Category Archives: Expertise

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Researchers: For Your Eyes Only

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Experts do research. Experts generate research papers. Those papers are referenced by other researchers. And so on. Sometimes you can get lost in the thick and sticky wickets of peer-reviewed journals searching for an arcane piece of information.

For those who live in the world of research and journal articles, you put forth painstaking and time-consuming care in finding the right papers with the latest and most relevant material to support your case. Paul Allen, the lesser-known Microsoft founder, recently put some of his considerable resources toward helping researchers enjoy a better AI-enhanced search engine. Launched in 2015, Semantic  Scholar was originally populated with 3 million computer science papers. Today, it boasts more than 40 million papers, many in the biomedical and environmental fields as well.

While Semantic Scholar has been available for two years, it caught my attention when I was doing some research for a biopharmaceutical company a few weeks ago. The Economist October 19, 2017 edition included a story that mentioned an updated version had just been launched that added 26 million biomedical research papers to its existing 12 million. I jumped on the site to test it out. What makes Semantic Scholar special, and different from other search engines like Google Scholar, is that it uses AI to search and categorize articles relevant to your specific needs rather than relying simply on rankings or citations in other papers based on your search terms.

I was looking for papers that combined two topics not commonly addressed in the same article – on the business and the medicine of a particular disease. The search netted me some good hits that met those unique criteria and sent me to the same reliable publication sources I would normally search. Overall, I had a good experience and recommend it.

From The Economist description:

“Like most AI systems, the new Semantic Scholar relies on a neural network – a computer architecture inspired by the way real neurons connect to each other. Neural networks are able to learn tasks by trial-and-error. Miss [Marie] Hagman’s team [the project’s leader] wished to bend their network to the task of recognising [sic] scientific phrases and their contexts…”

“To do this Ms Hagman asked four medical researchers to annotate ten entire research papers and 67 isolated abstracts, which were to serve as fodder for the training process. The annotators read the papers and abstracts, and highlighted within them a total of about 7,000 medical ‘topics’ (particular diseases, particular genes, particular proteins and so on). Between these topics they identified some 2,000 pairwise relationships, such as a particular gene encoding a particular protein, or being associated with a particular disease.

“That done, they fed the results into the neural network, which, based on the context of a topic (ie, the words surrounding it in the various places it appears) and the pairwise relationships identified by the researchers, was able to find new topics and relationships to add to the hoard. The team then improved the network’s performance by presenting it with previously unseen papers to annotate, and correcting its suggestions until it was able, without help, to annotate such papers correctly. It can now identify 368,071 topics (mentioned a total of 236,979,862 times) and 6,756,863 relationships in the 38m papers available to it.

“The upshot is that both scholars and laymen can pull out clutches of papers on particular topics from the database, with a reasonable presumption that those papers are the ones most pertinent to their needs.”

In my experience, that claim is true. For those whose job includes research, this tool is well worth investigating.

Have you had experience with Semantic Scholar or other search engines? We’d like to hear about it in the comment section below.

Photo by Olu Eletu on Unsplash

 

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As Human Interface Rides into the Sunset, the Industrial Internet of Things Comes to Town

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The Industrial Internet of Things or IIoT is emerging as a business imperative. The IIoT is the interconnectivity of all parts of your process with a central brain that monitors business health from whether a machine is running properly to tracking shipments in transit in real time. You name it, and it can be connected, monitored, measured, adjusted, scrapped or recalibrated. All without human intervention.

Just the data derived from this information is priceless, which is why companies are jumping on board to integrate smart systems throughout their organizations.

What does this mean for Jack who ran that machine for 35 years and knew by the sound and smell whether it needed repair? Yes, it means you don’t need Jack anymore. Sensors can do that now, and probably better than Jack, because they can be calibrated to read things like vibrations and other leading indicators of trouble on that machine. But that doesn’t put Jack out of a job. Jack just needs to consider a new career in IT.

