Library clips

It’s funny, I just finished reading a book that has nothing to do with my usual interests, but yet it relates so much. This put a smile on my face as what I’m learning is not confined to a bubble, I’m learning the essence of things that transfer, relate and apply to anything in life. Which suits me fine as parenting is just around the corner

Men at Birth, Edited by David Vernon

“I read the standard birth texts…they told me about the physiology of birth. They told me how things should work and a bit of why things worked they way they did. They told me about ‘normal’ labours, ‘normal’ pelvis sizes, normal ‘contractions’ and ‘normal’ women. Unfortunately the texts use the term ‘normal’, when they mean the mathematical term ‘mean’, ‘median’ or even ‘mode’. But I found all the talk about ‘average’ births to be unhelpful because I knew from friends and family that every birth is an individual experience.”

“Interestingly, I found it was the birth stories that really gave me a handle on birth. They told me the practical things from an individual’s point of view and they told me how it felt for a woman to give birth. They told me about real experiences. There were no ‘normals’ here. Amd the stories told me how things did work, and sometimes differed from the textbook statement on how things should work.”

“These stories were not attempting to meet the rigours required of a textbook. The stories left it up to the reader to decide what the ‘take home message’ was from each story. For me, the stories made our upcoming birth all the more real, all the more exciting and something that we really looked forward to.”

What I got out of it is that midwifes are facilitators in uncertain situations.

No two births are alike, and nearly all births don’t fall on the planned date.

Every “mother to be” is different and the midwives both have to deal with people and their situation. They don’t know what to expect as they have not seen the “mother to be” going through a birth, either has the “mother to be” if it’s their first (even if it was the second or third baby, not every birth is the same anyway, so not even the “mother to be” knows how she will react to new circumstances, especially in different environments).

The “mother to be” can tell them their plan, but they don’t even know themselves what’s coming.
The midwife also has to deal with the surrounding environment, and the actual birth itself. When all this comes together, it’s a very unique situation, so the job of the midwife is to go with the flow and facilitate.

No best practice method or text book is going to teach a midwife these subtleties, but the multitude of stories and of course actual experience are, as they deliver the uniqueness of experiences.

Reading a hundred stories, and attending a hundred births is going to do wonders to their ability.

Not only because these stories are the antithesis to “normal” or “average” or “best”, in that they cover so many different contexts and situations, but also because stories leave more of a memorable imprint in our minds (something to do with visual, narrative and emotion).

This post is about facilitation, pattern-recognition, decision-making, sense-making, context, uncertainty, narrative, adaptive behaviours in relation to birthing and midwives.

They learn to respond and adapt to uncertainty and rapidly changing situation (real rapid, by the minute).

These stories and experiences imprint a pattern in their mind and attach an emotion which has great impact for recall, and to also be able to take fragments from different stories and blend them to the situation at hand.

Stories have know-how woven in pattern form which is in tune with how our brain best functions.

They are more aware of the thousands of different things that may happen at a birth - what fails, what surprises, what’s available at hand (eg having to think on the spot to facilitate a birth in a toilet) - a text book ain’t gonna cover this.

David Snowden refers to this, and I have posted about this concept:

“…we live in a world subject to constant change, and it’s better to blend fragments at the time of need than attempt to anticipate all needs. We are moving from attempting to anticipate the future to creating an attitude and capability of anticipatory awareness.”

David Snowden from the same article:

“…we have demonstrated that narrative assessment of a battlefield picks up more weak signals (those things that after the event you wished you had paid attention to) than analytical structured thinking.”

This applies to Gary Klein’s work on decision-making via Erich Nehrlich:

“The situation is evolving constantly, and an expert will know which elements are important to follow, and which are not. The expert has been in a situation enough times before that they can mentally simulate what should be happening, and recognize when things are deviating from their expectancies, which is a sign of danger. Another good example: a fire commander goes into a building for what he thinks is a regular kitchen fire. As he’s scouting around, he realizes that it’s not behaving like a normal fire. It’s too quiet, and too hot. He doesn’t like it, and pulls his team out of the house. A few moments later, the floor of the house collapses - the fire was actually in the basement. He had no idea that there was even a basement, but his experience let him know that something was wrong, and that he needed to figure out why the situation diverged from his expectations before he continued.”

“…how experts “see the invisible” (because they know what signs to look for), generate a course of action, mentally simulate the results of that action, and then carry it out”

Mark Gould has more on decision making and how it relates to KM:

“…what impact does KM have on people? Exactly how will they be better at decision-making as a result of our work?

My instinctive answer is that I want them to become experts (and therefore able to act swiftly and correctly in an emergency) in whatever field they work in. That means that we should always return our focus to the people in our organisations, and respond to their needs (taking into account the organisation’s direction and focus), rather than thinking solely about building organisational edifices. The more time that is spent on repositories, processes, structures, or documentation, the less is available for working with people. In becoming experts in our own field, we also need to be more instinctive.”

Brad Hinton on Dave Snowden’s pattern recognition:

“Snowden explained how human decision-making is based on pattern recognition. Our brain sees multiple fragmented patterns assembled to fit our needs in particular contexts. In decison-making, our brain makes a first-fit pattern from which we act.”

