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I’m finding that some Communities of Practice (CoPs) at work are lacking leadership even though they have a community leader.

This is a broad statement, and there can be many reasons for this, but in this post I want to focus on one particular reason.

This has happened on several CoPs where the team leader has appointed their personal assistant or a nominated team member to set up a CoP…or the team leader has borrowed a person from another team leader as they like how they designed their CoP.
NOTE: Personally I would be inspired by CoPs with active and frequent conversation, over a well designed website.

The reason for their approach is that the community leader is technically proficient at designing and using the CoPs. The problem is that this person is not a Subject Matter Expert (SME), and does not have the interest, passion or time to facilitate the community in a non-technical way.

Facilitation is not just technical design/support, part of it is monitoring how people use the community and encouraging things, and re-purposing others…I briefly listed Facilitator’s duties at the end of my post, Community of Practice for Facilitators : pilot, adoption and participation.

My point here, is that CoPs need a breadth of facilitator’s, the head facilitator being the Community Leader.

It’s important to have the technical facilitator to cover the technical parts, but most important is the SME. Or rather whoever the community leader is must have a group of facilitators that handle different aspects of a CoP…technical, SME, etc…

Really, if it was an offline CoP then you would not need the technical facilitator at all.

Pause

I have realised for a while that this has been happening, and as the global facilitator I have picked up the pieces, but now that we have lots of CoPs, I’m finding I don’t have time, and I should be “training the trainer” anyway. That’s why I’m currently working on a facilitators workshop, which I’ve always intended to do, but never got the time. I communicate and support to facilitators in the Facilitators CoP, but I need a good real-time focused presentation and conversation to make this stick.

What tipped me over to blog these thoughts?

As a global facilitator I subscribe to all blogs and forums in all CoPs, and I stress that this is important for facilitators to do in their CoPs. This way you have total awareness of the activity, and you can encourage and re-purpose behaviours.

As global facilitator I eaves drop on the activity in all CoPs, but I never interfere, instead I congratulate/assist/recommend to the facilitator of that CoP with some action to take, as it’s not my place to talk to their members.

Anyway…

In one particular CoP we crowdsourced ideas into one forum, and from those 500 ideas we created 10 forums to house them all.

I don’t really agree with the next step, but it was decided that the heavy contributors on a topic were then nominated to be in charge of that forum.
- liase with the lead on bringing some of those ideas into fruition
- keep the forum going as general conversations about that topic

To my surprise they are doing OK, but could be going better if each forum had a person who volunteered themselves, something Samuel Driessen agreed with, but I can’t remember where he left that comment.

Anyway, I have noticed that in one of the forums called “Collaboration”, the person put in charge of that forum was also the project manager for our Office Communicator deployment (instant messaging/conferencing). He posted a new forum topic called “Office Communicator Tip of the week”…which yes, sounds like a blog post.
And in the last couple of months he has posted replies to that forum topic to publish new tips. In essence, he’s using one forum thread as a blog, where each new post is a reply to the forum topic.

I’m glad he’s participating, but his enthusiasm can be channeled to the right tool for the job. In the future that forum thread will be a needle in a haystack, it will be a thread with 50 replies. Instead he could have his own place using a blog, where the whole blog is about his topic, rather than be buried as one of many topics in a forum. The blog will have more presence, it can be furnished around his topic, and he will be more recognised…he and his know-how become a destination.

My point though is that there is no-one to notice and harness this, as that CoP only has a technical facilitator who is not looking out for this sort of thing. The CoP instead needs a SME or a leader who cares about the CoP and it’s members.

This is not a post about social computing deploying/piloting/adoption in general. All these are applicable on many levels eg. a person implementing across the whole organisation, within a department, across a couple of departments, within a group, etc…

Of late we have seen posts by folks at ThoughtFarmer and Socialtext on pilot/implementation methods. These are great posts and show the difference between focused phased piloting and no pilot at all. I may cover these posts at a later date, as my post today is more on adoption or participation at the group level.

My focus is not on the social computing practitioner, but rather on a regular person wanting to run an online Community of Practice (CoP). It’s more about the social computing practitioner helping a CoP Facilitator help themselves.

ie what are the conditions that a facilitator can create to get their CoP off the ground.

