to @Nurturegirl for listening, inspiration and prodding to write this up.

Writing procedures for a preferably lean management system is like writing lean code, only it is not to instruct computers. Procedures instruct people, or better help them to follow a defined, proven process to achieve some of the purposes of the organization more efficiently. Of course, people can do so much more than computers, they can improve instructions and reject faulty ones, where a computer would just bug out.

 

Radiation risk: what about ground or food contamination?

Relative radiation risk... Recently, we get a lot of radiation values in our news streams and very few have comparison data to estimate: is this normal, elevated, severe or hazardous? Distrust and panic may result. Here, I aim to provide a bit of grounding.

Most simple Geiger counters, as used on this site and in many places, are good for a warning to stay indoors in case of black rain from nuclear fallout. Sensitive as they may be, they are hardly sensitive enough to quickly and reliably detect the small additional activity within the normal background radiation to isolate the contribution from a ground or food sample. It usually takes heavy shielding and good spectrometry to tell that story truthfully.