Library clips

Currency

Not long ago I posted on how the unstructured nature of blogs can work against us, as unlike wikis they are not generally updated pages, rather they are a point in time, so if used as a knowledge base, someone could search and come across an outdated post and apply it with perhaps bad consequences. I explained a wiki is better off as a knowledge base, whereas blogs are communications and thoughts in time.

In fact James Dellow summed it up nicely in the comments:

“A blog by its nature is a record of a communication at a particularly point in time, so naturally “buyer beware” if you are seeking currency.”

Context

Another fear is that someone may use what you say the wrong way, compared to email which is closed and directed to parties you know that understand your context.

Unlike email I think blogs face a context issue, only not as extreme as codified documents.

Blogs are kind of between email and codified documents; similar to codification in the way that it’s in the open for public consumption, ie. people who don’t know you may not be able to grasp what you are saying.
But then it’s similar to email as blog posts are casual (not a polished product), they are more informal, as it happens.
When compared to codified documents, blogs have more potential for common understanding and context to come across to readers as blogs are conversational (comment feedback), and they are also on a network or relationship model, so people who subscribe to you come to understand your writings over time. Sure this relationship model is not within a closed circle of a forum, or email, but still there is opportunity for a shared level of understanding, plus being outside a walled garden lends to discovery and a greater reach to valuable people.

Publish

In my post about my KM review article I talked about my experience with publishing an article and how it’s different to the blogging experience.

This really made me think that the word “publish” just doesn’t mean the same thing in the context of blogs, but in the same breath since blogs are unstructured they can indeed be used as an editorial based online magazine, newspaper or even a journal.

I think in the enterprise it’s important these two ways of using blogs is known; they can be used as a report or formal communication, and at the same time they can be used for thinking-out-loud, unfinished work-in-progress type thing, ideas, thoughts, etc…

It’s this second way that’s special in spreading the know-how and connecting to people, until now we have never been able to do this in a documented and globally networked fashion. Now we can share thoughts-out-loud fragments as it happens, rather than traditionally wait till the end when you have a polished product.

So the two benefits we have are the timely nature, and raw information, and of course the regular read/write benefits of a blog.

The problem we have here is that the word “publish” brings up feelings of polished material, and the fact that your scratchings are documented for all to see…the hope is to try and use the word “post” to avoid falling into this thinking.

I certainly don’t feel like I publish (in the traditional sense), when I blog and tweet…I think the word “post” or “entry” or “stream” (for aggregate) are far more suitable.

Is the fact that it’s visible for all to see make it “published”… I’m not too sure because then every graffiti artist is a publisher.

My blog is more for memory management, connection, discovery, conversations, and learning…in this respect it’s more what you don’t see or the interactions that’s exciting…for me it’s more stream of consciousness than publishing.

As I said earlier blogs are a perfectly OK medium for traditionally published editorials, but when using them to get tacit know-how flowing the word “publish” works against us.

I think part of the enterprise adoption is to explain the format of blogs in comparison to email; how much better blogs are for certain types of communication, but at the same time, how similar they can be with the casualness of the content.

It needs to be put across, even though blog posts, unlike email, are in the open and immortalised, like email, they can be disposable, fall into the archives, and can be as official/unofficial as an email…I really think it needs to be assimilated to the casualness of email, only in the open.

BTW-this post was triggered by something I read on Jack Vinson’s post:

“This led into a discussion of writing and thinking and how “finished” the written word is vs. the spoken word. In blogging, while the thinking-out-loud element is important, it’s also important to realize that the publish button is a publication of sorts. Even if I acknowledge that the thoughts are incomplete, they are still out there for people to ponder and re-use as they wish. (If I didn’t want that to happen, I’d keep it in my personal notes blog or in my paper notebook.)”

Of late I have posted on the big picture of KM, such as how KM used the ironic industrial approach in its practice, even though it recognised that workers have talent and are not cogs in a machine, and a reference to Andrew Gent’s KM Core Sample, where I compared KM 1.0, KM 2.0, and social computing.

Patti Anklam has a post covering a Dave Pollard presentation, From Content to Context and from Collection to Connection, which goes over the transition from KM 1.0 to KM 2.0.

Patti also refers to the generations of KM (re-published below), which is another way to see the big picture of KM. What I really like about this is that KM 2.0 is more than the tacit know-how and people, it’s in the networks and the emergence…the stuff that flows and rises as a result of participating in the ecosystem.

I closed my KM Review article on a similar note:

It’s about the network - the connecting lines between people. It’s this web of nodes - and the quality of what flows between them - that amounts to competitive edge.

Generation of KM	Where Knowledge Lives	Type of Knowledge	Implications
First Generation	Artifacts	Explicit	Create the infrastructure for capturing, collecting, refining, and re-using artifacts
Second Generation	Individuals	Tacit	Focus on collaborative behaviors and person-to-person knowledge sharing
Third Generation	The network	Emergent	Provide the conditions for enabling knowledge and action to emerge

(SOURCE: The Social Network Toolkit, Ark Group 2005.)

Recently I posted about the community paradox, inspired by Andrew Gent, and today I am sharing some excerpts by another one of Andrew’s defining posts called the KM Core Sample.

In Andrew’s paradox post he posted on choosing whether your KM strategy is going to focus on the explicit or the tacit…I personally think you can do a bit of both.

Here’s the excerpt:

“This is perhaps the oldest of the paradoxes and the most intractable: whether to focus on explicit or tacit knowledge.
Explicit knowledge is information that is written down: project documents, white papers, lessons learned, best practices, etc. Tacit knowledge is all the information your constituents have garnered from experience but still have locked up in their heads.”

“A focus on explicit knowledge usually leads to an emphasis on search, taxonomy (categorizing the explicit knowledge), and sometimes selection (e.g. qualifying best practices). A focus on tacit knowledge often requires a concentration on establishing and encouraging communities (where tactic knowledge can be shared), story telling…”

Information Management

At work our Global KM lead has tackled the explicit part by going around the world and getting a feel for how our people find and look for information, and to also discover all the information providers such as the library catalogue, intranet, document management system (DMS), this system, that system, etc…

I guess you can call this a information audit or mapping, with the goal of identifying all the silos and somehow bringing them together to form some sort of cohesiveness, like a gateway page (something more navigable, with some more information scent), and perhaps some integration like federated search. We have also decided to take the published deliverables that live across all these silos and make a new silo for deliverables At least this way when you want to use a standard, procedure, best practice document, they are all in the published library.

So far, all this is Information Management, next we move onto the more tacit space.

