Library clips

My previous blog entry was a follow up on flexible tools not being immune to being used the wrong way. My example was the danger of using a blog as a solution centre due to its news type nature, and rather using a wiki for an official solution centre.

In that example, wikis were described as a place to house explicit information, whereas the blog was more explanatory tacit based information, perhaps containing the know-how behind the solution.

Why is the blog entry important?

We may not be aware that the wiki solution page that we are reading, with a little altering, can also fix our current error we are troubleshooting.

Why?

The wiki solution page may not have much context, it’s just, “when you see this error, use this solution”.
The good thing about this is the page is succinct, we don’t want to be reading forever when we are researching for a solution.

But if that wiki solution page points to a blog entry about the experience of coming up with that solution, we may find we can apply these same techniques to our current troubleshooting.

This is the difference between explicit and tacit, with tacit know-how we learn, rather than just being informed.

It can be done without a blog

You don’t have to have a blog to share the anecdote about your troubleshooting experience, you could have a link on your wiki solution page to another wikpage that is a space for anecdotes about the solution. I just like the idea of a blog format listing a diary of experiences in time, like reading the daily news (again, this is learning by building anticipatory awareness).

Wikis vs Documents

So at the moment a wiki is preferable as a solution centre over a folder with a bunch of documents, as the website format is more usable, and one-click edit is very easy compared to having to launch a Word document in a Document Management System (DMS).
I guess a website feels like a sense of place, more a one stop shop compared to a document in a folder, a website just has more character, a front door, etc…

Know-how expressed as both explicit and tacit

Using the example above, the fact that people are taking the time to add a solution to a wiki is an act of sharing their know-how. Even though I have called it “explicit”, it blurs the line as know-how is usually synonomous with “tacit”. Perhaps it’s better to say that they share their know-how in the wikipage in a more explicit and summarized way, and they share this same know-how in a more tacit and personal way in the blog entry.

In fact I described the different ways to express information in an entry called the KM Core Sample.

Whether explicit (more formal) or tacit (more informal) we are happy that people are sharing at all, and as facilitators we are to concentrate on creating conditions for it to happen more often.

Wikis reach what procedures cannot forsee

Wikis are really valuable for people to pool their know-how for incidences where there are process failures and exceptions to the rule.

Some members of a Document Control team at my work use an Excel document (stored in the DMS) to list exceptions to procedures or just little steps that are not able to be known upfront in a procedure…we hope wikis will cover this space.

A procedure or a best practice cannot cover every context, and some clients and situations have different needs, which means we need to be able to make our workflow flexible and also keep everyone in the loop of what’s going on and how to do things that procedure’s simply cannot cover (they are thick enough already, and are not clairvoyant anyway).

Actually I mentioned this point in my KM Review article:

“These types of interactions enable learning to occur in a more informal and social way; a way we cannot cater for upfront; and a way that brings to light answers and workarounds for contexts and situations that arise, as well as those that already exist.”

There’s always a documented formal way in how to do things, and then there’s the way things are really done. I think a wiki is sharing and documenting how things are really done, they reflect the reality of where a manual cannot reach.

In a learning perspective this is the difference between formal learning (training) and informal learning (social on the job). I heard the other day that 80% of what we learn to do our job, is contextual on the job learning by experience, and 20% is from formal training. Put another way why do we spend 80% on training, when it effectively relates to only 20% of learning…this is based on the Pareto Principle of 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

See more on a comparison of Learning 1.0 vs Learning 2.0.

BRP - Barely Repeatable Process

Ross Dawson explains the need to complement an ERP - Easily Repeatable Process, with a BRP - Barely Repeatable Process:

“Typically exceptions to the ERPs, anything that involves people in non-rigid flows through education, health, support, government, consulting or the daily unplanned issues that happens in every organisation. The activities that employees spend most of their time on every day.
Processes that often starts with an e-mail or a call. A process volume, measured by time and resource spent at organisations, probably larger than for the Easily Repeatable Processes.
These are mostly handled and organised - frameworked - by systems like paper based rules and policies, e-mail, meetings, calls and now in more modern organisations by wikis and other collaboration systems and methods.

Known by extensive loss of information (e-mails residing on HDDs), little knowledge acquired and reused (typical research says 70% of problems solved before without being known) and most of all, untrustworthy processes (oops, forgot to send that mail). In other words not an iota (well almost) of business process thinking or methodology applied to this huge untapped area of business processes.”

Not only do wikis offer a communal space to list these exceptions to procedures and workflows that occur due to unplanned events or just the plain reality of situational contexts, so we can do our work, but it can be seen as a knowledge re-use perspective. Once what was just “known” but not written down, is now flowing out of people’s heads onto the communal canvas.
When I’m in a urgent siutation I may not need to wait for a couple of people to get back to me with an answer, as they may have already shared a little scribble about an exception to a process in the wiki.

Ross Mayfield on the same meme:

“The way organizations adapt, survive and be productive is through the social interaction that happens outside the lines that we draw by hierarchy, process and organizational structure. The first form of social software to really take off to facilitate these discussions was email.”

