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Recently I have been talking about how to have less messy, more transparent, open, diverse, and recorded (by default) conversations. In particular conversations that move across silos or involve multiple departments.

My first post was about bridging the enterprise gap, and my second post was about no longer having to report back to base (and some background).

I will quickly review those two posts and add a third scenario of the usual spontaneous email conversations that span many levels of hierarchy and departments.

Top down communication and conversation - cut through hierarchy and across groups

The former was about a communication made to leads in different units who were then responsible to pass the communication down the chain. And you know what happens, people react to the communications and the same conversation is had in multiple spots.

The commenters have to wait for leads (if the leads choose to do so) to get their message up the chain and then back down.

Middle managers as communication reps or agents can often be a blockage; wouldn’t it be good to communicate straight with the source (this is more timely, engaging, empowering…and less frustrating for workers). The other point is that rather than each group missing out on clone discussions happening elsewhere, the inter-departmental conversation can happen in one space…yeah for collaboration, cooperation, and awareness…and of course all of this being documented by default.

My suggestion was a blog post, which is like writing an email, only on an online page. If some intended recipients don’t subscribe to the blog, then the author can send them a link to the post.

The recipients (the leads) simply pass on the link to their people, and anyone can post in the central spot for a discussion that cuts through and involves many levels of the hierarchy…a flat discussion perhaps.
What enterprise tools could learn from Facebook Notes (which is like blogging) is to be able to tag people, which is basically like putting their name in the To: field of an email. Sure you have subscribers, but if you really want to alert them then tag them, and also tag others that may not subscribe (which is kind of a tweak to the Facebook Note functionality)

I guess this can also be done in a microblogging network. People who follow you will get your communication, but so they don’t miss it in their stream you may want to @mention them, and also @mention some others that may not follow you.

SUMMARY

Blogging

• Shift Context - people like communicating by email as they simply visit their inbox and click new message. This is less convenient with blogging as you have to shift context ie. browse for the group space (CoP), then the blog…people are too busy and there is no time to do this (unless you can email a post…but most often people haven’t added a blog’s address in their email personal contacts)
• Awareness opportunity - non-subscribers probably won’t come across this post unless in a search result or random browsing
• Recipients - are email subscribers, and non-subscribers are sent a link (prone to inbox interruption and flooding, unless you can opt-out of the conversation thread)…don’t bring RSS into this as people just want one dashboard, and an RSS Reader is just not as productive as email (The plot thickens….microblogging is much more similar to both email and an RSS Reader)
• Future use - good in hindsight as all info about this topic is in one spot

Microblogging

• Shift Context - you don’t have to shift context at all (you don’t have to browse to the place where you want to post), instead like email it’s done from the one window
• Awareness opportunity - anyone in the network might see it
• Recipients - have been @mentioned or notified, but others can also be aware by following people (and choose to pay attention or ignore posts in their stream ie. no inbox interruption and flooding)
• Future use - but in hindsight where does this communication live (you could use #hashtag I guess)…or like all good facilitators you take the best bits from raw conversations and list them in a wiki (linking back to those conversations)…this is related to the "Practice" part of a Community of Practice

Combination

• Future use - blog about it so it lives in a solidified place
• Awareness opportunity - from an easy click on the blog post footer you can post a link to your blog post in the microblogging network
• Recipients - no inbox interruption and flooding (make sure commenting and subscribing is turned off on the blog, as these two things happen in the microblogging network. Microblogging posts about the blog post are displayed on the blog post via a plug-in. Perhaps you can comment via the blog post, but the box you are typing in is really a window into the microblogging platform).

An observation for this context could be…it’s like microblogging is the new blogging and blogging is the new document.

As it happens awareness rather than reporting progress back to base

The latter post was about using microblogging and #hashtags to do task work so that communications a task member has with a non-task member is visible to other task members as it happens…voiding the need for the task member to report progress back to base.

Spontaneous conversations across levels of hierarchy and departments

A similar communication, and all too familiar one is as follows:

WorkerA from UnitA emails LeadA about an issue with UnitB’s system. LeadA emails LeadB from UnitB about the issue (whilst WorkerA is not in the loop.) LeadA forgot to include LeadC in the email so one is sent (whilst WorkerA and LeadB aren’t in the loop that LeadC has been contacted) LeadB then emails one of their workers, WorkerB (whilst WorkerA, LeadA and LeadC are not in the loop.) WorkerB emails WorkerB2 about some troubleshooting and cc: LeadB (whilst WorkerA, LeadA, and LeadC are not in the loop.) WorkerB2 then emails WorkerC in UnitC for some help but forgets to cc: LeadB and WorkerB (whilst WorkerA, LeadA and LeadC are not in the loop.) Meanwhile WorkerA has also thought to email WorkerC2 (with no-one else in the to or cc field) in UnitC about the issue […at this stage all three people in UnitC know about the issue from different people in different email chains] Then WorkerC2 emails LeadC to let them know (with no-one in the to or cc field), but LeadC already knows as Lead A emailed them earlier (but may not know the latest) Meanwhile WorkerA2 has emailed WorkerA as they also ran into the same issue but found some more interesting detail (with no-one else in the to or cc field). WorkerA replies to WorkerA2 with an attachment of the original email they sent to LeadA (and includes LeadA, and WorkerC2 in the cc field to mention some additional insight picked up by WorkerA2) WorkerC2 emails WorkerC about the interesting detail found by WorkerA2 (and cc LeadC) WorkerA2 emails WorkerC (with no-one else in the to or cc field)…but WorkerC already knows the new found detail LeadA then emails LeadB and LeadC about this additional info (with no-one else in the to or cc field)…but LeadC already knows about the new found detail LeadB then emails their people WorkerB and B2…it turns out UnitB have been out of the loop for a while …and so on.

These fictional scenario’s are hard to contrive. It would be more interesting to do some ethnographic work!!

I have drawn a map, but am not sure if it’s helpful.

As you can see the conversations get’s messy, and each unit is having closed conversations amongst themselves, and then at particular points emails cross units. Most of the time the frontline people (UnitA) who need to find some workaround to this issue are waiting for their lead to get back to them. But because they are out of the loop they start emailing around to others to find a solution.

Wouldn’t this all be easier if the question was posted in a forum and all comments could be centralised so everyone is in the loop.

Perhaps, but that means everyone needs to be a member of the forum (in order to have "write" access)…do they know which group space it’s in, are they subscribed to it.

Further to this; are people from UnitA interested in the techie stuff that people from UnitB and UnitC are talking about. Yes it’s good they can be aware, but the n-extra emails they don’t understand is not fun.
eg.refer to point 4. - When LeadB emails WorkerB; WorkerA, LeadA and LeadC are not cc: as it may be of a technical nature.
Maybe it’s best to leave things how they currently are, and wait for a communication that makes sense to UnitA. Perhaps, but it’s frustrating waiting and being out of the loop…collaborating in one spot is more engaging and clean, and is recorded for future use.

If only we could be aware as it happens (rather than waiting to be updated or asking people) without being interrupted or piling up our inbox with emails we don’t understand.

Another option is microblogging!

