Library clips

I was browsing the shelves of the library at the college my wife goes to and came across a book on alzheimers. Flicking through it there’s no surprise I found lots and lots of information about how the brain works and fails, about memory, etc… Since I’m addicted to cognitive stuff lately I had a read. And of course whatever I read I relate it to my perspective of life, and that’s through a KM lens. 

What I noticed is that it reminded me of an old post of mine where I talk about how we filter the world and how an artist, like a writer or film maker does this, using narrative to give us a story. When an artist does this filtering it’s called art, whereas in everyday life, filtering information is simply what we do and who we are. The more a film maker does away with a narrative, the more the film comes closer to simply being switched on and observing. From this approach the film really isn’t that much of a film as it’s not filtering life into a perspective and story. Much like us as people, the information we choose to filter and retain becomes the lens we view life through; what gets through the filter is part of what makes our character and personality…how we see and react to the world (basically our illusion of the world).

Here’s an excerpt of my past post We make choices…it’s what we choose…:

I was watching a movie the other night called “Wonderboys”.

Towards the end there was a great part about the student reviewing the teachers book draft telling him he was not practicing a technique he taught, and that was to make “choices”. 

She said his book was too detailed, he lacked making choices, choosing what we see and what is told. Basically the narrative wasn’t sharp enough, anymore obtuse and we just have real life, or documentary without narrative, just observation. This sub-text or theme paralleled with his own character in the movie where he didn’t really live life, he just let things happen, he avoided making decisions, including harnessing the omens and the things nature throws at you..acting on the subtle signs. 

Anyway I thought of this movie when I was reading a passage in a book by Deepak Chopra (Life After Death), who was talking about a book called “The Biology of Transcendence”.

It said that savant children don’t perform tasks from their own accord, they instead respond when asked, similar to a computer.

Deepak says:

“The normal brain filters out information for good reason-it takes narrow experience to form a self, a separate person with limited beliefs, goals, memories, likes and dislikes. We deliberately reject huge portions of information, but a damaged brain is exposed to everything through its inability to select and filter”

It seems that children with this type of condition, don’t carve out a life, they don’t make choices, all they do is process information and then incredibly recall it when needed, almost like a computer.

I wonder what would happen if I didn’t make any choices in life and passively absorbed the perpetual information that bombards me daily…I think I would have a break down, and perhaps this is why people with this condition seem numbed or indifferent to the world. 

Basically if we didn’t filter we wouldn’t have a library, but instead a pile of books…we wouldn’t have a film, but instead a video observing real life, etc…filtering is life!

A point here is the different between blogging (anecdotal raw truths) and a report (which has a narrative or agenda). The report is structured to achieve a goal, whereas the blog posts are simply more raw. I explained how this relates to KM in my post, Real KM : It’s about the match play, not the scoreboard. Basically if we watch the match we understand holistically why the score is what it is, compared to a report that may have an agenda or narrative which filters out stuff…and we may miss out on the meaning on the "why" and "how".

An excerpt from Nassim Taleb’s book, The Black Swan, describes this perfectly:

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

This then connects to Dave Snowden’s concept of Seek patterns first then data, Information carries too many assumptions to allow it to be context free, and Micro-narratives - from information to data to patterns. 

Anyway let’s get back to the hippocampus…

I noticed the way the hippocampus works is similar to how we work as I have described above…the world is a grain of sand. 

The following is some excerpts from Dr Vincent Fortanasce’s book, The anti-alzheimer’s prescription (p 153, 160-2)

…the hippocampus (a small bean-shaped area in the brain) receives the barrage of sensory information from the cortex and starts filing it away. To prevent the information overload that would accompany having to retain the entire influx of information, the hippocampus sifts through and picks out which information to store and which information to discard. The hippocampus’s decision to store memory is believed to hinge on two factors: whether the information has emotional value and whether it relates to something the person already knows…most of what we learn and remember relates to the brain’s ability to form and retrieve associations

…memory is…dependent on emotional context. The hippocampus is more apt to tag information for long-term memory if it has emotional significance. Interactions with other people are an important trigger of emotional responses.

Because each memory is represented in many different cortical areas, the stronger and richer the network of associations, the more your brain has some protection if it should lose neurons and dendrites. The larger your brain "safety net, " the greater the chances are that you can solve problems or meet challenges". That’s because you have many more pathways at your disposal from which you can reach a conclusion.

