Massey University lecturer and soldier Major Josh Wineera has been invited by the United States State Department to participate in a high-profile study programme examining US national security policy and current threats facing the United States.

Major Wineera was chosen by the United States Embassy in Wellington as the sole New Zealand nomination from a very competitive national pool. He went on to be selected by the State Department in Washington from a range of worldwide candidates whose areas of expertise included foreign affairs and international relations. 

The intensive post-graduate level programme begins later this month in Amherst, Massachusetts, and brings together around 20 international participants. It includes study sessions at Harvard University as well as study tours to the University of California in San Diego and Washington D.C. 

The six-week programme will examine such issues as energy policy, economic stability, cyber-security, chemical and biological weapons, nuclear weapons and infectious diseases. The United States Government will meet all costs of the programme. 

Major Wineera says he feels humbled to be representing New Zealand, the Defence Force, and Massey University’s Centre for Defence and Security Studies. 

“This will be an excellent opportunity to deepen our understanding of the way the US formulates its national security policy,” he says. “I think this is especially relevant for us in New Zealand given the recent announcement by President Barack Obama that America will renew its focus in the Asia Pacific region.”

In addition to lecturing at Massey University, Major Wineera speaks to many Defence Force contingents preparing for overseas deployments, particularly to Afghanistan. His extensive operational experience includes missions to Bosnia, Bougainville, East Timor and more recently Iraq. He is also a member of the New Zealand forum of the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific.

“2012 will be a big year for me,” Major Wineera says. “I start with this incredible invitation to deepen my understanding of US national security policy and it will continue as I embark on a PhD. By total coincidence my doctorate will examine New Zealand’s approach to international security and will compare it to other nations, including the US.”

And also covered in the Manawatu Standard.

Good luck to Josh on his latest excursion – a real coup for a local lad and for Massey’s Centre for Defence Studies - expect to see a new face on the domestic commentator scene on his return to New Zealand…

Josh and I attended the Irregular Warfare Summit is Washington last year to come up to speed on contemporary thinking on the irregular environment. It was a long way to go from the quiet (but windy) Manawatu and we weren’t too sure what we were getting ourselves into. I think that many of the other participants probably felt the same but once the ice was broken, engagement at all levels was frank and honest. There weren’t any great epiphanies for either of us and the main lesson that we brought home was probably that everyone is facing the same essential problems and that no one has the monopoly of solutions for the way ahead.

Lunch was provided for the main days of the Summit. The first day was funny: there was no seating plan (probably part of the mix and mingle ice-breaking strategy) and so people just sat where they could find a seat. As the Kiwi delegation (all both of us) approached a table, we could see two guys on the other side eyeing us up with some quite animated conversation. Uh-oh, maybe we shouldn’t have taken the last of the coffee from the urn! One says “Are you THE Josh Wineera?” Josh looks at me, turns back “Well, the only one I know…” “The one who briefed at the COIN Centre a couple of years ago? Wow, we’re using some of your stuff in out school…!” Turns out these guys are contractors providing training on the COE to the US Army. Just like Steinlager: They’re drinking our beer reading my stuff there…

Josh with Colonel Dan Roper

....and with Dr Rich Kiper...

Col Roper (who had just retired as Director of the COIN Center at Fort Leavenworth, KS) and Rich (who’s on the staff at the Centre) were staying at the Marriott as well – While they weren’t in Kansas any more, these guys were great hosts to two Kiwis a long way from home and we had some significant post-dinner networking sessions…

Lessons seem to fall into the big gap in the middle - obvious design flaw!

This article bounced in via one of my connections on LinkedIn or Facebook…it’s interesting but on the light side especially it’s parting shot whimper “…In summary, change at all levels is tough and many initiatives fail to deliver – that’s human nature. But, never give-up trying…” I really hate these “…oh, well, it’s just human nature…” pseudo-arguments. They essentially just say “…it’s all too hard…” and, in the lessons world, that’s just not true.

The problem is that people and organisations see lessons learned as some sort of blend between a universal panacea for all that ails them and good old-fashioned magic (except that, of course, magic generally works whereas lessons learned…). Lessons learned or L2 as it is becoming known in ‘in’ circles is not difficult, not that hard and certainly not magic…like most trades, skills and professions, there is a fundamental need for practitioners to have some idea of what the hell they are meant to be doing.

The simple fact is that the perception that enduring lessons are so difficult to implement is because most people and organisations tend to focus on the solution and not the reason why behind it. So, after some time, normally when those with first-hand knowledge and experience of the original issue and the applied solution move on, we are left with an implemented solution that slowly loses context as the individual and corporate memories of reasons why behind it fade into insignificance. What we are left with then is either dogma where that solution continues to be implemented without any real knowledge of the why, or satisfaction of the urge to change especially if the solution is considered onerous or too hard.

Even more important than the actual implemented solution we must keep alive the reasons why the solution was implemented in the first place – this allows use to evolve if and, when necessary, as circumstances and environments change.