Let’s try it…

WorkerA writes a status update and @mentions LeadA (even though LeadA follows WorkerA a @mention is used in case the post was not noticed in the stream) - WorkerA2 follows WorkerA so is in the loop LeadA comments on this post and @mentions LeadB (WorkerA is kept in the loop as they are auto-notified about the comment) - WorkerA2 follows LeadA so is in the loop, but decides to add this post to their Watchlist just incase they miss any new comments made by people they follow, and to also be in the loop of comments made by people they don’t follow…if WorkerA2 made a comment then they wouldn’t need to add the post to their Watchlist as they would then be auto-notified of new comments. But since they don’t plan to get involved at this point in time they find the Watchlist feature handy. - LeadB decides to add this post to their Watchlist for the same reason WorkerD (a new comer to our example) follows WorkerA and saw this post so decided to leave a comment @mentioning WorkerC2 (WorkerA, are LeadA are kept in the loop as they are auto-notified about the comment) (WorkerA2 and LeadB are kept in the loop as they have added this post to their Watchlist) WorkerA2 mentions some additional info about the issue (WorkerC2, WorkerA, and LeadA are kept in the loop as they are auto-notified about the comment) (LeadB is kept in the loop as they have added this post to their Watchlist) WorkerC2 leaves a comment saying the issue is fixed (WorkerA2, WorkerA, and LeadA are kept in the loop as they are auto-notified about the comment) (LeadB is kept in the loop as they have added this post to their Watchlist)

In this example…

WorkerA2 was aware of what’s happening much earlier.

Workers A listened mostly and didn’t have to find out on their own what’s going on or wait for a communication

WorkerD defied what would happen in email as they were ambiently aware and knew WorkerC2 was the person to fix it (this circumvented the need for UnitB to get involved, yet they could be ambiently aware of what was happening).

LeadA had minimal involvement and LeadB didn’t see the need to get involved, and people who didn’t even need to get involved at all were WorkersB, B2,C and LeadC
(all these people were aware as they follow people involved, and may have added the post to a Watchlist)

The difference here is: flat transparent conversations, timely (quicker turnaround), adapt to changes, visibility, everyone can be in the loop, not frustrating, no need to channel the solutions through the hierarchy…

The point is that these are spontaneous conversations that span many units and pre-defined group spaces just don’t cut it. Group spaces can have a hard time in the context of ad-hoc task work as the space needs to be prescriptive (created upfront in anticipation), and people need to become members. Which means you have to join before content can be communicated to you…waiting, waiting for you to join as I need to tell you something…email doesn’t have this issue as you simply push it to people.

Network interactions are more transient, and only exist as long as they need to (just like email conversations).

Another obstacle is you have to shift context to use them depending on the topic of your conversation, whereas email is the same familiar window.

Microblogging has the visibility of group spaces, but the ease of use of email.

Signal and Noise

Microblogging works really well on the web for discovery, awareness, research, communication, coordination…how does this transpose into the enterprise.

Yes, it’s good to be ambiently aware so we can be in the loop. When you are aware, you are more mindful and can act more appropriately knowing the bigger picture.

But how do I decipher the ambient information (good to know) from the essential information (must know)?

This is a good point raised by Mary Abraham on her TMI post (which I also talked about in my facelift post)

Must know - typical emails you currently get from your lead, co-workers and people in other teams you are working with on tasks
Good to know - ambient awareness (which by serendipity you may discover stuff you "must know" but don’t, as you weren’t in the email chain…both within and outside of your team

In my example above I mentioned a few times that even though a person followed another, they still @mentioned them so you get that email-like push feeling that you know it has been brought to their attention.

When you are working on a task and have commented on a post, you don’t need to be @mentioned a second time as you automatically get notified

So with the help of @mentions and notifications we can still be alerted like email

In addition what we need to be able to do is add a post to a Watchlist so you can go back to it and have a look at the history to refresh yourself
(just like going to an email that’s a couple of weeks old in your inbox and reading the email chain)

Maybe we could even flag items in our Watchlist so they standout, and even group them into a manageable folder or tag page

And fourthly we need to be able to follow #hashtags so we can be in the loop of new posts about the same task

That covers the posting and receiving, and also covers organising access to posts you have been involved in.

To this we can also add other filtering aspects like group spaces, list aggregations, search streams…

I wonder if anyone has experienced being able to have a controlled email-like experience (making sure people get your message, and that you can find and read past messages) in a microblogging platform, but at the same time be immersed in the ambient awareness of microblogging that we all know so well. The point is; can we make sure the essential stuff (must know) doesn’t get mixed and lost in the stream (amongst the good to know)?

I think with good design this is achievable with features like @mention, auto-notifications, watchlists, flagging, tagging and #hashtags…and I haven’t mentioned private messages.

My previous posts have indirectly been on "know-why."

They are about working on tasks in an open way where anyone can go along for the ride and see all the context and workings out to a solution…which as a by-product of this methodology is documented for future findings.

I just thought of a good metaphor for the concept of know-why.

By looking at the scoreboard of a sports match you "know-what" has happened but you don’t really get a sense of why it turned out like that (the know-why).

If you watch a re-run of the match you will then understand all the micro-decisions each player made, and how the team worked together.

There are also other complexities like: morale, a man short, a fight broke-out, a few players on the team have been in a bad light in the media recently, a team has new players that need to get into the groove…and complexities we don’t even know about (a player having a rough family patch, hidden rivalry between team mates, a player ate some bad food, whatever….)

Understanding all this context and what led up to the final score gives you more of an understanding on the "why" which helps you make a more informed decision on your next action.

Representation

This is also important when looking back at the past. Will reading a report give you a complete picture of all the complexities mentioned above that all contributed to the whole? I doubt it. But reading back on multiple stories and raw blog fragments will. Raw information has all the peripheral information that may not seem important to include in a report. It isn’t the job of a report to be a video recorder, a report has an aim or agenda (it has a narrative) as does a novel (it’s what you choose to say). What I like about blog fragments and conversations is we can piece together our own understanding or narrative from the raw artifacts that are always available (we don’t just want formal representations, we want raw information to make our own). Further to this a raw fragment can be found and re-mixed for a completely different subject matter.

Imagine if the coach for some reason was not able to watch the match (undergoing surgery or something). He/she is not interested in just the final score, rather they are interested in how it came to be (what went wrong, what went right), and to learn from that and move on with an understanding. It’s much harder to improve by just knowing the score alone, as it can only tell you so much (close to even result, a team got it’s ass kicked, it was level all the way until the last 20 minutes, etc…)

Reflection

This is the whole notion of AAR and Lessons Learned, where we talk about the brain work, the conversations and decisions the led to the final results. This is what sports coaching is all about, improving yourself and the team for the next game, learning and using that. This may relate well to business units in organisations (especially if measured on collaboration and group output), but not so much for projects. Why? Well project teams don’t have a thirsty motivation to improve as the team is only temporary (unlike a business unit). Once the project is over people move on to another. Yes you take away your individual lessons, but there is less drive to do this in open anecdote circles as your care factor drops due to you moving on to working with a bunch of new people on a new project. Lessons Learned is important for the organisation as a whole and project managers, but I’m not sure workers see it as an investment or of innate importance as the entity they are improving is about to disband.

At the least if we can document as we go using social computing, then these artifacts will be left behind. And I think this is what a sports coach does, besides reviewing the match, and training to improve performance, they are on the sidelines watching a match unfold and manipulate the conditions for an intended better result. This doesn’t always happen in the workplace, often a manager requests you to report as a representation or interpretation of your conversations and brainwork, rather than seeing and interacting with you as it unfolds, which was the point of my previous post.

