An anecdote circle resembles a focus group except it’s designed to elicit people’s stories—their real life experiences—rather than opinions.

The role of the anecdote facilitator is to ask very few, open questions which helps the participants recount real events. The facilitator spends most of their time listening and whenever someone offers an opinion they ask for an example. Sharon Darwent (a colleague at the IBM Cynefin Centre) taught me how to conduct anecdote circles and her simple advice was: “relish silence and ask for examples.” It’s put me in good stead ever since.

We find you can run anecdote circles with between 4–12 people with 6–8 being the ideal number. An anecdote circle typically runs for 60–90 minutes or whenever the group runs our of energy. The longest anecdote circle I’ve run lasted 2.5 hours—it was exhausting.

Let me know if you would like to know anything else about this approach to collecting narrative.

For those who enjoyed The Tipping Point and Blink you will be pleased to hear Malcolm Gladwell has a blog which will expand on aspects of his articles (found here) and other writings for the New Yorker. As he says:

And if you want to remember what you read in Blink and the Tipping Point, Malcolm has summarised the chapters (using Blink as an example) as a reading guide, provided a suggested reading list, and expanded bibliography.

I attended the Victorian Public Service Continuous Improvement Network (VPSCIN) seminar today. Peter Jackson, Essendon Football Club’s CEO, delivered an excellent talk on ‘leadership.’ Peter has been CEO for the last 10 years and has learned two important lessons:

1. Variety in your leadership team is essential. Peter spent the first 8 or his 10 years as CEO employing clones of himself. Each one was highly motivated, task-focussed individual. These people, in turn, employed clones of themselves. The club was full of Peters. He said “we were doing things right, but not the right things.” In the last two years Peter has reorganised and set out to employ people different to himself. He has found it tough communicating with creative and intuitive people but knows it will be good for the club to have more creative input.
2. The leader does not control the club; the players control the club. The CEO’s role is to create a conducive environment for players to thrive—sounds like knowledge workers (here is a paper I wrote a few years ago on knowledge strategy with a similar message about knowledge environments). Peter also observed that it was just as important to know who are the ‘water-cooler leaders’—and know what they are saying—than those in the formal organisation.

With more than 300 people in the room it was great to hear these messages clearly articulated by a respected business leader. Better still, it was delivered by the CEO of the best AFL team in the competition (OK, OK, so I’m an Essendon supporter).

Steve Bealing (CEO of Cynefin Software) spent 3 hours with Mark and I yesterday describing the new version of the Cynefin sense-making software. Exciting stuff. The new version will be released in April which will enable our clients to extract additional value from their investment in collecting and making sense of narrative. When we see the new version we will give you a complete review.

If you’re wondering where I’ve been, for the last 2 days at least (the rest is a whole other story), I’ve been at the Australian Open Space on Open Space or OSonOSinOz for short. It was great!

A gem which really stood out in my mind was a great discussion which was hosted by Jess Dart titled “Exploring the underpinning philosophy of open space”. In particular Jess was very curious about the epistemology of OS, which in my crude translation is simply about “knowing about knowing”. Now yes, this does seem an esoteric topic and yes you may be wondering what possible practical application this may have, and yes we did ask “does it matter?”. The gem which emerged from this was a classic statement about being happy with not-knowing.

Enter stage left, Greg Jenkins, with a great diagram for us on knowing and not-knowing. In life, work or otherwise, we find ourselves travelling the spiral between ‘the known’ and ‘the unknown’. That is, knowing and not-knowing. It is often when stakes, emotions and eyebrows are high that we find ourselves in this not-knowing area of the spiral. The way that we deal with this ‘not-knowing’ is often a key determiner for the kinds of outcomes that emerge. Being able to stand the complexity, the intensity, the discomfort and generally being happy with not-knowing takes some real effort. Incidently, it is here in the not-knowing area that an open space facilitator will often find themselves.

So, here we were, discussing all about ‘knowing about knowing’ and what emerges is the importance of being happy with not-knowing. Typical.

Nature has just reported on research which found people make better decisions by going with their gut if the situation is complex. The evidence is growing. Gary Klein’s work on naturalistic decision making supports this idea and Malcolm Gladwell has certainly popularised the viewpoint in his book Blink.

