Library clips

A while back I blogged about the possibility of networks and blogospheres cutting into the need for communities. I believe this is happening a great deal, as now people may have a more purposeful or ideal way of achieving their needs that they were once achieving by being in a community.

NOTE: I want to stress in this post I’m referring to *pure* CoPs, ie. cross-functional group spaces to learn about a topic (*usually* comprised of people across different teams). I’m not refering to teams using CoP-like social software, like Basecamp as a group space to coordinate and communicate tasks/project.

This doesn’t mean communities are no longer relevant…does it?

Sometimes we need a place of shared interest to build a communal practice, sometimes we need people to be committed members of a space to coordinate activities, some people like being part of a group, rather than on their own space, or both.

Just look at Friendfeed, it’s a network, but you can also join rooms (member groups); some are feedback rooms, news rooms, topic rooms…people still like hanging out in a place (pub/coffee shop) and contributing to the pool of info in one spot, rather than scattered in a social network. If I have a question about Friendfeed functionality I will not post in my network, but I will go to their feedback room.

Actually I lie, I live in Twitter, so naturally I will first post a question to my Twitter network. But if my network don’t have the time or expertise then I will ask in the Friendfeed Room where they do have the expertise and the dedication to answer any questions in their domain (room), as a respect to members.

NOTE: I demonstrated this reflex yesterday asking questions about Clearstep in Twitter rather than in the Clearstep community.

But the premise is that a community like a feedback room is less likely to get replaced over topic communities that are about building your knowledge on a topic. But again, I won’t hold my breath, as we are now seeing lots of companies and services using a Twitter account for news and support. As that’s where the people are at, you don’t have to shift to another space to engage in something else.

Issue of shifting for context and the naturalistic feel of networks

Stowe Boyd has more on this “shift” that may be a big cognitive reason that when it comes to individual learning on a topic, networked sharing is cutting into the ease of learning over CoPs:

“Contrasting group forums with blogging is a good example in which to make the distinction between group- and individual-oriented social tools. In group forums, members of a closed group can post threads and comment on them. It is a closed model. When individuals blog in the open web, trackbacks and comments allow discussions to take place that are — in many cases — logically equivalent to forums, but since each individual blogger decides where to turn their focus, and what other blogs to comment on, bloggers are members of many groups at the same time. More importantly, the structure of blogging supports that model directly. In a group forum, you are a member of that one group, and not a member of any others: the fact that you may be a member of other groups is not explicitly supported.”

Stowe Boyd, like Dave Snowden, often refers to social tools and naturalistic approaches, ie. how they are in tune with human behaviour.

“So the groupware model of collaboration, where neatly partitioned worlds are created, and individuals are made to shift context in order to shift from one social thread to another, seems unnatural to me. The primacy of groups and group membership in old-school groupware is outmoded.

The shift to the individual changes everything, and in revolutionary ways. Moving from groupware premises to “soloware” shifts the dialog about standards and interoperability.”

This type of approach seems to be more conducive to our attention and how we naturally behave. But the one thing we do forgo is the neatness of a topic hub, compared to scattered content. What I mean is that if you network you know how to tie all the scattered content together as you blog about it and bookmark it. But for new comers, finding all content on a topic in one page is always easier.

” But the glue that connects the dots in the soloware world are standards like RSS, IM interoperability, and blog trackback conventions: standards that allow individuals to do their thing, but to allow bottom-up aggregation of their artifacts along social connections. The groups are there, but latent, implicit in the gestural relationships of crosslinking, tags, comments, and blogrolls.“

“We are, first and foremost, individuals. The concept that whenever we do something it should be intentionally in the context of a specific well-defined group is outmoded, and was always an approximation of what is really going on, socially. We are involved in social relationships, and what we do with others is always social, but not necessarily part of a group, or only of one group. So, let’s put aside groups, and focus on the individual. The groups will follow.”

Read more, on groups and individuals.

I also find at work that we need a social network to complement our communities. If people could discover others with like interests perhaps we’d get more communities, or, as the premise of this post, would the social network do the job.

Back to it…

An attraction of CoPs is that some people don’t want their own profile or space to upkeep, and build a network (note that this is more effort intensive in a distributed network such as the blogosphere rather than a default network like Twitter), they don’t have time, they’d more enjoy a quick post in a forum, and the safety that only select people will see their posting. (What I mean by this is even though your community may be public, usually only the members visit your posts, and can reply to them).

