Library clips

It all started with Euan Semple’s insightful post on knowledge ecologies (not economies or markets). It resonated with me so much that I celebrated Euan’s post by reviewing each point through the eyes of a Community of Practice facilitator. Prior to this I touched on one point called "follow the energy", which is what the spirit of social business design or enterprise 2.0 is all about.

A discussion on G+ led to points about control, managing, leadership, and facilitation; which Luis Suarez has kindly summarized.

A few notable points in the discussion:

One of the key concepts which links with any ecological approach is co-evolution. As things interact with other things patterns form and you can never reverse. Its a radical break from engineering or idealistic (define where you want to be and close the gap) approaches as it managers in the “present now”

- Dave Snowden (comment 13)

Co-evolution is a very different word and approach than "control" and "targets"; which are quite synonymous with the usual approach to management.

I got the word "community" expunged from any tools we bought!

- Euan Semple

I agree with Euan here. Our software at work is called "Communities" as are many other vendors. This can be too narrow or misleading as lots of our so called "Communities" are not that at all, but instead work spaces, task spaces, etc…see here.

I don’t want to dwell on this next point too much here as I’ve posted about it before (see I don’t create communities, I create online spaces!).

Actually maybe Dave Snowden’s words once again hit the mark:

“If a community has value it will form and the technology now allows that"

This does not imply "leaderless", but it does imply that a thing will form if the need, and willingness to see that need arises. In other words, you have an uphill battle if you are trying to create, force or control an online community into being.

So what do I mean by an online community or shared interest/purpose group space?
I think the "Community Roundtable" do a good job on their "Community Management Fundamentals" presentation:

1. A common interest or context
2. A sense of shared purpose and fate
3. A common set of needs

I’m not going to get into the difference between online Communities of Practice (CoPs) and teams or work groups, so check out these links below for that information. Yes, some CoPs may end up doing a task, and teams may do CoP-like stuff like sharing interest news and discussion that may be unrelated to tasks…but there is a defining difference when you compare the primary activity, their purpose, aims and expectations.

Here’s those links:

Team-based CoPs compared to cross-functional CoPs

How relevant are communities of practice in a network age?

Communities, Work teams, Social teams and Crews

But I will highlight Bertrand Duperrin’s pithy comparison where he says "Communities exchange to learn, workgroups exchange to execute"…here’s more:

Communities are places where practices, knowledge, information are exchanged and has not to be confused with workgroups which are operational entities…

Groups know what they have to do, to deliver, and that’s why they exist. Groups exist because they have operational purposes.

Communities exchange to learn, groups exchange to execute (even if there a learning dimension in the background routine).

The group is a manager’s responsibility, the manager being responsible for objective’s achievement. Communties can be handled by external people who is an expert, a skilled communicator while groups only react to hierarchical hierarchy (even if expertise matters in the background).

I think they are both groups; one being a community-type group, and the other a work-type group.

Boris puts it another way:

“…we “exist” as a community, but we “achieve” as a team

Each of us “exists” within a multitude of communities with which we  associate – with differing levels of interest. However, to actually achieve a specific aim/goal, we need to tap into a subset of that group to create a “team” to help us achieve that.

I can’t help myself to just go on a bit more on this, as when I read back on this, Kaye Vivian really compares it nicely:

…any “community” formed for the purpose of creating a content resource is not a true community.

I don’t think communities have “mission critical” expectations.  Organizations do.

…true communities form around a common interest in a topic Their purpose is not to create content…the content is a by-product of how the members interact in exploring their common interest. 

CoPs don’t usually involve doing a task or deliverable, but the real key word in Kaye’s statement is the word "expectations".

Kaye’s part about CoPs not being about creating content could be challenged I suppose, but I feel too academic trying to go further in the demarcation, who really cares in the end about making it a black and white world. In the end CoPs are more volunteer based, and don’t usually involve deliverables. Nancy White has more on CoP orientations.

