Legal Implications of Gathering Competitive Intelligence

From the world of competitive intelligence, comes this interesting bit
of speculation from the US. It seems that there are concerns
about the legal liability of a firm in relation to any competitive
intelligence activities they undertake. I've been doing some work on CI
lately - in particular looking at using narrative to extract CI held
internally. (One thing that this does is make you a little bit paranoid
about things like blogging - what competitive intelligence might I give
away by talking about competitive intelligence. I can see how major
intelligence agency stuff can become so nutty. )

I've always thought that he really tricky legal implication might be the
'human intelligence' - the stuff you gather from people in the field. To
me, this is where the real wealth is, and where you are going to get the
legally questionable stuff if you undertake work to gather, analyse,
distribute, and act on it. Such an activity carries the inherent risk
that a bit of info gets passed around that really shouldn't have. Of
course, this is nothing new, but the use of narrative techniques to
gather this kind of information means that it is more likely to be
recorded and retrievable - I mean, that's the whole idea. And a
conversation that has been transcribed and stored on a hard drive is
much harder to deny any knowledge of (makes me wish that the briefings
to Howard Government ministers on SIEV-4, children overboard, and AWB to
name a few where undertaken using a narrative approach).

Previously though, I've had less concern around the stuff that's
publicly available because it's publicly available. A lot of the
information isn't overly useful on its own, and requires a lot of
gathering and analysis activity before it becomes intelligence. The
implication now is that the act of knowingly gathering this information
for purposes which are very nearly the antithesis of what it was
provided for - instead of selling a service, the information is being
used to guide a competitor on how to beat them to a sale - could be
illegal under current US laws. That makes a trick area of work just that
little bit trickier.

Blogging by email isn't as easy as it sounds

Here I am, happily assuming a bunch of recent posts had gone up onto my blog, and when I went in to check today - nada. Looks like I haven't done anything in nearly 2 months. This isn't true - I've only done almost nothing in the past 2 months.

Anyway, I'm going through and putting the stuff up, and back-dating everything to when I wrote the post, because I have no problem with editing my personal history. I've become quite adept at navigating the tricky, somewhat contrdictory path of marrying the differences between retrospective coherence and retrospective cohesion when it comes to my own history. It only has to make sense to me. The Gods help anyone who has to take me through a complex narrative exercise - I have enough trouble being consistent with what I though happened 5 minutes ago.

Ultimate Anecdote Circles

Shawn Callahan of Anecdote has posted an updated version of their “Ultimate Guide to Anecdote Circles”. It’s a great resource for those wanting to facilitate anecdote circle sessions. Very easy to read, and designed for people like me whose eyes tend to glaze over on any business document by about page 2 – just following the skim reading path (First the big print title, then the slightly smaller print orange, then the even smaller print black, and finally stories in very tiny print scattered throughout). If only more textbooks were written that way!

Why Dave Snowden Doesn't Know Who Shot JFK

Yesterday I spoke about the presentation on SharePoint implementation at the recent NSW KM Roundtable. Today I want to talk briefly about the second presentation, which was on storytelling.

Well, it was billed as being about storytelling, because that how the audience thought of it, I suspect. It was actually about narrative and how to use it to supplement existing business reporting. So of course, when we're talking about narrative & business in Australia, who better to have come in than Mark Schenk from Anecdote.

Mark kicked off with a new story (or at least, one I haven't heard before), which I enjoyed. I won't tell it - It'll probably turn up on the Anecdote site sooner or later, so keep an eye out for a new "bathroom" story. Then he presented the framework for narrative, the old Cynefin, and used this to build on how to use narrative in business. All good interesting, and well worth listening to.