This is not to say you can’t achieve this to a degree in a social network. In a network a person can connect to the same people that were in the community, only they all live in their own houses rather than a shared house. They can still blast each other questions and publish in their own space where others can subscribe.
The fact that they are separate does not prevent learning and knowledge sharing from happening. The big difference is that there is no longer an agenda, or shared interest topic, and you no longer have an output storage that is your practice.

Topic Hubs or Tag Aggregation

I think this is the main difference here, if you want to build a topic hub (a clearing house on a topic, as well as learning from each other whilst you’re building your practice via conversations), you need a community, people become members of a shared space, which is a commitment to contributing to the aim.

Just the same you may employ, as Dave Snowden says, top-down stimulation and see what the network percolates.
eg. a manager asks a question, and requests people to tag their posts with a unique tag, then all answers/conversations can be aggregated. Even though this is distributed it can feel like a community, but more a collective. This example demonstrates a more on-the-fly activity, and using aggregating for output, without having to be committed members of a shared space. This is not a substitute for a community, but it is still a means for collective action. An example could be asking a question on a network like Twitter and everyone tags their answer with the same hash tag. Then we can go to this hash tag to see all the aggregated answers.

I think communities and networks are complementary (as mentioned above in my reference to Friendfeed), that’s why we see both the Facebook social network and Facebook groups as extremely popular…they both have their unique purpose. And that’s why most enterprise social computing platforms are doing both nowadays: Knowledge Plaza, Clearspace, Lotus Connections, Socialtext, Yammer, etc…

Anyway this post is a loose follow on from my last post and is a bit of a repeat of what I’ve said in a few of my previous posts, but a reprise is sometimes good as we can give it a fresh layer of paint:

km 2.0 enablers: blogs, wikis, and social networks
Networks, Communities and Aggregation

Here’s a comparsion of dynamics from a past post (this is an excerpt from a now defunct Collaboration Loop blog post):

Online Communities	Social Networks
Top-down	Bottom-up
Place-centric	People-centric
Moderator controlled	User controlled
Topic driven	Decentralized
Centralized	Context driven
Architected	Self-organizing

This post is not about the definitive differences between communities and networks
(for that check out the table above, and also Nancy White and Anecdote’s wonderful paper) but more so the differences from a user perspective or experience..

Anecdote’s paper also includes teams dynamics. Others comparing teams and communities are Jessica Lipnack’s Teams of Practice post, (teams primarily focus on performance and measurable output, but it’s about time teams also focus on sharing practices) and Francois Gossieaux’s Teams vs Communities post (they definitely have different motivations)

AN INDIVIDUAL’S PERSPECTIVE

Blogosphere or Network

1. It takes work to build your blog and upkeep content (no-one will fill in the gap, if you don’t post, there will be no posts)

2. I can post about any topic

3. One blog/profile is all you need
- you don’t need to be a member of different places

4. Need to build an audience (subscribers, visitors, commenters)
- this is easier in a default network rather than a distributed network like the blogosphere (which Google Connect is bridging)

5. Audience is not restricted (potentially more awareness of you)

6. More visible to a broader audience
- you can also tune into lots of different topics
- greater serendipity

7. Do what you want (it’s your house)

8. You have to find/build sources to network with (other bloggers/profiles)

9. Topic hubs only available by aggregating content by all bloggers on a tag/s
- this is hit and miss
- still this is not organised as a website

10. Highly emergent
- not restricted to a topic
- people from all over commenting/linking

11. No Group Think

12. Branding is more about the group than the individual

Community

1. If I don’t contribute, there are others who will, so together we can keep content fresh (it’s a group effort), plus we build the CoP’s shell together

2. Posts have to be on topic (domain)
- this is limiting, as I have to stay on topic, and find another community to say off-topic things
- this is the shifted space for new context issue mentioned earlier in this post by Stowe Boyd

3. Community fatigue
- how many do I have to join so I can talk about all the things I’m interested in
- some communities may have a topic I’m interested in but I don’t want to join their club, and spend time relationship building
- once again the Shifted context issue

4. Guaranteed audience

5. Audience is limited to the community, and frequent visitors (less findability)
- even though your community may be public

6. Less opportunity for serendipity
- people may not take the time to visit your community
- you don’t really venture out to tune into other topics unless they are other communities

7. Need to comply to house rules/policies/etiquette

8. Instant contacts

9. Output (practice) turns the site into a topic hub

10. Mildly emergent
- others may not visit as you are within your own walls

11. Could lead to Group Think

12. Brand (you are an expert)
- people come to your house
- build a reputation network wide

Looking at these differences there are plenty of reasons why someone may prefer one environment over the other. But this will soon become a non-issue as most existing platforms are now starting to provide both.

