Library clips

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).

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

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

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

I closed my KM Review article on a similar note:

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the excerpt:

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

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

Information Management

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

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

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

Social Computing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Knowledge Management

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

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

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

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

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

COMPARISON

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

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

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

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

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

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

At the moment, all the comments I make in the blogosphere are bookmarked in a delicious account, which is a pain because I’m constantly logging in and out of both my accounts. Anyway this enables me to keep a collection or stream of comments I make elsewhere, I even feed this into Friendfeed.

I then track the comment at co.mments which is added to my co.mments feed, this way I can keep up with any new comments made on the same blog post.

I could do both these things at coComment, and more as you can follow other users, search and browse tag all comments in this system, etc…but I don’t because I find this service overwhelming with features, it just doesn’t have the simplicity and effectiveness of Twitter, delicious, Friendfeed, Google, etc…

In comes Backtype.

It seems to be a way to store all the comments you make in the blogosphere, but you don’t store them, instead it harvests them from the blogosphere itself by looking for the URL you leave in the URL field when you make a comment in a blogs comment form. It matches this URL with the one you entered in your Backtype profile. So it treats the URL you put in the URL field as your ID. Sometimes people have several ID’s, they may put the URL of their blog, Twitter, Friendfeed…personally I always us my blog URL. Anyway, the Backtype settings allow you to enter multiple URL’s as your ID.

You have to trust that it’s actually collecting all the comments you make (I do feel safer bookmarking comments, as I have comfort they are stored as I did it myself…but let’s see how we go).

If you search for your name in Backtype it may already have a page where you can claim comments you have made in the blogosphere, kind of like a pre-made account.

Not only have I got my User page (http://www.backtype.com/johnt) that I made, there is already a mirror type URL page (http://www.backtype.com/url/libraryclips.blogsome.com)…I found this by searching for my name, and it asked if I want to claim these comments.

What this URL page means is that whoever leaves a comment in the blogosphere with my URL in the comment form URL field, it will appear in my URL page…let’s hope I’m the only person doing this (I will surely find out now if people in the blogosphere are signing off comments using my URL in the URL field of a comment form).

Just say on my Backtype registered User profile settings I also entered my Twitter URL, as I may sometimes use that in comment forms, then these comments would appear in my user page stream, but not in my URL page stream…so there is a difference here.

Now you could say that anyone could make a comment in the blogosphere and use the URL of your blog, this would spam your stream with comments not made by you. The way around this is to go to your settings and turn on moderation.

So in a way Backtype is my comment blog or stream, from comments I make in the blogosphere, only thing I need to do is import all the comments I’ve been saving in delicious.

It could replace my method of bookmarking comments I make in delicious as Backtype saves me doing this, but I will still need to use co.mments to track others comments made on the same blog post…which is OK with me.

Item

For each item (comment) in the stream you can launch to the original comment. You can also share that comment which lives in your Shared Items stream, it’s like re-blogging a comment because you like it.

Profile

Backtype is not just about me, I can search for people and see their comment stream, and I can “follow” them.

On a User profile we can see:

- their comment stream
- a link to who that person follows
- a link to their Shared Items page
- a link to who is following them
- a link to an RSS feed for their comment stream
- Backtype profiles from blogs commented on
eg. if I comment on a Read Write Web blog post, then their profile will be listed on the sidebar as a source I comment on

I’d like to filter my stream or a users stream by blog source commented on eg. filter my stream by comments I have made on the Read Write Web blog.

Types of Profiles - User, URL, blog

As alluded to at the start of this post you may not even need to create an account, as you may already have a URL profile that represents you (which people can follow to add to their network). But if you want to get network with people and create a dashboard then you need to register.
I still think two accounts becomes confusing, once I claim the comments of my URL profile it should no longer exist and be absorbed into my User profile.

