THE WELCH COMPANY
440 Davis Court #1602
San Francisco, CA 94111-2496
415 781 5700
Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2002 11:55:37 -0700
03 00050 61 02082302
Mr. John Maloney
President
kmcluster@collaboratory.com
Knowledge Management Consortium, Inc.
San Francisco Chapter
Street address
San Francisco, CA 94111
..
Subject:
Groove Seminar Invitation and Work Product Support
Linking Why Does Every Call Meeting Chance
Dear John,
You make a powerful point in your letter today about the importance of
multiple ways for people to interact with the world. I agree with
that.
..
It is also true that I am focusing on a new way of doing things which
you correctly note involves POIMS and SDS. These are arcane terms, as
you point out, but nor more so than KM, Groove, and many others which
you seem to embrace with equanimity. Moreover
SDS and POIMS derive from experience using customary management methods
you champion. As you can see, the record on July 23, 2000 shows reliance over
many years on all of the methods you are using, and this experience led to a
new way of working, not to replace customary ways to provide intelligence
support that makes people effective.
..
As shown in another letter earlier today, your
work as critical for building bridges to a better future that improves
customary ways. An example of the
need for a bridge,
is the record on January 7, 1997.
.. As you can see from that experience, it shows work performed minute by
minute, hour by hour using the kind of direct communication you cite in your
letter today as the driving force of daily work in the real world. Certainly
the people who interacted, like you, were not burdened by POIMS and SDS, nor by
a lot of annoying references. Yet they were helped because someone took the
trouble to line up the tasks they were doing with objectives, requirements and
commitments. If you look further in the record on January 7, 1997 you can see
the president of a company, who held your view that SDS is harmful, eventually
changed his mind upon the accumulation of experience showing that
accurate memory saves time and money.
.. Notice as well, experience a few days later on January 10, 1997 shows
that a entire group of people who relied on customary work practices, came to
rely on SDS for adding value to daily work, after gaining exposure over a
period of time. Your example today of
"hall conversation"
lines up pretty well with a
discussion that began in an elevator. As you can see, SDS
adds
addressability
that empowers people to invest information from all forms of daily work as
critical intellectual capital to grow knowledge and ideas for getting things
done, as explained in POIMS.
..
So, while it is true that there are lot of methods for interacting
with people, SDS was designed to augment traditional methods in ways
that enable people to improve performance. Experience has shown that
using SDS saves time and money and failing to do so on complex
endeavors causes mistakes, loss, conflict, crisis and calamity.
Since, as you can see, I have a lot of experience using customary
ways, I wouldn't waste time with SDS, if there were not a long record
showing it adds value.
..
This does not require people to give up customary ways. When literacy
emerged about 700 BC, people did not abandon orality. Still today the
methods you use and advocate are powerful methods for building
community through relationships and for getting things done. Your
methods will remain useful and indeed the dominate methodologies,
because they are grounded in
human biology,
as set out in POIMS.
.. As a leader in the KM movement, I only hope that you will join in the
effort to strengthen obvious weaknesses in customary methods, as technology
continues to compress time and distance, creating a new world order that is
different from the conditions that evolved our biological gifts. Leaving room
for advance, perhaps there will come a time that SDS can be seen as
contributing to the long march of civilization, rather than an annoying
hindrance that constantly reminds of alignment between what we are doing and
saying today, and what we set out to do, agreed to do and are required to do
for sake of community.
..
Let's keep building bridges for alliance and progress.