Social Computing

Since most know-how lies in interactions like physical conversations, on the phone, IM and email we decided to use communities as a way to make all this findable, learnable, visible, transparent, etc…(this is still in development).
My current role is Communities Coordinator, and I say to a lot of people that our communities are like our DMS, but for conversations. If the DMS stores documents, the CoP not only stores conversations, but that’s where they happen (you don’t have to upload your conversations, as they are already there).
So the CoP is like our DMS but more, you can store documents, and you can have conversations…I won’t go deeper than that in this post. BTW- the main CoP tools are forums and blogs.

We are also trialing wikis within some CoPs, which people have used for: events, meeting agenda/minutes, lists and workaround pages, events, catalogue pages, glossary, how-to guides…

In the future we plan to look at social networking and revamping our Intranet, perhaps the Intranet will be our social network…there’s plenty of enterprise products to choose from these days. I feel that social networks (the new breed of expert locator), social bookmarking, presence (micro-blogging) networks and blogs outside of communities are an essential layer in our enterprise 2.0 stack.

The CoPs and wikis have been about creating conditions for people to share tacit knowledge, or more importantly giving them simple tools so they can get their work done in a more open and re-usable way than using email.

So far, all this is Social Computing…it’s a self organising network that requires someone to lightly constrain it so it doesn’t self organise in the wrong direction.

What we have a need for here is knowledge champions and facilitators to be embedded in teams to help facilitate a new way of working, and other ways to share knowledge and make decisions using complexity and narrative techniques. Shawn Callahan also takes this seriously alluding that we always complain about missing out on communications and finding information, but then when it comes to embedding dedicated collaboration coordinators, it’s not taken seriously. If you want personnel managed you have a HR team, so if you want human behaviour facilitated in “socially working together” then you need knowledge champions (for use of a better term).

Even though I’ve said that this is all about social computing, when you add the element of facilitating and lightly contraining we tread into the realm of Knowledge Management (I do have a problem with this term but we are stuck with KM for the time being).

But you don’t have to call this Knowledge Management, it could be a Learning Coordinator, Working Coordinator, etc…you tell me. Most of all this person has to be tech savvy in collaborating, participating and emergence, but they also need humanistic (social, counselling) characteristics to understand cognitive and social qualities of people. We used to have “Industrial psychologists”, well now we are heading into the same ground for the new connected age, but I’d rather call this “Knowledge facilitators” or “Knowledge counsellors” or “Knowledge coaches”. Or leave out the word Knowledge all together, and use Network or something else, we just need to pay attention to the people skills and they way they interact, as Anecdote say Corporate Anthropologist sums it all up. I think this may be an intimidating and foreign name that people may not specifically identify or relate to…see more.

Knowledge Management

We do not have a process or procedure for distilling the rich knowledge in communities and the other tacit spaces into best practices, lessons learned, etc that will be housed in our published library.
My idea if we do this is for each of these documents (or wikis) to have a references page that points back to the blogs posts and forum topics so people can read the raw interactions that have been summarized into these deliverables

It’s my hope we don’t concentrate too much on this supply-side KM, being a solutions company, we must have an innovative bent, and an addiction to looking at the past is dangerous. It has to be said that best practices are not recipes that will be applicable for any situation, using them this way could be detrimental, as nothing is the same and predictable…and spending time on these is time spent not creating new knowledge.

Plus we know human behaviour is to go to people to find information, so we wonder how often the published library will be used for this sort of thing compared to using an expert locator (social network) or diving into raw conversations in forums and blogs. I personally think the published library will be more used for forms, procedures, etc…the real context-free, or soulless documents.

Hopefully I can rub some sense-making and anticipatory awareness into the mix.

The best practice approach of summarizing what has come up in the communities is not too bad, but I disagree with the approach of a weekly mandate of “tell us what you know or learnt this week”…yuk, this is what communities are for and this know-how comes out as a byproduct, it’s embedded into routines. The “tell us what you know” approach is classic KM, and riffing on Snowden I call it “anticipating needs KM” or “maybe one day KM”, which usually starts off with a knowledge audit of what we know followed by a program of weekly/monthly sharing what you know into the knowledgebase (in the hope or anticipation that someone will one day need it), which is either mandated or rewarded. This is what gives KM a bad name as it’s resisted, unnatural, and gamed…it’s big brother society thinking.

COMPARISON

KM is something extra that happens with the content of what comes out of the social computing ecosystem, but it also stewards (facilitate/contrain) this ecosystem so it doesn’t go astray.

It seems we could have social computing without KM (to some extent, but there needs to be some governance and guidance), but KM without social computing is going back to the ineffective classic KM days.

Beforehand KM had to mandate to get it’s job done, now it mostly just happens on its own.

IM - managing and organising information (this is the same as explicit knowledge for some)

KM 1.0 - is the top-down way to mandate (command and control) “what you know” documents into a database, as a separate job duty, and then seeking this database when you have a need.

- anticipates a need (just in case)
- looking at the past
- supply-based (content and store)
- after the fact summary (this is a problem…see heuristics)
- search/taxonomy (no filters/ranking)…this part is information management
- rigid (read only)
- static
- IT centric
- centralised
- efficiency (Industrial age)
- reward as motivation/incentive (game the system)

Social Computing - is bottom-up and distributed, using communities and networks (participation, connectedness and openness) where “what you know” surfaces by default, and what you want to know is always coming to you (rather than the other way around)…perpetually learning (build capabilities/situational awareness) and facilitates thinking.

- anticipatory awareness (”always on” knowledge flow/sense-making)
- living in the now (innovation)
- creation-based (context and connection)
- as it happens (raw and in context)
- connected/author tags (filters by ratings and your network)
- flexible/unstructured (read/write)
- dynamic/evolving/serendipity (feedback)
- people centric (discover/build relationships)
- decentralised (emergence)
- effectiveness (Network age)
- reputation as motivation (self-interest/gain)

KM 2.0 - is facilitating, harnessing and lightly constraining what happens in the self-organised social computing network, and secondly distilling these contributions and interactions (publishings and commentary) from the mess of the social computing ecosystem into formal documents (which can be seeked)

Sure we can use tags to find the raw information and relevancy/ratings and our social network to further filter our results, but distilling this into formally captured documents is just like writing a review, sometimes non-tech people just want it all in one document.

They don’t realise that by delving into the network they are going to come across a lot more relevant information than what they were looking for, just like the web, this links here, then links there, which links over there…related posts, posts with the same tag, people who tagged this…just like surfing the neural network of an enterprise mind. It’s no longer about finding information, it’s about information finding you…it’s about being hooked up, it’s not seek when you need to know, it’s an “always on” ecosystem.

The question is how valid is this distilling when we have networks, still I think if these distilled documents are based on the content in the network and can point back to the raw information, then it’s more acceptable. Everyone likes making “best of” lists reviewing each point or perhaps weaving it into a report or essay…it’s human nature that we want to stamp done on a process, or done on a topic, we feel safe to close the book, but we must realise that the book never closes, as we are always perpetually learning.