Social computing environments are engaging from the "What’s In It For Me" factor, which perhaps is the intrinsic motivation that will help glean improvements from temporary units like projects.

What can we say about knowledge management (KM) in relation to this?

Sure we need end products, but the real juice is in the connections, conversations and context that went into these end products. We can better understand these end products when we have access (during and after) to the workings-out and people. Just like the coach back from surgery (or anyone else) can watch a re-run of the match, or the coach at the game can make decisions as the play is happening.

Is it important for managers to eavesdrop and interact on the workings-out on your path to your end-product so they can facilitate the work? If so, we can now do this in the most ambient way.

John Hagel talks about Stocks and Flows, and that we have to move from a stockpiling culture to a flow culture, where it’s important to connect to fragments in context. From these intersections our new conversations based on earlier fragments becomes a process of knowledge creation, which is simply a by-product of doing work.

"…the real value is in creating new knowledge, rather than simply "managing" existing knowledge. In this fast moving world, what we know - our "stocks" of knowledge - depreciate faster than they used to. So we’ve got to keep creating" "Most of us, as individuals, know this. That’s why we’re not keen to spend time entering our latest document into a knowledge management system. We know we’re better off engaging in the interactions and collaborations that create new knowledge about how to get things done.new knowledge in order to keep pace." "Knowledge management systems desperately try to persuade participants to invest time and effort to contribute existing knowledge with the vague and long-term promise that they themselves might eventually derive value from the contributions of others. In contrast, creation spaces focus on providing immediate value to participants in terms of helping them tackle difficult performance challenges while at the same time reducing the effort required to capture and disseminate the knowledge created."

This is KM for free, as we are creating conditions for "flow" based on how humans behave to get things done, rather than explicitly warehousing end products on the shelf hoping someone comes across them, blows the dust off them, and uses them before their expiry date. Only to find it only has hints of usability (if you dare read the 50 page document hoping to find relevancy to your context in the first place). Your next move is to find the author to re-frame this information into a workable context. When doing this you are not documenting these conversations as they happen (knowledge creation) so all people get in the end is your end product, the cycle goes on. In comes social computing….

John Hagel then talks about stocks and flows in relation to written information compared to observation, experience and conversation. Which is what is special about social computing as it’s a written form that is alive; getting as close as possible to offline interactions and learning.

"…think of tacit knowledge as the "know how" rather than the "know what." Imagine trying to perform brain surgery after having read all the books you can find on the subject. The books are the explicit knowledge telling you what to do but knowing how to perform this kind of surgery critically depends on an extended apprenticeship process in which tacit knowledge gets communicated through observation and then by participating on the periphery of these operations. Accessing this kind of knowledge typically requires long-term trust-based relationships. And, in times of rapid change, tacit knowledge becomes increasingly valuable: because it’s the newest knowledge, it’s the most helpful in dealing with the latest changes in a fast-moving business landscape.

Then he alludes to the ecosystem and symbiotic relationships…self-generating, self-organising, self-regulating. Something you get by facilitating conditions and monitoring the system to do it’s own thing rather than a managed approach:

"We can’t participate effectively in flows of knowledge–at least not for long–without contributing knowledge of our own. This occurs because participants in these knowledge flows don’t want free riding "takers"; they want to develop relationships with people and institutions that can contribute knowledge of their own. This is a huge hurdle for most executives who were trained to guard their knowledge carefully. Yet if they remain "takers" they will find themselves rapidly marginalized. Knowledge flows tend to concentrate among participants who are sharing with, and learning from, each other."

Above I have talked about KM embedded in doing work. Not having this is a loss, as from a KM perspective the workings-out are more valuable than the end product. KM of the past has known this but the right tools weren’t available so people were asked to write reports. Which is kind of like watching a two minute sports review of the match, which mostly show the goal scoring…the nature of this format leaves out content and context, and can also have their own agendas.

KM has been branded from a library science / information management side of managing and organising end products. But I think if social computing existed back in the day, then KM would of had the right tools for their aims. But it’s not just the tools, KM like anything else of the past has been approached with a scientific management style, whereas social computing is more about facilitating conditions, less about plans and targeted outcomes, and more about nurturing, experimenting, and emergence…not to say it can’t be incorporated to flavour business processes.

Capturing output is not KM

Let’s finish with reviewing an experience shared by Yigal Chamish, who says:

"knowledge is for action, not for warehousing"

Simon Bostock adds to this:

"You cant "manage" knowledge in a traditional sense. Its contextual, it resides in stories, its only valuable when it "flow" not when its stored, it cant be measured and its always, but always, Just In Time."

David Tebbutt has left a valuable comment on Yigals post:

"No doubt the outcomes could be captured and archived as useful information, especially if it were tagged adequately and made easy to find. But this is more content, or information management, not KM. Were the people (in the interests of cutting travel, CO2 emissions, whatever) able to cooperate through social tools, tele-presence, or whatever, this too would be part of the "management" role that of creating the right environment for knowledge sharing to flourish."

Anyway what was Yigals post about?

Yigal talks about a group of Europeans who were invited to a herb farm in Ethiopia to explain to them the process of growing herbs and sending them to Europe. Out of conversation the issue of dealing with (eliminating) insects that damage the herb crops was raised. This was not on the agenda but its a common interest. What ensued was lots of discussion, each sharing stories and experiences. This was not planned or led, it surfaced naturally, and is the makings of a Community of Practice…naturally forming at time of need.

Social computing can mimic this type of exchange. Conversations are no way limited to the offline world. Whether they form into a community or not is not important, what is, is that the people are able to find each other and the conversation is able to take place. These are conditions for sense-making, and helping each other at time of need. It’s all documented so the conversation has longevity and reach to new people, and this whole process creates new knowledge and leaves behind artifacts that can be found and become pieces of new conversations and knowledge creation processes, and the flux goes on.

Yigal makes an important point:

"I can only imagine trying to pump this new contextual knowledge and warehouse it in a form stored in a database."

Conclusion

Charles Jennings (via Harold Jarche) gives us a nice way to conclude:

"…we need to move away from a focus on knowledge transfer and acquisition, an approach rooted in Plato’s academy…we are moving to the world of the sons of Socrates, where dialogue and guidance are key competencies. It is a world where the capability to find information and turn it into knowledge at the point-of-need provides the key competitive advantage, where knowing the right people to ask the right questions of is more likely to lead to success than any amount of internally-held knowledge and skill."

This is a follow-up to my post Enterprise microblogging needs a facelift to rival email.

In that post I talked about adding an item in the stream to your Watchlist

• This way you can keep in the loop about a conversation without you having to be a poster or a commenter

I also talked about communally grouping items via contributors tagging them with a hashtag

• This way you can keep in the loop about the greater task that is generating all these items

Differences

• You are not being cc:ed, rather you "pull" the content to you (filtering your own information)
  • you can be @mentioned which is like the to: or cc: field
    • but this won’t happen in every post and comment, so it’s up to people to add it to their Watchlist
• The sender has an understanding of who needs to be involved in a conversation, but this is not always apparent at the start of a task, and there are plenty of people on the edges who need to be consulted that emerge
  • Now anyone can find a conversation, add it to their Watchlist, get involved

Deeper than In-the-flow and Above-the-flow

A while back a defining post was made on the difference between working Above-the-Flow (volunteering to share information and experiences based on engagement, trust, audience, reciprocity), and In-the-Flow (communicating and asking questions about tasks using social tools rather than email…doing what you are already doing in new tools).

