I'm presenting our story work at KM Australia this year (24-26 July) and I'll also be taking part in the debate, which has been organised in a friendly and fun way. We are debating whether tacit knowledge can and should be captured.

If you'd like to know more about the congress here's the event blurb. I've been told that if you share this blog post with your Facebook friends or your Twitter followers, or any other social media channel for that matter, you'll receive a 15% discount off the registration price.

Did you ever think the good old movie training montage, found in such classic's as The Karate Kid, Team America, or the Rocky movies, could beautifully sum up all the elements of deliberate practice?

I have been doing some work over the last few weeks on developing a 'Deliberate Practice Program' that will help to make learning stick even more for participants in our programs such as Storytelling for Business Leaders.   

As my mind was very much tuned into the whole area of 'practice', I watched a scene from The Kings Speech last week with added interest. The scene was a montage where Lionel Logue (played by Geoffrey Rush) and Bertie (Colin Firth) were undertaking a series of exercises and drills to help the future King overcome his speech impediment. What I realised is that I was actually watching all the elements of deliberate practice.

Deliberate practice is a concept outlined by Dr. K. Anders Ericsson, who is is widely recognised as the world's leading researcher on expertise. He has studied how people become experts in a whole range of fields, and looked for the consistent attributes of what they do to make them achieve these superior levels of performance. The consistent feature they have identified is not some natural born talent, or the hours they practice, but how they practice - specifically how they undertake deliberate practice.

The key attributes of deliberate practice are:

• Repetition - Performing the task occurs repetitively rather than at its naturally occurring frequency
• Focused feedback: - Task performance is evaluated by a coach during performance
• Breaking the task down into its parts and practicing these individually and then as a whole
• Immediacy of performance - After corrective feedback on task performance there is an immediate repetition so that the task can be performed more in accordance with what is required/expected
• Stop and start- because of the repetition and feedback, deliberate practice is typically seen as a series of short performances
• Active coaching - Typically a coach must be very active during deliberate practice, monitoring performance, assessing adequacy, and controlling the structure of training
• Emphasis on difficult aspects - Deliberate practice will focus on more difficult aspects, for example, when flying an airplane normally only a small percentage of the flight time is taken up by takeoffs and landings. In deliberate practice simulators, however, a large portion of the time will be involved in landings and takeoffs
• Focus on areas of weakness - in real life situations people are striving to achieve the task and therefore are unlikely to do the things they see as a weakness or they think will stop them achieving. Deliberate practice therefore allows time and space to practise these elements
• Work vs. play - deliberate practice feels more like work and is more effortful than casual performance

Now, watch the following clip from the movie 'Cool Runnings' and tell me how many of these elements exist?

I had a throughly enjoyable afternoon on Saturday learning not only how to make great coffee, but being surrounded by stories.

The course was a present from my wife for Christmas and took place at the Home Barista Institute, just round the corner from the Anecdote office here in Melbourne.

The course was delivered by Rita Zhang who began by telling a fantastic 'Who am I' story. She told a series of shorter stories about how she fell in love with coffee, how she used a mentor to help her develop her business and how she started teaching courses on coffee. She brought to life each of the scenes in real detail (e.g. describing a sunny Saturday afternoon when she went and visited a 'bright spot' coffee shop that her mentor recommended), she used suspense and surprise in the stories (e.g. how she lifted up a takeaway coffee from the same shop and discovered a love heart drawn in the latte foam) and also linked them together to create a cohesive account of how she came to be there, teaching that course, on that day. These short stories gave a fantastic insight into Rita and where her passion for coffee came from.

Stories were also included in two other aspects of the course.

Each of us had to introduce ourselves by telling stories of good and bad coffee experiences we had had. After seven years in the UK I had no shortage of bad coffee stories! It was a nice way to be introduced to the other attendees and hear a bit about them and why they were there, in a very non-threatening and insightful way.

Stories were also used by Rita to bringing to life the history of coffee, right through from how coffee was discovered (the story of the 'dancing goat'), through to how Pope Clement VIII played a key role in coffees acceptance into Europe in the 1600s.

Overall a fantastic day, not only because I was learning how to make great coffee (which now requires some serious practice on my part!), but also because I was reminded, yet again, about the power of stories.

I stumbled across a blog post yesterday from Bob Sutton where he referred to the 'Otis Redding Problem'.

This is where you put in place too many metrics to measure individuals, teams, or business units. meaning they can’t even think about all of them at once. They therefore end-up doing what they believe are important or that will bring them rewards.

This is based on the line from the famous Otis Redding song Sitting By the Dock of the Bay; “Can’t do what ten people tell me to do, so I guess I’ll remain the same.”

This triggered a thought for me about how you could potentially use musical artists, lyrics or song names in an exercise.

Say you wanted to explore levels of engagement within a team or department. Asking straight out is unlikely to get you an accurate picture, depending on the culture, environment, who is present etc.   

What you could do is get groups to come up with, say, a written 'Playlist' of songs that sum up levels of engagement for them within the team. Or you could give them an iPod and get them to actually create one and play it back to the room.

Maybe instead you could introduce them to the 'Otis Redding Problem' and then get them to come up with their own examples within the team, based on song lyrics.

I just think this type of method allows people some safety and security to "discuss the undiscussable". It allows them to distance themselves from openly expressing how they feel, and the dangers that presents, just as archetypes or metaphor exercises might allow. It also creates a bit of fun, and lets people express some of their creativity and musical knowledge!

Anyone ever used anything like this and wanted to share how it went? Or does anyone have their own ideas on Problems/Dilemmas/Scenarios in the 'Otis Redding Problem' vein? Love to hear your thoughts.

Sometimes you just need a few things to get started. I think this is the case for mentoring. We have been helping a company develop a mentoring culture and in typical Anecdote style we collected 50 stories of good and bad mentoring in the organisation and then help potential mentors draw lessons from these stories themselves. They learn that listening is more important that giving advice, that questions are more important than answers and the ability to tell a story is important to share experiences.

This is great foundational knowledge but quite frankly sometimes you also need a simple framework to guide your mentoring sessions. Mary Connor and Julia Pokora in their book Coaching & Mentoring at Work provided just what's needed: three topics to cover in a mentoring conversation.

Stage 1: What's going on? What's the present state of affairs.

You want to start by getting your mentee talking about the current situation. Get them to tell the story of the challenge they are facing. Practice good listening.

Then you might help them expand their perspectives. Are there any thing you missed? What would X say about this? How would this story be told by one of the other characters?

Then explore what they think might help them most. What's causing the most concern? What's a manageable chunk to tackle? What would give a high personal payoff?

Stage 2: What solutions make sense for me? What do I need or want instead of what I have?

Start with generating possibilities. In an ideal world what might you need or want? It's now X months into the future and it has been a wild success, what happened? It's now X months in the future and it has been a dismal failure, what happened?

What would be a realistic goal to achieve? Now you are moving from exploration to choosing a path forward.

Then test the commitment. What are the pros and cons, costs and benefits?

Stage 3: How do I get what I need or want?

How might you achieve the goals. What strategies might you use?

Which approach makes the most sense for you?

What's the action plan and how do you get started? What is your next action?

Now, this is a severe distillation of their good work. There are lots more things to learn about mentoring. But if you are about to have your first mentoring session and were wondering what you might do, here's a simple framework to guide your conversation.

Telling, telling, telling ...  So many in the field of story work focus on storytelling. Sure, telling a good story at the right time has impact. But storytelling represents a mere fraction of what can be done with business stories.

Here is one little example.

Last year I had a call from Kirstyn. She works in HR for a large engineering firm. Kirstyn runs a program for their graduate employees to build their skills over three years. This firm has some or the world's engineering and scientific experts and the graduate employees get the opportunity to work shoulder to shoulder with these experts on some amazing projects. The thing is, the graduates often don't make the most of it because they rarely get to hear what these experts have actually done in their careers. Why? Because they graduates are unskilled in asking story-eliciting questions.

So we set about helping about 40 graduate employees learn how to elicit stories from their expert colleagues. And after learning the basics we wheeled in some senior experts as guinea pigs to practice with. It was a great way to practice their new story-listening skills but more importantly it was an opportunity to get to know some of the more senior folk in the firm.

And because we know that people remember what they feel we asked Melbourne Playback Theatre to perform some of the stories the experts shared with the graduates.

Here is one of the stories.

You could hear a pin drop as the graduates heard Clare tell this story and their jaws dropped when Melbourne Playback Theatre performed the story for everyone.

Thomas Jefferson was a great believer in luck, and he found that the harder he worked the luckier he got. His friend and fellow signatory of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin, shared this belief in hard work and self development. From a remarkably young age Franklin understood the importance of practice. Not the kind you get knocking a tennis ball around with friends. But that drilled, repetitive practice of hitting the same shot over and over again. Benjamin, however, didn't have his eye on Wimbledon (actually it's kind of a temporal impossibility), rather his ambition was to be a man of letters.

The Anecdote blog is all about how leaders can return humanity to the workplace and the vital role stories play. I get a little tired of leaders who hear about the value of storytelling and then tell me they don't have the time to learn how to do it. The fact is it takes practice to be good at anything. Some estimate 10,000 hours of practice. But it is not just any type of practice. You need to engage in deliberate practice just like Ben Franklin did to be world the renowned writer and communicator he became.

Terrence Gargiulo and I and going to share some of our ideas about storytelling deliberate practice in a webinar next week. Please feel free to come along and join our conversation.

We're doing this webinar twice, one timed for Asia Pacific and the other for the Americas. Just click on the link of the webinar you want to attend and fill in your details.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM Aust. EST

Tuesday, August 17, 2010 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM USA PDT

The story about Ben Franklin comes from his autobiography. You can read the whole thing on Google Books.

Last month Bob Sutton wrote a post listing the important mindsets of a good manager. It got me thinking about the important mindsets for a good mentor. Here's my top 10.

1. You really care about the person you're mentoring. You want them to succeed.
2. You're curious and intensely interested in them as a person
3. You're not competing with them
4. You don't have all the answers and know you don't need to
5. They can solve many of their own issues
6. Your the facilitator, not the expert
7. In most cases there's no single right answer
8. It's better to engage in dialogue than lecture
9. A good question is often better than a good answer
10. Trust is essential. It takes time and effort to build and can evaporate in an instance. TRUST = (credibility + reliability + intimacy) / self interest

What mindsets would you add?

Thanks to Christian Dahmen for a excellent conversation last week that helped me write this list.

I'm sitting in a cafe thinking about what makes a great listener. I can see a few. They're leaning forward, nodding, smiling, asking questions. You can tell they want to be there and that they care about the person they are listening to. They're not glancing at their watch, their phones and there're no computer screens to distract them. They take turns telling their stories and sharing their thoughts but when they're listening they're engrossed in what the other person is saying and they're not interrupting. It's impossible for me to say for sure but I'm imagining that when they're listening they're not working out the next thing they're going to say to impress their friend, to knock down their argument, to win the point. It's a natural flow, improvisation style.

Most of know how to listen but why does it seem to evaporate in the workplace?

I suspect we've created workplace cultures that emphasise problem solving and getting the job done quickly and getting through the work. When someone asks a question people are clamouring to answer it and show that they are the fixer, the can-do person. Or they enter into interrogation mode to get the information so they can fix the problem.

And there are distractions galore. Phone beeping, computers beeping, colleagues bleating, all competing for our attention.

Yet there are many important times when deep listening is essential. One particular type of conversation which is top of mind for me at the moment is mentoring.

When someone you're mentoring pops into your office and says, "I'd really appreciate your thoughts on this thing I'm grappling with," then it's time to go into deep listening mode. Can you be like the people in the cafe?

A couple of ideas.

First, remove distractions. Put your mobile out of site, put your phone on silent and if your computer screen is on a swivel arm move it so it's also out of sight. Better still come around the to the other side of your desk and sit next to them with your distractions out of eye shot. I have one client who has to put his back to the glass wall of his office so he can't see the stream of people who wander past and want to speak with him.

Second, ask good questions. You want them to open up and explore the issue. Hopefully they will get a new perspective and some possible options. So you need to listen carefully to ask good questions. As a general rule, 'why' questions will get to the bigger purpose. 'How' and 'what' questions will get the detail of how things work and what might be done. And my favourites, 'when' and 'where' questions often get you stories.

Third, tell stories. You would think that listening is about just shutting up but it would be pretty weird to sit quietly and not say a peep. So to avoid just solving their problem, a strong urge for Type A's, recount some of your experiences to get them thinking of what's possible without telling them what to do.

Fourth, show that you are listening. How you look, how you respond, what you say, all indicate whether you really care and are listening. I'm not a big fan of summarising everything someone says in the form "so what I'm hearing you say is ..." I reckon that's distracting and merely a rote response. A better way is to try and predict a consequence of what they are saying and test it. "Wow, that must have been hard to take?" This way you are adding to the conversation. Body language is the other way to show you're listening. You know what to do. I find it fascinating to watch body language in our workshops. When we are sharing opinions people lean back and have that "prove it to me" look on their faces, but when are sharing stories everyone leans forward.

I'd love to know more about how to help people be better listeners. Any thoughts would be welcomed. One great source on the web is my friend Jill Chivers who has a business called I'm Listening. She has a video-based program you can take and learn to be a better listener. Note to self: must go on it.

Everyday we tell those closest to us (our family, friends, colleagues) about what happened to us: today, yesterday, last week. Occasionally we'll reminisce about the old days but for those we know well what's worth recounting, what's remarkable, is happening on a daily basis. We don't even need to tell the whole story because the people we know well have much of the background. We tell the smaller details that wouldn't make sense or be interesting to someone we didn't know that well. The storytelling is gradual.

Imagine you grew up without knowing anything about restaurants. You've never heard of them, never seen them and have never had an experience, apart from eating a meal at home, that is anything like going to a restaurant. Then one day a friend takes you to one and you can't believe that you can just order your meal, that waiters bring your meal and clear away all the dirty dishes. For you this is truly remarkable and if someone ask you to share your experience you could do it without hesitation.

For those people who go to restaurants regularly much of the experience is invisible. We're not surprised by waiters, menus, asking for the bill, etc.. We have developed a script for what a restaurant experience will be like and we will only notice things if something unexpected happens. These scripts are important. Without them we would have to think through everything. It would be exhausting.

Important knowledge, however, resides in the scripts. It's difficult to recount stories for someone who is not close about what you do day-in, day-out. You're not sure they care about the small stories you tell to those people who see you every day. There is an art to collecting stories, especially the small ones.

I mention this conumdrum because just knowing that stories can get converted to scripts will help anyone who is trying to elicit stories to go beyond what's remarkable to a stranger. For a long time I was flummoxed at times during an anecdote circle when the participants could only give you broad illustrations of what they did at work rather than specific anecdotes. It didn't happen often but when it did I couldn't explain it. With this explanation I do three things to find the small stories.

1. be truly interested in every detail. Curiosity must exude from your pores
2. use memory triggers: timelines, artefacts, pictures
3. get peers together in the anecdote circle

The next frontier for me will be cognitive task analysis. I have Crandall, Klein and Hoffman's book, Working Minds and I'm looking forward to learning more about the techniques.

Some implications of this research.

Don't think you can provide nifty arguments to change people's minds. People will reason things away in whatever way they can and feel good in their answers regardless of how faulty the thinking.

Emotion has a large part to play in our decision making so we need to employ ways of connecting with people that are emotional, such as stories.

In a large change initiative you are just not going to get everyone accepting a new way of thinking or approaching things so it's important to work with those people who can take on the ideas and show the others it can be done.

Westen, D. 2007, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, PublicAffairs, New York.

Westen, D., Kilts, C., Blagov, P., Harenski, K., & Hamann, S. (2006). The neural basis of motivated reasoning: An fMRI study of emotional constraints on political judgment during the U.S. Presidential election of 2004. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 18, 1947–1958.

You can imagine my surprise when on day 1 of the conference I found myself sitting at the same table as Dan Kirsch. I've never met Dan. I've seen some of his posts in ActKM but top-most in my mind was that Dan was the guy who triggered the events that led Yahoogroups to delete the ActKM forum. At first we didn't say too much to each other and then I found myself next to Dan in the line for lunch, so I asked him, "so from your perspective what happened to our YahooGroups forum?" We sat down and he told me the story.

I came away with a different perspective on those events and it reinforced for me the importance of listening to other people's stories to make connections. Stories told and listened were creating new connections throughout the conference. You could feel the energy it was creating among the 150 delegates.

On the first day I started off sitting next to Kerry from CPA. She couldn't believe how small Luna Park was because as a 12 year old she used to think it was an enormous theme park where you could get lost for hours. Context is so important on how we view things. We were blessed with sunny Sydney days and being right on the harbour we looked out over the harbour bridge and the opera house. Spectacular venue.

Rather than give you a blow by blow description of the conference I thought it might be more fun (especially for me) to just recount those things that grabbed my attention.

I enjoyed Frank Connolly's presentation the most. Frank is the co-ordinator for the Victorian Public Sector Continuous Improvement Network. It was like watching a stand up comedian. Not in the sense of delivering funny lines but in just how relaxed he looked and how well he connected with us. I really admired how Frank phrased his ideas, which were focussed on creativity and how we talk to each other. He told us when he was uncertain of what he knew, he spoke directly and plainly, and showed real empathy for the discipline and his place in it. He was creating a space that encouraged conversation. Frank also left us with this enduring image: "KM is like pushing a loose stool up a hill with a toothpick."

When Dale Chatwin from the Australian Bureau of Statistics was presenting I felt myself cheering him on. Dale was one of the few presenters who had the courage to admit their efforts to establish communities of practice were less than successful. It was a warts and all expose describing how ABS mandated CoPs based on IT consultants recommendations and from what I could read between the lines it seemed that CoPs were mainly viewed as online discussion forums. Dale and a few others knew better and are working to turn things around.

You might have seen me tweeting about On the Origin of Stories. One of its themes is just how important play is for animals, such as lions, because it creates a safe way to learn how to fight and hunt and by practising these things strength, agility and speed also improves. With humans we engage in cognitive play through storytelling, dance, painting, singing etc. Somehow however we've managed to kill many of the opportunities in organisations for cognitive play, with the exception of mind games. So it was refreshing to experience Patrick Lambe's session using his KM Method and Culture cards. At each table we played a set of games which got us talking and thinking in new ways. Great fun.

Roberto Evaristo from 3M showed us how they are mapping the skills of their employees using network graphs. I've been involved in a number of skill register projects and most have failed because they require a lot of time to compile and are rarely referred to which in turns diminishes the motivation for anyone to keep them up to date. Roberto's approach seemed different because senior folk were using the network graphs on a regular basis to decide who would be on what team, where learning efforts should be focussed and who might succeed another based on capabilities. You can imagine that these types of decisions matter to people and would give you plenty of motivation to update your details.

I have to admit I'm normally a KM conference-goer who leaves the room when the software vendor sponsoring the event stands up to speak. I know this is disrespectful but as a delegate I've found that I normally gain much more from the discussions with colleagues in the networking lounge than hear what is often merely a sales pitch. But on day 2 of the conference I was the conference chair so there was no skipping out of the room for me. As a result I was pleasantly surprised by Cuneyt Uysal's presentation from Open Text. Cuneyt (pronounced Jenai) gave us a good context for what was happening in social software. This quote sticks in my mind, "young people only use email to communicate with old people." It checks out with my 14 and 16 year old but like all definitive statements it's not the whole story. Most importantly it reminded me of what was happening in the software world and I was chuffed to see that ideas that I blogged about years ago are being incorporated into mainstream products such as social ranking of search, idea crowdsourcing (but I didn't call it that) and easily incorporating video.

Dave Snowden spoke a couple of times during the conference starting with the conference keynote. The idea that got me interested was the concept that it's not that useful to think of tacit knowledge as something that's in your head but that it's contained throughout your body. I was sort of expecting Dave to go the next step and say that tacit knowledge extends beyond your self and incorporates tacit knowledge of those people and things you are connected to or surrounded by. It reminds me of the network controller who couldn't remember what he knew in his lounge room or that classic of anthropology, Cognition in the Wild where each navigator alone was unable to explain or dock an aircraft carrier, but together they could.

During the conference I heard a some speakers recount the meme, "we learn best from failure." I'm not sure this is entirely true. Anecdotally I remember distantly when I read about the Ritz Carlton approach to conveying values using stories and I'm now delivering a similar approach to a client on the topic of innovation. Here I've learned from a good practice. As Bob Dickman once told me, "you remember what you feel." I can imagine memory being a key first step to learning. And some research shows it's more complex than just learning from failure. Take this example. The researchers take two groups who have never done ten pin bowling and get them bowling for a couple of hours. Then one group is taken aside and coached on what they were doing wrong and how they could improve. The other group merely watches an edited video of what they were doing right. The second group did better than the first. However there was no difference with experienced groups.

So I'm hoping we will have many more presentations at KM conferences like Frank's and Dale's which open up the possibilities, speak plainly and directly without jargon and doublespeak.

Thanks to the conference organisers, Ark Group, and especially Valerie and Aimee, for being attentive and putting into practice the ideas for improvements year in year out. It was a worthwhile and enjoyable event.

I discovered this video today which lists 10 questions to help you decide whether a viewpoint, opinion, theory is worth taking on board and believing. Here are the questions that will help you detect bullshit (actually they called it the baloney detector kit but no one says baloney in Australia). Write them down and take them to conferences and see how the speakers fair—ask questions and if you don't really understand what they are saying, pull them up and ask them to say it simply. It's harder to convey your ideas simply than to use jargon. Don't let them baffle you with bullshit.

1. How reliable is the source of the claim?
2. Does the source make similar claims? (eg. if you are into magic (or evolution), then all your ideas have a magic (or evolution) bent)
3. Have the claims been verified by somebody else?
4. Does this fit with the way the world works?
5. Has anyone tried to disprove the claim?
6. Where does the preponderance of evidence point?
7. Is the claimant playing by the rules of science
8. Is the claimant providing positive evidence? (it's too easy to just bag the other side)
9. Does the new theory account for as many phenomena as the old theory?
10. Are personal beliefs driving the claim?

There are lots of good comments on my post, The importance of deliberate practice and I was prompted to write this one based on Tony Karrer's observation that many people are thrust into jobs where they must get up to speed quickly. Tony was wondering whether deliberate practice makes sense in these cases. Do we have time to be experts?

The principles of deliberate practice make sense in any situation. It is just a matter of degree. If deliberate practice is an ongoing and designed set of activities where you apply your skill in a domain of expertise, such as storytelling, then reflect on your efforts, get feedback (coach, peers, yourself), modify your practice based on this reflection, then do it again, and again and again then this process is similar to Kolb's experiential learning cycle and we know it works when we are trying to improve our ability to do things well. I've emphasised the doing because deliberate practice is all about doing rather than merely being able to answer questions. Much of our vital knowledge can't be written down and we build this intuitive know-how through reflective experience (without the reflection you are condemned to repeating the past). While social networks are great for the quick answer it doesn't help you with the class of question that only experience can provide (unless of course you convince the expert to get involved in doing the project with you), such what is the best design for a circuit board? how should I emphasise aspects of this CAD design so the fitters will know what to do? How should I lead my team?

It's true that it's harder to be the most outstanding expert. Stephen Jay Gould has written on this topic using baseball statistics and shows that the normal distribution of batter performance has changed shape since Babe Ruth's time. In his day the tails at both ends were long: there were many good batters and quite a few bad ones. But with professionalism the distribution has been squashed shortening the tails and making the centre hold most of the players. It's hard to be the very best. But who cares about being the very best. We just need to be bloody good and to be that requires practice.

To put the effort in to be bloody good requires time and dedication. Consequently we need to pick our desired expertise carefully. Here are some things to consider:

• do you love the skill that much that it doesn't seem like work to you?
• is it a skill you can use in any job?
• will people value and recognise your expertise and therefore motivate your ongoing efforts?
• can practice feel like play? If so then there is much more chance you will keep practising.

We will always need content experts. Your social network should help you connect to these valuable folk. What will also need are people who can thrive in complexity and the skills we'll need to deliberately practice will include designing, leading, managing, innovating, storytelling, strategizing, implementing, sensemaking, and engaging (I'm sure you can think of others). These skills will be helpful in any job and so feel free to dedicate 10,000+ hours to any one of them and know you haven't wasted your time.

It took me a little while to work out what was happening. I snapped my first photo of the motor scooter with clip board attached in Soho but I only got a fleeting glance and then he was gone.

But my next sighting was far more informative. This time the motorcyclist was parked so I asked about the clipboard and what he was doing. It turned out he was learning to become a London taxi driver; he was learning was they call, "the knowledge."

It takes between 2 and 4 years to learn the 320 routes (they call them runs) required to pass the tests. The student is given 20 runs at a time to memorise and they ride their scooters along the routes remembering the vagaries of one-way streets and where the traffic jams happen, as well as the notable sights a tourist might want to see. The guy I was chatting to said the first 20 runs seem like a jumble but when you learn the next set of 20 patterns begin to emerge as one run partially coincides with another.

I've just finished reading Geoff Colvin's book, Talent is Overrated. His central theme (which I believe is shared by Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, which I haven't read yet), is that high performers are not merely naturally talented (and perhaps talent has little to do with it), but they also engage in deliberate practice. That is, they design and perform a program of activities focussed on developing specific skills. For these future black cabbies they were deliberately developing their navigation skills in the pursuit of passing a test and at the same time actually enlarging part of their brain.

In Colvin's book I was taken with the story of how Benjamin Franklin developed himself a program for improving his writing skills.

This has got me thinking about what would a program of deliberate practice for developing your storytelling skills look like. Any suggestions?

Three weeks ago I arrived in London for a couple of weeks work and a couple weeks holiday. One of my must-see destinations was the water pump in Broadwick Street, Soho, which was the main contamination source for the 1854 cholera outbreak (my family think I'm crazy). This pump is also the star attraction on John Snow's famous map showing the geographic distribution of deaths from the cholera outbreak and is one of the earliest example of epidemiology (in case you were wondering, I studied geography at uni). So imagine my surprise when I arrived at the pump to find it was also a community of practice meeting spot for Soho cycle couriers.

I wandered about the pump for a while taking photos (to the cyclists' amusement) and listened to their conversation, which of course consisted of telling stories of what happened in the morning and over the week. Nothing written down, no social software, just oral storytelling.

Finding or creating these places for community in organisations is an important step is supporting communities of practice. Ideally they should be somewhere you can eat, chat informally and know that when you arrive, there will be other people just like you to share your stories with.

You might be thinking, but what if my organisation is distributed and we can't get everyone in one place? Well, do what the London taxi drivers do, form clusters across the network to tell your stories. Here's a photo of one group of taxi drivers who meet on Russell Square (there is a little group of them behind the silver taxi).

To link across the small groupings the taxi drivers use technology: blogs, newspapers, websites, radio.

Meeting in small clusters for oral storytelling and linking across these clusters for wider knowledge sharing might be a useful pattern to adopt in organisations.

The technology we use changes the way we organise and the way we organise effects the technologies we use. This hand-in-glove interaction is called co-evolution. Take the example of the invention of the spinning frame during the industrial revolution of the 18th century. The spinning frame made possible large scale cloth production and created the need for factories, which in turn affected how water and steam were used to drive machinery in those factories.¹

Are we seeing a similar co-evolution between information dissemination technology and how knowledge programs are organised? The two killer apps for the PC have been the word processor and the spreadsheet. With these two tools we were able to create documents. Consequently many knowledge sharing initiatives focus on creating and sharing documents. This limited us to sharing what we could write down.

YouTube started in 2005 (here is the first video uploaded to the site). It’s a site for sharing videos. Now that it's easy to share videos more companies are building this form of information dissemination into its knowledge sharing programs. The interesting thing is that the tool changes the type of knowledge shared. It seems to me that videos encourage us to share practices and tell a story of what happened or how to do something. This type of knowledge helps us share values, principles and lessons in a more compact and digestible way. Sure, documents can be used to do that too but that wasn’t the default use and it took so much effort.

As we witness the rise of the video we'll need to develop other skills to make the most of it. Most importantly, you guessed it, video creators will need to be adept at finding and telling stories. Just as we learned the language of documents (structure, headings, font sizes, margins, footnotes etc.) we will need to learn the language of video. And that language will partly involve characters, events, action, time and place.