The core KM Sample

I don’t know what just happened but Andrew’s post sent me off on a tangent on the usual stuff but more on the big picture perspective, let’s close with this diagram and some excerpts from his post.

SOURCE: Andrew Gent

[The diagram] “…captures the various levels of “knowledge” and where they reside. The diagram also illustrates the rationalization and codification of knowledge as it rises through the layers.”

I’ve quoted this gem in another post:

“the process of codifying or standardizing knowledge into actionable procedures and practices actually changes the knowledge. It cleanses, sanitizes, and simplifies the knowledge — removing the stray tidbits, the ugly but necessary workarounds, the secret tricks of the trade… all of the untidy clutter that make up true expertise in a field — all of this is stripped off to achieve a linear, documentable, process.”

Layer 1 - Personal Knowledge

People Direct

“This is where true knowledge exists. In other words what people know. And the most accurate way of sharing that knowledge is talking to the people who possess it…”

Layer 2 - Tacit Knowledge

People Online

“The next layer up is where that personal communication is expanded to allow people to “talk” to others they do not know or cannot meet in person. Email distribution lists, forums, and other discussion technology reside in this layer. (Note that blogs are also in this layer.)”

Layer 3 - Best Practices

Capture

“…knowledge is instantiated in documents of some kind: sample documents, lesson learned, case studies, white papers. These all represent mechanisms used to selectively capture and sort knowledge in such a way that it can be reused by people who may never come in contact with the original author. The obvious limitation is that only a small portion of what any individual knows about their profession is captured in any of these documents. This is offset by trying to capture the most important or influential pieces of wisdom.”

Layer 3 - Institutionalised

Non-personal

“…captured knowledge and learnings are further refined into a defined set of templates, guidelines, and standard processes. In some sense, you might say that in this final layer the actual “knowledge” has been removed and is replaced by step-by-step procedures to ensure a consistent and reliable execution of desired behavior. To achieve this goal, a significant amount of sorting, sifting, and selection is required to winnow down all possible options or alternatives to a limited set of recommended or required processes and deliverables.”

I hope Andrew doesn’t mind me nearly re-posting his whole post, but I just want it for my record, I think it’s in my top 10 blog posts on KM.

Related
Seven ways enterprise 2.0 differs from web 2.0 (actually it’s 12 and counting)

Not long ago I wrote a post called “7 seconds to knowledge share” based on a post at Infovark.

Here’s something I said:

“I really think blogs and the like need to be features of existing products.
(You would think our document management system would have an item comment stream (like Google Docs)…”

This really ties up with Bill Ives’s comments that I’ve quoted on two posts about old KM being both workflow and repository types…the problem being that the workflow types were too rigid so we went elsewhere for these exceptions, and the repository types were out of our flow, not in tune with human behaviour, and as Bill says, “…it became managing knowledge rather than supporting work”

At this stage of KM 2.0 or enterprise 2.0 we have seen people familiarising themselves with these new social tools, and how they are the new exception handler. Instead of using email to get work done because my workflow tools are too rigid, I can now use wiki or a blog for these workarounds, etc…the benefit is openness, transparency, visibility, feedback and evolving…basically pooling our talent.

I think the next phase of KM 2.0 (no, I’m not calling it KM 3.0 or KM 2.5) is going to be where answers to these exceptions will be shared into the flow.

Firstly the idea is for these new social tools to become boring, as said by Clay Shirky.

Secondly we are going to see features of blogs and wikis in existing workflow tools.
Like I said in the quote at the start of this post, we need “blog it” features in our current workflow tools, etc…just like every object has “print this” or “email this”…

Further to this we need our current workflow products (an example is a support database-from users logging calls, to working on calls, to closing the call, to harvesting the unique calls to a solutions page) to be blogified and wikified.
I think along with wikis and blogs as standalone tools, we are going to see our workflow tools incorporate wiki and blog features, but yet it won’t be a blog or a wiki. We will have “post it” buttons on forms that publish fragments from our workflow to other places, yet we don’t have a blog in our workflow, it’s just a form, kind of like an edge feed like publi.sh.
We will perhaps have access to a “edit this” button at stages in our workflow to add/edit notes to a page
eg. you get to a stage of a workflow where the procedures really don’t help you with a clients need, this becomes an exception, but as you get to this stage someone has edited this page and instructed you how to move on with this type of client need. The talent pool is able to share their experiences and know-how right into the workflow…it’s not really a standalone wiki, it’s just a wikified object.

What I like about “edit this’ all over the place is that we don’t have to go to a separate repository (wiki-page) to see if people have shared this type of information before, instead it’s right in our flow, without us even having to think about it.

The current stage of KM 2.0 is that people have a personal interest in sharing their know-how, there’s less resistance, in fact people feel the benefits, and it’s all due to tools with a low barrier to entry, and how they are in tune with human behaviour, just the way we converse offline.

These tools are open and transparent and perpetually evolve content, but similar to KM 1.0 they are still a separate place from our workflow. When we want to know something, we visit a blog or wiki to see if anyone has shared some insight, if we find something relevant, we then go back to our workflow and move to the next stage.

It’s not just about workflows, of course blogs and wikis are used outside of workflows eg. personal blogs, communication blogs, wikipedia’s, wikis for lists, wikis for meetings, wikis for documentation, etc…

I just think the next phase is using features of these tools into our existings workflows, so when we get to dead end, we don’t go elsewhere to find a way to move on, instead the answer is right there. If it’s not, then when you do find an answer you include it in the workflow stage that you are at so the next person will go through the flow like a speed bump rather than a detour.

This is all about the ubiquity of social tools in context of workflows.

Related
Knowledge visibility, conversation, and the In and Out Flow

[ADDED 30/09/08: In-the-Flow with Acumen Fund]

A couple of months ago I was asked by the editor at “KM Review” to write an opinion piece for their organisational learning issue.

This could not have come at a better time as my blogging has come to a convergence point where the read/write web has enabled KM and Learning to become one in the same in some respect.

It also got me recognition at work even though I have been internal blogging about this stuff for ages, it goes to show the power of authoritativeness.

This article was a challenge as I had a 700 word limit, my only other experience is an interview, so actually writing a piece was a developing a new skill set for me, very different from blogging.

Blogging is easy as I choose the topics and I can blab on for as long as I want…having a word limit and a different audience changes all this.

Rather than my affordances of space and casualness to allow stream of consciousness, personal, and informal writings; the different audience, format and word limit, meant I had to pack a punch with each paragraph, and try to fill out my statements without the luxury of pointing to examples, experience, and explanations.

