Library clips

Andrew Gent has a timeless blog post on the four paradoxes of KM, which I pointed to in a past post.

“There are different models and approaches for managing knowledge — any of which can be helpful in establishing goals, a strategy, and tactical initiatives for a corporate KM program. Each model narrows the focus to a subset of the larger problem.”

“The reality is that any given KM program has only so much time, money, or attention to spend and must tactically select what problems to attack and how, thereby staking a position on each issue. And when you do, there will be advocates within management, among your professional peers, and in your audience base who will argue — loudly — for the alternative.”

The 4 KM paradoxes are:

1. Tacit vs Explicit
2. Local vs Global
3. Open vs Closed
4. Quantity vs Quality

Andrew Gent’s blog post is a quick and worthwhile read, view his post the KM Core Sample which is related to tacit and codification. I’m just going to comment on the Local vs Global paradox in relation to Communities of Practice as it relates to current talks I’m having at the moment in creating communities for a Procurement practice.
Do we create multiple communities by region, by specialty, do we also have a general community (where there is overlap in interests)? What’s the downside of splintered communities? Will people identify and participate in a general community?

We are thinking about communities by region, as each is a different kettle of fish. But then each region may have about 10% issues in common with other regions, so this discussion could take place in a general or home community.
At the end of this post, you will see, this type of community formation would fail the “I am a…” test, which is more about communities with a speciality, a community people can identity with…

Local vs Global

Andrew cuts to the reality of the situation:

“It is relatively easy to establish a community for knowledge sharing within a local area. Sharing involves trust and trust is easier to establish among people who share physical and cultural proximity.”

“But for large companies, sharing knowledge locally is not the problem. Making information and problem solutions visible and available across the corporation is the issue. Consequently, these localized efforts actually create barriers to sharing knowledge between regions and organizations.”

“Global communities are harder to get started. Individuals don’t feel as connected…there is actually a chicken-and-egg situation…people will claim…there is no benefit in their participating in the global community because it isn’t as active as their local group. But the global community cannot thrive until the individuals get involved…”

“So, the individuals would prefer and will — in the absence of any outside influence — create small, closed, local groups. But from a larger corporate perspective there is a critical need to establish and foster global sharing. And until the global communities are firmly established and prove their worth, there can be continuing and sometimes heated battles over who gets to establish communities and how.”

If we go for the global approach the community is relatively more prone to fail, whereas with a more local community people trust each other enough, and feel they are not wasting their time sharing or explaining things with close colleagues, as this gesture will be understood and reciprocated.

So do we start small to get traction and then overcome the local barrier issue by merging later on, or will it be too late as people will be against the merger?
If so, this is a good thing as it means they are passionate about their community, it has an identity that is being challenged…so it will be best left alone. The only issue we will have is one of convenience of a one stop shop community, but if it’s a choice of one global unactive community compared to several thriving smaller communities then we will have to go without convenience.

Trust and numbers

Is this just about geography, I think it’s also about numbers and who you trust and are willing to spend time sharing information. Let’s also make clear that the higher abstraction (same wavelength) we have with others the more chance there is for their information to be internalised as knowledge. The less you know someone and their way, the less you will be able to intake their information/messages into knowledge, resulting in just an information transfer rather than a knowledge transfer (if you wanna speak the lingo).

In a past blog post I review Dave Snowden’s view on effective community numbers, and also the fact that when communities get too large the quality of dialogue may be diluted by new comers who are not aware of the past interactions and whose contributions are not of the same calibre, which somewhat snags the community. If these new comers out number the originals, the calibre of the community can totally flip, and the originals may leave.

We can only have close relationships with only so many people, we only have a certain amount of time to nuture a close knit of people, and in large communities experts would get burnt out.

Specific or General

I think this scenario is also related to General vs Specific topic communities, again a general community is a convenient one stop shop, whereas splintered communities mean related knowledge is fragmented. But as mentioned above at least we have more participation in more specific communities.

The Anecdote blog share a blog post on how people need to identify with a community, the more specific the more they can identify:

“Etienne was helping a car manufacturer establish a community and practice and the first thought was to connect the company’s engineers. They took this idea to potential community members and discovered there was little interest: the scope was too broad. ‘Yeh sure I’m an engineer but I have nothing in common with chemical engineers.’ The second attempt was to narrow the scope to automotive engineers: still little interest. It wasn’t until they reduced the scope to brake engineers did they find a group of people who thought they had enough in common, a shared identity, to band together as a community of practice.”