A friend who works for a pharmaceutical company has developed a sensing device to help customers monitor inventory. When he presented the concept to investors, they were excited not just about the tech behind the device but more excited about the value of the data that could be collected across the supply chain. When sensors are providing accurate feedback on a regular basis- no matter where they are installed – that information has the potential to be priceless.

In an article in IT Business Edge last week, author Carl Weinschenk discussed the results of interviews with several company exeuctives and found there is a lot of excitement about the business potential of the IIoT to eliminate waste, serve customers, increase efficiency and productivity and reduce downtime to name a few benefits. The hurdles remain, and chief among them is to find people who can operate the IIoT…it,s very clear that the great difficult we’re seeing is finding people with the right expertise…In some parts of the technology stack, it’s not too difficult (especially connectivity), but in others it’s still quite difficult, wrote one respondent.

A lot of currently embedded technology is not connectivity-friendly and most companies will require a complete integrated upgrade to take full advantage of the potential. Vendors, suppliers, and other related systems must be considered. And then, of course, there is the need to secure of all that valuable information generated by an IIoT implementation.

Just like other leaps in technology and progress throughout history, this one will take a lot of experts with different skills sets than the experts you have today. Competition will be fierce when all your competitors can make split second decisions based on real time data.

It’s time to groom the next generation of experts who will have skill sets relevant to the IIoT much the way industrial engineers of the World War II generation introduced all new management techniques and organizational structures to support the evolving workplace of the mid-20th Century.

For more information, go to the Industrial Internet Consortium.

Photo by Greta Scholderle Moller on Unsplash
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Lean Leadership and Knowledge Management: Perfect Together

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In this blog, we sometimes talk about the fact that vital, growing organizations are learning organizations. The lifeblood of a learning organization is knowledge management. For learning to sit at the heart of your organization, leadership needs to recognize and promote knowledge management at all levels. Our guest blogger today is Lean practitioner  and author Robert Camp who talks about the qualities of Lean Leadership and how they support a learning organization.

Guest Blogger: Robert Camp

The longer I practice Lean the more I appreciate how great a role good leadership plays in an organization’s transformation.

LEADERSHIP: Honestly, I can think of no other single factor that makes or breaks a transformation so readily.

A LEAN LEADER:

- LEADS FROM THE FRONT

By that I mean they make the time to learn about Lean themselves and make the decision to proceed. No successful transformation can be approached with a “do as I say” attitude. You’re asking people to change, and leading from the front means you have to change first and demonstrate your personal commitment.

- REQUIRES SUBORDINATES TO COMMIT

Lean can’t succeed without a personal commitment from all leaders. That commitment can’t be provisional or halfhearted.  Once subordinates have learned what Lean is all about, they need to commit to personally practice and support it. If they can’t or won’t, they’ll need to leave. PERIOD.

- CREATES ENVIRONMENT

You can demand people to change and they will do exactly what’s required, but no more. You’ve won their hands, but not their hearts. Only by creating an environment in which subordinates are led to embrace lean can real change take place. That brings us back to leaders lead by example and coach good performance.

- CASCADES LEAN FROM THE TOP

Most organizations are in a rush to save/make money, so they begin Lean at the bottom of the organization, where money is made. That won’t work.

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For Lean to work, employees at each level need to see their leaders demonstrating it first. That means Lean behavior has to cascade down from the top. Anyone who tells you that Lean can work from the bottom up, or the middle out, has never seen a transformation to the end. There’s only one way. Top down!

- EMPHASIZES PHILOSOPHIES OVER TOOLS.

Because the tools save money, everyone’s in a rush to start with the tools first, but tools only support the philosophies. If practitioners don’t understand how Lean works, any gains made with the tools will be short lived.

It doesn’t take years to learn the philosophies. It takes a lifetime, but you can begin your use of a tool as soon as the connection has been made between the tool and the philosophy it supports. Those connections are well covered in “The Toyota Way.”

Lean becomes the WAY you manage, HOW you manage and ultimately, WHY you do everything.

- KNOWS LEAN IS A MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Lean isn’t something you do in addition to managing your company. It becomes the way you manage. Lean isn’t something you layer on top of everything else you do. It becomes how you do everything. In time Lean becomes why you do everything.