Well what I want to describe here is going deeper than In-the-Flow…to the artifacts of the activity itself.

Example

We have a web conference about a task that involves people across teams.

We set up a group space.

We use this group space to ask the task team questions.

We use this group space to communicate our individual progress to the task members.

Why do I have to go to a blog to describe to other task members about my progress?

Let me explain…

An action item that came up in the initial meeting was for a member of the task to contact someone in IT to find out where we can host our database.

Once he found this out, he communicated back to the task members by fowarding his email conversation with the IT guy

OR

By blogging about this email conversation he had.

But you kind of feel silly blogging about something when you can just easily fwd it…it’s just easier.

Yes blogging it stores it for all to see, and keeps the conversation centralised…but it needs to feel natural. One positive step is to forward your email to the blogs email address, this way further comments about this is centralised around the blog post.

Deep In-the-Flow (Embedded In-the-Activity)

There is a better way…

Why report your progress by updating task members about it (whether in email or a blog)…

when instead they can see your conversation as it happens.

MICROBLOGGING AND HASHTAGS

Watch what happens when all task members follow the hashtag for this task:

Task Member B’s filtered stream of #DMS_dev Hi @ITguy we are looking for a place to host our new server…blah blah blah…#DMS_dev Posted by TaskMemberA Comments expanded ITguy - No probs we have room in our data centre in Australia TaskMemberC - When do you think this may happen ITguy - We will have a meeting tomorrow so can give you a date TaskMemberA - do you have a goto person that we can liase with ITguy - just got out of a meeting and @ITguysfriend will do the hands on work, no date yet ITguysfriend - I’m travelling soon, so it would be good to do this ASAP

Notice here how Task Member A does not have to write a blog post or forward an email to Task Member B or any of the other task members.

Why? Because all the task members are following the hashtag.

Task Member A is no longer the middleman to report the conversations he/she is having at the edges when doing their part of the task. They don’t have to forward an email or report progress as everyone can already know "as it happens."

ie. when on a task we don’t just converse with task members, we need to speak to random others in the organisation to get information from, authorise, or simply consult with as part of a task member doing their bit of the task

All task members (and anyone else) can now see the conversations each member is having with both task members and with indirect task members they need to consult with.

Indirect task members such as @ITguy can get involved at anytime without having to go through a task member; as long as they use the hashtag all task members will be in the loop.

What I’m getting to is you don’t need to report status or progress, as everyone can already see the conversations you are having.

Traditionally, if I were to report back to the group the progress of my task I would examine all my email conversations and write an email or a blog post on my progress…kind of like a real informal reporting. Or I would upload my emails which no-one will read.

But now people can have access to the artifacts without me having to forward them, or without me having to report about them.

This is a major difference between a closed system like email and an open microblogging system with the use of hashtags.

To reiterate the two main theme’s here:

1. People can now see the raw conversation as it happens, you no-longer have to report back to base…as people at base are privy to your conversation as it unfolds.

2. As a task member I am no longer a middleman in interpreting and communicating the progress of my part of the task, as you can see what I’m doing. Plus other task members can interact with the people on the edges (indirect task members) on the details of my part of the task.

Where it doesn’t apply

I’ve made clear that this works as a replacement to email, but when doing your part of a task you may have phone and face-to-face conversations with 3rd parties…in that case you do have to write a status update reporting your progress

Work products Deep In-the-Flow (Embedded In-the-Activity)

Aside from open conversations with both members of the task and people on the edges that are consulted about various parts of the task; we also have output documents eg. deliverables and supporting materials.

We no longer have to communicate (email or write a blog post) to people that we have just added a document related to our task. We simply do this at the time of adding the document.

The Activity stream of the microblogging app will suck in items added to the Document Management System (DMS) via an API

Task Member A is adding a document to the old DMS Click here to browse and and Add the document. Click here to add a description: Here’s the information sheet about our server #DMS_dev I thought I’d better @mention you @ITguysfriend as pushing this to you may get to you quicker as I recall you are travelling soon Posted by TaskMemberA CLICK TO SUBMIT

If we take another look at the hashtag stream we will see that the act of adding this document and a description has resulted in posting a new item into the stream (see the 5th post down)

Task Member B’s filtered stream of #DMS_dev Hi @ITguy we are looking for a place to host our new server…blah blah blah…#DMS_dev Posted by TaskMemberA [Expand Comments] Hey @Qualityguy I need you to sign off on this paper work…basically it says…blah blah blah…#DSM_dev Posted by TaskMemberC [Expand Comments] [Link to Document] Hey main members of this task, what do you think we can call the new DMS, any ideas #DSM_dev Hey @Marketingguy are you able to come up with a brand logo for our new product, I gave you background to this task on your voicemail…also see linked document #DSM_dev Posted by TaskMemberB [Expand Comments] [Link to Document] Here’s the information sheet about our server #DMS_dev I thought I’d better @mention you @ITguysfriend as pushing this to you may get to you quicker as I recall you are travelling soon Posted by TaskMemberA [Link to Document] Comments Expanded ITguysfriend - just about to hop on a plane, sorry, will login when I land ITguy - that’s OK I’m gonna get @ITguysotherfriend to do this if she has time ITguysotherfriend - no probs, I’ve added this to my watchlist and read up on other related posts in this hashtag, so I’m all up to speed TaskMemberC - is Thursday OK ITguy - I’ll be in the office on Friday so we’ll do it then ITguysotherfriend - OK with me TaskMemberC - great ITguysfriend - just landed, good to see it’s all sorted

Summary

This post focuses on a sweet spot in performing tasks.

Why?

It’s as easy as email.

You don’t have to set up a group space.

All you need to do is use microblogging (utlising Watchlists and Hashtags)

But the real focus of this post is about what happens on the edges.

All people on a task go off and do their bit and either report back on progress via email or a blog. They are the middleman between the task members and people on the edges who they are consulting with in doing the task.

Now we don’t have to report back, as task members (and anyone for that matter) can see the the raw conversations with people on the edges as it happens. Both other task members and people on the edges can interact without having to go through a particular task member.

Related

This is taking my ambient awareness post to proper task use, and brings back into fashion Jim McGee’s post on the loss of observable work.

Paula Thornton talks about artifacts of work, and this is exactly what I’m tackling:

"Conversations are artifacts of work. Do not confuse artifacts of work with work products. Work products often miss much of the “real work” that occurred. Any evidence of “real work” qualifies as an artifact. 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."

This post is not so much the difference between conversations and the end product (deliverable), but more so how the conversations happen, and how we don’t have to report progress on our daily work on achieving our task.

Well let me clear that up, sure if I’m doing my own brainwork I will report my results, but if I’m having conversations with people that I need to consult with to achieve my task, well then I don’t have to report that this took place, as other task members already know, due to me using the task channel (defined by assigning a hashtag) to converse with people on the edges…all without them having to be part of an official group space.

OK, here’s the solution upfront. You can read the rest of this post to know why this needs to happen.