They go on to mention the simple “I am a…” test to find promising communities:

“I now have a simple test to gauge whether a community of practice might form. When someone says, “I would like to start a community of practice.” I ask, “Can you describe the potential members by completing the following sentence? I am a …..” If they can fill in the blank in a way that people can passionately identify with the descriptor then there is a chance a community might emerge. Let me give you an example. I was helping the Department of Defence design a community of practice for project managers. ‘I am a project manager’ was a strong descriptor and so we knew we had a chance. During the design process the client has another job type for which they wanted a community to support simply called ‘technical’. ‘I am a technical’ didn’t inspire so we knew it was unachievable. The ‘I am a …” test is easy and effective.”

Shawn Callahan (the author of the Anecdote blog) has also left a great comment on his blog post about never having a hard a fast rule in defining the scope of a community, each situation is different.

“The ActKM (a public CoP) was named with a scope covering all of knowledge management. There have been a number of times when we think that the scope should be narrower but such a move would significantly fracture the group. In ActKM’s case the scope has emerged from the conversations. For example, you are unlikely to see a deeply technical discussion on ActKM but you will find many theoretical discussions on ways to view the discipline. The discussion act as an attractor for certain people and a repellent for others.”

“It’s for this reason why I think you can’t be too rigid with defining the scope. It will adapt with the needs and interests of the members.”

“Another way to look at the scope is to think about the level of abstraction occuring in the discussion. If the discussion is too detailed for the audience the audience will get bored and leave. If the discussion is too high-level and assumes everyone knows the jargon and acroymns the audience is unable to understand and will leave. Like the three bears the level of abstraction in the discussion has to be just right.”

[ADDED 8/1/09: The top-down and bottom-up creation of enterprise communities, and wikis
The participation issue from community ownership and structure
Community Lessons]

Not long ago I wrote a post called “7 seconds to knowledge share” based on a post at Infovark.

Here’s something I said:

“I really think blogs and the like need to be features of existing products.
(You would think our document management system would have an item comment stream (like Google Docs)…”

This really ties up with Bill Ives’s comments that I’ve quoted on two posts about old KM being both workflow and repository types…the problem being that the workflow types were too rigid so we went elsewhere for these exceptions, and the repository types were out of our flow, not in tune with human behaviour, and as Bill says, “…it became managing knowledge rather than supporting work”

At this stage of KM 2.0 or enterprise 2.0 we have seen people familiarising themselves with these new social tools, and how they are the new exception handler. Instead of using email to get work done because my workflow tools are too rigid, I can now use wiki or a blog for these workarounds, etc…the benefit is openness, transparency, visibility, feedback and evolving…basically pooling our talent.

I think the next phase of KM 2.0 (no, I’m not calling it KM 3.0 or KM 2.5) is going to be where answers to these exceptions will be shared into the flow.

Firstly the idea is for these new social tools to become boring, as said by Clay Shirky.

Secondly we are going to see features of blogs and wikis in existing workflow tools.
Like I said in the quote at the start of this post, we need “blog it” features in our current workflow tools, etc…just like every object has “print this” or “email this”…

Further to this we need our current workflow products (an example is a support database-from users logging calls, to working on calls, to closing the call, to harvesting the unique calls to a solutions page) to be blogified and wikified.
I think along with wikis and blogs as standalone tools, we are going to see our workflow tools incorporate wiki and blog features, but yet it won’t be a blog or a wiki. We will have “post it” buttons on forms that publish fragments from our workflow to other places, yet we don’t have a blog in our workflow, it’s just a form, kind of like an edge feed like publi.sh.
We will perhaps have access to a “edit this” button at stages in our workflow to add/edit notes to a page
eg. you get to a stage of a workflow where the procedures really don’t help you with a clients need, this becomes an exception, but as you get to this stage someone has edited this page and instructed you how to move on with this type of client need. The talent pool is able to share their experiences and know-how right into the workflow…it’s not really a standalone wiki, it’s just a wikified object.

What I like about “edit this’ all over the place is that we don’t have to go to a separate repository (wiki-page) to see if people have shared this type of information before, instead it’s right in our flow, without us even having to think about it.