While I was drafting this post this morning, the first Knoco newsletter for 2012 dropped into my inbox. It has some good pointers, even though it is technically about knowledge management than lessons learned (like there’s a difference?) (text in italics in from the original Knoco article, the rest is my thoughts):

How to build a KM strategy

There is no such thing as an “off the peg”, “one size fits all” knowledge management strategy.  Every organization needs to create their own knowledge management strategy, which fits their own context and their own business needs.  Here is how to do it (for more detail, order the strategy guide)

Start with the Business Drivers

Looking broader than a mere business perspective, driven by bottom lines, etc, look at what your organisation or agency is actually meant to do and why. There’s that word again ‘why’ – the good old ‘in order to’ of the mission statement…if you’re deviating from your chosen path of truth, light and purpose, you need to identify why – and whether that is both a good thing and a sanctioned thing: the two do not always go hand in hand.

Identify the knowledge that is crucial to delivering business strategy

Work out where that knowledge lies

It is the easiest thing in today’s world to simply drown in too much information: the crux of any system has to be getting the right information to the right people at the right time and knowing that they know how to apply it – again the rationale of all the ‘rights’; otherwise, really, what’s the point?
Knowledge management, at its simplest, consists of building a system to transfer strategic knowledge from the people who have it, to the people who need it, in an effective, efficient and routine manner.
So once you have identified the strategic knowledge, you then need to map out where it lies, and where it needs to be transferred.
Is the knowledge centralized, in a small number of company experts?  Is it dispersed among a community of experienced practitioners?  Is it created as best practices and lessons from projects, living in the heads of the project managers?

If it’s penny-packeted away, do you need to kick in some doors? Does the organisation still have bastions of ‘need to know’ resisting ‘need to share’? Do they even know that there is external interest in what THEY do and produce?

Understand the audience

It’s absolutely crucial to understand the users of the knowledge; how many there are, and the degree of context and knowledge they have already, then knowledge needs, their working styles and habits.  The knowledge demographics of the organization are important (see section below), and knowledge supply needs to be compatible with working style. A mobile workforce, for example, needs to be able to access the knowledge of their peers through smart phones or other mobile devices, while a office based workforce can use desktop computers.

Simply, despite our natural inclinations to revert back to this, there is no easy simple cookie-cutter solution to much except, of course, cutting cookies.

Choose an effective transfer approach

The two main strategic approaches for knowledge management are Connection and Collection, otherwise known as personalisation and codification.  Although any knowledge management strategy will need a combination of these two, one might receive more focused than the other.

A Collection approach, where knowledge is collected and codified and made available as documents, is effective where the knowledge is relatively straightforward, and needs to be transferred to a large number of people, for example in a company with a large turnover of staff, or a company wishing to transfer product knowledge to a large sales force.

A connection approach, where knowledge is transferred through communities of practice and social networks, is suitable for complex contextual knowledge shared between communities of experienced practitioners.

When you get down to it, you need to be able to apply and actually apply a blend of both what are referred to as collection and connexion approaches (when did connection lose the ‘ct’???????). Things won’t solve all things and neither will talk – together they may.

Drive Pull before driving Push

Many of the knowledge management strategies we asked to review, talk about “creating a culture of knowledge sharing”; in other words, they seek to promote publishing and “push” of knowledge around the organization.

This is the wrong place to start.  There is no point in creating a culture of sharing, if you have no culture of re-use. “Pull” is a far more powerful driver for Knowledge Management than Push, and we would always recommend creating a culture of knowledge seeking before creating a culture of knowledge sharing.

Create the demand for knowledge, and the supply will follow.  Create a culture of asking, and the culture of sharing will follow.

While I don’t necessarily agree that ‘ a culture of knowledge sharing’ automatically leads to a ‘push’ culture, I do agree that ‘pull’ is the most effective way to go. While staff must pull information to themselves, some knowledge sharing culture is necessary for there to be anything to pull in the first place…Create just a ‘culture of asking‘ and all that may happen is that people wull turn away when you approach the water cooler…

Which all comes back to the original question “Why is it so hard to deliver lasting change?” It is hard because current L2 practitioners focus tend to too much on the lessons for its own sake; worry less about ensuring that it is current, relevant and practical for its targeted audience; and pretty much totally forget the key rationale for the change, the reason why – that’s not doctrine, that’s dogma….

My first (decent) cup of expresso coffee....

I almost missed this week’s photo challenge: I’ve been changing all my contact details to my new email address (part of the whole ISP change thing, shifting to an email provider that is not tied to an ISP) – this is not a simple task, believe me, and somewhere all the way I dropped off some of my WordPress subscriptions including the one for the Weekly Photo Challenge.

