Library clips

Usually Business Units (BU’s) have a HTML profile page on the Intranet…this is where you go to read what a BU is about, what they offer, who the contacts are, etc…but these pages are usually slow to update and non-interactive.

Some BU’s suggested to me that since their online Community of Practice (online group) is taking off, perhaps they will just have a link on their intranet page to their Community of Practice (CoP)…basically the their intranet page just serving as an entry point (basically a re-direct link)

NOTE: Our CoPs are not just about communication; you can design the homepage however you like using HTML widgets, so they can look very informative like an Intranet page.

Now the problem with this scenario is that a BU online CoP/group is not really something a person not in that BU wants to see as an informative profile page for that BU

ie. online CoPs/groups aren’t usually about informing a general audience, they are about a group of members sharing and learning on a topic…or even doing actual work (yes I know ours are called CoPs, but they are just online group spaces really)

At first I thought BU pages on intranets need to be more like wikis, but then what about a news channel (to inform people) and a feedback channel (for others to ask questions)

How can we have some of the tools we see in our online CoPs/groups, but for a general audience like a BU intranet page serves?

Then it hit me, “Pages”!!!!

A BU will do work/share in online group spaces eg. Facebook groups

A BU will broadcast/inform, and gather feedback from the organisation at large by using a “page” eg Facebook Pages

A Facebook page is similar to a group but designed for a different purpose…a group has “members”, whereas a “page” is “liked”

Only it wouldn’t be Facebook, it would be IBM Connections or Jive or Socialcast or Yammer (yikes Yammer already called their docs/wiki, “pages”)

NOTE: It doesn’t have to be just BU’s, it can be any group who need an online group to enable members to do their thing, but also an online page to inform everyone else

Example

The Mechanical Engineers “online group space” is where members do work and share

The Mechanical Engineers “online page space” is where they broadcast communications to the rest of the organisation on recent happenings, and where people can post questions or share stuff (in Facebook this is called the “wall”)…and it also acts as an “about” page, just like the “Info” section on a Facebook page.

Another example

Our Document Management team have an online group space to do work…

…when they have new releases, they need to communicate to the power users of the document management system, these are the project assistants (PA) and document controllers (DC).

At the moment their online group space doubles up as a “page” in that it has an extra blog to communicate to these audiences (PA, DC) and an extra forum for these audiences to ask questions…when PA’s and DC’s visit the Document Management online group space, it’s really not catered to them at all, other than that extra blog and forum which don’t really get much real estate at all on the group space.

It’s true with our current technology, they could just create a new online group space to do this, and cater the whole space to PA’s and DC’s, but it just ‘aint the same purpose-design as a “page”.

So here’s my thinking…

Rather than a team having two online group spaces (one for them, and one for them to communicate to the org which also doubles up as their information profile/about page, like you see on Intranets)…

How about they have one online group space, and one online page!

So basically “pages” are the new type of Intranet/About page for teams…

…whereas groups are where those teams work, which generally speaking most others in the organisation are not going to be that interested in (remember with scale, ambient awareness can become noise)

Just like online groups are not just for teams (you can have a group about anything), same goes with “pages”; not only can teams use a “page” as their general audience page…but any type of event, topic, etc… could use a page

Eg. If I was running an event, I may use a group space to coordinate it with my team, and a “page” space as the actual event webpage that a general audience can read and interact…both spaces have different purpose, therefore are slightly designed differently.

Perhaps if you create a group space, there is always a link in the admin area for you to create a “page” for this group, and vice versa…this way group/page owners are aware of what’s possible.

Anyway this is typical of this space, where the consumer web is years ahead…and yes, often the functional/features do cross over.

NOTE: I came across this just before publishing Facebook Groups Vs Pages: The Definitive Guide

According to Facebook, groups are “for members of groups to connect, share and even collaborate on a given topic or idea”…Facebook Pages “allow entities such as public figures and organizations to broadcast information to their fans.”

GROUP - share/collaborate (member-based)
PAGE - broadcast/feedback (fan-based)

In other words the “page” is like the quarterly newsletter that is emailed out to the whole organisation telling them what’s being going on in their silo, only now it’s real-time, interactive and more of a social silo…yes the newsletter could still possibly be sent out as a curation of “page” content.

ADDED: I just remembered something, perhaps the concept of “pages” is what Socialcast is aiming for with it’s “Categories” feature, and for Tibbr with its “Subjects” feature.

I don’t post in this blog often as I leave it for long pieces, but don’t get the time lately…you can check out my daily posts at Snippets.

Anyway here’s a good excuse for a post…

Dr Peter John Chen, Department of Government and International Relations, University of Sydney is publishing a book in 2012 about the Internet and Australia, and politics.

