A year ago I blogged a report from Australia about the endangered status of (biological) taxonomists in Australia. It seems from a recent article by Bob Grant in The Scientist magazine that the problem is widespread. That turns out to be a problem not just for taxonomists but also for the whole biological sustainability movement, because tracking and ameliorating the collapse of ecosystems requires the ability to accurately describe and study organisms and their roles in the ecosystems. Taxonomy plays a cornerstone role in this. The problem is:

”...there are fewer and fewer biologists who practice traditional taxonomy, or the collection, description, naming and categorization of organisms through intense study of their physical attributes. In general, the field of taxonomy, or systematics as it is often called, has been leaning towards the molecular end of the spectrum since genetic technology matured in the late 1970s and 1980s, and traditional taxonomic skills have been dwindling as older taxonomic experts retire. Many taxonomists blend traditional methods, such as morphological and behavioral study, with modern molecular techniques, such as DNA sequencing, to fully characterize their pet taxa. But taxonomists like Cognato and Hulcr, who rely on fieldwork and morphological study as core aspects of their taxonomic work, appear to be slowly going extinct.”

Biological taxonomy as a discipline is under severe stress because traditional descriptive (morphological) methods of discriminating species and creating family trees has been largely supplanted by the quick-fix “barcoding” method of reading sample sections of DNA sequences and coming up with a unique identification “genetic barcode”. Who needs to locate an organism in a taxonomic classification when you have the equivalent of a book ISBN? Well duh. Why do books need to be classified as well as having a barcode? Taxonomies put objects into relation with each other (as the Scientist article graphically illustrates) as well as providing identification data. Barcodes don’t.

There are other problems with genetic barcoding, such as the problem that there is substantial genetic variation within species as well, so any given DNA barcode sequence is an averaged approximation across several specimens. You can’t actually be confident about whether you are averaging the right set without a taxonomist to tell you whether on other morphological, behavioural and geographic factors, you do indeed have specimens from the same species. Taxonomy is an approximate, multi-factoral art of pragmatic judgment, whether it be in biology or in knowledge management. It’s all about whether you can function better having one, not about how quickly you can slap a label on something.

For those of you curious about the ructions and stresses in the world of scientific taxonomy, Quentin Wheeler’s recent edited collection of articles gives an excellent survey.

There’s good thinking material in here about the theatricality of storytelling (ie good storytelling goes beyond the telling technique, and can involve the context, situatedness, deliberate placement in space and time).

This is a tad different from the recent Wharton-profiled thoughts on the role of narrative in leadership from movie-maker Peter Guber. He has a couple of interesting thigs to say about narrative eg “Narrative bonds information to an emotional experience” but then he undoes it all with the appalling acronym of narrative-use in management as MAGIC: Motivating your Audience to a Goal Interactively with great Content.

Somebody hand me a gun. If I have to deal with thinking like that, give me a lecture anyday.

Now I don’t know if this is a real Patrick Lambe question or a bait for ego-surfing Patrick Lambes out there (how many can there be?) to discover themselves and Yedda and somehow get persuaded to sign up. If it’s a real one, which one is it? The Fresno lawyer? The Irish teenager? The open source guy? The Chicago lawyer? The New Jersey crime fiction author? The Pennsylvania technology trainer? The long haired Brummie?

And which Patrick Lambe was on the flight with me? And if I actually meet another Patrick Lambe, will we cause a disturbance in the space time continuum and implode into a black hole?

But ubiquity combined with shortcomings does at least create a market for improvements, and here’s a report of a new release by Colligo, one of the many companies making a living out of Sharepoint’s native failure to reflect the normal working environment of users.

What I liked about this was the way in which adding small and apparently simple features can make the tool much much easier to use – and more useful than intrusive :

• integrating windows explorer with Sharepoint document libraries, so that you can share files via Sharepoint, weaning users off the jungle of badly managed shared folders
• giving drag and drop ability to reorganise document library folders in Sharepoint (I hope there’s some governance process around this, because free licence to change could turn a structured library into areplica of the shared folder madness we are all trying to escape from)
• adding an upload feature in Outlook so that instead of attaching documents to emails, you just send a link to the document in Sharepoint, limiting multiple version (and space consumption) madness

It’s small and basic things like this that should be got right first, not last. The design of a system has to stay close to the user, not migrate towards them painfully, inch by inch. On a side note, a plea for help from a colleague battling with Sharepoint workflow right now: her legal department has discovered (9 months into the project) that approvals associated with documents in Sharepoint are automatically de-linked after 60 days. This is not a good thing for anyone who cares about approvals, and it makes one wonder what piece of code was dragged and dropped unthinkingly to deliver this workflow process in Sharepoint. But does anyone know a fix? Small things, helpful or maddening. Let’s not forget them.

Like him, I too entered into it with preconceptions about the workshop. I imagined that running a workshop in the Middle East would be very different from running one in Asia. In many ways, they are. For example, you need to be more attuned to religious, cultural and gender sensibilities there. But at the end of the day, what makes a workshop work is not just what you but also what the participants bring to it. And I have to say that I was both humbled and jazzed by a room full of smart, eloquent people eager to share and learn from each other. Despite the 17-hr door-to-door journey, I’m already looking forward to the next workshop with them.

The workshop outputs are being posted into the project wiki. (If you are interested in hosting a workshop somewhere, let us know… we don’t charge as it’s a community research project, we just need to figure out travel and expenses).

We’ve now got to the point where we’re starting to get some insights that we’d like to check out on a larger scale through a survey. It’s short and snappy, and you’ll get to see the responses so far once you’ve completed (or go back and visit as the survey unfolds). Please do visit and take the survey and pass it on to anyone else you think might be interested.

Here’s the link! http://tinyurl.com/expertisesurvey

More is brewing on this project, with a recent sensemaking workshop in Sydney, another coming up in Dubai, and a large scale survey to check some of the insights arising from the narrative work. Stay tuned!