“Most employees don’t spend their time executing business process. That’s a myth. They spend most of their time handling exceptions to business process. That’s what they’re doing in their [e-mail] inbox for four hours a day. Email has become the great exception handler.”

And again, there’s no knowledge re-use when we use a closed system like email to handle exceptions that procedures cannot cover.

Examples

Just say some of your work tools or applications don’t work on certain laptops
- you are never going to get a laptop that works seamlessly with everything, that’s life
- IT could create a wikipage listing tools that don’t work on a particular laptop model, or what you have to do in order to make them work
- I bet a communal effort could whip up a list in no time at all

These little things we take for granted usually come up when we are training someone new.
Like all of us, every job I’ve had I’ve been taught processes, but also been overwhelmed with things like “but on this day, or in this situation, you have to deviate from the norm and do this instead”. You usually hear about 10 of these exceptions and think, how will I ever remember what to do when I need to do it.

Part of my role is in Document Management support. When a project coordinator creates a project there are various post-duties we have to do for projects created with different templates. This is because the templates are being revamped, and procedures don’t cover these in-between stages. Once the new templates come in then everything will be more generic, but for now we need to know what to do different for which template.
There are even local differences, and these differences can’t be part of a procedure, so again this is where a wiki can be used to help you do your job.

The world is complex and contextual, and wikis help ease this situation by pooling the efforts of all the players. Wikis can also display patterns that emerge. If a manager reviews all the exceptions and workarounds in a wiki, it could reveal a usage issue, a bottleneck problem, a safety issue, etc…

Every plant site has procedures, but like everything else these procedures cannot be aware of every situation that can occur, or meet every need, so a site wiki for these heuristics, anomalies, band-aids, exceptions can be communally created by the people who actually work at the site.

A wiki would be doing a site manager a favour in the ways of safety, and possible new inclusion into the procedures…when exceptions become the rule. Now that I think of it, it’s kind of a distant cousin to an online suggestion box.

What I like about this is no-one is in charge or responsible to write such a document, it’s just stuff everyone knows or doesn’t know, so by everyone pitching in we help each other out, there is no effort on just one person, therefore it’s more prone to exist…plus none of us are smarter than the sum of us.

I’m sure everyone has seen a sign when they have travelled and stayed in hostels, that says “if toilet doesn’t flush, keep button pressed till it passes” or “first set shower hot water tap, then turn on the cold water tap”.

But we can’t have signs or post it notes everywhere, and you can’t easily put a sign on intangible things like a process step in using an online application.

Please leave a comment of an example of exceptions and workarounds in your job, that people know (or don’t know), but isn’t written down because it’s not someone’s job duty.

I expect some comments as I think this happens everywhere

In this post I describe using wikis for a solution centre and for an exceptions list, but there are endless ways to use wikis, go check it out.

Related

The tacitness of wikis
The value of networked free-form publishing
KM 2.0 : doing your job or giving back to the organisation

In the past many discoveries and innovations have come by accident or by chance, rather than a team hurting their heads with too much innovation think, “no matter how much I try I just can’t think of an innovation”. It doesn’t usually happen if you sit around doing nothing, it happens when you are involved in life, participating, interacting, only it’s not what your chasing, it’s what happened on the way, it’s what’s triggered, it’s the accidents (the gifts from the gods;) etc…

It’s happened to all of us that we are researching on one task and come across a gem we can use for another task…or this gem may take our current task in a new and better direction. I think as long as we are participating and active we increase the opportunity to be exposed to more great information and people, it may just trigger something inside.

Definition

This catalyst, the spark happens by serendipity, here’s what wikipedia has to say at this point in time:

“Serendipity is the effect by which one accidentally discovers something fortunate, especially while looking for something else entirely”

“It was once when I read a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip: as their highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of…”

“…the word is the “sagacity” of being able to link together apparently innocuous facts to come to a valuable conclusion. Thus, while some scientists and inventors are reluctant about reporting accidental discoveries, others openly admit its role; in fact serendipity is a major component of scientific discoveries and inventions.”

“…agree that a prepared and open mind is required on the part of the scientist or inventor to detect the importance of information revealed accidentally”

And a memorable one, “Serendipity is looking in a haystack for a needle and discovering a farmer’s daughter.” Pek van Andel

Examples

The wikipedia page has a vast list of these accidental discoveries in the scientific fields and inventions, here are a few:

“Penicillin by Alexander Fleming. He failed to disinfect cultures of bacteria when leaving for his vacations, only to find them contaminated with Penicillium molds, which killed the bacteria. However, he had previously done extensive research into antibacterial substances.”

“Viagra (sildenafil citrate), an anti-impotence drug. It was initially studied for use in hypertension and angina pectoris. Phase I clinical trials under the direction of Ian Osterloh suggested that the drug had little effect on angina, but that it could induce marked penile erections.”

“Discovery of the principle behind inkjet printers by a Canon engineer. After putting his hot soldering iron by accident on his pen, ink was ejected from the pen’s point a few moments later.”