I found this very hard, and have since come to know that blogging is a very different beast than traditional publishing (the good thing about KM Review is they let me say what I want, so there is no inhouse bias or anything like that). Even though a blog can be used to publish professional articles, I think traditionally it’s more sharing, opinion and a learning soapbox, a way to express and develop…a conversation.

In a blog I’m expressing my thoughts and ideas as it happens in an informal fashion, whereas in an article I am codifying what I know.
NOTE: Basically I looked over all my blog posts and condensed them into the article.
I also looked in delicious for stuff that has come across my radar in the past that I bookmarked for a rainy day, and I also searched my Google Reader. Just this research process alone (come to me web) typifies exactly what this article is about, very zen…checkout Lee Bryant’s post for more on network productivity/social filtering/actionable collective intelligence, I’ve quoted it in my k-flow post.

From reading the article I’m not sure if all the information will holistically be understood by the reader, as there is not much room to explain in 700 words. But if you were then to read my blog posts, you would get to know my character, as a blog allows it to come through; you would get to know my style and wavelength, and you can leave comments to clarify points, contexts and examples with me. Also with each point I make I have the liberty to expand on contexts, and examples.

In the end there is going to be more of a chance that the information is transferred to the reader and internalised as knowledge, as the reader has more of a scope and familiarity (abstraction) with me to understand my message (signal).

These two formats complement each other, and I’ve spoken before about the power of blogs being used as “thinking out loud” and “work in progress” in writing a deliverable. Firstly this is a crowdsourcing technique to evolve the deliverable itself, and secondly when reading the deliverable a reader can refer to various blog posts for more peripheral information on the “workings out” of what took place.

Why is this important?

Deliverables and best practices are not always going to suit your situation, and when applied like a recipe can have a distasterous effect as they can leave out peripheral content, and your context is different. A best practice is not always going to be the best practice (pardon the pun) as there are so many different variables that can be different with your situation…see my post on on anticipatory awareness for more.

Alternate methods, like blogs, wikis and social networking really fit in with the promotion of knowledge sharing, and this is captured nicely by Ron Young’s article in the same issue of KM Review called “Reap the rewards from combining learning and KM”.

The virtuous KM circle is made up of: Trust, Communicate, Learn, Share

If you don’t have trust, then people are less likely to share or communicate, and less learning results.

Also there must be a personal benefit, like a learning feedback loop or reputation as a publisher, to motivate you to share (What’s in it for me?)

…you can become a subject matter expert when you make your know-how visible (and people can subscribe to your thoughts)

Again, once you have trust and simple tools, and a way to connect to people, we are more prone to share. We receive feedback and a reputation in this conversation network, in the end, as Dave Snowden says, we may form interdependencies with our trust circle which ultimately means our most effective way to get work done is by leveraging the social capital (ie. we come to rely on each other to share what we know to get things done). So by creating the conditions for “knowledge sharing”, we have enabled it to happen using a naturalistic approach.

Ron sums this up by saying:

“Capturing new learning and ideas as they occur…transforms an organization from an environment of episodic learning and innovation to one of continual learning and innovation.

Giving people an ecosystem where they can: improve, learn, self develop, and connect to like people, is a way to achieve the aims of KM. Not only can we re-use and apply knowledge to given situations but we become smarter and agile, so there is a mutual benefit at both the individual and organisational level

Related
Social learning and social computing
Flexible uses of web 2.0 tools

Dave Snowden once again hones in on “trust”, and creating conditions for it, as a naturalistic approach to knowledge sharing. Rather than focusing on “knowledge sharing” itself, we are focusing on shaping our efforts to human behaviour, so people are ultimately sharing of their own accord.

Trust

This is how he said it last time (gee I’ve linked to this post about 5 times):

“Knowledge is a voluntary act, if people trust each other they will share. If they work together and create interdependencies then they will share…Good management (including knowledge management) is about creating the right sort of environment and interactions. Creating a set of explicit targets is an abrogation of management responsibility not its assumption.”

Anticipation

And the time before that (I quoted it in this post as well):

“Its critical to realise that no one will refuse people knowledge in the context of real need, but few if any people will publish what they know in anticipation of need. That means that it is more important to focus on the channels through which knowledge flows than on the knowledge itself. That means linking and connecting people and there are a range of techniques of which SNS is the Rolls Royce It’s also true that using social computing in the way I advocated above will hugely increase the connectivity and the ability of the network to create a resilience and responsive mechanism for distributing knowledge.”

And here’s how he said it recently which explicitly points at the faults of how KM was run in the past:

“My general response to people who ask the question How do we get people to share what they know, is If you have to ask the question then you have probably taken the wrong approach. In my experience people generally do want to share, but they may not want to share in the manner prescribed by the corporate KM department. If you ask someone for assistance in the context of real and immediate need it will rarely be refused. Ask someone to share knowledge in the absence of that need, or in a form or manner determined by a centralised function then it will nearly always be refused.

Sharing needs to be linked to tools that support the way in which humans have evolved to share knowledge, not the way that IT departments have designed most current systems. They also need to be linked to common perceived need. Look at the success of blogging between platoon commanders in Iraq compared with formal distribution of doctrine if you want a good example.”

I first mentioned this naturalistic realisation to knowledge sharing, in my post Knowledge sharing in the new KM (includes Jon Husband interview with Dave Snowden on Web 2.0):

“1. If people need knowledge in the “context” of need it will always be shared
- people will share in the context of your immediate need

2. People don’t share knowledge in the anticipation that you need it
- if you ask people (perhaps someone you may not know) to put it in a common data store for a possible need in the future, on the basis you might need it…it just doesn’t happen.”

Weakness of codification

Dave also explains the weakness of codifying anticipated material:

“We urgently need to shift from working with chunked documents that seek to summarise material, to increasing direct access to fine granularity raw data in the form of anecdotes, sound files, pictures etc. etc. The process of chunking, or abstraction involves loss of content which may well contain weak signals or subtle clues and more importantly involves making the material specific to the context of its creation in time and socio-cultural context.”

The past doesn’t always help us

In a past post I quoted Jay Cross:

“Workers need to be able to assess new situations, learn in real time, and improvise solutions. That’s an entirely new learning agenda, for it means putting enough trust in workers to give them the wheel”

Seeking people

There’s no need to get into the other end of the knowledge sharing scenario, which is the knowledge seeker. Rather than go to a database to fill a need (that you hope you find because some altruistic person decided to share their know-how for no apparent reason, but for potential use in the future), we are implying that people go to people for information…for more see Ross Dawson’s quote on my k-flow post.
NOTE: reading a blogosphere is similar to going to people, rather than a database, because blog content is informal and conversational

In KM 2.0 we have a publish and subscribe model, where we are learning off each other daily whether we have a need or not. Although we may share know-how that is not needed now, it’s not totally altruistic, it’s to generate conversation, you know your sharing is worthwhile as people are subscribed and listening or they can visit your blog at any time and leave comments.