1. Beinhocker, E. D. (2006). The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics. Boston, Harvard Business School Press.

A couple of week ago a 28 year old naval engineer delivered his baby son based on watching some DIY YouTube videos. When I heard this news I realised that the DIY video's time had come and it wouldn't be too long before we see its wide adoption in organisations.

I've been a long-time user of screencasting technology such as ScreenFlow as a way of recording how to do things on your computer. As an example here is a 3 minute guide on how to establish a cash flow schedule in Salesforce.com.

How to establish a schedule in Salesforce from Shawn Callahan on Vimeo.

Notice how I've preceded the instructions with a story that conveys why it's important to go through these steps.

Technology can be your best friend or your worst enemy. The two technologies I've managed to turn back into friendly allies are email and Twitter. Until recently I had my email and Twitter open all day. As a result I was being interrupted (and quite frankly would interrupt myself) checking email and Twitter and posting messages. My productivity was going down the toilet.

I think it's useful to have an analogy to explain how to use a technology. I think of Twitter as like my virtual tea room or cafe. It's the place I go to hear the chatter about what's happening. I will tend to sit down with some friends (using Tweetdeck) while also looking forward to meeting someone new. I'll share some ideas and resources and ask people for their help, experiences and opinions.

The problem was that I was in cafe (socializing) mode all day long when I should have enjoyed this social space like I use to when I worked in an organisation, at 10.30am and 3.30pm.

So my new regime has been to only participate in Twitter at 10.30 and 3.30 (for about 30 minutes at a time) and in times when I've decided I'm going to just have some fun (evenings, weekends). This doesn't mean that I'm going full pelt at Twitter in each session. It just means I have a read and participate during these times.

And the same rule applies to email with one variation. I'll send emails and read emails throughout the day as part of getting things done, but I wont retrieve new emails except at 10.30 and 3.30.

As a result of this new approach to productivity I spend more time in my task manager (OmniFocus) picking off the next task and knocking it off.

My colleague Hugh Bathurst is currently working for an engineering firm helping one of the divisions develop a knowledge sharing culture. Hugh has been collecting stories, eliciting how things get done and encouraging peope to contribute to developing of a range of knowledge resources.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of meeting the manager who's sponsoring this initiative. His division is leading the firm financially and he puts their success largely down to the knowledge sharing initiatives, especially their ability to transform their culture over the last 18 months. So I asked him, "what behaviours do you see now that weren't there when you started?"

I find this question really gets people thinking because in many cases managers don't think about culture in terms of behaviours. "Hmmm, I think people spend more time moving about the floor and having conversations," he said first. "But now I think of it, there are two things that have made the biggest difference. We call one of them Active Introductions. It's where I accompany Hugh when we first introduce a new person to our knowledge sharing initiatives. I sit next to Hugh as he explains the program to show that knowledge sharing is important. After about 5 minutes, when I see they are getting it, I say I'll leave you guys to work through the details and I head off."

"The second thing we do is to identify what we call Beacons. These are the people who really get into knowledge sharing. They are like a bright light. We make sure the beacons are spread across the floor so they shine on as many people as possible and we keep their energy up by heaping praise on their good work."

In the second half of 2007, Anecdote worked with the Knowledge for Regional Natural Resource Management (K4RNRM) project in Land & Water Australia (LWA) to develop a methodology for the 56 NRM bodies in Australia to develop knowledge and information strategies. The output is documented in the Regional Knowledge Resource Kit (RKRK), a wiki that is now being used and maintained by practitioners from the regional NRM bodies. Much of the methodology is licensed from Anecdote based on our experience in developing knowledge strategies.

The idea behind the RKRK is that regional NRM bodies can use it to develop their own knowledge strategies. Some initial training is provided to the staff that help facilitate the process in each region, otherwise it is pretty self explanatory.

The RKRK has proven extremely successful, with many of the regional bodies having completed their knowledge strategies. The most recent news is that funding has been provided by the South Australian government for the eight regional bodies in South Australia to develop strategies using the RKRK process.

We think this is a pretty good example of public and private sector collaboration and are proud to have been part of this great initiative. We are in the process of updating the RKRK to ensure it reflects current practice. For any RKRK users from the NRM regions, we would love to get any feedback on RKRK usability and ideas for improvement (mark@anecdote.com.au).

A while back I created a sketchcast of how I explain the Cynefin Framework and it became a popular sketch. Unfortunately Sketchcast went out of business and I lost my sketch so last night I recreated it and popped it up on YouTube.

For years the field of neuroscience, much like the field of management, has been held back by a metaphor: the brain is a computer (machine) with each part playing a specific role. If one part of the machine (your brain) is destroyed it's impossible to fix. The Brain That Changes Itself (by Norman Doige) is the remarkable story of how a handful of pioneering neuroscientists challenged and eventually overturned the machine metaphor and clearly showed how the that brain is changeable throughout your life.

One of the featured scientists is Michael Merzenich. He obviously has an entrepreneurial flair because he's started a couple of businesses to apply his research findings. A recent business venture is called Posit Science which focusses on helping elderly people improve and maintain their brain function. And by elderly Merzenich points out that by the time we get to our 40s we have established a pattern of doing things to the point that are thinking is automatic. This autopilot ossifies our brain connections and new ones are less likely to form. To keep our brains nimble we need to keep learning. Apparently crosswords don't do too much for our brains, so forget that as a strategy.

Here are 7 things you can do today to keep your brain in tip top fitness. There are a part of a list of 14 provided on the Posit Science site. Follow the links to find the reasoning for each suggestion.

1. Visit a museum. Take a guided tour. Listen carefully to what the guide said and when you get home recall what you learned
2. Memorise a song. Pick a song you don't know. Listen to it enough times to get all the lyrics down. Then learn the song off by heart. Sing it to some friends.
3. Learn to play a new instrument. Maybe it's a good time for me to take up the harmonica.
4. Do a jigsaw puzzle. At least 500 pieces.
5. Step it up a notch. Take something you do regularly and increase the level of difficulty. Yachtmen are now getting their yachts towed to speed far greater than winds will take then so they can speed up their reactions to better cope with normal conditions.
6. Turn down your TV. Turn down the volume to a point you have to concentrate to hear it. When you can keep track turn it down again.
7. Eat dark chocolate. This one is for your Nancy White (also known as choconancy)

Yesterday I spend the day with 40+ other TED enthusiasts at Monash Uni watching and discussing TED videos. We believe it was the first independent TED event in the world. Lot's of interesting people there including presentation guru, Les Posen, who has just returned from MacWorld after giving a two-day workshop on a cognitive perspective on using Keynote, and Stuart French, who told a gruesome story of murder in his backyard. There was also my new Jelly co-working colleagues Susan, Pieter, Sjors and Jason. Sjors had a big hand in organising the event. Great job!

Most of the day was spent watching the videos and chatting about them in small and large groups. It was great for sparking new ideas. There was one live speaker, Dr Ninian Peckitt, who told us about how he rebuilds people's faces using manufactured implants made from titanium. This talk was fascinating if not a little gruesome. Not for the faint hearted. Amazingly there are strong political forces against manufactured implants because they are less expensive and surgeons don't make as much income from using them. Major face surgery that would normally cost $80,000 can be done for $40,000 using Ninian's approach.

Here are the videos we watched:

• Do schools kill creativity by Ken Robinson
• Why are we happy? Why aren't we happy? by Dan Gilbert
• My stroke of insight by Jill Bolte Taylor
• How ordinary people become monsters ... or heroes by Philip Zimbardo
• A 3-minute story of mixed emoticons by Rives
• Our priorities for saving the world by Bjorn Lomborg
• The art of collecting stories by Jonathan Harris
• Sliced bread and other marketing delights by Seth Godin
• The mystery box by JJ Abrams
• Why we age and how we can avoid it? by Aubrey de Grey

The video that had the most impact for me was Phil Zimbardo's talk about the Stanford Prison experiment. In particular I liked the point that more often than not it's not the bad apple that's the problem, it's the bad barrel. This got me thinking about why we often go after the bad apple. Perhaps it's because our major sensemaking device is our ability to tell ourselves stories and the most compelling stories are about individuals. At lunch Jason made the point that perhaps groups are represented in stories by archetypes or gods so that the story remains compelling. This idea has lots of ramifications for blame, scapegoats, performance appraisals etc.

Just a word of warning on the Zimbardo video. It contains many pictures of the Abu Ghraib tragedy, which are shocking.

Next year I will be giving a couple of presentations at the Ark Group's conference, KM for the Experienced Practitioner. It will be in my home town of Melbourne and I'm looking forward to catching up with everyone.

On the first day of the conference, at 2pm, I'll describe one of our business narrative projects from this year that was all about engaging staff in a change process to improve client service and strategic alignment. Then at 4pm I will be running a skills development session on three story-based skills for visioning, instilling values and establishing rapport.

The folks at Ark have offered Anecdote blog readers a 20% discount on the conference. Just quote "AG-SC" when registering.

Remembering experiences is heavily dependent on surroundings. I’m currently helping an energy company learn the lessons from retiring employees. I’m videoing their experiences with the view to facilitating sessions using the footage; it’s not really about capturing knowledge, just sparking new conversation based on what’s captured. My last subject was the company’s network controller. He’d been in the role for 10 years and I interviewed him in his office, which was right next to the control room. The control room looks like a mini version of the one from the movie The China Syndrome. His office has a window looking into the control room and it is festooned with charts and whiteboard diagrams. Everywhere you look are computer screens. He has a large table in the middle of his office, which has been the site of many disaster response war rooms. He was brimming with stories.

The network controller was retiring two weeks after my interview and I asked whether I could interview him again at his home. He was happy to help. A month later we met in his lounge room and the response was noticeably different. The stories weren’t as rich. It was harder for him to recall the events. The surroundings didn’t contain the memories and prompters to help him remember what he knew. Surroundings make a big difference to what people can recall.

This pattern repeated itself yesterday, but in a positive way. I had lunch with Patrick Lambe in Singapore and after dim sum (and a durian fruit dessert) we jumped in a cab and visited one of Singapore's best book stores, Kinokuniya. We wandered around the store chatting and the book covers that grabbed our attention sparked new threads in our conversation. Really enjoyable albeit an expensive outing. Here are the books I bought:

Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science

Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance

Einstein's Mistakes: The Human Failings of Genius

The actKM conference was held in Canberra in mid October. One of the presenters was Jane Chrystal from the Central West Catchment Management Authority who were one of the pilot sites for the Regional Knowledge Resource Kit (RKRK) project. The RKRK project developed a process and supporting resources for the various Natural Resource Management regions to develop their own knowledge strategies.

Jane mentioned that one of the actions from their knowledge strategy has had a big impact. This simple action was for all staff to write a clear description in the subject line of their emails. Adopting this practice has helped staff deal with information overload by being able to quickly identify emails that they need to deal with, and which ones can be simply deleted. I recall when we were working with Jane and her team that another 'small' initiative was to encourage people to travel together as much as possible when driving around the region - the idea being that car trips are an ideal time to have conversations, build relationships and share knowledge.

Congratulations to Nerida Hart and the Knowledge for Regional NRM team from Land & Water Australia on receiving the actKM Platinum Award for their achievements in developing the RKRK and related activities. Anecdote is proud to have had a major role in supporting the RKRK project and we really enjoyed working with Nerida and her team on this project.

MLA stands for Museums and Libraries Association and my friend Victoria Ward has recently finished a tremendous project using narrative techniques to help MLA London understand and enhance the way in which Museums and Libraries are used in London. The bonanza for narrative and knowledge practitioners is that the MLA and Sparknow (Victoria's company) have shared their findings, method and initial pilot descriptions for everyone to download.

I'm reading John Medina's Brain Rules and thoroughly enjoying it. Here's a snippet illustrating his humorous style while making an important point.

Any learning environment that deals with only the database instincts [our ability to memorise things] or only the improvisatory instincts [our ability to imagine things] ignores one half of our ability. It is doomed to fail. It makes me think of jazz guitarists: They're not going to make it if they know a lot about music theory but don't know how to jam in a live concert. Some schools and workplaces emphasize a stable, rote-learning database. They ignore the the improvisatory instincts drilled unto us for millions of years. Creativity suffers. Others emphasize usage of a database, without installing a fund of knowledge in the first place. They ignore our need to obtain deep understanding of a subject, which includes memorizing and storing a richly structured database. You get people who are great improvisers but don't have depth of knowledge. You may know someone like this where you work. They may look like jazz musicians and have the appearance of jamming, but in the end they know nothing. They're playing intellectual air guitar.

Apart from a great last sentence, this paragraph is a warning against the pendulum swinging between rote and improvisation. I suspect we are at the impro end at the moment and at risk of being guitar heros.

A few posts ago I described one of the reasons why stories are memorable: they evoke emotion.

But stories are also memoriable because they create a framework for us to hang ideas, facts and concepts from.

Thanks to Daryl Cook and the magic of delicious I read this post on how to use storytelling to remember your what you have just learned in a lecture.

• After each class, tell a “story” about the material covered—a five minute summary of the concepts that drove the lecture.
• Don’t bother writing it down. Instead, just say it to yourself while walking to your next class. Treat it like you’re a literary agent or movie producer pitching the lecture at an important meeting.
• Cover the big picture flow of ideas, not the small details. Answer the question “why was this lecture important?”, not all the information it contained. Play up the flashy or unexpected.

Read the rest of Cal's post for good examples and the full reasoning.

This is also relevant for those of us in the workplace who attend conferences, seminars or just have to bone up on a new topic for, say, a new job.

The story goes that Bluma Zeigarnik was sitting in a cafe in Vienna (as all good psychologists do) and noticed that the waiters were able to remember long and complicated orders up to the point where the orders were delivered to the table and placed in front of the correct patron. After this point the order was completely forgotten. This simple observation triggered a series of experiments where Bluma found that if something is left incomplete it creates a psychic tension which makes a person more mindful and open to learning. It's now called the Zeigarnik Effect. Or perhaps more simply, suspense.

I heard a story-based example of the Zeigarnik effect this week. A presenter started their talk with a story and stopped just as it was getting interesting, creating psychic tension and probably some considerable annoyance. He then proceeded with the rest of his talk and completed the story at the end of the presentation. People were on the edge of their seats throughout I'm told. I've gotta give this a go.

This effect reminds me that you can use this desire for completion in other ways:

If you want to come up with a list of ideas write, "There are five things to consider:" and jot down 5 dots points (just the dots) and you will be surprised how easy it is to come up with the 5 ideas.

Thanks to Jay Cross for introducing me to this phenomenon.

Last week I ran a half day workshop to get a group thinking about their knowledge strategy. We got into a conversation about what things constrain knowledge-related practices such as peer assists, after action reviews, decision games etc., and one of the participants hit the nail on the head, "we have our real work and then everything else is an add on."

So if knowledge practices are not defined as 'real work' then you will face an uphill battle.

How might you turn things around? Here's an approach using Patterson et al's Influencer model.

Identify the vital behaviours you want to encourage. Search for these behaviours by seeking out people and groups who are already great at incorporating knowledge-related practices and observe them, collect stories about how they get things done. Compare these observations with groups who are poor at implementing knowledge-related behaviours.

A vital behaviour might be: Managers ask how the after action review went and what was learned from the process.

So now you need to encourage this behaviour (and probably 2 or 3 others, not 8 or 10 others). The Influencer model suggests 6 sources of influence to draw on. There are two basic questions that must be answered in the positive for someone to change: Is it worth it? and Can I do it? These two questions are reflected in the two columns in this diagram, motivation and ability.

1. Make the undesirable desirable. This is all about tapping into people's intrinsic motivators. For example, in this case you might focus on what it means to be a professional and the upmost importance of learning.

2. Surpass your limits. You can't expect people to adopt new practices without building new skills. This source of influence is about helping people build their abilities. It's about giving opportunities to try things out, engage in deliberate practice and obtain fast and effective feedback.

3. Harness peer pressure. If people you respect are doing it then it's more likely you will do it. Find the opinion leaders and get them on board first. The rest will follow.

4. Find strength in numbers. Actively build your social networks so you can tap into them when needed.

5. Design rewards and demand accountability. Use rewards carefully and only after the other sources of influence have been exercised. Link the extrinsic rewards to the vital behaviours rather than outcomes.

6. Change the environment. Physical spaces affect the way we work. Give people visual cues, create places to work, use the physical environment to reinforce the behaviours you desire.

The best way to learn a practical skill is to receive immediate, helpful feedback while you are performing the task. I was reminded of this fact this morning at our junior basketball competition. Next to each referee was an apprentice referee in a green shirt, whistle in mouth ready to make the call. They get six weeks of working with an experienced ref but only get their stripes when they can demonstrate their ability to confidently and accurately blow their whistle and do what a ref needs to do.

So why don't we employ a similar approach in the workplace? Managing staff, conducting performance reviews, facilitating sales meetings, leading teams, co-ordinating communities of practice, and I'm sure you can think of a heap of others, are practical skills you need to learn which you just can't read from a book.

I suspect workplace cultures make these types of apprenticeship initiatives embarrassing. "I've been employed to do this job and I can't let anyone know I have a lot to learn. Plus I don't want to bother anyone else." Organisations that make an apprenticeship approach just part of the norm are going reap the rewards.

Garr Reynolds is the presentation guru and he's developed a series of book reviews done in an engaging and informative way using, you guessed it, presentations (search slideshare for Garr's presentations). Here's one on, Brain Rules.

Over at the Bumble Bee, Ken Thompson provides an excerpt of Ori Brafman forthcoming book, Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior.

It's a terrific tale of how a very rational airline pilot can act irrationally under pressure.

A growing body of research reveals that our behaviour and decision making are influenced by an array of such psychological undercurrents and that they are much more powerful and pervasive than most of us realise. The interesting thing about these forces is that, like streams, they converge to become even more powerful. As we follow these streams, we notice unlikely connections among events that lie along their banks: the actions of an investor help us to better understand presidential decision making; students buying theatre tickets illuminate a bitter controversy in the archaeological community over human evolution; NBA draft picks point to a fatal flaw in common job-interview procedures; women talking on the phone show why a shaky bridge can be a powerful aphrodisiac.

Charting these psychological undercurrents and their unexpected effects, we can see where the currents are strongest and how their dynamics help us understand some of the most perplexing human mysteries. These hidden currents and forces include loss aversion (our tendency to go to great lengths to avoid possible losses), value attribution (our inclination to imbue a person or thing with certain qualities based on initial perceived value), and the diagnosis bias (our blindness to all evidence that contradicts our initial assessment of a person or situation). When we understand how these and a host of other mysterious forces operate, one thing becomes certain: whether we're a head of state or a college football coach, a love-struck student or a venture capitalist, we're all susceptible to the irresistible pull of irrational behavior. And as we gain insight about irrational motives that affect our work and personal lives, fascinating patterns emerge, connecting seemingly unrelated events.

The building in the left foreground of the image is the historic Hyde Park Barracks Museum in Sydney. The building at the back behind the tree is an extension to the equally historic NSW Lands Department building (right of shot). Apparently there was great care taken and no expense spared to ensure that the brickwork of the extension was an exact match for the brickwork on the Hyde Park Barracks building. "Not very successful" I hear you cry! The story goes that after the extension was completed some bright spark decided to steam clean the brickwork on Hyde Park Barracks, revealing the true colour of the brickwork and leaving the unsightly mismatch shown in the photo.

"Not that old chestnut" I hear you cry.

We have written a whitepaper on this subject and blogged on it a few times. It keeps the KM list serves across the planet pre-occupied for a few months each year.

I recently had coffee with a client to get an update on the implementation of the knowledge strategy we did for them a while back. The client described good progress in many areas but highlighted one of the things holding them back was the continuing confusion/uncertainty about the difference between information management and knowledge management. This was despite an extensive education campaign to get a consistent 'language' in place across the organisation on order to minimise the roadblocks to implementation.

This reinforced to me that we should just stop 'pushing the proverbial up a hill' on this one. My suggestion to the client was to stop talking about knowledge management. It is much easier to grasp concepts like 'better information management' on the one hand, and 'improved collaboration and learning' on the other. This conception makes it much clearer that there is a big 'people' and 'process/practice' component to the task.

Knowledge strategy = Information Management + [Collaboration and Learning]

Robert Cialdini discovered a secret to learning in 2005. As a world-leading psychologist he was surprised he didn’t already know this secret but now swears by it. He was researching a new psychology book he wanted to write for a general audience and wanted to know the characteristics of effective science writing for an informed public readership. Most of his review confirmed what he already knew: must have a clear and focussed point, well written, concrete examples. The big surprise for Robert was that the best examples where written in the format of a mystery story.

Robert’s laboratory is his classroom so he tried out the approach there. A typical lecture, before using the mystery story format, would end with his students starting to pack up five minutes before the lecture’s scheduled finishing time. When he presented the same information as a mystery story, and he was yet to reveal the who’d dunnit, the students remained totally engaged and didn’t move, even after the lecture was supposed to have finished. It was like magic.

So here is the structure Cialdini discovered in his review and then wrote up in volume 24 of the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology.

• Pose the mystery
• Deepen the mystery
• Home in on the proper explanation by considering (and offering evidence against) alternative explanations
• Provide a clue to the proper explanation
• Resolve the mystery
• Draw the implications for the phenomenon under study

To test this out I wrote a blog post using the mystery format called ‘What is happening to Melbourne's trains?’ I would be grateful to receive your feedback. Just leave comments on the blog post.

Cialdini, R. B. (2005). “What’s The Best Secret Device for Engaging Student Interest? The Answer Is In The Title.” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 24(1): 22-29.

John Caddell has an interesting project he's just started called The Mistake Bank. It's a place to tell stories of some of your biggest stuff ups with the idea we learn best from our mistakes.

"We have to consider people, process and technology." It's a phrase I hear quite often, especially among IT folk. Sometimes they say, "people, process, technology and content." These are the things to consider when implementing a system. There are a myriad of variations. Yesterday I was told by an experienced consultant that they always consider policy when thinking about process. "People, process and technology" has entered our business thinking much like proverbs such as "a stitch in time saves nine." They create the framework for our thinking and both guide and constrain our actions.

I'd like to focus on the Process element of this business proverb and would like to suggest that this word creates a limited and inadequate response when thinking about what happens to make a system work. The word 'process' suggests all those things you can describe and write down, especially using boxes and arrows. Yet we know professional practice and even expert craft is required to get things done. So here is my suggestion. When we use the PPT (all business proverbs should have an acronym—my little joke) let's expand 'Process' and include Practice and Craft. Here is a short-hand way of thinking about it.

• Process is what you are told to do
• Practice is what everyone does
• Craft is striving for utmost quality with years of experience under your belt

And the ways to understand these three modes also differs but it's hard to categorise except to say that many processes can be analysed, many practices can be observed and illustrated with stories and craft can be observed, experienced and appreciated but takes years to learn.

I'm certain better systems will emerge if we take this wider view of process.

I am reading The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I enjoyed his description of how history is extremely opaque; how "you see what comes out, not the script that produces events." He describes three ailments the human mind suffers when it comes into contact with history (he calls them the 'triplet of opacity'):

• The Illusion of Understanding. This relates to the pathology of thinking that the world we live in is more understandable, more explainable and therefore more predictable than it actually is. It also relates to our tendency to reflect and conclude that events had a specific cause and that events could have been averted by removing that specific cause.
• Retrospective Distortion. How we assess matters after the fact, as if they were in a rearview mirror. Taleb describes his impression that our minds are wonderful explanation machines, capable of making sense out of anything, capable of mounting explanations for all sorts of phenomena and generally incapable of accepting the idea of unpredictability. History and societies do not crawl. They make jumps. They go from fracture to fracture with few vibrations in between. Yet we believe in predictable, incremental progression. This is a slightly different take from Dave Snowden's description of 'retrospective coherence' where cause and effect in complex situations only becomes visible in hindsight.
• Overvaluation of Factual Information. Taleb also calls this 'the curse of learning', referring to the "handicap of authoritative and learned people, particularly when they create categories-when they "Platonify."" In many cases, particularly regarding complex issues, experts are no better at knowing what is going to happen than cab drivers. The difference is that the experts think they know better what is going to happen. Taleb also describes how gathering more and more facts, details and information doesn't help us predict what is going to happen.

Not surprisingly, we see these 'ailments' all the time. The trick is balancing our tendency to 'Platonify' with the need to make sense and become aware of the inherent unpredictability of our organisational environments. A bit more inquiry and listening, a little less arrogance (believing we know best). Continuing to see good data..and supplementing it with the willingness to try things and see what happens.

I've just started to read Otto Scharmer's book, Theory U, and this passage grabbed my attention.

Twenty-three hundred years ago Aristotle. arguably the greatest pioneer and innovator of Western inquiry and thought, wrote on Book VI of his Nicomachean Ethics that there are five different ways, faculties, or capacities in the human soul to grasp the truth. Only one of them is science (episteme). Science (episteme), according to Aristotle, is limited to the things that cannot be otherwise than they are (in other words, things that are determined by necessity). By contrast, the other four ways and capacities of grasping the truth apply to all other contexts or reality and life. They are: art or producing (techne), practical wisdom (phronesis), theoretical wisdom (sophia), and intuition or the capacity to grasp first principles or sources (nous).

To date the primary focus has been on episteme and we are only beginning to see leaders valuing the other approaches in a systematic way.

As the co-ordinator of the SIKMLeaders community of practice, Stan Garfield asked the community members this question:

"If you were invited to give a keynote speech on knowledge management, what words of wisdom or lessons learned would you impart?"

Here's my answer.

All KM is change management
View every knowledge management initiative as a change initiative, which means helping the leadership group to imagine what it will be like when it's done and after imagining it, they want it. It also means getting the employees engaged in working out how it's going to work and then getting people to volunteer to work on it. It will also involve a recognition that most KM initiatives are affected by culture (actually, what isn't) and culture is never completed, done, ticked off the list of things to do. Consequently, a continuous improvement approach is needed.

Link to what matters
Make sure that the the most powerful people in the organisation understand and believe the answer to, "so what?" Always link the KM initiative to what people care about. Mostly that's the business strategy but there have been times when I've worked with organisations without a clear business strategy, so a linkage there wasn't going to help. Find out what matters and if the KM initiatives doesn't make a difference, dump it rather than try and make it fit. A poor fitting KM initiative will eventually unravel anyway so it's better to dump it early than to forced to dump it when heaps of resources have been spent and it's barely limping along.

Collect stories early and often
It's often hard to quantify the value of KM initiatives. So whenever you hear a real live experience, no matter how small, take a note of what happened and tell others. We're helping an engineering firm start a community of practice for its draftspeople. At the first teleconference a woman in Newcastle recounted how she was creating a library of screws for a particular type of aircraft. A fellow in Adelaide piped up saying they already have a library of screws and it also includes auto-placement. You could hear the excitement in the woman's voice on hearing this work had already been done, "and it even has auto-placement." The couple joined forces and updated the library and made it available to the whole community.
This is a small story but one senior leadership heard from the very beginning of the community's development and they could retell to other leaders in the company while finishing their anecdote with, "and this is just one thing the community is doing." While the business benefits must be articulated, the stories gave the community time to establish themselves.

After listening to a podcast recently -- an interesting conversation between Dave Pollard and Chris Corrigan -- I am now even more convinced of the importance that we know HOW to learn. (To be honest I probably didn't need all that much convincing!).

This skill will be so important in the future due to the exponential growth of information and the sheer volume of knowledge. We just don't have the capacity to absorb it all.

It's not particular knowledge you need, it's just the ability to know how to learn. Because we're not going to know what's going to be needed in the future. You need to be able to learn and adapt to new environments and new knowledge.

This reminds me of the story about a university professor went to visit a famous Zen master. While the master quietly served tea, the professor talked about wanting to learn Zen. The master poured the visitor's cup to the brim, and then kept pouring. The professor watched the overflowing cup until he could no longer restrain himself. "It's overfill! No more will go in!" the professor blurted. "You are like this cup," said the master.