Enterprise 2.0

Then you have a military type invention like the internet which just can’t help breeding more invention, that’s the thing when you invent a tool that actually allows you to invent more tools…I don’t think we imagined e-commerce, blogging, social networking, wikis, etc…

If serendipity increases the chance of discoveries leading to innovation, then what better than a platform such as enterprise 2.0, where all can participate, interact and network.

I may be researching a few blog posts for my draft post on topicA, and links from post to post take me on another discovery, and I end up drafting 5 new posts…as I investigate these accidental findings I learn.

I browse a social bookmarks tag as part of research, and come across a great article, I then see articles from similar tags, and articles from a particular tagger, and before you know it, I’ve learnt more than I bargained for on this supposed 30 minute research window…see an indepth view.

I have my Twitter @replies turned on to full so I can eaves drop on conversations from people I follow, and the people they follow that I don’t…sometimes I come across some gems.

I search our internal blogosphere and come across an irrelevant post to my needs, but am able to leave a comment on this post as a possible solution. We work in totally different business units, live in different countries, and don’t know each other at all, yet because we both participate and are visible I increase my opportunity for serendipitous affairs, which can lead to innovation.

This serendipity can also be a product in aggregate. If everyone participates and networks on a platform we could view a tag cloud and see some emerging patterns…we could view the frequent tags and realise we need to take action on something, or realise the mood at the moment. Without a participation platform and tagging content, there is no way we would have known otherwise of these emergent patterns, and what they tell us.

The benefit of enterprise 2.0 is it helps us get our work done, share and evolve ideas, and connect with people, but at the same time the same platform exposes us to loads of know-how, quality stuff that we may discover on the way to somewhere else.

Conditions for Innovation

So not only is enterprise 2.0 about sharing know-how it’s about increasing the chances for innovation…see more.

Dave Snowden says KM is about supporting effective decision making and creating conditions for innovation. This really rings true in a KM 2.0 environment as we have the ability and are empowered to connect to the right people and know-how, and at the same time be almost always subject to the conditions of serendipity, which as we mentioned increases the chances of innovation.

He says it himself:

“…its not luck, and yes you can manage for it. By increasing the number and type of things that you pay attention too then you increase the chance of serendipity (which is what SenseMaker does) and various methods such as SNS increase the encounter rations with things which are unusual or novel.”

A comment from Wayne Zandbergen says, “…’serendipity’ happens to those who are prepared to notice it, rather than mere accident…” he goes on to examine the semantics of the term.

Luke Naismith on serendipity and synchronicity:

“He defined serendipity as those events that are somewhat unusual but that are noticed and in that noticing, provide some value to the observer. In contrast, synchronicity is the meaningful coincidence between two seemingly separate events – some form of meaningful relationship between causally unconnected events. I noted that it is often through serendipity, we can find synchronicity.”

“We talked about innovation and the role that people in organisations need to play of looking for the unexpected, those anomalies that fall outside the norm, and to try and ascertain the meaning behind that difference. It goes against the notion of seeking equilibrium or getting things back to the average”

Johnnie Moore points to a post on engineering serendipity:

“…an interesting paradox here, how can we engineer that which is meant to be fortuitous?”…I think we have answered this above, by networking in a participation culture.

Rod Boothby expands on emergence:

“Just as high-level patterns of intelligence emerge from separate brain cells or individual agents within a free market economy, groups can be motivated to create intelligent decisions in other circumstances.”

“Emergent intelligence only evolves when agents have the freedom to act independently. The traditional command and control structures employed by most large firms do not lend themselves to fostering this kind of independence”

“However, that does not mean that there isn’t still a roll of management to play. Their task now is to cultivate an environment that encourages innovation.”

…read more of this post about oblique control, kind of like the light constraints on a complex system.

To learn more Rod has a paper called, Turning Knowledge Workers into Innovation Creators.

Ross Mayfield has a post about the edge (people in enterprise social networks), pointing to people such as Eugene Lee, John Seely Brown, John Hagel, JP Rangaswami, and the Cluetrain:

“The edge of the organization is the source of innovation and growth. Its also where an organization can sense and respond to change.”

“…the edge is the only source of sustainable innovation, and the edge is becoming the core”

“Social interaction often precedes economic activity.”
“Otherwise known as cluetrain. Markets are conversations. Relationship before conversation before transaction.
Just as new solutions are emerging to enable effectiveness for the edge, it may be more critical than ever.”

KM 1.0 ain’t set up for serendipity, nor innovation

…instead we learn from failure and trial and error

I’m not going to get into this for the thousandth time, so you can read these posts about the “anticipating needs, or the maybe one day KM”

Serendipity management

Dave Snowden on Knowledge Management:

“Dave appears to share my disdain for the context-free capture and ‘codification’ of people’s business knowledge in massive ‘knowledge bases’ just in case someone else might be able to benefit from that knowledge sometime in the future (assuming they can find it).”

These blog posts point to Dave’s paper, Managing for Serendipity (alternate link), his offerings to encourage learning and knowledge transfer are: Narrative Databases, Social Network Stimulation, and Disruptive Pattern Breaking.

