Birkenkrahe’s Blog

{{ PERSONALDATA=found the user password to my own bloody blog only after digging deeply … to show me how long i haven’t written an update. motivation was there. participant of a leadership workshop i gave last week (when she saw my blog for the first time): “i can’t believe you’re telling the world that you’re ill!”  - there you go. and here’s more: i am back and better again! }}

twittered the evening away while taking care of my sick (yup) daughter @home. my student nadiz who works on web communities in her thesis connected me to a very lively crowd on twitter who are pushing “lernen durch lehren” (learning by teaching, or LdL), a refreshing approach that comes awfully close to what i’ve been thinking for a long time, and doing for a much shorter time (still new at this teaching thing) - mostly in close collaboration with my colleague axel benz also of the Berlin School of Economics.

LdL goes back to the work of jean-pol martin of the univ of eichstätt in germany. so far, i could not find english resources, but there is a very good site in german, as well as a new community of educators  (”Maschendraht“) that i joined, convened by Christian Spannagel and Melanie Gottschalk. Especially attractive: the improvised manner of getting a network started - by simply growing it, not by constructing an impermeable infrastructure (the way Germans do most other things). Me thinks “yes, we can”

own experiments: an article on my experiments with letting students develop their own ILIAS learning modules (since april 2008) is going to be finished soon. the experiences so far are are more and more encouraging - next week we are going to apply software development practice (short iteration cycles, user stories, customer requirements…) to the development of the learning module. a collaborator, jörn schultz aka juanito schwarz, has used sloodle with students from argentina on my rock in 2nd life - apparently with good results. since we seem to have got substantial funding, 2009 could well be a year with a lot more 2nd life activity and -teaching than 2008.

this has been quite the networking evening with a whopping additional 20 or so twitter friends. and i even managed to update my very own wikipedia pages (germ. / engl.) somehow, the encyclopedic entry lends an air of notoriety to oneself. it’s so … wiki. in fact, i had a wiki user page a while back which was rudely deleted by a wikipedia editor - she was completely right though and i learnt something new about wikipedia rules. now a new job: need a script to protect my internet wiki from spam (even though i tend to use the school’s internal ILIAS wiki now) - mediawiki software is quite spam-friendly, it seems.

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i would really like to write something about the new world disorder and the current hysteria related to the financial crisis, but i am not quite there yet. certainly, there is a field effect, which creates a particular constellation. it is rare that a field effect can be felt so clearly - except in the movies: remember the scene in the original “star wars” (usa, 1978) where an entire planet is annihilated - and obi wan kenobi feels the impact of this event. sheldrake did research on this, but i do not know whether it is conclusive.

in organisational development, this effect - be it scientifically proven or not - is already used. my latest article, “System constellations as a tool to support organisational learning and change processes” (to be published in the next issue of Int. J. of Learning and Change) explains why and how the constellation method (which possibly relies on a similar effect) can be used in companies.

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Some of you may not know “GNU” - it’s not the wildebeest, but one of those funny self-referential akronyms computer scientists are nerdishly famous for (”GNU is not Unix”) - stands for the free operating system distributed by the Free Software Foundation.

Now, famous British Comedian Stephen Fry has made a 5 min video explaining free software, which is both clever, interesting and funny, linking free software and its success to the ways of science and its successes. More Gnu pictures than you ever wanted to see …

Having spent more time than I care to remember (since the late 1980s) with GNU, I feel similarly to Mr Fry who endorses free software beautifully.

What else - oh yes - back to the grindstone after 3 lovely weeks including one week of splendid sailing. We’ve got 3 different funding proposals underway, which should be interesting, especially if we’d win them all!

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The NY Times “Books” portal published an article last week looking at how literacy is changed by the Internet. Fascinating read, here’s the first: Literacy Debate: R U Really Reading?

The article manages to convey some angst related to the decreasing ability to “linearly focus and pay attention long enough” which is required for reading (books, not web pages). There is also an interesting article by Nick Carr “Is Google making us stupid?” in the Atlantic Mag. Carr is a self-confessed web-head praises the ability of the web to save time when doing research or finding information, but he also wonders aloud how the machine might be changing us:

“As we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.”

