Communication and Context

What about it? We all know that communication is important and most of us also know that the context of where or what the communication is about is just as important.

Consider some of the pictures i took while in China. They show a will to communicate with you as an english speaker, but they do not always make sense. Anyway here are a few of them:


The next one is harder to understand the meaning of.. Mingtien means tomorrow, so maybe they mean tomorrows language café? or language coffee?




Think about the context when you communicate with someone. They might not understand what you are trying to communicate even though they understand the language.

The value of search engines

Before we were able to find solutions to our technical problems by asking people at work or to read a manual. In the last 15 years the search engines have taken over this responsibility. I'm a huge fan of engines like google.com to help me when I'm stuck on a technical problem.

Often that is my first respons when people ask me about a technical problem.
"Have you tried to google it?".

This brings me to another side of the search engines. It can really be hard to find the answer you are looking for if you do not know how to make your search good enough.

Take this problem I just had on my lovely Dell XPS m1330. Dell have been really stupid and added their own software thats connected with one of the buttons on the keyboard. So for me that have Ubunbtu Linux installed instead of the prepackaged windows, it creates a huge problem. When I press the button, the laptop cannot start the operating system again.

There is virtually no documentation of how the Dell Media Direct program works or even how it is installed. Because when pressing a "special" button on the keyboard the laptop tries to start Dell Media Direct. This crashes my normal ubuntu install and destroys what is called a MBR. This MBR is what enables me to actually start any operating system on a pc.

After reading alot of forumposts and various blogs I finally find one that helps me out.

If I accidentally hit the MD key, my partitions gets fudged and I have to repair them manually.
Response:
Have you tried pressing the button a second time? I notice if I press it it ruins my partitions as well, but if I press it again everything is perfect again... Not sure what it actually does...

This solves my problem and voilá I can boot into ubuntu linux again.

To find this forumpost, I had to tweak my search and narrow down the findings to an amount that I could actually be able to read. It took me about one hour to find this little piece of information.

But at the same time as doing this I read a lot of other interesting things too. Maybe the search engines not only helps us with the problem at hand, but helps us to know more in general? It reminds be of the work we are doing in the company on semantic web and the use of this technology to find information.
I wish there was an easier way to tell the search engine what I am looking for.

Code review: increased quality and knowledge sharing

In my earlier post "Make it better" I said we were starting with a more TDD similar approach. We have tried this now for more than a month. We have tried writing tests first, but this seem to be a futile attempt. Arguments used are "I tried, but it took too much time to make the test" and "It is too difficult to make the test and it was only a small change in the code". To these arguments I can say that they are true in our case. Much of our legacy businesslogic has been placed in beans which in our case are difficult to write tests for. Hopefully we will be able to make more tests totally new businesslogic rather than trying to make it for the old code.

This said, I would say that we have in this process learned a lot about our own code and its limitations. Placing the business logic in beans is not good for the ability to test the code. We will try not to blindly do as the one before us did. I figured a way to try to compensate for the lack of writing the tests and introduced mandatory code review before any code can be checked in to the subversion repository. This forces the developer to argument and discuss the code before it become a part of the solution. It gives the developer another perspective and thus enable both the sharing of knowledge and an increase of quality. As in TDD the idea is that one would think differently before coding because we write the test first, we in this case do the code review after the coding but still enable the developer to get comments on both the code and its quality.

At the last xp & agile meetup in oslo we had Robert C. Martin (uncle Bob) present his thoughts on craftmanship and ethics where he mentioned that if we checked in code that was just a little bit cleaner and better than when we checked out we would eventually increase the quality of the code. The code review is a good incentive for this practice.

To quote uncle Bob: "Never check in bad code!"

Presentation skills and feedback

I've had a few presentations at work, but often I feel that they could be more focused and clear. Recently I also got feedback that I was saying some words as "Hmm. What is it I'm going to say..." or similar. And today I came across the stop, start, continue technique over at Dwayne Melancons blog.

People should be better to give feedback to people that holds presentations. In this way one might be given a chance to improve instead of making the same mistakes again and again. This is in a sense knowledge sharing. The have a different perspective on the whole presentation that you have. Things you find easy can be difficult for others, but it is often difficult to get people to actively participate in the presentation. Lets hope that when I next time pull out my paper with the stop, start, continue notes on it, people will laugh and point out when I do the mistakes. Hopefully I will then learn more and even get the audience to participate in -at least- some way

Team Learning

The previous post trigged a wish to share some excerpts from my master thesis with you!