The ability to be open -- to first unlearn what we already know to allow us to accept new knowledge is perhaps the first step. What other competencies or skills are required to learn how to learn?

Chris Collison is pondering the usefulness of the Kolb learning cycle as the basis for many of the lessons learning activities organisations conduct. I agree with Chris' observation that most organisations don't build in reflection and therefore are unable to reformulate what they have learned to change behaviour. And like Chris I'm not sure of the effectiveness of write-ups to achieve this last point. In fact I think we create our abstract conceptualisations (Kolb's language) by telling ourselves and others a story of what happen. Ironically the abstract comes from the specific of a story. Something like this happened to me just last week.

I got a friendly email from someone who has been a long-time subscriber to our newsletter. After mentioning that she had gained many useful tips and ideas from it she went on to say that she had only just realised we provided consulting services. I was nearly knocked off my chair—were we that poor at telling people what we do?. So I rang Mark and told him the story. He was gobsmacked. We obviously weren't letting people know in our newsletter we provided consulting services. What shall we do? Our first idea was to put a line at the top of our newsletter that said, in effect, 'we provide consulting services.' Actually we wordsmithed it a bit more than that. Then I called up our graphic designer, Kerenza, and told her the story and shared our plan for the oneliner. 'Ahhrg, that oneliner is awful,' she said. 'Before you were sending useful tips and information to me, now you are selling to me.' It was immediately clear that the one-liner approach was wrong and Kerenza and I came up with a new way forward.

So on reflection it was the story of the original email, told a number of times to different people that created new conversations that helped me learn about our brand, how we communicate to our newsletter subscribers and how we keep what we do authentic, fun and useful. And it changed my behaviour. To me, that's learning.

[thanks to Patrick Lambe for putting me on to Chris' post]

Another find from the filing cabinet clean up. This time an anecdote from Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn.

This story was recorded by Brand from the anthropologist Gregory Bateson.

New College, Oxford, is of rather late foundation, hence the name. It was founded around the late 14th century. It has, like other colleges, a great dining hall with big oak beams across the top. These might be two feet square and forty-five feet long.

A century ago, so I am told, some busy entomologist went up into the roof of the dining hall with a penknife and poked at the beams and found that they were full of beetles. This was reported to the College Council, who met in some dismay, because they had no idea where they would get beams of that calibre nowadays.

One of the Junior Fellows stuck his neck out and suggested that there might be some oak on College lands. These colleges are endowed with pieces of land scattered across the country. So they called in the College Forester, who of course had not been near the college itself for some years, and asked about oaks. And he pulled his forelock and said, "Well sirs, we was wonderin' when you'd be askin'."

Upon further inquiry it was discovered that when the College was founded, a grove of oaks has been planted to replace the beams in the dining hall when they became beetly, because oak beams always become beetly in the end. This plan had been passed down from one Forester to the next for five hundred years. "You don't cut them oaks. Them's for the College Hall."

Yesterday I arrived home from a relaxing trip to Jervis Bay to enjoy Christmas with my family (sans computer). So today I couldn't help myself to have a peek at Google Reader to see what was happening on the blogosphere when I noticed my little post about knowledge work has raised the hackles of two friends, Dave Snowden and Matthew Hodgson.

So let me respond in the relax way I'm feeling at the moment without a point by point refutation because most of what they say is right on. The main problem we face in this dialogue is the limitation of the written word and what can be said in three paragraphs (my original post length). Imagine the terrific conversation we could have which, if we weren't in the mode of one-upmanship and scoring points, we could increase our pool of meaning (a phrase I've recently learnt from a fabulous book, Crucial Conversations). Sadly, the three of us rarely get the opportunity to sit and talk.

Matt says I miss the point about knowledge workers because the phrase is still useful for communication. Matt seems to saying there is something else that this phrase can be used for other than communication but in my book the term 'knowledge worker' can only be used to communicate and the communication is misleading. As soon as you say someone is a knowledge worker and someone is not you create a false dichotomy. It's easy to make the distinctions at the edges but try making them in the middle of the distribution and you find that you are making stuff up. Matt also says he knows what the term 'knowledge worker' means but at the same time wont tell us because a definition will be messy and do little to progress the objective of helping organisations make the most of people's knowledge.

Both Dave and Matt latched on to the point I made about technology and how it is becoming ubiquitous and even those jobs which Drucker might have excluded from 'knowledge worker' status are now being affected. This observation became even more apparent to me last year as I travelled around regional Australia talking to farmers, pastoralists, conversations and natural resource managers and it became clear that in our global economy everyone is forcing people to up-skill and use whatever technology available to gain or maintain a competitive edge. But technology is just one factor—a point I make in the original post but ignored by Matt and Dave. Increasing speed, increasing complexity, abundance of products and services, rampant consumerism and out-sourcing are just some of the other factors forcing everyone in the first world to be a knowledge worker.

Dave thinks I have fallen foul in three areas: The confusion of knowledge artifact use, with knowledge work; Failure to understand the impact of time & experience in knowledge capability; Ethical naiveté or the moral red herring. I'll dismiss the first two points because I can't believe Dave really things I don't understand these distinctions. It's the third point that requires a response while I know it's Dave's style to stir the pot but he also has the habit of muddying the waters with his own sophisticated arguments.

My position on knowledge work is actually a practical one, not one bound in idealism. If you avoid categorising your staff as 'knowledge workers' or 'not knowledge workers' you move to a more practical conversation about what knowledge our people use and how can we help them create, share and use it better (yes, I know this statement suggests that knowledge is a thing and ignores knowledge as a flow, but the wording gets quite difficult when you need to cover off on every statement). It's quite a useful approach Dave.

The conduit metaphor is a common way for people to imagine how information is passed from one person to another. This metaphor paints a picture of information passing as a message to a receiver and the receiver picks it up and pops it in their mind. I have even seen a keynote speech recently where the speaker made the additional point that the receiver needs to be pointing their antenna in the right direction to pick up the signal.

I have been aware for sometime that this metaphor is unreliable at best and I was recently reminded of this fact reading Steven Pinker's latest book, The Stuff of Thought.

Another misleading conceptual formula is the conduit metaphor, in which to know is to have something and to communicate is to send it in a package. Again, it has a kernel of truth; if information were never transmitted with some fidelity from mind to mind, knowledge could never accumulate in a society, and language itself would be useless. But cognitive science has repeatedly shown ways in which the metaphor falls short. ... language understanding is more than just extracting literal meaning, as George Costanza learned too late when he realized that coffee doesn't necessarily mean coffee [his girlfriend asks him up for coffee and he says no because it keeps him up at night]. And once a meaning is extracted and stored in memory, it does not sit there like a knickknack on a shelf; memory research confirms Twain's observation that people tend to remember things whether they happened or not. Traditional education was dominated by a version of the conduit metaphor sometimes called the savings-and-loans model: the teacher dispenses nuggets of information to the pupils, who try to retain them in their mind long enough to give them back on an exam.

But now I'm stumped. Is there a better metaphor or analogy for illustrating how we transfer our knowledge? Until we have one, the conduit metaphor will reign supreme and organisations will continue to waste money training staff by employing the expert to lecture students.

Some of the references Pinker makes include:

Blakemore, S. J., and U. Frith. The Learning Brain: Lessons for Education. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005.

Schacter, D. L. The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001.

I just read a great article over at the thestar.com about Nobel laureate Carl Wieman who wants professors to rethink how they teach.

His message? In a nutshell: reduce the load; stimulate the brain.

A lot of what he recommends is not just applicable to teaching science, it's also relevant to anyone who presents information to others or works with groups (meetings, presentations, workshops, training etc).

Basically, we need to up the interaction quotient folks!.

The term 'knowledge worker' is now a meaningless concept in developed countries because the shift Drucker started to notice in the '50s from jobs requiring manual work to jobs requiring knowledge work is now complete. Today all work is knowledge work because even the most manual of activities such as farmer digging post holes for a fence requires pre-planning using their spatial information system, the use of GPS to position the hole and entry of data when it's done. The ubiquity of technology is one major factor that makes everyone a knowledge worker.

Sadly, when we use the term 'knowledge worker' today we are often unfairly saying one type of job is superior that another. It's an dark undercurrent and tacitly becomes a basis for discrimination. "Our salespeople are knowledge workers but our gas fitters are not." I suspect this feeling of superiority comes from the erroneous data-information-knowledge model where knowledge (and even more ridiculously, wisdom) sits at the pinnacle of the pyramid. See here for an alternative model for thinking about data, information and knowledge.

Have you ever seen anyone in recent years define what they mean by knowledge workers and knowledge work? They tie themselves in knots and confuse their readers. The people who write about knowledge workers see themselves as a knowledge worker and wish so very hard that the term is true and useful. But alas it's not and the sooner we realise this the better so we can get back to asking more useful questions like, "How does knowledge help us to work better?"

I'm currently helping a client develop their knowledge strategy. We've decided to include knowledge sharing principles. I believe principles should be clear, unambiguous and emphatic and everyone should know whether they are adhering to the principles or not. More importantly the organisation should decide together what should happen when the principles are transgressed. Are there any biggies I've missed? I probably should keep it to 7 or so.

• We will share what we know with our colleagues.
• We will take time to help our colleagues learn
• We will encourage open and rigorous dialogue, discuss and exploring assumptions, and speak our mind respectfully.
• We shall see if what we are about to embark on has been done before rather than create things from scratch.
• We will borrow ideas shamelessly (with attribution) and not suffer the ‘not invented here’ syndrome.
• We will take time to learn from our successes and failures.
• We will promote cooperation, trust and active participation in project teams, task forces and networks.
• We shall actively look outside our discipline in search of ideas, concepts and approaches that can be adapted and applied to meet our goals.
• We will recognise others for their intellectual effort and willingly share the kudos.

I really enjoyed watching this video about the web challenging our most basic assumptions about 'finding' information.

Technorati Tags: findability

On 29-30 August, a USAF B-52 bomber mistakenly armed with six nuclear tipped cruise missiles, flew from Minot, North Dakota to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. The incident has sparked enormous media attention and it is the first time the US military has publicly commented on the whereabouts of nuclear weapons.

The Air Force deputy chief of staff for operations announced the results of a six-week inquiry into the incident yesterday, the results of which pretty much conclude that the procedures were correct but the personnel simply didn't follow them. The incident was evidently not a one-off: "there has been an erosion of adherence to weapons-handling standards." The airmen replaced the schedule with their own "informal" system, he said, though he didn't say why they did that nor how long they had been doing it their own way. Apparently, up to 70 people will be disciplined over the incident; a wing will be removed from wartime status and the base commander has been relieved of his command.

My 20 year career in the Australian Air Force, and consulting back to Defence since, makes me pretty familiar with the rigorous documentation of policy and procedure in the military.... and with the way these procedures are often used. I remember the mantra "policies are for the guidance of wise men and the blind obedience of fools" and how this was embedded into many of the stories told in the bar and on the flight line. What was also evident was the enormous amount of experience, knowledge and understanding of context that enabled the tailoring of procedures to be done effectively and with due regard to the circumstances. The 'people' bit was always much more important than the 'process' bit.

If we wanted a procedure to be followed precisely there was a lot of work up front ensuring the necessary understanding (knowledge, context) was provided and a lot of resources monitoring compliance. As the drive for military 'efficiency' bit in the late part of my career the extent to which the basics were done dropped dramatically. In the Australian Defence Force this was exemplified by the annual audit of Defence accounts being qualified (a very bad thing) for years on end due to a decade of neglecting the simple act of stocktaking. It was like the organisation just started to assume it would get done 'because everyone knows its important' and yet it behaved in a way that gave no indication that it was, in fact, important. Hmmm, sound familiar?

So, in the case of the recent 'nukes across the US' incident, I would love the opportunity to do some narrative-based research (probably using anecdote circles) to find out what was really going on. Of course, if the objective was to determine blame we would not get much better information than provided by an investigation. But if the objective was to understand the context and behaviors relating to the incident the insights could be incredibly valuable. And with something important (and I guess nuclear safety would fall in that category) we should be using the full range of investigative/evaluation approaches available to us rather than relying solely on traditional, linear ones based on the scientific method and focused on who was at fault.

One of the aims of a knowledge strategy is to design a set of activities to enhance an organisation’s knowledge environment. The knowledge environment includes all the factors, both within and outside an organisation, which might affect the creation, sharing and use of knowledge. The list of factors is potentially limitless but experience has shown that many of the important factors can be clumped together under 7 headings.

1. Support - what support does knowledge management have within the organisation? Do the executives believe it's valuable? Are resources set aside for knowledge management? Are roles established to support knowledge management initiatives? Is there a clear link between the business strategy and the knowledge strategy (better still, does the organisation have a knowledge focussed business strategy?)?

2. Technology - what technology is available to support the creation, sharing and use of knowledge? How well is this technology used? What technology should be introduced? Are the practices to use the technology well developed?

3. Organisation and people - How are people organised? What structures exists? What characterises the organisational culture? What types of people are employed? How much churn is there? Is knowledge management a recognised and desirable competency?

4. Routines, rituals and recognition - Are their processes and systems in place that regularly connect people, engage them in conversation and help share what people know? Is it normal to conduct after action reviews, peer assists and lesson learning sessions throughout the life of projects? Does the organisation celebrate good knowledge behaviours?

5. Information - Are information principles well known and followed? Is information well managed, findable, accessible and meaningful?

6. External - What drivers outside the organisation might affect how knowledge will be created, sourced, shared and used?

7. Spaces - How are people and workplaces arranged? Are there physical barriers to knowledge flow? Are their places to collaborate, think, focus and socialise?

Are there other questions you think should be asked?

We've been running a series of knowledge strategy projects for natural resource management regions across Australia. The activities culminate for each region in a two day workshop where participants design a set of projects and interventions to improve their knowledge environment.

To guide people through a process of designing their projects we divide up a sheet of butcher's paper (also called flip-chart paper) into steps for small teams to work on to help them plan their project. I've noticed that the way we divide up this paper and the tools we provide seems to have a big impact. This is not evidence nor proof, just an observation.

Here is an example of one way I've divided up the paper and what the small group of participants wrote.

Now here is another example where I provided a much larger space for brainstorming (a separate page) and suggested they use post-it notes to capture their brainstorming ideas. We also gave them finer tipped felt pens.

Their 'Organise' section spilled over into another sheet of butcher's paper plus there was yet another sheet dedicated to brainstorming. This change toward more detail seems to hold for all the groups in the workshop.

It seems people will fill the space you provide and as a result the second group engaged in a more rigourous and deliberate thinking. Mind you, it could have just been the people in the room.

Technorati Tags: facilitation

I've recently been telling everyone about a presentation I saw on You Tube by David Weinberger called Everything is Miscellaneous. David's argument is that in the past we organised our information into neat categories and then we had one category called miscellaneous to cope with those things that didn't fit. Now with the explosion of information most of information is in the misc category.

This 45 minute presentation by David, and follow on debate, raises some important questions about how we are locked into a physical world's way of organising, the role of social networks and implicit knowledge, and the importance of findability. Don't be put off by the electronic introductions.

Last week I was lucky enough to go along to the Intranets '07 forum in Sydney and had the opportunity to see what a number of organisations in Australia are doing in this space.

One thing that really struck me is that most organisations seem to view wiki's and blogs (and all things 2.0), to be a natural extension to their Intranet projects. The pressures to adopt the latest trends are certainly there, and doing something inside the firewalls seems to be on people's agendas, so it makes perfect sense to use the teams and infrastructure that are already in place.

However, I'm not sure that they know what they're getting themselves into. Adopting these new collaborative and social tools will require a paradigm shift from the current thinking. Let me explain ...

In my notes, I wrote that there seemed to be a real dichotomy in the language being used. On the one hand speakers when describing their Intranets were talking about standards, compliance, custodians, approval, reviews, structured, efficiency, control, and 'single source of truth'. Yet on the other hand, they mused that intranets were about 'people, people, people' and that they were trying to improve collaboration, increase knowledge sharing and foster networks.

I put this down to what appears to be a lack of or poor understanding about the differences between information and knowledge. It seems that many organisations still have a mindset that knowledge management is about trying to codify explicit knowledge - finding it and sticking it in a database, which will in-turn improve sharing and collaboration. However, in doing so, they are ignoring tacit knowledge and the social aspects of learning. Organisations face big challenges to bridge this nexus, and to do so they will need to also consider the 'human' aspects of social software - that it is enabling, empowering, emergent, organic, action-oriented and open. I'll end with a quote, which I think sums it up pretty well ...

" ... viewing knowledge as a duality means that both perspectives are needed and both must be taken into account in any attempt to manage knowledge." 1

References
1. Hildreth, P.J. & Kimble, C. (2002). "The duality of knowledge"Information Research, 8(1), paper no. 142 [Available at http://InformationR.net/ir/8-1/paper142.html]

Why does Google work? Because on the internet people link between sites. Popular sites are popular probably because they are relevant and more people link to these sites. As a result Google ranks them higher than others and hey presto when you Google the most highly ranked sites are at the top.

What happens on an intranet? Pages and pages of material is published and by comparison to the internet there is no linking. And as a result it's hard to work out what is useful and what's not. How many of you have searched for the “car booking” procedure for your department to find a myriad of other gumf totally unrelated to what you need? I have. And it's a pain.

That's why social search is going to be important. I've been playing around with social search for a while using Eurekster's Swickis. Here's one I've created for people interested in business narrative.

Grab this swicki from eurekster.com

The idea is that whenever you do a business narrative related search and you find a hit that is a good one, you vote for it. Over time its ability to server the business narrative community improves. I've added it to the bottom of our blog and you can easily add it to yours as well.

Imagine using this type of tool on your intranet where over time you good efforts make the search engine work for you rather than something you have to battle with. In fact we will be relying more and more on our colleagues and community members to keep abreast of the tsunami of information coming our way. This is one was to do it.

In 2002 I wrote a paper called Crafting a Knowledge Strategy. Its basic premise was that a knowledge strategy should be designed for emergence: it should both encourage and cope with unpredictable things happening.

Part of the framework included something I called the knowledge environment, a container of sorts that enabled knowledge to be created, shared, lost and used. Every organisation has a knowledge environment and the role of the knowledge strategy is to work with what's there while incrementally improving it.

So what should you (ideally people within the organisation with some guidance from people like me) examine in a knowledge environment in order to make improvements? Mnemonics helps you remember lists so this is what we came up with.

Space—physical space has a significant impact on how knowledge flows
Technology—what's there to support knowledge work?
Organisation and People—organisational structures, roles, HR processes, rewards and recognition
Routines and Rituals—important business processes, rituals people talk about
Information—can you find the good stuff?
External—external factors affecting knowledge, job markets, industry trends, competitors, clients
Support—is KM supported by the executive? what are the tangible support structures

What have we missed?

Last year I wrote this short paper arguing that communities of practice were an effective strategy to transfer tacit knowledge. This week we gave the old look and feel a makeover and updated the pdf.

This paper therefore provides guidance on how to identify and foster such communities of practice in your organisation. It explains why communities of practice are effective in managing tacit knowledge, describes how to ‘map’ communities, and provides suggestions for garnering management support. Finally, the paper describes three common traps to avoid.

On the weekend I created this presentation about how we got started and I describe some of the projects we've done.

There are five parts. Here are the other links:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOAtwhgSTf8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYuwumeWn_E
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BweLmKlTbnI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd7WVri5aCI

I've been keeping my eyes open for something entertaining to read on a long plane journey. I'm a fast reader and easily bored so the usual fare at airports barely lasts until I am flying over the West Australian coast. That leaves about another 20 hours of flying time to fill. So wandering past the Socrates store in Eastland last Sunday afternoon the cover on this book in the window display caught my eye. After a quick browse through the pages I decided I had found my travel companion.

I don't mind admitting I am an absolute Leonardo-phile. And I am not deluding myself into thinking any book can turn me into a Da Vinci equivalent. Since I took up scrapbooking in earnest in 2002 I have expanded my creative endeavours into book-making and mixed media art. But I have been continually frustrated by that little voice that tells me I can't draw and and I can't paint. I know when I was teaching, I never met a prep class child who could not draw, paint, sing or dance. Seek out a four or five year old of your acquaintance and ask them. Not only can they do it but they are more than willing to demonstrate it to you right there and then. And look at you oddly for asking such a silly question.

No, this is more about studying Da Vinci and learning from his work in order to utilise our potential to the best of our ability. And Leonardo's 500 year old techniques still work. Finding metaphors in nature was one of his favourites. Velcro was invented by someone who took a close look at a burr hooked to his trousers after a walk outdoors. The ease with which you can "open" a banana inspired the inventors of the ring pull tab on aluminum cans.

The book is centred around the seven fundamental principles (named in Italian) that Michael Gelb has drawn from his study of the man and his work. I'm struck by how they reflect much of what we at Anecdote believe and do.

1. Curiosita - an insatiably curious approach to life and an unrelenting quest for continuous learning
2. Dimonstrazione - a commitment to test knowledge through experience, persistence and a willingness to learn from mistakes
3. Sensazione- the continual refinement of the senses as the means to enliven experience
4. Sfumato (literally "going up in smoke") - a willingness to embrace ambiguity, paradox and uncertainty
5. Arte/Scienza - - the development of balance between science and art, logic and imagination. Whole-brain thinking
6. Corporalita - the cultivation of grace, ambidexterity, fitness and poise
7. Connessione - a recognition and appreciation for the interconnectedness of all things and phenomena. Systems thinking.

Leonardo had the ability to see and live with paradox. Relentless hard work was not the solution. Taking time with a problem, sleeping on it and letting the solution incubate gave better results. As Michael Gelb points out - the ability to trust your gut when dealing with ambiguity is still critical even in the age of information overload.

I'm looking forward to reading more about these principles and the examples that Gelb provides, following along with, and doing the activities. I may even return from my holiday able to draw.

Most of our work here at Anecdote involves working with tacit knowledge. But it is clear that there is a broad understanding about what's meant by the phrase. In the knowledge management world there are two camps: one that believes tacit knowledge can be captured, translated, converted; and the other that highlights its ineffable characteristics. I must admit I was for a long time firmly ensconced in the latter category and our white paper on “How we talk about knowledge management” reflects this view. But I realise now it is simply impractical to adopt an either/or perspective and so I would like to propose a way forward that focusses on why knowledge is tacit (remaining unspoken, unsaid, implied, unexpressed) and then based on these reasons we can start thinking about the appropriate approach to capturing or transferring tacit knowledge.

I think the iceberg metaphor is useful. Below the waterline lies an organisation's tacit knowledge. Near the water surface lies tacit knowledge that's easier to work with but as we go deeper the nature of the tacit knowledge changes, it becomes murkier and harder to see and grasp. As we increase in depth we can think of the different reasons why our knowledge is unspoken.

Hasn't been recorded. Most organisations put their efforts in in dealing with this type of tacit knowledge. Probably because it's easy. “Let's find out what we know and then document it.” As a result wikis are popping up everywhere. Creating more explicit knowledge then creates a new problem of findability And as Peter Morville says, “what we find changes who we become.”

Will never be recorded. There are some things you know, that you could quite easily tell someone else, that you would never want to write down or be widely known. Imagine a diplomat who has an intimate knowledge of their counterpart's peccadillos in an allied government. Perhaps not the type of thing that would be written down. More benign examples include stuff ups and when people are breaking the rules for the right reasons (or even for the wrong reasons).

Too many resources required to record. Sometimes it just takes too much time and effort to write down what you know. For one thing, when you write it down you have to assume a broad audience (not like a conversation where you are assessing whether the person you are taking to is getting it), which makes the task even harder. Imagine Einstein walking in the room and someone without advanced physics knowledge asking him to explain the general theory of relativity. It would be impossible for Einstein to provide a comprehensive answer because his knowledge requires stimulation in order to be forthcoming. Dave Snowden encapsulates this idea in his aphorism, “you only know what you know when you need to know it.”

Everyone knows it (taken for granted). Now we are getting into the type of tacit knowledge that's more difficult to identify. This knowledge often represents the core values and beliefs in an organisation. It can manifest as metaphors. For example, I visited a investment bank in Sydney and their language revolved around gambling: “We can take a bet on that.” “Let's roll the dice and see what happens.” “Everyone was poker faced.” Another organisation was fixated with traffic metaphors: “It's a real roadblock.” “We got the green light.” “We have a clear roadmap now.” No one noticed how they were using these metaphors yet it guided their actions every day. I guess we call these things 'culture.'

Individuals don't know but groups do. Have you ever read Cognition in the Wild? It tells the story of the bridge crew of the aircraft carrier USS Palau and how together they can dock this enormous ship yet no single individual could describe how it is done. Many teams have this underrated and generally unrecognised this group-based ability.

Can't be recorded. Much of our tacit knowledge falls into this category. The effects of this type of tacit knowledge (some would say the only true tacit knowledge) are displayed in our action and therefore it's impossible to capture or convert it. The approach here is to become mindful and reflect of what is displayed—conversations, coaching, shadowing. Sure, we can video tape people undertaking tasks but time and time again practitioners have discovered there are qualities that are not captured and the task cannot be completed successfully. My favourite example is those white-coated gentlemen in France who test whether those humungous wheels of cheese have ripened. Using a little hammer they tap each one and know instantly which ones are ready to eat. How do they know? Is it the sounds, the bounciness, the smell? I recall a group of scientists set about to measure all these characteristics in order to create an automatic cheese ripeness testing machine but as hard as they might try they paled in comparison to the experience of the practised cheesemaker.

Technorati Tags: tacit knowledge

Rick Davies, the creator of the Most Significant Change techniques, has posted a description of a story-based technique he experimented with that's designed to help a group of people imagine a set of future possibilities or, as Rick puts it, when embarking on a project we need “... a theory of change, and a theory of change when spelled out in detail can be seen as a story.”

Rick's experiment was conducted with a group of secondary students but it's clear this participatory process could be used in organisations. I'm particularly interested in how it might be used in our First Journey process. Here's my rewriting of Rick's process based on how it might work with a group of ten senior managers in the first journey.

1. Give the ten participants some small filing cards, and asked them each to write the beginning of a story on one card about how the project we are about the embark will unfold. When completed, these ten cards are then posted, as a column of cards, on the left side of a whiteboard. This provided some initial variation
2. Then ask the same participants to read all ten cards on the board, and for each of them to identify the story beginning they most liked. This involved selection
3. Ask the participants to each use a second card to write a continuation of the one story beginning they most liked. These story segments are then posted next to the one story beginning they most liked. As a result, some stories beginnings will gain multiple new segments, others none. This step involves retention of the selected story beginnings, and introduction of further variation.
4. Then ask participants to look at all the stories again, now they had been extended. Ask them to write a third generation story segment, which they add to the emerging storyline they most liked so far. This process is re-iterated for four generations or longer.

Rick then analyses the results of his experiment and explores different ways people could use the technique.

For me this approach would be ideal to get people talking about the possibilities of a project. It could be then followed by a pre-mortem to provide a reality check.

Technorati Tags: rick davies

Made to Stick is one of my favourite books at the moment because it's well written and well researched. And, you know what? the ideas stick. So I thought I would pass on this sticky story from Victoria Ward's blog. It's a scene from West Wing.

In one of the episodes of the final series of the West Wing, CJ Cragg is more and more frustrated by her inability to make a dent, leave something behind. So when someone from an NGO tries to make an appointment with her, she breaks with habit and gives him a slot in her diary.

He overwhelms her with statistics about the atrocities in Sudan. Thousands, millions, terrible things, rape, amputation, devastation. It’s all beyond her grasp, there is nothing she can imagining doing in this vastness of human failure, and he can see from her face that he is losing her attention, so he says, suddenly

‘When the babies die, the mothers carry them round in their arms because there is nowhere to put them down.’

20 words (I approximate, from memory.)

‘When the babies die, the mothers carry them round in their arms because there is nowhere to put them down.’

Just cleaning up my Bloglines and thought I would share some of the posts I was saving.