Carmen bought us a flash new coffee machine for Christmas – not many bells but loads of whistles – and now the creation of coffee in our home has become something of an art form. Simple? Nope!! Not at first for me anyway!! Let’s just call it ‘simple – with practice’…

This week’s photo challenge is Bill the Bedford on his way to Gore on a very peaceful Kaikoura morning…funny sort of job….long story starting with a rimu spiral staircase that appeared on Trademe in 2008. Rimu staircases being somewhat rare, one’s with an opening bid of  a dollar being even rarer, Carmen and I had a quick confab over the phone at work (this is when we were both in Waiouru) and tossed a fairly substantial maximum bid in on it with only a couple of hours to go. We were really surprised to win the auction for only $600…

A few weeks later, must have been just after the big snow of ’08, we took Oscar the Ssangyong on its first run to Wellington to pick up the stair case. Not only did we get the staircase but also a full set of rimu doors for kitcheb cupboards. The guy we got them off had just been made redundant and while unemployed was working his way through his ‘honey to-do’ list at home, task #1 being to remove “…that staircase that I’ve always hated…” His original plan had been to toss it on a bonfire but a mate suggetsed he stick it on Trademe just to see what would happen “…might be a bit of pocket money in it…you never know…”

So, we get this stair case home, all parts wrapped and numbered and it sat in the garages (migrating from the top garage to the bottom one as its installation date slipped further into the future…in mid-09, we got a joiner into to look at it to give as idea of what was involved in putting it in…he took one look and was dead keen to have a crack at it as “…things like this don’t just come along every day…” Next thing he’s shifted all the parts to his workshop in Turangi, along with some spare rimu to make a platform the top landing, as it needed to be assembled in a proper workshop where it could be supported. Apparently it became something of an attraction there once it has been assembled and polished with some interesting offers being made for it – well over our initial investment but by then we’d seen it too and we set on repalcing the front stairs with it.

What’s all this got to do with Bill the Bedford’s trip to Gore? Well, one smoke while it was being installed, the joiner mentioned that he’d sold Bill on Trademe but was at a bit of a loss on how to deliver him to the new owner in Gore. Carmen, at this point wasn’t working and promptly volunteered to drive it down for a small fee, staying with friends for a few days before meeting me in Wellington for Scale Model Expo 09. That was the year that Feral the Cat decided to go walkabout just as I was ready to leave home and we stayed at the delightful Belmont Cottage above the Hutt Valley…

Long ago high school athletics trials....

This week’s WordPress weekly photo challenge…a long time ago in a galaxy far far away…

Maybe I should have saved this one in case there is a photo challenge for ‘scary’ but it’ll have to do for the ‘self-portrait’ photo challenge…as seen in the date in to top corner, this dates back to 1999…when I had started out on the series of exercises in Betty Edwards most excellent Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain (ISBN 0006381146)…one of these days, I must get around to finishing the entire series…

...between the rail and the river...

I really struggled with this photo challenge…until while Picasa-ing through the photo library, I came across  this shot of one of the last one-way bridges on State Highway 1, between Kaikoura and Blenheim – kinda strange to think that, in 2005, there were still one-way bridges on the national ‘one end t’other’ highway…it’s now been replaced by a new dual carriage-way bridge but I think that the railway (running on the level above the road) still uses this bridge…

We were driving back from my sister’s wedding in Dunedin – you can see the Otago Property Press reflected in the windscreen – we’d picked up one of these as it our wont when travelling and stumbled across the little whaling cottage I mentioned in the Paths photo challenge and that we bought spur of the moment…

Every year, the true celebration, as per the weekly photo challenge from a few weeks back, of spring is when the punga explode into life…around the time that this challenge was posted the punga all around the house were all straggly and brown, looking pretty much like they were all dying….every year we go through the same angst, wondering if they are all dying and then, almost overnight, they explode into life with glorious fascinators for green reaching for the skies…

Although, here, it is (apparently!!) summer, Winter is the theme of this week’s WordPress photo challenge…our winter this year was more wet than anything – we’re just below the Central Plateau snow line but even then we only got snow twice last winter…it was as cold as it looks here – the driveway is a big heat soak (we only heard about heat exchanger heating systems the week after we laid it down) and a sure sign that it is really cold outside is when the snow settles on it with out melting as it did soon after this pic was taken.

…but the next day was beautiful: great contrats of blue skies and white ground…

…and not everyone was upset by the cold…of course, the flip side of this is that it kinda sux to be a big black dog in summer…

More photo challenge catch-up in bound…

At least he'll be remembered for something...

Certainly I’m looking for a bit of slower time between Christmas and New Year to recharge batteries and consider how to do things smarter in 2012 – I don’t think that current tempo is sustainable – although spending two months of the year overseas sounds all very nice and exotic it is actually a real grinder that generates its own burden of work on getting home…I think I’ll be mandating periods of down time from January onwards to chase that elusive work/life balance – apart from reading and stash acquisition, hobbies have definitely take a back seat in 20112 and that’s neither healthy nor satisfying - I have enjoyed meeting the challenge of the WordPress weekly photo and expect see see this last couple of challenges caught up before the end of the year…I hope WordPress keep this up into 2012 as it is a great way of trying to maintain a steady pulse of posts…

Also expect a surge of more professionally-based posts too as I wade through the morass of draft posts sitting here and in MS Live Writer and select those which still may have a little life left in them…

Right then, that’s that surge of creativity suppressed…back to shifting offices…