SOLUTION

Requirements More than 140 characters (like Yammer and Socialtext Signals) Inline comments; also posts in their own right (like Yammer and Socialtext Signals)

Request Add a post to your Watchlist like an RSS Reader but subscribing at the post level Imagine rather than "favouriting/liking" a post, you are actually subscribing to it This way you can be notified of any new comments about a post Tag posts in your Watchlist a tagcloud/list would be accessible in the left hand pane of the microblogging app list preferred posts from your Watchlist in the left hand pane for one click access see it turn bold-which signifies new content-and displays a number-which signifies the number of new comments in that post Follow a Hashtag like saving Twitter search queries in your sidebar but more like an RSS Reader subscribing to a tag Click on it to view as a stream Reason for this feature is to catch new posts (and comments on those posts) on the same topic or task accessible from the left hand pane of the client and turns bold-which signifies new content-and displays a number-which signifies the number of new posts and comments in existing posts These requests are necessary to catch posts and comments that stream by that are important to you.

Microblogging in the enterprise is a different context from the consumer web; people are doing real work and need to be able to catch important posts in the stream. It’s not about just dipping into the stream and having a swim, it’s not just about following interests, it’s more about my boss, or people from a task I’m on, have posted a few things and I can’t afford to let them stream by unnoticed, I need the notification/subscription/follow mechanisms set up so I don’t miss anything essential.

This doesn’t happen in email, you don’t have difficulty sorting out the spam and the friendly email from the task type email…you don’t really miss seeing an email from your boss. This needs to be the same in enterprise microblogging; but it’s not as easy as email as the stream is much more a firehose than the email inbox.

Mary Abraham has talked about TMI (Too Much Information), and how do I differentiate the "good to know" stuff (it’s great to be aware of what’s happening in the organisation), from the "essential to know" (what’s the latest update I have to action today).

This brings up the need for enterprise microblogging to get a facelift by including a way to catch information that is essential to you…basically it needs a couple of simple features and functions.

READ ON

Not long ago I posted on how we do knowledge work via email because it’s easy, but we suffer later as it’s messy…and we miss out on these conversations living in a central place where others can be aware (and for possible diverse input), and later can be searched.

I explained the alternative in using a blog or forum. Which is OK, but it’s simply not in our flow to jump to a group space to communicate, especially when some of the people you want to communicate to are not subscribed to your blog.

At the moment if I need to have a conversation with a random group of people I use email (this is my ad-hoc tool)…I may even add an attachment if we need to do more than just converse. I’m not about to set up a group space for a conversation that may last a week or even a moment…it’s way too much effort.

Hence, no adoption of social computing tools for ad-hoc work. If we do get this design right, then not only will we get adoption for activity based work, but also for learning and sharing sites like online communities, online team spaces, etc..

It’s not just email; if I need to grab some relevant parties or have a discussion about a task we email or phone each other, and then get a room, or go to someone’s desk and have that chat. I want to be able to assemble this way using social tools, where there is not so much a group space, but a conversation space…kind of like a Twitter hashtag conversation, or a Yammer threaded post.

Group spaces (like CoPs) require facilitation to keep them active and you have to shift context to use them depending on the topic of your conversation, whereas network interactions are more transient, and only exist as long as they need to (just like email conversations).

Keith Swenson shares his pain:

"The solution is to make a shared “room” where all the toys can be shared equally within a group. That is the solution that many approaches have taken, and it is not difficult. But someone still has to set up the room in advance, in anticipation of the need to share, and most people will not take this step. It is just easier to send the documents as an attachment and force the work onto everyone else. In groups that I work with, even making the room available to people, they rarely get used."

What I’m alluding to here is the need not for a group space, but simply an ad-hoc conversation space…and networks, not groups is the answer.

In comes microblogging…

Here’s a fictional example…

@bob @sarah @jason @neil @brad @sally @jeff @denali @arielle @peter as you know the development of our new DMS has been on hold due to low resources. Well now there is an initiative happening that needs the use of a new DMS to store its documents, so they will sponsor it’s development…blah blah blah…please tell your people Posted by John Tropea Comments Bob - do you have a new roadmap? Sally - what’s the deadline? John - the deadline is August 31st, and a roadmap will be shared soon Neil - what is the initiative you are alluding to, and how far will they sponsor it’s development Jim - hey guys just came across this conversation as I follow John. We are running a global Quality initiative and need somewhere to keep our output, so we are sponsoring the new DMS John - apologies Jim, I forgot to @mention you in the original, come to think of it I forgot to add in our IT representative, hey @abby join in the conversation. Jody - Neil told me about this resurrection, congrats guys Abby - Hey guys, we ordered the new servers yesterday John - Thx Jody, yes we are indeed very happy about this Samantha - Hey guys, I’m from the DMS team, we are looking for some work for our intern, could they possibly get involved

So far so good, this is the type of thing you can do on Yammer as it has inline comments (and maybe Twitter soon via Twitoaster)

But the issue we have here is with notifications (which I will tackle further down in this post)

What new capabilities does microblogging bring to the table

Others can read this open conversation in the stream and be aware and get involved (diverse input…possible clashes with other tasks or what other teams are doing can be revealed as conversations are in the open to be found):

• whereas in email it’s just the recipients and people who have been forwarded the email
• microblogging makes for more chance of collaboration and awareness to better align and cooperate with other units

The recipients in the original post can re-post (retweet) the post including an @mention to other people so they are aware of it, or to get involved…or alternatively can leave a comment that includes @mention to others.

The recipients can re-post (retweet) the post to their group space (eg. as happens in Yammer group or Socialtext Signals) so their team can see the raw conversation, if they have not already seen it stream by anyway in the public stream

• what I like about this is that people down the hierarchy can see the raw conversation, not some filtered re-interpreted conversation. And of course if the post has failed to reach them via their manager, there is a chance they will still see it as it’s online in the stream for anyone to see

The conversation is in one location and not messy like email, no-one is left out of the loop, new comers can join and see the past conversation…it’s searchable

And of course it’s essential that posts have a comments thread, and more than 140 characters to post content.

But what’s missing here…

NOTIFICATIONS

If we follow the Facebook model… John is getting notifications that people are commenting on his post Bob, Sally, Neil, Jim, Jody, Abby and Samantha are also getting notifications as they have left a comment… BUT, they are only being notified of comments that have come after their comment. So they have to catch up reading on the earlier comments, unless they have already seen them stream by (remember comments are threaded, but are also a post in their own right) Sarah, Jason, Brad, Denali, Arielle, and Peter ARE NOT being notified of any comments Until microblogging can duplicate this uniqueness of email, it will not be as useful to do actual back and forth work

FILING/BOOKMARKING (FAVOURITE/LIKE)

When we have this typical conversation in email; people will individually file this conversation in a folder. This way they can find it later.

In microblogging we can favourite/like the post of this conversation so we can come back to it later, but we also need to be able to tag these favourites so there is more context to help us find them later.

And we need these tagged favourites browsable in a tagcloud/or a list on the left of our microblogging app, just like we have our email folders in the left-hand pane.

But we also need to be able to list some posts from within our favourites so we can see them right there in our left-hand pane.

Maybe they are not called favourite/like, perhaps Watchlist is better.

