For Friday, here’s “Seven Distinct Paths of Decision and Action” by Warren Kinston and Jimmy Algie from 1989. This paper describes the seven different approaches to decision-making, but note that it’s really about action.

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While sorting through my notes, I came upon the following, which was published by some self-important systems architects at a major financial institution. They were later all “made redundant”, poor sots. But perhaps their habit of writing without ever saying anything (see previous post) didn’t help their company succeed.

The Detail Recommendation List is a [...]

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It’s interesting to consider that most people will interpret my title as being the mishmash of too many languages spoken in IT. Actually, that’s not the point of the story: Babel was disrupted because they all spoke one language. It’s in part a warning about the futility of single, monolithic human solutions.
Hoebeke, in “Against [...]

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Lots of people talk about these things, but I found it interesting to find it in science fiction from the 1970s.

It was a revelation, a liberation. Physicists, mathematicians, astronomers, logicians, biologists, all were here at the University, and they came to him or he went to them, and they talked, and new worlds were born [...]

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ues

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One of the guys I interviewed for my CIP training class with PeopleFit was a local Christian Reformed pastor, whom I had hoped would give me an example of Stratum 3. Instead, he gave me what seemed clearly Stratum 5. An example:
ME: [REV], I’d love to hear what you think is the most critical issue [...]

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In a recent comment to a Jim Heskett post on Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge blog (”Neuro Economics: Science or Science Fiction?“), Dick Meza of Chapman University College said:

Emotional Intelligence in the past few years has had to suffer through similar scrutiny like “The Fadification of Emotional Intelligence” or “Business Susceptibility to Consulting Fads: [...]

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InformIT has an interesting article on recent research out of Wharton by Sigal Barsade and Lakshmi Ramarajan (”More than Job Demands or Personality, Lack of Organizational Respect Fuels Employee Burnout”
Dec 8, 2006).

Barsade and Ramarajan were especially interested in health care because many of the lower-level jobs in that industry tend to be difficult, and because [...]

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Reviewed: Wastell, David G. (1999). “Learning dysfunctons in information systems development: Overcoming the social defenses with transitional objects.” MIS Quarterly 23(4):581-600 [Dec 99].
(Just a thought: wouldn’t it be nice to simply have these references in XML and simply display them as needed? Another reason to move to Framemaker with DITA.)
Wastell, who was Senior Lecturer in [...]

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What happens when people in a meeting are different stratum, knowing each other well enough to have some experience of each other’s capacity? Who leads? If certain people talk, does the conversation die? Does the meeting have to be facillitated by the highest stratum person? Will it be regardless, at least effectively?
This got started by [...]

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