One would think profit or revenue would suffer, but the opposite is true. Lean management leads to a state, a mindset, of continuous improvement; not only reducing the cost of today’s product, but becoming more aware of your customer’s needs and creating products and services to meet or exceed those needs.

- LOOKS TO THE HORIZON

Like all great leaders the Lean leader’s focus is often on the horizon. They are scanning for new ideas, new technologies, new products, etc. Lean leaders don’t spend their time perfecting today, they are constantly on the lookout for things that will enhance their future position in the market.

- HAS PROFOUND RESPECT FOR OTHERS

Fanatical Fans return to do more business and bring others with them. Lean leaders understand that neither money, nor machines, nor technology, nor anything else makes fanatical fans of their customers. They know that only people do that. Whether it’s their suppliers, their employees, or their customers, Lean Leaders recognize the dignity of the people they lead and serve in all they do.

That doesn’t mean Lean leaders are soft. Part of recognizing the dignity of people is to continue to challenge them, to continue to hold them to high expectations. Lean leaders don’t just arbitrarily set new challenges. They collaborate with their suppliers, with their employees, with their customers, always looking to improve. Because the leaders set the standard by embracing change first, others are more open to accepting new challenges and even recommending them.

- CONTINUES TO LEARN AND GROW

Lean leaders don’t end their growth once they’ve embraced Lean. They continue to learn and grow. Moreover, they create an environment in which everyone continues to learn & grow. That is why Lean organizations are frequently referred to as learning organizations.

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.” Robert Frost

If you have recently embarked, or are thinking about embarking, on the road of Lean, ponder these words, as they will have profound impact on your life.

 

To learn more, visit Getting to Lean or contact Robert Camp at Robert@gettingtolean.com

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Are You Thinking of Writing a Book? Let’s Talk About Your Idea!

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Mark Twain is credited with saying, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics.”

Here is one of those statistics.

In 2002, the New York Times published an article that stated “81 percent of Americans feel they have a book in them.”

Having written or assisted at least 10 books into being – some under my own name, some ghostwritten, some as a coach – I’d say it’s more like 100%. Every time I mention that I write books, the other person says, “I’ve always wanted to do that. People tell me I should write a book about (choose one) my business or personal or exceptional or funny experience.”

And then they tell me something fascinating.

Which leads me to believe that most, if not all, people have at least one book in them. Our lives are great stories. Every one of them, no exceptions. For many people who follow the Working with SMEs blog, your book is probably about your business or your profession.

Just this week, a high school friend who has been contemplating writing her memoirs since we graduated many moons ago called to say she is ready to put fingers to keyboard.  I am glad she waited because she has so much more to say today and a grander perspective. Her undergraduate degree was in journalism, and she is an excellent writer who will need very little editing or direction.

Not all people with great ideas, great stories and interesting lives – who are all of you reading this, by the way – are writers first and foremost. Often, great books and great lives lie inside non-writers. If you are one of those non-writers who know you have a book inside you, don’t despair. There are ways to get that book out of you and into print, and those ways can be fun, too.

In the New York Times article referenced above, the writer Joseph Epstein warns people away from writing a book. He emphasizes the difficulty of the process. Yes, it is hard work. But it can be joyful hard work. The Working With Subject Matter Experts tribe knows about the joy of hard work and a job well done. That is how you became experts.

Which brings me to an offer:

I just finished a manuscript on October 1 and am putting together my next book proposal. So, while I’m in the gap between books, I would love to talk to you about your book idea and help you figure out if this is the time for you to pull the trigger on that idea, and how you can make it happen. I’ve helped people birth business books and personal memoirs. It’s all fun, and the best part is the look on someone’s face when they have a book in their hands with their name on it.

The process can be painless, and works a few different ways depending on your needs and preferences:

  1. I coach you through it and you do the writing
  2. I write your drafts with you
  3. I write it for you

If you want to talk about your book idea, let’s schedule a free, no obligation 30 minute consultation. I am taking appointments the week of November 6 through 10. Here’s my calendar link , just click on Book Consult and pick a time slot.