Imagine you are meeting a new client…instead of listening to the person’s name and shaking their hand, I’d like you to focus on the following:

1. …feel of their hand…soft…cold…

2. …small…are they wearing a scent…

3. …voice…deep…soft…

4. …unique charactersitics…tall…mole

5. …past memories and associations…does that person remind you of someone…

You have now tagged someone’s name with not, just one or two associations, but with at least four very personal connections

 

This got me thinking about online social bookmarking sites like "delicious". They work similar to how we recall things. I used to use delicious tags kind of like folders, but then I decided to use it as subject keywords, and then I threw in other facets like document type, diagram… The idea is to perhaps go one step further…don’t just tag it’s aboutness, but also tag it’s characteristics according to your perspective and past. ie. with terms that somehow had impact on you when you read the article, whether it was an emotional story or because it reminded you of the past.

I recall an article about enterprise 2.0 used the phrase "yellow-brick road", and for some reason that word had impact on me. If I ever have to look for that article the best thing to do for me personally is to tag it "yellow"

Another article was about potentiation (which is a word I rarely remember) and I remember it had a diagram with a neuron path, and whenever I think about that article that diagram surfaces in a second. If I ever have to look for that article the best thing to do for me personally is to tag it "path"

Yes, tag for aboutness and other facets, but don’t forget to use those powerful recall tags that may be odd, but not odd to your brain (ie. to you and your past).

The point here is that if we tag and object many different ways then there’s more chance we will recall it, just like the hippocampus tags or associates to a memory many ways…if one path is broken, another can lead to the memory. 

The hippocampus sounds like me as a person. I sift through information via social networks as a filter and then blog about the stuff I want to retain. That’s how I cope with information signals; and soon enough what filters through becomes part of who I am (yes, it’s important to choose your sources and a variety of disciplines so you don’t live in a bubble).

I think if information has emotional or narrative elements it resonates and has impact; but whether your hippocampus decides to keep it in the long-term I guess relates to how information resonates with me as a person (does it strike a chord with me, does it associate with other memories/patterns).

So the more associations the brain has (the more connected the neurons are for a given thing) the more resilient your brain is at remembering ie. if some pathways are down or can’t be recalled there are other pathways to tread, and ultimately continue to have capacity to deal with things. 

This reminds me of organisations being more aware and connected ie a networked organisation…that collective mind type lingo. I don’t think organisations are one giant brain, but we can do our best to emulate these advantages by networking…sharing our information and connecting creates awareness…many pathways and associations, opportunities to swarm around issues.

That is, if we all learn from each other; when one of us is down (unavailable, vacation, leave the company) there’s a good chance my information has been learnt by others and the issue can be explored without me, as part of my know-how and know-what has been carried on.

So in a KM way it’s not about a filing cabinet, it’s about connecting. This is the best way to find and filter information, to re-frame it to our context through conversations. From this approach we retain the information as personal knowledge due to the discovery, interaction, relationship and subsequent action having a greater impact on the brain compared to reading some facts or a best practice or a report). Symbols, visuals, stories are the middle-ground here ie. they are other people’s experiences (have emotional impact)…and the whole mirror neuron thing.

The brain retains information that has emotional impact, and also associates with the context of past patterns, it imprints information when we action it (again and again)…the more we do and have experience, the more it’s a skill and becomes part of us.

Knowledge Management is a flow and a flux, which has momentum and evolves through connections in networks; whereas organised objects sitting static on a shelf is information management.

"….the blueprints for the Saturn rocket have been lost and much of the knowledge of the 400,000 engineers that made the first moon landing possible lies in documents that are devoid of meaning without the contextual and personal knowledge of those who generated them."

- Jon Glesinger

"NASA had lost knowledge of how to manufacture the material because it had kept few records of the process when the material was made in the 1980s, and almost all staff with expertise on production had retired or left the agency"

- How the US forgot to make Trident missiles

The cost of knowledge, in this case lost knowledge and attrition, is one of the reasons that we need a KM department; to coach and counsel organisations in the value of knowledge, and moreso the lack of resilience in a loss of knowledge.

A lot of KM has to do with knowledge sharing, (especially across silos), accessing people who can help, communication, and awareness…and we claim the lack of this is partly to blame for disasters perhaps like "Tsunami Japanese Nuclear Plant" the "Challenger space shuttle disaster", "9-11" etc…just quietly this may be more a problem of seeing the world as connecting the dots, rather than anticipatory awareness.

