Will communication networks eventually replace the social ones when will come the time to gather informal pieces of knowledge?

Frederick Giasson

Communication networks are spreading everywhere. The new trend is to include blogs and Wikis in these networks. The goal is to manage, archive and search conversations that two people or a group of peoples are exchanging.

However, the question is: will these communication networks, mainly supported by Internet technologies, eventually replace the social (see face-to-face) ones when will come the time to gather informal pieces of knowledge?

We will get the perspective of a project manager to see if it could. First of all, you need to have in mind that replacing it or not, these new communications networks emerging from everywhere help us archiving things that were not thinkable decades ago.

As a project manager, you will have to deal with working teams, clients, suppliers, etc. You will have an overview of the project to develop. You will be helped in your task by many sources of knowledge like, marketing requirements documents, vision/scope documents, specifications documents, or the knowledge that came from expert consultants, your workers, or anything else present in your working environment. Communication and social networks are just two other sources of knowledge in that environment.

The power of a project manager is that he is able to talk to every body that works on a project. He can talk with them about the things they are currently working on, or about more personal problems that will force them to go out of the city for a week. One of the non written tasks of this manager is to take into account all these parcels of knowledge that could help him managing his project. This sort of knowledge is gathered via informal discussions with people. With that knowledge, he will be able to re-plan his schedule to take into account that one of his employee is in trouble and that he will probably need take a week off. Without these informal discussions, it would be much harder to plan all these little irritants that could and will afflict the project.

What if these managers stops to walk around between the working teams members and only communicated with them via the latest communication tool that help him to have all the information he wants at the finger tip? Will this system will be able to give him that sort of informal pieces of knowledge essential for the good execution of the project? This is the question.

Personally I think that it could be done technically, but not practically. The problem would be that every employee would need to take time, many times, to write everything that happens in his job and in his personal live. It is impossible to archive. The employee will only talk about these essential informal pieces of knowledge if he entrust the person he is talking to, in our case, the project manager.

Have you another vision of the problem that could eventually appear? I mean, many companies develop such systems. If they develop them, they will also sell them. If they sell them, it is sure that someone will buy them (considering that some sellers are able to sell fridges to Eskimos). Do you think that these companies could expect some problems if they rely too heavily on these systems instead of the more conventional human relations?

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Taking the time to learn from the outputs of your GTD systems

Frederick Giasson

You have developed, used and digest many GTD systems over years. These systems produced a bunch of outputs that you put in the bin, or classified somewhere in a file cabinet. However, what about learning of these outputs? I mean, coming back at them and see what goes well and what goes wrong. Bellow is a little text wrote by Dale Carnegie that reported the sayings of the Wall Street bank’s president in years 1930. I think it worth reading and thinking about it.

“For years I have kept an engagement book showing all the appointments I have during the day. My family never makes any plans for me on Saturday night, for the family knows that I devote a part of each Saturday evening to illuminating process of self-examination and review and appraisal. After dinner I of by myself, open my engagement book, and think over all the interviews, discussions, and meetings that have taken place during the week. I ask myself:

“’What mistakes did I make that time?’
“’What did I do that was right – and in what way could I have improved my performance?’
“’What lessons can I learn from that experience?’
“’I often find that this weekly review makes me very unhappy. I am frequently astonished at my own blunders. Of courses, as the years have gone by, these blunders have become less frequent. Sometimes now I am inclined to pat myself on the back a little after one of these sessions. This system of self-analyses, self-education, continued year after yea, had done more for me than any other one think I have ever attempted.’
“It has helped me improve my ability to make decisions – and it has aided me enormously in all my contacts with people. I cannot recommend it too highly.”

You need to have in mind that that president had little formal schooling and was one of the most important financiers in America in that time.

Note: this excerpt come from the book “How to Win Friends and Influence people” by Dale Carnegie. I will write back on that really interesting work in the next days.

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