How Desktop Publishing Works

How Money Works

How to Use Word

How Cities Work

How Computers Work (9th Edition)

Although I don't get a credit or colophon on this title I did a number of spreads including the joystick spread, the CD-ROM spread and the USB spread.

More and more my core work appears to be moving in the direction of Change Management, whether this is in terms of learning and development, business development, project management, organization design, or software development. Previously I wrote a brief post titled "What is Change?" where I started to look at one aspect of change through the filter of Bateson's levels of learning. Of course there are many more aspects to this topic, and I'll look at a couple of those in this post: Types of change and motivation.

Knowledge Design is a set of methods, techniques and processes used to construct a useful, accessible system of knowledge resources within or across organizations. The vast, untapped majority of organizational knowledge is embedded in sub-conscious individual work habits, work relationship networks, real communication patterns, political structures, informal operating procedures, processes, document workflows and software code. Unearthing and making use of these resources to realize organizational learning requires a shift in thinking about what knowledge really is and use of design approaches to create new knowledge ecologies.

Debugging in Flash has come a long way in the last eight years, but the concepts I presented in this Element K Journals article still apply.

Debugging in Flash [PDF, 555 K]

In 2002 I wrote a blog post and developed a prototype Self-Organizing Map. The blog post was quoted by some Cal Tech graduate students in their thesis. Here I present the technique in a short article.

Using Self-Organizing Maps for Document Keyword Extraction [PDF, 39 K]

On my most recent assignment, I was involved in a conflict with a supplier that ultimately broke down into bickering and squabbling. A skilled facilitator was brought in to help us resolve the issue. He started by having us talk about our concerns:

• "I'm concerned that without a better level of support we won't be able to innovate."
• "The amount of time we spend on these back and forth issues is huge and is wildly inefficient."
• "If they do what they're proposing, I can't maintain the security of the system."
• "I don't even feel comfortable with this conversation- why can't they just get along and work together?" 

A key principle from Permaculture is "the problem is the solution," meaning that when we really understand the problem, the solution becomes clear. It also means that solutions are patterns that are not separate from the problem, but that the problem can be seen as a conflict of forces within a particular context. Thus the problem doesn't disappear, but is resolved by the solution. The approach to conflict resolution applied in this case was one of the most creative and positive I've experienced.

A few years ago, a friend and I sat in a Starbucks in Lafayette, CA talking about quality, Deming, systems thinking and the other usual topics. He recommended I start reading Meg Wheatley. When I got back to Rochester, I picked up Finding Our Way, but couldn't get into it. More recently this book jumped off the shelf while I was looking at other leadership books.

I had a lightbulb moment when I read that organizations are made up of living human beings, and therefore work like living systems rather than machine parts. Organizational Development needs to take into account the complexities and understandings of sciences like biology and ecology. This brought together two great strands of my career: my work life in training, learning and systems development are now connected to my passionate hobby work with sustainable living systems and Permaculture (see blog.greenerminds.com for my work on these topics).