In this case the aspect of KM I’m talking about is observable work…which of course can help with awareness and other points I’ve mentioned above, but it also helps in understanding why decisions were made. If we can find the workings out, the work-in-progress, the thinking out loud conversations, the peripheral information, then we will understand the meaning and the context behind decisions.

Not only that, we can re-mix these nuggets of work-in-progress and assemble them with other thinking to create something entirely new…this is KM as a flow or as a flux…fragments connecting, morphing…

"Why was this decision made in paragraph 2 on page 3…I want to use the thinking behind this for something else" asks the manager.

"I’m not sure, it must be in emails, minutes of meetings, buried in our repository…one of those people are currently on vacation and the other has left the organisation" says the worker.

That’s right our knowledge is in our head and is represented in conversation and email communications…where it goes to die. Hence Ross Mayfield’s brilliant insight in using social tools for doing work; which retains the represented knowledge by default. Not only this; but it can be commented on, talk to the author, re-used, enhanced, re-mixed…

In a comment on a past post I likened this to a maths problem:

"Again this is like a maths solution to me in a way

From equation to solution

- show me the workings out

- show me all the paths that we took that failed

- in essence show me all the conversations around each step in both the failed paths and successful path"

And all this brings me to the idea of having an inventors notebook and diary; all the thinking (and the "way" they think), workings out, conversations, peripheral information, and even failed attempts and wrong paths.

Without this how do we know why decisions were made (make sense of something without the underlying context), why they may have failed to see some things (again the context of the time or situation may give clues), what to avoid (which helps to not re-invent the wrong wheel), how to replicate starting conditions, how to re-create things, and how to take a fragment that made up a product and use it in another product.

Not just the know-what, but the know-why, and a glimpse into the know-how.

If we go back to the NASA documents; they are merely information…KM is not just about content and finished products. The repository of documents is not good enough if you can’t make sense of it…and a best practice may not be able to transfer to the new context or complexity of the situation. We need to connect with the authors or at least see their trails of conversation that led to these documents…only then can we get closer to the know-how and know-why. In this respect KM has more in common with observation, apprenticeship, conversations/stories than it does with organising documents (information management).

Here’s an example:

"In a blog post in January 2009, Gowers asked whether spontaneous online collaborations could crack hard mathematical problems—and if they could do so in the open, laying the creative process out for the world to see.

As Gowers wrote on his blog, Polymath may be “the first fully documented account of how a serious [math] research problem was solved, complete with false starts, dead ends, etcetera.” Or, as Tao puts it, the project was valuable because it showed “an example of how the sausage is made.”

- Problem Solved, LOL: Scientific American

 

If you want an extended look at this thinking consult my two posts:

The know-why tragedy : divorced from my work on the cutting room floor

Real KM : It’s about the match play, not the scoreboard

I was interviewed by Cathrin Gill on the Enterprise 2.0 Open blog as part of their E2.0 Expert Profiles.

The Enterprise2Open blog was initiated for the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT.

It’s not easy summarizing over 5 years of my thought blogging and reading…this was something I needed to do. I have learnt about many things by reading bloggers, commenting and blogging myself…nothing better than DIY interactive education…I thank Cathrin for giving me motivation to do that…

Here’s the main bits below. I hope it’s OK that I’m re-posting…I don’t want to lose this summary

What is your understanding of the core concept of the Enterprise 2.0 idea?

• A new operating system based on different ideals, designs and structures
• For people to be engaged at work, rather than be seen as assets
• A focus on engagement rather than sharing…through design and facilitation you have better conditions to achieve your goal… sharing and heightened awareness will happen by default
• A somewhat role-based network organisational structure where people connect and are aware, have diverse input, acknowledge and action emergent outcomes, find suitable tasks and people…basically to exploit the collective knowledge to make better decisions and have an innovative edge
• A focus on complexity theory based on experimenting, manipulating for favourable conditions, monitoring and feeding back, rather than an addiction to plans and outcomes, targets and rewards. Being more transparent, adaptive, agile, and resilient

5.) What are the main potentials of the Enterprise 2.0 idea?