Steve Barth on decision-making and intuition:

“Even at the level of the expert or the executive, the human brain is capable of reaching conclusions and finding solutions to difficult problems by using and trusting “gut” feelings. When these decisions are based on deep background knowledge and experience, intuition can be just as effective a tool as analysis—and considerably faster.”

Erich Nehrlich on stories and memories:

“Stories are how we structure our memories. If you ask me about what I was doing on June 25, 1994, I’d say, “Um, what?” But, when you prompt me that that was the day that my friends Brian and Jen got married, I’d be able to tell you all sorts of details about that day. Our memories are not filed like a computer’s, with dates and times. Our memories are filed like del.icio.us, with tags on various memories that are associatively linked in a spaghetti-like fashion.”

David Weinberger on the knowledge creative:

“Implicit knowledge isn’t explicit knowledge that we’re not currently thinking about. Implicit knowledge isn’t there the way ore is buried. It’s “there” only in the sense that we can generate it when required. Most simply: That we can come up with an answer doesn’t mean that the answer was lying dormant in us all along. Answering questions is a creative act.”

David Snowden also refers to this:

“Critically fragmented material can combine and recombine in novel and different ways, a form of conceptual blending”

Text books will have a plan and the writing will be focused on achieving that goal. But stories don’t have an outcome to achieve, rather they are in the moment, they are raw, you hear lots of peripheral information and many other things that would not be included in a text book as those things may seem unnecessary or excluded as they are tangents or just the fact that they don’t belong in the narrow focus of the outcome. But it is infact these nuances that all come together to paint the holistic picture…just ask a detective

In contrast

What did I learn from the stories about hospitals and obstetricians?

They abide by procedures and processes that do not cater for the individual person. The “mother to be” is just a number, she is the average person, she is homogeneous. The system runs like a factory, it runs on control and risk management.

They are certainly not a facilitator, they are dominantly in control. They treat the mother as if she were the “fictional average person”, use medical interventions where not necessary, and need her out of the baby factory as quick as possible eg. inducing, episiotomy, epidural, vacuum, forceps, caesarian…

There is also something called the “cascade of interventions”, which refers to an intervention to fix a problem the previous intervention caused, and so on.

Whereas the midwife has continuity of care - she has a relationship with the “mother to be” from start to even after the baby is born. The midwife facilitates the situation, she interferes as least as possible, it’s seen best to let a natural approach arise as much as possible. This approach is more in tune with human behaviour and the natural dealings of the world, they are there to re-tune the situation where needed so it realigns itself and does it’s thing naturally, rather than take the force of control, overriding nature.

I guess they surf the biodiversity of the situation rather than try control the biodiversity itself, which is an oxymoron.

When you think of it, this approach is empowering for the “mother to be” as the midwife is facilitating her to reach her human potential, rather than taking over.

Of course all this translates into the workplace with leadership and a more self organising role based organisation.

Listening, respect, trust and sharing

This leadership role and knowledge worker empowerment are great conditions for knowledge sharing and transfer…especially listening skills.

Years ago, part of my wife’s Counseling diploma included some work experience, so I decided to tag along with her and did telephone counseling for 6 months (every Saturday). Our role was to tie people over and support them till they could get their usual help. The first thing we learnt is that we don’t give advice, instead we listen and support, just being there spoke volumes.

Of course lots of people wanted advice and solutions to their issues, but we were there to support them, trying to create an environment so they could see their issue and solve it with some guidance (like probing, triggers, re-framing questions, seeing same issue from someone else’s perspective)…much more empowering, much more personal ownership.

And of course lots of people just like talking, it’s like I wasn’t even there, then at the end of the call they would thank me. I think “listening” is the greatest thing we can do (for me it’s sometimes hard to sit back and not offer advice), but offering little building blocks so people create their own answer (or co-create) is much more effective. They now have a skill and may use it to adapt to new situations, or riff off that skill.

The more you listen, the more you are respected as people like to feel heard. Further to this their transactions with you lead to them being empowered, so there is something about you that is improving their life. And I think this type of transaction or relationship leads to trust. When we trust and respect people we want to do things for them. Ultimately this leads to sharing, and a high chance of transfer in what is being shared since we have come to know each others way.

And then there were the suicide callers. Having a framework is helpful with these calls, it keeps you grounded, but you still freeze, and the only way you can best deal with them is hearing stories and experiencing them. There is no time to search for a best practice when the person on the other end of the line is fading away. You have to immediately react, and somehow fragments of memories all come together into a decision.

Why am I writing about this?

My wife is expecting our first child in a couple of months and we plan to have a home water birth. We believe hospitals are only for sick and injured people, and this my wife is not.
But, if during the birth my wife displays signs of risk to her health and the baby, that the midwife cannot deal with, then we will transfer to a hospital.

For some interesting points of view on “birthing” in Australia, here’s a link to an episode of an audience based TV program called Insight. You can watch the episode online, get a transcript, see the comments, and also view the Cover It Live post program chat. Or download it. They are also on Twitter.

This is a follow-up to my Community Lessons post, and Community paradox post.