I strongly disagree with New York Times author Joseph Epstein who encourages readers to “Don’t write that book…don’t even think about it. Keep it inside you, where it belongs.”

Nope. People have far too many wonderful stories that have turned into valuable books.

Can’t wait to hear your story!

 

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From the Twitterverse: The Importance of Critical Thinking Skills

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Capture Okay. I admit it. I love Twitter. I often find out what is happening in the world by following news and information threads.  See #RedSox, for example. But not this week.

The Twitterverse is teaming with inspirational quotes, opportunities to peer quickly into the minds of others (for good or ill!) and creates a place for community and conversation.

The other day I caught this quote from Einstein posted by a Boston University professor:

Told of Edison’s view that a knowledge of facts was vitally important, Einstein disagreed. “A person doesn’t need to go to college to learn facts. He can get them from books. The value of a liberal arts college education is that it trains the mind to think. And that’s something you can’t learn from textbooks.”

Einstein’s quote was never more true in this age of burgeoning information. Replace the word “books” with “the internet”, then replace the word “textbooks” with “a search engine”, and it is obvious that this sentiment is truer today than when it was spoken nearly 100 years ago.

This dramatic uptick in information is evident in the way companies choose  which information to store and transfer, and affects the types of skills and training that the modern corporation must encourage to grow and prosper. Today, a company’s money is well spent on teaching discernment about the relative merit of almost limitless information and on educating employees about the application of the relevant to the task at hand.

Translation for your corporate knowledge management plan:

1. Discern what information is critical and particular to your organization

2. Spend your finite resources to preserve and transfer that information to your employees

3. Spend the rest of your training dollars teaching people how to think, discern, and apply what they know to your challenges

Take it from Einstein.

[Thanks to Boston University Professor of International Studies Vesko Garcevic for the Tweet. Follow @VeskoGarcevic ]

 

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Until Robots Make Humans Obsolete, What’s Your Plan?

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According to futurist Ray Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns, he estimated back in 2001 that knowledge will double every 12 months in this century. With such rapid proliferation of knowledge, it begs the question how long experts remain so and what bits of information are important, essential, need to be captured and carried on – or really have any value at all – in light of the rapid progress in robots and artificial intelligence.

For those of us who follow developments in the training world, you know that we are learning how to train robots.  Research is making the leap so that robots can now acquire learning that builds on prior knowledge – you know, the same way we silly old humans learn.

If you believe the future is here, you are right. However, if you believe you still have to operate in the present, you are also right.

For those of us still living in the pre-AI world, we need to continue to contend with the issues of human knowledge capture, retention and transfer between generations of workers for the ongoing success of your enterprise. What and how you capture, preserve and transfer information will change over time, which is a different discussion. For now, consider that you have knowledge under your roof that is the lifeblood of your organization today and preserving it against an imminent loss of expertise remains crucial.

Making a Plan to Retain Human Knowledge Until the Robots Take Over

If your experts flee to retirement or leave your organization for any other reason, you are still vulnerable to losing their valuable knowledge, skills and attitudes to fulfill your mission effectively, efficiently and in a cost-responsible way today.

What are you doing right now to make sure you keep your expertise under your roof even if your experts leave?

Here’s what you can do about these issues in your organization today:

  • Raise awareness. Speak to your organization’s decision makers to help them analyze their risk of losing valuable expertise
  • Get a plan. Explore methods to help you dissect your organization for areas where you are vulnerable to losing your critical experts
  • Work your plan. Identify and capture intelligence from individual experts in your organization

Think about it. Until the robots take over, you still need to rely on the humans that got you where you are.

In my book Finding Your SMEs: Capturing Knowledge From Retiring Subject Matter Experts in Your Organization Before They Leave, I lay out a pathway to dissect your organization, find your experts, decide where to spend your finite resources to preserve knowledge and explore options for preserving and transferring knowledge in an age of rapid change in technology and the way we learn.