But as I mentioned earlier, sure we will need groups to coordinate work, but when it comes to knowledge sharing on a topic for learning purposes, these types of groups are being trumped by networks. With networking we can still get the dynamic of connecting to people we trust and understand, like in a community, only we are outside the confines of a community, there are no group rules to adhere to, we don’t have to always shift to another space to engage in a topic, and we can learn about any topic we like and connect to anyone we like.

Like I said, a big difference with this approach is the output (topic hub) is missing. I wonder of the success of conversing in a network to build an output page that lives elsewhere, or will people be more successful creating the document in the same space they converse in ie. a group workspace.

Anecdote have a different take based on your experience.

What sparked this post

What ignited this post is finding this discussion thread on the Facebook CP Square group, which is on the same meme as something that I mentioned in a previous post nearly a year ago based on Dave Snowden’s post.

I’ll re-post here:

“…perhaps people don’t need to engage in CoPs anymore to fulfill their knowledge needs - they can mash-up applications and have ‘knowledge nuggets’ delivered to their virtual doorstep without ever venturing out. I can’t remember where I read this but someone claimed that the more connected a person is, the less he/she is likely to engage in CoPs, in this new scenario.”

“My first response…was…people would feel the need to engage *more* in order to deepen their knowledge in a particular domain, now that ‘knowledge’ sources are more dispersed; however now I am actually wondering whether this is truly the case, and that a new form of networking will emerge that is much more individualistic.”

This is true, as it wasn’t possible before, but I don’t think it’s a total annihilation of CoPs for the reasons already cited above…the most vulnerable will be those pure CoPs that are about a general sharing knowledge space…and the replacement of these will not be without a loss, as we will see less organised one-stop-shops on a topic (where you can converse)

Stowe Boyd and Dave Snowden are truly on to something here.

It’s not that CoPs are not worthy, it’s just that a more “individualistic” form of networking and learning has surfaced that is more conducive and natural to the flow of how humans think and learn. If we can achieve the same goal in a more simplistic and effective way, we will naturally do it, as that’s being human.

Personal Growth

But it did happen to KnowledgeBoard. Once blogs came on the scene, people participated in forums less frequently, and blogged from their own soapbox about any topic, others could subscribe, trackback and comment…plus your audience is the whole web. Since you come up in Google results and on people’s blogrolls it brings serendipity and discovery to an audience that would never have bumped into you in a community.

We all have that experience of reading one blog post that links to another, and then that one links to another, it keeps going, and the mean while you are also checking out the blogroll of each blog, and their earlier posts…and hours can go by…but luckily you have bookmarked these pages (even tweeted some as you can’t contain your excitement), and perhaps post a blog post later on. This is personal productivity and learning in a social network ecosystem.

This serendipity and discovery process is incredibly amazing which you get in a distributed environment like a blogosphere. You bump into new things, new thoughts, new topics of interest…it’s very open and unpredictable in what your future interests will hold.
eg. I started off blogging about libraries, then web tools, then KM, and now communities and networks, and soon, facilitation, complexity, narrative and decision making. Being immersed in the blogosphere has formed a path for me that I didn’t conceive…who knew my next interest would be “decision making”, not me.

I’m not sure this exposure to new interests and personal growth would have happened if I lived within the confine of a few CoPs.

Bridging the Structural Holes

But it has a greater effect than on just the individual. It allows for clusters to be connected to other clusters. Sometimes in communities we get GroupThink and an EchoChamber effect, where there is not enough diversity, so the learning can become narrow, stale, and indoctrinated (for use of a better word).
Highly connected people that bridge clusters of networks lessen this effect (this is also related to the strength of weak ties), as they fill in structural holes.

Here’s an excerpt from a past post:

“People who interact daily come to know many of the same things, and are in that sense informationally redundant. In contrast, people who do not interact will often know many things that the other does not know.”

“The property of having ties to people who are not in the same social circles with each other is called betweenness or “structural holes”. A person rich in structural holes has many ties, and the people they are tied to are not tied to each other.”

At the moment I’m reading Clay Shirky’s book, Here Comes Everybody, and he talks about a study related to “bridging capital” on p229. One of the conclusions was that most good ideas in the study came from “Connector” type people, those who bridge groups, as these people were exposed to more diverse ideas and ways of thinking. Whereas people that hung round in the same group and didn’t really connect with other clusters seemed to have an echo chamber effect, and that the ideas were not strategically beneficial for the company at large, they could not see beyond their own group (how they fit into the big picture, how they effect and are effected by other groups).