Top-Down community creation

We have not officially released communities at work, but we have over 50, as it’s spreading by word of mouth (plus all this stuff is in vogue now).
I’m still writing the help guides, so I feel for the current users, and sometimes they are lost…the design of our communities is not very web 2.0, so people need help.

People have to fill in a request form that asks them various questions highlighting the committment and facilitation required.
Once I review that form I meet with the proposed community leader and talk to them about communities, domain, people (community), practice (output), tools, methods, participation, facilitation, structure, types, community indicators, shared identity, how they are different to networks, sustainability, etc…

NOTE: Previously with organisational/team based communities I met with the whole team on a telecon, and it was a bit messy because everyone had their idea of structure, etc…so now I meet with the proposed leader and a couple of key members, and we go through everything, then they may or may not talk to their team before coming back to me to finalise.

Once this is finalised I create the community to the required specifications eg. maybe a community only want forums, or maybe they just want a blog and a place to store documents, etc…

Then I ask the leader to pilot the community with a few key members, this way when it’s opened to more people they can visit and read the content and discussions that have already taken place. The idea is to make it attractive and engaging on the first visit.
The other aspect to this is that the community leader and key members will be proficient users and will be empowered to tackle questions by new users.
For me this is part of adoption - a blank community is not inviting, it lacks a gravitational pull, and a leader who is not equipped to properly lead may leave members in the cold. Plus as global community coordinator I don’t want to be asked questions that the facilitators could be empowered to answer.

In the future I will be running a Facilitator’s community so I can keep community leaders in the loop of running and sustaining communities, and a place for them to learn off each other. I also give them examples of community specific help guides and examples of instructional design to help their users orient and learn to use the community…it’s crucial they have a good experience, by their needs being fulfilled. This also goes for people who visit. In regards to design it’s important to role play and pretend you are a member or a visitor and see how you fair in knowing how to orient yourself when visiting or participating in a community.

Something I’ll add here is that the person I talk to has to be the community leader, they have to be the passionate person. What happens with organisational/team based communities, as opposed to practice or share interest communities, is that a sponsor will set it up with me, and then they leave it to others to run…whereas I’d rather speak to those others from the start as well…I want a relationship with the person running the community. I want the nominated person to be passionate and committed, and not doing it because their boss said so…this is something I try to make known to their boss.

Another thing I learnt is that alot of communities have lots of members for no reason. With our communities visitors are free to subscribe to blogs and forums, leave blog comments, and ask a question.

Members can additonally write blog posts, interact in forums, and add documents. But it’s more than this, members need to be involved either offline/online, they need to be an integral part…whether they are behind the scenes organising meeting/events or they are a subject matter blogger or perhaps they don’t write forum topics but get involved in a lot of forum replies.
The real communities are those where each member is integral, this quote by Adam Fields sums it up:

“There’s really only one rule for community as far as I’m concerned, and it’s this - in order to call some gathering of people a “community”, it is a requirement that if you’re a member of the community, and one day you stop showing up, people will come looking for you to see where you went.”

If you are not going to participate at all, well you might as well not be a member, but still subscribe or visit to content you are interested in.
Anyway, when people request to join a community there is a message to this effect, helping them decide right off the bat if being a member is what they thought it would be.

So far this post has been about community creation, but what I really wanted to focus is on the disadvantages of top-down creation of communities, wiki, blogs, etc… That is, what are we, the company, and knowledge workers missing out on by not being able to have the freedom to create these objects (bottom-up creation)?

I have explained above, in the pre-creation consultation of a community I talk people through what’s involved. A lot of the time it’s not what they are after, they didn’t realise “communities are conversations”, and they were just after more of a document management (DM) type thing. I tell them that DM is a way to centralise and make available what’s on people’s hard drives into one easy place. The additional feature of our communities is that we can also have conversations using blogs and forums, that replace and make less messy what happens in emails, and much more…it’s about awareness, discovery and connecting with people, participating, conversations, evolving content, and learning.

The other aspect is that they don’t know what’s involved in sustaining and facilitating a community to be a sticky hot spot for people to visit daily, interact…ie a daily resource to learn more about your interest. In the end, the less participation, the less it’s a community. In one community at work there are very few forum topics and I’m basically the lone blogger, so it doesn’t feel like a community at all…we don’t meet-up or discuss things we want to learn. I get lots of comments, but then you don’t have to be a member to comment on a blog. I learn from these comments, but I might as well blog outside the community (but we don’t have this kind of framework yet, we only have blogs within communities, an intranet 2.0 network solution is further down the line)…I’ll stop here as this is not a post about participation.

I’ve mentioned that some people:

- think they want a community, but don’t, once they find out it’s not what they wanted
- don’t have time to commit
- don’t like the top-down process of having to set one up

Bottom-Up community creation

It’s this last point I’m interested in, if community creation was a bottom-up process what would be different?

For starters our communities are not that well designed or intuitive so they need to interact with me anyway, and creating a community requires a few steps.

My speculation is that we would have hundreds of abandoned communities, as people would realise it’s not what they want, they don’t know it’s about conversation, they don’t know how to facilitate, etc…

What this means is that our community directory would contain lots of empty communities, which would be an unfriendly experience as people would browse and discover lots of empty spaces, and perhaps think this community tool is not really serious, or wonder how to find the good stuff.