Mark and I are travelling to Singapore and Hong Kong tomorrow. We have a busy schedule including running a narrative techniques workshop in Hong Kong, presenting at the iKMS and Hong Kong KM Association and catching up with Patrick Lambe, Steve Bealing and Nick Noakes.

Let us know if you would like to catch up while we are in the area. While the schedule is getting tight it’s easy to add people to our dinner engagements or catching up for breakfast.

My nine year old daughter (she’s now 13) is an avid reader. She loves the Harry Potter series and reads them repeatedly. This voracious appetite for stories has unfortunately resulted in an annoying ‘know-it-all’ attitude that was driving her parents crazy—the only negative side effect of reading we've noticed. She would whine in utter disdain comments like: “Come on Dad, don't ... you ... know ... who ... made ... the ... philosopher's ... stone?”

One morning at breakfast, after another episode of Potter boasting, I quipped: “you know you're sounding just like Hermione.” Her behaviour changed instantly as she quickly compared the characteristics of Hermione from Harry Potter with her own behaviour; she obviously didn't like the result. The Hermione character was rich in detail for her yet it would have been quite difficult for me to explicit and accurately explain these characteristics in a meaningful way without referring to a character in a story.

Stories are a great way to understand complexity and share meaning. In business we tell stories to create reputations (or destroy them), share experiences (retelling someone else's story is the next best thing to being there) and build culture. When working with clients we help them retell their stories and then capture them to be reused as lessons learned material. In place of the individual characters we develop, with the client, archetypes which convey the complex social characteristics that we deal with every day. Instead of Hermione we develop archetypes like Mr Officious Project Manager, Ms Bulldozer or Mr Know-it-all Consultant. Any sound familiar?

http://radio.weblogs.com/0113975/2002/10/01.html

I was reflecting on the last social network analysis we did and it occurred to me that the survey response  might be heavily influenced by what was happening just before it was completed. For example, if you’ve just spent the last last 3 months working on an intensive special project and were ask to list 7 people you collaborate with to get your job done, there is a good chance people from the last 3 months would feature prominently in your response, perhaps excluding those vital helpers not currently on the tip of your tongue.

One way to remind people of what they know is to help them remember stories of the past. So here are a couple of options for priming the respondent to remember what they know:

• convene a group of people to participate in an anecdote circle for 15–30 minutes and have them retell their stories of collaborations over the last few years, then ask them to complete the SNA survey;
• ask the survey respondent to draw a timeline representing the last few years and mark on the significant periods of collaboration or key milestones, then complete the SNA questions.

I wonder what other ways you can prepare people to respond usefully to answering SNA surveys given the many limitations of a survey technique?

I started blogging in 2002, first using Radiolands then Blogger. As many Anecdote readers would be unaware of my ordinal posts I thought I would pick a few and re-post them here. I will mark all my re-posts with the original url at the bottom of the blog entry.

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In 1987 my father and I travelled to the Kimberleys in the north-west corner of Australia. We set out to complete the field work for my geography and archaeology honours thesis. My father accompanied me because my study grant required someone in the party who could fire a rifle. The estuaries of the Kimberleys are renowned for crocodiles.

Leading up to the field work I spent 6 months pouring over models of how macro-tidal islands form in estuaries. I was presented with many compelling accounts that made it clear to me how the four small islands that I was studying suddenly appeared in the Ord River estuary in the 1950s. This understanding was based on a concept of how sand and silt flowed up and down a tidal river called dynamic equilibrium. This concept is based on the idea that an observation at any point in time may yield a river (or any other natural system) that appears out of balance; in apparent chaos. Taking the observation over time, however, can produce a picture of the river in perfect balance; a dynamic equilibrium.

Implementing a KM program can appear the same way. In the first 6 months you may focus entirely on one initiative, such as communities of practice. A casual observer may by critical pointing out that you are giving no attention to other worthy initiatives such as expertise location or recruiting capable knowledge workers. In the short-term the system may seem out of balance but over time your knowledge program can develop its own dynamic equilibrium. Of course to achieve this equilibrium requires a designer to observe the system at multiple time scales.