Current experience

And I’m certainly feeling this stifling or GroupThink is happening in a few LinkedIn KM groups I have visited for the first time in the last month, as they still talk about KM practices as they were done 10 years ago. The blogosphere (networks) is more cutting edge, it’s more interdisciplinary, it has made clear that KM is entering a new stage where new social tools are enabling new methods in achieving the original aims of KM.

Another thing is that there are so many groups/communities on topics I like, some of late are LinkedIn groups, Clearstep, Facebook groups, Ning, etc…
I know I should find a group with people I care about, but these people are already blogging, so it’s easier for me to just stick to networks. The other thing, is I don’t have the time to be a member of lots of communities, but being in a network is effortless (again Stowe Boyd’s context shift and naturalistic points).

NOTE: Are we generally moving from a topic web to a type web, where all topics exist in the one place eg. YouTube, Get Satisfaction, delicious, Flickr, Twitter, Scribd.

A good start is finding blog aggregators on a topic (people blogging from their own space and re-syndicated on a page), like Social Media Today, Content Management Connection, Communities and Networks Connection, ScienceBlogs, or even some group blogs like The AppGap, and The FastForward blog…these all ease the discovery process for newbies.

What’s special about Ning is that when you create a Ning, you are creating a community space that you can network in, and also create groups. So basically you are creating your own topic based Facebook. Nonetheless, even though you can network, you are still coming together in a community, and can even branch off into groups.

NOTE: You can network within a community, but a network is not a community

For example there is a Ning on story based techniques, there is a Ning for cognitive edge practioners, there is a Ning for Social Learning…you still get the benefit of networking, but you are still within the walls of a topic/agenda, which makes it a community…also someone created that space, making you a member.

To compare, if you want to know about story based techniques you can search blogs, bookmarks, tags and work your way…subscribing to blogs, checking out blogrolls, etc.. Or you could come across a topic community like on Ning.

Back to what sparked this post

Anyway, the CP Square thread on Facebook had lots of responses. I hope people don’t mind (privacy issues) that I’m making the Facebook wall transparent.

Some responses to Dave Snowden’s statement

Bronwyn Stuckey (Indiana) wrote on September 7, 2007 at 3:19pm
“Dave Snowden recently said to Etienne Wenger “If knowledge management had had the tools we have today it would not have needed communities of practice” (I paraphrase).”

I’ll just note here that Dave uses a Ning community for his Cognitive Edge practioners.
I’m not trying to be smart here, I’m just thinking that he has found a use for a community, even though, and I agree, that it’s less becoming the norm as a way to learn about a topic…groups are giving way to networks and buddy lists view of the world.

David John Snowden (London) replied to Warren’s poston September 7, 2007 at 10:12pm
“It was meant as a factual statement not a provocation
Most of the tools used in CoP are over formal and over structured. You can achieve more or less all that you can achieve with technology through the unstructured associations and links that social computing provides.”

This is exactly was Stowe Boyd said by referring to groups based on gestural relationships or linking and tagging.

Derek Chirnside (Canterbury) wroteon September 7, 2007 at 10:31pm
“I think CoP’s exist in spite of clunky tools. CoP’s (in my assessment) are an observable social interaction/entry - it’s not whether they are ‘needed’ or not, they just are - or are not - according to the context, nurture, conditions . . .”

Andy Roberts (London) replied to Warren’s poston September 8, 2007 at 1:03am
“I interpret COP as observable social phenomena like Derek, so the question about ‘needing’ them is moot. What concerns me is that in the distributed technology enabled world we can now make deliberate choices as to how transparent the ties and communications are.

Is Dave perhaps hinting that organisations can now reap the same informational benefits from a semi-transparent network of individual communications and temporary nodes that before required a fully open many-to-many community with a formally subscribed membership?

I think ( or at least hope ) that the real practice based communities will find ways to protect themselves from being undermined by person-centric networks with their secret backchannels and disenfranchising power curves.”

Can anyone elaborate on what Andy is saying here?

Joitske Hulsebosch replied to Andy’s poston September 8, 2007 at 3:20am
“…The interesting question raised by Dave Snowden has, in my opinion, more to do with what changes in this social phenomena because of the new tools and technologies and ways of connecting and exchanging information that’s offered by these technologies.”