Found the link on Arndt’s blog on integrated information architecture - he published a book on that topic about 2 yrs ago where he develops web sites architecture from the metaphor concept. Unfortunately there is no English version of this title, unlike Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville’s classic on IA. Rosenfeld is currently writing a new book on “Search Analytics” which I am interested in as the basis for a new course in 2009 on “collective intelligence” derived from searching (free) web data.

As I am signing off the net for 3 weeks (!) I feel myself drawn to paper-based books again … no, I am not going to turn Kindle. I will not browse the web. I will turn pages and soak up content the traditional way…bliss. Have a good summer yourself! Read! Write! Draw! Dance! Make music!

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Sadly, Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon Univ. computer science professor about whom I wrote several times in this blog, and who inspired a lot of people, died a few days ago. Here is his CMU obituary.

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A little Theory

I am thinking about responsibility and the self in modern management. (Background is an article which I promised to write this year based on client data, which is supposed to be part of a collection of articles dealing with the role of responsibility and management). An opportunity to put some thoughts into writing that I’ve had for the longest time - some 15 years or so … consider the following graph with four different scenarios related to two dimensions -

• the degree to which the self is dominated by internal/external events and expectations (vertical axis)
• the degree to which the expression of the self is dominated by (the availability of) technology

This coordinate system allows us to distinguish four different scenarios:

1. Self improvement: an extension of the self through education, acquiring skills. Emphasis is on improving the individual self - often in response to family and/or societal pressure (class). Low degree of self-determination. Drives educational industry. Responsibility is felt towards family or society.
2. Self congruence: congruence of inner and outer persona in the sense of authentic behavior and self. Emphasis is on self-reflection and self-interventions. Relationships with professional helpers (e.g. coaches). Responsibility is felt towards different aspects of oneself.
3. Self extension: extentsion of self facilitated by computer technology. Seemingly limitless availability, independence of time and place, split-off electronic identities both online (avatars) and offline (blog, newsgroup). Participation in communities of practice or interest (SIGs). Responsibility is felt towards a group.
4. Self reliance: ego-motivated virtualisation - the individual becomes the object of appliances. Resistance against state and industry interference is lowered, human relationships suffer and privacy is threatened. Little sense of responsibility.

I am not happy yet with the last quadrant (”self reliance”) yet - both the naming and the characterisation are pretty weak. In this scenario, the self disappears behind technology rather than being enhanced by it.

My research proposition: we are moving from a time of self improvement and congruence into one of self extension and reliance. This change is catalysed by new technologies. It also requires different coaching tools and practice than in the past. Both the scenario poles (improvement,congruence) and (extension,reliance) are opposites. Though the individual may oscillate between them.

Short Story

Consider myself: like most young people, I started out wanting to learn and improve myself - based mostly on the beliefs and dreams of my father, mother and those people we adopt in the course of a life (in school, from books etc.) as role models.

I took this path with so much vigour and conviction that, once it had brought me relative success, I experienced the gap between my “improved” persona and my original self as painful: the latter had, in some important respects, not caught up with the former! This is partly how I got into coaching and therapy (first for myself). I was now trying to become more congruent.

All the while, I loved the web and computers and new technologies. To some extent they were part of my self improvement programme, but for the larger part they were a conduit for the extension of myself to participate in groups anywhere in the world, build things, dream with others, and so on - and the use of these tools also improved my communication skills. I was extending my self beyond its original form (limited by my body). I find traces of this former self even today on the web - here is an example: my user page in 1995 which miraculously was never erased on the DESY server. It is as if I someone grows additional hands, uses them, and then leaves them laying around somewhere. Kind of a gruesome thought! (Question: how is this different from a diary? Answer: nobody interacts with your diary!)

At times, technology would not be a channel towards others but an excuse for me to completely withdraw from others - this happened when I was 15 and I had my first Texas Instruments home computer, and it happened in the early 90s when we were building the WWW, and it happens now, too! Today’s information technology has the potential to make us believe that we need nobody. That we are self-reliant. I then have to bring myself back on the path of communication (or others do that - family and friends).

