But the crash raises the disturbing possibility that aviation may well long be plagued by a subtler menace, one that ironically springs from the never-ending quest to make flying safer. Over the decades, airliners have been built with increasingly automated flight-control functions. These have the potential to remove a great deal of uncertainty and danger from aviation. But they also remove important information from the attention of the flight crew. While the airplane's avionics track crucial parameters such as location, speed, and heading, the human beings can pay attention to something else. But when trouble suddenly springs up and the computer decides that it can no longer copeon a dark night, perhaps, in turbulence, far from landthe humans might find themselves with a very incomplete notion of what's going on. They'll wonder: What instruments are reliable, and which can't be trusted? What's the most pressing threat? What's going on? Unfortunately, the vast majority of pilots will have little experience in finding the answers.

Without detracting from the seriousness of the Air France crash, this final paragraph highlights something that has bugged me for a while.

In many contexts, including flying aeroplanes, we try hard to automate, to simplify and to turn things into processes. Ultimately, though, people still need to pay attention. I think one of the critical purposes of knowledge management is to ensure that people are still able to pay attention to the right things. (Even when it cannot be predicted what the right things might be.)

EXTRA (Experts Telling Relevant Advice) is a knowledge management system that stores and retrieves digitally recorded stories. EXTRA has one intention -- and that is to get a story to a user that will help him or her make a decision just at the time that they are about to make a decision. We use storytelling as the vehicle to impart knowledge.

EXTRA could exist in any domain of knowledge, and in fact, all possible domains of knowledge might come into play, depending on the needs of the user. The system can capture corporate stories, historical stories, or any recorded material. The idea is simple and is based on observations about everyday human interaction. People talk about their problems and those with whom they are speaking offer solutions. Typically, people tell each other information through storytelling. These stories are derived from their own experiences. When someone tells a friend about an issue, they are often regaled with a story that starts with “something like that happened to me” or “you know what I did when I was faced with that situation?”

As I was catching up with Language Log, I read a fascinating post on AI, semantics and linguistics. Too much to take in at one sitting, but full of appended insights, including a link to this novel 'KM system'. I think it appears to be hypothetical, but I need to explore further.

If you are mainly using collaboration tools to support virtual conversations then travel reduction is likely the big benefit. To get the really big benefits in other areas you have to explicitly go there. You usually get what you ask for, at best.

This was the case with knowledge management. The only really successful KM efforts that I saw were ones that were aligned with business processes such as product development or customer service. In these aligned cases, I saw documented benefits such as reduced time to market, increase in successful cross selling and reductions in repeat calls on the same service issue.

Bill Ives, reporting on a recent Forrester report, puts his finger on the reasons businesses are seeing only limited benefits from their investment in collaboration tools. The mistake they have made (as many also made with KM) has been to see collaboration (or KM) as self-evidently and intrinsically good. In fact, they only have limited intrinisic value.

The real value (as John Hagel made clear in his talk at last month's Social Business Summit in London) comes from deployments of the right tools in the places they will make most impact. That requires those responsible (whether IT or KM professionals) to work closely with senior people in the business to identify the metrics that matter (cost, performance, etc.), where there is underperformance against those metrics, and what can be done to change turn that underperformance around.

That kind of strategic approach means we stop using a hammer on screws. It also means we might be able to buy a smaller hammer, because that is all the nails need.

To encourage worker productivity offices prohibit Internet use. Consequently, many employees delay Internet activity to the end of the workday. Recent work in social psychology, however, suggests that using willpower to delay gratification can negatively impact performance. We report data from an experiment where subjects in a Willpower Treatment are asked to resist the temptation to join others in watching a humorous video for 10 minutes. In relation to a baseline treatment that does not require will power, we show that resisting this temptation detrimentally impacts economic productivity on a subsequent task.

I can't decide what is the worst thing about this study. As far as I can tell from skimming through the full working paper, the researchers gave some people boring tasks to do and measured how difficult it was for them to control their willpower under specific conditions.

Is the work people do really so boring that it can be said to be equivalent to 'counting tasks'? If so, they probably deserve to have access to the internet in order to stretch their mental muscles.