Anticipatory Awareness

My post Adapting to change with enterprise 2.0, has yet another quote by Dave Snowden, here’s a a little piece:

“Faced with an intractable problem, do you go and draw down best practice from your company’s knowledge management system, or do you go and find eight or nine people you know and trust with relevant experience and listen to their stories?”

“…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”

“The free flow of the blogosphere, ad hoc collaboration, Facebook and many other tools work because they conform with the patterns of expectation that arise from our evolutionary uncertainty”

Actually I’m finding “anticipatory awareness” a hard thing to succinctly define, see more here.

This post has focused on contributing what you know, which draws on the concept of people sharing knowledge with others they trust or in the context of a real need, rather than the highly resisted, codifying what they know into a database in case it becomes handy in the future (which has value loss anyway).

In this respect KM 2.0 is more about living in the present (living in the moment), rather than spending our time and focus on possible future needs (supply-side KM). When that future comes it will no longer be the future, it will be the present, and in that moment we will use KM 2.0 methods to get our work done.

I’m not neglecting the future, I’m just saying we can’t spend all our time (and money) codifying information that may never be used in the future, at the expense of spending our time creating new knowledge now. In KM 2.0, when the future comes we can network or look at past blog posts, etc to fill our needs. These past blog posts were not created for this future need, they filled a past need, if their content extends to aiding tasks in the future, well that’s just great

Plus the fact that the process of codification can leave behind valuable content; sanitised and summarised documents may leave out handy peripheral information and context. We have to be aware of situational differences, and not be prone to blindly following a method from the best practice master file like a recipe.

…and beyond

By using this new approach with simple participative networking tools, we go beyond achieving knowledge sharing, ie. the more static end-to-end method of knowledge store and knowledge seek. KM 2.0 generates an ecosystem where people are connected and become more autonomous in getting things done…in all we become a learning organisation. Further to this it may indeed change the way organisations are managed (management 2.0).

From aiming to achieve the KM task of extracting and distributing know-how, these same tools have taken us to even greater places of an evolution in management, and ultimately how this transparency may alter the decisions we make, and how the result of the way we use these tools may change or shape our culture.

Related

Conversations, Connections and Context
KM 2.0 culture

I perpetually point out the difference to the old and new KM in this blog, but I’ve never thought of it in terms of ROI for the knowledge worker. I have only thought of this in terms of the incentive and motiviation for knowledge sharing. When you think of the big picture of the need for a return in knowledge sharing, we can say this is the ROI for the knowledge worker.

My thought are if the ROI for the knowledge worker is high, ie. high reciprocation of value for participating, then in aggregate the enterprise ROI from a social computing ecosystem will be high.

The old KM was not about people, it went for the knowledge as a separate thing, and knowledge as a separate act approach, where the participants really had no return on their contributions, and no self motiviation to want to participate. In essence this process didn’t blend with human nature at all. Plus there is the other end of naturally seeking know-how off people, that’s just it, you were meant to seek it from a database (not people), and what you find, if you do find something relevant is meant to be context objective so it will suit all needs.

Whereas the new KM is not really KM at all (considering the key to KM is sharing what’s in our heads), it’s not a separate act, it’s embedded into our regular routines. In an ecosystem where we are networked to people and we participate as we do our work, as well as the finished product of our work, there is no conscious effort to make sure you are sharing your know-how, it’s just happening from being, just like in the offline world. In the offline world I don’t make sure I’m sharing know-how, it’s just blended into how I am as a person, it comes out when I act and speak whether I like it or not.

Quite simply when my wife is on Facebook, she doesn’t feel that she is being altruistic and sharing know-how, she is just using Facebook, and that’s that. As a result of being connected everyone wins and learns off each other continuously, just like we do in the offline world.

Anyway, this post all started from a great post on the AppGap group blog by Matthew Hodgson. For some of my similar posts see KM round 2.0 and KM 2.0 culture, read on:

“…our misplaced trust that the newly emerging web technology would somehow deliver something that is essentially a people process, because collaboration and knowledge management is about people, not technology. The other failure is in our management practices and a missunderstanding about how people work — that information is somehow a product, a Word document for example, that, like an engine in a car factory, is produced by the end of a hard days work. There’s no return on investment to be had in this paradigm.”

“…it reflects a very Tayloristic view of the world, where efficiency is to be had by motivating workers to behave in more efficient ways, rather than to think smarter. Certainly, you can offer better tools like large intranet repositories with a wealth of information inside, but the synthesis of information into knowledge is a difficult task when the person who created a piece of information, or a similarly empowered individual, is not there to help you know where to look, understand what you find, and then assimilate it.”

“The truth of most modern work is that we analyse data and information and reach out to our networks in order to gain access to knowledge. We collaborate on ideas and then have a burst of work that reflects the sharing of ideas. And, of course, once we have produced something, we then tend to socialise it again within our networks in order to refine the ideas we’ve produced. This is knowledge work in action and people are at the centre of it.”

Knowledge Worker

The concept of the knowledge worker is that workers have unique (and welcomed) talent that they can apply to their job and beyond, and in the knowledge era this is not only recognised but it’s a requirement in these fast changing conditions, and where a lot of work is becoming specialised…less micro-managing (local experts know best).

This differs from the extreme top-down industrial era (scientifc management) where a worker was seen in a de-humanised role as a cog in a wheel. A person’s job was like a piece of machinery (a replaceable part), they were programmed to do one thing, they didn’t need to bring any of their knoow-how to the table, they were to do as told…the big picture of this is a fetish for efficiency or hedonistic productivity.

With our fast paced, specialised and global workforce the new model is more about “effectiveness”, and people need to go beyond org charts to get work done, favouring a networked ecosystem. The old system doesn’t lend to innovation or invention at all, as it lacks the notion (or doesn’t care) that a worker has expertise or thoughts about and beyond their immediate task at hand.
Each person has become valued not just for their output, but what we can all learn from their input (knowledge creation). Jim McGee says it so well:

“The challenge is that we have been trained and conditioned by the industrial economy to strive for uniformity and to see uniqueness as undesirable variation instead of the essential quality it has become.”

“Our inappropriate habits stem from assumptions about industrial work. With industrial thinking, once you’ve created a new product the goal becomes how to replicate it predictably. You specify the characteristics of the output precisely, lock down the process, or, ideally, do both. That works if you need to manufacture cars or calculate every employee’s pay stub correctly. It doesn’t when the goal is to create the new product. The primary challenge here is to shift focus away from the issue of replication and toward creation. The question becomes “how do we manage to create this?” instead of “how do we create the same thing all over again?””