In many organisations today, people are organised in groups to perform specific task. These groups are often called teams. The team can contain knowledge workers that acquire, generate and share knowledge. They work and learn together. Senge (1992) calls this team learning. Flood (1999) claims that often the aim of team learning is to achieve alignment in people’s thoughts and energies. This brings us back to the notion of mental models and that the mentioned alignment in thought is a shared mental model, or at least a similar mental model with common elements or schemata. If we have people that work with the same tasks within a similar context it could be that they have in some sense similar mental models regarding the task, thus a common understanding (Senge, 1992). Davenport and Prusak (1998) mention that without a common understanding of terms, knowledge sharing might not occur. Sometimes multiple and contradictory meanings for fundamental terms exists in many organisations and create barriers to consolidate information and knowledge. In support of this, Senge (1992) claims that discussion and dialogue are the most important practises in a team. He argues that discussion and dialogue are necessary counterparts in a quest for consensus. This consensus can be seen as alignment in the mental models between the knowledge workers.

Davenport and Prusak (1998) notes that the traditional management attitude is “Stop talking and get to work!”, while the advice to a knowledge worker should be “Start talking and get to work!”. This communication and alignment in energy and thought can result in what some organisations call best practices, where people learn from each-others’ success. The sharing does not only occur within the group, but it also influences other groups in the organisation, meaning the groups are not disclosed to influence from the outside. Team learning and knowledge sharing within a team enables us to act with today’s knowledge instead.

Another perspective posed along the same lines is to understand tacit knowledge sharing in a team, as people “following rules by being members of communities, with the disposition to reciprocally adjust our use of signs to that of the rest of the community” (Gerrans, 2005). This means that a community has its own rules and we act accordingly.

Interesting Answers

I have been quite busy at work the last week, but I did ask some questions..

And it seems that most questions can be asked without starting any problems for yourself or put you in a bad position. At least that was my experience during last week at work. The question opens for a dialog and create social relations between the people involved. I asked the questions because I where interested in the answers. This dialog has showed me perspectives from another part of the organisation and it has even influenced that part of the organisation to think a little different (at least it feels that way). A difference in perspective is natural, but with dialog we are able to direct the perspectives and the mental model of both parts involved towards a common one or something you can call an agreement. Or at the very least an understanding of each others viewpoints.

It reminds me of a motto I have: "If you do not tell the person what you think is wrong, how can that person do anything about it?" This meaning that if a person is not aware of his "wrong" behaviour, it will stay that way for a long time. If we have a dialog and talk about the issue we might both gain an understanding of why this behaviour is wrong. It might also be that it is right for him and wrong for you, but from knowing his perspective you can understand his actions.

I will end the post with a few words from Davenport and Prusak (1998), "Start talking and get to work!" (instead of the traditional "Stop talking and get to work!")

Share the information

I have to mention a situation I experienced the other day when riding the train for work, like I do every day.

I am waiting for a train which is announced to be "delayed" ,but decide to move to another platform and try to catch another train. This train also stops at my destination and is scheduled to depart in five minutes. Train arrives and I get in, but when I had been sitting in this train for about ten minutes there is an announcement on the radio, telling the passengers that the train is actually waiting for the train-employee that actually "drives" the train. I thought my decision to change train was still a good one since my first train was probably coming in very late. Minutes came and went.. Another train passed the platform, this third train also stops at my destination, but I then thought that I would not make that one. And I was not about to run out of the train again to catch the other train.

A while after the third train left the platform we where still waiting for our chauffeur and the first train arrived the station. I did not want to move back to that platform either, afraid of loosing both trains while running between the platforms. Ok.. That train leaves as well! Now I was actually getting irritated and wanted more information. The train started moving in about 10 minutes after this. I had spent more than 30 minutes waiting. When the conductor comes for the tickets I ask why we where so late. She said the train driver had been on the first train I was waiting for.. Just this tiny and crucial piece of information could have changed my choices during my wait. (if they had this information earlier themselves of course)

I can just imagine when one is in business situations and that little piece of information is not available to you. All the difference it could make. Projects has to reinvent the wheel because the information is not found or provided to them. You waste both time and motivation on doing tasks that can be done faster and probably easier if you had the right information.

Bottom line is: Share the information!