Community Manager or Community Facilitator (Lead) or host

As usual I’ve posted lots without evening coming yet to the purpose of this post, which was inspired by Luis’s post, and based on something I said in the G+ discussion:

At work we don’t use the term community manager we instead use the term community facilitator. The term community manager may be more appropriate if you have a thriving CoP and you spend a lot of time administering it, but at work this is not always the case, instead most of our CoPs require a host to facilitate and generate activity. Anyway that’s why we use the term "facilitator", as it’s the dominant skill required when CoPs begin….there’s really not much to manage at the start

We need to both manage and lead, they co-exist.

Yes, even though online CoPs are not usually about tasks, deliverables, targets, expectations, there is still an element of "managing"

But in the end you have to choose a word, and I choose "facilitate" as that’s more the primary function when it comes to online CoPs.

Imagine you had an external brand community. A lot of work would be monitoring, answering questions, maintenance, gardening, support…all the managing stuff. But it also involves leadership (and facilitation) as you listen to people, bring out the best in people, co-create, foster new directions, play host, role-model, educate, riff off the emergence.

Anyway I run internal communities where the contributions aren’t as great as external brand communities. In our communities-especially in the growth stage-leadership/facilitation is key in generating activity and a community spirit. I like how Andrew Gent says:

…it is not enough to schedule a party, hire a caterer, and send out invitations. Once the event begins, you must play host: introduce people so no one feels left out, make sure they circulate, suggest activities… t’s not enough to invite people to the party, you need to play host and get people talking and generating activities.

Chris Corrigan has more on this:

A facilitator is like a party planner, or a wedding organizer, running around taking care of details, scripting the event and staying outside of the experience.

A party host, by contrast, is inside the experience, invested in the outcome, bringing energy to conversations, not only form, and both affecting and being affected by the experience. 

People will find managing much easier (not to say we are necessarily good at it) as that’s what we have done all our lives, we manage our life, situations, we have control over things…as Dave mentioned above, we have a target and work to close the gap. We so easily go into managing mode as that’s what we know; but leadership is something that is more intentional, learned, experiential; rather than automatic.

Why I mostly use the term "facilitator" or "leader" in relation to our online CoPs is because this is a skill most people don’t have in a deep way; it’s something special (usually drawn from experience, rather than learnt at business school) to be able to lead, bring the best out in others, actively listen, counsel, correlate, steward, and harness; rather than control (whether it’s controlling for a targeted outcome, or just for the sake of it). I make it my job at work to educate people in facilitating, as they are already wired to manage. And when it comes to online CoPs (even more so in the growth stage) facilitating is a more valuable skill than managing (but I stress we need both skills, all I’m saying is I’m paying more attention to developing skills in facilitation).

And to reiterate the start of this post, the whole premise of communities leads to facilitating anyway, as most of what they are about is people coming together to celebrate a shared interest…it’s not so much about tasks and deliverables. And no, you can’t manage people to share just like you would manage them for contexts like deliverables. People share because they want to, because they feel connected and engaged with others, so our job is to nurture this particular drive and desire.

If you would like to know more about nurturing participation, see my post, Presentation : Participation in Communities of Practice (here’s a link to the presentation) 

For a deeper look I have a collection of links on the role of a community manager/facilitator/lead, see my post, The field of community management

Also check out slides 13 and 14 from the Community Management Fundamentals slidedeck.

For more about leadership and management check out…

Leadership and management are symbiotic:

The upshot, in my view, is that asking if leadership or management is more important is like asking “what is more important, your heart or your brain?”  Both are equally essential and if there isn’t a connection between the two, you are in big trouble! 

- Bob Sutton (…and more)

There is a profound difference between management and leadership, and both are important:

To manage means to bring about, to accomplish, to have charge of or responsibility for, to conduct. Leading is influencing, guiding in a direction, course, action, opinion. The distinction is crucial.” And in one of his most famous lines, he added, “Managers are people who do things right and leaders are people who do the right thing.

