Jan 23
Building Common Ground on Jelly
Yesterday I wrote about the importance of face to face meetings to build trust and the ability to interpret each other. Today I noticed this post by Chandni over at Anecdote telling a really nice story of Google and Procter & Gamble and how they mooched around on each other’s territory and came up with some great learning as well as a better working relationship.
Also at Anecdote (and it seems to me there’s a connection here), Shawn has referenced jelly-working a couple of times recently. Jelly is casual co-working where members take turns to host each other for a day’s work in the same space – you bring your own work, but for a day it’s like you are sharing your workspace with a whole new set of colleagues.
Jelly looks ideal for independents and small firms, where you miss the interactions, diversity, ideas and conversations of working in a larger organisation. So far, it seems to assume everybody comes from different firms. But what if a large organisation adopted jelly-working internally? If different departments hosted people from other parts of the company once a month or so? No special facilitation needed, just provide space, electricity and inter/intranet so people can do their work, and let things evolve? Would that help break down silos and build mutual familiarity and common ground as a basis for better knowledge sharing and collaboration? Would the sharp learnings of the Google and P&G experiment also emerge there?
Jan 22
Building Relationships to Support KM
I have an interview this month in TCWorld, a magazine published in collaboration with European technical communication association tekcom. This month’s issue takes a look at knowledge management as a way of enabling organisations to coordinate effectively across borders.
TCWorld: How can you enable an informal knowledge exchange in an international context / what is the virtual equivalent to the “coffee machine chat”?
PL: There are lots of Web 2.0 tools that support this – the most ubiquitous are e-mail and phone of course, but instant messaging, blogging and micro-blogging can also help do this. The key – usually – is that people should be able to meet face to face once in a while to build up the trust relationships that help them to share more freely, to interpret more accurately what other people are sharing, and to forgive the slips and inconstancies that human beings are prone to.
Download the soft copy of this issue here.
Jan 21
Spamming Goes Human
Is spam (at least on blogs) finally emerging from its robot-driven large-scale war onto a more slippery, human scale? For a while now spammers have been using cheap human labour to read the funny verification codes we commonly use, but to spam on any scale, you generally can’t afford to spend a lot of time and attention on the content of your comment, so you or a machine get the link in there and then boom you’re on your way to the next blog.
Recently I’ve noticed the spam comments I get on this blog need double-takes, because at first glance they SEEM to be appropriate to the specific content of the post. The spammers are actually reading the post. There are two giveaways, however – (1) if you are not genuinely interested in the topic your comment is very generic (enthusiastic generalities don’t come over as interest!) and adds no insight to the blog, and (2) the spammer’s weblink is to a completely unrelated commercial site. I’ve noticed that spammers are trying harder to overcome giveaway #1, but #2 is insurmountable as far as I can see, since to remove it defeats the very purpose of spamming.
Perhaps in some coming golden age, spammers will need to become so proficient in a blog’s interest area that they actually do provide insight, hold meaningful discussions and build relationships before they get away with locking down that precious hyperlink. But hey… that looks like evolution out of the primordial spammic ooze.
Jan 15
Storytelling for Personal Benefit
Over at Anecdote, Shawn Callahan has a really nice, grounded post for job-seekers, with some very concrete, practical suggestions for how to improve your storytelling skills to better communicate your experience and strengths when you go for interviews. A lot of it will work for performance appraisal interviews too!
Jan 15
KM Certification Again
Christian Young blogs about what a curriculum for a KM certification course might look like – he distinguishes nicely between the people who need to know about KM and the people who want to progress through it professionally, via both theory and practice. I’ve written about the politics of KM certification here, and unfortunately politics (and commerce) tend to screw with sensible thinking. So all we have to do now is figure out who should drive the sensible course Christian sketches out.
Jan 14
Counting on Expertise
I have lots of opinons about how badly expertise and experience (they are closely related) are managed inside the typical organisation, but very few of these opinions are what I would call well grounded.
There are several reasons why I believe expertise is hard to manage, but here are the five biggest ones I come across:
- We don’t know what we’re talking about – This is the old chestnut of thinking about knowledge too simplistically as either something that can be documented or something that can be told; however, in different situations leveraging our experienced staff can mean an incredibly diverse range of things: from being able to call in help from external people they have strong relationships with, to answering a difficult but precise technical question, to handling a challenging situation with skill, to diagnosing a problem quickly and accurately, to being able to remember why something is done the way it is, to being able to improvise through a point in the process where existing procedures don’t help
- We assume all expertise is of equal value – We don’t know how to identify the really critical knowledge for our business, we don’t know how to tell which experience is essential for our sustainability and when it’s a barrier getting in the way of innovation
- We don’t count the cost of not managing expertise well – The consequences of not managing expertise well are not formally observed or tracked in most organisations – I think this is because when we don’t leverage our experienced staff well, we typically end up in a fire-fighting mode, if we don’t die we keep muddling through somehow (which gives us a false sense of confidence), and expertise is one of those nasty big complicated issues we give lip service to but save up for a rainy day when we don’t have quite so much work to do
- We assume it’s already covered – KM says they have a knowledge capture programme, and/or HR say they have their competency or talent management programme, so where’s the need for a new concerted effort, especially if it means (horrors) asking KM and HR to coordinate with each other?