Originally posted: http://radio.weblogs.com/0113975/2002/10/03.html

Last month actKM faced a disaster. On the 15th January YahooGroups deleted the actKM group. It's a long story and not really the point of this post but it amounted to a member complaining to Yahoo that another member infringed their trademark. So instead of deleting the offending posts, Yahoo deleted the whole group.

I first heard of actKM's disappearance from David Williams. I'm the group owner so Dave called me to see if I knew anything, which I didn't, and was then told of the desperate attempts to contact Yahoo. The first couple of weeks were the hardest because we didn't know why it vanished and while David and Nerida Hart maintained their efforts to contact Yahoo on a daily basis there was no response.

It was time for plan B. I fired off emails to Nancy White, Etienne Wenger, and John Smith. Mark contacted Patrick Lambe, Jerry Ash (AOK), Dave Snowden, Joe Firestone, David Gurteen and many others. We tried to get in contact with everyone we knew in the community of practice and knowledge management discipline who might help out. Fortunately both Nancy White and Patrick Lambe knew some  people at Yahoo, and played key roles in activating networks. The Yahoo contact started to make enquiries inside the  behemoth. Dave Snowden was talking to the member who had complained to Yahoo and smoothing things out from that end.

As actKM convener, Mark Schenk played a pivotal role. He spent many late nights understanding what actually happened, talking to the protagonists and smoothing the waters, and contacting the owners of other missing KM groups (a Malaysian and Indian KM groups vanished too). At the same time Mark and the actKM committee members, with the help of Ron Rogers (IT support guy extraordinaire), started a new discussion list and web-site (including a blog). During this time Mark would have sent 100s of emails to the community, community sponsors and people at Yahoo.

Eventually the Yahoo product manager contacted Mark and said that the growing momentum of the grass roots blogging and email campaign could not be ignored and they reinstated our group, minus the offending emails. Yahoo realises that this was an unfortunate event and are currently looking at ways to improve their service.

There are two lessons for me. First, never underestimate to power of networks. As Nancy said a few times in emails: networks rock! When a group of passionate, smart and dedicated people decide to band together to right a wrong there is nothing stopping them. Second, there needs to be a conductor, a voice of reason, a cool head, and Mark played this role to perfection.

[Update: it looked liked the Yahoo lawyers made the decision to remove the group. As Seth Godin says, the lawyers must see them selves as part of the marketing department and in this case they didn't.

The clever folk over at Cognitive Daily show us some experiments that suggest that determining cause and effect relationships depends on what you are looking and how things are grouped.

Be prepared to get a little dotty :-)

Kaye Vivien asks the question: knowledge hoarding (is it real?) Absolutely! is my answer. The term ‘hoarding’ suggests a premeditated attempt to hide something away for your own future purposes, so this is a serious charge. Most retained knowledge, however, is not a result of premeditated hoarding. Gabriel Szulanski’s work¹ on why knowledge is not transferred (sticky knowledge) helps explain unintentional knowledge retention. So does Dave Snowden’s aphorism: you only know what you know when you need to know it. So let’s put the unintentional knowledge retention aside and focus on hoarding.

Fear and ambition mixed with a dollop of distrust seem to create the conditions for knowledge hoarding. Fear is a strong emotion affecting behaviour. People will hoard their knowledge if they think sharing what they know will result in punishment. Here are some possible reasons for thinking this way:

• I might share something that’s wrong and I’ll look dumb
• What I share might be misused and I will be blamed regardless of the implementation
• If I share it with others there is no need for my expertise
• I might be recognised for my contribution

Fear of punishment is probably not the biggest reason why people hoard their knowledge. Ambition and organisational culture could play a more significant role. I believe, like Edgar Schein³, that people are incessant leader watchers. Watching leaders and retelling the stories of their deeds helps people understand how to get ahead around here—how to act. If there is a preponderance for leaders to keep their cards close to theirs chests there will be a growing number of people in the organisation who believe this is the way to act. The converse if also true. Check our Schein’s culture embedding mechanisms for the type of things people keep an eye on. This will give you some ideas for interventions.

OK, so its all about culture change if you want to tackle knowledge hoarding. I’m sure many of you have techniques and approaches to create a more conducive knowledge environment (the purpose of knowledge management). Here at Anecdote we favour participative approaches where the organisation works it out for themselves rather than having an ‘expert’ tell them what needs to be done. Our paper on change management will give you a good idea of the approach we take.