- Warren Bennis

It’s funny when you look back as the original meaning of management it seems more close to leadership and facilitation ie. developing a relationship, understanding it and nurturing it, treating with respect and co-purpose. I guess depending on the activity the juggling of managing an activity is still there, but I think if we devote a lot of time to the above descriptions about relationship, then the managing part falls more into place.

Dave Snowden bought it’s original meaning to my attention:

Manege comes from the Italian Maneggiare meaning to handle and train horses and it’s one of the origins of the word manage in English

We are not about to control and manage a horse are we; we instead need interpersonal skills; we have to befriend it, form a relationship, have respect…all the qualities of facilitation and leadership.

Partners, Leaderless, Community-ship 

If we look at employee engagement, happiness, purpose, well being, and their intrinsic motivations, we can certainly borrow some practices from the way we lead and facilitate online communities into our work teams…Peter Drucker thinks so:

…“employees” have to be managed as “partners”—and it is the definition of a partnership that all partners are equal.  It is also the definition of a partnership that partners cannot be ordered.  They have to be persuaded…

Henry Mitzberg is also on this meme of organisations borrowing approaches from communities (not turning them into communities, as they are not, but instead borrowing skills from running communities and fostering happy workers). In fact he speaks beyond leadership, in favour of community-ship:

…show me a leader and I will show you all kinds of followers and that is not the kind of organizations that we want…we need to put more emphasis on what I prefer to call, there is no word for it but I use the word ‘community-ship’, which is the idea that corporations and other organizations, when they function well, are communities. People care for each other, they worry about each other, they work for each other and they work for the institution and they feel pride in the institution.

…and more.

As is Margaret Wheatley:

…the first task of a leader is to make sure the organization knows itself.

There is so much that an organization needs to know about itself. But it needs to know it; it doesn’t ever respond to being told what it is or what it’s supposed to do

…and more.

And once again Dave Snowden:

Training leadership crews rather than leaders may be one way to build more resilience into organisations…Ultimately the role of the leader is to create sufficient coherence to allow progress to be made; to be seen as an enabler of good decision making, not always to be the decision maker.

Naturalistic, joint sensemaking and co-evolution 

Dave Snowden hones in on perhaps the management 2.0 approach:

In the idealistic approach, the leaders of an organization set out an ideal future state that they wish to achieve, identify the gap between the ideal and their perception of the present, and seek to close it. This is common not only to process-based theory but also to practice that follows the general heading of the “learning organization”. Naturalistic approaches, by contrast, seek to understand a sufficiency of the present in order to act to stimulate evolution of the system. Once such stimulation is made, monitoring of emergent patterns becomes a critical activity so that desired patterns can be supported and undesired patterns disrupted. The organization thus evolves to a future that was unknowable in advance, but is more contextually appropriate when discovered. 

Chris Rodgers also talks about the perspective of naturalistic organisations:

Outcomes, in the form of the sense that is made and the use that this is put to, are co-created by those in the conversation. These can’t be handed down by leaders – or by anyone else for that matter.  From this perspective, a leader’s task is to actively engage in the joint sensemaking process

…and more.

Let’s not leave out Stephen Billing:

The challenge is “How can I influence the constraints and power relationships so that different (hopefully more desirable) patterns of social interaction emerge.”…as a manager you can only influence your organisation from within your own local interaction with others. So you must pay attention to your own interaction, observe what results and adjust as you go along.

…and more.

I’ve got lots of good information on engagement (and more) and social connection and caring in these posts.

Also check out Deb Lavoy’s posts on respect and purpose and CV Harquail’s posts on authenticity and distinction

Done

In organisations we have a fetish for control and neatness in regards to information and communication; which is flys in the face of how we naturally behave.