- We ignore the personality component – we treat expertise like it’s a commodity which can be produced and consumed at will, forgetting that experienced people have moods and motivations (and often a sense of being special)
As I say, these are opinions based on very circumstantial and limited experience. Aside from David DeLong’s magisterial book Lost Knowledge and a raft of academic literature on the nature of expertise and problems with its transfer, there’s very little research on the diverse contexts and the real ground issues around how expertise and experience are interpreted, leveraged and valued.
Until now! Matt and I are now kicking off a narrative research project aimed at gathering narrative evidence for how experience and expertise are viewed and treated by people working in a wide range of organisations. You can read the contributions already posted, you can subscribe to the project blog and discuss the issues you see there, and most of all, you can contribute your own stories. This will be a public project, so the findings will be made openly available via the project blog. Take a look, contribute and pass this invitation on!
Jan 13
Accountability
Those of you who have seen me at conferences over the past couple of years, will know that I have been wrestling with the notions of accountability and performance, which I believe are inter-connected. With this in mind I have been meaning to post a link for several weeks now (travels intervened) to this very rich post by Glenda Eoyang when she was guest blogger at Cognitive Edge back in December.
Glenda uses the Cynefin framework to identify three different types of accountability, depending on the type of environment you are dealing with:
Outcome-based accountability in stable, well-understood, ordered systems
Learning-based accountability in active, self-organising systems – “Instead of being held accountable to outcomes, individuals and groups can be held accountable for learning, shared meaning making, and directional movement. Are individuals and groups learning new things? Is shared meaning being constructed and/or maintained? Is the trend-line of processes and products moving toward a desirable goal?”
Sharing-based accountability in systems tending towards the random and chaotic – In these situations, people can be held accountable to explore and share. In the same way that an ant colony spreads out in random patterns, finds a juicy spot, then returns to share the news, people hunt and gather. In random systems, people must be held accountable to gather and disseminate information. This behavior over time increases the coherence of system-wide understanding and action.”To my mind this makes a very interesting connection to ideas of performance, indeed, it implies that accountability and performance tend to merge into each other as the environment becomes more chaotic and poorly understood.
There is a risk if you distinguish too clearly between these types of situation, however… we do not absolve people of responsibility, praise or blame for the outcomes of their actions even in the most difficult and unfamiliar of circumstances. Outcomes matter to us, not just learning, and not just sharing. So I liked the way Glenda followed up with this remark in her reply to comments:
“The real challenge-
for me as a leader and as a consultant-is to consider these dimensions simultaneously and each in the context of others. I can no more focus solely on predictable outcomes than I can focus solely on emergent patterns or broad exploration of the territory. To be effective, I have to do them all at the same time… Though our discourse often focuses on distinction, we need to be able to move with some agility across the complex landscape that lies between the two.”Jan 12
KM Awards
The UN has a Public Service Award with knowledge management (you have three more days to submit a nomination!), presented as a separate category from:
- Fostering participation in policy-making decisions through innovative mechanisms
- Improving the delivery of services
- Improving transparency, accountability, and responsiveness in the public service
I like the structure of this award, it is impact and not checklist based similar to the actKM Awards and the iKMS KM Excellence Awards. But does it make sense to treat KM as a distinct category from policy participation, service delivery and accountability? Surely that’s what KM should deliver, if it’s not to be an end in itself?
Thanks to Graham for pointing me to this.
Jan 12
Leading Change
Nancy Dixon has blogged about an ideas/improvement/innovation initiative at the Defense Intelligence Agency. She focuses on the format of the “un-townhall” meeting where ideas are presented and responded to, but I was most taken with her observations on the way the leadership style of LTG Maples has influenced the success of the programme.
- Visibility: make the process transparent and the results visible
- Support: provide coaching to the idea-submitters to help them bring their ideas to fruition, and make sure they don’t fall off the radar
- Involvement – the head honcho is seen to be personally involved
- Appreciation – even when ideas are critical of the organisation the contribution is listened to, appreciated and responded to with respect and frankness
- Ownership – employees must be committed to taking ownership for the implementation of their ideas
Read the full post!
Jan 06
KM Method Cards - Updated Contents Guide
For those of you who are proud owners of our KM Method Cards, we have updated our guide to the contents of the cards pack. No, there are no new cards (they will have to wait for the second edition, but suggestions gratefully accepted), but after several requests, we’ve created an additional page of references and sources to acknowledge the originators of many of the techniques covered, and point you to additional useful resources. We know many of you keep this as a contents map to the pack, so we have formatted this for easy back to back printing on one sheet of paper.
Click on the image below to download the updated guide, or by rightclicking here.