What I do like about this approach is since people are free to create communities, they will, and we would potentially get lots of great communities. Factors such as limited time, attention, and the fact that you can do it yourself and not need permissions, would surely result in the creation of lots more new communities, compared to a top-down method.

Simply, if there is a button called “create a new community”, people will press it, but if the button is “request a community” and outlines steps in involved, they are more inclined to wait another day, or never (and continue as an email gang)…that’s human nature. But then again if they are really passionate about enhancing their email gang with more appropriate tools, then they will make time for the formal process of starting a community.

By using our top-down creation approach we are probably forgoing the creation of lots of good potential communities, but at the same time we are not getting; duplicate communities, and lots of abandoned communities that make the product look like horseplay. All this flies in the face of Dave Snowden’s experience in IBM’s change to bottom-up community creation.

Another thing is that bottom-up creation may result in more communities that have lower membership, but where everyone is a major contributor (these are thriving communities as you usually trust a smaller circle of people, and you are all on the same wavelength and have time for each other). At the moment our community requests are never for 5 or 6 people, they are always for an indended crowd of 20, 50 or 100, I don’t know why. What I want to see are real small and tight communities, at the moment I still think these types are still using emails. Somehow I have to make clear that communities can be tiny and are able to reject membership. As I get into below, maybe a Facebook Group type of design is more inducive to this type of community.

I suppose there is also the other point in that we are being an authority in deciding whether the proposed community is a worthy topic for organisational performance, and so far it is every time. We also have more casual spaces like a bicycle users community, etc…but these are the minority, the idea is that the majority of communities are about building situational awareness and capabilities.
We are not averse to casual communities (just as long as they are not the majority, we are at work!), as it’s a way for people to discover, connect, converse and engage at work…people like where they work when they are socially engaged. Casual communities are like bumping into someone in the coffee room, you never know what may percolate, perhaps a conversation in the bicycle users community will lead to a work oriented task, or finding some information, or wanting to create a new community, or collaborating.
As long as we give people the tools to connect and converse we hope that everything else follows, and this will certainly be true with a future social networking tool. I think more communities will be created as people will meet in the network, and then hook up as a group as a community to pursue their shared interests.
Dawn Foster has an interesting idea of a lounge area in a community, where people can bond in a forum about things that don’t have to be work oriented or don’t have to pertain to the topic of the community. I think this is a great idea, and is something I may suggest in the future, this gives people a way to connect beyond the commonality of their job, and get to know each other a little deeper, or simply more holistically (I mean we do spend more time with these people than our families).

So when I think about it our communities are transparent and bottom-up in that people participate and interact their know-how, allowing for emergence, but they are not very enterprise 2.0 in the way of bottom-up creation. If people were free to create I bet we’d get lots more created than we’d get asked to create, so we are missing out on some emergence here.

Groups and Design

I have to think to myself if our communities were intuitive in design like Facebook groups, would we be more likely to let people create communities, as a Facebook group is very simple to create and use.

But then our communities are more robust than Facebook groups, you can do a lot more with the structure, permissions, and look and feel. Facebook groups are more disposable whereas our communities seem more professional. With our communities you wouldn’t go to the trouble to creating a “Nicole Kidman hate group” (well you wouldn’t do this in the enterprise anyway), as they take longer to set-up, and gather people…so I’m thinking here that there is a difference between a group and a community, or at least a group being a feature of a social network.

In the future when we look into an enterprise social network, I’m sure it will have a group feature just like Yammer, or any other enterprise Facebook type tool, and in this case people will be free to create groups on the fly. I’ve got a feeling these types of groups will be more about getting a task done, or smaller things, or more temporary things, rather than our official community tool.

I wait for the future to see how these groups will differ to our communities…for starters groups will be a feature of a social network, so already you have a pool of people one click away from being part of a group.

Actually I see these groups being use heavily for cross team collaboration, or team collaboration tasks. We don’t have a basecamp type tool (which is more task oriented than a community, but very similar), so some people use communities for tasks, but they are not quite designed that way even though they have almost the same tools. Our communities are too big or serious to set up to for a one month task, so people nominate an existing community and create a folder, adding a blog, forum, and documents, and then give non-members permissions to just that folder. The problem is first you have to choose a community to do a cross team task, wait for the Facilitator to create your blog and forum, and secondly the other team after a while may forget the link to that folder.

Our communities are just not designed for this, but I really feel this is where a groups feature in a social network will shine.

BTW - only a Community Leader can create a blog or forum…community members must send a request to the leader of a community. What do people think about this?

Wikis - Top or Bottom

We are also piloting wikis, and at the moment, as a control mechanism for the pilot you can only create a wiki in a community. I have had requests for wikis that don’t fit into any existing communities, but these will have to wait. Just like blogs and forums, a community member has to request a new wiki in their community. Any thoughts?