You know how it goes, "this type of information must live here", "if you talk about this topic it must happen here", etc…

Now people naturally form groups and personal networks, they talk about various things and feel comfortable and confident in participating in circles of people they trust, have rapport with, have shared experiences with…

If you look at our lives offline and even on the web there is no person that mandates where you file topic-based content and where you are allowed to talk about a topic. Yes control has a purpose sometimes, but I’m talking about an equilibium, I’m talking about realising that management approaches have a fetish that sometimes do more bad than good…we need to stop and think, does the command approach suit a particular initiative or event.

Online groups 

I’ve talked about this before in a post called social computing is messy, and so it should be. What initiated that post was a new Community of Practice (CoP) that was formed to be a support group for designers. This CoP noticed a few other CoPs had forums about design tool applications and suggested that since they were now the official design tools CoP that these forums be moved. I’m glad this didn’t happen, I’m glad not even management could persuade these other CoPs. If it did happen, there would be a good chance these forums would have died. Why? Because people like to talk where they hang out, with people they feel comfortable with. In the end a CoP is about the people not the topic. I mean, in the offline world I talk about any topic with anyone I like where ever I happen to be (coffee room, desk, elevator, etc.)

Online networks

At least with online groups tools like CoPs organisations have a "form" to control, but online social networks take it a step further as there is no standard space to speak about a topic, it’s simply a messy network just like email (People connecting to each other talking about what they need to talk about to get their work done) ie. it’s not a group space where someone can choose to control it, it’s simply connected profiles where only the person who owns the profile can control, and hence no-one controls the network. At least with email this happens underground so there is no chance to control, but when we bring this way of communicating online, management get a fever that they can’t control it. 

Aggregate and curate 

Like on the web, organisations must realise to allow things to be messy, let them flourish, that’s natures way…and then it’s the job of aggregators and curators to pull topic based content where ever it surfaces and to present it.

Rather than control unfront which will somewhat curtail what you want to achieve, look around and gather what you find. Let people free-play and then collect what you find.

Let’s look at some examples of this on the web…

Travel  

When some people travel they blog about their travels…they do this all over the web, whether on blogs, or blog networks etc…

As a user we use Google or Google Blog search to find personal posts about a city, region, event, etc…

Google social search will show results from people in our Google Reader and Twtiter list, and more…this is a good start as it helps reduce the load of results

Without Google social search finding stuff like travel reviews is time consuming, and sometimes nowadays we use help engines or social search like Twitter, Facebook or Quora to explicitly ask a question ie. it’s quick to ask friends, you trust their feedback, they know your history so they can offer contextual recommendations, and you can chat to clarify, and of course the wonder of conversations begets idea, insights and gifts.

Quite often on the web destination sites make a business out of this need eg. TripAdvisor. But the focus of this post is less about social networks and more about aggregation and curation.

Yesterday I was looking into what to do for a couple of days in Kuala Lumpur, and TripAdvisor is great for this, but I wanted to check this out from all corners of the web…so I started on Google blog search and Google search.

I came across the Kuala Lumpur city overview page on Lonely Planet’s website, and I noticed a beta program they have on their sidebar that says "OUR FAVOURITE KUALA LUMPUR BLOGS (BETA)" I clicked to see more and I landed on their Kuala Lumpur "Blogs we like" page. This lists blog posts from handpicked sources that blog about Kuala Lumpur and travel. This saved me lots of time, I got to read 10 quality posts.

NOTE: I’m not sure if Lonely Planet go a step further and curate posts ie. they choose particular posts from their source list, rather than just aggregate every post.

There you go, that’s an example of the messiness of the blogosphere, and a third party picking sources to valuable content…in essence they do the hard work for you.

This is what I saying organisations have to get their head around, the world is messy and we have to make sense of it as it happens rather than try controlling it…and as I said by controlling it you actually stifle the world from happening, or push it into the "black communications market" (ie email).

Music 

Another example is music. I’m personally into bedroom or starting out artists…without sites like Soundcloud, Myspace, Vimeo, Bandcamp where would we be in finding this cool stuff. But even with these destination sites there is still a lot to look through. A good site is last.fm as similar to TripAdvisor you can connect with people to see what they listen to and get recommendations.