If knowledge workers take a more bottom-up (and autonomous) approach, and the unique talent and responsibility is given to workers to run some of the business, what happens when they are absent or leave the company?

It was easy in the past, you just replace the cog, whereas now you can’t replace a brain, as brains are unique, and you have to deal (learn) with what that brain has left behind, ie. the momentum, processes, procedures, workarounds…the unique effective style of doing work. I think this is what Jim McGee means by “invisibility”:

“…one unintended consequence has been to make the execution of knowledge work essentially invisible, making it harder to manage and improve such work. Attacking that invisibility opens an important path to making knowledge work manageable and improvable.”

As a result of the knowledge worker concept (or due to this invisibility) there has been a reaction to capture what’s inside their heads, otherwise they are harder to replace, and it’s harder to know the method and thinking behind their output and processes.

If so much reponsibility is placed on workers to run the business all together, we have to know how they went about it once they leave or move position, we have to know how to fill the gap, if we don’t know this (in time) business can start to drop.

Hence the reaction and creation of the notion of knowledge management…well, I think anyway.

And here’s the irony!

We now understand that a person has unique talent and know-how to bring to the business, and we rely on them exercising that know-how…compared to the machine-like view of industrial man (like they were a spare part that could be replaced).

But our original concept of knowledge management was still treating the knowledge worker as if they were a machine…old KM is industrial in it’s process.

To recap:

- Industrial era (people are told what to do and to do it efficiently)
- Knowledge era (we need people to have autonomy, we need their talent to survive and be effective)
- New problem is people that move on leave a gap of how things are done (invisibility), this can be deterimental
- Reaction (knowledge management), treat people like machines, command them to log what they know into the central databank, for the good of the business as a whole. And when they need information the worker is to rub the databank and ask the “km genie” their wish and it will be granted.

So what resulted, I think, is KM as a top-down (mandated) process to a bottom-up knowledge worker…this just ain’t gonna work.

In comes visiblity

In comes social computing, and we now have an even more augmented way for the knowledge worker to network and perform work, spread their talent, learn off others, etc…what an ideal system for the needs of a knowledge worker.

Plus it becomes the new KM, as now people are sharing know-how as a part of doing work, and because there is a return on investment for the individual, in the big picture is an ROI as a whole.

The talent is documented in the open, it is visible. When someone moves on we know how to fill their gap, we don’t have to always ask them (and they wouldn’t be able to remember everything they know anyway), as they have already told us indirectly, we can read their visible workings out of how they did their job as a result of their participation using social computing tools.

The worker gets work done, and the business gets to know their know-how all within the same motion.

In a few posts I have talked about a support team using blogs (micro-blogs), forums, and wikis to get work done.

In regards to blogs the idea is to that we have an unstructured, low barrier to entry type tool to quickly publish fragments about experiences, tips, solutions, ideas…in fact we can publish by email, so this blends in with current rountines.
BTW - this isn’t just altruistic, I often do it as a way to remember what I know, but at least I’m keeping notes in the open for all to see.

Can blogs be harmful? I think it’s how you use them.

I think it’s of absolute importance that people understand that blogs are based on a currency format, they are similar to a newspaper or a journal.
A blog entry that was true last month may no longer be true anymore or correct, or there may be a better way to do the same thing.

So even though a blog is technically a database, I feel that it shouldn’t be a solutions database, especially when it’s a massive group blog.

eg.
POST 1
2 months ago someone may of posted about a feature in the software that has an error with editing a file
- someone may leave a comment saying we are working on it, and here is a workaround

POST 2
2 months later what could happen is that someone else (different to the person who created the comment) may post that the problem with editing will be fixed in the next release and we won’t be getting this till next year. Plus we have made some patches to our software and the workaround that people were using to edit files no longer works

Now someone searching a blog may come across the first post, try the workaround and it fails.

What should of happened?

The person who made post 2 should have also left a comment on Post 1.
- but 2 months have past, are they going to remember, especially when they didn’t participate in the first post

Or perhaps the person searching could of browsed the tag “edit”, and would’ve found the most recent post about “editing”
- this wouldn’t be viable if 20 posts since then have been made about “editing”
- plus we have to assume the authors are using the correct tags

What would be good practice is that the URL of Post 2, be included in Post 1, this way Post 1 will have a trackback link, that takes you to the new post.
- even better, is something I have posted called “Sparklines” which rather than add a trackback link to Post 1, will automatically edit Post 1 and put the trackback link in the post itself.

But regardless of all this, we are relying on people to follow all these subtle rules.

The point I’m trying to make is, just because blog content is visible, it doesn’t mean it’s all correct, it’s not a website that is re-edited and updated, rather it’s a blog, where you write a new post as an update…old posts may be incorrect as time goes on.

Another example…

I made a blog post describing a particular functionality of a piece of software.

We now have a new release of this software and this month old blog post is now outdated.

What’s good practice?

I need to make a new post about how this feature now works.
Then re-edit the old post to point to the new post or a leave comment on the old post
- but what happens 5 releases later, will I have to update each past post?

What are your views?

Do we have to retro edit or comment on all blog posts to keep things neat and tidy?

Wikis for solutions

I’m much more inclined to use a wiki for a solution database, as the concept is more about going back to “the entry” and re-editing it.

In this instance the blog post is not the solution, but the messenger.

eg.
1. This wikipage is solutionA for errorA
2. Write blog postA to tell people about it, include perhaps some casual (personal) and contextual content
- also include the link of the blog post in the wikipage

So far this makes sense, but it has a high process barrier to entry as you have to share twice
- write the wikipage (perhaps via email), then write the blog post (perhaps via email)

A new patch on your software means that solutionA for errorA no longer applies
3. you re-edit the wikipage
4. Write blog postB to tell people about it, include perhaps some casual (personal) and contextual content
- also include the link of the blog post in the wikipage

In this example the wiki is the solution database that gets corrected and updated, where the blog is just the messenger, and old message become out-dated, but that’s OK, because we know the blog is currency based. This doesn’t matter too much anyway because if someone visits blog postA it will still link to the same wikipage, so they will land on the correct solution.

NOTE: it would be good to re-edit blog postA and include a link to blogpostB, or use trackbacks to link them together, or perhaps grouping them with the same tag is enough…either way re-editing blog posts is higher maintenance, or not as common as old posts fall off the radar, and people may be aware they are date-stamped and may be outdated.

A blog is a blog and a wiki is a wiki

The case I’m making is that I don’t think it’s safe or good practice to use a blog as a solutions database, it’s more for sharing current happenings, where posts do not get re-edited, rather a new post is made (just like newspapers).
The blog post is not limited to just pointing to the solution, it can involve some personal context and peripheral information, or workings out (experience) that led to the solution, whereas the wikipage is a more focused formal and official solution.