• As Euan Semple says these new social platforms can finally legitimise informal networks. Closing the gap between the c-level and the frontline (”we” rather than “us” and “them”), a more transparent, two-way communication, feedback and bypassing the levels of hierarchy. Preventing blockage of information and re-interpretations, welcoming and capitalising on feedback.
• This is a new approach and leveling, and can be amplified by the use of social tools. Two things come to my mind: Improve awareness and the seminal lack of communication syndrome, and co-create change so it’s relevant to the frontline.
• It also means working socially productive in silos and bridging silos using visible and open group tools, and connecting silos via enterprise-wide networks.
• E 2.0 provides workers with tools to communicate and share their exceptions to processes…let’s face it procedures are not clairvoyant, every context brings up unique aspects to current processes.
• E 2.0 leads to social productivity and activities like crowdsourcing are now achievable by connecting and conversing in public by default, rather than private by default (like the current email way). This is a move from PC (Personal computing) to SC (Social computing).
  But I’m not too sure how decision making being done in a social way will pan out; if we really want to talk about democracy that is…maybe a committee. It just depends on who owns the firm really.
• And since these interactions happen in the open, everyone learns for free on a daily basis, a pull system where workers pick up signals with their radar.
  Referencing Jim McGee: New social tools reprise the concept of observable work that we lost with the coming of the digital era. We now have the potential to tap into the “know-how” and “know-why”, rather than just the “know-what” we get in deliverables and documents. We are interested in the conversations and brainwork. When reading a deliverable we wonder why things are they way they are, what were the many micro-decisions and now we can go back to those fragments if we worked using social tools - this is the real corporate memory. The beauty of it is these fragments can be assembled together (re-mixed) for different contexts. Then the output of that work can be traced back to the artifacts (the workings out) and re-hashed, and so on. The whole idea is not re-use but re-mix…malleable objects that live in a flux…basically fragments as springboards to continuous knowledge creation.
  Ahhh, just read Oscar Berg’s post on social tools being our coping mechanism

6.) What are the main challenges, threats and issues of the Enterprise 2.0 idea?

Control…simple as that!
Bottom-up is not enough, we need a new organisational design, a top-down shift in ideals. At the moment we have worker 2.0 and group 2.0, but we need management 2.0 to make enterprise 2.0 happen.

My top 10

1. We share with people we trust, and share when we are engaged, rather than incentives and rewards, and now we have new social tools that appeal to intrinsic motivations
2. Some managers may feel dis-intermediated, especially those who rely on their status in controlling information flow, whereas managers who slant to the more leadership side of things welcome it. People worked a long time for their authority, and now comes along a way (eg blogs) to be influential by reputation
3. Transparency, two-way communication, and co-creation are key to engaged workers
4. We currently get rewarded for individual action, not collaboration or group output…or how much we help others on tasks we are not on…or how well we source the right people to help you on your task.
5. Different units compete for resources
6. Politics and power
7. This one can be slowly overcome, and that’s changing routines and habits from email to new tools (as long as the new tool is designed for ease of use)
8. A culture that is OK with sharing and learning from failure
9. Psychological safety (it’s OK to be wrong or to speak up)
10. In the past we only shared finished products in the open, and all the working out and know-why happens in closed email. There is now a change to “work-in-progress / status updates” happening in the open. With this we get more awareness, diverse feedback, reputation building, relationship building, learning… We can look back at a record of how things came to be…peripheral information, the conversations behind decisions. A report doesn’t compare as a raw record vs emails, phone, meetings…but all these things are behind closed doors.

Learnings since the interview

Here’s some snippets about the "real enterprise 2.0"…

Real enterprise 2.0 is about “service” "Because service is a person-to-person commitment rather than a goal-to-people one, it engages employees more, make the whole organization more responsive and make them less reluctant about caring about issues that are not directly theirs. Collaboration is something one do with someone else to achieve something. Service is quite different. Service is not something one do with another but something one do for another. The final purpose is, of course, to achieve something, but the immediate purpose is to help someone. And that changes everything. Fostering stronger relationships within the organization has few impact on collaboration because collaboration often commits people to a goal and not to other people. In a collaboration context, people don’t feel they help one another but rather that they’re on the same boat rowing to reach an island they don’t care about. In a service context, one is directly commited to help the other solve his problem and, then, relationships are more easily leveraged." - Bertrand Duperrin

Social Media goals are derived goals "I repeat. Your company does not need a social media strategy. What your company does need to do however, is to incorporate social media into almost every other strategy or plan that it has. This means that social media needs to be a part of your marketing strategy, public relations strategy, HR strategy, customer service strategy and maybe even your finance strategy. Maybe you do need someone to coordinate your company wide social media efforts, but that is not the same creating a social media strategy." - Asia Digital Map.com