But since this post is about aggregation and curation I’ll mention something more inline with that…I discovered a music site called "Altered Zones". They have noticed there are lots of underground music blogs and know it’s hard to keep up, so what they have done is chosen 15 of the best undergound music blogs and aggregated the stream into one feed. Again I’m not sure if it’s pure aggregation, or if they are curating one ot two posts a week from each blog.

OK here’s one step further. A social network/mp3 blog aggregator/streaming site called The Hype Machine have aggregated lots and lots of music blogs and put them into topic directories. You get your own profile and choose the blogs you want to follow, and you can also follow search results

I have several music blogs I subscribe to in Google Reader, and Facebook Pages; which is great so I can keep up with the latest.

The Hype Machine like me and countless others, have discovered brilliant blogs on the web that share the lastest mp3’s.

What The Hype Machine have done is select hundreds (or perhaps thousands) of these blogs and built a massive directory and aggregator.

Search for a blog by tag
- When you find a blog you like, you add it to your subscriptions
-You can display posts by one blog or all the blogs you have subscribed to

So rather than Google Reader I can use The Hype Machine to keep up with the latest

Now the interesting thing is that it will only display blog posts that have an audio link
- So when I say the latest, I don’t mean the latest news, but I mean the latest audio links

Further to this you can stream the song right there from the blog post within The Hype Machine

You can also favourite blog posts which in essense is a favourites playlist
- it even has a shuffle mode
- I can’t seem to see the ability to make multiple playlists

Now I can find, keep up, play and keep music in the one spot without having to leave.

In addition to subscribing to blogs, you can also search and subscribe to an artist
- this is not based on metadata, but is simply a search (so it can be a bit noisy)

Your subscriptions page can be limited to show posts via blogs or artists, or both

And you knew it was coming, you can also subscribe (follow) others users, and do the social network thing.

Another cool thing is that it lists all blog posts that link to the same audio file. In this respect you can read multiples reviews about a song. See an example.

And of course Twitter integration.

Anyway, yet another example of people out there freely doing their thing, and the job of a facilitator (or startup in this case) is picking a bunch of sources, and letting you do the aggregation and curation.

If you want to know about aggregation and curation look no further than Robin Good

A mindmap of content curation tools to aggregate, filter, edit, curate and distribute any type of content

Real-Time News Curation - The Complete Guide Part 6: The Tools Universe

Real-Time News Curation - The Complete Guide Part 7: Business Applications And Trends

Real-Time News And Content Curation: The Best 2010 Articles And Reports From MasterNewMedia

Here’s an example of Robin drinking his new champagne, he’s uses Scoop.it as a real-time news curation tool to present news funnily enough, on real-time news curation

Related

Communities and Networks Connection blog aggregator

At work I’m the global lead for Communities of Practice (CoPs) and work solo…I report to a director and have a part time techie.

We are still in the GROWTH stage…I’ve still got a few wiki help guides to make, need to further develop my support CoPs, and work on reporting.

Along with this is the usual daily support and maintenance.

And side projects like developing external communities.

Anyway…

I consult with each new CoP, I inform them, I support them, then it’s up to the facilitator to host their CoP.

At any time they can phone, email, IM me, or use the support CoPs (to ask questions and where I share tips), and refer to help guides

The idea here is to train the trainer ie. each CoP facilitator

Issue

We have over 50 communities but only half are active, and I’d say about a quarter are really active.

I don’t want to deny new CoPs, but then I don’t want a ghost town.

NOTE: Our CoPs are not temporary group collaboration spaces, these are long term spaces for Business Units, Shared Services and Cross-functional groups. From this you can tell that CoPs is no longer an appropriate descriptor, but it’s something we are used to

, but it’s something we are used to, but it’s something we are used to, but it’s something we are used to, but it’s something we are used to, but it’s something we are used to, but it’s something we are used to, but it’s something we are used to

Since we are in the growth stage I don’t have time to consult with each CoP on an ongoing basis…and they need it as CoPs are about facilitating group dynamics, learning new tools, replacing habits…something not all people know about

If I could only train each facilitator each day to transfer these concepts and practice them, then I think their CoPs would have more capacity to improve.