“…I do believe that with a new mindset of open exchange of collaboration and openness in sharing what you are doing, the aspect of belonging may become less important, but I’m not sure. People may not need a certain level of trust before they share ideas and information in an online forum. Moving in and out of communities of practice may also increase velocity as people do not have a life long practice, but may change with changing jobs, interests etc…”

Bronwyn Stuckey (Indiana) replied to Joitske’s poston September 10, 2007 at 12:28am
“Cop for me is not a thing but an ethos, a culture - a way of behaving and being responsible for more than your own learning.…So while I do think some tools will help people take responsibility for each others learning and to build community I don’t think it is necessarily the critical issue.”

“Take FACEBOOK - while many of us network, join groups and hook up - how much is it really about community for the majority? Even the SNA tools put the profile member in the middle of the network. This space is about linking individuals - well at least how it seems for me right now.”

This is the whole premise, are networks enough when it comes to shared learning?

Nancy White (Seattle, WA) wrote on September 10, 2007 at 4:03pm
“…I SUSPECT (I don’t know) that Dave is talking about the sort of fadish focus on CoPs and CoP software, rather than the intrinsic value of learning from and with each other”

I agree here, the premise is networks as a new enabler on the block in achieving learning…an individuals network approach over a group space.

Frances Bell (Uni. Salford) replied to Bronwyn’s poston September 11, 2007 at 4:52am
“…we are setting up an online network for a face to face women’s network at my place of work. We discussed how people could be in the group but not share their slightly edgy network of friends’ behaviours with work colleagues. We came up with the idea of having a closed group for the work network (where members could message each other and participate in discussions like this but private from passers by) but only using friend option for people who we would have friended anyway.”

So perhaps privacy is a key driver for a community.

Also the fact that in a group setting you have rules of engagement, you get to choose who you trust to share your information with…

David John Snowden (London) replied to Nancy’s post on September 12, 2007 at 3:56am
“Nancy is pretty close. I would certainly argue that CoP application software packages have been a complete waste of time and damage real communities. Social computing offers more capability. Hence my general view that we could have done with today’s technology ten years so.”

I asked a similar question a while back about whether KM would of existed if social computing was around 10 years ago?

Dave continues onto another topic of which I have blogged a lot about lately:

“I would also (to take the issue on) argue that attempts to create CoP through formal process and control are also a mistake. If a community has value it will form and the technology now allows that. Control and censorship are not appropriate. You might need that in a formal document repository or lessons learnt database (where a degree of validity is required) and those might link to communities. But the idea of a formally controlled and structured environment is I think (and thankfully) at an end.”

This post has been on the topic of sharing, learning and discovering…as opposed to tasks and organising. But I’ll just include an example of group spaces for tasks as our contrast.
A bunch of bloggers or social networkers who read each others stuff need to organise an event or perform a task. If these guys were on Facebook (social network) they would come together by creating an event or group page, if they were bloggers they may come together using a group task tool like Basecamp or even a simple Google Group.

End thought

I’m not going to conclude or offer a summary, in the end more tools to choose from and ways to approach learning can only be a good thing. The choice is up to you, it’s all part of your journey and learning.

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

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

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

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

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

Bottom-up vs Top-down management approach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Venkat finishes by saying:

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

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

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

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

Complex Adaptive System

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

KM 2.0 is the adaptive guidance

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

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

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

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

But my question to people like Dave Snowden is:

Is enterprise 2.0 without outside interference a complex adaptive system?

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

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

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

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

Practitioner

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

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

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

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

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

In this post I asked:

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

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

Generations

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

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

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

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

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

More on this from Shifted HR:

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

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

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

Read more about generational stereotypes.

Technology

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

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

Does the enterprise exist?

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

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

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

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

Enterprises are made of people.”

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

Dean from Infovark talks about enterprise 2.0:

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

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

Related

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

James Dellow has blog tagged me on the meme, How do I decide what to blog about?

I’m changing this a little to what blogging does for me.

Quite simply it’s ideas, thoughts and feedback related to the way we work.

I started off being a library and web 2.0 blogger, but since changing work roles I now blog more about KM, collaboration, community, conversation, learning, self-organisation, emergence, and slowly getting into complex adaptive systems. I still occasionally blog about new web 2.0 tools to fill in the gaps.

You will find my blogroll on my blog and if it wasn’t for these people, I really wouldn’t blog much…sure I have my own original ideas, but they are often riffing off other people. The more I read the more it triggers stuff in me, and I evolve my perspective on an idea into the communal pool.

