Knowledge Aforethought

Before you go paperless ...

Last week's USA Weekend magazine ran an interview entitled Computer Counselor featuring Kelly Chessen. She's a psychologist now working as a "data crisis counselor" at DriveSavers in Novato, California.

Kelly used to work at a suicide prevention hotline ... and maybe she still does. An article posted on the DriveSavers site describes her job as

comforting poor souls whose computers have been melted in fires, dropped into rivers, run over by cars and in one case, shot. "Sometimes people will threaten to throw their computers out the window," says Kelly. "Hard drive failure happens every day, but it doesn't happen to everybody every day," she continues.

While DriveSavers can do a lot with severely damaged drives (visit their Museum of Disk-asters) and Kelly exudes confidence that most such disasters can be fixed, she states the success rate as 90%. For the other 10%, the implied advice might be longer term counseling.

The lesson for knowledge management professionals all starry-eyed about technology "solutions" for storing and retrieving important information comes in Kelly's Final Answer:

Q: Where do you keep important data?

A: My trusty yellow pad of paper. I hear horror stories all day. Do I want to lose all of my financial information? No!

As I've urged in prior posts (here and there), if you're considering a move to a "paperless office" you first ought to read The Myth of the Paperless Office by Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper (MIT Press 2002). There you'll learn at least a half dozen reasons why yellow pads and other forms of paper outperform computers and other digital media for some information storage, retrieval, and manipulation tasks. The authors studied a diverse set of knowledge workers in a wide range of settings. One or more should trigger ideas helpful in your own situation.

If you haven't read it, don't argue with me (or Kelly). Keep your yellow pads handy. And seek help from a qualified professional.

Captology Notebook's Top 10

I've been remiss in failing to mention the Stanford Persuasive Technologies Lab's (relatively) new blog, Captology Notebook.
Just the techie-tweaking comics in the occasional "Tuesday Funnies" posts make the blog worth checking out.

Providing yet another reason for me to be thankful I met her, my fiance Yvonne DiVita ran an interview on her Lip-Sticking blog, with "Smart Man Online" William Slawski. Yvonne's second question honed in on Slawski's discussion of credibility on his A Nasty Bit of Business blog, which led promptly to the new Captology Notebook blog.

The blog has been up since April of this year and gives a public glimpse into the work at the Lab. Because it has already accumulated some wonderful material on how information technology can be used (for good or ill) to persuade people, it is well worth browsing through the archives. To help induce you to do so, I recommend locating all of the TOP TEN "Behavoirs Web Sites Want From You." Each entry in this series describes a common tactic used on Web sites to presuade you to provide information and explains "What they gain (and you lose)." Many of these posts include screen shots to illustrate the tactics discussed.

The first post in the series, back on May 13, introduced the philosophy behind the Lab's work: "the web is about persuasion, not information. Our lab has identified the top ten behaviors that websites want from you." The last post in the series appeared on September 8. It is well worth your time to look through all of them.

In another early post, Lab Director BJ Fogg, noted their interest in the persuasive power of stories and his conversation with Jessica Hammer on the topic:

At one point in the conversation I said, "Narrative is the one persuasion strategy for which there is no defense. A good story always has an impact at some level."

Jessica's response was a smart one: "The only defense," she said, "is a better story."

The Captology Notebook blog will also lead you to the site for the Web Credibility Project, another of BJ Fogg's projects at Stanford.
I've written about his book, Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do, in an earlier post, and want to add here that the chapters on web credibility (Chs. 6 and 7) present the work at Stanford up to the point of publication (2003). The book and the blog complement each other well.

Hope you enjoy the discoveries as much as I have. And remember, don't thank me, thank Yvonne!