As part of it he’s doing research on characteristics of blog readers…I’m happy to help out on his endeavor by asking my readers if they are interested in sparing 5 to 10 minutes on a survey about this topic

The survey is open to readers of the blog who live in Australia.

All responses in the survey are anonymous and confidential.

The survey can be found here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/Australian_blog_readers

I will be gaining access to a summary of the results and will share them with those who are interested

Salesforce’s acquisition of Rypple will be the beginning of a new explosion in these peer performance apps (social performance software); it’s not hard to predict that existing enterprise social software suites will either create their own, or acquire small start-ups (now’s a good time for software entrepeneurs to make some potential money). Whether the large enterprise social software suites agree with the effectiveness of these tools or not doesn’t really matter, as they need to keep competitive by not allowing the competition to offer something they don’t have. Hence often something becomes the norm not because it’s a must have purpose-based innovation or fills a pre-existing need; but instead just because everyone’s doing it…or cashing in.

But this post isn’t about this high level view, instead it’s on one particular feature that these peer performance vendors offer; and that’s "recognition/thanks/kudos/recommendation".

For organisations already using social networking tools, I wonder whether it’s going to be effective introducing yet another more specific-based social network. I wonder if instead these functions will be incorporated as new features in existing tools.

But first let’s establish what they are about, lets examine their feature set. Most of them are about changing the performance review process to an ongoing thing, rather than annually…and for it to happen socially online.

The players in the market that I know of are Rypple, Worksimple, Coworkers, Achievers, Saba and now an IBM partner application…get ready for more (eg. Atlassian), especially from Talent Management vendors.

The first time I recall something to this effect was LinkedIn Recommendations Some mildy related tools are Happiily and Niko by Socialcast (which are actually more mood based apps) and Evaluat3.me (this is more a survey about you)

The main feature set of social performance suites are:

• Social Goals (setting objectives, and viewing the status of them on our profile) eg. 20% market growth…what a great way for others to know your progess and achievement
• Coaching
• Feedback
• Performance Summary
• Recognition (Kudos/Thanks/Praise)

View the Rypple features page for an explanation on “social performance”, and how they have created a more meaningful and engaging system that is more than performance appraisal/review, in the way that it’s not so much a review, but coaching goal achievement as it happens (by both leads and peers)…much more transparent, and purposeful.

Recognition (Kudos/Thanks/Praise)

For the focus of this post the feature I’m most interested in is peer/lead recognition (thanks, praise, kudos, recommendations…) For example Rypple Thanks (read and watch the video).

Then there are existing social network vendors have have incorporated thanks/praise/kudos as a feature eg. Yammer and a few others. Note that thanks/praise/kudos is only one feature of Rypple and the like. Yammer is different than Rypple, but they do have a few overlapping features. Read and watch the video on Yammer Praise.

ADDED: Socialcast also have a “thanks” feature.

Recognise how well I use my social network to generate quality productivity

In a past post, Measuring employee’s on the quality of their work and gifting; based on how well they utilise their online network, I focused on the need of an observation technique where we can acknowledge the productivity employees generate from being socially active online within their organisation. Firstly, for the direct reason of acknowledging their good work-and how it came to being-which needs to be recognised, and secondly that feedback, acknowledgement and recognition are positive conditions for people to continue participating and adopt new ways of working (in this case online social tools).

Please read my post as it quotes from some intelligent and experienced people in this industry, and gets to the heart of the matter of where current organisational design clashes with the cultural shift that begins to take place with the addition of working with social tools (ie. like we shape tools, tools shape society). Especially in relation to being measured on your individual contributions; rather than how well you used your network as sources, or even collaborators on your deliverable…and also the time required to participate, build and nuture relationships in order to have a valuable network in the first place.

Just quickly, I should get kudos for knowing the right people to give me advice in order to churn out a quality deliverable. Why? Because this sends a signal to people that connecting to the talent of others is what we are about, we didn’t just hire you for your individual intelligence. One step further is me actually getting people I’ve sourced to contribute to the deliverable; this should have no impact on how I’m measured for individual contributions, in fact I should get more kudos for the same reason above. If we need to hire a team to do a job in the organisation we scout around in an attempt to source the best available internal experts. Well I’m just doing the same thing for my tasks.

I’ll re-quote Oscar Berg which will give you the gist of the post:

A paradox for employees today is that they really need to connect with and collaborate more with more people, and strengthen their personal networks if they are to deliver better results and strengthen our their positions. One problem they are facing when doing this is that most current incentive models do not reward employees helping their colleagues, unless there is a direct and measurable return on their contributions. Another problem is that many organizations fail at making the contributions that employees do outside of their own team visible, and thus if fails to recognize them. These problems put people in a kind of deadlock position. During uncertain times, most people will simply do what becomes visible and recognized by those who evaluate them, their managers. They will most likely also most be asked or commended by their managers to do so, because their managers are in a similar position as they will be judged by their managers on the visible contributions from the team they are managing (and so it goes on, all the way to the top).