One of our staff (Jeff Brown) posted a great reply to one of my internal forum topics:

“A wiki is just another type of document, isn’t it? It has similar features to a document, in that it contains formatted text, images, can get updated, and is read by (possibly) multiple audiences. Do we restrict people from adding documents? (No)
I can see wanting to reach out to the people who just created a wiki, and providing them with material on how to use it, make it better, etc. I got an “urgent” call several weeks ago about how to set up a community, about 5 minutes in after I started explaining about the process, they said they had to go and never called back. I think they decided it was too much work (midcall). I’d hate to think we are putting too much red tape into the wiki creation process.

What could happen if everyone could create a wiki? Are we worried that someone will create a wiki that is then abandoned or not updated? That we will have a flood of wiki-hungry users with no support?”

This got me thinking, documents are linear and wikis are websites (hyperlinked pages), is there anything about the wiki format that makes it seem more official than a document.

Each community could create about 5 wikis, one for notes, one lists, one for drafting articles, etc…so whenever you need a wiki you just create a new page in an existing wiki and go for it. If people want a whole wiki for a task or topic they can request it from the Facilitator…but in a global community this could mean waiting for the next day, and that’s too late, as we only want to wait 5 minutes, and rightfully so.

Since they nature of wikis are more immediate and spontaneous eg. brainstorming, lists drafting…I think anyone needs to be able to create one.

But at the same time wikis can be official eg Help Guides, Glossary…and we don’t want duplication.

In the future when we allow wikis in and outside of communities eg. in our document management system, I don’t see why they can’t be created by anyone. It’s up to the owner of that folder or space to promote the official wikis from the scratchings and non-official wikis.

Thoughts

In relation to our communities, even if we had a bottom-up approach of people creating them, they would have to follow instruction as it’s not straight forward like user designed web 2.0 tools, and they may be put off straight away. Due to this non-intuitive design they will have a better experience if they can wait and allow me to create one, as they will be needing my help anyway. This way I will not be receiving constant support calls.

As I said earlier, if the design was right, it would be more probable for a bottom-up community creation scenario. We would get duplication, and abandoned communities which we would have to monitor. We’d also get more support calls as we’d get members asking the differences between blogs and forums and how to use them, as the community creator would not be empowered. Maybe communities could be promoted to the official directory based on participation and success statistics.

But I still like the idea of top-down creation as I get to share my skill in how to pilot, run and best set up (structure) a community.

So I’m really in two minds about this.

And of course it depends on your culture eg. if I was talking about a company like Google, I would assume their culture is web 2.0 savvy, and can probably survive on bottom-up creation. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they have facilitating and leadership skills.

When it comes to wikis, well I think users need to create this at will, bottom-up all the way…keep in mind I’m not saying this from experience.

I’d like to here from the likes of Gia Lyons, Chuck Hollis, Joitske Hulsebosch, Stewart Mader, Luis Suarez, Nancy White, Shawn Callahan, Steve Dale, Ed Mitchell, John Smith, Richard Dennison, Dawn Foster, Stan Garfield and any others on bottom-up community and wiki creation.

eg. Does Lotus Connections enable anyone to create a community, if so, what are the pros and cons of this bottom-up approach.

[ADDED 8/01/09: The participation issue from community ownership and structure]

[ADDED 9/01/09: A social media proficiency strategy]

Dean from the Infovark blog has a contemporary post, “Knowledge Management Renaissance?“, I guess the question mark is nicely put as it may indeed be considered a war for some.

Some people do not want to be affiliated with the failed KM crowd, and the existing KM crowd have been waiting for the day that the tools (along with the right approach) would come along to achieve their aims…and now these tools are here!

Some would say, what gives the right for KM to hijack Enterprise 2.0.

I’ve posted on the irony that employees became to be respected, that they were not just cogs in a machine, instead they were knowledge workers. They had talent beyond their job, and their ideas and what they learnt from their job or elsewhere could be fed back into the organisation. This is really important for the fast paced services industry, as exploiting know-how is how work gets done most effectively. So the irony was, to try and capitalise and augment the sharing and spread of this knowledge, we had KM use industrial techniques. Just as we were moving away from the industrial age, KM was still treating people as computers that log things and spit them out on demand.

Enterprise 2.0 is based on bottom-up tools that allows for connections and emergence to happen, ie. knowledge workers now have the tools to do work and distribute their talent without really needing a department telling them to do so.

Bottom-up vs Top-down management approach

Venkat’s post about the KM and SM War has merit, his example shows that some KM practioners are incorporating these new tools, but still in the old management style, ie. a planned recipe style approach. Venkat’s says:

“…he completely ignored new elements in the technology and forcefully presented the design pattern for his success as the design pattern for success”

“Where he advocated planning, I advocated ad-hoc experimentation. Where he advocated charters to declare expected value, I advocated a you’ll-know-it-when-you-see-it approach to discovering value. Where he talked about convincing SMEs, I argued that you should just watch for opinion leaders to emerge.”

“…not only do Boomers not get complexity, they are suspicious of it, thanks to their early cultural training which deifies simplicity. The result of this difference is that Boomer management models rely too much on simplistic ideological-vision-driven ideas. Consider, for instance, the classic Boomer idea of creating “communities of practice” with defined “Charters” and devoted to identifying “Best Practices.” No Gen X’er or Millenial would dare to reduce the complexity of real-world social engineering to a fixed “charter” or presume to nominate any work process as “best.””

