Library clips

My post on Just-in-Time KM finished on a note that needed to be expanded. It was a post about knowledge asymmetries and secrecy in relation to the corporate plot. It’s focus was on sharing, but the same concept applies to change and outcomes based management.

It’s not enough to have a vision or a plan (The Corporate Plot). People and teams/departments have their own agendas, your message gets interpreted and acted upon according to how relevant or in tune it is to that persons job. The goal is not changing people to comply with your vision, as people are not robots. Instead the goal is to get involved at ground zero in conversations. The idea is to make the individuals job easier to do, and you can only find out by involving them in the decision making.

This is essentially leading down the road of what some people call management 2.0, leadership, complexity, etc…so I am being careful in this post as it could potentially touch on many aspects and go on forever…I do have to restrain myself with my usual long blog posts.

Organisational politics; power-play, resource/budget scarcity, information hoarding, rewards, motivations, agendas is inevitable…and they are the reason why we are not self-organising like ants, biological systems, etc…it’s a fact of human nature, and therefore organisations. All we have is to the capacity to influence the constraints…and think about a more inclusive and holistic model.

Patrick Lambe on the Corporate Plot

 Peter Anthony-Glick on the Corporate Plot

Stephen Billing on the Corporate Plot

 Nilofer Merchant on the Corporate Plot

 Dave Snowden on the Corporate Plot

Going off on a tangent…

John Bordeaux encapsulates this nicely, like Snowden he talks about anticipatory awareness, rather than prediction. The title of his post says it all, "Don’t connect the dots, watch the noise"

Ron Ashkenas has a great post on controls for future events based on past events.

Related Quotes

A while back I posted about and shared a presentation I did at a KM Conference in Perth last year. The slidedeck is on my experience developing, supporting, and facilitating online Communities of Practice for a global EPCM (Engineering) consulting firm.

That presentation contained a couple of slides on participation and I spent a lot of time talking about these slides. For the CoP facilitators at my work I thought I would flesh this out into it’s own presentation, as participation is an important topic.

It’s not just important because there is a lot of content to cover, but because the nature of the content is something that is not really practiced or paid attention to. Normally all the focus is on command and control, rather than on people. I guess you could say this belongs in the same ballpark as Management vs Leadership, but only from the concept of running a CoP.

It’s important that managers who run CoPs understand that the usual scientific management approach based on the main concept of efficiency won’t cut it. CoPs are more like good parenting or leadership where you create conditions for good and emergent outcomes.

NOTE: Our CoPs have social tools like blogs, forums and wikis. Our team spaces don’t have these, so some teams are using CoPs. In this case the team is not really a CoP, but just using our CoP tools; therefore this presentation may not be as relevant in those cases. But still if you want an effective and engaged workplace, you need to pay attention to the happiness of your workers.

What is often missing in management practices is the anthropological aspect…observing group behaviour, leadership, interpersonal skills, trust, intrinsic motivations, social interaction/connection…

We need to focus on worker satisifaction and aspiration, rather than just ordering people to complete tasks.

When considering this in the context of “issues”; rather than continually doing surgery, why not look at the more holistic perspective….create conditions so the illness has less chance to emerge…disrupt the patterns.

Anyway…

Readers of this blog may already be familiar with the content of this presentation as I have blogged about it before in a post called Community of Practice for Facilitators : pilot, adoption and participation. I guess this presentation is a more succinct and refined version of my earlier thoughts.

It’s loosely divided into four parts:

Lessons and good practice

• Do you have a community leader with passion and time?
• Do you have passionate key members?
• Do you have a shared identity on what you want out of the community?
• The manager who thought he could create a community
• CoPs are Voluntary, Emergent, Self-selecting
• It has a sense of place, and needs to be tendered and cared
• Social tools are not built for a specific purpose
• Social tools are interactional rather than transactional
• Don’t need lots of members to succeed
• Subject matter expert needs to run it
• Merging CoPs is a risk
• Don’t over design look upfront
• I don’t want to share, that’s counter to meeting my objectives…and reward!!
• Intrinsic motivation, rather than rewards