The current stage of KM 2.0 is that people have a personal interest in sharing their know-how, there’s less resistance, in fact people feel the benefits, and it’s all due to tools with a low barrier to entry, and how they are in tune with human behaviour, just the way we converse offline.

These tools are open and transparent and perpetually evolve content, but similar to KM 1.0 they are still a separate place from our workflow. When we want to know something, we visit a blog or wiki to see if anyone has shared some insight, if we find something relevant, we then go back to our workflow and move to the next stage.

It’s not just about workflows, of course blogs and wikis are used outside of workflows eg. personal blogs, communication blogs, wikipedia’s, wikis for lists, wikis for meetings, wikis for documentation, etc…

I just think the next phase is using features of these tools into our existings workflows, so when we get to dead end, we don’t go elsewhere to find a way to move on, instead the answer is right there. If it’s not, then when you do find an answer you include it in the workflow stage that you are at so the next person will go through the flow like a speed bump rather than a detour.

This is all about the ubiquity of social tools in context of workflows.

Related
Knowledge visibility, conversation, and the In and Out Flow

[ADDED 30/09/08: In-the-Flow with Acumen Fund]

[ADDED 14/01/08: KM 2.0 : doing your job or giving back to the organisation]

A couple of months ago I was asked by the editor at “KM Review” to write an opinion piece for their organisational learning issue.

This could not have come at a better time as my blogging has come to a convergence point where the read/write web has enabled KM and Learning to become one in the same in some respect.

It also got me recognition at work even though I have been internal blogging about this stuff for ages, it goes to show the power of authoritativeness.

This article was a challenge as I had a 700 word limit, my only other experience is an interview, so actually writing a piece was a developing a new skill set for me, very different from blogging.

Blogging is easy as I choose the topics and I can blab on for as long as I want…having a word limit and a different audience changes all this.

Rather than my affordances of space and casualness to allow stream of consciousness, personal, and informal writings; the different audience, format and word limit, meant I had to pack a punch with each paragraph, and try to fill out my statements without the luxury of pointing to examples, experience, and explanations.

I found this very hard, and have since come to know that blogging is a very different beast than traditional publishing (the good thing about KM Review is they let me say what I want, so there is no inhouse bias or anything like that). Even though a blog can be used to publish professional articles, I think traditionally it’s more sharing, opinion and a learning soapbox, a way to express and develop…a conversation.

In a blog I’m expressing my thoughts and ideas as it happens in an informal fashion, whereas in an article I am codifying what I know.
NOTE: Basically I looked over all my blog posts and condensed them into the article.
I also looked in delicious for stuff that has come across my radar in the past that I bookmarked for a rainy day, and I also searched my Google Reader. Just this research process alone (come to me web) typifies exactly what this article is about, very zen…checkout Lee Bryant’s post for more on network productivity/social filtering/actionable collective intelligence, I’ve quoted it in my k-flow post.

From reading the article I’m not sure if all the information will holistically be understood by the reader, as there is not much room to explain in 700 words. But if you were then to read my blog posts, you would get to know my character, as a blog allows it to come through; you would get to know my style and wavelength, and you can leave comments to clarify points, contexts and examples with me. Also with each point I make I have the liberty to expand on contexts, and examples.

In the end there is going to be more of a chance that the information is transferred to the reader and internalised as knowledge, as the reader has more of a scope and familiarity (abstraction) with me to understand my message (signal).

These two formats complement each other, and I’ve spoken before about the power of blogs being used as “thinking out loud” and “work in progress” in writing a deliverable. Firstly this is a crowdsourcing technique to evolve the deliverable itself, and secondly when reading the deliverable a reader can refer to various blog posts for more peripheral information on the “workings out” of what took place.

Why is this important?

Deliverables and best practices are not always going to suit your situation, and when applied like a recipe can have a distasterous effect as they can leave out peripheral content, and your context is different. A best practice is not always going to be the best practice (pardon the pun) as there are so many different variables that can be different with your situation…see my post on on anticipatory awareness for more.

Alternate methods, like blogs, wikis and social networking really fit in with the promotion of knowledge sharing, and this is captured nicely by Ron Young’s article in the same issue of KM Review called “Reap the rewards from combining learning and KM”.