I can’t help myself, just quickly…the Socialtext post above refers to the interactive nature of social software (compared to transactional) where scale and network effects are essential to actually see the potential and emergence. And this is so true for enterprise wide tools such as social networks, microblogging, blogosphere, etc..

But this is not always the case with social computing islands such as CoPs. You don’t need network effects for a group space to work, you just need willing and interested members…and in regards to a team, you need a task or issue to tackle where social tools will replace current tools. I went in depth into this in my post, Do group tools get more traction due to not requiring network effects.

Just to mix it up, group spaces aren’t just about the talent of the group, the task/agenda, and how they work with social tools, which a pilot helps with…they are also about others roaming from CoP to CoP, and as a visitor being able to ask a CoP a question or perhaps answer something…this is serendipity and emergence that will only present itself with scale (it is less likely to happen in a pilot).

The two takeaways here are

1. social tools to help you do what you already do better

2. connecting the enterprise to increase cross-team awareness, cooperation, collaboration, ideas, sourcing information (who knows what), serendipity, opportunities, diversity of emergence…

Basically the more connected an organisation is, the more productive and effective they are. As I alluded to in my social PKM post, that a whole bunch of personally productive people does not make the organisation necessarily productive.

Oops, I wasn’t meant to get into this in this post!

What are the reasons for a pilot again?

• Helps to discover and squash tech issues before release

• Helps to discover and assist in user issues

- that’s why a cross-section of people is important in the pilot

• Deployment team can get an idea of early good practices, codes of conduct, showcase examples

- and will be prepared with the knowledge to help a greater number of people and issues when comes release time

- the more tech and usability issues found and documented in pilot stage the more room this makes to devote time to championing and facilitating

• Stewart Mader has similar thoughts…a good one is use cases in how you can use wikis, he says:

“The teams involved in the pilot would help define and model wiki uses that can then be shown as examples during the wiki rollout to the rest of the organization. This embeds the right kind of uses throughout the organization, and ensures sustained use of the tool.”

Many points in this post have been enrichened by a podcast with Stewart Mader, here’s some notes.

WHAT ARE THE CONDITIONS THAT A FACILITATOR CAN CREATE TO GET THEIR COP OFF THE GROUND?

Following on from my post on workshopping and piloting a new community are the adoption factors a facilitator can massage to get participation off the ground.

After creating a community that everyone wants (or if it’s a task space; finding an issue to solve/fix a process), and piloting it to test it’s use, you will have done all the right things to get started on the right foot, you will have hopefully circumvented any fundamental obstacles.

Next is to create conditions for people to use the community; you need interactions and conversation to grow the community. This requires facilitation, guidance and some tactics or notions to be aware of when dealing with getting a group of people to channel their time into a certain direction.

We all agree the community was a great idea, and here it is, but some people have cold feet, or find it’s unfamiliar. There is an unintentional resistance, and this can be facilitated or nurtured with some points about adoption.

“…people don’t resist change, they resist being changed”
- Peter Bregman

“…resistance is not so much about the change; it’s all about being changed”
- Peter Vajda

“Resistance to change is situation specific, not an attribute of an individual or group”
- Nancy Dixon

We have already asked the questions (needs analysis), workshopped and piloted, so what do we need to know for it to grow or start breathing, and sustain a heartbeat.

Design and Structure

• People need to be a click or two away from what they need to do

• If it’s too complex people won’t have the time to learn, they need to orient themselves with ease

• Create a guide on how, and when to use each tool (better still incorporate it into the design)

• Blank slates don’t help (people are used to structured tools that are designed for a specific purpose, and are not used to the idea of flexing unstructured tools to fit their needs)

- I like ThoughtFarmers idea of usage scenarios

• Create a stickiness factor so people return (frequent blog posts, a communal wikipedia)

- are you appealing to all members

Frequency

• Core group of bloggers to do weekly columns

• Whenever something happens, blog about it
eg. I uploaded a presentation into our library, go check it out…

Email Interaction

• If it’s not in your inbox it doesn’t exist

- people are more likely to react if it comes to them

• Also being able to publish via email is handy

Peer to Peer influence

• Sometimes people will only adopt if their close colleagues are participating

• Prior to this they have not dedicated the time to investigate, but if a close colleague finds it of value, then this will influence them to give it a try

• Again, we are influenced by people we trust, more than a training programme or by others we don’t know well. We take recommendations from people we value.