WATCHLIST

Ok, I think I just solved our notification issue… What’s required is a Watchlist feature. The recipients of the original post can click the Watchlist link on the footer of the post (it will also ask them to tag it ). This will put the post in a tag in their tagcloud, and also list it under the tagcloud so at a glance they can see the current important conversations they are following. When a new comment is added to a post that they have in their Watchlist it will become bold with the number of new comments. See what’s happening here, a Watchlist is catching something for you that you may miss streaming by. Kind of like an RSS reader, but at the post level. If the conversation becomes old, they can then remove it from their Watchlist and later find it in their tagcloud if they need it

MICROBLOGGING APP

An important aspect is that the microblogging app becomes the new email…so there is a battle here.

Similar to the screenshot I linked to in my previous post, perhaps microblogging can be integrated into the email client, and perhaps it’s no longer an email client, perhaps email is just a feature of Inbox 2.0.

The microblogging private message feature can perhaps replace email.

So why do we still need email?

We still need to email with people that don’t have access to the microblogging system. Our clients, vendors, friends, family, local shops, etc don’t have access. What I’m saying is different microblogging platforms don’t connect via a protocol like email does.

What about groups?

Earlier I mentioned microblogging groups, all this means is that you are not posting in the public stream, instead that post just appears in the group stream. And to catch these posts you just have a group tab to see them.

This is a great way to filter the firehose to see stuff that’s important to you…but often a task I’m in doesn’t really involve my whole team, instead it’s me and a handful of others from various teams, so the group stream doesn’t help here, instead we ad-hoc groups need a hashtag stream to filter the firehose (which I will tackle further down in this post)

Tag based forum

So what’s happening here? What is Twitter or Yammer? It’s conversations, but not confined to groups, instead it’s one massive group, but moreso a crowd as not everyone knows each other, just like you don’t know everyone in your workplace or suburb you live in.

So really it’s not a group, it’s a network.

Which kind of makes it like a giant forum, or a giant blog.

At work we have groups (CoPs) and each one has forums and blogs.

So to have conversations about a topic you need to visit the right forum/blog in the right group, and further to this you need to be a member, and you have to be a subscriber.

What if the appropriate topic doesn’t exist yet; I’m not about to create a forum and get people to subscribe…further to this they also have to become a member of the group space that they may not want to do.

For the sake of being open, this is way more difficult than email.

And if all we are having is one conversation I don’t want to subscribe to a forum and get further content that I don’t want to read.

And as mentioned earlier I want an ad-hoc conversation that doesn’t warrant the setting up of a space…you don’t have to do this in email.

Over 4 years ago I posted on Tag-based forum networks (I wonder if the idea for Twitter came from these sites)

It’s basically the idea of microblogging where a question about any topic can be asked, and the question is tagged, and further similar questions can be tagged the same so these questions can be collected into a browseable space.

Which brings us back to our fiactional example…

Collecting posts in the stream that are about the same task

The fictional example in this post is perfect for one off conversations, more appropriate than email and more designed to how we behave over having to go to a group space. This is not about groups, it’s about ad-hoc conversations.

Now what happens, is that the conversation stream on that post can get really long and cover lots of questions, which really should be their own posts.

What I mean is; what if this one-off ad-hoc conversation is part of a bigger task that requires many conversations on various items pertaining to the task. You’d hope that you could collect all these conversations into one browseable space.

To follow our example John needs to ask a question or give an update about the task. So again he has to @mention various people in a new post. This time he might @mention only a couple of people as the question or update is more contextual.

But what results is that unless all the recipients from the 1st question see this new post in the public stream they won’t be aware of progress…it’s not essential they see it otherwise John would have @mentioned them, but still the same they may want to be aware as they are part of the greater task. And for all John knows maybe it turns out it is essential for someone else to see it…that’s the beauty of these tools in that the it circumvents the sender having the power as they cannot always know who needs to know what.

Again people who see this post can tag it in their inbox and also add it to their watchlist so they can follow the conversation…keeping all the items about the task in a bucket.

The issue increases…

If people that are not @mentioned want to be in the loop about this task they have to catch these posts coming through the stream, there’s a good chance they are gonna miss them. What if you go on vacation for a few days. Are you gonna go through thousands of posts, add to your watchlist and tag them. How are you gonna differentiate the posts in the stream that are important to you.

So everyone will be doing the same thing, picking out these posts and personally tagging them to their collection.

See what’s happening here, we end up using microblogging just like email. Sure it’s open so you may catch these items race through the stream, but we need a way for the system to keep everyone in the loop on every conversation about the task, even if you it’s not your part of the task, it’s still good to be in the know of the greater picture. And further to this, in the future we want to look back at all the conversations about that particular task.

In come hashtags…

In our example the 2nd post could have a hashtag #DMS_dev, and then perhaps the 1st post could be re-edited to add this tag as well.

Then anyone can follow this hashtag, which is listed in your microblogging app sidebar

When there is a new post within this hashtag, the hashtag in your left-hand pane would go bold and display the number of new posts. The same would happen if there was a comment on an existing post. Just click the hastag to access the new content.

In this scenario what you could do is remove the 1st question off your Watchlist and remove it from your personal tag cloud. As now you are following the hashtag stream which is accessible via your hashtag list or cloud.

A hashtag stream would actually be similar in a way to a group stream, but it’s post-created rather than pre-created.

NOTE: When you think of it following a hashtag would be similar to saving a Twitter search query in your sidebar, but more like an RSS Reader subscribing to a tag

So there you have it…

• a way to follow ad-hoc conversations (using a Watchlist)
• a way to follow many conversations about the same task (following a Hashtag)

This design has the uniqueness and ease of email in ad-hoc conversations, but the benefits of the awareness and emergence of microblogging

I haven’t played much with Google Wave or Socialwok (I guess 9cays can be included), but these may be the closest tools to my thinking…it’s not about groups, it’s about the conversation, and similar conversations can be channeled into a unique tag that becomes a type of group space (or channel) on-the-fly.

Perhaps ActionBase is worth a mention:

"A task oriented email client will behave like a wiki document in the sense that once you send it out, any response, question or comment made by recipients or yourself, will all happen on the same email entry… all the relevant information under a single line item - THIS IS COLLABORATIVE EMAIL. In ActionBase we call this email - ActionMail. ActionMail is the next generation of work email which is task oriented rather than message oriented."

Output

Oh yeah, where is all the output, where is the documentation for the task kept.

This could be kept anywhere it doesn’t matter. But somehow the Hashtag page needs to be able to store links to where stuff is kept.

Pull

But there still is one big difference to email, this is mostly still a "pull" system where you add posts to your Watchlist, or follow Hashtags in order to be updated about new content.

Sure it starts off as "push" for some by way of @mentions, but then it becomes "pull" if you need or want to be further updated of new content without having to constantly @mention.

For others unrelated to the conversation it’s all "pull" for them as they were not @mentioned in the original post.

In saying this:

…if you publish the post or have left a comment then you will be pushed notifications by the system, but if you haven’t done one of these things and it’s pertinent that you are aware, then you better add it to your Watchlist, or follow the Hashtag.

Yeah, but no…

In the first part of the fictional example I mentioned that the lack of notifications means some people that were @mentioned in the original post won’t receive further comments unless they make a comment…hence my idea to pull it to yourself via a Watchlist.

Facebook have a private message feature where you can have a group conversation and all involved received comments by default (you don’t have to leave a comment to be notified of new ones). This is less messy than email but is still closed like email

End thoughts

I can only imagine so much, but without using such a system I won’t know if it’s too complicated. At the moment there are all these possible streams/filters:

• Public
• My network (people I follow)
• Various group streams
• @mention
• Hash tags I follow
• Watchlist (comments in a post I follow)
• Notifications (comments on my posts, and on posts I have commented on)

Thx to everyone for the retweets on my previous post about socialising processes, adhoc work, observable work and ACM.