I agree, the new style is for workers to put the complexity into the software, let them sculpture it to their way of working and connecting. As Bill Ives says:

“The irony of enterprise 2.0 is that you actually get more control because the free form nature of the tools allow the business people to decide on where structure occurs, not the people who make the software.”

The main thing we have to teach is a little on how to use the tools, especially in their context of helping them get their work done more efficiently and effectively, and a little governance (boundaries).

It’s my hope that most existing KM practitioners understand that this new generation of KM has changed from a management role, to facilitating and flow…more about coordinating and guiding.

I do agree with Neil Olonoff’s comment that Venkat is generalising how people typically run KM. When you look at conferences from actKM you will see that these KM’ers have been ahead of the curve in this thinking for a long while.

Keith De La Rue concurs, saying: “Most KM practitioners (certainly most that I know and work with) view KM as being all about people, with the tools a secondary issue. Web 2.0 provides a fantastic new toolkit - one that is far more people-centric that the older tools - and is a great boon to real KM.”

The way I see it, we can’t tell or force seeds to propagate into a plant, it’s not always going to work out, but we can fertilise and water the soil, ie. create conditions for this to happen on it’s own.

Enterprise 2.0 is connecting and networks, emergence and autonomous behaviours result (sense-making), so this becomes closer to achieving the original aim of KM. Doing KM at the individual level becomes more invisible and embedded…practitioners become coordinators guiding people, cultivating and fertilising the soil (this is the KM 2.0 part).

You can also see this in the library industry, with Google and the web, librarian’s are increasingly becoming focused on the reference role of facilitators, guides, assistants in helping you with your approach to your task.

Venkat finishes by saying:

“And it won’t be just a victory of fashion. It will be a fundamental victory of the better idea. SM is an organic, protean, creative and energetic force. KM is a brittle, mechanical, anxiety and fear-ridden structure”

Again, with a bottom-up management approach KM doesn’t have to be this way, just like Marketing 2.0, Learning 2.0, etc…it’s all about a 2.0 approach.

It’s important that heavy weights like Tom Davenport recognise how enterprise 2.0 differs from KM, and how KM 2.0 is about guiding the emergence, and feeding back, making it adaptive as possible:

“…there are a few differences between classical KM and E2.0. The tools are largely different, for one. Perhaps the most important difference is the emphasis on emergence of content structures in E2.0, rather than specifying them in advance, as early knowledge managers had to. But I’ve always felt that most information environments require some mixture of structure and emergence. Andy’s comment that E2.0 requires “gardeners” suggests that he agrees.”

Complex Adaptive System

I have just started to read Steven Johnson’s book, Emergence, and from it I’m taking away the idea that enterprise 2.0 or emergence is not enough on its own, as there will always be a management framework, which serves the reason for being in business.

It’s known that enterprise 2.0 needs facilitation to get adoption and network effects compared to the open web, when there is emergence, the macro picture may show that workers are carving out their own work, which can be seen as adaptive (self-organising), but the question is…

Is it adaptive to the mission and objectives of the enterprise?

Steven gives an example of programmed billiard balls that alter their movement when interacting with other balls…he calls this complex behaviour, “a system with multiple agents dynamically interacting in multiple ways, following local rules and oblivious to any higher-level instructions”

“But it wouldn’t truly be considered emergent until those local interactions resulted in some kind of discernable macrobehaviour.” eg. the balls end up on either side of the table in clusters, even on one side and odd on the other.

“That would mark the beginnings of emergence, a high-level pattern arising out of parallel complex interactions between local agents…the balls aren’t programmed explicitly to cluser in two groups…yet out of those low-level routines, a coherent shape emerges.”

But he goes on to say that this is not adaptive, until it becomes useful.

eg. if it was in the interest of our pool hall to attract players, it would be adaptive behaviour for the balls to end up forming one cluster in a triangle shape with the white ball on the other end…as this is useful.

“The system would use local rules between interacting agents to create higher-level behaviour well suited to its environment. Emergent complexity without adaptation is like the intricate crystals formed by a snowflake: it’s a beautiful pattern, but it has no function”

He talks about emergent behavior becoming smarter over time and responding to environmental changes.

KM 2.0 is the adaptive guidance

This is why in my post on the KM Core sample I differentiated between social computing (an aspect of enterprise 2.0) and KM 2.0.

Enterprise 2.0 can show plenty of emergence (eg. a wiki evolving or manifesting into a great thing from the input of many people, tagged blog posts in a blogosphere showing us what’s hot and what’s being talked about in a tag cloud…these are low level interactions, that in aggregate paint a picture or emerging pattern), but perhaps it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s an adaptive system. Things could emerge into negative patterns, and an enterprise framework is only self-organising in the correct direction to an extent, as we still have a director or manager who has a goal, objective, etc…

So KM 2.0’s role is to harness these gifts of emergence that the manager couldn’t forsee upfront, and is respecting this gift and talent of the knowledge workers…having an enterprise 2.0 ecosystem shows respect already, as it shows that the manager is willing for transparency and people to direct themselves to an extent.
Another important aspect here is that KM is not always about adhering to strategy, in fact new strategy can emerge from listening to the enterprise 2.0 ecosystem.