I’m talking about an attention problem…I can’t spread it as far and as deep as I’d like to

I don’t have a team of global facilitators, it’s just me.

If I did I could assign a global facilitator to 10 CoPs each…this way we could do daily ground-zero facilitation with CoP facilitators

NOTE: We do not want to facilitate each CoP, we want to facilitate the facilitators

A team of global facilitators would only be short-term; it’s just to get our stagnant CoPs off the ground…to hold their hand for 6 months.

If all 50 CoPs were tuned, then only a couple of us would be needed to support/maintain, develop, and consult existing and new CoPs

My coping mechanism (currently in development)

• A volunteer facilitator network to help new CoPs…especially handy in a global company operating in various time zones
• A CoPs in Action wiki to highlight how groups are using CoPs in different ways, how they are using tools in various ways, interviews, case studies, recognition, curating content.
  This can help immensely as often new CoPs stare at a blank slate, they are not sure how or which way to flex these unstructured tools…they are used to tools designed for a specific purpose, and now suddenly they are the designers
• Monthly webinars on technical skills and participation practices

Where can I add value most? (currently in development)

What about this as an approach…

Simply focus my attention on those CoPs that "get it".

Keep allowing new CoPs to happen and support them, but only go that extra mile on enthusiastic upcoming facilitators and existing thriving CoPs

This way my time and expertise is being used to add value, rather than being spread thinly.

The idea is to create showcase CoPs.

Better to have 10 engaging CoPs, rather than 50 not so engaging.

The showcase CoPs can act as a magnet or attractor for other CoPs to want to be like them.

If this happens then I can eventually take my attention of the showcase CoPs, as they know what they are doing, and pay attention to existing CoPs that are insistently knocking on my door to resurrect participation.

At the moment I have demand for new CoPs, but I want demand for existing CoPs to want to be better

What I like about this approach is that I’m not denying the creation of new CoPs, that can continue as usual, but at the same time most of my time will be focused just on a handful of CoPs

One at a time…

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."

An email was sent to a bunch of leads the other day about the progress of our new document management server.

At the end of the email it said to pass this information on to our teams.

Need to Know - Scattered and Slow - Private by default

The way I see it each lead will send a version of this email to their teams, and then they will all have silo’d conversations.

Then certain leads will want clarification or have a question to ask, but will not include all the other leads on that email.

Then back to their teams again….

Back and forth, back and forth…the same topic being conversed in different groups…the scattered and slow approach.

On some occasions some of the leads will not pass on the message, or maybe the lead didn’t get one of the emails, and maybe the lead will slip passing on your feedback…and if they do you may not be attributed.

Then one day the change comes and people say why wasn’t I communicated about this…this initiative doesn’t even factor in how we work…if they consulted us the change could at least reflect to make the way we work easier and more productive. They don’t have a clue about ground zero. This is the enterprise gap!

Worker: Resist…ignore new process, use my backdoor workaround.

Manager: How come this change is being resisted…email the change management guy we need to "push" this.

Yuck, the word "push"…anyway this shows how a lack of visibility, co-creation, and bottlenecks that managers have the potential to be, lead to ineffectiveness…need a KM Flow Doctor!

Actually this takes me back to my corporate plot post.

Good to Know - Contained and Quick - Public by default

Here’s how I would have done it.

Believe it or not we actually have a Community of Practice (CoP) for this initiative.

I would have written a blog post instead of an email

• Our blogs have an email address, so we can publish a post by emailing the blog
• Since not all these people may subscribe to the blog I would have emailed these people the link to the blog post
• In the email I would mention to them to leave a comment on the blog if they had any queries
• I would also mention in the email for them to subscribe to the blog to get further comments (unfortunately our platform doesn’t have post level subscriptions like a "Watchlist")
• When you are subscribed you get emailed new posts and comments, and can use the email reply button to have comments conversations
• Basically you don’t even have to visit the blog itself to read and interact

Now each of these people can just pass on the link to the people in their teams.

