I saw a phrase in a blog comment recently: "If you can't see how people react to an action, you won't know how to improve." We talk a lot about setting up the conditions to find out what people are really thinking. --- I'm just wondering... are these the same issue?

The impetus for this musing is my digestion of the Web 2.0 issues that are all around lately. I take web 2 to mean not the cool bells and whistles, but rather the ability of the group to add value to the content. This means many things: the accrrual of ratings on books or CDs at Amazon, tag clouds or tag sites (deli.cio.us), group accuracy and curiosity over time on Wikipedia, prediction markets, etc.

In our work, this is not so much a public capability as a structured reflection by a selected group of knowlegeable stakeholders. With such a group, we want to get at what they really think about certain key issues. This gets back to that first comment: in order to improve (...the product, the strategy, the work culture) you have to know how people react.

I just did a day-long conference for the Project Management Institute of Silicon Valley .. the issue was the maturity of the field. So one key action of the day was to gather the major challenges from the various participants about what they face in their various organizations. There were 12 tables of members, and each table entered their top issues into the software. We came up with 88 issues, and categorized these into 10 or so major theme areas. We got the tables to prioritize these themes and then to work for a while on one issue from one theme area, and enter their solutions into the respective section for one of the top 4 themes. We ended up with 15 specific ideas for addressing the top challenges from the group.

So this is the idea of gathering what the group is thinking about the key issue of the conference -- the main challenges in developing project management maturity, based on the combined real-world expereiences in many SIlicon Valley organizations, and focusing down on developing some shared solutions to the major issues. Using the collective intelligence of that diverse group to drive the improvement of the field... and doing this through interaction, iteration, drilling down to specifics that came from the group's thinking.