• Brad Hinton reflects on oral history and storytelling and points to some useful resources.
• Stephen Dubner (of Freakonomics) sharing Mark Twain's view of work and play.
• If you have read Made to Stick, you might also like these columns from the Heath brothers in Fast Company.
• Psychologist Daniel Gilbert writes some excellent essays. Here is one on our biases.
• This is a neuroscience blog and here they talk about the difference in thinking with exploration or direct reward
• Why It's Hard to Get Rid of Old Ideas - this will be the subject of an upcoming post I think
• Supporting Community of Practice Facilitators by Stephen Dale (well worth signing up to Stephen's RSS)
• Here I reveal (again) my stationary fetish. Grid and ruled paper.
• Victoria Ward on silence.

Enjoy!

My wife, Sheenagh, went to a conference on literacy last week. She's a primary school teacher and teaches a 1st grade class. One the speakers, David Hornsby, said there were three principles you should keep in mind when helping children to learn.

• Move from the heart to the head
• Move from the meaningful to the abstract
• Move from the known to the unknown

Great principles for any learning initiative at any age.

A few years ago I attended KM Australia in Sydney. It was the early days of KM in Australia and I remember one of the keynote speakers spent a large portion of this presentation typing knowledge management into Google and everyone marvelling at vast quantity of hits returned. KM was really popular on the net.

The following speaker was Dale Chatwin from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Dale opened his talk by opening his browser, surfing to Google and typing in the following:

The number of hits was reduced dramatically and Dale simple said: “And that is knowledge management.”

I was reminded of this incident this week because Daryl and I were in a meeting of 12 people and when we mentioned that you needed to surround a phrase with quotes to find exact phrase matches half of them were totally unaware. And everyone in the room were frequent users of Google.

Sometimes we try too hard with sophisticated KM initiatives. What would happen if we could just get the simple things right?

Technorati Tags: google

I just returned from a week's holiday at Mossy Point in NSW and as usual I had a pile of books I was going to read and somehow managed to read a completely different set. This usually happens because my host often has a more compelling choice of reading or there's a good second hand book store nearby (in this case Mogo has a fine example). I started with the following:

• “The Myths We Live By” (Mary Midgley)
• “Orality and Literacy (New Accents)” (Walter J. Ong)
• “A Cultural History of Causality: Science, Murder Novels, and Systems of Thought” (Stephen Kern)

And ended up reading,

• “Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't” (Jim Collins)
• “Catch-22” (Joseph Heller)
• “The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell” (Bertrand Russell)

Good to Great captured my imagination. While I'm always a little sceptical of the approach, “let's compare some companies that have done well and learn their secrets and let's learn how we can apply those secrets to your company and also do well”, there were many unknowns and questions posed by Collins and his team of researchers. One of the points in the book was the supremacy of planning over the plan. While not a new idea in itself it came on the heels of another simple and fairly well known idea: what you measure will affect behaviour so think carefully about what you should measure (Collins was referring to the need to understand your economic driver).

This got me thinking. Why do so many organisations develop their knowledge strategies with a burst of energy over a short period of time? This puzzles me because we know that planning is more important than the plan. Understanding emerges over time through conversations. You can't have a couple of workshops and run some interviews to develop a good grasp of what needs to be done, where the focus should be. Organisations require a process that engages people at different levels in conversations that matter about how knowledge can be best used.

So while chatting to Mark this afternoon I suggested the short, sharp approach (which will definitely create a strategy but can't be the best way to strategize) might be partly due to how large consulting firms need to work in order to stay profitable. The large firms work on a profit per consultant basis. Within the firm this is called utilisation. The best way for a consultant to maintain high utilisation is to be billable five days a week. A project that's divided and spread over a couple of months with a couple of days here and there is unsustainable for large firm. So over the years after an organisation receives proposal after proposal from the large firms the organisation begin to tacitly learn that strategies should be created intensely over short periods of time.

And guess what happens when you get together highly paid, smart professionals to deliver a strategy to a tight deadline? Most of the time it results in a hefty document detailing many factors and features to consider but often merely succeeds in bamboozling. Last week I was talking to a senior manager in a government agency and she said they'd just received their knowledge strategy and they feel it's too complex and they're not quite sure what to do. Imagine, on the other hand, a group of people within the organisation working together on their knowledge strategy and all agreeing that the essence of their strategy is captured in a simple sentence. Because they all have been part of the process this sentence means so much that action can be taken to make it a reality. Sure, you need the implementation plan and more importantly a process so actions that move the organisation toward their objectives bubble up from everyone.

One fact that stood out for me in Good to Great was that on average it took a 'great' company four years to define their essential strategy (their hedgehog concept). And the strategy evolved through vigourous debate, discussion and listening. It's this type of process I'm advocating, and now large organisations are turning to specialists in small companies, they can served without the constraints of the large firm's economic model.

I think our Three Journey Approach to knowledge strategy is a new way to orchestrate these essential conversations.

• The first journey is with the leadership team and the aim is to create a broad direction for everyone. Rather than having a single workshop and interviews we would facilitate four conversations (or more) around the nature of their business and the role knowledge plays. The result is a small set of objectives for the knowledge strategy.
• The second journey is where the rest of the staff get involved. Their job is to help work out how the objectives might be achieved in reality. We know, however, that asking people what they know is a futile exercise because we all need context to remember what we know. So we use anecdote circles and collect stories as a way to find out what's happening and what could be done.
• The third journey is a simple improvement process whereby the knowledge strategy continues to adapt to the changing circumstances.

Technorati Tags: knowledge strategy

Our friend and colleague Amanda Horne sent us an e-newsletter with an essay about a brilliant networker called Catherine Fitzgerald. The essay describes some of the ways that Catherine networks by helping others and sharing her knowledge and experience. One of her activities is to to set up 'Collegial Consults' that described as follows:

Catherine has also designed an approach to supporting colleagues during times of intense professional change, such as a new entrepreneurial venture or a new book that is really taking off.

She arranges a day-long "collegial consult," to which she invites six to eight savvy, experienced, creative, and generous colleagues.

During that day, the person who is in transition describes his/her current situation and his/her hopes, concerns, and questions.

The group asks clarifying questions and brainstorms ways to help the transition be as successful as possible.

People who have had collegial consults have found the day-long attention of wise and supportive colleagues to be invaluable.

And, by the way, Catherine doesn't charge for arranging and facilitating collegial consults for her colleagues.

The 'collegial consults' sound like a great idea and I know I could have used them many times in the past. In the knowledge arena we would probably call them Peer Assists (that we regularly use in Anecdote for new projects, ideas and for supporting our clients). One of the great things is that everyone in the 'collegial consult' learns as part of the process, not just the person being assisted.

The relationship among data, information and knowledge is often depicted as a pyramid. With data at the base, it’s converted to information and information converted to knowledge. This metaphor of a pyramid or ladder to explain these concepts is unhelpful because you start to believe one is better than the other and there is a tendency to extrapolate to the next level believing that knowledge is simply extrapolated to form wisdom—I have even heard people talk about wisdom management. My two days at the meaning making symposium has helped me see this relationship differently, that is, viewing data, information and knowledge as a system.

Thanks to John Barton at the symposium reminding me of a view of data, information and knowledge first brought to my attention by Dave Snowden which I will extend to include the role of sensemaking and context.

Knowledge acts as an interpretant to turn data into information. The information we notice (we don’t notice all information channelled toward us), might create some level of dissonance (its surprises us or we ask ourselves, “What’s the story here?”) and if we care about resolving this dissonance we create knowledge. Knowledge is created through a sensemaking process.

But data to one person is someone else’s information. A commodities trader might stare at a computer screen of numbers which would look to most people as raw data. To the commodity trader, however, slight changes in the numbers conveys messages which act as information they might convert to knowledge (via sensemaking) and take action. Consequently, context is a key ingredient acting as an underlay to all three concepts of data, information and knowledge.

Originally posted: 30/03/06

Eric Tsui asked me to let you know he has a couple of jobs going in Hong Kong. Here are the details.

THE HONG KONG POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF INDUSTRIAL AND SYSTEMS ENGINEERING

Post Specification

Project Associate (two posts) (Ref. 95172) [Appointment period: eighteen months]

Duties

The appointees will assist the project leader in the project - “Learning and practicing knowledge harnessing and sharing techniques in the WebCT Vista environment”. Qualifications

For the first post, applicants should:

(a) have a master’s degree in a related discipline;
(b) have prior experience in working with E-learning or Knowledge Management projects;
(c) have an excellent command of both written and spoken English; (d) be a good technical writer; and
(e) be able to work independently as well as in a team.

For the second post, applicants should:

(a) have a master’s degree in Information Technology, Information Systems, Knowledge Management or Multimedia Design;
(b) have knowledge and passion in working with E-Learning and Knowledge Management projects;
(c) have technical skills in evaluating, developing, configuring and deploying simulation, scenario planning or gaming software in an online learning environment;
(d) have good communication skills; and
(e) be able to work independently as well as in a team.

Applicants are invited to contact Prof. Eric Tsui at tel no. 2766 6609, fax no. 2774 9308 or email eric.tsui@polyu.edu.hk for further information.

Remuneration

Salary offered will be commensurate with qualifications and experience. Applicants should state their current and expected salary in the application.

For a few months now I have been proposing a new way to do knowledge strategy that involves everyone in the organisation. There are three journeys involved and in the last journey you help establish a process (described here and illustrated above) that encourages lots of people to make incremental improvements towards a set of common objectives. We have mentioned here that organisations have similar objectives so you don't need to create these from scratch.

This post is here to pull these threads together.

The way you enter an organisation has a big impact on how you perceive the place you work. The recruitment process (really part of staff induction) creates a range of expectations and if these expectations are unmet a subtle erosion of trust occurs—not what you want on day 1. A common view of staff induction is that it all happens the day you start and mostly over within a week. A typical induction involves being taken around the floor by you manager to meet your new colleagues and shown the places to eat, then the new employee sits through a session with a group of other new starters where senior people tell what they think you should know—strategy, policies, who's who in the zoo. Invariably there is too much information to take in on day 1.

I have been asking people, “How long after starting here did you feel you really knew the organisation and job you were doing?” Most people said it took them 12-18 months in a large organisation to really feel on top on things. Staff induction, therefore, needs to be more gradual and unfold over time as we experience the organisation we've joined. We need a slower and longer-term approach, one that better balances intellectual and emotional learning.

Here's how I reckon this might work.

Day 1—the basics of survival, security passes, floor plan, toilets, colleagues, managers, colleagues sitting down for coffee to let you know of the gotchas to avoid

Week 1—why you are here and how your work fits into the big picture, cycles of activities, people you need to know, show how to elicit stories from people, meet some of the people you need to know and get them to tell a story or two, where to find information such as policies and processes and the staff directory, team lunch

Month 1—how to get your expenses paid, stuff about pays, people you need to know, conversation about how to get ahead around here, know what managers to avoid, conversation with your manager about what you need to do to make a good contribution, understand the wider network (check out the social network charts)

Quarter 1—reflect of what you have achieved so far and discuss with your manager, ask “where do things happen here?”, understand your purpose and how it links to what the organisation is trying achieve, know who you can trust, have lunch and coffees with people, ask questions and stay curious.

Year 1—sit back and think about what you learnt, help a new employee get up and running, tell them your stories of how you started, wonder what you don't know,

Staff induction is simply learning how you fit in and learning is social. Each step of the way conversations are necessary. Here are some more things I believe about learning. If you think about staff induction as a learning process we immediately understand why relying solely on a classroom approach is ineffective.

The job of HR professionals is to provide the formal induction activities and then support the informal methods in the full knowledge that induction occurs primarily informally over a period of a year of so.

Technorati Tags: hr, staff induction

I have just finished marking a bunch of assignments. Not surprising the topic was narrative techniques in knowledge management. The students are masters level and I have to say I was depressed by what I received. The majority of the students were relying on Google and wikipedia to support their claims and arguments. The only journal articles referred to where the ones I made available in the shared online space.

What's happening here? I was reading Jay Cross' blog and he mentioned Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability: What we find changes who we become. What a fabulous title. I agree, we definitely become what we find, just like we become what we find to eat. Our information diets are becoming junk food because we are unwilling to put the effort in finding something more satisfying than what you can get from a browser in one or two clicks. Or is it simply a case that most people don't know how to find the journals online or can't get access?

Of course there are at least two sides to this issue (probably many more actually). In the case of our students are we setting the right standards for what we expect? If the the standards are lax, then merely satisficing will remain unsatisfying.

Jay has added 'findability' to his list of essential 21st Century skills. I agree. The problem we face right at this moment is like 5-10 years ago when fast food was entirely junk food. Slowly but surely people started to demand healthy eating options from these same fast food outlets. Today new healthy fast food joints have appeared and new choices added to the menu. In the meantime will we be creating an information obescity epidemic? Where are the fast and healthy outlets on the web today?

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I found a new blog this morning and while it's a newie I'm hoping it will have some more good posts like this one about Walter Ong and the issue of redundancy in storytelling. The blog authors are Jim Stahl and Nemola Kalo.

I found this quote Jim posted from Walter Ong very interesting:

“Since redundancy characterizes oral thought and speech, it is in a profound sense more natural to thought and speech than is sparse linearity. Sparse linear or analytic thought and speech are artificial creations, structured by the technology of writing.... With writing, the mind is forced into a slowed-down pattern that affords it the opportunity to interfere with and recognize its more normal, redundant processes.”

A while back I wrote a piece about the difference between storytelling and story writing and while I didn't recognize the issue of redundancy there I was quite aware of the reduced speed and second guessing that was introduced when a story is written.

Perhaps more importantly, redundancy is an important feature in a complex environment where contexts are continuously changing. Mark and I are in the middle of a knowledge strategy assignment and we are conducting some interviews to help the organisation choose the knowledge objectives they would like to focus on for the next 12 months. During those interviews I have been telling the same story about how we propose the conduct the 3rd journey (the continuous improvement process). On the forth telling of the story I get this confused look on Mark's face. It turns out that up until that point I was not conveying what I meant so this disconnect triggered a good conversation and we got our story straight. There was something different in the forth context and telling that triggered something for Mark. Redundancy is important.

Technorati Tags: knowledge strategy

We have noticed that knowledge strategies tend to have a recurring set of objectives. We listed an initial set of core objectives here and have developed a longer set over a series of conversations over the past few days. The list is shown below. Unfortunately a strategy cannot tackle everything without losing focus - the 'boiling the ocean' effect.

During the 1st journey of knowledge strategy development we encourage the leadership team to identify a 3 or 4 of the areas on the list below to focus on as part of the project. These then guide the 2nd journey and the first 12 months of the 3rd journey. The three journeys are described here.

Our list of generic knowledge strategy objectives includes:

1. Attract and retain the best people
2. Minimise the impact of people leaving – or better retain our knowledge
3. Build better relationships
4. Enhance collaboration
5. Build skills and know-how
6. Improve innovation
7. Improve how we learn from mistakes and successes
8. Improve ability to find relevant expertise
9. Better deal with complex situations
10. Improve ability to search for and find information
11. Avoiding reinventing the wheel
12. Finding and applying good practice
13. Encouraging people to call for help

Ford Harding over at Harding & Company is planning to blog some anecdotes of his and others failures under the title of sadder and wiser. His first anecdote post has two good stories with strong lessons. Dave Snowden has often said that worst practices are more important in complex, unpredictable situations because it is better to know what to avoid than to attempt to replay a 'best practice' that worked in an entirely different context. And it is certainly true that people remember and retell stories of failure. So I'm looking forward to seeing Ford's anecdote posts.

Strategies should result in a set of actions making the organisation more valuable to whoever it serves. I learned this from David Maister Knowledge strategies are no different. The objectives of the knowledge strategy activity are fourfold:

• develop a common understanding among leaders and staff of where and how they should enhance their capability to create, share and use knowledge
• understand where to focus efforts and when to say 'no' to suggested activities
• inspire people to take action and work differently
• work out the actions needed to make a difference and get acting

We've learned that top down strategies don't work. For one thing they typically rely on extrinsic motivations (rewards—do this and you'll get that) which I'm learning from Alfie Kohn is an intrinsic motivator killer (I've got to share some of the experiments Alfie talks about in a future post). So our approach to knowledge strategy is to first view the activity more as a verb than a noun. That is, it is better to strategize that the develop a strategy. The get things moving in an organisation we've developed what we call the three journeys approach.

The first journey is designed to help the organisation's leaders develop a common understanding of what they would like to achieve and defining this end-state in broad terms, while knowing that detailed plans are unlikely to be achieved (the world is too unpredictable for a simple, linear view). We encourage the leadership group to develop a rough mud map of the journey from the current situation to this desired end state while resisting the urge to fill in the details. The staff fill in the details as part of the second journey.

The second journey involves the rest of the organisation (or a representative subset) planning how they will get to the desired state. This involves understanding the current knowledge environment—who's connected to whom, where are the important knowledge assets, where are the blockers, what are the enablers—and developing the best possible map based on current information and resources available that can be made to guide the third journey.

The third journey is when the organisation actually embarks on implementing the ideas developed in the first two imaginary journeys. Most importantly in the third journey, the organisation implements an iterative process they designed in the second journey that embeds new knowledge-related behaviours and provides opportunities for new ideas to be injected in how things are done. For an example of what this might look like please refer to our recent blog post on the topic (http://www.anecdote.com.au/archives/2007/02/redressing_the.html).

The following four conditions are cited as factors that communities of practice might consider in deciding whether something should be made explicit:

• it is relatively stable
• it has longer lasting value for a larger community
• it is expected to be retreived relatively frequently
• it will be maintained and kept up to date

1. A van Unnik, Shell EP LLD, Benefits of Developing Knowledge Sharing Communities, Abu Dhabi International Conference and Exhibition, 10-13 October, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, Society of Petroleum Engineers, 2004

Strategies should result in a set of actions making the organisation more valuable to whoever it serves. Knowledge strategies are no different but most organisations develop a knowledge strategy in the following way:

1. the company engages consultants to analyse their needs
2. the leaders are asked, "what result would you like to see at the end of the project?" The consultants capture this information as the project's vision.
3. the consultants interview staff, conduct focus groups and compile an inventory of important knowledge assets
4. gaps are identified between what currently occurs and what needs to happen to achieve the vision
5. a report is written and there's considerable debate over the structure, format and wording of this document
6. the knowledge strategy and associated implementation plan is presented to the executive group for their approval
7. everyone is exhausted but pleased with the document
8. there is little energy left for the actions needed to make the required changes

Don't get me wrong, a process like this is what’s mostly needed to undertake an effective knowledge strategy. It suffers, however, from a problem of balance. The weight of effort is on developing the document—the strategy or plan. Little energy or process is left for people to take actions that will change how things are actually done. The further the organisation gets away from the initial strategy development exercise, the greater the apathy to implement the original plan. The ideal situation is one where the top down focus on defining what to do is balanced with a process that enables people to do things that will make the organisation more valuable to whoever it serves.

So what if we put less effort into the knowledge strategy design and more into implementing strategic actions?

There are three reasons why we should shift the balance from viewing the strategy as a thing to redressing the balance towards the process for implementing the strategy.

1. businesses are less predictable and long-term, linear plans rarely achieve their stated goals
2. embedding actions in the day-to-day activities of the organisation allows new ways to tackle problems to emerge
3. the process moves the responsibility for making a difference to how knowledge is created, shared and used to everyone in the organisation rather than a typically under-resourced knowledge management unit

So how might this look? The best solution is one developed by people in the organisation, one that develops the process for embedding the strategic actions into the day-to-day activities. To give you an idea of what it might look like here are some ideas adapted from David Maister's suggested approach for conducting a strategy.

The initial knowledge strategy design should result in some objectives, which might include things like:

• improve knowledge sharing
• enhance innovation
• reduce impact of people leaving (knowledge retention)
• build skills and know-how
• improve everyone's ability to find relevant knowledge when they need it
• improve how we learn from experience

Ideally, there should only be two or three objectives. Six is too many.
The process starts by giving each group within the organisation one sheet of paper for each objective. Each sheet has four columns. The group lists, for each objective, the actions they are going to take over the next three months to help achieve the objectives. A senior member of staff works with the group acting as a friendly sceptic or mentor. This mentor's role is to ask question, helping the group to stretch their plans or to reign in over enthusiasm. At the end of the session, the mentor sets a date to meet with the group again in three months where they will review how they went, what they learned and establish a new set of actions for the following three months.

The four columns to fill in for each objective are:

• the action to be done
• who is responsible for ensuring the action is completed
• the date the action will be completed
• a description of how the group will know the action has been completed

It’s important that the group focuses on actions and not goals. For example, if the objective is “improve knowledge sharing” then rather than provide a goal such as, “build better relationships with the policy division,” describe a tangible action like “organise 3 brown bag seminars with the policy division.”

By repeating this activity every three months the organisation begins to embed knowledge-related activities into their day to day business. It becomes second nature. The three-month time frame also feels achievable and tangible. It gives the groups something in the foreseeable future to aim for. One last benefit of a shorter time frame for action is that it enables the organisation to sense and respond to the changing business environment making it more nimble and resilient.

You might be thinking, “Yeh, but what about those initiatives that take longer than three months to accomplish?” Of course this will be the case. Sometimes the organisation will be able to identify longer-term initiatives, such as the adoption of communities of practice or an intranet implementation, in the initial knowledge strategy design which can be implemented organisation-wide. Here I am arguing for a balance between the more traditional approach to developing a knowledge strategy with a greater emphasis on embedding the knowledge actions.

Maister, D. H. “Ready, Set, Go: Fast-track Strategy.” Strategy in Professional Business  Retrieved 27 February, 2007, from http://davidmaister.com/podcasts/4/45/.

There seems to be a renewed interest in developing knowledge strategies. We have been involved in three in the last six months and our narrative techniques have been well received. We now need to move people from seeing a knowledge strategy as a thing to a seeing it as a process. We also need to see a shift from developing knowledge strategies to engaging people in knowledge-focussed business strategies.

People have heard that storytelling is great for dealing with tacit knowledge. They say things like, “If we could only capture our stories we could then capture our organisation’s tacit knowledge.”

This is the big mistake! Stories only have meaning in the context of their telling. That is, you need to tell and listen to stories to transfer (not capture) tacitly held knowledge. It’s a social process. You need to be part of the conversation.

In practice, this means creating spaces for stories to be told and listened to. We do it in a bunch of different ways depending on the needs and objectives of our clients.

For example, if we are helping tackle complex issues such as trust, leadership, culture change, we would create the space in sensemaking workshops.

If we need to evaluate the impact of difficult to measure initiatives we create the space using Most Significant Change and the selection workshops.

NASA creates this space for staff to listen to and tell stories in their monthly project management seminars where PMs discuss the stories collected in the their monthly newsletter, ASK.

Everyone is busy and no one will give up their valuable time to listen and tell stories. But they will allocate time to evaluate a project, tackle a complex problem or learn lessons from their colleagues.

The stories don’t contain magical solutions that we can capture, dissect and unleash. Rather they provide a language of engagement, of learning and a way to transfer what is impossible to write down and store in any database.

A simple tip last night from the actKM discussion list contributed by Ivan Webb who provides a ‘strategic job description’…

…that will change the culture of most organisations and leads naturally to knowledge management being embedded in the organisation’s activity. It is everyone’s job to:

• know what is happening
• work with others to improve what is happening
• make it easier for the next person to do their work well

I like the simplicity of these statements and the guidance for behaviour they provide. In some situations they might contribute to improved knowledge sharing behavours. They are also interesting because we know that little things can make a big difference.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that every knowledge strategy has the same objectives, which are:

• improve knowledge sharing
• enhance innovation
• reduce impact of people leaving (knowledge retention)
• build skills and know-how
• improve everyone’s ability to find relevant knowledge when they need it
• improve how we learn from experience

If this is the case, couldn’t a knowledge strategy activity move quickly to engaging as many people as possible in the organisation to work out what actions are needed to make progress on the objectives?

I should have mentioned this earlier but this Friday (23rd February) I will be presenting a workshop in Sydney on how to use stories to retain and keep alive retiring employees’ knowledge. It will be a practical session where the participants will have fun crafting questions to elicit stories, conduct interviews, facilitate anecdote circles and then use a couple techniques to help make sense of the stories. Communities of practice will feature.

The two key messages I’m hoping to convey in the workshop are:

• communities keep stories alive
• lessons from a few stories collected once are fun and interesting; lessons from many stories reviewed widely and regularly nurtures wisdom

This workshop is a post-conference event for Extracting and Sharing Knowledge from an Ageing Workforce conference. To receive a full copy of the brochure for this event please email Louise at louise.badcock@keyforums.com.au or call on +61 2 9436 4255.

Last night I went along to a talk by Guy St. Clair held by the KMLF and VPSCIN. I found Guy’s topic of knowledge services quite interesting. Guy comes from a libraries background but now takes a wider view of how to integrate information management, KM and strategic learning.

One idea that stuck was the reason Guy called his work ‘knowledge services’ and not ‘knowledge management’. As we know, knowledge management is not easily understood by executives. It seems too nebulous. But executives have had plenty experience in obtaining services: legal services, accounting services, catering services. So why not ‘knowledge services’?

Do you like my old library catalogue card? I created it with the Card Catalog Creator. Thanks for the link Patti.

Everyone in knowledge management acknowledges the vital role trust plays. “Trust is the bandwidth of communication” says Karl-Erik Sveiby. When talking about trust I mostly hear people say “we need to build trust”. But I rarely hear people discuss the issue of what to do when trust is broken and needs to be rebuilt. See below for a process for rebuilding trust. At the core is an apology.

I was reminded of this issue by a post by Seth Godin where he lists 10 apologies from the weakest to the strongest.

• “You can always take your business elsewhere.” (1): Thank you, I will, and so will all of my friends.
• “It’s not our fault.” (2): This is a non-apology, where you are not seeking to redress the issue, nor evincing any sort of sympathy for the injured.
• “We’re sorry that you feel that way.” (3): This is also a non-apology, which roughly translates into “It pisses us off that you feel that way. If you didn't feel that way, we would be happy.” It also doesn't take any responsibility for the problem, and places all of it onto the injured party. Be careful of any apology that starts “I’m sorry that you...”
• “We’re sorry if we did something wrong.” (6): This is getting there, but doesn’t really accept responsibility either. You are not acknowledging that you did anything wrong; you're still hoping that you haven’t. You are offering an apology for appearances sake.
• “We're sorry that this occurred.” (7): You are sorry, but as a matter of principle you’re still trying to insist that it wasn’t really your fault.
• “We’re sorry that we caused this problem.” or “We’re sorry that we have let this happen.” (9): This is a full apology, and is what the customer needs to hear. Frankly, it doesn’t matter that it was really the post office’s fault, and not yours; the customer doesn't care. Most people hearing this cannot help but respond with some sort of graciousness, such as “Well, all right then, these things happen. What are you going to do to fix it?” This is the target level that you want to hit for your customer service. But for the record, there is still one level to go. The complete apology is:
• “We’re so sorry that we caused this problem; we are really distressed over this. Please know that we take this very seriously. This is a huge oversight on our part. I will immediately notify my supervisor, and we will review our procedures to ensure that this cannot happen again. In the meantime, that is no consolation to you for our lack of service! What can we do to regain your trust? We will be sending you a little surprise as a token of our appreciation of having you as a customer.” (10) In truth, this little speech goes on until the customer interrupts. And it is followed by a few more apologies as the conversation closes, as well.

In my search for ways to help organisations rebuild trust in groups, I discovered this interesting paper and process which came from work in reconciliation in South Africa. The author suggests a five step process in rebuilding trust. The process requires actions on both sides of the relationship: from the violator of the trust and the victim (this is language from the source material).

Actions of the Violator

• They must engage in a series of steps that identify, acknowledge, and assume some ‘ownership’ for the trust destroying events that occurred.
• recognise and acknowledge that a violation has occurred
• determine the nature of the violation—that is, what ‘caused’ it—and admit that one has caused the event
• admit that the act was destructive
• accept responsibility for the effect of one’s actions

This very much looks likes apology 10 above.

Actions of the Victim

• The victim to request (or the violator to offer) some form of forgiveness, atonement, or action designed to undo the violation and rebuild the trust

Lindskold, S. (1978). “Trust development, the GRIT proposal, and the affects of conciliatory acts on conflict and cooperation.” Psychological Bulletin 85: 772-793.