He concludes that, “…a major area of knowlege management practice should be to create worst practice systems on the grounds that they provide better and more resilient approaches to learning.”

We are not just talking about online here, serendipity and innovation happen using participative and emergent methods such as knowledge cafes, world cafes, anecdote circles, unconference, open space, etc…

Similar to Dave’s paper above Luis Suarez posts about innovation derived from communities, and learning from failures…there is a Ning (social network) on failures called the Mistake Bank.

Dave Gurteen has found a great quote by JK Rowling on failure and living:

“You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default.”

Jay Cross on Learning from worst practices:

“Stories of failures can be used to generate “worst case scenarios.” People learn more from avoiding failure than from affirming success.”

Mary Abraham on True leaders value mistakes:

“When you’re dealing with an organization that faces liability if it doesn’t reach the right result every time in a predictable, controlled fashion, mistakes take on an even greater importance. Consequently, there can be a tendency to sacrifice innovation and growth for predictability and control. In that environment, mistakes are barely tolerated and rarely encouraged. The problem is that an organization without mistakes is an organization without innovation and growth.”

Jevon MacDonald talks about Google’s trial and error, learning from failure approach…this reminds me of the Safe-Fail approach that I mention later on in this blog post.

Back to Enterprise 2.0

Patti Anklam refers to serendipity as “accidental collisions“:

“…how important it is for search engines to return information about our connections with people who may have the expertise and experience we need to tap. We must also arrange for people to bump into each other (in physical and virtual spaces) who may not know that there is experience available for the tapping. Jim calls this the art of making “accidental collisions” — causing people to bump into each other so they can whatever sparks may be, will ignite.”

Jack Vinson leads me to a post on this topic by Doug Cornelius:

“One thing I noticed in our search for an enterprise search tool is the serendipity factor. People were finding interesting and informative things that they did not expect to find.”

More on accidental collisions by Joe McKendrick:

“This is the old knowledge management conundrum — how can you capture and bottle informal, unstructured data? How do you capture serendipity — someone runs into a business colleague at an event, and learns that so-and-so is leaving because the company pulled support for a project? How do you take it out of peoples’ heads and digitize it?”

It seems a participation network (connected profiles) is always the answer here, as it mimics the conversational behaviours we have in the offline world. Who would have thought that MySpace and Facebook would have been the next innovation tools, see an example by James Dellow, on a bunch of guys forming a band by networking on MySpace. I too came across this scenario when I was listening to the local radio (RTR-fm) the other day when a local band (Apricot Rail) found each other and conversed on MySpace.

This kind of also ties in with Andrew McAfee’s rendition of the strength of weak ties, and expanded in to the enterprise 2.0 bullseye, specifically Facebook, and how the status updates of your weak ties may not be of much care to you usually, but perhaps something they update may be of use for a future need.

I like this quote from McAfee:

“…it can in fact be quite powerful because it’s a quick and easy way to form connections and make associations that might not ever occur otherwise.”

NOTE: Unlike KM 1.0 they are not anticipating this need, they are just updating their status, if you tune into them and it’s useful to you (anticipatory awareness), then the concept of KM has worked.

Brad Hinton too posts about innovation and network ties:

“The gist of the new Gratton book is that “innovation comes from people who cross boundaries (and) talk to people in all areas of the business and outside and bring foreign ideas into their own work”. Gratton rightly points out that most organisations don’t even realise the capacity and power of potential networks inside their own organisation - an untapped and relatively inexpensive resource.”

“A new employee often brings new insights and ideas to a new organisation because they have not been corralled into like-minded teams inside the organisation. Once people become ensconced with people of similar ideas and contexts, the opportunity for innovative ideas tends to break down.”

Jon Mell on serendipity and noise:

“The more you think about the random coincidences that happen on Twitter or on other social software tools, the more you realise that a lot of ideas and moments of serendipity actually come from noise.

So it’s not that noise is unwelcome, just that there is ‘good’ noise and ‘bad’ noise (spam). This relates to the idea that has been floating around the web recently that information overload is actually a filtering problem.”

More on noise by Read/Write Web:

“Some people call it “serendipity,” others call it “passive and opportunistic information acquisition.” (Erdelez, see below.) The less limited the boundaries of your scope of view are, the more likely you may be to find things you didn’t even think to look for.”

More examples

Before we move to the next section here are a few more “happy accidents“:

“An example is that of a drug company seeking an antacid based on amino acids, the building blocks of a protein. When the researcher, having inadvertently spilled some of the crystals, wet his finger on his tongue to turn a page in his laboratory notebook, he was astonished at the taste of sweetness. In this way, the artificial sweetener know as Equal or NutraSweet was born. In another instance, an engineer developing radar sets found that a candy bar in his pocket had melted. With the realization that the unit’s power device was emitting radio waves, the microwave oven was born.”

Examples of attraction and engagement

The Mystery of Attraction on the web - Luis Suarez

Lifestreaming Increases Chances of Serendipity

Dave Snowden on Innovation

Since serendipity may lead to innovation I’ve collected some quotes.