It doesn’t stop there, there is a third type of profile…not just people have profiles, and not just URL’s have profiles, but blog’s also have profiles, check out Read Write Web.
This is a stream of every post made on Read Write Web…at least that’s what I think it’s doing. If the item (comment) is from a non-Backtype user the item (comment) will not have hyperlink to the commenters Backtype user page.

You cannnot follow a blog URL, instead they have a list of Top contributors (with an RSS feed as well).
This is great if you own a blog as subscribing to this feed will keep you in the loop of who your most dedicated commenters (fans) are.
For this top list type feed, I wonder if they would consider using an SLE feed (rather than a regular RSS feed)

Here’s an example of three types of profiles for a given user:

User:
Louis Gray

URL’s:
URL/Louis Gray.com
URL/friendfeed.com/louisgray

Blog:
blog/Louis Gray.com

Dashboard

My dashboard has a friendstream where I can see the latest comments from people I follow, with an RSS feed, and also a Shared stream from people I follow, which also has an RSS feed.

Subscribing to this feed is going to be a great addition to Google Reader, now I not only subscribe to a blogger, but I can also to the comments bloggers I like make in the blogosphere in one easy feed (or I could go to each profile and subscribe to these individually).
It seems like my Backtype profile page feed is going to be a handy source to put in my Friendfeed stream.

I wish my Dashboard also had a “me” stream, and a stream for items I have Shared, instead I have to go to my public user profile.

As always when finding a new promising service I’d like to run my buddy list through it so I don’t have to spend time searching for my usual friends.

Searching

Searching Backtype is like searching the commentsphere…Yacktrack is a service achieving something different in the comment space, but they both have a similar aspect of being the commentsphere search engine.

You can search for both people and comments.
The People page has a list of the most followed people (with an RSS feed)
The Comments page has a stream of Recent comments (Timeline), and Top comments (with an RSS feed)
The search results page also has a feed, and there is a nifty advanced search.
I’d like to search for a keyword by a user, but it lacks a user field.
- Reason being is this way I can search my comments
- I’d also like to search comments limited to just my network

It seems easy enough to work out top commenters (this can be based on the top comments), just not sure how these top comments are worked out.

See Louis Gray’s post for more.

Here’s a list of social sites where you can upload documents and presentations.

If you know of any others, please leave a comment.

Document

Scribd

DocStoc

ThinkFree Docs

OpenFloodgate

Issuu

Insightory

Twidox

Presentation

Slideshare (Slidecast)

authorSTREAM

SlideBurner

Zentation

vacsmo

Empressr

Web Slideshows

WebSlides

Trailfire

JogTheWeb

A while back I posted on an alternate interface for Friendfeed called Mio News, this allows you to group friends in folders and when you click a folder you can see a stream for just that group of friends…no different than an RSS Reader.

Read Write Web tell us that Friendfeed have a beta version that does just this. Just like Pownce, Tweetdeck, etc…you can group friends into lists (streams).

I really wish Twitter would do this, as sometimes I just want to see updates from my KM friends. So I thought, maybe I can find those KM friends on Friendfeed, and make a list, and then eventually I would be able to access that stream on mobile Friendfeed. Quite simply all I did was view a list, and then click the Twitter icon from one of the items in the stream, and voila…a group Twitter stream.

One point of feedback.

When I’m on a user profile I can filter their stream by clicking a button on the top of the screen, but when I’m on my home stream or on a list stream there lacks a set of these “filter by service” buttons…instead as mentioned above I have to click on the service icon from one of the items in the stream to get a filtered view.

Also I’d like to do multiple filters eg. from my KM list show me just tweets and del.icio.us links

A related point is when I view my user stream, one of the service filter buttons on the top of the page is “FF”, these are posts you make on Friendfeed itself (which by the way now allows you to upload pictures)…but when I look at my list of services (under the My Feeds section) on by right sidebar, this FF service is missing.

I’ve noticed on this beta version that the “hide” feature is missing. Hopefully it will come back and also add a page where I can access a list of all the stuff I’m hiding.