Next steps

Wrap these scenarios in four different short stories, which I will present to my manager test group together with questions on how they see themselves relative to them. It will be hard not to describe the “self reliance” scenario as quite impoverished - though it is a realistic, possible choice for the self. See Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay on the topic. Isn’t this is also the Great American Virtue: need nobody? The scenarios will highlight which managerial (and personal) choices are open to people behaving accordingly. The fact that all managerial choices are personal choices might also be worth looking at.

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I am excited about finally turning my “forever construction site” into a proper CMS system. After looking at mambo/joomla!, and smaller cousins like miaCMS, skeletonz (my favourite at first b/c built with python) I finally settled on Drupal. This is a content management framework rather than a system - it allows for a much more modular, less file-tree-systemish kind of structure - clever!

Installation was a fair breeze thanks to an excellent learning video from lullabot. All worked pretty well - and now the site is offline until Carlye and I can work on some content. Or at least a better new name than “Birkenkrahe’s Web” …

There is a brillant online article comparing Drupal, Joomla! and Typo3, complete with an equally high-powered conversation in the comment thread. The more I read about the phenomenon of “forking” developer communities, which is especially in the Open Source area a frequent event, the more I think this could be an interesting area of modern sociological research. One day, perhaps … Just look at the first few minutes of this video only - bunch of Drupal developers musing:

And after looking at their (commercial, though the Drupal team gets a share) 1 hr video “Understanding Drupal“, I must give it to them: this is a really nice piece of work that I am dying to use in class next semester. Great short explanation how modern website development (should) work(s) and how it came all about. God, the way we built websites in … 1992

I also discovered a nice series of talks, Googletechtalks @ google in CA - including a talk by Angie Byron from Lullabot on Implementing Drupal, full of cameos.

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I am currently sitting at home recovering from a summer flu while trying to write a long (2 years!) overdue article on system constellations. It’s been both fun (to think and write) and a strain (to be ill and write). Guess this is how it is. Weaving organisational learning and systems theory strands into my theme (”overcoming organisational defensiveness routines with constellations”) is a challenge - ’cause I am not reading as much as I probably should be

All this, including my daughter feeling abandoned (my wife’s sick, too), made me think (again) about the purpose in life. Or perhaps I should say “my” purpose in life, since nobody else can give you one, you cannot buy it for any money. Just like love. It comes for free or it doesn’t at all. To keep it, requires work, but to stick to your purpose, requires work, too.

So it seemed magical that I am stepping, after … more than six months … on Randy Pausch and his incredible journey of courage again - I wrote about this some time ago: he is dying of pancreatic cancer. Randy has given a very noteworthy speech on time management at the Univ. of Virginia.

Near the beginning, he says “we need systemic solutions” - meaning: if you feel like you have an issue, you shouldn’t muck around. You need to change the pattern, not just the course. If you don’t want to take the time for that (Pausch: “… you have to make time”), enjoy his moving graduation address of May 18, 2008 below. Gotta show this to my students at the end of term before I possibly never see them again - given the rapid and fragmented course of study that they must (?) follow:

Thinking of following Pausch’s advice and send my daughter to Carnegie Mellon. Their teacher:student ratio is about 2,5. Ours is 10, and that’s not even bad - I think classes are typically quite small … go figure.

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A coaching colleague asked a question that’s been on my mind since a while:

One thing that worries us is the everrising number of people who call themselves “coach” it seems that every second manager, therapist or teacher uses this title without any or very little training or experience, this is influencing the market negativly with dumping prices, free sessions etc. what are your thought concerning this?