There is something peculiar going on with Melbourne’s trains. A couple of years ago we received a new fleet of brand new Siemens trains and everything worked fine. This year the same trains have a mysterious and serious problem: they don’t stop when and where the driver wants them to. The brakes seem to have a problem and no one can pinpoint the difficulty. According to The Age, there is a glimmer of hope but the resolution is dragging out. Experts have been flown in and the best people are working on the issue, so why is it taking so long to resolve?

What increases my befuddlement is the apparent nuts and bolts characteristic of the problem (at least that is how it appears). A train is a system (admittedly complicated) you can pull apart, analyse each component, make a diagnosis and put back together and you still have a train. So the solution, therefore, can’t be just a simple malfunction of equipment there must be something more complex occurring.

Could it be that they just don’t have the right people working on the problem, that the true experts on maintaining Siemens trains are yet to be engaged? I think this is unlikely given the concern and inconvenience the absence of these trains is causing Melbourne commuters, Connex and the Victorian Government. Could it be that this type of problem hasn’t been encountered anywhere else in the world and the engineers are simply not equipped to handle the problem? That’s hard to believe given the number of these trains working diligently on so many tracks around the world. While the problem might not be identical, if it were a purely mechanical issue the mechanics would be able to spot it and fix it.

But any issue involving people is never purely mechanical. When people are involved in problem solving we need to consider how knowledge is flowing from one person to another; from one group to another; from one organisation to another. Here are some possibilities that might be hindering the resolution of the unstoppable train problem.

The people responsible for the day to day maintenance of the trains in Melbourne (I’ll call them the mechanics) don’t know the experts that well from Siemens (I’ll call them the engineers). Knowledge will only flow between these groups after a relationship has developed and trust formed. If the first time they have ever met is in the heat of resolving a high profile issue, then tempers are likely to be frayed, finger-pointing occurs and communications stop. In the future, prepare for emergencies by ensuring the experts know the people on the ground.

Mechanics tend to be practical, concrete thinkers. Experts like to work with abstractions. Engineers like to work with drawings and designs. When there is a problem, go back to the drawings to figure out what is going on. Mechanics like to try things out. Get another part, replace an old one, see what happens. The two groups speak different languages. One solution is help both groups become bi-lingual and show more empathy for the others’ approach. And mechanics and engineers wont be the only groups involved who speak a different professional language. The policy folks from the department, the politicians and the rail safety regulator will have a way of talking that will be different again.

While the absence of pre-existing relationships and the lack of a common language among experts will slow the flow of knowledge, there are a myriad of other possibilities and it’s impossible to predict which one will help resolve the problem. The key point is that a complex problem like this requires the team to try things, make educated guesses and see what happens, while ensuring the public is kept safe and services are maintained as best as they can.

The unstoppable train problem is unlikely to be a mere mechanical fault. It sounds like a knowledge problem: an inability to find and access the right knowledge when it is needed. But don’t be fooled in thinking this knowledge resides in a database somewhere. More than likely it is contained in the experiences and stories of groups of people around the world who don’t even realise they have the answer or that anyone is looking for it.

From the time of the first bound books, right up until the 17th century, books were shelved with their spines facing inwards and the pages facing out. There was a practical reason for this seemingly perverse practice. Books were typically bound in leather and the technology for decorating a book was primitive. Bookmakers applied embellishments to the front and back cover but avoided the spine because it had to bend and flex and created problems when you affixed adornments.

So how do you know which book is which on your bookshelf when you can’t see the spine? Well, you decorate the fore-edge (the paper) of the book—much like you did with your school books. And if you’re a renaissance book collector you engage an artist to decorate your outward facing pages. This is what Odorico Pilone did when he employed Cesare Vecellio to decorate 172 of his books. Here is an example of this beautiful work.

So how does all this relate to Kathy Sierra’s excellent post on how to use your Moleskine notebook to keep your life in order? I’ve been a Moleskine users for a few years now and have a small collection of completed notebooks. I found it difficult to label the spine on a Moleskine so I simply reverted to the pre-seventeenth century practice of shelving the notebooks with the fore-edge facing out and decorating my fore-edges with the dates I started and finished each notebook adding a simple label for reference. Here they are on the left.

Petroski, H. (2000). The book on the book shelf. New York, Vintage Books.

When you’re steeped in a discipline like knowledge management you start to assume that everyone knows about techniques like After Action Reviews and Peer Assists. Of course this is untrue. Steve Dale over at Dissident has discovered this neat Flash animation that describes the peer assist process. I particular like the idea of rotating peer assists.

I spent a couple of hours today tracking down some papers for a course I’m helping to teach at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University on business narrative when I discovered this excellent paper by Tsoukas and Hatch called ‘Complex thinking, complex practice: The case for a narrative approach to organizational complexity’. I’m a bit of a fan of Hari Tsoukas’ work. Just read his paper on tacit knowledge to get an idea of what a great KM thinker he is. Anyway, there are a couple of paragraphs and a table that jumped out at me in this paper. The paper is based on two modes of thinking proposed by J. Bruner and goes on to say,

Bruner called the two modes of thought ‘logico-scientific’ (or paradigmatic) and ‘narrative’, arguing that:

the types of causality implied in the two modes are palpably different. The term then functions differently in the logical proposition ‘if x, then y’ and in the narrative recit ‘The king died, and then the queen died.’ One leads to a search for universal truth conditions, the other for likely particular connections between two events – mortal grief, suicide, foul play. (pp. 11–12)

To compare the two modes, Bruner claimed, is to understand the difference between a sound argument and a good story.

I’ve been working with engineers lately and I have been struggling to explain this whole issue of knowing the truth. Now I have some language to open the conversation up. This table elaborates this idea perfectly.

Bruner, J. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.

Tsoukas, H. and M. J. Hatch (2001). "Complex thinking, complex practice: The case for a narrative approach to organizational complexity." Human Relations 54(8): 979-1013.

Tsoukas, H. (2003). Do we really understand tacit knowledge? The Blackwell Handbook of Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management. M. Easterby-Smith, M. A. Lysles and K. E. Weick, Blackwell Publishers.

This looks really interesting:

Expertise is about more than evidence. It is also about judgement and wisdom. Our argument is not that we should reject the received wisdom in favour of the wisdom of crowds. But we need to go beyond a simple model of ‘evidence-based policy.’ Drawing on recent case studies and research with ‘lay members’ of expert committees, this pamphlet looks to a new model of expertise which is more diverse, takes better account of uncertainty, is aware of its context and trusts the public.

The pamphlet is 87 pages (down-loadable pdf) in the style, I guess, of the polemics of the 18th and 19th century. But perhaps less controversial. The work is available under a creative commons licence and I will be having a good read.

You can find the background to the pamphlet here, which says “The good folk of Defra have asked Demos and Liverpool University to consider how lay people can play a part in expert scientific advice.”

Here’s a good idea. A neat compilation of a range of visualisation techniques arranged in the form of a periodic table. I was checking out all the different examples by rolling my mouse over each ‘element’ and then notice this one titled ‘knowledge map’.

Hmmm, of all the knowledge maps I’ve helped organisations create, they’ve never looked like this! Mind you, with my love of geography and old cartographic masterpieces, this is a gem. I suspect, however, that Edward Tufte would label it as chart junk—it looks good but it doesn’t tell you anything.

I have talked before about how there’s rarely a single ‘knowledge map’ that adequately describes an organisations knowledge assets (this post also describes the mapping process we use and its origins). The process of identifying and talking about your knowledge assets is more important than the artifact. But if I was to suggest an alternative to the example presented in the Periodic Table of Visualisation Methods I would offer this one.  

So to explain my example. The knowledge objects are artifacts, skills, heuristics, experience or natural talents people have in the organisation. The business processes are key processing in the organisation like engagement delivery, client satisfaction, opportunity identification. It’s not unusual to have 30+ processes listed. Ranking is the ranking of the processes from most important to least important (a difficult but important activity for a decision making group). Risk is the likelihood of the knowledge object being lost. This knowledge map is developed by a group of people in a workshop. The aim is to identify important knowledge objects that are vulnerable so initiatives can be designed.

What knowledge mapping techniques do you use?

This approach to knowledge mapping was first developed by Dave Snowden while he worked at IBM. Check out m related post above for all the references.

[via Guy Kawasaki]

This post from Jack Vinson titled ‘Knowledge management is hard?’ reminded me of a presentation I give at the iKMS Conference in Singapore in November. During questions someone asked ‘why is KM so hard? Its not like its rocket science?’ A gentleman in the audience responded “Hmmm, I am a rocket scientist. In rocket science I can generally find a demonstrably correct answer. You can’t do that with KM. KM is harder than rocket science because it is so ‘soft’”.

I also met some great people at the conference. The happy snaps shows (L to R) me with Noor Faridah Rahim, Jerry Ash and David Gurteen. Thanks to Farida for the photo.

The previous blog contained some reflections on the considerable amout of knowledge strategy work we did in 2006. One of the things mentioned was the establishment of sets of principles (I’m not sure they are principles but it gets us into the right space) to help guide behaviours to improve knowledge sharing. The following list gives an idea of the types of things that have been included in various strategies. Simple statements like these make explicit the types of behaviours that the organisation desires. Importantly, such principles must be customised for each setting and they generally work best when co-created rather than delivered from on high. 

• Encourage questions. Encourage people to ask questions, and recognise them when they do. Create opportunities for open and rigorous dialogue that allows assumptions to be explored and debated.
• Go to the source. Knowledge deteriorates as it is transmitted through a hierarchy. Wherever possible find the source and have a conversation with them.
• Share. Share what you know and help others to learn.
• Relationships. Value relationships and understanding between all divisions and invest in the development of these relationships.

• Have we done this before? Build on what has been done rather than creating something from the ground up. Managers should ask, 'have we done this before?' when approached with ideas and issues.
• Collaborate. Link up with people outside your area to see if they are doing something your area can use. Form teams to collaborate on projects/tasks.
• Value diversity. Get new ideas and fresh perspectives into play. Teams work best when the people within them are diverse in both background and approach.
• Synthesise. Try to combine ideas from different fields.
• Be approachable. Approachability and accessibility have major impacts on knowledge sharing and communication.All staff, especially senior managers, need to be approachable and ensure all staff have the context they need to be successful in their roles.
• Learn. Learn before, learn during and learn after. Take time to reflect on what's happened and discuss this with your colleagues. Learn from experience (actively search for others' ideas, be willing to discuss failures and be open to feedback). Help others learn and grow. View mistakes and near misses as learning opportunities.
• Be a team player. Promote cooperation and trust; participate openly and actively in team projects, task forces and networks; uphold the team's ideas and proposals. Bring credit on yourself by acknowledging the contribution of others.
• Empathise. Consider things from the perspective of others. When you communicate, remember that people look at events in different ways and the value of your message is determined by the receiver, not by the sender.

Denham Grey also suggested a set of KM Principles some time ago and these are worth a look in addition to the ones listed above. Importantly, don’t try to ‘boil the ocean’ by having a list as long as the one above. Focus on the key few that reflect the core themes of the knowledge strategy.

Are there any additional ‘principles’ that could be included for your organisation?

Anecdote has worked with some fantastic organisations over the past year and one of the main areas has been in developing knowledge strategies. I thought it timely to look back and reflect on some of the key learnings from these projects and some of these initial thoughts are captured in the bullet points below.

• Strategy is a journey much more than it is a deliverable. Delivering a ‘strategy’ to a leadership team without engaging them in its development is a recipe for disaster at worst or inaction at best. This was driven home to me years ago when in a senior management role: the ‘strategy manager’ stood up at an offsite meeting and delivered the new strategy and concluded ‘well if there are no comments then we will considered the strategy adopted’. He was the only one in the room who understood it well enough to make any comment. The rest of us just thought…’whatever!’, and proceeded to ignore it.

• The flip side to this is the difficulty encountered when trying to write the strategy ‘artefact’ through the normal ‘staffing’ process within organisations. Everyone has a different view of what it should contain, how it should be presented, how long it should be, what font should be used  etc etc. Nightmare. Avoid if possible. Patrick Lambe suggests a better way is for the project to culminate in a strategy workshop engaging the leadership team and the artefact becomes a summary of the workshop output.  
• The knowledge strategy projects with the biggest impact have used highly participative approaches including anecdote circles and group sensemaking. The impact is mainly through the organisation changing as the project progressed and by people seeing and feeling these changes. I remember an anecdote circle from a heavily stovepiped organisation (see below) that exposed fundamental assumptions embedded in the organisations behaviour, that were patently ridiculous once aired. It is nothing short of amazing to see behaviours change once fundamental assumptions and values are surfaced.

“We have developed cheat sheets on each country we deal with.  These contain contact information for the major agencies within that country.  We keep them on our local drives as they are specific to our area and are of no use to anyone else.”  Another participant, from a different area in the same division, then interjected: “We deal with other countries and I didn’t know about the initiatives going on in other areas.  We have been working on our own cheat sheets. It could have saved us a lot of work to use yours.”

• Don’t overcomplicate things. Work hard to establish a simple, shared understanding of what the knowledge stategy is about. Avoid complex definitions. If you must have a definition of KM then use one like Carla O’Dell’s simple description “Knowledge management is the systematic process of connecting people to people and people to knowledge and information they need to act effectively and create new knowledge.” [1]
• To harp on a theme of ours, little things can make a big difference. Some initiatives are hard to get up because they are so obvious, simple and seemingly innocuous. But, as Drucker said “the greatest compliment you can pay an innovation is to say ‘that’s obvious’”. Resist the temptation to put little things aside in favour of major initiatives.
• Develop a set of principles or behavious that resonate within the organisation. I will blog an example set in a few days time.
• Many of the challenges are similar across organisations. But the path to tackle them needs to be crafted to match the specific context of the organisation. Common themes are lots of silos creating barriers to the flow of knowledge; everyone being too busy to reflect, learn and strategise; low approachability and accessability of senior staff; staff that do not feel empowered to decide and act; and IT philosophies based on delivering systems to users and then trying to overcome their passive-aggressive resistance rather than focussing on user requirements and useability from the outset.

We have found that the key roles of the consultant are to bring proven approaches to the strategy development process, to provide a sense of what is possible (including communicating this in ways that resonate within the organisation) and to achieve acceptance of initiatives that occasionally stretch the comfort zone of the organisation. The more we help organisations in this area the more we realise the impact that having a robust knowledge strategy can have on organisational performance and the achievement of business outcomes.

[1] C. O'Dell, The Executive's Role in Knowledge Management. Houston: APQC Publications, 2004

One of the techniques I’ve recently introduced to my lessons-learning projects is what Gary Klein calls a PreMortem. As we all know, a PostMortem helps us learn why a patient has died. A PreMortem explores why a project might die in the future. Here’s how Gary describes the approach. I find it works well at the end of an open space after the planning process is complete. It injects an additional level of realism into the plans.

 

Step 1: Preparation. Team members take out sheets of paper and get relaxed in their chairs. They should already be familiar with the plan, or else have the plan described to them so they can understand what is supposed to be happening.

Step 2: Imagine a fiasco. When I conduct the PreMortem, I say I am looking into a crystal ball and, oh no, I am seeing that the project has failed. It isn’t a simple failure either. It is a total, embarrassing, devastating failure. The people on the team are no longer talking to each other. Our company is not talking to the sponsors. Things have gone as wrong as they could. However, we could only afford an inexpensive model of the crystal ball so we cannot make out the reason for the failure. Then I ask, “What could have caused this?”

Step 3: Generate reasons for failure. The people on the team spend the next three minuted writing down all the reasons why they believe the failure occurred. Here is where intuitions of the team members come into play. Each person has a different set of experiences, a different set of scars, and a different mental model to bring to this task. You want to see what the collective knowledge in the room can produce.

Step 4: Consolidate the lists. When each member of the group is done writing, the facilitator goes around the room, asking each person to state one item from his or her list. Each item is recorded in a whiteboard. This process continues until every member of the group has revealed every item on their list. By the end of this step, you should have a comprehensive list of the group’s concerns with the plan as hand.

Step 5: Revisit the plan. The team can address the two or three items of greatest concern, and then schedule another meeting to discuss ideas for avoiding or minimising other problems.

Step 6: Periodically review the list. Some project leaders take out the list every the list every three to four months to keep the spectre of failure fresh, and re-sensitise the team to the problems that may be emerging. (pp 89–90)

Klein, G. (2003). Intuition at Work: Why Developing Your Gut Instincts Will Make You Better at What You Do. New York, Currency Doubleday.

Mark and I have been helping clients with knowledge strategies lately and as we write them up we would remember  knowledge management ‘facts’ like, “knowledge transfer significantly degrades when people are separated by more that 18 feet.” You know how it is, you remember something like this but where is the original research.

So I went looking and found the following:

“When employees work at locations more than approximately 30 meters apart, they have a much-reduced daily contact and less frequent informal communication. Physical separation from others in daily life drastically reduces the likelihood of voluntary work collaboration.” (Kiesler and Cummings 2004: 59)

The authors quote the following references in relation to these statements about proximity and collaboration.

Allen, T. J. (1977). Managing the Flow of Technology. Cambridge, MIT Press.

Kiesler, S. and J. N. Cummings (2002). What Do We Know about Proximity and Distance in Work Groups? A Legacy of Research. Distributed Work. P. J. Hinds and S. Kiesler. Cambridge, Massachusetts, The MIT Press.

Kraut, R. E., S. R. Fussell, et al. (2002). Understanding effects of proximity on collaboration: Implications for technologies to support remote collaborative work. Distributed Work. P. J. Hinds and S. Kiesler. Cambridge, Massachusetts, The MIT Press.

Kraut, R. E. and L. A. Streeter (1995). "Coordination in software development." Communications of the ACM 38: 69-81.

Are you aware of any other research that support or contradict this idea of “out of sight, out of mind?”

Social searching is the next big step in helping you get the search results you need. This is how it works. Someone in your community creates a community search engine for your group and then everyone in the community starts using it. When the results appear you add value by telling the engine which results don’t belong and which ones should be promoted to the top of the list. The more the community uses the engine the better the results. 

I’ve created three social search engines using Swiki from Eurekstar:

• people issues related to knowledge management
• evaluation of hard to measure initiatives
• meaningful organisational change

If you are interested in these three topics please bookmark these links and use the search feature as much as you can. We can then see, as a community, how we can improve our searchability.

I’m reading Stealth KM: Winning Knowledge Management Strategies for the Public Sector. It’s a well written and comprehensive approach to implementing KM. And the author, Niall Sinclair, understands public sector environments. My only criticism would be its overemphasis on capturing knowledge but this is a minor point because there is a lot of good, practical advice on how to get your KM program up and running.

I love good questions so when I read Nial'’s “checklist of process improvement criteria” I thought they make a good set of questions to ask when trying to decide what aspect of KM might you implement for a specific business unit. Here are the 14 questions:

• What do people know?


• What people do not know?


• How to best leverage people’s knowledge?


• How to convince people to share knowledge?


• How to map what people know to a business process?


• How to fill knowledge gaps?


• How to capture unique knowledge?


• How to prevent knowledge loss unless such loss is planned abandonment?


• To whom or what to turn when people need to fill a knowledge gap?


• How to get people the knowledge they need, when they need it?


• How to repair knowledge processes if they fail?


• How to capture and advocate lessons learned and best practices?


• How to value unique and proprietary corporate knowledge?

del.icio.us is a free social book-marking web site which can help a group share useful links. Instead of one person relying on their own efforts to find relevant and useful information, with social book-marking you can distribute the effort among your group. Teams, communities and networks within and across organisations can make use of this simple and effective capability and enhance their collaboration practices.

This is how you do it.

Get everyone in your group to register as users of del.icio.us. If you want to check out my bookmarks, my username is ‘unorder’.

You’ll find the ‘register’ link at the top right corner of the del.icio.us home page.

 

You will be asked to install a couple of buttons to your browser. These buttons are essential and hopefully you will be able to do this inside your firewall. The buttons make it easy for you to bookmark web pages as you find them.

Now you are logged in and ready to add some bookmarks. Your delicious home page will look something like this:

To add a bookmark go to a web site like www.anecdote.com.au. Click on the ‘tag’ button that has been added to your browser. A window like this will pop up.

Fill in the description, notes and tags. I recommend you follow a practice of noting whether you have read the article or web page so colleagues know who has just skimmed it and who has read it.

The ‘tag’ field provides much of the power behind social book-marking. delicious will start to recommend tags as you use the system based on tags you have used before, what your network is using and what’s popular throughout delicious. Rather than have pre-defined categories you can record the web page using any tags you like.

To get the most value as a group, however, I recommend at the outset you decide on some tags you will use to categorise the web sites you find. Don’t attempt to develop a full taxonomy. Let it evolve by listing a few common tags and then as new ones are needed let your group know as you create them.

Now add your colleagues using the ‘Your Network’ link at the top left corner of your del.icio.us page.

Find out your colleagues’ delicious usernames and add each one. Make sure they add your name to their network too.

If you want to notify a particular member of your group of a web page you think they might like to read, use the special tag ‘for:username’. Links directed to you will turn up in your ‘links for you’ page.

Now you can keep track of what your group is book-marking on the web using del.icio.us.

I discovered Instructables today. A web site for sharing ‘How To’ advice. Imagine if organisations had a similar capability. It is interesting how many entries link to YouTube or upload a video to convey how they do things. How many organisations are you aware of actively using video on their intranets?

Wherever I go I hear the same thing, “I’d love to do it, but we just don’t have enough time.”

‘It’ is anything they know is important, and could make a difference, but they are totally overwhelmed with their current tasks. The thought of something else is just too much.

So why is there such a lack of time? Here are my top 7 reasons:

1. Someone else sets your agenda and fills you schedule with tasks
2. You don’t know what to say ‘no’ to
3. We can do so many things these days, so we do
4. We want to keep an eye on everything because the world is complex and changing and we are constantly distracted
5. Our physical workspaces encourage distractions
6. We are more connected than ever and technology keeps the channels open
7. Being generalists we tackle new things over and over and never are really proficient

These suggestions will help you wrest control of you time.

1. Learn a task management method like Getting Things Done. I’d recommend getting David Allen’s book of the same name and put it into practice. Better still, get your organisation to invest in a GTD training program (addresses issues 1 and 3).
2. Understand your priorities and work out how your work fits in to the big picture. If it doesn’t fit in to either the big picture or your priorities then say ‘no’ (issue 2)
3. Get into a community of practice and learn how to work smarter from your peers and with your peers that already do it. Rather than try and keep up with all the changes in your discipline, share the workload. Social book-marking is one possible tool (issues 4 & 7)
4. Periodically close down the communication channels. Turn off the mobile, Skype, email and then find a cafe where you can work anonymously. You’ll be amazed at how much work you’ll get done (issues 5 & 6).

Obviously this is not a comprehensive assessment of the why there is such a lack of time in organisations and what to do about it (I just don’t have the time ). But what advice would you give to someone who seems to be flat out like a lizard drinking?

[Thanks to Nancy White for a conversation this morning about this issue]

Darren Woolley over at P3 put me onto this little book that was first published in the 1940s called A Technique for Producing Ideas. Here is the five step process.

1. Gather raw material

You need to collect specific and the general information about the issue you are working on. I like to gather my raw material using Mindmanager. I also gather material on the web and tag it using del.icio.us and then link key pages to the mind map. It’s important to be a maven and get interested in the peripheral areas and keep saying to yourself, “this might be useful.”

2. Digest the material

As James Webb says, “This part of the process is harder to describe in concrete terms because it goes on entirely inside your head.” Play with the material you’ve collected. Look at it from different angles and perspectives. Don’t be too literal, use metaphors and most importantly jot down partial ideas as they come to you, regardless of how crazy they seem. Keep going until you get to the hopeless stage and everything seems like a jumble.

3. Put the issue out of your mind completely—incubation

This is the easy bit. Forget about the problem and just like Sherlock Holmes, abruptly drop the case mid-way through and got to a concert. Do anything that keeps you mind off the issue at hand and engages your emotions. Movies, music, reading, lively conversation.

4. An idea will appear

At some point the “ah ha!” moment happens. Don’t let it slide past. Write down the idea immediately.

5. Expose the idea to reality

The idea is likely to need work. So now is the time to build it up, think about the practicalities, and work out how it might really work in practice. Test the idea with colleagues and clients and be ready to adapt.

Now these five steps might seem bleedingly obvious but you will be surprised how many people want to just jump to steps four and five. I recommend buying a copy of this tiny book. It will take you an hour to read, costs $6 and does a terrific job of explaining these five steps in much greatly detail and humour. 

 

The whole fraud is only possible because performance metrics in knowledge organizations are completely trivial to game. Joel on Software

Joel demonstrates a weakness of metrics in assessing the performance of software developers and somewhat cynically suggests that large management consulting firms actively exploit this weakness. Whenever I have a choice between malicious intent and incompetence I tend towards the latter as an explanation.  Personally I believe large consulting firms have these problems because they are steeped in particular mental models, namely the idea that organisations are machines and if you can’t measure it you can’t fix it. Fredrick Brooks understood this and painted a clear picture of the complexity of managing software development projects in his classic, The Mythical Man-Month.

So what is the weakness Joel uncovers? Companies want to improve performance (excellent objective) and consulting companies have methods to measure the current performance (it’s good to know where you stand). But here is the big mistake: the consulting company makes the measure of performance a target. And this is what happens:

Consulting company comes in, gets all the programmers in a room, tells them all about Function Points [the measure of performance] and stuff, and how productivity is REALLY IMPORTANT.

Programmers remember that scene from Office Space where Bob and Bob, the consultants, recommended all the people to get fired.

Programmers start writing a heck of a lot more function points. For example you can triple the number of function points in your code simply by round tripping everything through an XML file. Big waste of time, prone to bugs, does nothing, but each file you touch adds a function point. W00t!

Consulting company comes back, measures again, and lo and behold, with all the round trips through XML the function point count is up drastically. Consultant announces that Oil Company is now at 151.29% productivity. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.

Here is an alternative approach.

• Work with the leaders to get a broad picture of what they think performance is in the context of software development. Get them to paint that broad picture while resisting the temptation to fill in all the gaps.
• Ask the software developers to define the performance measures and keep them to a minimum.
• Be clear what will remain measures and what will be the targets
• Add to the metrics approach a qualitative assessment of impact using Most Significant Change (see Zahmoo to learn about this technique).

This approach is based on the idea that any journey of change (actually I prefer the metaphor of the expedition) should be created three times. The first creation is in the minds of the leadership group (however you want to define that). The second creation of the journey is in the minds of the participants. Finally the journey is created for real as everyone sets off together and it’s here that everyone discovers that is never turns out the way they expected, so a willingness to monitor and adapt is essential.

[thanks to Les Posen for the pointer to Joel’s post]

I’m planning to be in Hong Kong for the The 3rd Asia-Pacific International Conference on Knowledge Management (11–13 December) and as part of the conference I will be running a half day workshop on Starting and Sustaining Communities of Practice on the 15th of December. You can register for the workshop here. Here is the description of the workshop. Of course there will be a good amount of narrative included the workshop.

Communities of practice are one of the most powerful organizational structures available to connect people, access expertise, facilitate learning and create business value. But communities of practice are often fickle, and present paradoxical challenges in their design and management.

This interactive half-day workshop is designed to help participants to design and foster sustainable communities of practice within their organizations, be they public sector, private enterprise or not-for-profit. The workshop will address the creation of social structures that can take responsibility for fostering learning, developing skills and artifacts, and managing knowledge. It will help participants to understand how to balance the need for sustainable communities by having both autonomy and informality; and for the community to be structured to support organizational objectives.

Paradoxically, one of the dangers of specialising in the practical application of narrative techniques is their wide applicability; sometimes the people who might be interested in your services are unsure what business issues you can help with because you appear to do so many things. So last week we decided to focus on four business issues. We selected these four because our clients are asking for this type of assistance, we’re experienced in helping clients address these business issues and each issue is a natural fit for story-based approaches. They are:

• how to keep your people and knowledge
• facilitating meaningful and lasting change
• assessing the impact of difficult to measure initiatives
• getting knowledge flowing and enhancing collaboration

Cynthia Kurtz and Dave Snowden have written a thought provoking chapter on inter-organisational learning networks. I’ve seen their ideas develop over the last few years (on listservers, Skype chats, rare meet-ups and presentations) and this paper is an excellent synthesis and application of three key ideas (in my words):

• idealistic approaches predicated on predictability, analysis and the depiction of ideal future states are total nonsense for making progress in a highly connected, complex environments.
• dispassionate and objective observers can carefully analyse and diagnose ‘the problem’ then implement a solution—more nonsense. The fact is observers impact what they observe and every diagnosis is also an intervention.
• experts have the solution—even more nonsense. The knowledge required to change and successfully adapt exists within the group and participatory approaches seed and harness natural social processes.