But at the same time it’s the KM 2.0 practitioners role is to make sure all this emergence is adaptable to what the organisation is about, etc…I don’t yet know much about complexity, so I can’t give examples.

But my question to people like Dave Snowden is:

Is enterprise 2.0 without outside interference a complex adaptive system?

ie. is web 2.0 within an organisational framework, self-organising and emergent that is adapts to the organisational goals.

At this stage I don’t think so, as emergent patterns may conflict with existing goals, this could be for the better, resulting in altering the goals, but it could be for the worse, where the emerging patterns have to be pushed back or dampened.

But in another way I do think workers can become more autonomous, connecting to people carving out their own work projects.

Anyway, this to me is my current stance on the difference between KM 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0.

Practitioner

Some might say that people facilitating enterprise 2.0 do not have to have existing KM skills (which is what anyway?), so KM does not really have to be this role. But to me existing KM practitioners are the obvious choice to guide enterprise 2.0, just as long as they understand complex systems and facilitation. They require humanistic and interpersonal skills, rather than too much focusing on top-down plan and outcome, they need to understand emergence, to let just things happen and then capitalise on this, their is no golden recipe, every situation is contextually different.
They are usually the same person that facilitate or teach offline emergent techniques such as anecdote circles, knowledge cafes, etc…

Existing KM people in organisations naturally become the people responsible for enterprise 2.0, does this mean they change their job title. KM attempted to achieve better performance, sharing, productivity, etc…and this is what enterprise 2.0 also does, but without trying, it kind of just does it if you use it, it has no aim or intention. Enterprise 2.0 goes beyond the original concept of KM (knowledge sharing) to situational awareness and perpetual learning and building capabilities…rather than need-to-know, it “always on” learning.

Are we going to sack KM people and replace them with E2.0 people, or are KM people now going to have a change of job title?

This is really bigger than KM or enterprise 2.0, it’s about a new style of management.

It’s about letting enterprise 2.0 breathe and flow, and adapting to what emerges into decision making

In this post I asked:

“Imagine there was no such thing as knowledge management.
And all through the 1990’s there was only information management, and collaboration spaces, and then 10 years later social computing happened.

When you think about it like this, what actually is knowledge management?”

Generations

Venkat attributes this a generational war with Gen X as neutral (the swing vote), Boomers as idealistic and linear, Millenials understanding complexity and avoiding the big picture (having trust in how it all comes together.)

I agree to a degree, but I wouldn’t say it’s this black and white, I’m a Gen X’er and all my networks (facebook, blogs, twitter, friendfeed) are mostly Gen X and Boomers…in fact there are too many for me to network with…

I think we also need to see this in the perspective of Generation Virtual (Generation V)

Stephen Collins from AcidLabs alludes to not getting carried away by the the age divide:

“There’s solid research that suggests the generational divide is at least in part less about age and more about life situation. I agree that as a group taken in aggregate, Gen Y exhibits these traits. And, again as a group they will ultimately be the catalyst for change societally and in business (and I can hardly wait).”

More on this from Shifted HR:

“…all generations have similar values; they just express them differently. It also highlighted that if you are party to a conflict that appears to be about generation-based values differences it is most likely that the conflict is between individuals and that it has nothing to do with their generation and the conflict is about difference in behaviour rather than about a fundamental values difference.”

Olivier Amprimo comments on this blog post about the generational neutral trait of curiosity:

“The adoption of social computing is linked to curiosity to use tools and understanding how this set of tools can be customized to create meaningful application for organisations.
Hopefully, curiosity is not a question of age. And the ability to create meaningful applications in a corporate world means one does need to have experience in this environment.
How social tools can positively complement or renew existing processes and help make more profitable or efficient businesses is the key to “Enterprise 2.0″ adoption. The immature debate on ROI 2.0 over the last summer set the frame: the bottom line is and remains the driver.”

Read more about generational stereotypes.

Technology

I’m not going to get into this but I do agree with Venkat that social networks are more dynamic then expert locators. Briefly my thoughts are that social networks are engaging, they are an actual tool, rather than a look-up thing, check out my comments on Mark Gould’s blog.

Let’s keep in mind that latest reports show us that learning and guidance is the main key to adoption. No matter how low a barrier to entry the technology is, and how many great features are available people need to know how it applies to their routine…ease of use alone is not the panacea to adoption.

Does the enterprise exist?

Just to finish off Gordon from Infovark has a gem on the individuals that make up the enterprise:

“If we want to change the way people work, we have to give up on this notion of “the enterprise” as the thing that needs to change. We have to stop focusing on abstractions like Enterprise Content Management and Business Intelligence. We can’t claim to bring more “Collaboration“, more “Innovation” or more “Social” into the enterprise. These things are intangible, hard to see, hard to measure, and largely irrelevant to the problems at hand.

Enterprises are made of people.”

I left a comment saying it’s got to be an ROI for the individual first.

Dean from Infovark talks about enterprise 2.0:

“That’s what Enterprise 2.0 is about. It’s about adapting some of the successful tools and communications technologies found on the open web to solve problems faced by people working in creative, knowledge-based industries.