Contact us at workingwithsmes@gmail.com to schedule a call to discuss capturing expertise as part of your knowledge management plan.

Photo courtesy of Davide Ragusa on Unsplash.

 

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The Ultimate Knowledge Management CQI Process for Organizational Leaders

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imagesQC7VSL6F.jpg     Knowledge management is an ongoing, living process.

Ideally, it is part of the knowledge management component of your larger business continuity strategic plan. Using the concept of continuous quality improvement, these six-steps reinforce the idea that your knowledge management process is iterative; you will revisit your decisions in the future, make new ones, and change your tactics to align with evolving business strategy.

Also, it is helpful to recognize that parts of the cycle are always in play somewhere in your organization. As you think about your knowledge management plan, consider the 6 Steps of CPI Knowledge Management framework to review the value of the assets you will dedicate your finite resources to preserve.

6 Steps of Continuous Process Improvement Knowledge Management

  1. Discover and uncover KSAs. Drill down to identify the knowledge, skills and attitudes that make your company unique by uncovering your Competitive Advantages.
  2. Categorize critical information. Distinguish among critical information that makes your company, product or service unique in the marketplace, essential information that is general to your industry but necessary to operations, and non-essential information that is nice-to-have. Identify critical KSAs for business continuity.
  3. Search for internal experts. Find your internal experts who are the keys to your success and possess your critical information.
  4. Capture and preserve critical KSAs. Work with your internal experts to capture your critical knowledge, skills and attitudes using methods that authentically capture them and preserve them in a way that they can be transferred and replicated later.
  5. Transfer critical KSAs. Choose the best methods for transferring specific types of knowledge, skills and attitudes to others, especially relying on technology that you can reasonably expect will be available and usable in the future.
  6. Evaluate and refresh. Review your current critical KSAs against the backdrop of your long-term strategic plan considering the rapid pace of change. As you identify new critical KSAs, repeat this process to capture, preserve and transfer updated assets with the aid of your internal experts.

No, execution of this plan is not easy. However, your discipline in capturing your internal expertise is the lifeblood of your current and future success.

Each of these steps is more fully explored in the book, Finding Your SMEs.  Workshops and consulting are available to help you integrate this process into your strategic plan.

If you would like a copy of the 6 Steps of CPI Knowledge Management diagram, write to me at workingwithsmes@gmail.com and I will email a copy to you.

Please comment below and share your knowledge management challenges as we are always learning together.

 

 

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Mass Layoffs and Your Knowledge Capture Plan

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bench-accounting-49908  Yesterday, I had the privilege of presenting a webinar to ITMPI, an organization that provides project management support for IT professionals. Our topic was Three Strategies for Capturing Retiring Expertise, and as is always the case, I learn a lot from the participants. Yesterday, the questions gave me a glimpse into some of the challenges they face.

In particular, some companies need to capture knowledge from large groups of people at the same time due to anticipated layoffs. When one company is encountering an issue, I expect other organizations face it, too. That makes it a ripe topic for discussion here.

Several large organizations I have spoken with over the past few months are doing mass knowledge capture assignments, one with 6,000 internal research scientists and another with engineers across a national system. These knowledge transfer challenges require process and standardization to make sure the work is done consistently and catalogued in a logical way. Most of this work requires tedious planning and particular execution.

The issue presented by yesterday’s webinar participants goes beyond those of systemized planning, organization and execution because the question is: How do you gather knowledge from experts en masse in anticipation of a round of layoffs? No matter how well you plan your knowledge capture efforts, you will encounter some resistance and resentment due to the nature of their separation. Most likely, some of the experts you are working with under these conditions are unwilling and unhappy.

In Working With SMEs, we discuss ways to handle The Reluctant SME and other experts who do not have the time or inclination to share their wisdom. But the problem of capturing knowledge from a group of people who are being separated adds a layer of complexity to the interaction.

While you can’t overcome the feelings of employees who are being laid off, you can implement a few strategies to help you work with them in a manner that is sensitive and respectful of their situation. They are, after all, facing at least a job change and at most a period of unemployment. They aren’t happy campers, but you can help set up a campground that smooths their transition.

