Wednesday, January 01, 2003

The objectives of all organizational or collaboration tools or systems appear to be much the same -- To provide me with:



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All of What Is Needed but Only What Is Needed

In an ideal world, I would always have available all of the tools and information I need to do my work with nothing extraneous to get in the way. When I can accomplish this in my thinking, it is called memory and focus.
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All organizing systems and tools try to accomplish this.



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Organized For Recall, Reference, and Understanding

If I have all the material, but it is in chaotic form (I don't know where anything is), or there is too much of it (I can't find anything in it), or it is poorly structured (I need to do too much reading to understand what I need), then getting the material together is no help.
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Whether I am doing searches on the internet, looking for documents in a file, or reading some material, I have the same problems. What I really want is exactly those pieces of information that directly address my current focus organized in such a way that I can understand all of it "at a glance".



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Levels of Detail

This is related to the way humans form and organize concepts. Since our active span of attention or focus is limited by our biology, we form concepts by classifying othere sets of concepts according to patterns and creating new concepts to allow us to think about more things at once.
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This is the source of the fundamental ideas of hierarchical organization and why it is so powerful.


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Meaning and Context Change Over Time

As we gather experience, our understanding of what we know changes. We evaluate the importance of material differently. We see different aspects of it as being important or relevant. We classify it differently. We find that some information applies to different areas and in different ways. We actually modify our understanding and sometimes our memory of events.
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We often don't know what is going to be relevant and so we save the wrong information and classify it is ways that later prove to be less than useful. This is one of the reasons that filing systems of all sorts are problematic -- we don't look for information later the way we thought we would when we first saved it.

The fact that we are not conscious of much of this meaning drift is both a weakness and a strength of human memory. It certainly makes both memory and communication more difficult.
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Electronic memory does not change in this way unless we take specific steps to update it. This is one of the problems that all indexing systems have. It is an ongoing problem with libraries and librarians.


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Information Gets Added

We discover more information over time. It changes our perception of older material. It really needs to be included at the correct places in our memor of the data rather than just be "tacked on".



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Relationships Evolve

As I work with information, I make more connections to other information. I say "this is similar to that," or "this implies something else". The relationships within my information change as my understanding of the infomration changes or as I establish new connections.



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When, Where, and How I Need It

If the information is in the wrong place or in the wrong form when I do get it together, it is not really available to me.

We develop all sorts of tools for various things -- pieces of paper for notes, PDAs for electronic versions, Post-It notes to annotate other documents, DayTimers to mainitain calendars, appointments, notes, etc., binders for storage, ways of piling up stuff or of filing stuff -- the list goes on and on.



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Mnemonic (Memory) Systems

Although the practice has declined, memory systems were used for millenia to support human memory. Numerous systems were used for "pegging" information. Stories and music were used to add context to information to aid memory.



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Tools to Work with It Once I Find It

One of the major purposes of locating and organizing information is to create some sort of work product. For a manager or decision maker this work product is often a presentation to persuade others. For a knowledge worker the work product is to make it easier for those who follow to grasp the information that has been assembled -- to save others the effort that the knowledge worker has just gone through.



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Ways to Save and Organize Information

In order to accomplish the results I desire, there has to be a way for me to make sure that it happens. If I could, I would skip this step. That is why I "ask the experts," because they have done all of this work, and I don't want to.
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So, this is a consequence or a secondary requirement of the fact that I want the benefits given above.

Given that I really don't want to do this in the first place, I then add a desired condition:



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As Painlessly as Possible Being inherently lazy (economical, efficient) all human beings will stop at the point where the perceived effort begins to seem more than the perceived benefit.
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When we attempt to convince people to adopt a new system, the task is always to convince them that the value to them outweighs the effort required of them.

It is always about them.

Whenever we accept or adopt an idea, a tool, or a process, and others do not, it is because we perceive the balance of effort and reward differently.