Aug 19
Leadership 2.0
Attended an iKMS talk last evening by Bonnie Cheuk of Environmental Resources Management (ERM). The talk was about the successful rollout of their Sharepoint portal named Minerva, which includes Web 2.0 tools like blogs and wikis.
What was remarkable to me was how participatory the leaders of ERM were in the rollout of the portal. The then CEO hosted a “CEO’s Blog”. Bonnie recounted how that CEO had a rough start, pricked by a challenging first comment from a junior staff in another part of the world, but slowly came around to appreciate the good intention behind that comment. A year later when the two met face to face the CEO and commenter were able to have deep conversations because of that shared context.
In another example, the Human Resource director hosted a 72-hr discussion marathon to address HR-related concerns from employees in 40 countries and across different time zones. He was nearly defeated by sceptics until after the first 24 hours he decided to use his own voice in the blog and people began to sense and accept his sincerity in addressing the issues raised.
I haven’t met these people, but they seemed to me like a courageous bunch. They opened themselves up to question and scrutiny, but by doing so they achieved transparency, alignment, openness and trust. Imagine: down to the very frontline the commander’s intent is unambiguous because there’s an opportunity for making clarifications upwards. What kind of leaders would open themselves up to such vulnerability in order to see hierarchical structure (ie power) crumble away? Bonnie listed the qualities of what she termed Leardership 2.0.
– employee-centric – listen and value every staff’s inputs – ready to be surprised – tolerate mistakes – hear what you may not like to hear – genuine dialogues with employees – willingness to let go of leader’s authority – leaders have to participate, not delegateI began to wonder how many CEOs, especially in my part of the world, were willing to make themselves vulnerable publicly. So I googled “CEO’s blog” and found a wiki list of CEO’s blog from all over the world. From Singapore there’s one – Lai Kok Fung, CEO of BuzzCity Pte Ltd. Thinking that there had got to be more I refined my search and discovered another. Tan Kin Lian, former CEO of NTUC Income, also maintained a blog. That’s it. Are there other CEO blogs, perhaps internally-directed, that exist but aren’t publicized? If you know of any, please tell me.
Aug 18
Email Detox Revisited
Matt Moore has revisited and refined his enterprise 2.0/ email detox medley. I particularly like this sensible advice for a five step approach:
1. ban attachments & instead link to files sitting in a more permanent location
2. if an email conversation involves more than 5 people then shift it elsewhere
3. make your tools as simple to use as possible
4. encourage role modelling of good behaviours by senior staff
5. begin with a small step in the right direction rather than trying to change the world in one go.
Aug 16
Against Bestness
I’ve had a couple of brushes with bestness in the past week. Well three brushes actually, illustrating four distinct dangers of the notion of “bestness” in knowledge management:
• The notion of bestness is attractive but has little utility in dealing with human systems
• The application of the notion of bestness can be abusive
• The notion of bestness can give you licence to switch off your brain
• The notion of bestness can blind you to your options
Aug 06
Happy Birthday Komunitas KM
I’m presenting at a taxonomy seminar/workshop for a KM community of practice here in Jakarta. The workshop coincides with their first anniversary, and the picture shows Iris Tutuarima thanking the participants for their happy birthday song. Bottom right is the birthday cake with one candle. All communities build their identities, in some ways like people do. I like the idea of celebrating birthdays.
Aug 06
The Need to Share: Find It, Exercise It
Via Michael Idinopulos this New York Times article is not only a good story of wiki adoption (in the US State Department) but it also has this great two-liner:
“The decision to embrace wikis is part of a changing ethic at the department, from a “need to know culture” to a “need to share culture,” said Daniel Sheerin, deputy director of eDiplomacy, which was created in 2003. “This is a technological manifestation of a policy difference,” he said, a change he dated to when Colin L. Powell was secretary of state.”
So:
(1) Find a need to share: what are you duplicating across silos that would save time money and accuracy by consolidating?
(2) Show people how to use the tools to share and create some seed content (we’ve talked about wiki raids before; Tim Kannegieter recently reported on actKM a very similar idea using bulletin boards/forums for a project team – they posted their questions and ideas into the forum during their kickoff meeting, they were shown how to set up their email alerts, and then used it as a continuing sharing resource)
(3) Create rhythms and habits of sharing – it takes time for people to acquire new habits, so use natural rhythms like regular meetings, broadcast reminders to encourage people to get into that habit.