Here are a few common sense ways to deal with capturing knowledge from a group of employees who are facing layoff:

1.       Acknowledge their feelings. Don’t pretend it isn’t happening by avoiding the obvious, but don’t dwell on it either. You can’t solve the problem but you can empathize with workers. “I know this is hard for you. I (or my wife) was really scared when I (she) was laid off a few years ago.” Feeling understood helps reduce the sting for anyone who is angry, depressed or fearful.

2.       Try to structure their remaining weeks or months to allow for some dedicated knowledge capture time so you don’t add the burden of another task to their regular workload while you are expecting them to continue to do their jobs effectively. Adding one more straw to the camel’s back can only increase their resentment and reduce their willingness to participate in your knowledge capture efforts.

3.       Consider adding a bonus for working with the company to capture information about their role.

4.       When the laid off group is large and concentrated, implement a corporate communications plan that informs employees about the company’s knowledge management plan and any other relevant information they need to know about their remaining time with the company. When people know what is going on, it reduces the rumor mill’s ability to cause strife and increases trust with supervisors and managers with whom the worker has relationships.

5.       If, and only if, the workers may be called back, remain positive about keeping the company functioning and vital during their layoff period so it has the greatest chance of success. 

When you are capturing information from experts who are not just reluctant – but being reluctantly separated from your organization – you face special management issues that go beyond implementing a good process for knowledge capture. If you have faced a similar challenge in your organization and would like to share your experiences, please comment below.

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The World’s Oldest Profession

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The world’s oldest profession is not what you think! Training is actually the world’s oldest profession. When the first human babies popped out of the first human mamas, the mamas immediately ramped up knowledge, skills and attitudes transfer. I wasn’t there and haven’t actually seen this documented, but it is a fairly safe bet. If mama didn’t transfer her acquired wisdom to her child, the species would not have survived. And therein lies the foundation for my assumption.

You can eat this, it’s safe.

Stay away from that animal, it’s dangerous.

Put one foot in front of the other like this.

And don’t forget to put your napkin in your lap and start with the silverware on the outside of your place setting.

Mamas have been keeping babies safe and viable in their environment by imparting acquired wisdom from the beginning of time. So I rest my case. Training is the world’s oldest profession.

Extending this example, critical just-in-time information is the heart of training.

Early childhood learning is all about see one-do one: Tie your shoes by bringing this loop around.

Early childhood learning is about immediate feedback: I told you not to touch the stove!

Early childhood learning is about mentoring: Next time she teases you, tell her how she makes you feel.

Just-in-Time Learning Works

Early childhood learning relies on these strategies in the moment because they work. Those same methods have served industrial and business knowledge, skills and attitudes transfer since we hammered out the second wheel. Again, I wasn’t there but it is a safe assumption that the human who smoothed out the rough edges on the first wheel figured out a plan for replicating the process and told the next person. And it became the way it was done.

Early childhood education from mother to child is about the value of short, demonstrative, and immediate learning opportunities.

In the fashion of the watchful caregiver, the uptake of just-in-time educational videos and smartphone reminders allows employees to have tutors and mentors at their fingertips all day long. The training industry is learning how to take advantage of this development in on-demand learning. Short video and electronic smartphone snippets of on-the-job training and reminders are sophisticated extensions of the old fashioned paper job aid posted in a work station.

These electronic job aids provide heretofore impossible access to experts. No matter what your experts do for you, whether she is the best assembler on the floor or he is the best accountant in your department, make sure they are documenting their actions using short, transferable snippets because all the pieces of their aggregated wisdom becomes the bedrock of knowledge transfer.

You can build larger and more intensive learnings from these pieces, but it is important to collect these learning components in situ.

Humans learn best in the moment, when they need it. Capturing and preserving information from experts to be accessed on an as-needed basis is the foundation of knowledge transfer for your organization.

What is your experience of using JIT learning? We welcome comments below.