Wow, that’s a great piece!

A resume that’s alive

So how do we change this syndrome?

• not recognising the help and work you do beyond your team, or even within your team (if you are not allowed to spend time in your internal social network, and help others in the first place, then you have a bigger problem…which is what the post linked above is all about…in addition to the adoption obstacle of not being acknowledged for knowing who the best people are to source and help to create a more quality deliverable)
• people only doing what’s going to be visible; rather than what’s best for the business

I once tweeted:

Before we visited the Rolodex, now we live in the Rolodex

…this is my reference to Twitter, Facebook, Yammer and the like. I think the same can be for social work performance

Before we had a static Resume, now we we live in our Resume

…this is a reference to our profile page and how it lists the work we are doing as it happens, comments, likes, recognition, bio links (all this shows off our expertise, respect, dedication, competency, character, passion, etc…what more do you want raw anecdotes of a person in action…and that are continuously updated).

Moonlighting

For those who don’t know I’m the global lead for collaboration, and part of this is facilitating our online communities. Recently I helped facilitate a new community about career development. My role is more about train the trainer, perpetual guidance; doing my best to enable them and coach them in being acute at their new craft in facilitating…and of course I manage the product in general. Anyway on this occassion I went beyond my call of duty by spending time helping them design their community (I did this as a regional CEO was involved, so it was in my interest). Now this is not my job, I would have no time to do my job if I always provided this service (If I had a team of people then it would be different). But it wasn’t just about the design, it was about actually doing the design. Now my HTML skills are basic, but here I am learning about imagemaps, javascript overlay boxes, and then attempting to code them. I also spent time talking to those in the company that I know have HTML skills, and sometimes got them to do some of the work. Ideally these people could have been internally contracted to do the work, but it turned out my product knowledge was required, and they don’t have that much time to spare. (SIDE NOTE: This is natural human behaviour; you make less time to help someone not in your network, than someone in your network).

Now this took me away from other work; but I thought it was valuable to work on this. From the perspective of my HTML contact; well his role is not a webdesigner, although he does utilise these skills in his role. In this case because I knew he has these skills I asked if he could utilise them on a task that has nothing to do with him, but is entirely based on the respect and history he has for me (and on top of this he was busy with his own stuff)

So here I am going beyond the call of duty within my team task, and here my colleague is performing work for free, on top of his already busy workload.

If we did this work observably online on a social network like Yammer, I’m sure people would of noticed our hard work, dedication and beyond the call of duty attitude…indirectly we become known for our skills and qualities. The double-edged sword is this could become a burden…I say this because this same colleague was helping out another trusted colleague of ours on a task also not within his portfolio…we are starting to call this "moonlighting"…and he’s I must say, a professional "moonlighter". Anyway, it turns out we did this work in email, so no-one really knows we did this unless we told them, or they saw the finished product (which they still won’t know who was behind it). I told my boss about this work, and he was OK with it, and said good work. But there’s a better way that could have more impact or impression on my peers and boss, and also fulfill my natural human need for a job well done (and everything that cascades from that being displayed in my profile page as part of my capabilities and service as you would see on a resume…only I’m not telling you about it, you are seeing it in action). The task owner also continually thanked me in email as we did the job, and then at the end of the job he couldn’t thank me enough…he mentioned that he owes me a beer or 5

We have the first part down ie. we can now work observably online where people can see the work we do as it happens. ie. not only the work, but the quality of our participation and how we are dedicated to the organisation at large. But what if you weren’t looking, these conversations roll into the archives quite quickly.
Now a more formal way for peers and leads to recognise your work is to issue you kudos/thanks/praise, etc…this is not just done as a comment, but it’s an actual feature eg a type of status update. Your profile page would also be the place that shows off your kudos/thanks/praise. Surely this is DIY career development, and gives you drive to keep doing what you’re doing ie participating…which is a bonus for social tool product managers as it helps with adoption.

Now take a breather…as the next part is important.

Beware gamification!

Let’s not start gamifying this and create a leaderboard and badges based on levels for all the kudos/thanks/praise you accumulate, and then have this as the basis for decision-making like resource allocation, expertise or which employees to retain based on their badge level. NOTE: Some vendors use descriptive badges, whereas I’m talking about badges that represent an earned expertise level (which could be based on false praise, and invaluable participation…better known as "gaming the system"). Let’s make sure we don’t let the numbers make decisions for us. Why? Because some people that deserve more kudos than others may not have them as the people they helped out haven’t adopted the online social tools in which to issue kudos/praise/thanks…maybe someone with lots of kudos/praise/thanks is less valuable than the next person; but the numbers don’t tell it that way, and what they also don’t tell is that person is gaming the system with others to accumulate kudos/praise/thanks. Also there is valuable, generous and altruistic work being done offline, on the phone, in email, in IM that will miss out on being recognised, due to not being visible…I have posted an anecdote on this before, here it is again:

Someone mentioned today that they hope our organisation doesn’t measure value based on just online communities. That there is so much community activity done on the phone and in meetings that brings value to the business that may not be known about. The concern is that people that are visible are going to get recognition over others that are more offline workers, who may even contribute more value.