The priorities have shifted from problems of scale to problems of innovation.”

Related

Has km died, and resurrected as social computing?
Knowledge and its facilitators
KM : Round 2.0
KM 2.0 culture
The emergence of Serendipity 2.0 and Innovation 2.0
Seven ways enterprise 2.0 differs from web 2.0
The KM generation of networks and emergence
ROI for the knowledge worker is ROI for all, and how KM took an ironic approach
The KM Core Sample in relation to IM, KM 1.0, Social Computing, and KM 2.0
The emergence of Serendipity 2.0 and Innovation 2.0
My recent article on KM Review - When Two Worlds Collide
Knowledge sharing for anticipatory awareness
There’s more than just supply-side KM
Knowledge Management…NOT!
KM 2.0 model
Participation is the currency of the knowledge economy
An ecosystem is emerging

It’s really important to get closure on communications and discussions when they are done out in the open.

Email

- Someone emails a question
- A person phones you with a solution

What you have here is an unanswered email, as the answer was via the phone

But who cares, you know the answer, and on-one else can see that email

Forum

This scenario changes when the interaction is out in the open

- Someone posts a forum topic
- A person phones you with a solution

What you have here is an unanswered forum topic, as the answer was via the phone

A who cares approach is unwise

- others may be interested in an answer
- they may think these forums don’t work every time as there are lots of unanswered topics
- someone searching the forum in the future will see a topic without an answer when indeed an answer did result, but they weren’t physically there to be part of it.

My word of good practice is always answer that forum topic if an answer exists
- even if all members of the forum know the answer as it was discussed in a meeting, still document an answer, so future people will also be informed (and also to remind ourselves, as we are often forgetful)

The forum or community Facilitator can convey this recommended behaviour to members, but in the end it’s up to them to pick up the pieces or reinforce the correct behaviour

What if no-one answers the forum topic?

Well, so be it. But it’s also good practice if the Facilitator tries to source an answer for their member, or at least contact them individually to let them know they are not being ignored.
- this is more for new communities as people are finding their feet…and wouldn’t be practical for communities with large numbers

What about forum topics that are off-topic?

Thankfully in the forums we use we can move a forum topic (with its replies) to the correct forum

What about forum replies that are off-topic?

Now this is something we can’t do anything about.
Often our forum topics are long threads and people do their best to rename the subject line when the topic veers off a little, but sometimes a reply becomes so off topic that I would like to move it or rather make it into a new topic.
That is, I would like the ability to convert a reply into a topic

In a past post I wrote about this as the gardening aspects of a Facilitators role.

Distilling Conversations

Another gardening task is to take the cream of the conversations and reference them elsewhere, otherwise they just fall off the radar, and you have to rely on search. I posted about this as distilling conversations, which kind of reminds me of those review type blog posts. Some might think that structuring this information in a MSWord document or a wiki, may lose it’s value or become too narrow and focused, but I think it’s important that you include the forum URL’s, the raw conversations that led to this document.

Someone mentioned today that they hope our organisation doesn’t measure value based on just online communities. That there is so much community activity done on the phone and in meetings that brings value to the business that may not be known about. The concern is that people that are visible are going to get recognition over others that are more offline workers, who may even contribute more value. Consequently communities should be called portals.

First off, you may be the most talented person in a room who works behind the scenes and creates great value, but if you don’t speak up in a room how will anyone ever know. Online communities put you on the map, now you can be seen. Sometimes people don’t even know offline communities exist. If you do have an online community, and you have active members behind the scenes, it’s up to the Facilitator to feature this value by publishing a blog post, etc…or encouraging the member to do some featured posts.

I don’t think the CEO is going to search to see if there is value out there, I think it’s up to you to make yourself known and be seen.
I agree that a CoP does not require any technology, it can be a few people who have f2f meetings and that’s it, as long as it works for them. Communities are not about technology, they are about people with a shared identity who grow and evolve together.

The idea for online communities is to extend this and give an online presence, an enabler to enhance what you are already doing in email, on the phone and in person. A shop front, a place to hang out where you can keep all your documents, and have conversations. Now that you are on the map and visible, others can benefit from your talent and this means your value is now extended to more people, which means your value contributions are greater. You also get the benefit of visitors dropping by, offering suggestions and evolving your content, people you didn’t know beforehand could become the new guru in your team.

I say to people that CoPs are like our central document repository, but here we get a homepage rather than a folder, we get a document repository, and the big thing is all those conversations we have in email can actually be done in the community blogs and forums. My sell is that it’s a document repository with conversations. Everything happens in the one place, nothing is distributed or falls off the radar like in email silos.

I see portals a step up from a gateway page of links, having a page of widgets is more like a portal because you can access stuff from other sites from the one place. Communities are not just a webpage that a bunch of people visit. Communities are a group of people who share an interest and get things done together, and having an online version of these physical interactions can help immensly…and also for exposure of your community.

Just because there are offline communities that are overlooked, and are not getting the kudos like online communities (who may even contribute to a lesser value at large), it doesn’t mean they should be called portals rather than communities. Offline or online, visible or invisible, a community is a bunch of people coming together adding value to their goals.