Anyway, I was looking at the Cynefin framework, and in particular the complex domain. Its been often (and better) explained in other places and forums, but basically, a complex problem is one in which you can only really make sense of what happened after it happened. Mark mentioned the Canberra bushfires as an example of this. Before the fire, we Canbrites (as I was at the time, and possibly still am given my despair over the performance of the Brumbies this year) blithely went on with life, giving little regard to the obvious danger we were in. The danger, however, was only so glaringly obvious in retrospect. After the fires, we could see all the factors that made it clear that 400 hundred homes would be destroyed on that fateful Saturday. This phenomenon of only being able to make sense of something after the fact has its own wonderful term (several, actually, but I like this one): retrospective coherence. Looking at it though, I began to wonder, "Isn't that how you get conspiracy theories?". This wonderful ability of humans to see patterns in the events that occurr around us also gives rise to the issue of seeing patterns where there are none:

The World Trade Centre attacks were funded by the US Government,

there had to be a second shooter behind the grassy knoll,

global warning has already doomed all life on earth and governments are covering it up, etc.

These are all acts of retrospective coherence - albeit flavoured with a little bit of cognitive bias, I would guess - but I wonder how you get around this when you are looking at complex problems.

I didn't have the chance to quiz Mark on this, as I didn't want to derail the line of questioning into something that was probably going to be more advanced than the audience was interested in. I'm curious though - where does understanding a complex problem end, and building a conspiracy theory begin? And how do you prevent one from becoming the other? Do you sometimes want to ensure that one does become the other?

Synchronicity

Mild synchronicity events this week. I went to a breakfast seminar hosted by Anecdote which looked at the use of Narrative Techniques for Knowledge Retention. Quite an interesting seminar, with provided some new concepts for me to investigate (Most Significant Change) and some new books to find (A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink). I'd like to say new books to read, but I suspect it will be skim, given my current backlog of 30 or 40 books (plus 7 or 8 games, plus 4 or 5 TV series, and God knows how many movies). Courtesy of an interview with Arthur Shelly done for the presentation, it provided a great example of the perils of lost knowledge, and the importance of meta-metadata (recording why something important is being done, not just what the important thing is and how to do it).

So it was that with narrative on the brain, I ended up watching a movie called Stranger Than Fiction, which I had wanted to catch while it was playing at the movies, but missed as I was moving house at the time. Now, if you want to see a movie about narrative, you could do a lot worse. The central premise is that a fairly ordinary guy starts to hear a woman's voice narrating his life, and - through a single sentence - changes the course of it. Not the belly-laugh comedy the trailers sell it as, but a quite interesting and entertaining little gem.

It also examines the nature of "story" - that almost all stories are either comedy or tragedy, depending on the outlook of the protagonist, and that powerful stories aren't always the best stories, and vice versa. It also manages to examine a story from the perspective of the writer, the reader AND the main character - simultaneously!

Then, to top it all of, I ended up doing a bit of re-research to remind myself of the (in)significance of the MacGuffin - courtesy of the almost archetypal example of one in Ronin - which I also watched by pure chance over the weekend.

Learning, always Learning

I was fortunate to have a short demonstration of a quality induction while I ate my lunch today. The manager of a Michel's Patisserie (Australian coffee and cake franchise) undertook a job interview next to me while I was sitting in a food court. She was interviewing a young OS student who was looking for some part-time work to help fund a few weeks of holidays. Over the course of the interview, the manager really caught my attention at 2 points:

1. She described the process of trialling the new employee. They would ask the girl to staff the pies and pastries counter for 2 hours, then would sit her down, and share the story of their experiences. First the prospective employee would describe her story of how the 2 hours went, including how she felt about her performance, the customers, and the other staff. Then the manager would tell her story of how she saw the prospective employees performance.
2. The manager spent the majority of the interview talking about what the new employee would need to learn - that the job required a great deal of memorisation, and how employees were stepped through the process of learning about the products on offer.

It really struck me that for what most (including myself, as a former retail employee) would see as a fairly basic, routine job, a lot of emphasis was placed on the individual and their experience. Perhaps it was just the aftershocks of Etienne Wegner's presentation at KM Australia, but this emphasis on the journey - both for the employee and the employer - resonated with me. It made me think of how badly "good" employers and organisations sell their roles as "journeys" - an experience that starts with who you are now and ends with a different you in some way - and just what a useful method of conveying shared purpose and direction this is for any person at any level. Metaphorically, it sure beats the broken down car, 5 tonnes of cargo, and 10-year old road map with a destination that's a 500m circle with the words "get us here" scribbled in over the street name.