Subscribers and browsers to the blog will also be informed.

And everyone can have ONE conversation in the ONE spot.

Inbox 2.0

Basically email becomes the vehicle for having the conversation, but yet no-one is personally sent an email; instead every email is sent to the blog object (social object), which people subscribe to ("pull" approach).

And at the end the blog object also stores the information.

Naturally we begin to think that the whole idea of the email client needs to be evolved…something like Tweetdeck, but more of an email client look, hello Lotus Notes, the "business inbox". Fuser and others have being doing this on the consumer web for years.

What results from using social tools

1. Transparency (communicating progress in the open…"public" by default)
2. Less distorted message (no interpretations, straight from the source, less gossip/rumors, access to raw facts allows you to re-mix and re-frame content)
3. Workers can offer feedback in discussions they normally would not be a part of (co-creation helps make the initiative more relevant to people who will actually use it…therefore less need for change management)
4. Diverse input (people not involved in either end of the change initiative may come across the conversation and add valuable input)
5. Workers feel engaged that they are included in discussions (happy workplace, build an influence by reputation)
6. Everyone is informed of the "know-why" (rather than just reading a report, they now know of, and can take part in the raw conversations…all the decisions that led to the final product)

This will help solve the fundamental issue that all organisations seem to face…the silo syndrome, communication and awareness breakdown, scattered and slow dialogue.

NOTE: Silos are natural and strong, and we need them. It’s just that each silo is not the enterprise, so to be effective we need to be aware and collaborate across silos…so we bridge silos, not smash them.

A support tool, a new literacy

Social computing (or KM) is not a strategy, it’s a support tool, a sense-making tool, a way of being…just like the phone, email, IM…

We can use these tools to improve sales, improve brand awareness, improve customer service, fix a problem, fix a process, etc…are these strategies/tactics, or simply using tools to achieve (support) your job tasks…difference to the past is that these tools (there use) can have a cultural impact in a deeper way…they challenge the dynamics of relationships, openness, power, routines, habits.

You could say we could use new social tools for everything, that’s why we see HR 2.0, Sales 2.0, Marketing 2.0, etc…that’s why existing products are starting to get features like blogs, social networks. So really it’s a way of being or a literacy, rather than a strategy. But yes, to get buy-in you may go the strategy route; but that’s just to get your foot in the door, and it’s also to help the blank faces when they are given tools that aren’t designed to do a specific thing…and what it takes to get adoption (the difference between transactional and interactional).

Obstacles

Visibility, connectedness (not just a horizontal slice of the org, but a network), and conversations are key.

What’s stopping this at the actioning or "doing" level (in relation to the anecdote I shared at the start of this post):

1. Design (have to visit the blog, rather than quickly shoot an email…but the blog does have it’s own email address, just need to remember to put it in your email contacts, and if you subscribe you can get new posts emailed and replying will publish a comment)

2. Habit and routine (this needs to be facilitated…rinse and repeat)

3. The message may want to be filtered for the masses (in this case the message was quite general)

4. Us and them syndrome (I have worked up my way in the hierarchy to be privy to these types of conversations…part of my status is to pass messages up and down the chain)

Going even more deeper the mass use of these tools could lead to a transformation that companies don’t see appropriate, not ready for, feel as a threat…the list goes on.

Subject Matter Networks

Another way of looking at the sense-making perspective is saying that we are moving from Subject Matter Experts to Subject Matter Networks. In the sense that it’s not about in-house gurus, it’s about people connecting in the network to do their work…much more normal, practical and resilient.