Failure and Innovation:

“Innovation happens when people use things in unexpected ways, or come up against intractable problems. We learn from tolerated failure, without the world is sterile and dies. Systems that eliminate failure, eliminate innovation.”

Creativity and Innovation:

“…creativity is a symptom of innovation not its cause”

and again:

“I have long argued that there are three necessary, but not sufficient conditions for innovation to take place. These are:

1. Starvation of familiar resource, forcing you to find new approaches, doing things in a different way;
2. Pressure that forces you to engage in the problem;
3. Perspective Shift to allow different patterns and ideas to be brought into play.

Creativity is just one way, and not necessarily the most effective to achieve perspective shift. In fact I am increasingly of the opinion that creativity is not a cause of innovation, but a property of innovation processes, its something that you can use as evidence of innovation, but not to create it.”

What inspired this blog post…

Nassim Taleb (The Black Swan) on Trial and Error (stochastic tinkering) and Failure:

“We have psychological and intellectual difficulties with trial and error, and with accepting that series of small failures are necessary in life.”

This is something that Dave Snowden calls a Safe-Fail culture, he expands here.

Back to Nassim Taleb:

“In fact, the reason I felt immediately at home in America is preceisely because American culture encourages the process of failure, unlike the cultures of Europe and Asia where failure is met with stigma and embarrassment. America’s speciality is to take these small risks for the rest of the world, which explains this country’s disproportionate share in innovations. Once established, an idea or a product is later “perfected” over there”

This totally links up with Thomas Friedman’s (The World is Flat) thinking that America is an ideas and design country, which is then passed on to countries like China to process and manufacture. His notion is that America will always be the intelligent and innovative country in this respect, as manufacturing-type countries don’t have time to think as they are busy manufacturing.

Here are a few interesting quotes by Thomas Friedman:

“What the carpenter or nanny has to sell can be bought by only one factory or one family at a time…while what the software writer or drug inventor has to sell-idea based products-can be sold to everyone in the global market at once.”

This is something Nassim Taleb also talks about in relation to the scalability of idea vs labor, which I expand on. The corollary is that ideas based jobs is very competitive, there are many losers, that are not as secure as labor based jobs. At the country level what about all those people in America who are not idea’s inclined and are more labor type workers, how do they fit in an idea’s country.

“The ideal country in a flat world is the one with no natural resources, because countries with no natural resources tend to dig inside themselves. The try to tap the energy, entrepeneurship, creativity, and intelligence of their own people…”

I like the global idea that countries are locked in a global supply chain, kind of like war prevention and self preservation.

BTW - I keep lots of notes from book reading in my Tumblr (archive).

[ADDED 13/10/08: I forgot to add some related stuff like crowdsourcing, recommendation engines and implicitness.]

[ADDED 13/10/08: Tony Hirst in the comments below surfaced this gem by Nanneet Bhusshan, well actually I used Tony’s tool, in which it then surfaced:

“INNOVATION IS AN EMERGENT FEATURE OF A SYSTEM!

When one starts - from any condition in a system, one doesnt know the end result although there is a desire to minimize entropy to reach the objective - sometimes the more one tries to reach the desired objective further one goes - in some cases, the objective may be achieved by moving away from the objective rather than towards it. The inherent stochasticity, entropy and unpredictability of Innovation emergence makes it a science closer to non-linear and complex systems rather than the linear system theory that we are taught!“]

[ADDED 13/10/08: I had some more Tumblr thoughts - We make choices…it’s what we choose…]

[ADDED 14/10/08: Ross Mayfield: “When we implement there is issues of control, we structure apps to automate business processes to drive down cost, in the end this is what everyone replicates, not a sustainable competitive advantage”]

Related

An ecosystem is emerging
Participation is the currency of the knowledge economy

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.

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.

KM 1.0	KM 2.0 (Social Computing)
Anticipates a need (just in case)	Anticipatory awareness  (”always on” knowledge flow/sense-making)
Looking at the past	Living in the now (innovation)
Supply-based (content and collection)	Creation-based (context and connection)
After the fact summary (this is a problem)	As it happens (raw and in context)
Search/Taxonomy (no filters/ranking) …this part is information management	Connected/author tags  (filters by ratings and your network)
Rigid (read only)	Flexible/unstructured (read/write)
Static	Dynamic/evolving/serendipity (feedback) …emergent
IT centric	People centric (discover/build relationships) …actually it’s about the networks
Centralised (Top down)	Decentralised (Bottom up)
Efficiency (Industrial age)	Effectiveness (Network age)
Reward as motivation/incentive (game the system)	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)

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

Some quick snippets on how we more effectively adapt to change within an informal, fragmented and networked environment such as enterprise 2.0.

The idea here is on the learning organisation where people are connected in networks, and publish and converse their know-how. This is perpetual social learning embedded into daily work, which enables more situational awareness.

Dave Snowden on Everything is Fragmented:

“The more you structure material, the more you summarize (either as an editor or using technology), 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?”