If you are going to take something away let it be the concept of BRP (Barely Repeatable Processes) to enable adhoc, unpredictable work…and at the same time reclaiming observable work, and as always ambient awareness.

I’m sure the pioneers like Thingamy, Traction Software, Activities on Lotus Connections, ActionBase, Google Wave will be joined by many others.

And thanks to Paula Thornton, Jim McGee and Greg Lloyd for this wonderful exchange where we are riffing off each other, sometimes unknowingly, where various topics seem to blend into each other.

And let me give a shout out to Keith Swenson for his incredible blog on Adaptive Case Management (ACM)…empowering workers to deal with the unpredictable "practice" that is knowledge work.

Practice Execution

Like Paula Thornton tweeted:

"…heuristic structure rather than process. The means for work to flow"

Yes, and perhaps knowledge work is about practice execution, rather than pre-defined processes…but this is a tricky one as whether predictable or not, whether repeatable or not, it’s still a process, even if it only happens once in it’s life.

A long while ago I posted why KM failed in a nutshell, and it was about KM being a separate thing you need to do rather than embedded as a literacy. My post shared that magnificent gem by Ross Mayfield on what’s happening most of the time in this knowledge work era is that people are dealing with exceptions to processes and workarounds. And they do this using email and attachments which is messy, and not visible or amplifying.

Since then we have had social computing platforms as an alternative, and now we are starting to see this evolving where the tools are designed or allow the user to design them in the flow of the way we practice work.

Jim McGee warns of Enterprise 2.0 playing the game of enhancing processes as it’s much more than that. In my post I talked about that as just 1st gear to not only get adoption but because it’s also useful for knowledge work, but not to lose site that enterprise 2.0 is also about emergence, networks, connections, transparency, awareness, etc…

I not only talked about enhancing or socialising business processes, but also building your own processes using new tools. The thing is a "2.0" approach can be used almost anywhere, and existing processes need not be left out.

I won’t say too much as Jim had not read my post thoroughly at time of publishing his post.

OK now this brings me to an enlightening video clip with Patrice Livingstone and her passion for Traction Software as the poster child for the nemesis of email. H/T to Paula Thornton for the link.

Patrice talks very passionately about visibility and fragments, rather than closed and big buried documents.

And most importantly emerges the concept of "know-why".

It has come to the point that social computing is the way Patrice has been working for the last while, and she could not bare facing a new job where they use email and attachments. It seems a lack of social computing would be a show stopper for Patrice deciding on whether to take on a new job…and I second that! And so does Karen Lilla it seems: “@marciamarcia Our team at IBM can’t live without our social media tools. Anarchy would ensue if it was ever taken away! @geoffliving”

OK, I just read Paula’s latest post and what do you know she reviewed the same video, and we both describe Patrice’s diatribe as passionate…I have also borrowed some of Paula’s words for the title of this post.

Like I said before no matter what I talk about lately it seems to be intune with what my network is thinking…indeed feels like a collective intelligence.

What Patrice said on fragments and context

"I knew at an instinctive level that what we were doing — all the unstructured communication, all the relationship building and stuff that our team was doing — was much more valuable than the work we were doing in written reports and meetings and minutes, which is what consumed the body of our time."

She typifies the usual scenario of all the brainwork and conversations done in meetings and email and then distilled into massive document that get shelved into a filing cabinet.

Where has all that brainwork gone, there is no trace of it…the unstructured stuff (know-why) is missing as it happened in email.

This is reminiscent of Dave Snowden on fragmented vs summarised material in relation to context, recall, usability and attention scarcity:

"Everything is fragmented. We evolved to handle unstructured fragmented fine granularity information objects, not highly structured documents. People will spend hours on the internet, or in casual conversation without any incentive or pressure. However creating and using structured documents requires considerably more effort and time. Our brains evolved to handle fragmented patterns not information."

Access the link above for related issues on summarising content or codification, like:

"We only know what we know when we need to know it" "The way we know things is not the way we report we know things" "We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down"

For more on human behaviour, refer to this list of cognitive biases. eg. Retrospective Coherence, Narrative Fallacy, Fundamental Attribution Error

And Dave again:

"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."

And yet again:

"The more you structure material, the more you summarize…the more you make material specific to a context or time, the less utility that material has as things change. For years now I have asked this question at conferences around the world: 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? So why for the last decade and more have we focused on chunking up best practice? Increasingly unstructured material, blended in unexpected ways, provides a richer source of knowledge.

Arthur Shelley on a comment on a past blog says:

"In many ways, documents are dead (or at the least in a coma) until brought to life through a conversation"

I take it Arthur alludes to documents being a summarised outcome of the end result (know-what), meaning you then need to find the "know-why" to understand parts of the document. And social tools are a way to do this as they are raw fragments of the conversation…they basically record the conversation.

Alister Grigg (Fastman Consulting and Solutions) via an email conversation encapsulates this:

"…the logic, the argument, the thought process can only really be captured through that conversation. Capture and contextualise that conversation and you have the why. Link that to the output / deliverable and you have the why."

Alister goes on to say:

"Well written reports will include the arguments but as an output and not a record, and often influenced…"

This is quite a pithy statement. A document like a report has an agenda, whereas blog posts are raw fragments. There may be lots of peripheral information in blog posts that people may find to re-mix and use elsewhere.

This concept of raw fragments over summarised content also paralleIs with our cognitive processes in how we apply knowledge, see my past post:

“I need to be able to flex my skill in assembling my know-how in applied and unexpected situations. Eg we have people over for dinner in an hour and I need to cook dinner with what I have…improvise. You need to know the fundamentals, this way you can assemble fragments in new ways. In this respect we can see personal knowledge fragments as ingredients, and when I’m faced with a situation I bring those ingredients together and assemble them into an outcome. The knowledge is in recalling ingredients for the context and assembling them (knowing how they work together and as a whole). In another context some of those ingredients will assemble with others, and also the assembly may be approached differently. To me, this is know-how!"

Alister’s quote echos a passage from Nassim Taleb’s brilliant book "The Black Swan" on raw fragments and context:

“The journal was purportedly written without…knowing what was going to happen next, when the information available…was not corrupted by the subsequent outcomes.” “While we have a highly unstable memory, a diary provides indelible facts recorded more or less immediately; it thus allows the fixation of an unrevised perception and enables us to later study events in their own context. Again, it is the purported method of description of the event, not its execution, that was important.”

Matthew Hodgson also says something similar:

"If we look back to the rich oral history of many of our cultures, blogging is a reflection of the need to story-tell, carrying with it important information not only on the what – the facts like the reports we typically store in our recordkeeping systems – but also the meaning behind the why and how."

This is also a cultural move to a work-in-progress culture, where we are sharing workings out in the open, rather than just the finished product…the workings out are always there, but is it visible…and of course if it is visible it can be enriched, and re-mixed into new contexts.

Think of it as Steam and Ice:

“Steam - The thoughts, ideas and concepts that rattle around in our heads. Ice - Books and polished documents that we reference from time to time.”