Eg. If someone recommends a movie I may not go, but if a friend does there is more chance I will go.
The same applies to participating in CoPs (if my trusted colleague or someone I respect is doing it, I may give it a go).

EXAMPLE

Peter and Joe are both Project Managers who attended a training session on communities. The online tool offers all the solutions to their needs about communication, awareness, sharing and learning.

When they got back to their desks Joe had a look at the communities and just didn’t have time to learn them…if the design was more appealing and intuitive, perhaps Joe would have delved further. A couple of months later Joe and Peter are chatting and Peter tells Joe of the brilliant transition his team has made to using online communities over emails and attachments. Peter told Joe it took a lot of getting used to, discipline and facilitating, but eventually it became part of their routines (it’s the way stuff is done around here now).

Joe really values Peter’s work ethic and they are mates and trust each other, help each other out…they have a history together. Due to this close relationship Joe has decided that if Peter thinks it’s good, then it must be, as past history shows that Joe trusts, respects and admires Peter and his endeavors. Indirectly Peter has influenced Joe to give it a try.

This example shows us that a training session is just one aspect to gaining adoption. We are more prone to take the time to try things out, based on recommendations by someone you trust over someone else that does not have as much influence on your decision-making.

What does this say…if you want to influence someone, influence their peers or people they respect and admire, and this will in turn make it more attractive or motivated for them to take up your offer.

I guess case studies are also influential as they can make known (to some degree) the worthiness, risk and return on trying something out…time or attention is also a factor.

People are like that; take up tends to increase when people can see others didn’t get hurt or they had a success, so it’s now safe to join…let others do the work first. I guess those who test the waters first, get to learn from their mistakes first hand (which is the best type of learning), and they are also perhaps the innovators or cutting edge people who reap the benefits or become known for their endeavors as the pioneers.

At my wife’s work there is a campaign to build a unique service centre for children who have been taken away from their families. A lot of high level people have been approached and have shown interest, but have not committed. But they noticed that when one person chose to commit, then this had a chain effect where those previous people that were approached also decided to commit.

This has an amazing snowball effect when people are visibly connected in online networks. Since we have more ambient awareness of each others actions, it doesn’t take long for people to see what their peers are doing and choose to follow…visibility and participation is the fundamental key.

There is more chance for peer to peer adoption for any old thing when people are connected in online networks; the irony of this post is we are trying to get them to be participants of online networks in the first place (actually this post is about communities, but you know what I mean).

Peter Bregman points to a study which illustrates our nature of peer influence:

“You could tell the children you expect them to eat their vegetables. And reward them with ice cream if they did. You could explain all the reasons why eating their vegetables is good for them. And you could eat your own vegetables as a good role model. Those things might help.

But Birch found one thing that worked predictably. She put a child who didn’t like peas at a table with several other children who did. Within a meal or two, the pea-hater was eating peas like the pea-lovers.

Peer pressure.

We tend to conform to the behavior of the people around us. Which is what makes culture change particularly challenging because everyone is conforming to the current culture. Sometimes though, the problem contains the solution.”

Champions and role-models

• In team-based communities especially (as opposed to shared interest groups), if the leads are not role-models in active participation, then this sends a signal that the community is not important

• Facilitators must lead by example, and encourage senior/respected people to be role-models

- People will follow or respond to their lead and encouragement

Viral Approach

• Concentrate on training a core group

- they will set the good examples and be an influence on others

Push sharing in a pull system

• I had a scenario of a CoP facilitator emailing a link to a few people

- I suggested using the blog otherwise it sends the wrong signal (kind of like a parent telling their kids off for something they do themselves)

- if their intended audience aren’t subscribers of the blog, they can create the blog post, then send them the link

It’s about conversation

• It’s not all about the blog post itself

- it’s about the the conversations that the blog post triggers (this will build community spirit…like a thriving dinner party…you will go to the next one as you enjoyed the company and stimulation of the previous one)