When we start basing decisions on badges we are forgoing badgless, but equally capable people. I don’t want to get into gamification in this post, but what once had immediate purpose and respect (recognition and praise), when quantified or turned into a fetish (accumulated into a total and turned into an entity "the badge"), can lead to competition and gaming the system (doing it simply to gain points, and "it" may be not really valuable stuff we need to pay attention to); it may become more of a tail wagging a dog scenario. The system just becomes a whore, or sold out just like film and music has become (SIDENOTE - luckily web 2.0 allows us to enjoy the honest and more true to artform music/film generated from the long tail)

So the thing here is that as long as there is no prize, people are less likely to game the system. Instead the accumulation of praises and kudos are just another aspect to consider when making decisions about recognition, finding experts, bonuses, promotions; rather than the sole aspect. This is contrary to what some in the Dachis group say (like Larry Irons, I was surprised to hear these words from that crowd):

…wouldn’t the decision to promote one of two equally skilled employees would be just a little simpler if one had five more “badges” than the other?

The new 3rd party IBM Connections app called "kudos" just doesn’t sit well with me (mind you I say this hastily without reading too deep or playing with it). In addition to what has been talked about above, they go one step further and award points for participating (need I mention Dan Pink’s book or psychological research on self-determination.

Kudos Badges works by tracking metrics around what users do within IBM Connections. For example when a user posts a Status Update, they get a Kudos Point. When they create a blog, they might get 5 Kudos Points. When someone recommends a file that someone else created, they get 1 Kudos Point and the receiver of the recommendation gets 3 Kudos Points. There are hundreds of potential actions within IBM Connections and Kudos Metrics enables us to track them and reward users for their behaviour. Kudos Metrics are used to award both Kudos Leaderboard points as well as award Kudos Badges. All of the metrics can be customised and you can even create your own metrics and badges. Kudos Badges comes with a heap of predefined metrics and badges to make it easy to get started. They have been designed to not only reward behaviour but also to encourage users to take further action and educate them on the broader capabilities of IBM Connections. In addition to metrics within IBM Connections, Kudos Badges enables you to create metrics for actions and behaviour in external systems. These external metrics can then be used to award custom badges as well as contribute to a users leaderboard score and rank. For example you may have a sales force system that you want to encourage specific behaviour. Or maybe HR Performance Objectives that you want to reward users for achieving. The options are endless!

It’s all good intended, but I fear it may lead to gaming the system, participation just for the sake of it…it’s old skool km, and not sustainable. Sorry I didn’t want this to be a post about gamification, but obviously gamification starts to bleed or take centre stage in some vendor offerings. What I can see happening is that organisations will get lazy on intrinsic motivations, and just rely on game mechanics.

Speaking of IBM this type of participation-based "pointsification" is one of the factor that did harm to one of their internal social networking sites "beehive" (socialblue)…so indeed we have to becareful of something poisoning the system.

This presentation by Rypple tells me they are very different than this and understand the balance between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and that intrinsic motivation needs to be the lead singer.

See my posts by Sebastian Deterding and Jane McGonigal on gamification is nothing without gamefulness. I also did an extensive post on the difference between gamers and employee engagement.

I may do a follow up post on gamification since this post has led us that way…I could keep going on this post about point systems and knowledge markets for sharing knowledge and collaboration, but I’ll elaborate on how gamification is not the answer for that particular context

Always good to finish with some philosophy by Dave Snowden:

Reward systems, linking social obligations to targets and promotion criteria are the single most stupid thing that anyone can do in KM or any other system reliant on social interaction. People will always share with people in the context of proven need, but to share in anticipation of that need will not happen. All that happens if you create a reward mechanism is that people game the system. Its another excuse (like the culture was wrong) for an ill conceived approach

I had a ponder while walking past the skate park they are constructing not far from my house…it occured to me that I have never seen children or teenagers on site wearing hard hats.

What do I mean?

I’ll ponder that with more pondering…

What was the requirements aspect of designing this skate park?

Was the design co-created with your typical skaters? ie. children, teenagers, adolescents in the design process

And if it was, what was the methodology?

Did they simply ask them what they want, or did they observe other local skate parks?