Not everyone will fall in (you don’t need everyone) and you have to be careful not to make contribution mechanical. Your aim is to create sufficient, good, seed content that it becomes an attractor, and to nudge folks with potential to fall into a new mode of sharing.
Aug 05
July in Wordle
This is my July blogging output represented by Wordle. I like the way Dave (Snowden) sits triumphantly above taxonomy and am intrigued by the fact that on a number of different views of the blog, the word “different” keeps cropping up… Thanks Paolina.
Jul 29
Cognitive Workout Coming Up
If your mind needs a good workout, and you’re interested in how to deal with complexity, uncertainty and those danged unpredictable creatures known as human beings, then you should get yourselves along to the Cognitive Edge practitioner accreditation workshop to be held in Singapore 28-30 October. It’ll be led by Dave Snowden and Steve Bealing. Brad Hinton has been blogging his recent attendance at this programme in Australia here and here. I’ve attended it probably four different times since Dave first ran it in Singapore back in 2002 or 2003. Like the ocean, it’s always the same, always different, and absolutely superabundant. Well worth the time and money. Remember to backup your brain before you go.
Jul 28
The First 180 Days
Cory Banks has posted his KM Australia presentation on Slideshare, reporting on his first six months in his current role. I like two things about this. First is the six month reporting idea: this is just a nice enough period to have something to say with some semblance of residual objectivity, before you get fully submerged in what you’re doing (notice, I DIDN’T say drowned). The second thing I like is the way he’s used mindmaps as his main slide material. It’s organised, clear, and a really nice way to structure a presentation as well as make it communicative for people who weren’t there.
Of course, the “first six months” slideshow report (which thinking about it, every knowledge manager should be made to do for their peers) – ie “the Stuff” (to riff of my previous post on Social Reporting) is nothing without the Stories and Conversations that really highlighted Cory’s initiation into his new organisation. That’s why I wish I’d been at the conference to hear some of it, both on the podium and off. And just for a nice rounding off, if Cory were introducing a new knowledge manager to his role today, what advice would he give, knowing what he knows now?
So my specifications for the 180 Days report for every knowledge manager:
The mindmapped report ala Cory
The stories about the things (s)he discovered along the way
The conversations that taught him/her most
What (s)he’d advise anyone starting in that role in that organisation today.
The hell with it, why shouldn’t that be routine knowledge sharing duty for any senior post in an organisation?
Jul 25
KM is Dead: Transcript Guide
Jack Vinson has done a great job of annotating the “Is KM Dead?” video with Dave and Larry together with timings. Mea culpa, should have done it myself, but Jack has done a much better job.
Jul 25
Social Reporting
Bev Trayner has been thinking about reporting socially (let’s NOT call it Reporting 2.0 please, tempting though it may be!), developing one of David Wilcox’s great ideas. She contrasts the formally constructed semblance-of-authority-and-completeness report with David Wilcox’s idea of social reporting as capturing “stuff” (ie the powerpoints and handouts), “stories” (ie what people think about the matter) and “conversations” (ie how people interact around the matter). She has some nice suggestions for why this might be useful:
”* Keeping a shared memory of “what happened” through more than one people doing it, often in quite random ways, and brought together by tags;
- Using different types of media for reporting, each media type being accessible to different types of people with different purposes for “reading” the (social) report;
- Extending the conversation beyond any one mode (such as face-to-face mode, telephone conference mode, lecture mode) making sure you include people who were not “there”.
- Putting reporting in the hands of more and different types of people with access to different tools, technologies and approaches.
- Modeling different ways of helping people to make sense of an occasion.
- Shining a spotlight on periphery voices by looking out for and recording what they say.
- Advocacy – raising awareness, highlighting good practice, having an impact in ways that incorporate a wider type of audience than just those who will plough their way through traditional written text.
Some of the characteristics of social reporting are that it’s informal, visual, and it doesn’t present itself as an accurate representation of the truth – but, rather, as perspectives from different places and angles.”
I can see this working beautifully for participative events and maybe even collective journeys. I like the way that ease of capture starts to become a factor, how even the composition of the “social reports” can become a collaborative, emergent thing. I like the way that it leaves space for the more formally-composed traditional reports to spring from the resources created by the social report while leaving their evidence visible and explicit. I’m sure Dave Snowden’s Sensemaker software could be laid over the top of this for larger scale sensemaking and pattern analysis. Lovely stuff.