Participation

• Design (Intuitive / Stickiness)
• Frequency of content
• Email interaction / Bookmarklet
• Peer influence
• Champions / Role models
• Viral approach
• Feedback (Reputation / Recognition)
• Group building
• Confidence / Comfort / Safe
• Trust
• Relationships (Give and Take)
• Personal relevancy / Change
• Post, and send link
• Attract comments
• Re-purposing email
• Hand-holding
• Barn-raising
• In-the-flow / Above-the-flow

Activities

• Offline to Online
• Member Intros
• Lounge forum
• Blog carnival
• Polls
• Guest posts
• Coffee Corner / Fill in the gap
• Member of the month
• Weekly roundup
• Personal stories
• People travelling
• Blog columns
• Engaging media (video)
• Email signature
• Newsletter
• Linking across CoPs
• Events
• Portal

Facilitating

• Garden
• Design
• Communicate
• Welcome
• Assist
• Support
• Prompt
• Correct
• Guides
• Promote
• Re-purpose
• Suggestions
• Feedback
• Congratulate
• Barnraise
• Monitor
• Listen
• Personal needs
• Subscribe
• Specialise

My last post was a review of a paper by Patrick Lambe, and in this post I review yet another paper on the same topic.

The point of this paper, called “Knowledge and Tragedy: or why we shouldn’t share knowledge”, is that sharing, even Just-in-Time sharing is not enough or a complete KM infrastructure, it’s the gap between knowing and acting that is often missing.

We often read about the same thing related to Lesson Learned…which need to be transferred into Lessons Applied.

The phrases below represent just a part of the KM program:

“If only we knew what we know”
“Right information, right time, right place”

These quotes are good but they are a plea, or ideal situation…they seem to highlight more of the distribution and management aspect, ie. describing ideal information management, rather than knowledge management…see my post on informal IM vs KM for more on this.

They are a starting point to get us thinking…but they don’t explicitly speak of real KM or the heart of KM ie. conversation/communication where queries and clarifications can be made, where information can be re-framed into usable contexts, and then applied becoming internalised as knowledge.
From which the output is again information, only waiting to be re-mixed into knowledge for someone else. For more on this thinking see my post It’s not about knowledge sharing, it’s about engagement and context!

Just-in-Time is only half of the story

Patrick uses story as a way to explain and remember this concept.

Artemidorus the philosopher passed on a note to Caesar “Just-in-Time” to avoid death…he gave him the note before Caesar entered the meeting hall where the senate were waiting to kill him (and indeed did).

As usual Caesar gave the note to one of his aides for keeping, as he is a busy man…he nearly got round to opening the note but was constantly distracted as busy men are.

Patrick says:

“Just-in-time knowledge wasn’t quite enough.”

“If we were relieved when Artemidorus turned up with the warning note, we were going as far as most knowledge management goes: getting the infrastructure in place to deliver the right knowledge to the right desktop in time for it to be used.”

And this is where the heart of KM lies:

“We also have to ensure that the recipient is capable of opening up the knowledge, understanding and using it appropriately, and that they have resources to do so”

NOTE: I would use the term “information” rather than “knowledge”

Work is conversation

This rings true with what David Weinberger says in relation to “work is conversation”:

“Business is a conversation because the defining work of business is conversation - literally. And ‘knowledge workers’ are simply those people whose job consists of having interesting conversations.”

David quotes on how conversation is the heart of KM:

“We get to knowledge — especially “actionable” knowledge — by having desires and curiosity, through plotting and play, by being wrong more often than right, by talking with others and forming social bonds, by applying methods and then backing away from them, by calculation and serendipity, by rationality and intuition, by institutional processes and social roles.

Most important in this regard, where the decisions are tough and knowledge is hard to come by, knowledge is not determined by information, for it is the knowing process that first decides which information is relevant, and how it is to be used.”

Patrick says:

“…the greater part of knowledge management lies not in information delivery (where we pay the most attention), but in the knowledge interpretation and deployment skills of knowledge workers…”

Asymmetries of knowledge

Patrick moves on to talk about asymmetries of knowledge (some people knowing what others don’t), basically “knowledge is power”.