Mark Oehlert on this:

"…we needed to be thinking differently…if we just used social media to build more ways to get to SMEs, then we wouldn’t fix what was broken…our ability to access the expertise that we need, when we need it - either in order to answer a question, provide input into a course design or for some other purpose - we didn’t need better access to Subject-Matter Experts…we needed access to Subject-Matter Networks. (SMNs)

Eric Davidove shares the details:

"Some key conclusions from the research: Activities and interactions that occur in blogs, wikis and social networks naturally provide the cues that are missing from current expert locator systems. A search engine that mines internal blogs, for example, where workers post updates and field queries about their work, will help searchers judge for themselves who is an expert in a given field. Wiki sites, because they involve collaborative work, will suggest not only how much each contributor knows, but also how eager they are to share that knowledge and how well they work with others. Tags and keywords, which are posted by employees and serve as flags for search engines, can reveal qualities in an expert that are far from transparent in any database or directory. I like this study because it demonstrates the hidden value of blogs and wikis. This study also helps us further understand that the formal organizational chart and company designated experts are not necessarily the best “maps” for finding expertise or the most qualified experts in the company. Social media such as blogs and wikis will help us to identify the established and emerging experts and to go beyond the “usual suspects.”

And I like Simon Bostock’s touch:

"The reasons that other people approach those experts has as much to do with approachability, generosity and perspicacity as it does with expertise."

Rex Lee talks about removing barriers:

"Enterprise 1.0, would suggest that only specialized, trained individuals with the resources knew how to find pearls… Enterprise 2.0 suggests that we can simplify and remove some of the "specialization" barriers to enable more people to search for pearls

Tune processes of engagement

Just to quickly go off on a small tangent (which relates to my previous post on ad-hoc processes). Rex suggests that the tools are not enough, in that we need to tune processes and attitudes. He gave the example of sales people using a wiki rather than Marketing, as the Sales people were more agile on this type of information. But existing processes are not going to bring fruit to this good idea; why would sales people contribute when hoarding gets them ahead, when it means less time spent selling.

I asked similar questions in my post, I don’t want to share, that’s counter to meeting my objectives…and reward!! (hehehehe, just noticed I quoted Rex in that post)

Rex says:

"Without social engineering and modifying processes, models, policies and education, the initiative was doomed to fail before it even started. There seems to be a belief that by just letting all conversation flow in blogs, tweets, forums, wiki’s, etc…, that corporations will find great nuggets of insight, that people will connect and come up with great ideas, that agility and holistic understanding will be natural outcomes. Although this may be true, we don’t need to leave it at that. Proper social engineering in leveraging social technologies can enable organization to focus the potential of their employees & business partners to drive specific business value of higher quality and in shorter time frames. This requires and understanding the engagement factors (motivation, opportunity, capability) and taking initiative to design and facilitate within the environment."

Resulting in:

"Enterprise 2.1 would suggest that rather than "serendipitously" finding pearls, that we coordinate our efforts to actually create pearl farms."

Let’s finish off

Simon Bostock gets to the reality of it (just substitute KM for social computing/networks):

"At some point, when a skill becomes so important, it ceases to be somebody’s job but becomes a literacy. We no longer have scriveners (or many secretaries for that matter) because we’re all expected to write. At what point will we face up to the fact that Knowledge Management is no longer a respectable job (or PR or HR or marketing?) but a literacy?"

[ADDED 10/06/10 - Policy memo’s are not leadership

“Pentagon leadership today craft new strategies and implement them via policy memo. These memos can often be summarized as “All programs must now do X”. To the thousands of program managers out there who read them, they think: “SIGH….Great, add that to the pile”. Once that policy memo is emailed out, what’s the follow-up implementation? Staffs spend months and years interpreting meanings and sorting out implementation strategies while leadership often don’t hear of issues until a few programs fail.

If leadership maintained a blog, they could share their vision and thoughts as part of an ongoing dialogue with the community. The community early on can understand where leadership is going on an issue, long before a policy memo is staffed, approved, and distributed. Feedback can be provided to Pentagon leadership on issues that may arise and lessons learned“]

[ADDED 10/06/10 - How to Break the Tyranny of E-mail]