Of course, observing the market myself, and hearing about clients’ experiences, I know what he means. However, my own views on this issue are split. This is what I answered:

The Free-Market View: On one hand, I think it is important to business that new views, methods and ways can enter the coaching practice freely. As experience in numerous other disciplines has shown, a “guild”-like approach is not too well suited for that: the guild tends to protect the rights of its members (as well as their professionality of course), as such, it is an anti-free market community-tool.
While I appreciate this goal in principle, I have never belonged to such a guild, or when I did formally, I have always found myself on the outside of the inside crowd too easily. Note, however, that I believe that the main argument for a “free approach” to coaching as a profession (= anybody can call himself a coach and the market decides) is that I believe that it will benefit the changing needs of business most. This really depends on whether you think coaching is more of a therapeutic, or more of a pragmatic discipline. I adhere to the latter school. In my experience, every client finds the coach that he or she deserves

The Professional Standards View: On the other hand, I appreciate what you are saying - it is hard to create or maintain quality standards in a free space. Which regulations? Which standards? The European way, I suppose, is to seek the common denominator. I have come to appreciate the British way, which tends to be more free-market-oriented.
The attempts of the EU e.g. to regulate everything and everybody do scare me - even though I undoubtedly profit from them often without knowing it (when I eat, use public infrastructure, fix up my house etc.) I have a limited phantasy when it comes to thinking about possible coaching standards.
I have come to appreciate tools and toolmakers, and I prefer it when a craftsman, or a coach, knows his stuff and can apply the tools. But (unlike therapy), business people can possibly be the best judges of that - they know the bullshit from the jewels. After all, there’s enough bullshit around in business, and maneuvering your way through it has been the art of the executive since many years!

Once again, this is spoken in the spirit of the blog - my views are not scientifically supported. I maintain a healthy balance between these two views, ie. I would not want to decide once and for all, though I am rather leaning towards the “Free Market View” of executive coaching: when I hear of a lousy coach, I grit my teeth, and when I hear of a good ethical standard that helps me change my ways so that I can better support my clients, I smile.

I suppose one fundamental problem with a decision between these two views is that nobody really knows, in the merry, crazy world of the mind & body, what causes what and what ultimately benefits or harms.
In this context, anybody - even a plummer turned coach - can initiate a healing process or cause a “bad” executive to change his behavioural patterns. The other way around does not work - a coach turned plummer is less likely to be able to “fix” my pipes. But “working” and “not working” pipes are also much easier to distinguish than “good” and “bad” management. Or at least this is what I think.

Perhaps you can guess what my coaching feels like - it’s not therapy, and it’s not consulting either - rather process work, driven by the client, with me providing tools where I can, but often learning more than I could possible teach. Having said that, I am happy with it, and many of my clients seem to be content. Other coachees find different coaches!

Having said that, I should add, in case this was not clear, that I believe in good and thorough training, and that I do not believe in its absence of training. In particular, I dislike it when coaches cease to learn (professionally). This is one of the main perks for me - besides supervision, which is a must - to be able (and called upon) to forever improve my skills and training. not for its own sake (though learning in itself is fun) but ultimately because it benefits my clients. The clients, I think, can easily distinguish between a “one-trick-pony” coach and someone, who has got experience under, and tools on his belt.

Here is a link to a recent article (in German) on the topic, showing that managers’ demands on coaches are significantly higher than they used to be. Good news!

And here a video (”The art of coaching in business”) full of diverse views “everybody has got a coach in us” (J Nicklaus) - I don’t agree with all the views in this video, but it shows an interesting divergence of views - “educationally valuable”. Not necessarily the most professional view (”You must be completely optimistic”? hm.)

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We are going - the whole family - to listen to the Hilliard Ensemble in Berlin, May 6. Really looking forward to that. My daughter (7 yrs) said, when she heard this clip: “Oh, please, lemme go too, can I go too, pls, pls daddy”. So there. It’s a cultural spring for her: today, she attended her first Shakespeare play (school adaptation of “Comedy of Errors”). More Shakespeare than I have seen in a decade … when she came home, I told her that Shakespeare was a very important poet, and she said: “Well, which one was he today?” Naturally, she expected him to be on stage. Hey, I don’t know what this has got to do with digital communities either. You need to see that old man Shakespeare, it’s not a digital experience… (though there is a “digital shakespeare“, an e-mail spam poet).

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