“…lack of knowledge, disguise, conspiracy, forgery, misunderstandings, treachery and betrayal, drive the plots of tragedy forward”

He says:

“…in order to succeed, we need to know things that our competitor’s don’t know. We need imperfect knowledge to exist”

…”it can only be shared if sharing moves the plot forward towards triumph and away from tragedy”

The issue here is that this happens within an organisation, where it ideally shouldn’t. The reason for this is covered in my post, “I dont want to share that’s counter to meeting my objectives and reward”…in reference to the model of “well defined measurable objectives and tying them directly to compensation”

To quote myself:

“…this is a strategy to amass an aggregate of personal efficiency ie an incentive to stack a pile of efficient people, at the expense of an effective organisation where the people share what they know with each other so the organisation can adapt, be resilient, innovate, etc…”

Of course there are many other factors that lead to silo’d models…departments competing for resources, politics, etc…silos are natural (we need to bridge, not smash).

Then Patrick gives it the full blow:

“Successful knowledge management in the real world is not about indiscriminate knowledge sharing at all: it’s far more about knowing what to share and when and with whom, what to keep secret, and what to reveal, whom to trust, and whom to avoid”

Our behaviours are servants to the game

This sounds terrible, but it is real in a capitalist society…we are servants of this system, and behave in ways to survive, and beyond…greed!

I do think things are changing, we are moving away from the fetish of fake customer service, to a more real relationship with customers/clients, based on transparency, co-creation, trust, loyalty and being treated as a real relationship, rather than fake customer service.

As long as our industrial structures and models are about compensating for individual action (over collaboration) knowledge hoarding is a model for not only survival, but success.

I say this in relation to the individual department, at the expense of the organisation as a whole.
I say this in relation to the organisation as a whole, at the expense of the industry.
I say this in relation to the industry, at the expense of society.

I really like that capitalism has provided opportunity for freedom, experimentation, innovation; but as a whole the invisible hand model of competition and consumers is flawed (but aren’t all, maybe it’s the players)…it’s absent of the holistic person, and sees them as actors in a game. Maybe this is what religious texts means by the anti-christ…our economic model is leading us more and more away from our spirit/humanity.

And then came the web, and places like the blogosphere, wikipedia and Twitter…but the information/network economy is different from the; “competing for resources”, “attention for consumers”,“tragedy of the commons” economy…but they are also intertwined.

But we need to digest more than information and connecting in networks to survive eg food…the world is not Twitter…not yet anyway

Sorry about the tangent into capitalism…

Knowledge secrecy

Patrick uses a story to describe the nature of “knowledge is power” in an economy based on competition.

He talks about a food business that sells quail products called the House of Quail.

They share some recipes, nutrition and quail information as it’s in their interests to attract and inform customers…creating a world for them.

But they would be foolish to share the recipes they use in their food stall (based on a family history of trial and error), and they would be foolish to share where they source their high quality qualis (based on a lot of research and connections).

Now I agree to not share all your intellectual capital, as we need to survive in a economy based on competition. But, it’s important not to just rely on this as your differentiator.

In today’s economy someone else will open a Quail shop and be able just like you, and without your help, to source good quail and possess amazing family recipes. In fact they may even be cashed up, and buy in bulk so they can offer cheaper quail but still the same quality…and have a better and faster supply chain, etc…

What I’m getting at is that the true value today is not just the quality, affordability and uniqueness of what you do and offer, but the community you generate. The sustainable value is engaged workers, and engaged clients/customers based on transparency, loyalty, trust, co-creation, etc…

If you have these things as well, you will attract a community…a community generates a likeable atmosphere, so much so that you would rather hang out there even though some other place is cheaper or more unique. You would rather hang where you have already established a relationship, where you have a history of fulfillment.

As long as you have conditions to generate a community, you have the number one thing.