- people are more prone to comment, rather than blog or write a forum topic

- don’t have to be provocative, but even when posting about a journal article, rather than just share the link, write an opinion based review…this will get people to react

Raids/Barnraising

• Similar to handholding and more popular with wikis is spending a session on using a wiki for a specific and real purpose

- this gives people real experience at using them, and using new tools for current needs

- the idea is that they will go back to their seats and continue using it, as they have overcome the technology barrier and the “what can I use this tool for” barrier

- it also builds working collaboratively

- as the ThoughFarmer post points out, it also gives people examples to learn from

- I have a Wiki CoP at work where we blog about wikis and ask questions in forums, it’s also where I list examples of wikis that people are creating (it gives others ideas of how they can use wikis)

- here are some links to barnraising wikis

Re-purposing email (It’s more about new behaviours)

• CoP tools replace the email distribution list

• If people continue using email out of habit, the facilitator must thank them for participating. And then mention that if you are going to email an announcement, news or sharing information, please use a blog. And if you are going to email a question or topic for discussion use a forum.

- then demonstrate by re-posting their email into the forum with your reply, then send them the link

- ask them to subscribe in case the conversation keeps going

• Answer questions promptly so people feel heard and benefit from participating

- this will influence return visits

Hand-holding

• This is about breaking old habits with new technologies, plus people are expected to publish in an open place, rather than the more confident private email channels

- plus they won’t spare the time for themselves to learn a new tool, but they perhaps will if you instigate it

• This may involve sitting down with a member once a week for a couple of months and guide them along in publishing a blog post, until they get used to it and build the confidence.

• Once people get comments and ratings on their blog posts, it gives them confidence and encouragement to continue posting.

- see Nancy Dixon’s post on a company commander who became an active participant after he found out that other people were getting valuable use from his AAR document

- being appreciated and feeling you have made a difference are good conditions for further participation

• After a while this system becomes self-rewarding as people may draw a reputation

For more on this, read the next section on “Feedback”

Feedback (Reputation/Recognition)

NOTE: I will state here that I lean more on the natural and sustainable method of the conversational element in self generating peer reputation to propel the community, rather than incentives.

• I’m finding that when people use CoPs well I am impressed and give them feedback

- this encourages more participation (see the end of the previous section on “Hand-holding”)
eg. good use of blogging

- one facilitator blogged to her members that she has email subscribed all members to the main blog, and took the courtesy to explain how to unsubscribe.

- Just today I emailed a picture of a gold star to a CoP facilitator for really using their blogs and forums well, they have a really active community…and he emailed me back saying “ha ha - I would rather have had a picture of a beer”

- and of course we hope a comments discussion self generates the motivation for more blog posts (HP’s study hold this as one of two highest factors to participation)

Nancy Dixon relates this to recognition:

“Recognition means the most to us when it comes from those who really know the subject – who know what they’re talking about. It’s great to have your boss think you’re a top performer, but chances are your boss doesn’t know enough about the technical part of your work to know how good you really are – but your peers do. For a peer to say, “The person that really understands that problem is Pete,” that comment Pete would regard as a sign of respect and one he would highly value.”

Group building

• Face-to-face interaction and connection, or online ways for members to connect in real-time

• These can be social gatherings, meetings, or workshops

The next section on “Confidence” extends on the impact that building rapport has for knowledge sharing/participation

Trust (Confidence/Comfort)

• Are people confident and comfortable enough to participate? ie. do they have a relationship with other members
eg. at a house party we are always more comfortable in sharing our lives after a lot of small talk where we build a rapport (a certain level of trust)…or after a few drinks

- Karen Stephenson’s article for more.

Relationships (Give and Take)

• Is there an equilibrium of give and take (both with members and non-members)

- do some members just ask questions and never help out with answers

- are members willing to research answers for questions from non-members
(this is an important point, and the reason why most CoPs are membership based, you are willing to take the time to help out others within the membership circle, as they will in turn help you out next time (like the reciprocal altruism of vampire bats)

- People you trust will give you confidence they will not misuse your knowledge sharing

- Are some members being burdened
(again membership is important, as you take the time to help out a handful of people)

Gia Lyons has a great post on this

“Because you are the one individual who knows this stuff, you are reluctant to advertise that fact, for fear of the avalanche of requests to collaborate. You need more emails, IMs, and phone calls like you need another orifice in your cranium. Plus, these people who would swarm you like flies on poo will not perhaps care too much if you are over-extended. But, you are more than happy to share what you know with one or two others, after you’ve discerned that they won’t abuse you, won’t stab you in the back, won’t take credit for your intellectual capital, and will perhaps return the favor. The people who invest in creating a relationship with you are rewarded with your experienced point of view.”