“…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. Have you ever heard anyone ask Wikipedia or the blogosphere, “How do we create a knowledge sharing culture?” No, but when I visit the knowledge management practitioners in organizations around the world, it is the dominant question. It’s not natural to chunk up material, to make it context specific; it is natural to share, blend and create fragmented material based on thoughts and reflections as we carry out tasks or engage in social interaction.”

Jay Cross on What’s so different about learning today?

“Until recently, the secret of success was to learn what had worked in the past and do that. Education and training faced backward. People learned the conventions and rules of thumb that worked for their ancestors. When things were slow to change, this was an excellent strategy…”

“…but things are changing so rapidly today that the only certainty is that what’s ahead won’t resemble the past. The rear view mirror no longer reflects the future. 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”

Samuel Driessen over at the infoarch blog has picked up on a key point in my post Conversations, Connections and Context

In it I said:

“This is great if the context of the blog post suits the need of your situation, but what if it doesn’t?

Is the arguement that blogs are not trying to be what they can’t be vs codified documents that have an intention they cannot meet (they are not achieving what they are intending to achieve)?

So, nothing can have a constant context, blog post or not.”

I suppose my main point is that blogs, as raw and informal as they are, are not a panacea for context, but they are a hell of a lot better than codified documents.

You may have trouble understanding the context of a blog post, and have not yet developed a relationship with the blog or author (eg. you don’t subscribe or regularly read the blog, you don’t leave comments, etc…), in fact it could be the first time you have seen this blog.

Some things you can do in the immediacy.

LEAVE A COMMENT
- the author will be happy to clarify

READ THE ARCHIVES, ESPECIALLY POSTS ON THE SAME AND SIMILAR TOPICS
- this will give you an understanding of how the author thinks, you can become familiar with their school of thought, language they use
- also read the comments on blogs posts, where conversations get deeper, and sometimes clarify and challenge the meaning in the blog post

CHECK OUT THE BLOGGERS NETWORK
- check out the blogroll to get an idea of blogs (people) this author trusts and recommends
- you may find distributed conversations
- these bloggers may blog about the same topic or meme, and perhaps you may find it easier to understand their calibre of writing and message, which can help you better understand the original blog post you were reading

CHECK OUT THE BLOGGERS LIFESTREAM
- you may find other things about this author, which helps you get a more holisitic perspective on the person
- also you may see all the video, links, podcasts they collect, which can give you more insight into their world

This illustrates the power of the blog format in enabling you to build some sort of higher abstraction with the author, ie. get to know the author, so you come to understand their intended messages and contexts.
Unlike codified documents, blogs are dynamic and take you on a journey of discovery.

participation + blogs = learning

Samuel has a really great point:

“I can send back an email in a couple of seconds to someone with whom I share a certain context. I can leave out all the details when I reply to him/her. But when I want to answer him/her via my blog I also have to think about all the other people that don’t share that context. Because they don’t, they’ll be frustrated when they read my post. Writing such a post (instead of an email) would take more of my time. Or am I missing something?”

He left a comment on my post on the same point:

“Can you just move an email conversation to a blog without providing (more) context (to other readers)?”

This is very true, but you have to weigh up the pros and cons of how your conversation is documented.

Sure, emails cut to the chase, but no-one else is going to know that conversation existed.
- the people emailing miss out on other people pitching in their insight
- other people miss out on seeing information gems
- everyone misses out on people discovery, and there is no visibility, rather it’s participation behind the curtain

As I mentioned at least with blogs, there is opportunity to seek clarification for context, but you have to work at it. And bloggers, most of the time, link back to their past posts for background on their present post.

Just like your email conversations, in your blog circle you can post without establishing background
- it’s on the onus of a new person who comes across your blog to study up on you and use the wonders of the blog format to get to know you and your network more so they can help build context.

The beauty is that you form a blog network around yourself, you participate and discover, and when you are in this zone, you are part of the vernacular.

What started as an issue of not understanding the context of a blog post, enables you the opportunity to go on a discovery of understanding.

When you come out the other end not only do you now have the shared context to undertanding this blog post, but you have discovered:
- the archives of this blog and learnt so much other stuff
- discovered a heap of other blogs
- starting posting on your own blog and leaving comments, pointing to these other blogs (you become part of the network)
- discovered people you trust, that you can perpetually learn from and tap into when you have information needs

The destination is nature’s way of giving you a good excuse to go on a journey.

Of late I’ve been posting about the concept of knowledge management in relation to social computing and networks, mostly focusing on how social computing networks are more self-organised keeping context intact, where knowledge flows rather than being managed. But I do agree that there is a need for a coordinator to facililtate, set boundaries, curate, garden, etc…

A lot of the talk is focused on whether the process of codification is managing knowledge anyway, it’s non-effectiveness due to a lack of high abstraction and shared context…and my investigation leading to a realisation that “explicit knowledge” is just information.