Near my work we have an animal welfare information/association place. Now you can imagine that sort of place would have it’s niche community. Several years on I have noticed they now have a cafe, and it was thriving. It’s not in a real good location where there is foot traffic, the place is not really pleasing to the eye, and I’m not sure if they have anything unique on their menu. But I bet the staff are down to earth, honest, respect and chat to their customers in a more real and friendly way (building relationships), etc…

Another anecdote…

I used to work in a tiny video shop that specialised in arthouse and foreign films. Our customers were mostly film buffs and academics…we provided to a niche market. We also had to stock some mainstream stuff to service some locals and to also make sure we generated a profit.
Lot’s of our customers became friends…when they came to the shop we could talk for an hour about film and other stuff, we were very low key and informal…people felt comfortable (at home). So much so that it was a great place for people to hang.
This gave us the idea to open a cafe and sell film stuff eg. scripts, a place for students to write and talk. Why not, we had a community of people in our hands who had passion for film.
If we implemented our idea I bet it would have worked, but unfortunately a major chain video shop opened across the road and killed us. You see, we could not survive on our niche product alone, we needed our mainstream customers, but now they got a better deal from the major chain.

The major chain don’t care about film like our shop, they just care about making money…they don’t have a community feel when you visit, it’s more just consumer transactions…they don’t offer niche films, they just offer what sells. Basically the major chain killed culture. But I’m not having a go at them, it’s just the reality of capitalism, the fact that it has no ceiling, and no holisitic intention for a better society.

Sorry about the tangent again…

Patrick also shares a few other stories: like the warehouse manager that won’t share how things are done, for fear of potentionally being replaced, and the executive who queried about the threat of KM…could it know how he swings a deal, his network of contacts and strong relationships that took years to build.

Patrick comments on the reality of the situation:

“If newer, cheaper and more malleable executives work for long enough with the target of the desired knowledge, eventually they will acquire enough confidence to cut the umbilical cord. They’ll never do the same job…they they’ll muddle through and learn their own way to success once they’ve got the basics. The business will survive”

Some might say it’s a choice: you either hoard so you have an edge, or you share and build a social reputation. When you share you are not just a dynamic performer, but you are also helping everyone else to be one as well, and that is reason for the company to actually hold on to you…it’s doing wonders for celebrity chefs.

Conclusion

This conclusion is outstanding, and reminds me of wise words by some other bloggers that I will share in the next post.

Patrick concludes:

“We assume, naïvely, that only the corporate plot and its aspiration towards triumph matters when it comes to knowledge asymmetries, and that everybody will share knowledge willingly once they understand what the corporate plot is. We forget that individuals and small groups also have smaller plots, smaller tragedies and triumphs, and their own unique aspirations. And they will also use knowledge asymmetries to drive themselves towards success, regardless of what the bigger, more impersonal plots of our superiors dictate.”

Patrick summarizes:

“Caesar’s unopened letter…teaches us…it’s not enough to simply deliver the knowledge, important though that is. The key is whether knowledge is, or can be, acted upon. That means far more emphasis on helping our people become skilled knowledge users.”

“…we don’t have to have perfect knowledge management, nor would we particularly enjoy it. In a competitive world, we simply have to be better at managing knowledge asymmetries than our current competitors are. As it turns out, that also means a greater emphasis on skills: building the experience, intuition and resourcefulness of our knowledge workers.”

“…we need to recognise that the corporate plot occupies only a part of most people’s lives. Knowledge sharing and knowledge secrecy also operate in our personal trajectories through life. When the two conflict, when my interest appears to be compromised by the dictates of my masters, then I will deploy my knowledge asymmetries first in my own defense – if not actively, at least passively. And unless our interests are selfish and cruel, it is right that we should do so.”

My last couple of posts have been about how important context is in KM. Without connecting to people, conversing and re-contextualising we are not really doing KM. In my mind knowledge doesn’t come in packets off a shelf; it’s a dance.

My last posts are:
KM in context : sense-making and connectedness
It’s not about knowledge sharing, it’s about engagment and context!
Informal information management and knowledge management are not the same

I want to harp on about context for a final installement, and I do this by reviewing a section of a paper by Patrick Lambe called “The Autism of Knowledge Management”.
I read this paper a long time ago and was blown away, and never got round to blogging about it. Mark Gould has got me in the mood as he recently blogged about the same paper. My previous post also linked to Marks post.