The essence of it for me is that we now have

• tools other than email to do unstructured work, that is, we can use wikis, blogs, etc…for workarounds, exceptions to the rule. What was once in email silos and document silos is now open, transparent, and shareable. The actual practice of work is now documented, we communally share what process documents never know
• tools to mimic our offline behaviours of conversation and networking with people. The most exciting thing online is that this type of ecosystem evolves into perpetual learning, and self-organisation, etc…

The crucial step is using a bottom-up facilitation approach in introducing these tools into the enterprise, web 2.0 or not, a top-down management approach aint gonna work.

Blogs as self education

It’s amazing that blogs I read have turned into my perpetual education, and it’s practical education at that…I interact as part of my learning, I am immersed…I distill my thoughts where people interact back.

If I went back to university to study KM, I think I’d have more rebellion and argument in my essays, as a bottom-up framework of working and understanding human behaviour has largely been ignored.
Knowledge workers and the knowledge age doesn’t mean anything until we have the tools, approaches and ecosystems to bring this to light.
Plus I’m learning from practioners on ground zero, they apply methods and find what does and doesn’t work when mixed with human behaviour and the enterprise environment. Sure you can read journals, but reading blogs put you right there…throw out the text books and create your own.

It’s just become an extension of my learning, probably the best learning I have engaged in, because I don’t even realise I’m learning, or I’m not trying to learn, I’m just being passionate and engaged about something.

If you are interested in something and need to research for a year or so, start blogging and reading blogs, because you become immersed where it’s no longer learning, but just something you do. Plus you get a casual and informal feel for your research topic, and network with an army of people who help you research without actually being aware of it.

Blogging for memory management

I guess if I didn’t bookmark, and blog I would find it hard to find stuff to re-read, or remember stuff, and blogging something I read helps me understand it more…blogging is often a stream of consciousness.

Where else do I blog

Tumblr - I have a micro blog called Snippets, this is for quotes, book note taking and more raw thoughts

Twitter - This is for spontaneous what’s on my mind, questions, and conversation…this is network blogging, my posts are often directed at someone (like IM, email, telephone), which you don’t really do in a blog.

Check out Friendfeed for my lifestream.

Researching a post

A few people have asked about my internal blog at work how I am able to draw from great sources and churn out a topical blog post in no time.
My secret trick is that I’ve blogged most stuff already on this blog, but the real deal is that when I’m writing a post I consult 3 places

• I search my blog
• I search my bookmarks
• I search my RSS Reader

…and I may search my Twitter network or ask them a question

I seek in places I own, rather than just a googling hit and hope approach. Stuff (filtered through my network) passes my radar everyday, and I learn from it, I have this peripheral awareness, and when it comes to blogging about it I’m already half way there…

The Social Stack and Actionable Collective Intelligence

Lee Bryant sums this all up, see the end of my K-flow post for an excerpt.

Passing on the meme

So let’s see who I can tag to pass it foward, perhaps some people I admire but have not yet networked with…

• Andrew Gent
• Kevin Jones
• Joitske Hulsebosch
• Rachel Happe
• Patti Anklam

UPDATE: I think I just wrote a new “About” page for this blog

[ADDED 19/01/09: Jack Vinson - “I base some of the decision on what I think my audience might want to read. The stuff that brings me a lot of feedback definitely influences my future blogging decisions.”]

[ADDED 19/01/09: Andrew Gent - I blog — like many other people, I suspect — as a way of clarifying my own ideas. The physical activity of writing things down forces me to verify those thoughts. Some ideas that sound good bouncing loosely around in my head can seem perfectly stupid or unsupportable when written down.]

[ADDED 25/01/09: Sense-making: from blogging to research methodologies - weblogs as a sense-making instrument that provides a way to deal with unexpected or complex ideas by supporting articulation and organising ideas at a personal level combined with distributed collaborative thinking in “sense-making networks“…see more Blog networking study: an overview]

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”]

[ADDED 16/10/08: Everything is fragmented—Managed serendipity]

[ADDED 16/10/08: In search of failure]

[ADDED 20/10/08: First, second and third generation innovation practice…]

[ADDED 15/03/09: Fostering Innovation: Lots of Little Fires or One Inferno?]

[ADDED 16/03/09: How Enterprise 2.0 Fosters Innovation: Stop Groupthink]

[ADDED 05/04/09: Do You Need a Failure Target?]

Related

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