More from Nancy Dixon:

“We do not give that knowledge away lightly. Before we take the time and trouble to share that knowledge, we need some assurance that our knowledge will be treated with the respect it deserves, given thoughtful consideration, and that the recipient actually knows enough to make use of it.”

In order to share knowledge, we need to build relationships, and we do this by informal conversations on sites such as online communities:

“The way a professional can know how someone will treat the precious commodity of her knowledge is to know that person well enough to make that judgment call.”

“…sharing knowledge is risky, the other person may make a cutting remark about it or indicate that it’s not worth listening to. And sharing knowledge is time consuming, because to really respond to another’s question or problem takes the time to understand the issue and to explain in sufficient depth. So we rightly place conditions around sharing our in-depth knowledge. The relationships we build with others provide a needed level of confidence that our knowledge will be treated with respect. Knowledge sharing and relationship are coupled.”

Personal relevancy

• Is the community personally relevant, or fulfilling needs at an individual level?

Dawn Foster lists some motivation factors

Portal

• In addition to being a conversational place, dress the homepage with common links so it becomes a pivot point for peripheral needs

In-the-flow

• Choose an activity or type of communication that is conducted in an email list and now do it in the CoP

eg. broadcast announcements are now done in the CoP blog, people have no choice but it visit the CoP
- while they are there they may look around and participate elsewhere

For more see the Transparent Office blog

Activities

• Offline

- choose something you do offline eg. a question time pre or post a conference/meeting…and complement this with using a forum for pre and post questions

• Member intros

- one of our CoPs makes it mandatory that new members fill in a forum topic where they can tell the group a little about themselves, experience, why they joined, aspirations

• Lounge forum

- some of our younger generation (graduate) CoPs have non-work forums as a way to build commonality, fun and relationships

- the more rapport we build the more we build opportunities to collaborate and help each other out

- Dawn Foster has more on the lounge concept

• Blog carnivals (thematic topic weeks)

• Polls

• Coffee corner/Fill in the gap

- fun quiz, riddle, story…

• Member of the month

- this showcases a member

- one of our graduate CoPs also asks questions to the community about a member
(this gets people talking to each other, and finding things out about each other)

• Showcase hot discussions (weekly roundup posts)

• Share personal stories

• Keep track of people traveling

• Guest posts from other CoPs

• Use engaging media (videos)

• Link to your CoP in your email signature

• Create your own newsletter to reach others

• Promote the CoP in other newsletters

• Write about stuff happening in other communities

• Build a relationship with sister CoPs (drive traffic to each other)

• Guest bloggers from other CoPs

• Rehash old content in other ways

• Events / guest speakers

• Blog columns (frequent posts)

General facilitator duties

The focus of this blog kind of bleeds into some of the duties of a Facilitator, so I’ve included a few below

• Gardening/Weeding (move topics, distill great posts on wikipages)

• Design

• Help and welcome new members

• Assist people in using CoP

• Answer questions promptly

• Make sure content is correct (re-edit old posts, leave a comment to correct/update)

• Help guides

• Remind people which tools to use

• Re-purpose email

• Off topic reminders

• Welcome suggestions and Feedback (via a forum)

• Barnraising

• Monitor/Listen in and always offer pointers or feedback or congratulate

• Understand member motivation

• Encourage members to specialise

• Promotion

Related

Preparing for community release
Self-serve create groups is essential to harness emergence and adapt
I don’t create communities, I create online spaces!
Enterprise social networks and ad-hoc groups

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.

Trying to bring about change at the abstract level is impossible. What ends up being sold is a utopian ideal. No wonder most of these projects fail — they’re designed entirely in fairyland.

What we need to do is get back to reality. Let’s tell the architecture astronauts to come home.

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