Like Mark I will share this same excerpt:

“There is a profound and dangerous autism in the way we describe knowledge management and e-learning. At its root is an obsessive fascination with the idea of knowledge as content, as object, and as manipulable artefact. It is accompanied by an almost psychotic blindness to the human experiences of knowing, learning, communicating, formulating, recognising, adapting, miscommunicating, forgetting, noticing, ignoring, choosing, liking, disliking, remembering and misremembering.”

Marks favourite part was the Myth of Completeness, the part that resonated for me at this point in time are the Myth of Reusablity and the Myth of Universality.

I really encourage you to read this whole paper as it once and for all describes the importance of context and the fallacy of knowledge objects.

Here’s a starter:

“Disengaging a piece of knowledge from its context is a remarkably difficult thing to do, even when you’re trying to do it. The Cisco experience suggests that even if you manage to do that, the object’s application to other contexts, its reusability, suffers. Context neutrality seems to disengage knowledge and learning from its immediate relevance, and makes it harder to ascribe significance to it.”

Steve Barth posts about this reality:

“Disconnecting knowledge from its source, in terms of people and places, will remove from that knowledge the very context which infuses it with life. Because indigenous knowledge is continuously generated and renewed in the living practices of people, archiving in isolation from practice removes its ongoing relevance….”

MYTH OF REUSABILITY

Patrick imagining the myth:

“All you do when you create a new programme is compile all the different pieces from the repository, and sequence them accordingly. The same objects can be used in lots of different courses, and in lots of different contexts, for lots of different types of people.”

THE ORANGE JUMPSUIT EXAMPLE

Criteria to be a jumpsuit

- one-piece coverall
- from neck to ankle
- fastens at the front
- it’s the colour orange

“What could be simpler than that? A better candidate for a reusable object in lots of contexts, you could not find. Your principal concern, surely, would be the simple one of providing a range of different sizes – and we could call that our personalization strategy.”

Functional Context starts to intervene

eg. worn in the cleanroom of a high-tech manufacturing company, astronauts, formula one car drivers, repairman, mechanic or housepainter

- require a thicker, warmer, more durable material
- require more pockets
- resistant to moisture, static and dust
- cold and fire retardant material

Social Context starts to intervene

eg worn as a privilege (badges of honour)
eg standard issue for convicts in the United States (these jumpsuits do not have any pockets)

“Orange jumpsuits, despite their apparent simplicity, are not reusable across categories, neither by function nor by meaning […] So if even a simple object like the jumpsuit cannot travel far out of its native context, why would we expect that an abstraction, an indeterminate knowledge object, would?”

MYTH OF UNIVERSALITY

Patrick assumes the myth:

“…the same piece of knowledge can be applied universally. It’s true, and relevant, everywhere.”

The next quote is an opening statement to the detriment of or Just-in-case KM

“…death knell to spurious arguments about the economic value of mass producing standard knowledge objects for global distribution.”

Factors

- time (out-dated) eg. knowing morse code will not land you a job like it once did
- place eg. react different to a bombscare than someone in the same city as the scare
- cultural eg training bank tellers in different countries would have to consider cultural sensitivities

“There is no such thing as universally applicable knowledge, and this is why the market for the localisation of instruction manuals, software and e-learning has blossomed in recent years.”

Further to this, Patrick states that it’s not about sculpturing or altering the content to suit the local context, but:

“…much more like a local construction of knowledge at the source of need, achieved by checking our own experience and observations, asking other people’s opinions and looking at other people’s apparently relevant knowledge artefacts. The more localised these artefacts are, the easier it may be to accept them as
apparently relevant, but the artefacts themselves do not accomplish the knowing.“

MYTH OF INTERCHANGEABILITY

Interchangeability is not as you think, as knowledge is not a thing:

“Let’s say that the photocopier suddenly starts a strange pattern of behaviour. It jams repeatedly every Monday morning. Technicians come and replace the rollers, but it still happens, and it happens every week.
It’s clear that we don’t solve this problem simply by replacing parts. It’s clear that something beyond the sum of parts is creating the problem.

