By doing and experiencing we dissolve the boundary between object and subject

Snowden says:

“Narrative acts as a half way house between the embodied knowledge of the taxi-driver and the abstracted and impersonal voice of the Sat Nav.

Narrative mediates the embodied and the symbolic.

Any good teacher uses stories and metaphors to enliven their papers (or those of others). Talk to a taxi driver and they can tell stories that help get you close to their knowledge

Without the mediation of narrative then can be no knowledge transfer or learning

Without the symbolic learning will not diffuse to broad populations and their will be no advance

Without embodied knowledge there will be no wisdom”

This is why observable work and blogging raw happenings is so important
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2010/07/08/the-know-why-tragedy-divorced-from-my-work-on-the-cutting-room-floor
http://johntropea.tumblr.com/post/47312505

It gives us the artifacts (as you say) of how things came to be…this is not a rendition or story in retrospect (that is subject to narrative fallacy/hindsight bias/retrospective coherence, loss of content and context, fundamental attribution error, making things up, etc…)…instead it’s a collection of raw nuggets.
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2010/07/22/real-km-its-about-the-match-play-not-the-scoreboard/

You put these nuggets together and you get a picture…you the seeker has just assembled it (via having access to the data), rather than someone writing a report with an agenda

I’ve snipped some of his posts into one post:

From KM to complexity - Necessary silos, cognitive truths about knowledge sharing, narrative as mediator, the zone of effective diffusion, and decision-making
http://johntropea.tumblr.com/post/3172509023

Business has always been social — but we’ve not been able to ‘persist’ those social exchanges. It’s a different slant on observable work. We can’t comment or even learn from the experiences of others, because we don’t know that they’ve happened.

Once persisted they must also be not only accessible but must be able to ‘tell’ their own story (or have intermediaries to serve as chroniclers).

For most enterprise systems, people rely on structured reports or other monolithic languages to get anything ‘out’ of them. They’re not freely accessible in the cognitive sense. There is often no obvious ’show me’ that emanates from such systems. Add a persistent mechanism for people to share what they’ve discovered from this morass of data and you add a critical ‘tell me’, living social element.

Your comment has spun me out.

Yes “observable work” is the artifacts, the tracemarks, of what goes into the end product…as per Jim’s post
http://www.mcgeesmusings.net/2010/06/23/managing-the-visibility-of-knowledge-work

And having access to these artifacts during and after.

Your quote is brilliant:

“KM tended to focus on “work products” (often most closely aligned with ‘the explicit’). But the goal was never to document the “implicit” (as was often postulated), but simply to make it observable by others.”

And you seem to point out the difference between data and artifacts.

OK so if I looked at this in hindsight it would be like this:

- here’s all this data, and here’s a work product (a deliverable)
- how did we get from data to work product
- easy…let’s look at all the artifacts (the conversations of how we got there, all the workings out and decisions)

It’s the inbetweeness…the artifacts that tell us what we did with the data.

Again this is like a maths solution to me in a way
From equation to solution
- show me the workings out
- show me all the paths that we took that failed
- in essence show me all the conversations around each step in both the failed paths and successful path

KM tended to focus on “work products” (often most closely aligned with ‘the explicit’). But the goal was never to document the “implicit” (as was often postulated), but simply to make it observable by others.

Back to the semantics, data bases are supposedly designed for the optimal management of structured data (I could argue that point to the contrary). There’s a huge distinction between structured data and artifacts, the latter most often differentiated as ‘unstructured’ data.

If the underlying tools and architectures aren’t changing, the capabilities will never really change either. If you build an E2.0 solution on top of 0.0 technology architectures, it will never reach the goal.

So postulating that E2.0 can better be served by something (e.g. ACM) that suggests that what we’re looking at is data-driven will land you right back where we started.

Remember, data is an necessary abstraction of what is real. Numbers are abstractions of reality — they’re not real. Sure you might have 4 quarters of an apple, but only on paper does it look like a whole apple. Indeed, there is a huge issue with turning what is observable into data. The minute that’s done, detail is lost — often critical detail.

Sure we need a balance, but rather than algorithms (process, data) of reality, we need samplings of the real thing. There is critical DNA in those samples from which much can be extracted and extrapolated. [Hint: YouTube is one example, but what’s the ‘next’ realm of that model?]

A corollary: look at how forensic medicine has shifted. Look at the types of clues they now rely on vs. clues of the past. Those clues are artifacts — evidence of what happened.

The biggest difference is that we’re not trying to reconstruct the past, or even control the present (e.g. process) we’re trying to simply make “now” better with a clearer view of our reality. We do that by tapping the human potential.

Agree that often going outside the process you find the answer. And part of this post is about this middle ground where existing processes have this flexibility to reach out to the network.

….Emergence, Ambient Awareness, Observable Work, Barely Repeatable Processes, Work-in-Progress, Thinking-out-loud, Stocks and Flows, Fragments, Visibility

I agree with you on these terms, but not on “socializing processes” as first approach, which resonates like “dealing in a better way with the messy parts of existing processes”, and might drive us into a dead-end, as what we need is a new work paradigm.

Let me tell you a (little) story:
A few months ago, I wanted to equip a house in the countryside with an ADSL internet connection. I received all the necessary gear, plugged it in, and,… nothing happened.
Fact is there is no GMS coverage in that place. As the land phone line was VoIP, I called the customer service when back in Paris, and they asked me for a couple of tests, which involved calling from aside the ADSL box. But how could I??? No more land line, no mobile coverage, and my closest neighbour was 200m away; even with binoculars, it was impossible to phone AND operate the box at the same time.
After several helpless calls, the customer rep told me that they couldn’t help. I then posted in a few customers forums, ranted, ranted, and finally threatened them to resign. Only at that time was I proposed and appointment with a technician, who finally solved the problem.

Bad customer service? Yes. Badly designed process? Yes indeed.
But the bottom line: in this case, as in many others, notably when the “messy” customers world is involved (but it is the only one which really matters, isn’t it?), is that the only way to go is not socializing processes, which offers no help when decision making is involved, but stepping OUT existing processes to deliberatly, collaboratively, tackle complexity.

Cheers,
Thierry

I’m finding yourself, Jordan, Paula, Jim and I subtly in tune with each other on Knowledge work

….Emergence, Ambient Awareness, Observable Work, Barely Repeatable Processes, Work-in-Progress, Thinking-out-loud, Stocks and Flows, Fragments, Visibility

OK I have a post to round this up on “know-why” as the real corporate memory (which is partly based on an internal blog post of mine from a couple of months ago)