Despite the lofty conclusions drawn from the study, no consideration is given to the fact that work is not a controlled environment. People bring in their own distractions (from stress balls to smartphones), and their colleagues provide more opportunities for distraction. The command and control assumptions in the study hark back to an older (and less wise) era.

Surely the real answer is to worry less about the distractions and concentrate on the reasons why someone would rather surf the net than do the work. Make the work more interesting, valuable, motivating, and people won't be distracted -- the work will win over the lure of Facebook and Twitter. If you can't do that, why is a human being doing that work? Maybe the managers and leaders are really the people who need to work harder.

The more you have of one, the less you have of the other.

That’s why propositions are supposed to be single-minded.

Because, that way, you get 100% of your media spend concentrated on the main message.

Whereas with a complicated proposition you dilute and fragment your message.

Less important points don’t add to the communication.

They detract from the most important point.

That’s what the single-minded proposition is all about.

That’s why we need people to make the effort to decide what is absolutely essential.

Not just people who think of what else they can include.

Welding a JCB to a Ferrari doesn’t make a machine that can dig roads at 200mph.

It makes something that can’t do either job properly.

Dave Trott has a unique style. I don't always agree with what he writes, but this post is worth noting. By using a short anecdote about feeding one of his sons (on request) strawberry ice cream and Twiglets, he shows how important it is to find, define and stick to a single point of focus.

Work out what you want to achieve, the best way to do that thing, and stick to it.

One of the comments on Dave's post suggests that the Swiss Army knife is a good counter-example. It isn't. In fact, the Swiss Army knife is an excellent example of why multi-purpose tools are worse at any given task than a tool designed for that task alone.

I have a beautiful, Sheffield-made, single-blade folding knife. It is the kind of thing that my grandfather would have used when working with his sheep. The blade is designed for a purpose, and it is perfectly balanced with the handle when opened.

I also have a simple Swiss Army knife, which has a couple of blades, bottle opener, reamer, screwdrivers, etc. The blades are shorter than my single-blade knife, and they are completely unbalanced with the handle.

That is only to say that the Swiss Army knife is a poor perfomer at all the tasks it can do. But its real purpose -- the thing that it is good at -- is convenience. If you have limited space available, and there may be times when you need a basic screwdriver or to cut some string, then a Swiss Army knife is exactly what you need. If you know you will have to trim sheeps' feet regularly and often, or you are cutting cloth for dress-making, you will need a tool designed for that task alone.

There are many business tools sold as Swiss Army knives. The question for those considering their purchase is whether they just want a convenient solution or whether they want a particular job done properly. If the latter is true, then there is almost certainly something that will do it better. Choose that instead.

The fact that people have multiple technologies, doesn't mean they use them the same way (cf. everyone is different). Years ago, I was shocked when I answered my office phone to discover that the caller was in an office no more than thirty feet away. But I thought nothing of sending email to the person in the cube next to me.

More recently, I was bemused the first time I received an instant message from a fellow worker two cubes down. (They didn't want to disturb the others by talking, since we work in such close proximity.)

How and when individuals use different technologies seems like an almost limitless set of permutations. Of the 11 people I currently work with:

• At least one answers email before IM
• One seems to respond to both equally (and instantaneously)
  
• Several answer either IMs or email, but with no clear pattern or preference
  
• One will respond to IMs more often than email, but will answer the IM via email.
• One never responds to IMs.

Is this good or bad use of the technology? It is neither. It is how individuals work. Part of "knowledge management" is managing your sources of knowledge, your technology, and your contacts. It is not enough to know how to use the technology; you must also know how it is used by your community.

I know this concept — the preeminence of personal choice — is an anathema to many KM practitioners. It is like trying to establish order without disturbing the chaos. How can you promote a company-wide program if each individual gets to choose for themselves?

Well, it is not quite that bad. It is not that each individual gets to decide for themselves. You can dictate, require, or recommend specific technologies and approaches. But you need to recognize that your audience will perform those actions in the way they think is best.

I agree that it is often be wiser to allow diversity (of systems use, in this case) to flourish, rather than trying to force people into one way of working.

I think KM has spent many years trying to predict what people will do, and force them into particular patterns of action, with only some success. It is worth reflecting on whether we would be better off giving people broad guidance, demonstrating good behaviours, and directing our real efforts to helping people make sense of what is already around them.