Another reason people and organisations hoard their knowledge is a fear of competitors stealing the ideas. Let me share one approach I’ve used successfully to combat the idea that we must always protect our knowledge from competitors (our IP).

A couple of years ago, when I worked at IBM, I was engaged by a legal firm to help design an online collaboration web-site which would enable the firm to communicate with its clients, the opposing party and their lawyers. Whenever large organisations enter into a contract to provide services the two sticking points are usually liability and intellectual property, and this wasn't an exception. The law firm wanted to own the IP and so did IBM. To break the jog jam I introduced the lawyers to Max Boisot’s I-space.

The I-space² is a model describing how knowledge moves from being undiffused (ie only known by a few people) and concrete (ie very specific to a single situation) to becoming more abstract (ie. generalised to apply to more situations) and codified (ie. more able to be articulated). At point 3 on the diagram the knowledge has maximum value to an organisation because it can be applied in a variety of ways to a range of problems but hasn’t leaked (diffused) to its competitors. It is inevitable, however, that if the knowledge is valuable it will soon become common knowledge. In the case of the lawyers, the idea of using collaboration software to get all parties together can quickly arrive at point 3 but as soon as the solution is implemented the knowledge is diffused and available to everyone—competitive value diminished rapidly.

Boisot’s argument is that organisations which operate in a slow moving environment, such as flute makers where the way flutes have been made hasn’t changed in a century, should do whatever it takes to protect their intellectual property including doing everything to retain their master craftspeople. Fast moving industries require a different strategy: keep your mean time at point 3 as high as possible. This requires an organisation to continually rotate through the I-space spiral with new ideas—constant innovation.

The lawyers understood they were in a fast moving industry and agreed IBM will own the IP and moved the discussion to how IBM was going to help them to continually to innovate in this field. This was a massive turn around. 

1. Szulanski, G. (1999). The Process of Knowledge Transfer: a Diachronic Analysis of Stickiness, Organisation Behaviour and Human Decision Processes (OBHDP): special issue on Knowledge Transfer, 14, June. Retrieved 12 February, 2006 from http://jonescenter.wharton.upenn.edu/papers/1999/wp99-05.pdf

2. Boisot, M.H., Knowledge Assets: Securing Competitive Advantage in the Information Economy. 1999, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

3. Schein, E.H., Organizational Culture and Leadership. 3rd ed. 2004, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

Now here is a great tool. Ever wanted to keep track of the comments you make on other people’s blog. Well coComment does just that. Add a bookmarklet to your browser and mark the comments as you make them. CoComment will tell you when someone has responded.

I was visiting Beverly Trayner’s blog today and noticed that she references a set of Nancy White’s del.icio.us tags on communities of practice. I think this is an excellent idea. If you are unfamiliar with del.icio.us think it of a website where you can bookmark websites that interest you and everyone else can see what you’ve bookmarked. You then categorise your bookmarks with tags. Here are some of Nancy’s (choconancy is her username and part time addiction) community of practice tags:

• http://del.icio.us/choconancy/communitiesofpractice
• http://del.icio.us/choconancy/communitytechnology
• http://del.icio.us/choconancy/technologyforcommunity
• http://del.icio.us/choconancy/techreport

I haven’t been as organised as Nancy with my tagging but you are welcomed to have a look at the mishmash of things I’ve found interesting on the web: http://del.icio.us/unorder

We collected an anecdote and used it in a document, and the document came to the attention of senior management. We were advised that the anecdote was inaccurate in some of its specifics, that it presented an overly negative picture and that there was a logical reason why someone might behave in the way described in the anecdote.

This highlights one of the key concepts about using business narrative techniques.  It is not whether the anecdote is right or wrong, unnecessarily negative or overly positive, or if it is illogical from a management perspective that is the issue.  The only issue is that the anecdote exists in the organisation.  It might change in the retelling, but the gist remains the same over time.  The anecdote doesn't disappear because management thinks it is wrong.  The anecdote provides insights that can help the organisation change the next story...

We’ve been helping one of our large corporate clients this week make sense of a series of social network charts and during the process the team identified a strong community of practice which appeared to be having a conspicuous integrating effect on their division. In this case the community was a network of hygienists.