The scenario comes to mind of someone following what is said in a blog post causing some kind of error or disaster. It’s essential people understand the nature of blog posts, and that they are not official…perhaps a message could be reinforced in the banner, and people can leave comments to clarify before acting on information in a blog post

Whereas a wiki is generally not a newspaper, it’s moreso a book that never goes out of date as it’s pages are continually re-edited.

In saying this it seems, you could always trust the support wiki, and you can trust recent blog posts, but how recent?
Do you trust a blog post 2 weeks old, a week old…who knows that could now be old news.

I think as long as a blog post points to the wikipage solution, then whether you click on an old or new blog post about the same solution you will always land on the correct wikipage.

What about wiki comments?

I suppose an alternative is to subscribe to wiki comments
- if a wikipage is updated, a comment can be left to let everyone know
- in this respect the wiki comments double up as a notifications feature of current happenings (which is what a blog does best)
- it doesn’t make wiki comments a blog, but the comments can be used for a blog-like way of updating people

This post is the reversal perspective on the flexibility and visibility of social tools. That is these tools are so unstructured and flexible that we can use them for unique purposes (as Ross Mayfield says, we, the users, put the complexity into the software).

I don’t think blogs are harmful, but I think they are so unstructured that people may decide to use them for inappropriate purposes. The problem is that it may work at the input stage, but it may not work at the seeking stage. I have demonstrated a scenario above where it’s so easy to post solutions in a blog, but people seeking a solution may find an old entry of that solution…this is not friendly and may have consequences. Instead a wiki is a more official solution as only one page always represents the solution, and even better is combining its use with a blog so we can explain how we came to the solution.

Just consulting a wiki solution page we get a focused error and solution, but reading a companion blog post we get what happened at the time and thought processes involved. This blog post may give away clues or trigger a thought to solving another solution that the wikipage didn’t reveal, as the blog post is more diffuse, not as focused on the endpoint.

Unstructured tools like email have been used for purposes that just don’t stretch, eg chain conversations and announcements, problem being that it’s too closed and messy.

Social tools are not immune to being used the wrong way either.

In regards to a support team or customer service I’m thinking a micro-blogging network (like Twitter) behind the firewall is a good idea. Some options are ReVou, SocialCast, and other Open Source offerings.

Using wikis and blogs are a great idea for support staff to inform each other of findings, experiences, workarounds, solutions as they happen.
This is called social learning where we learn from each other, which is essential as whoever wrote the procedures is not going to know the context of every unique situation upfront (the procedures may sometimes be a “dead-end”, and errors occur anyway), so leveraging user captured informal nuggets in blogs and wikis enables you to go “through the wall”.

But from my experience, not everyone could be bothered sharing, or has time before they move onto their next task.

The idea is we use blogs and wikis rather than an email list, but what about those people who didn’t even share using the email list.

There are many times when colleagues at work discover something in our office, but are too busy to blog about it, this is when micro-blogs comes into the picture.
People may find blog posting takes up too much time because they treat it as formal publishing, and fair enough (I covered this in my KM 2.0 Culture post). We have tried to overcome this with posting to a blog by email, making it feel very informal, now you can “flick a blog post”, just like you “flick an email”.

Anyway I feel that people will indeed post to a micro-blog as the content is the length of an SMS, ie. a max of 140 characters. This is not hard at all, and the format encourages a type of informalness.
Another low barrier is posting via email or some sort of app that’s real easy to get to and post, perhaps via the browser or a desktop widget. Actually micro-blog posting via IM feels right, it feels more casual and something people may be inclined to do, unlike a blog they are not fearing that lot’s of people will see their published post, in fact micro-blog streams fall off the radar quite quickly.

This is not a mirror replacement for typical blog content, using micro-blogs we also tend to share stuff we wouldn’t blog, more akin to IM…so this makes blogs and micro-blogs (or presence networks) very complementary.

eg. word 2003 is giving me grief with editing documents in our DMS…arghh
eg. server 3 is down, hmmm
eg.@colleagueA what dates will you be away again?
eg. wondering why personA can’t create a project
eg. it seems we don’t communicate enough to groupA, they need to be in the loop
eg. does anyone know where pluginA lives?
eg. hmm, we need a new drop down menu reason for supporting CoP issues in our database
eg. @colleagueB how did you go with getting that a user an external login?

None of the above examples suit a regular blog post, some resemble quick emails and IM, but some don’t even suit IM eg. word 2003 is giving me grief with editing documents in our DMS…arghh
- this is not a blog post, it’s more what you are experiencing now, but still you are publishing like a blog post
- it’s not email or IM as you are not directing this at anyone, you are just thinking out loud

Some of the other examples could be an email or IM, but micro-blogging allows more of an open conversation, anyone listening could jump in.

Essentially micro-blogs are very effortless and more chatty and I feel the format and social experience we have will lend it to being used more, I elaborated on this in another post:

“…I think Twitter is more prone, easier, less commited than blogs to express tacit know-how, and to offer help which also shares tacit know-how. Actually conversation is where it’s at, and an internal Twitter marketed the right way will be the optimal example of what we want out of KM 2.0 (conversation exchange).”

I expressed this in my Tumblr a little while ago:

“Twitters value contribution to the knowledge flow-spontaneous, unpolished, work in progress, thinking out loud-lends itself to this type or quality of participation due to its brief, immediate, and intimate publishing format…let’s hope internal blogs generate the same calibre of tacit value without being hindered by their format.””

Gordon from Inforvark has a piece on why KM didn’t work, due to it’s non-humanistic processes:

“Who was the guy we talked to about that thing?” Enterprise 1.0 tried to address this by mandating a central repository and hierarchical classification system. It forced employees to tell some computer system what they knew and how they knew it. Only after a lot of manual data entry would the system be able to tell them something in return.

This approach failed because knowledge workers couldn’t be bothered. There was too much up-front work to make the search results useful. Without useful search results, nobody wanted to use the system. It was a classic chicken-and-egg problem. Instead, knowledge workers would just ask someone who knew rather than working with a difficult computer and move on. You simply can’t turn your workforce into programmers, historians or archivists. There’s work to be done.”

The Diving Board blog in on the same plane:

“As we all know, collecting knowledge (if it happens at all) usually involves a person or organization monitoring knowledge as it is created, and then capturing and categorizing it after the fact. This could either be the knowledge worker as they create it or someone else charged with this mission. This process is both inefficient and inherently flawed. Typically, the expert or the users themselves know what the best knowledge is, not some third party who is one step removed from the actual work. However, the experts and users lack the tools, time and incentive to carry out this critical task.”