Did they observe skaters in our local area, to see their makeshift skating areas, and urban structures that provided popular skating recreation?

If they didn’t do this, here’s what could go wrong?

1. Focus groups, but lacks observation

Thanks for the skate park it’s great fun, but there’s isn’t a flat area to the side where we can practice our kick filps and ollies.

But we asked you kids what you wanted, and you failed to mention that…

Yeah I guess we did, I guess we are used to having a lot of flat area, and what we really lacked was a hilly area…so that’s what we really wanted when you asked us…we forgot about our other needs like flat areas, that we take for granted.

2. Best practice may not be best fit

This scenario is worse as it lacks co-creation and observation…

Just say rather than co-creation (and/or observation), the designers looked at other local skate parks as the only design research method…

Thanks for the skate park it’s great fun, but round this local area we are more half pipe type skaters, rather than freestlyle street skaters. It would of been good to have a half pipe as the showcase feature, rather than the quarter pipe.

Or maybe they overlooked bmx riders, and scooters; who would also like the skate park to be usable for their vehicles. 

…actually this is deeper than just design research best practice, it’s even making your purpose and goals based on best practice, and not your own backyard

3. Worst scenario

I don’t think this would happen that often, but it’s building a skate park when you don’t really have any interested skaters.

Scenario’s 2 and 3 needn’t be explored further as they are poor approaches, in respect to real needs, and understanding the context of your users and environment

What could make scenario 1 more effective?

I’ve already mentioned it…we need to observe the users in their natural environment and see how they self-organise themselves ie. what are the attractors, what are the exceptions…

And the other part is co-creation needs to be through the whole process; not just a focus group. That means youth with hardhats on site making decisions that may deviate from the requirements. This means an agile design process.

Another way to do this is have this whole idea, design, procurement and construction project online. In each of the phases the potential users and other experienced people could be chiming in and discussing the purpose, the materials and how the progress aligns with usability. This way midway through the project, we have an opportunity to alter part of the design that will make all the difference to usability and popularity. If project managers use complexity and agile methods they can deal and adapt to uncertainty.

The theme of this post is agile method projects, co-creation from start to end, observation; and online awareness, communication, collaboration and emergence.

I think if all these elements are in place, then your are more likely to succeed. And to be clear, succeeding is not the project management part; it’s the part when everything is done and people turn up to your party, and how long they stay, and whether they’re having a good time.

But let’s be realistic, this is not democratic…the project can be slowed down due to conflicting views and indecision…actually "slow" isn’t bad, it may be what’s needed…mostly what I’m referring to is that once people are truly heard and acknowledged, someone has to make the decision. 

How agile are government projects or the contractors they hire; how do they feel about others making decisions, especially youth?

If the answer is negative; why is this so, is it just entrainment of past patterns, ie. that’s how we always have done it…simply ignorant to better ways of working?

It’s easy to not involve co-creation and observation in your work approach. All you do is make a plan and try and execute it…you don’t need an education for that approach. And when it fails, you have to force people to like it, which isn’t good. As I mentioned in my previous post courses in design thinking, ethnography, social psychology, interpersonal skills, facilitation/coaching and agile methods really need to make the rounds in organisations. 

Highly related links to this post

Should do or context and understanding 

Do people really know what they want? 

The biggest problem in getting to know our customers is that they don’t know themselves 

Stop ‘doing things’ to people and start to work together 

Agile Project Management 

…who decides if a project is succesful? And if a project passes a series of tests and goes… 

A history of Waterfall and Agile 

Set goals for behaviour, not targets for performance 

Ethnography and social context - actual, not reported behaviour 

Surveys are better for opinions rather than needs 

Needs analysis research methods 

So my friend Jase has a problem. His little baby’s cradle swing is draining batteries…he seems to constantly be replacing them. In addition to this the motor seems to be dodgy; sometimes it doesn’t kick in…he has to swing it to get the motor to kick into action…but then sometimes it will stop again. It’s something he has put up with for a long time, and finally he decided to do something about it.

After tinkering a bit he decides to look online to buy a second hand one…but it’s nagging him he has to dish out more money…and besides the one he really wants doesn’t ship to Australia.

He decides to do the natural thing, Google his problem.

Searching, scanning, reading, searching scanning, reading…BINGO!

He comes across a forum post where someone has posted about the same issue…he anticipates what the comments have in store.

And then he strikes gold! He reads that his FisherPrice cradle swing has the same motor as an Airwick Freshmatic air freshener.

Bingo Bango…the cradle swing works better than ever!!

OK I bent the truth a little…it wasn’t posted as a question and someone didn’t deliver the solution as a comment; instead someone decided to share their experience in a forum thread. And then the Instructables site did a typical thing you would see in a Community of Practice; they gardened the gems from the stream (otherwise all this value just rolls off into the archives); and put it in a perhaps more official and findable place as a Wiki Help Guide entry…this behaviour is generally referred to as the "practice" part of a Community of Practice.

