There are a variety of articles and papers that I continue to draw insight from and find myself recommending to others on a regular basis. I decided it would be a useful exercise to assemble them into one set of pointers, add a little bit of commentary, and make it available.

I limited myself to materials that were easily available on the web, which eliminated some more obscure, academic, materials that you probably wouldn’t want to read anyway. I ended up with a dozen items that fall into two categories. The first group represents useful thinking about individual knowledge workers; the second about design principles relevant at the organizational and strategic level.

We talked about Richard Hamming's You and Your Research back in 2002. (It's now available here.) We've talked about As We May Think on numerous occasions. We've also talked about Alan Kay and Doug Engelbart, as well. We've talked about the Rise of the Stupid Network.

The ones I hadn't seen:

“Structured procrastination” - John Perry. A somewhat different, but nonetheless useful take on how to best leverage a multi-tasking, multi-demand world.

"Places to intervene in a system" - Meadows. The changes we need to make to take full advantage of the opportunities that technology presents us depend on thinking and operating at a systems level. This is the best short overview of the leverage points that can be found and used to make this level of change happen.

"Wicked problems and social complexity" - Conklin. As a counterbalance to Meadows, Conklin enriches the discussion of systems change by laying out the notion of “wicked problems.” These are the kinds problems whose solutions arise from the interaction between competing interest groups and change the definition of the problem as they are implemented.<?bq>

Papers you should read in the world of Enterprise 2.0