I do agree that blogs, like offline conversations with people you know, have more of a successful chance in transferring know-how, as there is familiarity and probing with the source, an “as it happens rawness”, with no other intention except expression, compared to codification that is written with an end result in mind. Rather than codification, the coordinator takes a curating approach to compile these similar fragments. You could call this codification or perhaps a review, but at least it’s based on the raw workings out, which can be referred to for more information.

Then there is the other end of the spectrum of trying to find usable information at a time of need, and ultimately whether this behaviour is too narrow for organisations to adapt, respond and learn…compared to a social ecosystem that is more tuned in, the “come to me web” effect (links, tags, subscribing)…where we have more capabilities and situational awareness to act.

Let’s get over the addiction or safety to the supply-side of “best practices”, and become a network of radars for innovation. I think there is a place for best practices, but not too much where you don’t allow the processes or conditions for the emergence of innovation.

For more, read my previous posts to catch up on how social computing networks better achieve the aims of knowledge management without even trying to do it, this being the first stage that is a part of a bigger change of how we work and are managed, where managers may be more effective as facilitators and coaches and knowledgeworkers more autonomous in getting work done.

Gee, that was a bigger introduction that I intended, but readers of this blog will be familiar with my brain splurges.

In this post I’m sharing the thoughts of others that are also riding this wave of a more effective and enjoyable way to work, first up is Lee Bryant from the Headshift blog:

“Some have millions of documents in primary EDMS storage, but they have literally no idea which ones are important. Thanks to centralised storage and centralised access, nobody can find what they need and eveybody fears they are missing something important. But contrary to the KM orthodoxy, you cannot actually codify knowledge - it downgrades to information when stored in databases, and crumbles to dust.”

“The problem with existing enterprise software is that there is simply not enough diversity of inputs to stimulate intuitive decision making, which is why the most adept individuals in organisations rely on more basic, offline techniques to know what is going on.”

“The information overload people face within organisations today is the worst kind: the wrong sort of information, with no individual control over inputs.”

“Instead of trying to gather all data and then analyse it in real-time, we need to help people build a better radar, go with the flow and trust in their own ability to sense what matters and make decisions. We need more peripheral and contextual information and less sequential memo and email processing. We need to create multiple paths to things we need to improve findability, as Peter Morville says, rather than focus just on storage and retrieval. Classification within organisations is calcification - it kills context. Social navigation and filtering is cheaper and more effective.
We need a new relationship between people in companies. We are hard-wired for socialisation, but enterprise tools are based on 1950’s management thinking that treats us like machines in a production line. The focus of information sharing in support of decision making should be on weaving the social web and allowing people to negotiate their own language and meaning by adding social markup to existing corporate data.”

Next is Dan Rasmus:

“The first time around, knowledge management was hardly a smashing success. When organizations several years ago tried to take advantage of the experience and insights of their workers, they captured information in large, structured data systems for access and retrieval. Unfortunately, those systems were often cumbersome and difficult to use, leading to low levels of participation and abandoned knowledge bases. Workers also suspected their own positions might be at risk after they shared their personal insights and knowledge.”

“Change happens too fast for people and organizations to rely exclusively on structured processes and the rigid IT solutions that support them.”

“…understanding about the role of knowledge in empowering people. Rigid, structured systems for data capture can easily be supplemented with more user-friendly applications that provide better integration into day-to-day work.”

“It is virtually impossible to design a process that anticipates every potential outcome. A DKE embraces people as part of structured processes and enables them to access the resources they need in a more flexible and responsive way. When people are empowered as a part of process-driven work, organizations can achieve the economy of structure, combined with the responsiveness and adaptability that only people can provide.”

And Bill Ives comment in this post:

“…most of the successful KM applications were workflow aligned and when KM was a separate document repository outside of business processes, it was much less successful. Then it became managing knowledge rather than supporting work”

Going back to my earlier post about knowledge and information, the insightful Paula Thornton, left a comment and I would like to share it here, she alludes to the impossible act of managing knowledge and instead says the aim is to “facilitate thinking to support ‘doing’”…this is inline with the concept of a learning organisation.

Then she gets into the epistemology, saying, “it isn’t information until it ‘informs’”.

And then this great anecdote on the need for personal context between you and the information for it to actually inform you:

“You’re in the middle of the Mojave desert. You come upon a gas station, but it’s abandoned. Lying on the counter is a map. Most would consider the map information: data in context. But there’s another criteria. It isn’t information until it’s in individually-relevant context (it has to be both important and understandable to me). In the middle of the desert, there is no context. The map is useless noise.”

Excerpts of my reply to Paula:

“I know where you are going Paula, KM is integrated into how you work. In the future there may not be KM, as it’s just how we work. KM is simply common sense, a way of being. Why would you work any other way.
The Net Generation would not have a clue they are knowledge workers, they are just being.”

“This stuff that organically emerges or manifests tells them something about themselves, they are learning from their interactions by participating. They can take back these rich insights and apply this new thinking in their doing (as you put it).”

“Social tools are humanistic as they are about conversation and connection, that’s how we get work done in the offine world.”