Photo courtesy of Unsplash by Janko Ferlic, Koper, Slovenia

 

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When Accuracy Counts: Talking to Experts with Differing Opinions and Preserving Truth

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In my book Working with SMEs: A Guide to Capturing and Organizing Content From Subject Matter Experts,  I tackle the issue of what to do when competing experts tell different stories and, most troubling, when agendas among stakeholders obscure factual information.

The answer is: the when you are writing training for a client, the stakeholder paying the bill gets the last say. It is their company and their money; it isn’t your call to decide what gets captured and preserved as official knowledge within their organization. Of course, some knowledge is an undisputed matter of science or math and you can’t undo the realities of gravity or 1+1. But in any matter open to question, the payer’s perspective wins in a matter open to expert opinion.

Which leads me in a somewhat circuitous way to discuss a very sensitive topic on the minds of many people: Whether a society should manipulate evidence of its history to bend to the will of those in power or if a different standard applies when preserving the knowledge of human history.

Most rational and loving people (and I include all my readers in this group!) want to give everyone a fair shake. We work with and socialize with and have relationships with people of all backgrounds. The beautiful array of people in my universe has much more in common as leaders, coworkers, entrepreneurs, parents, lovers, friends and neighbors than they have differences. Our 24/7 global social network makes sure of that. My Mastermind group originates in Denmark and has members in at least a dozen countries with people of almost every background and, lo and behold, we are much, much more alike than we are different. We honor our uniqueness and the individual skill each of us brings to that party in no small measure because the group’s leader is vigilant about the generosity of spirit of each member.

Let’s face it, though. Human history demonstrates that not everyone in every time has been as accepting of others.

When Passions are Inflamed, Reason Flees

Human history is awash with stories of armed conquest, atrocities and man’s inhumanity to man. The evidence remains intact at the Colosseum in Rome, at the crematoria that stand as testament to the horrors of WWII death camps, and, yes, in the bone-laden killing fields around the world where despots wreaked death on millions of people in the name of some ideology. Those horrible monuments stand as silent screams to those events. The United States has some violent and inhumane history we do not want to repeat. When passions are inflamed, reason flees. We need to be reminded where we’ve been so we can avoid retreading that bloody ground.

As vendors of accuracy (ah, a new meme!), those who are tasked with recording knowledge and information for preservation are called on to record it all. Just the way it happened.  To the best of their ability. Representing all points of view and all versions of events. That way we can reproduce what works and avoid what does not work in the future. We can do more of the right thing and less of the wrong thing. In a recent blog, I discussed Henry Ford’s statement that he fired the experts because they knew all the ways things couldn’t be done. While we want to put new, fresh minds to work on innovation, it is a good idea to keep the old heads around to tell you where the landmines are, too. So it is with preservation of historic fact.

We have important books in our literature, books like Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury and  1984 by George Orwell where we are warned of the perils of obscuring or rewriting history. People with agendas who burn books are in a position to tell a new, albeit inaccurate and incomplete, story. As we are told, those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it. Despotic rulers and invading armies destroy the histories and culture of the places they invade so the people cannot retrace either their roots to preserve their strengths or remember their tragedies. The victors write the history books. To have a just, whole and open society, people need to have an accurate knowledge of all that has gone before – the good and the horrific.

By destroying or masking terrible truths, we doom ourselves to repeat them – and to be controlled by people who want to rewrite history for their own ends. Because we have ample evidence of the sordid underbelly of the monsters in history, we know what happens after the books are burned and history is obscured. Without those reminders, we are vulnerable to bad information and bad outcomes.

In writing training for a company, the stakeholder with the checkbook has the last word on content. As for the story of human history, each individual is an equal stakeholder so we need the most complete story we can assemble for a 360 degree view of reality. History tells us and literature warns us to beware of any group that wants to control the historical narrative.

Sunlight is a disinfectant. Let history stand as its own witness.

What do you think? Should all historical artifacts be preserved for accuracy? Or, do you think preservation of history suggests de facto approval of our most unsavory events? Please comment.

By Diliff available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colosseum