Is this an aspect of capitalism 2.0? "Management in the 20th Century was about achieving a finite goal: delivering goods and services, to make money. Management in the 21st Century is about the infinite goal of delighting customers; the firm makes money, yes, but as a consequence of the delight that it creates for customers, not as the goal." - Steve Denning

Now this is the real enterprise 2.0 "The finite goal of delivering goods and services, in order to make money, was utterly boring and dispiriting…Because that goal dispirits those doing the work and often frustrates those for whom the work is done, it is inherently unsustainable. The infinite goal of delighting customers is inherently inspiring: helping other people is the essence of moral thinking. It is inherently uplifting for those doing the work, and invigorating to those for whom the work is done. Hence the goal is inherently sustainable. The new goal of delighting customers is a radical shift in the difficulty of what a firm is undertaking. The goal of a firm is no longer simple and linear and finite. Now the goal of the firm is difficult and complex and infinite. Now continuous innovation becomes a requirement, rather than a distraction and a de-stabilizer. Now we are in a world of continuous experimentation, to find out what works and what doesn’t, in terms of adding new value for clients. Now mistakes, instead of being elements that can be eliminated, are an essential element of the learning process. Now mistakes become crucial and welcome elements of the learning process. Instead of mistakes being punished, now mistakes are welcomed as essential opportunities for learning. Now everyone in the firm is focused on what can be done to add additional value to customers and clients. The firm is no longer an end in itself. The firm is now “other directed”: it is focused on meeting the needs of the clients and stakeholders whom it is purporting to serve." - Steve Denning

Real enterprise 2.0 is about letting go of “control” "Companies have to come to terms with the fact that the traditional model of managerial resource allocation and coordination (mainly coerced through extrinsic motivation in the form of rewards and punishments, such as payments, promotions, demotions, etc.) has become outdated and no longer reflects the social fabric of today’s workforce Commitment is fickle, reputation volatile, and loyalty scarce. In short: Companies have lost control – over their workforce, their customers, and as a result, their brands. Or, more precisely, as Charlene Li points out in her book Open Leadership, they have never really been in control – what they are actually forced to give up now is their need for control." - Tim Leberecht

Influence is replacing authority "If designers embrace the insight that influence is replacing authority as the new currency in the “pull economy” and that the best way to gain influence is to give up control…businesses can use “shaping strategies” to amplify and accelerate the inevitable loss of control in order to avoid employees and customers abandon them….levers of “access, attraction, and achievement” that provide the “creation spaces” and tools for employees and customers alike to design their own destiny, create their own meaning, and thus convert their very own skills and passions into productivity and loyalty" - Tim Leberecht

The need for both process and people-centric systems “A customer account manager receives a phone call from a client asking why an issue with their service has not been resolved and when it will be. The account manager can query a workflow-supported issue management system and learn that the issue has been assigned to a specific employee and that it has been assigned an “in-progress” status. However, that system does not tell the account manager what she really needs to know! She must turn to a communication system to ask the other employee what is the hold up and the current estimate of time to issue resolution. She emails, IM’s, phones, or maybe even tweets the employee to whom the issue has been assigned to get an answer she can give the customer. The employee to whom the issue was assigned most likely cannot use the issue management system to actually resolve the problem either. He uses a collaboration system to find documented information and individuals possessing knowledge that can help him deal with the issue. Once the problem is solved, the employee submits the solution to the issue management system, which feeds it to a someone who can make the necessary changes for the customer and inform the customer account manager that the issue is resolved. Case closed”. ad hoc communication and collaboration systems were the tools that drove actual results Without the cludgy, structured issue management system, the customer account manager would not have known to whom the issue had been assigned and, thus, been unable to contact a specific individual to get better information about its status - Larry Hawes

