The Tyranny of the Explicit
Recently, Viv McWaters and Johnnie Moore had a chat with Roland Harwood about another of the Tyranny’s … that of the Explicit!
As recorder of this podcast, here’s Johnnie overview (and the shownotes can be found on his site) …
Yesterday, I recorded a conversation with Viv McWaters and Roland Harwood on the theme of The Tyranny of the Explicit. We explore how the need for certainty in an uncertain world, the over reliance on metrics and the demand that learning be made explicit, can often kill energy in meetings and get in the way of innovation.
Download Tyranny of Explicit here (22m, 9MB)
Viv also expanded on this podcast by writing this over here …
What happens when there’s a great conversation going, ideas are sparking off each other, people are energised and excited and then someone says, “we should capture this”? Or when creativity or innovation has to be expressed as a number, you know, ROI? Or when our ideas need to conform to someone else’s model? And how do we make decisions in these complex and demanding times? Who is taking responsibility (or not) for making decisions? And what about accreditation? What’s that all about?
These and other thoughts are explored in this Tyranny of the Explicit podcast featuring the ever articulate and often provocative Johnnie Moore, and Roland Harwood, Director of Open Innovation at NESTA. Oh, and I chime in too.
And if you’d like to explore more about this and other tyrannies that oppress us in our organisations and in our work, come and join our Crumbs! workshop in Sydney on May 13.
Cheers
Geoff
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by GeoffBrown3231, ShowMeTheChange. ShowMeTheChange said: Podcast – The Tyranny of the Explicit featuring @vivmcw @johnniemoore @rolandharwood here – http://bit.ly/b80JEN [...]
Guys,
You hit on important topics. But this sort of vague discussion gets us nowhere. Tyranny of bad meetings, tyranny of metrics or tyranny of social science? They are not the same thing and it confuses to imply otherwise. Some knowledge technologies require lessons to be made explicit if the benefits of that knowledge are to be widely enjoyed; in other cases that is not so. It’s not so complicated. Accreditation in some contexts is critical to help us negotiate a world where we cannot, alas, trust everybody. In other cases, as you point out, it is absurd.
Hasan
Thanks Hasan, You make some good points. It’s useful, I think to be able to distinguish when and where to use metrics, accreditation, and to be explicit. What we’re also noticing is a yearning for certainty where none is possible, or even helpful. That’s the tyranny of the explicit.
Cheers, Viv
Hi Hasan: Yes I think the discussion probably was a bit rambling or vague as you put it. And in 20 mins or so we were cramming a quart of frustrations into a pint pot.
I don’t own the language so feel free to draw different distinctions… We were generalising.