The smart technician will start asking questions about habits of use. He might discover, for example, that because of cost cutting measures, the airconditioning is now switched off in the building over the weekend, the paper already in the machine expands from the higher humidity, and it jams easily because the rollers are calibrated for thinner, dryer sheets. He might also discover that the sales presentation meetings have been moved from Fridays to Monday afternoons, placing added stress on the machine on Monday mornings.

Understanding the science, and being able to label and replace components does little to resolve problems that arise from social and human initiatives and changes. And most knowledge and learning issues arise precisely from social and human initiatives and changes.”

“..when I have a specific working problem such as how to resolve a complex financial issue, the last thing I want is a necklace of evenly manufactured knowledge nuggets cross-indexed and compiled according to the key words I happen to have entered into the engine.”

“What really adds value to my problem-solving will be an answer that cuts to the chase, gives me deep insight on the core of my problem, and gives me light supporting information at the fringes of the problem, with the capability to probe deeper if I feel like it. Better still if the answer can be framed in relation to something I already know, so that I can call more of my own experience and perceptions into play. Evenness and interchangeability will not work for me, because life and the situations we create are neither even, nor made up of interchangeable parts.

We do have an evolved mechanism for achieving such deep knowledge results: this is the performance you can expect from a well-networked person who can sustain relatively close relationships with friends, colleagues and peers, and can perform as well as request deep knowledge services of this kind.”

Mark Gould brings this back to personal knowledge management (PKM):

“I can think of few more succinct and clear expressions of the process of knowing. In the organisational context, we need to be sure that everyone takes responsibility for developing their own knowledge — they cannot just plug themselves into a knowledge system or e-learning package.”

“I suspect that (whether inside our organisations or otherwise) we can all identify people whose personal networks add significant value to their work and those around them. (And probably plenty whose silo mentality brings problems rather than focus.)”

I have posted on PKM before and Steve Barth believes this is the heart of KM, also see Mary Abraham’s PKM Primer post.

THE MYTH OF COMPLETENESS

“Is it simply assumed, that once the knowledge is delivered, it has been successfully transferred?

“Out of the box and into the head, and hey presto the stuff is known. The evidence for this is in the almost complete lack of attention to what happens outside the computerised storage and delivery mechanism – specifically, what people do with knowledge, how it transitions into action and behaviour. How many people in knowledge management are talking about synapses, or the soft stuff that goes on in people’s heads?”

“Knowledge only has value if it is emerges into actions, decisions and behaviours – that much is
generally conceded.”

“How will you know you are making it correctly?” “I’ll have to spend a couple of months feeding my family wah kueh, until I get the taste right” she replied. This story, in miniature, is how we actually normally acquire knowledge.

Patrick continues with a classic case of re-using information used elsewhere (actually information created by another company) without actually understanding and re-mixing it to suit the context of the situation. ie. they didn’t do the KM. Creating new knowledge is not an explicit thing, it just happens from doing work.

Sure it’s great to save time by getting a head start from previously shared information, but information re-use is not enough, it’s just a start to re-model it into something applicable. This way the content is always in a flux, information is always being found where you can connect to the authors and others, and re-hash it into new contexts.

This is a good junction to re-visit Andrew Gent’s KM Core Sample (I posted about it here).

The press release of the knowledge fumble Patrick reviews goes a bit like this:

“Two completely different rivers. Two completely different types of dams. Two completely different forest types to be submerged. Two different locations […] The only expertise in this reuse of knowledge artefacts, is cut and paste expertise; and not especially complex cut and paste expertise – 60 pages of the 65 page report were exactly the same.

Does…advice on…projects carry any weight, if reusability of knowledge artefacts is not supplemented by processing, integration, application to context, and reference to experience? To what extent is the object-oriented knowledgebase designed for chunking and reusability simply authorised plagiarism, following the form rather than the substance of knowing and learning?”

Thanks for a superb essay Patrick!

“The gap between knowing and acting is a big gap, and a glaring one. The gap between knowledge and behaviour is a critical one to bridge”