I’ve also got a quote along the same lines from Andrew Gent in an earlier blog post.

And this is what my posts, Adapting to change with enterprise 2.0, Why km 1.0 failed in a nutshell, KM : Round 2.0, and Conversations, Connections and Context are all about.

Gordon then goes on to ponder whether enterprise 2.0 will fix this. His idea of a contribution engine is, “a tool that automatically captures an employee’s output, indexes it for later retrieval, and shares it with others in the group”

I think we need to define 2 types of knowledge sharing

1. knowledge sharing can take place as it happens as a result of doing work (capturing information as it happens)
eg. making your work visible on a wiki, using a forum to get answers, using a blog for directed communications
- others get the benefit of your participation
- you are sharing by default of doing your work

2. you may discover something, have some insight, have an experience…but then you have to choose whether you will let others know
eg. found a solution to a problem you were having, and if you share it others may benefit

In a past post I have covered that the difference here is In-the-flow (Directed) vs Above-the-flow (Volunteered)

So perhaps Gordon is talking about this second aspect (Above-the-flow), as I believe an In-the-flow approach is submitting to the “contribution engine” as it’s happening…he says:

“When I was working in ECM, I used to joke about the “seven-second window.” That’s the period of time between a user finishing a piece of work and moving on to the next task. That window is the length of time users will devote to figuring out where to put content and how to share it. Do I send an email? What folder on the share drive do I use? If you can’t capture the necessary metadata within that seven seconds of “Hmmm. Where should I put this?” then you lose. The system won’t work. People are too busy.”

At work our support team use a support database where users log calls. You can see the progress trail of any given call, and the final solution…then you close the call, and it goes into the ether.

You may have closed a call before any other support worker knew it even existed. Being based in Perth, I only choose to look at calls in my location anyway, so I don’t see the calls from around the world.

At the moment if the call we just closed is unique we add it to our group blog….this is our “seven seconds”.

But this doesn’t always happen.

So an ultimate contribution engine would be if our written solution in the support database posted to the blog as we hit the close call button.

I really think blogs and the like need to be features of existing products.
(You would think our document management system would have an item comment stream (like Google Docs), instead for every document we have chosen to have a forum topic. This is one step better than using email, but the conversation is still separated from the actual document).

Blur the line of above and in the flow

The other day at a staff meeting our new Quality guy spoke about his new role and how his focus is on working with other teams to ensure workers adhere to processes, procedures, culture of working, etc…and that he is writing a plan and report.

If he wrote this report in a wiki, others with permissions, especially cross-unit leads could eavesdrop on this progress, and add insight that he doesn’t know about, because he cannot possibly know the politics, norms, and domestics of each business unit.

NOTE: Please don’t say a survey…the idea of KM 2.0 is no extra effort to share and mingle, it happens as part of doing work.

This report, I assume, would take months to write, why not blog about; progress, feedback, ideas, musings, snippets to showcase, as you go along. By doing this others are in the loop, and they may leave comments to give you ideas and answers. Especially for this type of report, other leads could leave comments on blog posts, or even a dedicated wikipage, on the blockages they have with their team using current procedures, etc..

I bet when the report is finished it would be more relevant, and not just another report about you must work like this for the sake of quality
Instead, the writing of the report has incorporated the existing attitudes, which has helped shape it, now the procedures and processes may work as we are accomodating for the reality of the culture of work.

In fact it would be more true to “quality” if the report was more realistic in its research, being flexible to how people naturally work rather than rigid…in fact it may be realised that the proceses and procedures themselves are the problem as they are not in tune with human behaviour.

Why do I think this blurs the line?

Using a blog to share your insights and musings along the way is “Above-the-flow”, but using the same blog for progress updates and communications could be “In-the-flow” (as you would use email for this anyway).
Whichever method it increases a chance for others to contribute their know how as comments. In a nutshell working in a visible way may encourage more “Above-the-flow” participation.

Using a wiki to draft your document is “In-the-flow” (I don’t really like the descriptor “knowledge sharing” here as it’s just doing work). The benefit of doing this in a visible way, is others can see your progress without you having to update them, and they can add value using the comments. So what is happening, depending on the nature of their comment, is they may be choosing to share some “Above-the-flow” (personal know-how) to your wiki.

The idea is that an “In-the-flow” approach using participative tools, will encourage “Above-the-flow” sharing. You would hope in the long run that people would not only share know-how in a reactionary way, like using comments, but would also initiate original content using blog posts, wiki pages, etc…

We know comments is where the conversation is, and this is where all the know-how exchanges happen, as people share what they know and they discuss to clarify, etc… The object is dynamic, perpetual, and as smart as a crowd.
The existence of comments itself is our first step in an “Above-the-flow” culture, as they are less effort than initiating original content, and they almost always share opinion…it’s an effective way to get people in the swing of working open (transparent) and socially.

Anyway…

The premise is to capture thoughts and interactions as they happen, email is good but closed, and physical conversations have all the know-how, but can only be documented after the fact (which loses all its richness). So the idea is to complement the offline world with online social tools that mimic how we work offline, but have the benefit of capturing (documenting) as we interact, and including others in the converation, that don’t have the privilege of being in the same location of a meeting or 1-to1 conversation.

Without blogs and wikis, this would be the approach:
- Meetings, emails, IM, phone, physical conversations.

The problem here is there is no sense of place, if I am a new comer, how do I catch up on the progress of this initiative and the progress of the report.

Meetings are essential, but you can only say so much in a alotted timeframe, social tools allow to extend the meeting discussions in an asynchronous way, and to lots more eyeballs, that is much more open and conversational than email…others not in the meeting may have something valuable to say.

The phone and physical conversations are also essential, but blogs and wikis allow others to interact without having to engage in 1-on-1 conversation.
Sometimes I don’t want to engage in a phone call, I may have an idea and quickly add it as a comment to someone’s blog. I could email my idea, but then this clogs up their inbox, and who do I put in the to: field so lots of people see it. Actually maybe I feel a bit “pushy” and shy disturbing everyone with an email about a flash of insight, so I won’t send it after all. Whereas a blog comment doesn’t feel “pushy” at all, and you have more confidence sharing your ideas as you haven’t pushed them into people faces, instead they choose to “pull” your comment to themselves (you’re not quite sure who is going to see it, but it’s there for all to see).

I could give a quick IM, which isn’t as committed as a phone call, but then that comment is not attached to the object and the receiver has to write it down somewhere so they don’t forget.

To extend this post it’s essential to organically permeate the right culture by creating conditions for knowledge sharing, such as socially connected and unstructured tools with low barriers to entry, trust circles, roles models, senior support, job evaluation, and facilitation.

Related
The context of blogs
KM 2.0 : doing your job or giving back to the organisation
Knowledge and its facilitators