The mutation of capitalism "Every century or so, fundamental changes in the nature of consumption create new demand patterns that existing enterprises can’t meet. When a majority of people want things that remain priced at a premium under the old institutional regime—a condition I call the “premium puzzle”—the ground becomes extremely fertile for wholly new classes of competitors that can fulfill the new demands at an affordable price. A premium puzzle existed in the auto industry before Henry Ford and the Model T and in the music industry before Steve Jobs and the iPod. The consumption shift in Ford’s time was from the elite to the masses; today, we are moving from an era of mass consumption to one focused on the individual. The leading edge of consumption is now moving from products and services to tools and relationships enabled by interactive technologies. Innovations improve the framework in which enterprises produce and deliver goods and services. Mutations create new frameworks; they are not simply new technologies, though they do leverage technologies to do new things. Historically, mutations have superseded innovations when fundamental shifts in what people want require a new approach to enterprise: new purposes, new methods, new outcomes. The Model T embodied a mutation we now call mass production. It solved the premium puzzle of its time, reducing the price of an automobile by 60 percent or more, and thrived in the emerging environment of mass consumption. That potential for wealth creation remained invisible to those who clung to the 19th-century framework of small-factory, proprietary capitalism. In the same way that mass production moved the locus of industry from small shops to huge factories, today’s mutations have the potential to shift us away from business models based on economies of scale, asset intensification, concentration, and central control" - Shoshana Zuboff

The first wave of “distributed capitalism "The true source of value, which had been invisible to the music industry, resided in Apple’s ability to reinvent the consumption experience from the viewpoint of the individual, at a fraction of the old cost The iPod—and its successors, the iPhone and the iPad—are part of the first wave of what I call “distributed capitalism,” Winning mutations—those that create value by offering consumers individualized goods and services at a radically reduced cost—express a convergence of technological capabilities and the values associated with individual self-determination. Inversion The old logic of wealth creation worked from the perspective of the organization and its requirements—for efficiency, cost reductions, revenues, growth, earnings per share (EPS), and returns on investment (ROI)—and pointed inward. The new logic starts with the individual end user. Instead of “What do we have and how can we sell it to you?” good business practices start by asking “Who are you?” “What do you need?” and “How can we help?” This inverted thinking makes it possible to identify the assets that represent real value for each individual. Cash flow and profitability are derived from those assets. Reconfiguration Once individuals have the assets they want, they must be able to reconfigure those assets according to their own values, interests, convenience, and pleasure. A teenager, for instance, may use her iPod Touch and an application called Pandora to assemble an entire personalized “radio station” while at the same time learning Mandarin Chinese at the kitchen table on Sunday afternoon through an online classroom based thousands of miles from her home. Support The emerging logic of distributed capitalism rewards enterprises that realign their practices with the interests of the end consumer and punishes enterprises that try to impose their own internal requirements or, worse yet, maximize their own benefit at the expense of the individual end user" - Shoshana Zuboff

Next Generation Collaborative Enterprise (NGCE) "Collaboration encourages clusters of experts with diverse skills to make decisions quickly. The Next Generation Collaborative Enterprise allows experts at any level to propose, create and execute without hierarchical or geographical constraints. Priorities are set by clusters of experts that make decisions. Decisions are communicated real-time through social media applications…Individuals are able to apply themselves to the work based on their skills and availability, regardless of their geographic location…Funding is directed based on milestones. Direct accountability is embedded into the social network. Finally, organizational functions become less relevant and ‘Re-orgs’ become obsolete. Leadership is defined as the ability to influence, envision and execute ― rather than the authority to command and control." - Padmasree Warrior

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Representation

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

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

Reflection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Capturing output is not KM

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

"knowledge is for action, not for warehousing"

Simon Bostock adds to this:

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

David Tebbutt has left a valuable comment on Yigals post:

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

Anyway what was Yigals post about?

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

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

Yigal makes an important point:

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Practice Execution

Like Paula Thornton tweeted:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Patrice said on fragments and context

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Dave again:

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

And yet again:

"The more you structure material, the more you summarize…the more you make material specific to a context or time, the less utility that material has as things change. For years now I have asked this question at conferences around the world: Faced with an intractable problem, do you go and draw down best practice from your company’s knowledge management system, or do you go and find eight or nine people you know and trust with relevant experience and listen to their stories? So why for the last decade and more have we focused on chunking up best practice? Increasingly unstructured material, blended in unexpected ways, provides a richer source of knowledge.

Arthur Shelley on a comment on a past blog says:

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

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

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

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

Alister goes on to say:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matthew Hodgson also says something similar:

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

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

Think of it as Steam and Ice:

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

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

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

What Patrice said on "know-why"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Patrice’s know-why tragedy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Know-why is missing in action

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

Summary

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

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

Convergence of Themes

Emergence

Fragments

Visibility

Barely Repeatable Processes

Observable Work

Work-in-Progress

Thinking-out-Loud

Ambient Awareness

Stocks and Flows

Ad-hoc

Context

Craft

Next

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