Sorry about the tangent, but now we see how raw fragments over codified material is easier to digest and find, it is raw so it can be blended or re-mixed into another context…but most of all it’s the visibility and accessibility of all those myriad of decisions that help you understand how the "know-what" ie. the document you are reading, came to be.

Obviously both can co-exist, but as long as when when are reading a deliverable or report we can point back to the visible observable work, the tracemarks, the raw fragments, the conversations, whatever you want to call it, as this is where the "know-why" lives.

What Patrice said on "know-why"

Patrice mentions that we can’t reduce our brain work, you still have to work, but we can choose to re-purpose the tools we are currently using. She says with absolute clarity that an email is a blank page, an MS Word document is a blank page, a wiki is blank page, etc…which one are you going to choose when you do your work…a social and visible team space or email and attachments.

A social space has more value added down the road (tags, comments, links, visible, tracemarks…basically findable). Patrice shares a story of a task she was working on, and how a search in the Traction social platform revealed that her task had already been worked on or attempted before by another party:

"Along comes me, I’m here. I would not ever know about either Person A or B or that they had a conversation, but I can exhume a dialog that took place two years ago between these two individuals that lays out the problem and the solution. I can say…the following technology is now available. Problem solved."

Patrice also echoes something I posted about in getting up to speed with the help of accessing past conversations in online group spaces:

"…being placed in new situations, new organisations, and needed to get up to speed quickly - there was no luxury of time"

A quote in the Wikinomics book tells this same thing, in that the conversation once existed as it’s findable in a visible place (as opposed to closed email silos, which are a poor excuse for corporate memory). Now we can say, yeah this happened 2 years ago, not based on hear-say, but check out these links:

"When new problems and exceptions arise, people in organisations will swarm around that exception to try and resolve it […] this dencentralised approach to problem solving might be worked out in the lunchroom, while leaning over a colleague’s cubicle, over a pint after work, or increasingly through a long thread of emails The problem is that this causal approach to problem solving leaves no organisational memory of the event, with the risk that only people involved in creating the solution walk away with any new insights. Problems can persist like a bad cold, and solutions will be reinvented everytime the problem occurs. Social Software provides companies with a way to document and leverage those moments of innovation with relative ease, providing a living, breathing repository of easily accessible knowledge that grows along with the organisation. Companies can continually harness their local insights and adaptations to new problems by capturing and using those insights to drive organisational change and renewal."

The above quote is in relation to the context of "problems", but to me working visibly could be the norm in all group work, whether it’s a problem, task, coordinating something…anything.

And this echo’s Ross Mayfield’s quote about practice execution in that practice is used to fill the void, practice is used to fix things, but doing it in an invisible way using closed tools means we don’t leave any tracemarks behind, therefore no corporate memory.

And then Paula really brings home my notion of know-why and what the real corporate memory is:

"And yet, in most storage mechanism the work products themselves are stripped of the reality in which they were created. All the context as to why certain decisions were made at that time are all missing from the painfully-scrubbed collections of results and conclusions.The painful truth is, knowledge work products are not accurate representations of the work. The real work is on the cutting room floor and/or still in the minds of (or faded from) those that did the work and who may be gone. While there will always be ‘waste’ in any process, might the cuts from one project be relevant for another? Work products by themselves are often meaningless as they reflect what made it through the cuts. They lack the context of the work itself. When time and resources have past, how does one reconstruct the context for which the work product was created and you can no longer ask the workers questions about their work?"

And now let’s go back to Patrice in how she gives the details of Paula’s brilliant insight via a simple example of the invisible knowledge work that goes into a document review. It’s all too common that the person reading the document is missing the know-why in how to interpret the document. If all that know-why, all the workings-out that happened in creating/reviewing the document were visible, then it can easily be retrieved as the document can link to these raw fragments (conversations). These raw fragments, the knowledgework, can be consulted without having to track down the author (if they are still around), which we would then have to try and track down some emails, minutes, whiteboard, print-outs…

The key here is a document comment stream…which can inform the know-why or comments that hyperlink to other areas that have the know-why

Patrice’s know-why tragedy

"…100 page document get written, they’re beautiful, there’s a lot of work, lot of meetings, lot of brainpower, bright minds on difficult problems…and all this stuff…gets filed into Sharepoint [Document Managenent System]…nobody knows it’s in there…they don’t know how to find it, and if they could, they don’t know what they’re reading, why should they read it, there’s no context…because it’s been stripped now out of its environment…"

Patrice then talks about an order by the General (manager) to go back and re-work the document, and goes on vacation:

"…we work on pages 18 - 25…we do a lot of work - we cross out lines we explain why, we put in an appendix - and we put it back in Sharepoint…" "…unstructured conversation…our emails back and forth in generating that product which are now removed from the document itself…if we were blogging…it all would of been captured"

The lieutenant is asked to retrieve the document for the General, who wants to see the revised document…they are pointed to the new version of the file in the document management system:

"…change comparison…100 page document now an 87 page document [pages don’t match up anymore due to re-working it]…[the General and Lieutenant]… read this but…don’t know what they are doing. On page 20 there’s this whole paragraph about A and B and C…why did they do this…"

So they have to track down the authors of the document and get them back from the vacation:

"Now we are doing the work twice because we spent 3 weeks…doing this work and delivering it…all the value add is gone…yes we got a product, we still need a product…but this product is useless, because the knowledge work and the thinking, and the exchange, and the brainstorming, and the whiteboarding, and all that is gone…what good is it" "I will never use Sharepoint again because you’ve divorced me from my work" "Care and feeding of knowledge work requires relationships…people want high performance, but they forget about high touch…relationships are everything" "We did a lot of work…it got turned into some flat 80 page document that some General needed to have, and he got the document but he couldn’t understand the whys and wherefores" "He wouldn’t have…had the meeting to make the lieutenant retrieve the document, sit down with him and interpret the document [had he been able to access the visible unstructured conversations related to the document…whether in a blog or document comment stream, or whatever]

Sounds all too common. I bet you would hear hundreds of examples of this same story if you started asking around or eavesdropping in your workplace. I listen all the time at work and hear pains and pangs about communication and decisions being echoed around near where I sit.

Know-why is missing in action

Not long ago I was talking with Alister Grigg (who I linked to above) and he told me a story of a bridge built over a freeway. What the documentation didn’t tell them is why was it decided that the bridge was built to cover a 6 lane freeway when the freeway is only 4 lanes…where is this conversation that led to this decision?

Summary

Up until now the corporate memory has been in email silos, this is the know-how and know-why….the workings out, decisions, and conversations that led to deliverables. Just having end products (the know-what) is not good enough, we need to share the talent of the work that goes into this output…a move to a thinking-out-loud / work-in-progress culture.

Email silos are not discoverable and accessible, and people often will not share stuff in email that they would in blogs and forums. And now all the knowledge and decisions about documents can easily and intuitively be accessible via fragments whether they are micro-blogs, forums, blogs, wiki, document comment streams, etc…

Convergence of Themes

Emergence

Fragments

Visibility

Barely Repeatable Processes

Observable Work

Work-in-Progress

Thinking-out-Loud

Ambient Awareness

Stocks and Flows

Ad-hoc

Context

Craft

Next

In the next post I’ll explain my idea of conversational metadata. A way this "observable work" concept can be adopted (and take some email market share) as it’s designed into the process flow. This can happen various ways, but I’ll explain how it can happen against the backdrop of a Document Management System.