The chapter goes on to say:

Two of the most important elements of the naturalistic sense-making approach are narrative (as one of the primary mechanisms of complex knowledge transfer, creation and interpretation in human society) and networks (as one of the primary realities of human life – we are still, unless artificially constrained, tribal and clan-like in our needs and perspectives).

The rest of the chapter looks at inter-organisation learning networks from the perspective of tangible benefits delivered by this type of organisational structure. K&S note that “Inter-organisational learning networks are valuable yet intangible: while participants feel that they and their organisation have benefited, they struggle to explain what exactly those benefits are and how they can be expressed.” According to K&S, the broader literature points to speed of innovation difussion and improved knowledge creation as tangible benefits of these types of networks, but Cynthia and Dave suggest three more:

• improved negotiation of multiple identities
• increased discourse regarding trust and rule structures
• greater productive conflict

I’m not going to give a blow by blow description of the paper. Instead I will highlight a few of the ideas that grabbed my attention—mind you, it sparked many thoughts.

Naturalistic approaches … seek to understand a sufficiency of the present in order to act to stimulate evolution of the system. Once such stimulation is made, monitoring of emergent patterns becomes a critical activity so that desired patterns can be supported and undesired patterns disrupted.

Most Significant Change is an obvious technique for monitoring because of its participatory nature and it’s story based. I know Dave has a slight reservation about MSC because he sees it as privileging some stories over others. I think Dave makes a fair point and MSC done badly will focus on the selection rather than the dialogue that’s created by the selection process. This is a danger to keep in mind for MSC practitioners.

Many employees do their work without being able to answer the question, "Who are you in this organisation?" (And possibly just as importantly, "Who are the others in this organisation?" and “Who is this organization?”).

When I was in London last week I met Martin Clarkson from the Storytellers and their business is entirely focussed on using a story approach to address “Who is this organisation?”

I was reminded at this point of the simple test I use to assess the likelihood a community of practice forming. If you can sensibly complete the sentence, “I’m a <blank>”, then there is a chance a community might form. For example, I was helping a Defence organisation start a community of practice for project managers. I asked them, “do people ever say, ‘I’m a project manager.’?” Absolutely! Great … people identify themselves as project managers so we could get a community going. The next community was more problematic. They wanted to create a community around the competency of ‘technical.’ Does anyone say, “I’m a technical.” No… I suggested they think of another possible community to establish.

One of the ways people have always talked about identity has been through the telling of identity stories which feature the individual or group as a coherent character with certain highlighted characteristics – the lone genius, the band of principled rebels, the misunderstood nobility. Stories told for purposes of identity negotiation (both individually and collectively) are fundamentally different from stories told for other purposes.

K&S point out three characteristics of an identity story:

• the story is well known
• they tend to have a dramatic or performance nature
• they are apparently useless; they appear to be about nothing

These stories help people understand what it means to be part of the group. I heard this story last week which I think is an identity story:

A new salesman joined the company and a week after joining was told by his manager that the team was meeting in Jervis Bay. On the day of the meeting the salesman got up at 4am and made the trip down the coast and on arriving at the bay phoned his manager on his mobile to find out the exact location of the meeting. The salesman was told the Jervis Bay is the name of the meeting room of their conference centre in the city.

The example of a sacred story of the nine day fortnight reminded me of the importance of trying to find these stories in organisations. One way might be to ask, in the middle of an anecdote circle, whether anyone is aware of stories that are told and retold. I did this a couple of days ago and the fellow I was talking could immediately recall two negative stories. I’m not sure these are the sacred stories described in the chapter but I’m sure they are important to how things get done.

I loved the analogy between a Tour de France team (a peloton) and an organisation dealing with complexity.

K&S suggest a set of three heuristics for ethical narrative work:

1. always declare up front the use of narrative techniques (no stealth story work)
2. if asked any question about what sort of narrative intervention you are doing (such as instructing executives in how to tell stories for cultural change), answer honestly
3. appoint an independent arbitrator for any dispute over the use of narrative techniques in organisations

The last section of the chapter is about productive conflict. I have to admit that before reading this section and before chatting to Dave about the use of debate in a variety of forums I was sceptical about its effectiveness. As I saw it practised it seemed to be very much “I’m right, your wrong” approach that seemed to me less that productive. But I think if productive conflict is practised as described in this chapter I can see how a level a friction can be extremely beneficial. K&S’s main point, as I understood it, is that if a group focuses on conflict around ideas (cognitive conflict) and avoided conflict associated with interpersonal relationships (affective conflict) and conflict over who should do what (process conflict) a product outcome can emerge. This also assumes the group has a desire to improve the understanding or has a group problem to solve. Using a sporting metaphor, “play the ball, not the player.” 

This chapter is well worth a read. The only criticism of have of it is the slight feeling of disjointedness throughout. Each section was interesting and useful but I couldn’t always see how it fitted into a larger picture.

Just a small thought for the day.

I was chatting to the knowledge manager for a large Defence contractor today and he mentioned he’s having difficulty getting people to share information in an atmosphere of security consciousness. Whenever information is created the authors restrict its accessibility, effectively locking the resource away. If another team, in another part of the organisation, needs access to this information (and somehow they discovered the information exists) they must request permission, a process involving filling in forms and obtaining relevant levels of authority to sign off on the request. As a result people rarely bother.

This is a common problem in organisations that value security. There is, however, a simple solution. Turn the situation upside down.

The policy should be that all information is available to everyone in the organisation and if someone wants to restrict its availability they need to seek permission and fill in the relevant forms and gain the appropriate authority. Why don’t we go one step further and require everyone in an organisation to publish their information as RSS feeds inside the firewall.

Salvatore Parise, Rob Cross and Tom Davenport have teamed up to write an article for Sloan Management Review titled: Strategies for Preventing a Knowledge-Loss Crisis. It’s a description of how Organisational Network Analysis can be used to identify people who would be sorely missed if they left the organisation. They focus on three social network roles: central connectors, brokers and peripheral players. Here’s a summary, from the paper, describing the knowledge-loss risks and possible actions for each of the three network roles.

Central Connector

Knowledge-Loss Risks

• Technical expertise and organizational memory as well as a set of relationships that help many others get information or other resources to do their work.
• Experiential knowledge and reputation that enable rapid onboarding of new employees

Actions

• Use personal network profiles in career development and onboarding practices to create network redundancies systematically where departures might dramatically fragment a network.
• Reallocate information access and decision rights to ensure that one point does not become too vulnerable in the network.
• Have central connectors lead communities of practice as a means of creating connections around them.
• Require central connectors to help newcomers get acclimated through strategic introductions, “shadowing,” mentoring and joint projects.

Broker

Knowledge-Loss Risks

• Broad knowledge of how the organization operates and ability to reconize opportunities that require integration or disparate expertise.
• Ability to mobilize and coordinate efforts of disparate groups to pursue those opportunities.

Actions

• Identify and develop brokers through staffing and rotation across division, geographic and expertise groups.
• Assign brokers strategically where information gaps exist or where ideas can move from concept to action.
• Give brokers preauthorized decision limits to tap into network resources. Allow them to experiment to obtain real-time information.

Peripheral Player

Knowledge-Loss Risks

• Niche (and often marginalized) expertise or early-adopter ideas that have the potential to reshape offerings or operations.
• Set of external relationships built on trust and familiarity.

Actions

• Ensure relevant peripheral people agree visible and engaged, for example, by encouraging their hosting of “lunch-and-learns” and webcasts.
• Invite external partners to conduct workshops and attend meetings to broaden the network.
• Reward employees for bringing external ideas and connections into the organization.

Parise, Salvatore, Rob Cross, and Thomas H. Davenport. 2006. Strategies for Preventing a Knowledge-Loss Crisis. MIT Sloan Management Review 47 (4):31-38.

Last week I faciliated a workshop of 90 futurist gathered together for The Australian Foresight Conference. The organisers were keen to harness the energy created by the conference to explore new ways the group might collaborate into the future. With 90 people in a large atrium I was keen for the group to learn about themselves as a whole and go beyond an intellectual understanding. With Andrew’s help we designed a 90 minute session which included sociometry and getting people to vote with their feet. Here is what we did and a few things we learned from the process

We divided the session into two parts: understanding where the group was now; and exploring possible future collaboration opportunities. This session tool place about 2/3rds of the way though a three day conference. To kick things off I got everyone to stand and ask them to arrange themselves along an imaginery 20m line. One end of the line represented those people who thought this was one of the best conferences they had ever attended; a transformational event. The other end was for those people that thought the conference really sucked. With lots of laughter and chatting the group arranged itself pretty evenly along the line. I asked everyone to have a good look around at the result.

Using the same approach I then asked people to indicate the level of foresight experience they have with one end representing over 30 years (2 people) and the other end for those people just starting out. This time there were more people in the middle and the ‘just starting out’ end of the spectrum. Based on the movement from the previous question, it seemed like the people ‘just starting out’ were enjoying the conference more that the highly experienced practitioners.

The previous two questions where aimed at getting people used to moving around and learning about the whole group. My last question was directed squarely at the objective of the session: please indicate your level of comfort and preference for using technology to collaborate. One end represented those people who loved using technology and the other consisting of people who would rather avoid it eschewing even the telephone. Again, an even spread.

We then moved to creating a human social network diagram and I asked everyone to think about the time before the conference and recall those people they regularly collaborated with. Then stand next to a collaborator and place your hand on their shoulder. Within a few minutes a complex network of bodies emerged with clear clusters evident. I asked people to look around and then invited people from each cluster to describe their bunch.

The next step was to explore the potential for new collaborations, so I asked the group to think about the people they’ve met at the conference and who they would like to collaborate with in the future. Again I invited everyone to place their hand on the shoulder of potential future collaborators. The network changed considerably suggesting a substantial potential for new connections and collaborations.

At this point I asked everyone to grab a seat. The tables were arranged in groups of eight. To get people to consider what collaboration meant to them I ask each group to have a conversation and explore the question “why do you collaborate?” This discussion went for 15 minutes and was simply designed to get people to think about collaboration generally.

We wanted to move from this understanding of the reasons for collaboration to different forms it might take, so I invited the whole group to construct a final spectrum but this time with one person on the spectrum line representing a form of collaboration. The group made suggestions. At one end of the spectrum was formal approaches to collaboration while the other end represented informal approaches. The suggested structures, from formal to informal, were: association, community of practice, salon, virtual collaborators, partnerships, mentoring, adhoc collaborations. A addtional group formed calling themselves ‘the walkers’ and they paced up and down the entire spectrum highlighting that all the structures were relevant and useful.

Now that we had some structures identified I asked people to join a group that appealed to them most and for each group to develop a description of why their structure would be best suited for everyone to adopt. Each group then had a representative spruke the benefits of their approach. As the final move of the session I ask people to make a decision as to which group they would like to move to after hearing each benefits statement. This final group then develop a mini action plan on what they would do next to make progress after the conference finished.

The session seemed to be enjoyed by the group and the organisers were pleased with the outcomes. Lots of good actions and a commirement by people to take the next steps. One of the interesting things for me was how quickly strong groups formed and how strongly people identified with their chosen group. For example, in summarising the session I forgot to mention the Salon group and an indignant Salon member quickly pointed out that they had a very productive session and didn’t feel compelled to join any other group.

I was thinking this morning about what I believe about learning. Some of the things that sprang to mind include:

• people don’t think they’ve learned anything until they’ve reflected on what happened. When I conduct lessons learning sessions I get the same response. “So, what did you learn from the project” I’d ask. “Hmmm, let me think … no, nup, there was nothing new for me,” is a typical reply. We then start recounting the stories from the project and I then hear things like, “Hey, remember how we got our funding. What a mess. Remind me to just say no if it looks like that again.” The learning comes at this point of reflecting not in the act of work in many cases.

• learning is social—it benefits from conversations. While I believe learning can learn on your own, most learning comes through interacting with people. Learning richness increases as multiple perspectives are described, discussed, challenged and explored.
• learning is social, intellectual and emotional. There is a tremendous focus on intellectual learning in organisation yet we know decisions are made on more than the facts. Whether we are aware of it we learn through the emotions we experience. It’s no coincidence that we are better able to recall stories (our experiences) when they are attached to strong emotions.
• we learn through experience, and experience is shared through stories. I remember my honours year at uni spending 2 months researching the geomorphology of macro-tidal rivers, ‘learning about’ interference ripples, point bars and sedimentary structures. From the 3rd month I spent six weeks in the Ord River in Western Australia only to learn that it is never as clear as the diagrams in the text books make it out.
• we learn best when there is a reason to learn—I think this is an important aspect of sensemaking. We are awash with experience and information and we only notice things we care about. One of the reasons we care is when we know we must apply what we are noticing and making sense of.
• we get better at what we learn through practice. Focussed experience helps us develop a portfolio of patterns we can then use for future decision making. It’s said that it takes about 10 years the be proficient, perhaps expert, in a practice. But action without reflection through conversation doesn’t build proficiency.
• we all have different learning preferences and ways of interacting. On Saturday I facilitated a workshop attended by ninety futurists. They were exploring, as a group, how they might improve collaboration among their members. I invited everyone to arrange themselves along an imaginary line. At one end were those people who would prefer to avoid technology, even the phone was something they didn’t love using. At the other end were the techno-maniacs who love using blogs, wikis, and a raft of other web 2.0 gizmos. There was a completely even distribution along the line. And this is just one type of learning style preference. Audio, kinaesthetic, visual is another set of preferences to keep in mind.

We’ve been helping a few organisations with knowledge strategies lately and discovered the power of knowledge strategy tag lines. This idea first came to us while we were working on trust in one of the large Australian banks. They’d done a traditional mission, vision, values exercise (which are normally ineffective) but one of the values kept popping up in the meetings: “tell it like it is, no spin.” Whenever someone was pussy-footing around a topic someone would invariably blurt out this line and more often than not the pussy-footer would become forthright. We never heard the other values mentioned and when asked, people only seemed to remember this one. Colloquial language seem to be an important part of its effectiveness.

The relationship to knowledge strategies was drawn for me by Mark Bennett over at Rio Tinto. Mark was saying that he liked the tag line “Making collaboration ridiculously easy” and on hearing this I knew it had the same appeal as “tell like it is, no spin.” Whenever someone is faced with a difficult collaboration situation I can imagine people saying, “Come on, we need to make collaboration ridiculously easy not the bloody mess it is now!” (this is how an Aussie would say it and a little profanity ups the intensity).

Here are a couple of other knowledge-related tag lines I’ve heard which can be used but lack the punch of the previous examples:

• connect people to people, people to communities, people to information, and people to good practices (APQC?)
• find it and use it, find it and adapt it, build it yourself (Learning to Fly?)
• hire smart people and let them talk (Larry Prusak)
• notice, understand and act (based on Karl Weick)

Are you aware of other good knowledge strategy tag lines or would like to share your own creations? Love to hear them.

 

Dave Snowden has written an excellent post warning of the dangers of simply looking at the past and attempting to apply, without adaptation, what happened then to what is happening now. After reading Dave’s post jumped on a plane to Sydney and as I was rushing out the door grabbed Charles Handy’s Age of Unreason from my friend’s bookshelf for some in-flight reading. Published in 1989, Handy’s words are prophetic and reinforce Dave’s message as Handy argues that the nature of change has morphed in the last 30 years from incremental change, where the past was a good indicator of the future, to discontinuous change, where the future is much less certain.

Of course we do learn from history (Dave makes this clear in his post) but it’s how we apply this learning that matters. I remember in Arthur Koestler’s The Act of Creation (1964) how he talked about creativity being like being faced with a canyon you wish to cross. Your first step it to find a bridge. You might find a bridge that nearly fits but then some extra effort is required to completely span the gap. These ‘bridges’ are our patterns which we develop through experience or by hearing stories about other people’s adventures. While we are good at recalling past patterns we must remain mindful of the need to reshape these patterns according to the context and needs of the issue at hand. 

This view of decision making in a world of discontinuous change suggests two capabilities each and everyone should actively develop:

• seek out opportunities for new and diverse experiences or seek out people or accounts of new and diverse experiences – build your pattern repertoire
• learn ways to adapt bridges. As deBono says, “creativity thinking is a skill and can be taught.” Many of his techniques are applicable here.

David Pollard offered for anyone on the net to join him is a joint collaboration project using Writely. The topic: Why are conversation and collaboration tools so underused?

Dave lists 7 reasons and I jumped in with a number of other points answering a set of questions Dave posed. Interestingly only a few people got involved and the discussion hasn’t progressed much over the last few weeks. Hmmm, perhaps collaboration requires a strong need to work together.

Here’s Dave’s list:

• Most people are still unfamiliar with the tools in the middle and right columns. 
• Many of these tools are unintuitive and hence not easy to learn to use. 
• The way you have to use these tools is not the way most people converse and collaborate, i.e. they're awkward.
• Most people have poor listening, communication and collaboration skills, and these tools don't solve (and can exacerbate) this underlying problem of ineffective interpersonal skills.
• The training materials for these tools don't match the way most of us learn and discover (i.e. by doing, by watching others, and iteratively by trial and error).
• Often the people we most want to converse or collaborate with aren't online.
• Often we don't even know who the right people are to converse or collaborate with, so we need to go through a process of discovering who those people are first, which these tools cannot yet effectively help us with; once we've discovered who the right people are, we're likely already talking with them using the ubiquitous tools in the left column above.
• We are not accustomed to learning with others. Traditional schooling rewards individual effort (e.g. you take the test by yourself).

Here are my additions and some answers to specific questions posed by Dave:

When faced with the choice of learning new technology and chatting to colleagues on the phone and email to get a job done, if it can be done with what they already know they will go with that;

Collaboration tools work best when your collaborators are geographically distributed and in other time zones and I wonder how many teams have that as a situation? Sure, globalisation is spreading and small, nimble operators are connecting using these tools, but how many large corporations are active users? I know IBM is and I would imagine technology firms would be at the vanguard. I was surprised however when PriceWaterhouseCoopers consultants arrived in IBM because there were unfamiliar with collaboration tools and disinterested in using them.

It works best when all the collaborators are equally enthusiastic and capable in using the tool. It just takes a handful of influential members of a team to stop using the tool for the tool to be abandoned.

The majority of people in organisations are baby boomers (I'm not sure this is true) and haven't been brought up in environment using collaboration tools. I was in a pub the other day meeting our complexity group and I overheard a small group of people in their 20s and 30s talking about the MySpace interactions. These people already know how to use the tools and will expect them in the workplace.

To answer to Dave’s question: “Is the answer making the tools better? If so, how? If not, what is the answer?”

I think we need to make tools that operate in ways we are familiar using. People are all learning to use browsers so our tools should be browser based. I think we should stop encouraging people to use a new tool and just send them a URL and say, we are going to share our documents here, feel free to update the calendar and let people go for it. By saying it’s a new tool that will make your life better people put up the shutters; “I’m too busy to learn something new.” Yet learning something new is fun

To answer to Dave’s question: “Given time, do you think people will eventually learn to use these tools, despite their shortcomings? Which tools, current or envisioned, will be the winners, the killer apps for online-enabled conversation and collaboration, and why?”

Content volume kills collaboration tools. I’ve used Lotus Teamrooms, Groove, Basecamp and in each case when the volume of the content becomes unwieldy the users stop using. Considerable effort is required to clean out the material, archive it, highlight what's important and bring to people's attention the key things to notice. At the moment I favour web-based tools like Basecamp because of their keep it simple philosophy and the fact it's browser-based.

To answer to Dave’s question: “What one simple thing should we do/learn to most effectively enable people to become better conversationalists, and how would we do this?”

In addition to listening I think knowing how to craft and ask good questions which encourage people to converse is essential. I like asking questions that elicit stories such as "What happened?" or "When was the team at its best?"

To answer to Dave question: “What one simple thing should we do/learn to most effectively enable people to become better collaborators, and how would we do this?”

Focus on the practice of collaboration and only introduce tools when the need arises. For example, a research group might think of new ways to harness energy from heat is a promising research project. They start off chatting on the phone, sending emails to one another and then someone says: “It would be good if we could track the versions on this document we are creating.” That’s the point a tool could be introduced. I would run a poster campaign in an organisation with the title “Avoid using collaboration tools for as long as possible” and then use the rest of the poster to describe the signs the team should look out for to introduce effective tools. Put practice and process before tools.

Dissident reports that the UK Cabinet Office has posted two videos on YouTube. It’s good to see the UK Government using the latest social software. I went searching for the videos and found one called Sharing - the Leadership Challenge, which is about shared services. The second, called Transformational Government got this error message when I clicked on it:

This video has been removed at the request of copyright owner COI Television because its content was used without permission

While the intent was good—helping citizens understand government programmes and directions—the production sent the wrong message; the quality was too high. The message became, “the Government is wasting taxpayer money on expensive marketing.” Perhaps a better approach is to create a video at the quality that most YouTube videos are filmed; home hand-held handy-cam. Do some simple editing and add titles and start with a message that says, “we decided to keep costs down in this video and used the most basic tools.”

I found this YouTube link via Dissident. If you’re interested in what’s happening in knowledge management in the UK public sector, this is the blog to watch.

Yesterday I read a paper by Andreas Riege with the title, Three-dozen knowledge sharing barriers managers must consider. It’s a literature review that lists sets of potential knowledge-sharing barriers. The lit review has one major omission I noticed; there is no mention of Gabriel’s Szulanski’s work on knowledge sharing barriers (see references below).

The list is worth having as a ready reference to remind you of things to consider when you are crafting a knowledge strategy. He divides the barriers into three categories: individual, organisational and technological.

Individual knowledge sharing barriers

• general lack of time to share knowledge, and time to identify colleagues in need of specific knowledge;
• apprehension of fear that sharing may reduce or jeopardise people’s job security;
• low awareness and realisation of the value and benefit of possessed knowledge to others;
• dominance in sharing explicit over tacit knowledge such as know-how and experience that requires hands-on learning, observation, dialogue and interactive problem solving;
• use of strong hierarchy, position-based status, and formal power (“pull rank”);
• insufficient capture, evaluation, feedback, communication, and tolerance of past mistakes that would enhance individual and organisational learning effects;
• differences in experience levels;
• lack of contact time and interaction between knowledge sources and recipients;
• poor verbal/written communication and interpersonal skills;
• age differences;
• gender differences;
• lack of social network;
• differences in education levels;
• taking ownership of intellectual property due to fear of not receiving just recognition and accreditation from managers and colleagues;
• lack of trust in people because they misuse knowledge or take unjust credit for it;
• lack of trust in the accuracy and credibility of knowledge due to the source; and
• differences in national culture or ethnic background; and values and beliefs associated with it (language is part of this).

Organisational knowledge sharing barriers

• integration of KM strategy and sharing initiatives into the company’s goals and strategic approach is missing or unclear;
• lack of leadership and managerial direction in terms of clearly communicating the benefits and values of knowledge sharing practices;
• shortage of formal and informal spaces to share, reflect and generate (new) knowledge;
• lack of transparent rewards and recognition systems that would motivate people to share more of their knowledge;
• existing corporate culture does not provide sufficient support for sharing practices;
• deficiency of company resources that would provide adequate sharing opportunities;
• external competitiveness within business units or functional areas and between subsidiaries can be high (e.g. not invented here syndrome);
• communication and knowledge flows are restricted into certain directions (e.g. top-down);
• physical work environment and layout of work areas restrict effect sharing practices;
• internal competitiveness within business units, functional areas, and subsidiaries can be high;
• hierarchical organisation structure inhibits or slows down most sharing practices; and
• size of business units often is not small enough and unmanageable to enhance contact and facilitate ease of sharing.

Technological knowledge sharing barriers

• lack of integration of IT systems and processes impedes on the way people do things;
• lack of technical support (internal and external) and immediate maintenance of integrated IT systems obstructs work routines and communication flows;
• unrealistic expectations of employees as to what technology can do and cannot do;
• lack of compatibility between diverse IT systems and processes;
• mismatch between individuals’ need requirements and integrated IT systems and processes restrict sharing practices;
• reluctance to use IT systems due to lack of familiarity and experience with them;
• lack of training regarding employee familiarisation of new IT systems and processes; and
• lack of communication and demonstration of all advantages of any new system over existing ones.

Riege, A. (2005). "Three-dozen knowledge-sharing barriers managers must consider." Journal of Knowledge Management 9(3): 18-35.

Szulanski, G. (1996). "Exploring internal stickiness: Impediments to the transfer of best practice within the firm." Strategic Management Journal 17: 27-43.

Denham Grey has suggested a list of top KM principles. I’ve only included the headings here and encourage you to head over to Denham’s site for his full explanations. The principles include:

• Choose engagement over a repository
• Respect and appreciate the key role of trust & context
• Collect stories, use metaphor, ethnography and analogy to build inquiry
• Cultivate executive support

There is a lot of wisdom in Denham’s post. In addition to the principles Denham describes what he believes is the essence of KM:

• increasing awareness
• fostering learning
• supporting sense-making

I particularly like this statement:

Decisions, solutions, agility, competitive advantage and other benefits follow from sustaining a questioning environment, encouraging creative abrasion & experimentation, promoting deep dialog and allowing space for learning from mistakes.

The principles I would add to Denham’s list are:

• Focus on practice and process before employing technology
• Demonstrate value early and often—from the outset, collect success stories that demonstrate how the KM initiatives are enhancing responsiveness, increasing innovation, building capability and improving effectiveness.
• Get people talking about KM which goes beyond sharing and searching documents.

On this last point, Jack Vinson has posted about how the US Government has come up with a definition of knowledge management, which reads:

Defines the set of capabilities that support the identification, gathering and transformation of documents, reports and other sources into meaningful information.

Wow, this is so limited and unhelpful I was gobsmacked when I read it. Any organisation following this definition of knowledge management will end up with a plethora of IT systems and databases with documents no one looks at. It only talks about how information can be translated to information (a point well made by Tom Short today on the SKMLeaders forum) and forgets about people.

Here is our attempt of how we think people can usefully talk about knowledge management. And here is a way to develop a knowledge strategy.

One of the my favourite blogs at the moment is Bob Sutton’s Work Matters. He’s an academic at Stanford who has a practical view of organisational issues and the author of the no asshole rule. A phrase that jumped out at me while reading Bob’s post this morning is the advice to have strong opinions, weakly held. Strong opinions encourage you to develop strong arguments for your point of view while holding these opinions weakly enables you to see and hear other people’s ideas and change your opinion as you learn more about the world.

IBM seems to be taking its WorldJam technology to the streets and letting everyone take a look. Since IBM’s first Jam in 2001 (I was one of the 50,000 or so participants) they have regularly held these 72 hours collaborations on their intranet to tackle a range of issues. This is the first time, to my knowledge, that everyone (outside IBM) can see what’s going on. It’s starts on September 12 and it will be worth taking a look.

[Thanks to Nancy White for finding this one]

I’ve just discovered a new word which I love: taskonomy. Donald Norman uses it to describe how we arrange things around us to get our work done. Rather than organise our materials alphabetically or thematically (that’s the taxonomy approach) we assemble things we might use together. Don’s example comes from some anthropological work investigating blacksmiths. At the end of the day a blacksmith doesn’t put all his hammers in one pile and tongs in another. No, he places the hammer next to the tongs and pops them both on the anvil ready for work the next day.

Typesetters of old, as you would imagine, had a similar system. Typesetting cases were arranged so that the popular letters where together and easily accessible. Capital letters were less commonly used so they tended to be stored in the Upper Case, out of the way. This is where we got the terms upper and lowercase letters.