People in your organisation encounter problems like Jase had everyday; and I bet the first thing they do is turn to people for answers (face to face or email). The problem is the people you know, may not have the answers…enter online networks.

So we have, Jase (the seeker, the guy with the problem), the expert (the person on the forums who has the answer), and the curator (the site that made this scenario into a help guide). Now ask any of these people what they think about KM; and they’ll say "ha, what??"

That’s right, we label this behaviour (seeking, searching, connecting, curating) a KM approach to problem solving. These people would say "if that’s what we are doing so be it, but we didn’t intentionally try to behave that way, or know we approach things in a KM way"…and they don’t really do they, they are just doing what’s natural; connecting to people. 

Organisations attempt to do this KM thing and spend lots of money and frustrate people, and so on. Whereas my friend Jase just did what was natural. The people who posted the solution also did something natural in an online group space where you have a feeling of belonging, ownership, and social connection.

Dave Snowden’s principles of KM just keep popping in my mind again and again, why, because they are naturalistic, they are based on how we cognitively and socially behave. If economics thinks people are rational, then organisations think people are robotic/servants.

Here’s a few of Dave’s principles that in relation to what I have posted about so far:

We only know what we know when we need to know it. Human knowledge is deeply contextual and requires stimulus for recall. Unlike computers we do not have a list-all function. Small verbal or nonverbal clues can provide those ah-ha moments when a memory or series of memories are suddenly recalled, in context to enable us to act. When we sleep on things we are engaged in a complex organic form of knowledge recall and creation; in contrast a computer would need to be rebooted.

In the context of real need few people will withhold their knowledge. A genuine request for help is not often refused unless there is literally no time or a previous history of distrust. On the other hand ask people to codify all that they know in advance of a contextual enquiry and it will be refused (in practice its impossible anyway). Linking and connecting people is more important than storing their artifacts. 

Organisations try to push a thing or behaviour on people, whereas from our example, what they should be doing is creating conditions for natural behaviours to flourish. Set up technology where people can search for stuff that employee’s have shared. Make sure this system is engaging and serves the essential human need of social connection; for none of Maslow’s needs can be met without social connection (a prerequisite for survival). And by engaging I mean appeals to intrinsic motivations (challenge, autonomy, purpose), and stimulates happiness (the oxytocin/dopamine induced grooming, respect, exploring, sharing, belonging, helping, connecting). And by the way the by-product is that your KM goal has been served, and personal goals are also being served. By that I mean people are practicing KM without even knowing it as you are simply facilitating them to service their needs and pain points. That’s right, focus on the behavioural goal, rather than the business goal. And as for personal goals, this part is the "What’s in it for me factor?"; which I have talked about in my post, An observation of employee engagement. Here’s an excerpt:

Sense-making (re-use, find, ask) 

- people helping each other to get through their tasks and issues 

Build your reputation/recognition 

- have influence by reputation, rather than having to wait years till you are rightly positioned in the hierarchy 

Having the right audience and context motivates us 

Sense of belonging, ownership, and having impact 

- people feel good when they know their thinking and contributions are welcomed and have impact 

We are social creatures

- learning and connecting with others and finding like people to collaborate with is an innate driver 

DIY Career, personal development, exploring your passion

- participating online, as a by product, displays a person’s expertise…this creates an attractor mechanism, where you are noticed by the right people and are offered meaningful work  

I guess a theme here is that you cannot create a knowledge sharing culture; it’s impossible to create culture, culture is emergent (you can only attack the interplay that surface’s that emergence). Same goes for developing initiatives and then pushing them on people…you don’t need to go to management school to do this, it’s dead basic to create something and then push it on people, but it ain’t gonna be effective; infact this type of leadership is a cop-out; it involves not much talent at all. Management school needs to train the managers of tomorrow to understand complexity, design thinking, user experience…and most importantly respect people and understand how they behave. It’s much harder and challenging to co-create, to understand frontline pain points…why don’t people leading initiatives co-create, why don’t they observe people using their prototype, services, process before releasing it…focus groups and surveys are not enough, people don’t precisely know themselves what they need or want till it emerges from them interacting with it (all the while you are taking this in via observation and conversation).

But then again Management school needs more fundamental subjects on transparency, trust, openness, co-creation, coaching…social business is the new lean; don’t you know;) 

The whats and hows 

Now I always refer to tacit knowledge as know-how ie. a skill in doing something eg. how to win a bid on chinese mining projects.

