From the April 2010 Scientific American Magazine

Problem Solved, LOL

Blog comments point to a new, faster approach in math
By Davide Castelvecchi
In the mid-20th century the encyclopedic works of French mathematician Nicolas Bourbaki traced every mathematical concept back to the subject’s foundations in the theory of sets—the stuff of Venn diagrams—and changed the face of his field. Like many of his notions, Bourbaki existed only in the abstract: he was the pseudonym for a tight-knit group of young Parisian researchers. The Internet-age version could be D.H.J. Polymath, another collective pseudonym who could define a new style of mathematics.

This is another example of an expertise network in action. Also, an excellent example of why collaboration matters. If this works for mathematicians, why not for others? Why is this just a ‘faster approach for math’?

I remember Steve talking about one thing that made the CCs a team – their willingness to share what they knew and learned each and every day. You see, downhill skiing was (and in someways today still is) viewed as an individual sport not a team sport. The sport was dominated by Europeans. The Swiss and Austrian skiers of that time saw each other, including the teammates from their own countries, as competition. The CCs changed the way ski teams operated. Using technology (two way radios) the skiers that went down the hill ahead of you would call back up the hill with reports of the specific conditions a teammate was going to face.

As Steve puts it in the biography show, it was like saying “here’s how to run the course better – here’s how to beat me.” This collaboration contributed to their success on the world stage and accelerated their climb towards the top of the competitive field. Collaboration allowed them to accelerate their learning as a team and to change their pace of learning; out-pacing the competition. This helped them climb quickly through the ranks of world class skiers.

In our organizations today, sharing knowledge like this could greatly enhance our performance; even when we are in similar competitive positions. What if we turned our solo practices into team like the CCs did? What if we were as selfish?

If you know of other books that should be on this list, I would love to hear from you.

/Joel

Reaching back in my memory, I remembered having a similar discussion about ‘virtual organizations‘ when I was doing a workshop for the Association for Creative Change in Organizational Renewal and Development (ACCORD) a number of years ago.  My observation at the time was that the participants attending the workshop came in two groups — small organizations wanting to understand how to use virtual organization structures to look big and big organizations wanting to understand how to use virtual organization frameworks to look small. An interesting contrast.

With this in mind, I thought about the same kind of contrast we see in expertise networking. Large organizations embrace some of the concepts associated with expertise networks and expertise management primarily from an internal point of view. But small / medium organizations (like ours) use expertise networks to expand their reach and to embrace expertise that may be external and to assemble capabilities on a project basis to help when needed. We use our expertise network to allow us to reach out to many different associates to assemble project teams for client work.

In sum, any organization can use these concepts effectively.

I have posted the slides on SlideShare (if you have not explored SlideShare, I would encourage you to do so. A great place to find and share slides on almost any topic. Some of the slides are shared with a Creative Commons license – as I have done with this slide deck. Have fun exploring!)

[By the way, it took several tries to get this right on SlideShare. Seems that in reformatting slides for their website, they change fonts and alignment. Thanks Blaise for proofreading those slides and pointing that out.]

First, and on the cover, was a story about Ted Kennedy’s recent encounter with cancer titled “The Story Behind Kennedy’s Surgery“. Given his grave situation, Kennedy did what most of us cannot do – he convened a panel of experts from across the US (May 30th, 2008) and sought input (expertise) from the best experts he could assemble who had access to the latest research and treatments (knowledge). Here is a real life social example and application of expertise networking and expertise location. It turns out (or so the article alleges) that this approach to problems is a standard approach for the powerful Kennedy and illustrative of how he approached similar problems in the past.

Second, “Climate Experts Tussle Over Details. Public Gets Whiplash“  the author writes: “Scientists see persistent disputes as the normal stuttering journey toward improved understanding of how the world works. But many fear that the herky-jerky trajectory is distracting the public from the undisputed basics and blocking change.“. What interested me about this story was the notion that experts don’t always agree and the challenge we have as individual consumers of the knowledge-products they produce is how best to discern who to trust and what positions to adopt or follow.

Third, “Doctor and Patient, Now at Odds” deals head on with issues of trust. In the article, they point out that: “About one in four patients feel that their physicians sometimes expose them to unnecessary risk, according to data from a Johns Hopkins study published this year in the journal Medicine. And two recent studies show that whether patients trust a doctor strongly influences whether they take their medication.“. The short story:- when we trust physicians, we are more likely to follow their advice. Trust and credibility are paramount to the determination of whether an expert’s advice will be adopted and followed.

In some ways, this snapshot on one day of major newspaper shows the ubiquitous role of experts and expertise networks in our everyday lives. I would be interested to receive stories and case studies from anyone out there that are illustrative of expertise-in-action.