These examples illustrate physical arrangements of tools which represent a craftsman's knowledge. Do we use taskonomies to arrange our concepts? To me one obvious example are stories, which arrange ideas using a plot. Like a blacksmith arranging his tools ready for use, a story gathers ideas into a meaningful assemblage ready to be told. Social networks are another example of a taskonomy in the sense that the people we know and trust are clumped together into groups like communities, friends, colleagues.

Patrick Lambe’s post put me on to Donald Norman’s idea of taskonomy. Patrick says:

Taxonomists cannot remain in the back storeroom keeping the shelves tidy. They also need to venture into the storefront and see how customers need their information organised for use.

I suggest taxonomists go a step further and get out into the workplaces of their customers, listen to their stories, find out how work really gets done and start incorporating taskonomy thinking in how they deliver their services. I agree with Patrick when he says:

It’s not that taskonomies are any better than taxonomies – in fact, you’ll need both taxonomies and metadata to support your taskonomies behind the scenes.

The problem we face is that organisations are obsessed with order, taxonomies, and wanting their workplace to work like a well-oiled machine. It’s time we shifted the focus to taskonomy and re-balance our approach to organisational issues by including more right brain thinking (design, story, empathy, meaning. symphony, play).

[thanks to Tom Graves for the typesetter example]

I remember a great story told by Margaret Wheatley about how the US Federal Aviation Authority successfully landed all the planes in US airspace on September 11. I was searching around for it today and found it. Here is it:

On September 11th, as we all know, every plane was grounded. It took four hours for them to clear the skies, and during that time, they had to continue to assess whether terrorists were controlling any other plane. There was one incident in Alaska where the pilot was Korean and was giving the wrong code, so they thought he was in trouble, but he wasn't. The Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) had to land 5,000 planes. Never been done before. No preparation, no simulations, no training. The person who was head of the FAA, was new to the job; it was his first day on the job, and I remember that he said, “In the interview for this job I asked, ”Will I have complete authority to make decisions?” and they said, “Yes.” He never thought that his very first day would be one where he was going to buy the farm on if it didn't work. He gave the order. Several airlines, like Delta, had already asked all their planes to land. Many of the planes had to land at small airports. Small airports have air traffic controllers, rulebooks, and well-trained people, but there was no rulebook that covered this kind of circumstance, so they had to invent or disregard procedures. Everyone was being asked to be courageous by going against the book. And they all did it very well. It was a monumental task.

Later, they realized that the reason they succeeded was the strength of their relationships. They trusted each other as they were communicating across the country. There was a real esprit décor; they were smart. They could make new policies. They could make up rules that worked in the moment. So after Sept. 11, as any good organization would do, the FAA wanted to learn why this had worked so well. But of course, being a federal agency, they wanted to learn what worked so they could put it into a rulebook. After its research, the FAA did something extraordinarily brave. They decided not to write a rulebook about the incident; they understood that what had made it work was people's intelligence, dedication, and relationships. That's a lesson we all need to learn right now. The only way through an uncertain time is to have a certainty about your values, your purpose, and a certainty about each other. We call it trust, but it's even more than that. It's knowing, as my friend's daughter who plays rugby says, “When you're moving a ball down the field, you can’t see the people right behind you, but you may need to pass the ball to them, so they just keep signaling to you and they just keep staying with you, with you, with you.”

Andrew says we should be more comfortable with not knowing and I have to admit I don’t entirely know what he means. :-) This post over at Fast Company starts with a nice Einstein quote. I wish people would cite where these quotes were written, said, etc. Does anyone know where this quote comes from?

"The difference between what the most and the least learned people know is inexpressibly trivial in relation to that which is unknown." -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

Peering over the fence between disciplines has been a time honoured method for sparking revolutionary ideas. Remember Charles Darwin fruitful dalliance with economics which helped him understand the mechanism driving evolution—natural selection. Ironically, we now have the field of evolutionary economics—the economists are taking more than a peak at what evolutionary biologists are doing. Each new combination creates new ideas.

The maker of fancy speakers and headphones that cancel noise, Bose, have taken a leap into a new field and have developed a shock absorption system for cars based on technology they know well, high-voltage electrical coils and magnets. The authors of the research,  David Hsu and Kwanghui Lim, call the ‘peaking’ process, knowledge bridging and suggest that:

knowledge bridging can help companies bring products to market faster and raise money more quickly.

and

all a firm has to do to become a knowledge bridger is hire the right people and give them the freedom to follow their curiosity.

This is all reported in Knowledge at Wharton article called: In Biotech Startups, Knowledge Bridging Can Be the Key to Creativity. The article elaborates on Hsu and Lim’s research describing the ways Silicon Valley biotech companies created new patents and using this information to map the lineage of invention in the valley. Knowledge bridging was a noticeable trait of the successful companies and remarkably the only factor they could find that led to knowledge bridging was the act of hiring a variety of researchers. This reminds me of the Larry Prusak quip, when asked what someone should include in a knowledge strategy Larry suggested: hire smart people and let them talk. Perhaps we need to modify this to: hire a diverse bunch of smart people and let them talk.

The research paper that forms the background to this article is here. 

I just noticed this news item over at Harold Jarche’s blog describing how anthropologist Anne Irwin spent time collecting stories in the field with the Canadian Light Infantry battle group in Afghanistan. Here’s an except:

When they are out in the field and return from a patrol, the exhausted soldiers relax together in small, tightly-knit groups - Irwin calls them “nesting circles” - and recount the events of the day or the mission.

Each soldier contributes a story, an anecdote or even a joke, adding stock and spice into what becomes a collective stew of experiences, she said. They also playfully insult each other.

The storytelling not only helps forge the individual identity of each soldier, it builds interpersonal relationships that can have a bearing on how well the unit performs on the battlefield.

I was struck by two things which seem to be pre-requisites for storytelling among group: memorable experiences and down time together for recounting those experiences. While never as intense as battle conditions I’m certain we still have memorable experiences at work but I feel we are losing out down time to recount and as a result losing valuable informal learning.

There often comes a point in the life of a community of practice when the group really benefits from creating tangible things designed to improve the members’ practice. This point occurs sometime after the early days of formation after the members have worked out their domain, and they know who’s participating, how people get on with one another, and how members communicate.

Following is a simple approach designed to coordinate action within a CoP. I first spoke about this approach in relation to setting up a Quickplace environment, which in retrospect might have been a mistake because many people couldn’t see how the ideas where relevant if they weren’t using Quickplace or when technology isn’t in the community’s sights.

There are three parts to this approach:

• discussion tables
• a list of possible projects
• small groups (ideally 3 people) working on things together

A discussion table is when community members come together to discuss a topic related to the community’s domain. The community coordinator might organise discussion tables on a regular basis. They can be done face to face or be a facilitated online discussion. I think there should be no more than about 12 people in the conversation to ensure everyone is present and active. If there are more than 12 people interested in the discussion table topic then run multiple discussion tables. During the conversation one of the participants keeps a note of ideas involving members taking action to improve the member practice. For example, if you were part of a business narrative community and the topic was ‘running effective anecdote circles’ someone might suggest, “we should develop a anecdote circle facilitator’s kit” or “we should develop a members training program”. These ideas would be noted and added to the list of possible projects. A summary of the discussion table conservation is also distributed to the entire community.

The list of possible projects is a simple list of all the suggested projects and activities arising in the discussion tables and other forums. You might put the list online and allow members to vote on each suggested project. Members are encouraged to take on a project from this list in groups of 3 and ideally with people you haven’t work with before. This simple rule helps the community create new social networks. These small project teams might use an online collaboration space. Once they’ve completed their project they communicate the results to the entire community and store the outputs where members can access them.

The community therefore makes progress by hosting discussion tables and encouraging active and robust conversation that leads people to suggesting things that would be good to do as a community. The list of projects grows and some are tackled based on the energy and enthusiasm of members. The process of undertaking these projects in small groups creates new relationships which in turn creates new conversations and new ideas for future discussion tables.

Related posts:

• Using Quickplace to support a Communities of Practice
• New white paper: connecting people with content

 Learning Retention Rates

Originally uploaded by Eric Rice.

Looks like we need more opportunities to help others learn to enhance our own learning retention rates.

Following on from my post about how to identify and evaluate expertise, I discovered this list today in an interesting resource called How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School.

• Experts notice features and meaningful patterns of information that are not noticed by novices.
• Experts have acquired a great deal of content knowledge that is organized, and their organization of information reflects a deep understanding of the subject matter.
• Experts’ knowledge cannot be reduced to sets of isolated facts or propositions but, instead, reflects contexts of applicability, i.e., it is “conditionalized.”
• Experts are able to retrieve important aspects of their knowledge with little attentional effort.
• Though experts know their disciplines thoroughly, this does not guarantee that they are able to instruct others about the topic.
• Experts have varying levels of flexibility in their approaches to new situations.

In 1996 I helped the Australian Antarctic Division discover and document its spatial (map-related) data. I remember walking down long corridors in their Hobart offices and being regaled by stories of brave (crazy?) scientists enduring successive winters. Each scientist had their own office and I notice most doors were kept shut. I popped in to see a seal scientist and asked about his spatial data. He was a giant, hairy man—reminded me of a seal-elephant. In two strides he was in front on his map cabinet, lifted the lid about 5cm and whipped out a single map. There was at least another 50 maps inside the cabinet and when I asked about the others he assured me that I needn’t worry.

The location of seal colonies and sitings were marked on his map. It turns out that lichen is important to seals so lichen locations were also marked.

My next visit was to the lichen scientist two doors down the corridor. He was more forthcoming with his data. The lichen guy had also made careful note of seal locations whenever he was in the field. “Do you collaborate with the seal guy down the hall?”, I asked. “Nup, we have little in common.”

I remembered this incident while reading Nancy White’s post about the exciting new trial Nature is conducting to test the usefulness of public peer review. If successful we might see articles published faster and in a more transparent fashion. Nancy makes the following observation:

One of the barriers I've noticed to knowledge sharing is "publish or perish." The practice of very carefully sharing (or not at all) early data prior to publication has some unintended consequences. It slows down collaboration and potentially, stifles innovation. It creates a competitive scientific market where sometimes we need a collaborative one. The journal peer review process is intended to create rigor and critical thinking so we aren't all shammed by a fakester. But it also create firewalls between information and the public.

I’m working with two scientific organisations at the moment and in both cases the ‘publish or perish’ mentality doesn’t stifle collaboration entirely, it just ensures scientists don’t collaborate with their colleagues because they compete with them for recognition and promotions. Collaborators come from other organisations, and better yet, overseas and far away.

One of our newsletter readers asks the following question in relation to our article on expertise location: 

“do you have any comments or references on how to go about the evaluation of this expertise?”

Building a groups’ capability to assess the validity of advice, ideas and suggestions is an important skill. The first step is awareness. How often do you hear people, especially management gurus, saying “my research suggests …” then never actually referencing the research results. This happened this week in ActKM where a poster said:

So I asked for the reference and the poster said that he didn’t have access to the reports but thought it would be a good idea to cite references—and then omitted the citations!

I asked for the names of the reports, but no reply. Another member of the community supported my idea of citing references in these cases but after that, total silence. The community is tacitly giving permission to this behaviour.

This is an example of where the community is not building a capacity to recognise flawed advice. Following are some ideas on the skills communities could develop which would help the entire group be more discerning.

I remembered two useful references when I was asked about evaluating expertise: Chris Argyris’ book Flawed Advice, and Bob Sutton’s essay called Management Advice: Which 90% is Crap? But before I remind us of some of Chris and Bob’s suggestions on evaluating expertise let me describe some of the things I’ve learnt from experience (probably just common sense).

• Listen for stories. Without stories advice and expertise remains abstract and devoid of experience. Become aware of the richness of the story—how detailed are they? do they include facts?
• Are they ever wrong? I’m suspicious of people who purport to have all the answers and have never made a mistake in their life.
• Can they see what’s missing? Deep expertise is not just the ability to see what’s happening and make suggestions for improvement but the ability to see what’s missing and knowing what to leave out. This idea was introduced to me in Gary Klein’s book on Intuition.
• Simple, clear language. If you really understand what you are talking about you should be able to convey your ideas simply, clearly and concisely.
• Triangulate the expertise with your social networks. Jim tells me that Martha knows her stuff; Anne tells me that Martha is top notch; but Martha doesn’t keep telling me how wonderful she is. My confidence in Martha is high.
• An expert in one field doesn’t make them an expert in everything. There is a well known psychological pattern where if people believe a person is an expert in a field, such as corporate strategy, they are inclined to believe that person in also expert in other similar fields, such as mergers and acquisitions.

Chris Argyris suggestion is to listen for advice which is: “… illustrated, encourage inquiry, and are easily tested.” On the other hand be wary of  advice “that include little or no illustration, inquiry, or testing” and where defensive reasoning dominates. The problem with this suggestion, as I see it, that much advice is not easily tested or takes considerable time to test it. For example, we have been saying that anecdote circles are an excellent method to elicit stories and they create a positive and trusting experience simply based on our experience. It is not until this year that we have put this to the test and had each participant who attended an anecdote circle provide an evaluation of the experience that we were able to test our assertion. BTW we are presenting our results at KM Asia.

I’ve written a post about Bob Sutton’s suggestions to test management advice here. I call his suggestions heuristics for bullshit detection (please excuse the vulgarity of this phrase. You should know that it is quite a common term in Australia and I believe Australians are great bullshit detectors).

Thanks to Nancy White for a conversation that helped me remember some useful ideas.

 

Practically on the day I joined IBM in 1999 I was whisked off to Cambridge, MA, to be part of a global team to launch a new system that would help people discover hidden expertise in an organisation. On the way home I wrote a paper on the people issues I thought would hamper the implementation of this type of technology which I will share with you one day, but not today because I want to talk more generally about expertise location.

This trip was the moment I became interested in the problem of how you find people who know stuff that you need to know. Expertise is a slippery word because this stuff you need to know might not seem like rarefied knowledge; in fact, it rarely is. Most of the time you simply need to know how to get things done and the knowledge you need might be as simple as an introduction, a pointer to a web-site, a demonstration, or a conversation to get you thinking. So I got thinking: what are some simple ways to find the people you need to know? Interestingly, in many cases you already know these people but just don’t realise their breadth of knowledge.

I wrote this article a couple of years ago and found it again recently. I think it begins to answer my rhetorical question but it is far from complete. We published it in our last newsletter so I’ve popped it in the white papers section of our site. There is much more to be said on the topic, for example, on how people navigate through networks to find people, how do you validate expertise, what is expertise, and how do you create an environment where expertise finds you rather than the other way around?

I’m on the hunt for stories about knowledge management activities that are happening in Melbourne. Why? Because I’m on the organising committee for Melbourne KM Leadership Forum (KMLF) and we have a blog where we are posting about KM things happening in this fine (but sometime wet, windy and cold) city.

I’ve just written a little description of what Department of Primary Industries are doing with collaboration. I would love to hear about what you are doing too and happy to come visit and write something up if you’re game :-)

An observation: knowledge management is rarely called knowledge management any more. Yet you find knowledge management being practised in a range of different projects like continuous improvement projects, culture change initiatives, leadership development, project management and practically anything else you can think of. In fact if you are systematically encouraging knowledge behaviours like the ones I posted about a couple of days ago, then you are doing knowledge management.

Patrick Lambe over at Green Chameleon has written an interesting post which is half critique and half reflection. After getting down about a paper he is reading that seems to have a ‘stick information in a database’ theory of knowledge sharing (I’ve written about the problem with this approach here) to how a close friend is dealing with being diagnosed with a serious illness Patrick offers these lessons about knowledge sharing:

• Not all sharing is created equal – people share as part of their jobs, for purely altruistic reasons, or for a blend of the two
• Much of our important sharing has formal, well developed conventions and rituals
• Social prejudice can get in the way of knowledge sharing, even if the relevant information is available and known (Mary Douglas has written about the irrational ways societies deal with disease)
• To understand knowledge sharing, we have to look beyond the event to the context: a knowledge sharing event rarely exists in a vacuum; it’s usually a part of an interlocking network of knowledge sharing events, each of which complements and informs the others
• Knowledge sharing is often highly influenced by urgency, affective and emotional influences, and visible practical needs
  

I’ve been asked by a client to propose a way to help embed knowledge behaviours. My approach will consist of creating situations where the organisation’s staff work things out for themselves and develop their own interventions (as is my way), but it did get me wondering what knowledge behaviours might be. Here are some I’d thought of. My list was prompted by some ideas in David De Long’s working paper of 1997. I would love to hear what you think knowledge behaviours are.

• sharing what you know
• helping someone to learn something
• having open and rigorous dialogue
• discussing and exploring assumptions
• speaking one’s mind respectfully
• seeing whether it has been done before and using what’s been done rather than creating something anew
• linking up with people outside my clique to see if they are doing something we can use
• taking time out to reflect on what’s happened and discussing this with my colleagues
• seeking out the best person to help me (this might not be the most expert but perhaps the most approachable and quite expert)
• trying to combine ideas from different fields
• recognising others for their intellectual effort
• forming teams to collaborate on a project
• willingness to share the kudos
• being trustworthy
• fostering trust (this is a biggy and would have many related behaviours)
• checking my trusted information sources

I enjoy reading Bob Sutton’s work. He seems like a no nonsense sort of guy who is not trying to baffle you with BS. Bob was the guy who suggested the no asshole rule which I would love to see more organisations implement.

Today Bob has released a new essay on Change This suggesting some guidelines for detecting misguided management advice. Here are his 5 guidelines. Check out the essay for the detail.

• treat old ideas as if they are old ideas
• be suspicious of breakthrough ideas and studies
• what are the incentives for the people who are selling you the idea?
• are they telling you that “all the best companies” or “most of the fortune 500” do it?
• does it seem to obvious (this is a good thing)

One niggle. I’m sure Bob is aware of Chris Argyris’ book, Flawed Advice and the Management Trap: How Managers Can Know When They’re Getting Good Advice and When They’re Not yet there is no mention of it. “Treat old ideas as if they are old ideas”, hmmm.

In March this year I introduced you to A Whole New Mind. Daniel Pink’s argument goes something like this: jobs which can be done anywhere at the end of an ethernet cable (software development, call centres, accounting etc) are moving to wherever it can be done cheapest; if it can be automated it will; and we have so much of everything each individual item is worth less. Knowledge workers in first world countries like Australia, the US and Britain need to develop their capabilities in areas like design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning.

Apologies for the long intro to this observation—bear with me. On the weekend I was mentioning to a friend that skills that were difficult to off-shore like plumbing, bricklaying and running restaurants were good occupations to pursue but perhaps I was deluded. I was watching Today Tonight (an embarrassing admission) and there was a story about business owners importing employees from the Phillipines and while they were being paid the award wage the business owners took advantage of the immigrants lower expectations for accommodation and general living standards. So it seems all jobs are at risk and a sensible strategy for a knowledge worker is develop Pink’s 6 capabilities as quickly as possible.

Don Cohen reminds us of the power of telling stories in organisations by retelling the story about NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labs regular storytelling sessions. More organisations should do this rather than traditional information sharing get-togethers you typically find ladened with powerpoint and rooms filled with of rows of seats in seminar style. By asking the presenter to tell the story of their work the nature of the conversation changes—people don’t fight the content, they relax. Present people with facts and they feel compelled to examine and dispute. Present a tale and people engage and explore.

The different interpersonal dynamic created between presenting facts and telling stories was made clear to me one day when I was running one of our sensemaking workshops. The client said there was no time to collect stories to use in the workshop (our standard approach) and asked whether using snippets from reports would suffice. I said I was happy to give it a try while making it clear that I had never done it that way before. We ran the workshop and the participants argued vociferously over most of the snippets which, of course, lacked context and seemed to the participants as bold statements of fact without justification. It was a disaster. On the other hand people rarely argue against a story.

Don then makes two excellent observations we should all keep in mind:

• “I believe building trust and relationships is a more important effect of organizational storytelling than knowledge transfer.”
• “… the benefits of telling (emphasis added) a story can be profound.”

I agree with Don on both points and would add that any activity that fosters conversation and the development of new social networks is essential for creating adaptable organisations. Not only that but it makes work fun.

If you want to see a bunch of knowledge management blog content in one space, here is a blog aggregator site called Blogdigger.

The actKM list has a discussion underway to collect stories of how people have (either successfully or otherwise) tried to get management support for their KM activities. The story below is the one I submitted.

So, while I would love to say that the MD immediately approved the business case for travel for the domain teams, this wasn’t the outcome.  But there was a major change in the MD’s attitude towards the domains.  It went from ‘tolerating their existence’ to seeing clearly how they could and were adding value to the business.  I then continued to look for and test other stories…

 

David Maister has just written an example speech for a new Marketing Director starting out in a law firm. It occurred to me that a very similar approach would work for a newly appointed Chief Knowledge Officer, Knowledge Manager, Director of Knowledge.. Below is David’s version with some modifications in square brackets.

Denham Grey says:

At the same time we never seem to have time for good discussions. Many of our conversations appear largely transactional, designed to achieve the task at hand.

There are a number of techniques which foster dialogue. They can’t be used without a specific business purpose in mind, but when included in an initiative they create an opportunity for people to engage in in-depth conversations. And people love it!

• Most significant change helps people evaluate the impact of those projects which are difficult to measure. Stories of significant change are collected and then people are brought together to select which they think is the most significant. This selection process requires discussion, argument, listening and in the process people learn about base assumptions and what people value.
• Open space technology is a facilitation technique designed for small to very large groups to identify the issues that are most important to them and then once identified people nominate the topics they wish to discuss.
• Appreciative inquiry involves people interviewing one another about the things ‘that work around here’. People hear one another’s stories and the group discusses what the stories reveal  in order to design improvements.
• Anecdote circles involve people coming together to share their work experiences in the form of stories. They are typically used to size up a situation.

These techniques can form a key part of any change process because they perform the dual role of informing us of what’s really happening  and  by engaging people in conversation new social connections form, meaning emerges, assumptions are surfaced, energy is created and a range of possibilities materialise. It’s for these reasons we should include more conversation-fostering techniques wherever we can.

For years we have been listening to presentations, reading articles and working with organisations in the KM field and probably the only consistent theme is the lack of agreement as to what KM is.   The lack of a consistent way to talk about knowledge management effectively disempowers us from taking concerted action.  It makes competitors of those who need to work together to make organisations more effective and attractive.  We see far too much time and effort spent to-ing and fro-ing over what KM is and not enough in doing good things.  For these reasons, we have written our latest whitepaper to provide our thoughts on how to talk about KM building on our experiences and on the lessons of those who have most influenced our journey. We hope you find it useful in developing your thoughts on how to talk about KM in your organisations.

David Maister has posted a list of things organisations should do to get the most from their training efforts. Here are two points which I’ve seen make a real difference when people attend our workshops:

For David’s full list, go here.

The relationship among data, information and knowledge is often depicted as a pyramid. With data at the base, it’s converted to information and information converted to knowledge. This metaphor of a pyramid or ladder to explain these concepts is unhelpful because you start to believe one is better than the other and there is a tendency to extrapolate to the next level believing that knowledge is simply extrapolated to form wisdom—I have even heard people talk about wisdom management. My two days at the meaning making symposium has helped me see this relationship differently, that is, viewing data, information and knowledge as a system.

Thanks to John Barton at the symposium reminding me of a view of data, information and knowledge first brought to my attention by Dave Snowden which I will extend to include the role of sensemaking and context.

Knowledge acts as an interpretant to turn data into information. The information we notice (we don’t notice all information channelled toward us), might create some level of dissonance (its surprises us or we ask ourselves, “What’s the story here?”) and if we care about resolving this dissonance we create knowledge. Knowledge is created through a sensemaking process.

But data to one person is someone else’s information. A commodities trader might stare at a computer screen of numbers which would look to most people as raw data. To the commodity trader, however, slight changes in the numbers conveys messages which act as information they might convert to knowledge (via sensemaking) and take action. Consequently, context is a key ingredient acting as an underlay to all three concepts of data, information and knowledge.

David has a thought provoking post about why most of the training people take in business is useless. I particularly liked his test of whether a particular workshop or training course is well timed:

Karl-Erik Sveiby was one of the keynote speakers at the KM for Professional Services conference in Sydney last week. 
I was fortunate to have dinner with him on the night before his presentation and hear about his soon-to-be-released book ‘Treading Lightly – Revealing the Hidden Wisdom of the World’s Oldest People”.  Karl-Erik lived in Australia (well, OK, it was Queensland) for about 10 years and the book relates to research with an Aboriginal group in North-Western New South Wales. The book will be released in the next few weeks.

In his keynote presentation the next morning, Karl-Eric had a simple graphic that displayed how organisational priorities can be out of whack with reality.  He listed the following five points as being, in descending order, the things offering the highest ‘value potential’ in KM:

1.    Align KM with business strategy – a knowledge-based strategy
2.    Improve climate for knowledge creation and sharing – collaborative climate
3.    Improve knowledge sharing with clients
4.    Invest in internet-based communication
5.    Build organisation for content management (on-line library, databases)

His slide then changed to show where the most money was spent in KM.  And you guessed it…. it is the exact opposite from the list above. So most money is spent on item 5, and least money on item 1.  These thoughts are well worth bearing in mind when developing your organisation’s knowledge strategy and funding proposals for KM initiatives.  As Kate Andrews  said several years ago: “spend first on beer and travel, then on technology”.

A paper Trish Milne and I wrote over 12 months ago has just been published in the Journal of Knowledge Management. It’s called ActKM: the story of a community and it reports on a research project that sought to discover the value of the online discussion list to its members; how members manage the postings, the degree of off-list activity generated through the list; and the impact of the list on KM practice.

Of course ActKM has changed considerably over the last 3 months with its disappearance and re-emergence but the characteristics we found seemed to have endured in the new reincarnation of ActKM.

I’m always on the lookout for better tools for collaboration. foldera looks impressive and while it has only been available on the web for 12 days, and still in beta, they have had 400,000 sign ups. Here are some of the features

• document management
• calendar
• instant messages
• email
• task management
• contact management
• activity folder to pull it all together

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).

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

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.

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.

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?

BL Ochman has alerted me to this excellent initiative. The World Trade Center Memorial Foundation is collecting stories about 9/11. I guess we all remember what we were doing when this tragic event unfolded.

The story-base will be significant and I can see how it will be an effective memorial. With such a rich resource it would be a shame to see its potential unfulfilled. Here are a couple of ways it could be enhanced. People should be encouraged to interact with the stories by being able to comment on them and perhaps tagging and rating each story according to its impact on the reader. The group intelligence would arise from these interactions and provide assistance for new users seeking stories that matter to them.

 Kathy Sierra over at Creating Passionate Users (one of my favourite blogs) has a learning blog:

“A blog that shares what you know, to help others. Even—or especially—if that means giving away your ‘secrets.’”

Here at Anecdote we’ve had a similar approach. I remember a few years ago reading a book called Knowledge Assets by Max Boisot and was taken by his argument that slow industries benefited from locking away knowledge while fast industries benefit from maintaining a cycle of knowledge creation, sharing and adoption. Sharing what you know is the best way to be in a position to create more. Also, what was useful 6 months ago in a fast industry is old hat today. Those squirrelling away their knowledge assets quickly become irrelevant. Check out Boisot’s I-space to understand his point of view more fully.

The rest of Kathy’s post is about what she knows about learning theory. Well worth a look.

Anecdotes and anecdotal evidence are considered fairly sceptically by scientists and science as a whole. Science is very much concerned about verifiability and repeatability and although an anecdote is certainly repeatable, verifying an anecdote is a whole other story. Scientists do fear the anecdote, and rightly so. Scientists face a lot of frustration with how the sharing of a mere anecdote is able to convince people against their theories despite the apparent strength of their scientific data. (I would hazard a guess that the Flat Earth Society is an example where at least a few scientists would be tearing their hair out…)

And as Batman’s embracing of the bat, his greatest fear, enabled him access to a deeper power in himself, it looks like scientists are doing the same with the anecdote. The following list compiled by Ron Graham shows where scientists are quite happily using anecdotes and anecdotal evidence:

• deciding how and to whom to apply for research grants
• deciding directions for new and unstarted research
• deciding what questions to ask human subjects in gathering empirical data
• deciding what and when to publish

I enjoy reading Dave Pollard’s blog. While reading today’s post on the future of blogging it occurred to me that there is an underlying assumption in the way prognosticators like Dave talk about this type of software: people are working alone and social software makes it easy to avoid face to face encounters.