Then we have explicit knowledge which is know-what…this really isn’t knowledge it’s information. Some of it is common information that lots of people know of, and a lot of it is informal information based on experience eg. tips and tricks, how things are done around here. This informal stuff is often referred to as tacit knowledge, and I guess that’s OK. All this informal information paints a picture of the organisational culture; the more you know the more you can navigate and understand, this kind of heightened awareness leads you to be more productive and effective.

Formal information (processes, procedures) are not enough. When people practice work many contexts bring up different colors, all these interactions (informal information) can supplement and complement the formal information. I explained this in a past post:

A manual can only know so much up front, it’s not clairvoyant. The more we experience using these tools in various contexts, situations, purposes and by various people, the more we discover good practices, workarounds, lessons, etc…

Blogs and forums allow us to do this. Perhaps some of this content can be fed back into the manual, but a lot of it will exist complementary to the manual…a wiki is a good way to point to all the gems.

In essence community tools are our coping mechanism. Without it I could not sense-make. 

So back to our story.

The answer wasn’t high-level tacit knowledge (know-how) ie. Jase did not need to do an apprenticeship and overtime face many contexts and situations where he has developed expanse fundamental understanding and is highly skilled to apply himself to any scenario…this is real knowledge ie. you face a situation you may have never faced before and the nuggets in your head assemble into a new formation where you solve the problem; and now this solution is filed in your head (you never have to work it out again). If we can get people in organisations to connect as often as they can with each other (eg. CoPs, etc…) then overtime we become more competent people…we become chefs as much as we can, rather than recipe followers.

In our story Jase came across some knowledge in someone’s head in the form of a forum post where they shared some informal information (a tip or trick). Again, the more organisations have these types of ecosystem’s the better; life is 24 hour learning, and online networks amplify this. 

This is knowledge flow; people connecting to each other in the context of need, conversing, and from what we learn (and then action), becomes personal knowledge (when we action, we experience, and it imprints in our mind). When we do this online we leave behind the whole history of our interactions (observable work), this history thread becomes new information. One day someone will come across that information, and have a conversation, and so on. Information perpetually being remixed for new contexts, and people acquiring personal knowledge. It’s not just the nugget you find that’s gold, it’s that the nugget continuously transforms, it’s in a flux. Information is both a wave and a particle.

Anyway, the story of Jase and the cradle swing is in my mind what KM is; it’s what ideal sense-making is, it’s what engagement is, and what agile organisations are. 

The key point is don’t try and do KM, because you can’t, as KM is emergent…stimulate the conditions for behaviours, motivations, desires…enable an environment where people can sense-make (do their work by connecting with others), and the competencies that people develop as a result and what they leave behind for everyone else is KM.

Walking on the email platform and traditionally run organisations is not the emergence that you want; it’s poor man’s KM, it’s poor man’s sense-making; it’s not engaging, it’s not agile…online networks and social business is the type of emergence that employee’s and the business want…I hope.

Maybe I should have titled this post "KM is emergent" or "You can’t do knowledge management without knowledge flow".

Come to think of it my post "Don’t control, curate" has foreshadowed this post.

What’s important for an organistion is creating conditions for employee wellness and engagement, solving problems and decision-making, and innovation.

We achieve this by allowing people to connect; knowledge flow.

Once we have this then we can do knowledge management. By that I mean we can do the "manage" part by gardening, curating. ie. using links in documentation (processes, procedures, guides, etc.) that point to the threads from the knowledge flow. Our documentation is perpetually evolving; which is what KM is.

That makes KM seem like not a deep exercise; well it’s not really (but it’s not shallow at all, it’s very effective as it’s about awareness). It’s more a curators job of managing what’s spilt out of people’s heads in the knowledge flow and taking that dripping wet information out of the stream and linking it in places that matter like our documentation. And also creating new documentation like topic pages. Yep, part of KM is making playlists. It’s taking information and organising it and combining it so it drives further value.

I know information management is about organising information; so I’ll say knowledge management is about curating information.

But remember the KM practitioner is not only doing knowledge management; they are also facilitating knowledge flow, this is where the deep talent and skills come into action.

I don’t have a name that encompasses both facilitating knowledge flow and doing knowledge management. I think the term KM is meant to encompass both these activities, but I’m afraid KM managers often skip the knowledge flow part; which means traditional organisational design, doing things to people, all that top-down stuff, and failed KM.

When you think about a Community of Practice; the Community Manager/Facilitator does both the flow and the managing content aspect…so perhaps we need to look at these professionals for what KM really is (when I say KM I mean the combination of knowledge flow and knowledge management…let me know if you have a better word)

At work they having been talking for years about lessons learned

…there have been attempts at plans, strategies and whitepapers. You have to get everyone involved and to agree, and then you have to release it, and then you have to enforce it, etc…The whole deal is it’s starting with a top-down approach…it’s artificial and it’s slow.