The virtuous KM circle is made up of: Trust, Communicate, Learn, Share

If you don’t have trust, then people are less likely to share or communicate, and less learning results.

Also there must be a personal benefit, like a learning feedback loop or reputation as a publisher, to motivate you to share (What’s in it for me?)

…you can become a subject matter expert when you make your know-how visible (and people can subscribe to your thoughts)

Again, once you have trust and simple tools, and a way to connect to people, we are more prone to share. We receive feedback and a reputation in this conversation network, in the end, as Dave Snowden says, we may form interdependencies with our trust circle which ultimately means our most effective way to get work done is by leveraging the social capital (ie. we come to rely on each other to share what we know to get things done). So by creating the conditions for “knowledge sharing”, we have enabled it to happen using a naturalistic approach.

Ron sums this up by saying:

“Capturing new learning and ideas as they occur…transforms an organization from an environment of episodic learning and innovation to one of continual learning and innovation.

Giving people an ecosystem where they can: improve, learn, self develop, and connect to like people, is a way to achieve the aims of KM. Not only can we re-use and apply knowledge to given situations but we become smarter and agile, so there is a mutual benefit at both the individual and organisational level

Related
Social learning and social computing
Flexible uses of web 2.0 tools

Dave Snowden once again hones in on “trust”, and creating conditions for it, as a naturalistic approach to knowledge sharing. Rather than focusing on “knowledge sharing” itself, we are focusing on shaping our efforts to human behaviour, so people are ultimately sharing of their own accord.

Trust

This is how he said it last time (gee I’ve linked to this post about 5 times):

“Knowledge is a voluntary act, if people trust each other they will share. If they work together and create interdependencies then they will share…Good management (including knowledge management) is about creating the right sort of environment and interactions. Creating a set of explicit targets is an abrogation of management responsibility not its assumption.”

Anticipation

And the time before that (I quoted it in this post as well):

“Its critical to realise that no one will refuse people knowledge in the context of real need, but few if any people will publish what they know in anticipation of need. That means that it is more important to focus on the channels through which knowledge flows than on the knowledge itself. That means linking and connecting people and there are a range of techniques of which SNS is the Rolls Royce It’s also true that using social computing in the way I advocated above will hugely increase the connectivity and the ability of the network to create a resilience and responsive mechanism for distributing knowledge.”

And here’s how he said it recently which explicitly points at the faults of how KM was run in the past:

“My general response to people who ask the question How do we get people to share what they know, is If you have to ask the question then you have probably taken the wrong approach. In my experience people generally do want to share, but they may not want to share in the manner prescribed by the corporate KM department. If you ask someone for assistance in the context of real and immediate need it will rarely be refused. Ask someone to share knowledge in the absence of that need, or in a form or manner determined by a centralised function then it will nearly always be refused.

Sharing needs to be linked to tools that support the way in which humans have evolved to share knowledge, not the way that IT departments have designed most current systems. They also need to be linked to common perceived need. Look at the success of blogging between platoon commanders in Iraq compared with formal distribution of doctrine if you want a good example.”

I first mentioned this naturalistic realisation to knowledge sharing, in my post Knowledge sharing in the new KM (includes Jon Husband interview with Dave Snowden on Web 2.0):

“1. If people need knowledge in the “context” of need it will always be shared
- people will share in the context of your immediate need

2. People don’t share knowledge in the anticipation that you need it
- if you ask people (perhaps someone you may not know) to put it in a common data store for a possible need in the future, on the basis you might need it…it just doesn’t happen.”

Weakness of codification

Dave also explains the weakness of codifying anticipated material:

“We urgently need to shift from working with chunked documents that seek to summarise material, to increasing direct access to fine granularity raw data in the form of anecdotes, sound files, pictures etc. etc. The process of chunking, or abstraction involves loss of content which may well contain weak signals or subtle clues and more importantly involves making the material specific to the context of its creation in time and socio-cultural context.”