This observation started the group talking about what it takes to establish and sustain a community of practice. Of course this is an enormous and complex topic but it did remind me of a story Etienne Wenger told me which I’m fond of retelling.

Etienne was helping a car manufacturer establish a community and practice and the first thought was to connect the company’s engineers. They took this idea to potential community members and discovered there was little interest: the scope was too broad. ‘Yeh sure I’m an engineer but I have nothing in common with chemical engineers.’ The second attempt was to narrow the scope to automotive engineers: still little interest. It wasn’t until they reduced the scope to brake engineers did they find a group of people who thought they had enough in common, a shared identity, to band together as a community of practice.

I now have a simple test to gauge whether a community of practice might form. When someone says, “I would like to start a community of practice.” I ask, “Can you describe the potential members by completing the following sentence? I am a …..” If they can fill in the blank in a way that people can passionately identify with the descriptor then there is a chance a community might emerge. Let me give you an example. I was helping the Department of Defence design a community of practice for project managers. ‘I am a project manager’ was a strong descriptor and so we knew we had a chance. During the design process the client has another job type for which they wanted a community to support simply called ‘technical’. ‘I am a technical’ didn’t inspire so we knew it was unachievable. The ‘I am a …” test is easy and effective.

Our corporate client made a good point during our SNA discussions: the titles they bestow on people could effect whether someone identifies with a community or not. As it happens ‘hygienist’ is a common title and role in the organisation which might help new hygienists seek out and find one another. If you weren’t called a hygienist but did hygienist work in a large corporation you might never realise you should connect to the hygienist community. Renaming roles might be one small initiative in a portfolio of activities you might consider to get a community of practice started.

Denham Grey has noticed that the knowledge management entry over at Wikipedia has deteriorated lately and has called on all of us who care about this topic to help update it. Denham’s aim for the KM community is well stated:

Here’s the entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_management

Hope to see you there over the next few weeks.

In the style of The Office, here’s a short video detailing how not to use storytelling in your organisation. And a good laugh too. Just scroll to the bottom of the page to find the clip called ‘Principles of Organisational Storytelling’.

Thanks to Julian Carver for pointing this out to me.

Inspired by Kurt Richardson’s work exploring the parallels between systems thinking and complexity thinking I couldn’t help myself but to take a few of his gems and add my own angle.

The complementary law: A complex system is a system that has two or more potentially contradictory descriptions.

There is no right person, right answer, right perspective, right description.

System holism principle: The whole is greater than the sum of its parts

You’re not going to be able to get an outcome you want through control.

Incompressibility (Darkness principle): The best representation of a complex system is the system itself

When organisational issues and problems arise, it is a common mindset to want to dive into analysis mode. More and more analysis. Lets strive towards a description and understanding of this problem. The only problem is that it won’t happen. As this principle suggests, we will always be in the shadow the whole, and of course, the whole is greater than the parts. Couple this with the first principle and what do you do with all those contradictory descriptions and findings anyway?!

Another finding from Eide Neuroscience Blog. I love their piccies.

It’s so easy to become insular having conversations with people within your discipline or professional practice. To guard against this malady I went looking for interesting blogs in the field of neuroscience to see what they could tell me about how people learn. Well I found some good ones.

Eide Neurolearning Blog is focussed on education. One post that caught my eye was the neuroscience finding that personal information is better remembered than general information. As Drs. Fernette and Brock Eide say:

This perhaps explains why people find social network charts meaningful because they can see themselves represented and see how they are related to their colleagues.

The other neuroscience blog worth keeping an eye on is Brain Waves by Zack Lynch. This seems to be a news blog keeping you abreast of neuroscience happenings from a business, society and technology perspective. This is where I found the link to Eide’s blog.

Do you know of other good neuroscience blogs you would like to share with us?

Like all new businesses we’ve been asking questions of ourselves about what our business is all about. We’ve also had clients and friends say to us, “guys, read your company profile but we still don’t know what you do.”  Hmmm, bit of a worry.

After many weeks of discussion we’ve come up with a new company profile and we were hoping you might let us know what impression it leaves on you. Your thoughts will be greatly appreciated.