“I can see we need information managers, but I’m not sure about
knowledge managers, rather we need people that are more humanistic, learning type facilitators.”

“But we do need someone to make sure that all these knowledge sharing activities and way of being are occuring, this person will be managing knowledge-related activities, not knowledge itself.”

The I went over and found out that Paula, like I, is talking about this stuff from her own soapbox:

“The fundamental potential of 2.0 is emergent”

“The goal is not to manage knowledge, but to facilitate action or enhance thinking”

“Even more fundamental to the deeper philosophy here is that knowledge is relevant…it can only reasonably be applied to specific conditions. Few knowledge management technologies embrace the reailty and ensure that the relevant conditions are captured and likewise communicated.”

Paula alludes that knowledge needs to be free, to flow, bounce around, and evolve (and perhaps facilitated), rather than managed and shelved from the top-down.

Lyndar has a quote in the comments:

“Provided with the right tools and a culture that values openness, knowledge gets transferred effectively without management.”

As does Lou Paglia:

“I think in the 2.0 framework, the word “management” is almost synonymous with “enablement” or “facilitation”. We’ve shifted (or at least I think we have) from it meaning “full control”.”

In Dave Snowden’s blog post response he says:

“…I think it fairly self evident that a large number of business goals require knowledge to be managed in some form or other”

What I think Dave may be refering to is curating or steering the self-organisation, like a plumber directs water, like a film director directs a film.

I really want an example of this…

Perhaps an example could be the facilitator steering self-organised conversations into a direction that meet business goals. The facilitator can get involved or manipulate the flow of conversation by creating a blog post/comment, forum topic/reply that brings back the richness of the brainstorming and applies it to a task. Isn’t this the idea of Communities of Practice.

So perhaps we are moving on from knowledge management practices, to manipulating complex environments…not sure what you call this person other than a leader. I think leaders need to know how to deal with and steer complex environments, KM is not a separate thing, it should be embedded in how leaders work.

I’d like to finish on that note, but I just came across a perfectly relevant piece by Jon Husband:

“Debates raged about the best ways to move back and forth between the codified ‘explicit’ knowledge and the less obvious, often invisible ‘tacit’ knowledge that surfaces in human interaction, and how best to enable or enhance the collaborative and interactive use of information and knowledge to get things done or create additional useful knowledge.”

““how to create a knowledge sharing culture?,” is not the right question. It’s more important to ask and understand “what you can do to encourage and facilitate connections?”, supplemented with tools, capabilities and socially-generated context, to help the appropriate information and knowledge be available when and where it is most needed and best used. This means that a much-needed role and focus is as a catalyst and facilitator of connections, helping others see why it is now this way and how things work”

“Knowledge transfer is self-assembling and self-organizing. It really can’t be otherwise … it is done by humans in interaction“

This is inline with Joe Firestone’s thoughts:

“ …the idea that we must make knowledge workers unusually altruistic to get them to share and transfer knowledge ignores the many examples of social systems and organizations in which collaboration is based on normal motivations including self-interest.”

Back to Jon Husband:

“Considering or planning a “knowledge audit” implies auditing static “physical” knowledge assets”

“We need to think more carefully about combining top-down design and direction of business processes with the bottom-up use of knowledge objects. The combination of structure and organic generation and synthesis can help manage effectively in continuous flows of incoming and outgoing information (knowledge objects are anything that we can coherently manage).”

“An appropriate amount of structure (design constraints) is necessary to enable consistent recall and findability of information.”

These last two quotes echo what we covered earlier, the role of the coordinator to steer by constraints…actually isn’t this what Jack Vinson always talks about…hmm…I’ll have to go back to his posts now that I’m ready for them.

The comments from Jon Husbands post…this is where the richness is, in these comments, where everyone is riffing off each other:

Jon Husband - “I do think we need a new word for what is often understood as “managing”, or a different (wider, more adaptive and more oriented towards sensemaking and taking practical action after the sense is clear) understanding of that word.”

Stephen Collins - “KM can exist without the technology. The technology offers a platform for pervasiveness and ease of implementation. But without management drive, cultural capability (localised or across the organisation) and openness, you’re doomed - tech or no tech.”

This makes sense to me, offline, there’s so much richness and know-how in conversations and interactions, and techniques like world cafe, story listening, etc. are an example. But you have to convene for the latter, what about the offline interactions that are happening as you do your work, this is why online networks are an important outlet to express you discoveries, questions, concerns, etc…

Paula Thornton - “I am still at a loss as to what is uniquely KM and to what purpose it serves that is not already served by established disciplines.”

Stephen Collins - “…anything 2.0 is not about the technology. Technology is and always has been an enabler.”

“…organisations feel they need a KM practice because they don’t actually do the things that embed KM practices into corporate DNA.”

“KM shouldn’t need to be “done” as a particular thing belonging to a particular part of the organisation. It should just be. Be a part of what you do every day. Be a part of how your organisation operates.”

“KM only needs a revolution where KM is implemented as a widget. As a “thing” to be done. As a process. Once you embed stuff in corporate DNA and people’s attitudes that are just about