The past doesn’t always help us

In a past post I quoted Jay Cross:

“Workers need to be able to assess new situations, learn in real time, and improvise solutions. That’s an entirely new learning agenda, for it means putting enough trust in workers to give them the wheel”

Seeking people

There’s no need to get into the other end of the knowledge sharing scenario, which is the knowledge seeker. Rather than go to a database to fill a need (that you hope you find because some altruistic person decided to share their know-how for no apparent reason, but for potential use in the future), we are implying that people go to people for information…for more see Ross Dawson’s quote on my k-flow post.
NOTE: reading a blogosphere is similar to going to people, rather than a database, because blog content is informal and conversational

In KM 2.0 we have a publish and subscribe model, where we are learning off each other daily whether we have a need or not. Although we may share know-how that is not needed now, it’s not totally altruistic, it’s to generate conversation, you know your sharing is worthwhile as people are subscribed and listening or they can visit your blog at any time and leave comments.

Anticipatory Awareness

My post Adapting to change with enterprise 2.0, has yet another quote by Dave Snowden, here’s a a little piece:

“Faced with an intractable problem, do you go and draw down best practice from your company’s knowledge management system, or do you go and find eight or nine people you know and trust with relevant experience and listen to their stories?”

“The free flow of the blogosphere, ad hoc collaboration, Facebook and many other tools work because they conform with the patterns of expectation that arise from our evolutionary uncertainty”

Actually I’m finding “anticipatory awareness” a hard thing to succinctly define, see more here.

This post has focused on contributing what you know, which draws on the concept of people sharing knowledge with others they trust or in the context of a real need, rather than the highly resisted, codifying what they know into a database in case it becomes handy in the future (which has value loss anyway).

In this respect KM 2.0 is more about living in the present (living in the moment), rather than spending our time and focus on possible future needs (supply-side KM). When that future comes it will no longer be the future, it will be the present, and in that moment we will use KM 2.0 methods to get our work done.

I’m not neglecting the future, I’m just saying we can’t spend all our time (and money) codifying information that may never be used in the future, at the expense of spending our time creating new knowledge now. In KM 2.0, when the future comes we can network or look at past blog posts, etc to fill our needs. These past blog posts were not created for this future need, they filled a past need, if their content extends to aiding tasks in the future, well that’s just great

Plus the fact that the process of codification can leave behind valuable content; sanitised and summarised documents may leave out handy peripheral information and context. We have to be aware of situational differences, and not be prone to blindly following a method from the best practice master file like a recipe.

…and beyond

By using this new approach with simple participative networking tools, we go beyond achieving knowledge sharing, ie. the more static end-to-end method of knowledge store and knowledge seek. KM 2.0 generates an ecosystem where people are connected and become more autonomous in getting things done…in all we become a learning organisation. Further to this it may indeed change the way organisations are managed (management 2.0).

From aiming to achieve the KM task of extracting and distributing know-how, these same tools have taken us to even greater places of an evolution in management, and ultimately how this transparency may alter the decisions we make, and how the result of the way we use these tools may change or shape our culture.

Related

Conversations, Connections and Context
KM 2.0 culture

Yammer - a hosted enterprise Twitter, similar in the way Facebook hosts enterprise spaces by using the enterprise email address as a secure space.
I noticed it lacks private messages, other than that it does everything else, and is well designed:
- they have incorporated some desktop apps, you can also get access via SMS, IM, email
- they have incorporated search and tags
- you have a choice to see threaded replies (tags with your name, and replies to you display in your received stream)
- it lacks “favourites”, but you can email an item to yourself
- not sure if you can organise your friends by tag, which would be good so you can have a few streams to watch

By default this doubles up as a staff directory, social network, and also has a org chart for each person (showing who you report to).
For more on the usefulness of micro-blogging check out my post 140 characters to knowledge share…I must check out Socialcast next.
[via AG]

PureText - now this is handy, whenever I cut and paste text but I first want to strip the formating, I open Notepad, paste it in there, then cut it and paste it in my blog post, email, document, etc…
Now I don’t have to do that, instead of pressing CTRL-V to paste I click a hotkey of my choice like WINDOWS-V (set this to any hotkey in the options)
So now if I want to copy and paste and strip out the formatting I do CTRL-C, then WINDOWS-V
[via b]

Wiggio - create a group site, see BlastGroups and others [WWD]

Gravatar - “…an avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites.”

mixin - similar to Twitter, but for scheduling, availability, planning…basically micro-agenda. Post what you are gonna do, suggest a plan, etc…they use colours to see at a glance what type of item it is:
Green - your availability
Blue - make a suggestion
Orange - share an event
Cream - where you are, or will be
Pink - share your wish

You can even put in your latest week into your email signature…see their blog for more.