Coming back to my post on alternate FriendFeed interfaces, I agree with Read Write Web that we need a way to avoid the fragmented conversations on duplicate items within Friendfeed itself, something Moopz tackles…more basic memetracker is Friendfeed Links.

Here’s some Friendfeed tools to play with.

Related:
FriendFeed Rooms : Interactive topic streams

Not long ago I posted about Google Reader Shared Items, and was looking for a way to shop for people’s shared items and manually subscribe to them.
I was hoping when I subscribed to them it would appear in the “Friends’ Shared Items” section, but this isn’t the case, this only happens if they are your Gmail Contacts, you cannot manually subscribe to someone into this folder.

This is still the case, but the latest from the Google Reader blog is that you can now choose who of those Gmail contacts are allowed to see your Shared Items in their “Friends’ Shared Items” section. Even if I do prevent a few people from seeing my Shared Items, they could somehow still find my “Shared Items” webpage and subscribe from there…as I mentioned it would just be a regular feed subscription, they would not be able to organise that feed into their “Friends’ Shared Items” section.

How it happens is you can leave your setting on “Share with all my Chat contacts”, or you can now select “Share with Friends”.
This allows you to select particular people from your chat contacts into a more selective friends list.

If you do select a few people to see your “Shared Items”, they will be sent an email, where they can accept, and offer to share their “Shared Items” with you…at any time either of you can disable each other.

The more exciting news is that you can also add email addresses of people you want to add to your friends list, if they don’t have a Google Account, you will have to wait till they create one, if they do have a Google account, they will immediately be available for selection for your friends list (I guess this means they become a Gmail contact). Actually this isn’t exciting at all, only more convenient, because beforehand all I would have to do from Gmail is give them an invite and they would become one of my contacts, consequently they would then become available as my Google Reader contacts.

Read about it in the help section.

What I don’t get is why does someone have to be a Gmail contact first before I can add them to my friends list, or if I do invite a person and they do register with Gmail, then they automatically become a Gmail contact.

As I said in my previous post I simply want to roam around a Google Reader Social Network and simply add someone as a friend, and they have to friend me back.
Then I have the OK to subscribe to their Shared Items, and it will appear in my “Friends’ Shared Items” section…they can always disable me.
The beauty of this is we could also check out each others subscription pane’s…feed shopping.

Now that we have friended each other we could attack another issue in my previous post, and that is if I want to share an item with a particular friend instead of clicking the email footer button I could click a share with friend button, and select some friends I want to send this item to…and it would land in their Google Reader inbox.

I’m thinking of Google Reader looking like Facebook, but when I think of it like this maybe it does make sense to only have one friends list across all Google products. In a Google Reader social network the private message feature would be Gmail, and the chat section would be Gtalk….can’t remember if you can organise your contacts into friends lists.

When I think of it making a Google Reader friends list from my Gmail contacts, is similar to just making a selective contact list in Gmail and then pushing that to appear in Google Reader, only it’s more convenient to do it from within Google Reader.

I wonder if we could make multiple friends lists.

At the moment, as explained in my previous post, the manual way is to create a tag, and make that tag page public, and tell your friends about it so they can subscribe to that page as a regular Google Reader subscription (or they could subscribe in any RSS Reader, it doesn’t matter). Whenever you add an item to that tag, your friends that are subscribed to it will see the new content.

There’s an increasing number of open source and white label offerings for social bookmarks, memediggers, social networks, etc…I have posted on these in the past.

Here are the latest:

Lefora - forum (white label)
[via TC]

Revou - micro-blog network (open source)
[via TC]

Soceeo - social network (white label)

Reality Digital - video social network (??)
[via TC]

Dotster - social network (white label)
[via m]

Reddit - memedigger (open source)

Wikia - social network (open source)

BONUS LINKS
List of “White Label” or “Private Label” (Applications you can Rebrand) Social Networking Platforms
34 More Ways to Build Your Own Social Network