What if we had more software which brought people together, facilitated participation and fostered face to face conversations? Meetup is one example but I’m sure there are others (would love to know what there are) and if there isn’t we should be creating them.

There should be a new category of software called something like ‘participatory software.’ Its role would be to support processes which encourage people to meet, discuss and take action together. I think social software is too focussed on information sharing and the niceties of technology.

Over the last 6 months I have attended a few knowledge management conferences to see if things have progressed and I’m dismayed at how many times I heard academics and practitioners still talking about capturing tacit knowledge. I thought we understood that nature of tacit knowledge is that it cannot be translated or converted in this way. Hmmm. Disappointing. Sadly this thinking is being taught at the universities and then is applied in organisations. All we end up with are more unsuccessful ‘knowledge repositories.’

The best description of this common misunderstanding is contained in this paper by Professor Haridimous Tsoukas. One of the must reads in the KM literature.

 

On Monday and Tuesday this week I trundled off to ACKMIDS. Actually I didn’t think I would make it this year because I was scheduled to be in Adelaide but as luck would have it my client postponed our work which left me free to attend. ACKMIDS stands for the Australian Conference for Knowledge Management and Intelligent Decision Support. Frada Burstein and Henry Linger have been running this conference for 10 years and because it was a momentous occasion I took this snap of them both.

The highlight of the conference was the keynote address by Larry Prusak. He gave a presentation by video-link on the past, present and future of KM. Here are a couple of things I noted from Larry’s presentation which were good reminders:

• 1st generation KM largely failed because of the mislabelling of everything as KM and an over-emphasis on technology
• knowledge is profoundly social
• it is very difficult to share knowledge; it’s local, sticky and contextual 
• physical, cognitive and social space will be future areas of knowledge endeavour
• no one identifies with the firm anymore—people identify with their groups and communities
• trust and social norms have yet had the attention they deserve
• norms need to enforced
• transparency is important to foster trust
• trust is contagious therefore putting trustworthy people into the network hubs is important
• people don’t learn from failure (hmmm, I didn’t agree with this one)—only workers and organisations fail, never management
• knowledge management will never disappear but the name will change

Thanks to Frada and Henry for another excellent conference. I look forward to seeing the proceedings.

Tom Davenport relates an interesting observation about the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) by its developer, Watts Humphrey.

It makes sense of course to focus on helping people get better at what they do. Like Tom we need to ask “What do knowledge workers do?” and provide ways to improve their ability to do it. Tom picks some of the obvious knowledge worker activities such as reading and writing and suggests we have them covered. He also points out that we’re a group of meeters and could be better at this skill. But Tom want to take us to the topic of information processing pointing out that we do a lot of this but we don’t know much about how to improve our skills in this area.

Personal knowledge management is an important movement. I hope we don’t take to it, however, with a grand unifying approach where ‘the smart people’ decide how it will be implemented. I’d rather see knowledge workers (which is everyone I think—let me know if you can think of non-knowledge workers) design their own interventions and be supported to put them in action and learn from the process.

In an update on Personal Knowledge Management, Dave Pollard states the case for refocusing KM efforts away from the storing stuff in a central repository and onto ‘connecting to the right people just-in-time, canvassing them to gain their knowledge and advice in the context of a particular business problem or pursuit, synthesizing that knowledge and applying it to the issue at hand.’

I has a similar idea at the beginning of this year and I wrote a short paper on how to use blogging and RSS feeds inside a corporation to create these new context-rich connections. Actually Dave’s post is the first time I’ve really understood what people mean by Personal Knowledge Management—that bottom up approach which is all about improved personal productivity.

Dave illustrates his post with a series of anecdotes which really helps us understand the issues he faced inside the professional service firm. It sounded like he conducted a series of one-on one interviews and I was interested to read that,

This is not uncommon. For example when asking people what they’ve learned in a project there are often long pauses, some ums and ahs, shrugging of shoulders and a desultory, ‘nothing much.’ Then as they share their stories of the events that occurred during the project it dawns what they’ve actually learned. It is important to understand that their learning occurred at the time of the recollection not during the project. It would have been interesting to see what would have happened if Dave conducted anecdote circles instead of interviews.

 

Denham Grey’s post on just how useful annotations can be in providing context reminds me of two famous annotators, Pierre de Fermat and J Edgar Hoover.

Fermat was a genius mathematician born in 1601. Apart from being a judge he delighted in his hobby of solving the most difficult mathematical problems. While studying Diophantus’ Arithmetica (published in 1621) Fermat made an annotation which would spark creativity, competition, angst and reward for the following 400 years. I bet it also irritated the hell out of the mathematical community. He made the following marginal note in response to a well known mathematical conundrum related to Pythagoras’ theorem:^[1]

He never published his demonstration and created a 400 year search for a proof. While Fermat’s annotation initially clouded the waters of understanding he simultaneously sparked a new discourse among mathematicians and through these conversations new meaning emerged. In the process a raft of techniques were created.  

J. Edgar Hoover was FBI Director for almost 50 years from 1924 to 1972. During Hoover’s tenure he compiled a mass of files on his associates, politicians and other powerful people. Many of these files contained Hoover’s annotations but the wily director preferred the make his marks in pencil just in case he needed to erase his instructions at some later date.^[2]

Should our annotations be permanent? Perhaps they could fade over time or when written we can decide which type of ‘pen’ we will use. The choice of writing implement provides an additional layer of context and meaning. Using pen and paper the meaning is contained in more than simply the words. Will we lose this information in a digital equivalent?

One final thought. Perhaps in the digital age our annotations could be created as discussions, for example, using instant messaging. The completed discussion could be stored with the object being discussed linked to the specific part of the object under discussion.

[1] Singh, S. (1998). Fermat's Last Theorem. London, Fourth Estate.

[2] Centry, C. (1991). J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets. New York, W. W. Norton & Company.

McKinsey Quarterly is making available articles by Peter Drucker in commemoration of his death this week. He will be sadly missed, especially for those of us in the knowledge management profession.

Normally reserved for premium members, these articles are available to all site members until November 21. Read them for free this week only.

Best practice and beyond: Knowledge strategies
1998 Number 1

Managing the knowledge manager
2001 Number 3

Do you know who your experts are?
2003 Number 4

Making a market in knowledge
2004 Number 3

The 21st-century organization
2005 Number 3

Update: Thanks to Hal who checked these articles out (see comment). He found they are not actually written by Drucker but reference him. Still worth a look however.

I’ve noticed an increased interest in knowledge mapping recently. A couple of tenders have been released, there’s talk about it on ActKM and some of our clients have engaged us to help them with the process. The other thing I’ve noticed is the misguided belief that a knowledge mapping exercise should create a single, one-off, accurate map.

Knowledge mapping should primarily be a sensemaking exercise where people are prompted to discover and consider their knowledge assets, discuss them, argue about them, decide which things or processes are important, and most importantly guide them to a point in order to take some action.  Before starting mapping ensure the intention are clear because the map created will depend on its purpose. Some maps are social network charts, some are yellow-pages, while others are simply a matrix showing knowledge assets and their relationship to business processes. In many cases multiple maps are needed and every case it’s important to repeat knowledge mapping on a regular basis. Just like cartographic maps there is never a single map for every purpose. The world is too rich and varied, to include everything, if that was possible, would result in a noisy and confusing picture.

Denham Grey has created a wiki, which you are welcomed to join and contribute to, which provides an excellent starting point for a discussion of knowledge maps and mapping. I’ve started to contribute some of my perspectives on sensemaking and recognising that the process is just as important as the map. It would be great to see your contributions and perhaps we can create a useful artefact about knowledge mapping for our KM community.

At Anecdote our knowledge mapping process is based on a three papers Dave Snowden wrote in 2000 where he made the following thoughtful observation: asking someone what they know is a cruel question, it lacks context and is virtually impossible to answer meaningfully. Consequently, our first step in knowledge mapping involves collecting evidence for where important knowledge resides. For this job we use narrative techniques because contained within each story of how work gets done are pointers to important knowledge. “Last time we conducted a performance review we had to ask Jessica about how it was done in 2003. She’s our go to person for anything like that.” or “No one actually uses the database to identify folks to work on projects. We tend to chat to people who we’ve worked with in the past and update the database retrospectively. It keeps management happy.”  Once the evidence is collected surveys and interviews can be used to flesh out what the knowledge looks and feels like. The final and vital step involves conducting a workshop of key players to make sense of the collected information. The purpose of the workshop is to identify which knowledge assets support key business process and using this information for the group to identify gaps or points where knowledge is at risk. From here new knowledge initiatives are identified. Knowledge mapping is often the first step in an overall knowledge improvement programme.

In a matter of two weeks I’ve stumbled across the work of Larry Lessig. Last week I read about the Lessig presentation style at Presentation Zen. I even put the Lessig method into practice at my presentation at ActKM. Then today I hear Larry on ‘this WEEK in TECH’ podcast. I didn’t realise Larry was the guy who got creative commons off the ground. If you wondered what create commons are all about I recommend you check out these two Flash movies.

I would like ActKM to abandon the speaker-audience model in their conferences and adopt something radically different—discussions. Dave Winer sums the problem up beautifully:

Right on!

As I reflect on the ActKM conference I realise the reason I enjoyed it so much was the great conversations we had, but they didn’t occur during the presentations, they happened in the coffee break area. David Glynn-Jones, this year’s organiser, specifically made the coffee area a focal point and it was an excellent decision. That was definitely a step in the right direction but why not convert the entire conference into a organised coffee break. I believe this was the thinking that also led to Open Space approach to meetings.

Check out Dave’s post because it describes how such a conference could work. He calls it unconferencing.

One of the things I love about conferences is the people you meet and the stories you hear and share. Here’s an anecdote which I heard and thought it a great one for demonstrating the value of simplicity:

Andrew, Mark and I are currently at the ActKM conference in Canberra. So far it’s been the best ActKM conference in its six year history. Its success is primarily due to friendly nature of the 100 or so participants, many of whom know one another (shared history and context). The welcoming atmosphere combined with some stimulating presentations and a good place to sit and chat has set the scene for some tremendous conversations. I guess this is what knowledge management is all about: creating a conducive environment to create and share our knowledge. 

Here’s an unique way to use Powerpoint (or the Apple equivalent). The talk is by Dick Hardt on the topic of Identity on the net. Entertaining, informative and memorable. Warning – put on your techo hat before entering.

http://www.identity20.com/media/OSCON2005/

The topic at a meeting this morning was the design concept for a web-based ‘clearinghouse’.  I mentioned the risks of taking a ‘Field of Dreams’ approach – “if we build it they will come”, and the importance of having relevant content that users can easily find and use.  I also mentioned that having the best technology available isn’t worth a cracker if people either don’t use it, or if we train them not to use it by having them go there and they don’t find anything relevant or useful.  Thinking that this was merely pointing out the blindingly obvious, I was surprised when the design consultant asked if I could be quoted on that…..

My friend Eric Lessor at IBM’s Institute of Business Value has recently launched a report, “Addressing the Challenges of an Aging Workforce in EMEA (ie. Europe).” Here are the main conclusions described in an interview Eric did for leMarchedesSeniors.com:

Suggestions 3 concerns me because once again there is this notion that tacit knowledge can somehow be documented, especially if you use detailed interviewing. I think a better approach it to gain evidence, using narrative techniques, of where tacit knowledge exists in your organisations and then develop interventions to better harness that knowledge.

I like the balanced nature of the report in that it not only examines the scenario of baby boomers retiring en masse but considers ways to get the best out of the entire workforce. In my current projects the organisations are facing the opposite to baby boomer retirement problem—they are staying on into their seventies. As a result there are few places for the next generation to take on senior leadership roles.

Joy London at excited utterances writes one of the best legal KM blogs around, and Joy, a New Yorker, seems to have an interest in Australia. Joy reports on a recent survey conducted by the recruitment agency, Mahlab, noting, among other things, that salaries for knowledge managers in legal firms are pretty healthy—$A140–250K for a National KM Manager.

I wasn’t surprised to hear that only 20% of people where “very satisfied” with their role in a legal firm with more than half indicating they were planning to leave their current firm in the next 12 months. Legal firms are being hit with talent problems due to their hothouse environment and the generation X and Ys wanting a different work experience which allows for a social life. Until the new guard takes over lawyers are trapped in a cycle of moving from one firm to another in search of better working conditions.

Video is finally making it into the mainstream for organisations to see and hear, almost first hand, the experiences of their colleagues. The availability of reasonably priced video capture and editing solutions are now available. It is simple for someone to pick up a video recorder, film a colleague, download the video to a computer and make the clip available for anyone to view. There is an interesting video-driven lesson learning activity occurring on the web called Channel 9 run by Robert Scoble at Microsoft (see http://channel9.msdn.com/). Robert is visiting his Microsoft colleagues and asking them to talk about their projects. There are many interesting features of what has been built on Channel 9, but the most important is the efforts to build community around the video with features such as the ability for anyone to comment and rate each video posted.

While I was reading through some of the comments of a clip of Bill Staples talking about Microsoft’s web server (some commenters suggests that the first bit of the video was slow and uninformative but the second half was great), it occurred to me that a useful enhancement to the site would be to enable people to edit a clip so they can cut out the bit they found most useful. Then invite people to resubmit their edited versions. Add to this a way to rate the interestingness (concept at Flickr) and useful clips would bubble to the surface.

I was in New Zealand for a couple days this week. I caught up with my colleagues at Future of People and Organisations (FPO) – more about FPO in a future post. It reminded me that I should tell you about the project Stewart Forsyth, on of my fellow directors, and I did for an Auckland law firm. We used narrative techniques to help define their brand as part of a talent magnetism program. Stewart has written about talent magnetism here.

The most interesting outcome for me was noting how the values which emerged from the narrative were, in some cases, quite different to their stated values. The stated values were things like professionalism, integrity, innovation. A value which emerged was “being nice to people”. I wonder if that would have been included in a formal values creation exercise?

OK, so Chip didn’t say that exactly. I heard part of Chip’s speech (on ABC radio) to the market announcing their record profit and he said their success came on the back of “efficiencies gained by sharing knowledge” across the company. I know BHP Billiton has a significant communities of practice program which forms the foundation of their Operational Excellence Division. It’s this division which is responsible for helping people share what they know. They are world leaders in the adoption of communities of practice approaches and this comment pays significant recognition to their good work.

I scanned the papers this morning and did a couple of searches and couldn’t find any journalist picking up this angle of the story. Interesting.

Kathy Sierra's smackdown model for learning made me smile AND nod—what a great idea. I agree, we should be presenting multiple views rather than insisting there is one way forward. As Kathy argues, when we present two conflicting views people are encouraged to think and make up their own minds: learning occurs.

While the smackdown metaphor of two wrestlers in the ring, one trying to knock the other down, might be a little over the top, the idea of entertaining/exploring multiple perspectives is particular important when dealing with complex issues. As you might remember from previous posts (here, here and here), complex issues have many connected parts, are characterised by small things triggering large events and vice versa and are constantly in flux—like most organisations we know. In a complex system we can’t rely on what worked in the past because the landscape has changed. We need to try new ideas—experiment. Smackdowns should be in our kit bag.

The next time you here someone ‘telling you how it is,’ challenge them to argue the other perspective or ask someone else to help the group explore some of the other possibilities. This can only increase the level of interest in the discussion and people will hear more than just ‘blah, blah, blah.’ You never know, people might learn something too.

Ron Rogers at Weby Systems does a fantastic job of keeping the technologies I use up and running. He has recently been testing VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol — phone on the web) and here is what he has to say.

In Melbourne we have a small group of mainly public sector folk who get together monthly to talk about innovation. Recently we have been talking about how innovation requires that people be supported in their mistake-making rather than vilified. Sadly the opposite is generally true in the public sector with its culture of risk aversion and blaming rarely displaying mistake-forgiving behaviour. This is a significant conundrum for governments (i.e. all of them) which rely on government agencies as their primary (innovative) policy think-tanks.

While not a solution to the public sector innovation dilemma, it was timely that Denham Grey point us to this interesting essay on how we can learn from our mistakes. I love the following quote:

One of my quests in life is to meet interesting people. It looks like I will need to look out for interesting mistakes and follow the scent.

An excellent resource has been recently made available on the net: the knowledge sharing toolkit by David Bartholomew. It seems to be the product of David’s DBA studies of architectural and engineering firms. In addition to the 49 page how-to manual are the nine interesting case studies.

I have been thinking about the term ‘lessons learned’ today. In a way it’s an oxymoron. The word ‘lessons’ suggests something that is known which can be taught. With the term ‘lessons’ in your head you start thinking about how you can get people to understand these lessons and, as we were recently reminded, the knowledge transfer process is not as simple as tipping the contents from one head to another. Learning, on the other hand, suggests a complex, social, back and forth—an interaction. The two words are at odds and no wonder there is a level of discomfort among knowledge management practitioners with the phrase.

Interestingly some of the successful lesson learned programmes have put their emphasis on learning—not lessons—and wrapped their implementation in a community of practice approach. I’m thinking here about BHP Billiton’s operational excellence division which has a clear focus on best practice transfer but has implemented its objectives within a community of practice context. US Department of Energy is another example where the learning context is provided, at least in part, by their community of practice which they call the Society for Effective Lessons Learned.

In Thomas Friedman’s talk to MIT (http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/266/) about his new book, The World is Flat, he argues that there have been three phases of globalisation. Phase 1 is between 1492 and 1800 and was dominated by nations spreading their influence across the globe. Phase 2 was well established by 2000 and was dominated by global corporations. Phase 3 was triggered by a fluke of investment around 2003–04. The dot.com boom fuelled an unprecedented investment in optic fibre communication infrastructure across the globe. Individuals from Mumbai to Moreton Bay were now collaborating in new way which were previously impossible—just think of Skype, Groove, wikis, blogs, Google. This 3rd phase is dominated by individuals.

Anyone reading this blog is probably operating in this 3rd phase. For myself I have numerous collaborators whom I’ve never met face to face in Canada, Spain, USA. It seems to me that new knowledge-based business ventures must immediately conceive themselves as individuals with global connections. Friedman provides many entertaining examples of how hopelessly ‘phase 2’ his think had been and that a new mind-shift if required to effectively operate in this current environment.

Nancy White draws our attention to some interesting metaphors a startup called Socialtext uses to talk about virtual collaboration:

I have to admit I don’t know what VNC is and thought IRC was the same as IM. Can anyone enlighten me please.

I remember, while working at IBM, that only the people ‘in the know’ had internal blogs. And those in the know were the thousands of technical experts who dominate the company. Well it looks like blogging is becoming mainstream in Big Blue. According to whatsnextblog IBM has released to employees blogging guidelines. Worth checking out as I see blogging as an integral part of connecting and learning inside an organisation. It will be interesting to see whether my old colleagues from business consulting services start blogging. I had the feeling that they were reluctant to embrace new technologies.

I’m re-reading Karl Weick’s Sensemaking in Organizations and I thought this idea is worth keeping in mind. When facing conflicting and voluminous information avoid gathering more. Ignorance is not the problem. Rather, focus on principles, values and preferences to help you make a choice. In complexity you are best placed to choose base on plausibility instead of accuracy.

I find it interesting, however, that the knee jerk reaction of most organisations when faced with an unclear path (I suggest, if it isn’t already, this situation will be the norm) is to resort to gathering more information. Is this because these organisations have invested heavily in information technology and analytical professionals who are well equipped for this task?

There is a gradual awakening to how blogs might be used in business. Here is an article in Businessweek which provides a hosts of interesting facts and will bring you quickly up to speed on the blogosphere.

A couple of quotes:

Thanks to CorporateBloggingBlog for the link.

Finding good blogs is difficult. It is much like finding new friends when you move to a new city: it takes time and effort. Today I had a look at del.icio.us to see who else was bookmarking my website and then I checked out what else they were bookmarking. Hey presto—I found some interesting new blogs. Here is one called consulting commons—great place to share ideas and tools if you are consulting. Notice it’s labelled ‘beta’. I’m wondering whether they are using the Google tactic of labelling everything beta to give you freedom to try things out at a moments notice—it works for Google so why not.

Today’s Age has a article (requires free subscription) on Podcasting, the audio version of blogging, and suggests its adoption is outpacing its text-based cousin. While the numbers are still low—5000 podcasters in the US—the idea is exciting considering Polanyi’s idea: you know more than you can say and you will say more than you can write down. If it is easier to speak it, then recording an MP3 file and making it available to an audience might be an effective approach to transfer what you know.

A few weeks back I suggested a way to use blogs to help people find information rapidly and create new social networks using content as the catalyst. I can see how podcasting could be added to this solution but it is not just a simple replacement for blog posts. For a podcast to be effective—that is, be listened to—some work must be done to produce the podcast. I’m guessing an effective podcast sustained over a period of time will require more work to make it interesting that writing a regular blog.

Within an organisation I can see a variety of different types of podcasters:

• the official podcasters who craft professional programs which replace the audio tapes that describe the lastest product or new development;
• the sanctioned podcasters who are given time and tools to create podcasts such as key specialists within the organisation; and perhaps
• communities that wish to report, using techniques such as interviews, their progress and achievements

Can podcasting be a useful tool within organisations?

I spent last week in Fremantle, Western Australia, working with the folks at Spare Parts Puppet Theatre. They are a great bunch who’ve, over the last 8 years, turned their theatre into on of the most loved and frequented theatres in Western Australia. I helped them out in developing a knowledge map in preparation for a new General Manager. It was the first time they had a picture of the artefacts, skills, heuristics, experiences and natural talent (ASHEN) that make their company the success it is.

ASHEN is a Cynefin technique which I use for knowledge mapping and strategy. You need to register at the Cynefin site to download the papers that describe the high level process for using ASHEN. You can find them here.

James Dellow made the following comment:

I think there are some barriers to blogging inside corporates that Shawn's paper skims overs. For example, IT architecture, business culture and security. I mean we've had groupware for years and some organisations still find it hard to use it well.

Your right James, I did skim over those issues (I was concentrating on getting the basic idea described) but they are important. I couldn't comment on the architectural and security issues (not really my area), accept to say many companies have introduced blogging (on the intranet), so I guess it can be done and the architectural and security issues can be addressed.

The more difficult issue, I think, is getting a group of people to blog in the first place. As I suggest in the paper, sales people are unlikely to blog but pre-sales folk are more likely if the right environment (culture, recognition, WIFM) exists. I think there are 4 hurdles you need to jump to address motivation:

1) start with understanding people's basic needs (narrative is a good technique here);

2) think about how much activity is required to create an output (in this case, blogging--if it's too much of a chore people wont do it);

3) think about the how blogging is evaluated (by the blogger and others--if those that matter don't care, it wont happen); and

4) does the result of the evaluation help meet the individual's needs?

Every organisation will be different so some work is required up front to assess the environment. This should be done by those people who need to enhance how knowledge is shared and accessed (ie. the people in the organisation) and not by an outsider (ie.consultant), mainly because there are no right or wrong answers here and the organisation's decision-makers must use their judgement.

Organisations are still jumping to the conclusion that they absolutely need a ‘knowledge repository' to successfully harness employee know-how. While a database (let’s be honest with ourselves, it’s just a database) can be an important part of a knowledge solution, by itself, it’s typically an expensive waste of time. This white paper provides an alternative approach where content generated by subject matter experts (SME) creates new social networks, which in turn can provide useful pointers to content held in the ‘knowledge repository.’ People access the database at points recommended by the subject matter expert in context of the seeker’s current need. It’s a type of social indexing. While the paper takes a sales force application area, the solution is widely applicable.

The beauty of the solution is that it relies on simple and inexpensive software (blogs and RSS aggregators). Feel free to contact me if you would like to know more on how you might implement this solution in your organisation. In particular, how might you motivate SMEs to participate.

CIO magazine recently published this article describing the now well-known argument that organisations will lose significant knowledge as baby boomers retire. There is reference to David DeLong’s book, Lost Knowledge: Confronting the Threat of an Aging Workforce, which might be an interesting read. The piece concludes with a couple of ways IT can be used to retain this knowledge, which I must admit seemed like a pretty lame effort. The key suggestions revolved around conducting email interviews and running web-based surveys; both techniques are extremely limited in understanding or transferring what people know. How about coaching, mentoring, narrative capture, communities of practice? Surely these techniques are more suited to transferring, as Dorothy Leonard would say, an organisation’s deep smarts.

Have a look at some of the reader comments. There is an interesting post suggesting that the aging workforce issue is overstated.

Darren makes the following comment:

“The potential danger is this could limit thinking rather than expanding it. If people are constantly reminded of their past point of view, could it not encourage many not to move forward, but to reinforce their thinking of old?”

I guess like any tool, in the wrong hands it can be a dangerous weapon—or at least an ineffective one. Darren’s point is a good one. Past ideas should act as a prompter for new ways of thinking given the current circumstances and only regurgitated if the writer is confident it makes sense in the new context.

For one month Edward Tufte is making available a chapter from his upcoming book, Beautiful Evidence. Tufte wrote 3 of my favourite books which I love because of their simple beauty and their insightful portrayal of how to best convey information with graphics:  Envisioning Information , The Visual Display of Quantitative Information , Visual Explanations.

[thanks elearningpost]

I was chatting to Bill Godfrey today and we got onto the topic of Denham Grey's top 5 KM books. We were both surprised that Max Boisot's Knowledge Assets didn't get a guernsey. I have used Boisot's I-space a number of times to illustrate how commercial value might be derived from organisational knowledge. Bill has a review of the book and a full summary for those who are pressed for time. The summary sits behind a password protected section but I believe Bill is open to trial memberships of his system. Just send him an email.

There are relatively few available case studies that document projects using Cynefin techniques. I believe this will be remedied in the near future on the completion of the new Cynefin web site. In the meantime here is a brief description of a lessons learned project done by the Bank of Thailand which applied Cynefin narrative techniques. My friend and colleague, Warwick Holder, helped the BOT in developing their narrative skills on this project.

One view of the various flavours of knowledge management.

We know more than we can say, and we will say more than we can write down. This aphorism might be one of the reasons why podcasting is taking off. Now anyone can create their own radio programme and make it available on the web.

A couple of years ago I developed a simple approach to developing knowledge strategies. The premise was simple--that a strategy should incrememtally enhance the 'knowledge environment' and that this could be done by implementing a series of tangible initiatives. Each initiative should be coherent with how people view knowledge (the framework) and how they leverage the current infrastruture (knowledge environment)--while pushing forward both of these elements (see the above figure).

The strength of this approach lies in its focus on the tangible initiatives. But recently I have realised that this approach can be enhanced by applying Cynefin sense-making techniques to determine the nature of the initiative as part of the design process. For example, the project team might come together to decide the Cynefin domain for (say) the following initiatives: expertise location, document management, peer assist, communities of practice, and mentoring scheme. It is also possible to drill into a particular initiative and rerun the exercise using components of the initiative.

Then, based on the group's agreed position for each initiative, design an appropriatre implementation approach is adopted. For example, if it is decided that a mentoring scheme falls in the 'complex' domain, multiple small interventions might be developed and monitored to see what happens. Adjustments can then be made--probe, sense, and respond.

There has been some discussion during November in ActKM about whether tacit knowledge can be captured. Opinion ranged from ‘definitely yes’ to ‘absolutely no’. This discussion reminded me of the distinctions made by Max Boisot between three types of tacit knowledge:

• Things that are not said because everyone understands them and takes them for granted.
• Things that are not said because nobody fully understands them.
• Things that are not said because, although some people understand them, they cannot costlessly articulate them.

I think it is possible to adopt individual strategies to manage each type of tacit knowledge.

Narrative, for example, is useful for discovering the things that are taken for granted--but you won’t find them all.

Techniques for developing intuition can be employed to enhance the things that nobody fully understands--but you won’t know everything.

Organisations might decide that certain critical (but complicated) knowledge should be more generally known--but some will be just too costly to convert.