I mentioned that projects can just start using a blog right now. For there is no knowledge management without knowledge flow. Start blogging the captains log (ala Star Trek)…narrate your work, work observably. All people on the project can use the, or a, blog to share daily experiences and tag their entries. And if you have read this far in this post we don’t need to go over again the benefits to knowledge flow in relation to meaning, connection, purpose, sense-making, engagement and agility.

Then the knowledge management can start - where we view tag clouds from the experience blogs; all these raw anecdotes, stories, observations will form high-level patterns. And from this we may detect weak signals and opportunties, we may see strengths and weaknesses.

And then we can write our lessons learned documents and give talks based on what we have learned, plan new strategies based on our new insights.

Knowledge Management needs stuff to manage, as you can’t manage what’s in people’s heads. Instead if we first facilitate knowledge flow, a lot of what people know (ie. stuff) naturally spills out in conversation (mostly based in the context of need, or even proactively via totally engaged people who narrate their work)…and if this is done online, well then we have stuff to manage.

Knowledge management starts after there is knowledge flow. What if you try to do knowledge management based on a lack of knowledge flow? Well that perfectly describes the top-down way organisations usually approach programs like lessons learned. What happens is that there is a compliance to do lessons learned in project close out, and everyone reluctantly gets together (if they are available as most don’t have time as they have started on other projects). Then they go through the motions, it’s something we have to do I suppose, ok so what did you learn on the project, what worked, what didn’t…

The other thing is that without knowledge flow we forgo learning as it happens; rather than just learning at the end of a project.

I’m not saying to not do lessons learned sessions; but I’m saying without knowledge flow we leave it up to people to try and remember stuff; and the problem with this is that your memory fades, you don’t care as much as the time has past, things seem more linear in hindsight, you need context to trigger what you know. This last one is exactly why a blog is great at capturing experience as it happens. You are in a particular context in a project or someone asks you something, and you may answer it based on your expertise. Done, captured! At the lessons learned review the facilitator can now use these blog fragments to start conversations.

Let’s revisit some of Snowden’s KM principles; the first one I already shared earlier in this post

Human knowledge is deeply contextual and requires stimulus for recall. Unlike computers we do not have a list-all function

The way we know things is not the way we report we know things. There is an increasing body of research data which indicates that in the practice of knowledge people use heuristics, past pattern matching and extrapolation to make decisions, coupled with complex blending of ideas and experiences that takes place in nanoseconds. Asked to describe how they made a decision after the event they will tend to provide a more structured process oriented approach which does not match reality. This has major consequences for knowledge management practice

NOTE: I have spoken a lot about online connection as knowledge flow. But the same type of connection and valuable conversation of course happens face to face. Chris Collison shares the value of Peer Assist, Anecdote circles, open space, knowledge cafe’s, etc…). More accurately he shares the value of conversation (which is what we are all about):

As Knowledge Professionals, I believe that one of our most important tasks is to discover, surface, and give voice to experience.

People tell stories about their experience. If they presented or wrote them down, they inevitably filter, over-summarize, and post-rationalise with opinion and analysis – and it’s in that process when the waters get muddied, the purity of experience is lost – along with messages embedded in the tone of voice and body language. 

So what’s the purpose of all this? Improving decision-making and innovation.

Stephen Bounds add to this:

Knowledge Management is practised through activities that support better decision-making. IM is practised by improving the systems that store, capture, transmit etc information.

In this sense, a librarian neatly captures both sides of the coin. The act of building and making a library catalogue available is covered by IM. But the transaction by which a person can approach a librarian and leave with a relevant set of data to make a better decision is covered by KM. 

KM re-visited

I imagine that’s all I have to say about KM.

Actually, this post was inspired by James Dellow and Steven Oesterreich. It was my intention for this post to add to this discussion.

Here’s what Steven is suggesting: 

An idea for a debate: Making tacit knowledge explicit with collaborative technologies? 

Hi All- I want to open this up to the group. We want to have a debate for next years KM Australia and we were looking at the above topic - any other idea’s or suggestions on the topic? 

Here’s what James said in Steven’s post:  

I think that would be an excellent idea. Some suggestions around some similar themes:

* Is the Data, Information, Knowledge pyramid a failed concept?

* Does KM need technology or is it the other way around?

* With the rise of social software, is KM finally dead?

* Was KM only really just a fad? or Is KM just nonsense, created by consulting firms and software companies?

* If we can’t measure, touch or see ‘knowledge’, what exactly are we managing?

* Has KM been held back because of short sighted and reductionist management thinking or does KM just need to pay its way like the rest of the organisation?

* Are some people holding back the progress of KM, but making it sound harder and more complex than it is?

What ever you pick, it needs to be provocative! 

OK, signing off  

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