May 28
Why Implementing KM is like Raising a Child
Last week, I was observing a communication session whereby a group of senior managers were updated on the progress of KM in their organization. When we got to the part on their KM roadmap, someone asked where the organization was on the roadmap (I can’t replicate their roadmap here but it looks quite similar to APQC’s KM Roadmap below). The replies were as varied as the number of stages, and each contrasting view was defended vigorously. It was a lively debate as ever there was.
Apr 28
Why Elearning Systems Will Never Rule the World
A great story from James Robertson about how a bunch of airline pilots cheat their way through compulsory home-based elearning – giving their children candy to complete the page turning, downloading automatic pageturning software, and resetting the connection during the quiz so they have a chance to skip to the relevant answer.
Elearning pageturners deserve all the cheating they can get. This model of technology-assisted “self” directed learning is at least half a century old.
So it’s a nice coincidence that my mailbox today yielded up the spanking new book from Saul Carliner and Patti Shank, The E-learning Handbook. I’m biased, of course, because I have a chapter on measuring the impact of elearning inside, but that apart I like the way the whole front end of the book comes clean about the overweening hype surrounding the elearning boom of a decade ago, and takes a more critical, measured view – read especially the chapters by Margaret Driscoll, Brent Wilson and Lee Christopher.
There are cognitive functions where machines are better than humans – in calculation, memory and rule-following for example. But human wit far exceeds the machine’s capacity in those large domains of human activity where we shift the rules and simply play. Within its limits, and with intelligent design (the plain English kind, not the creationist kind), elearning can be useful and engaging. But it’s never going to replace the rest of the learning intervention family.
Apr 20
Wanted: Managers Who Think
Dave Snowden makes the daring suggestion that management education should teach managers to think. I’m not sure what Dr David Vaine would make of that, nor of Dave’s slighting reference to the “factory consulting” model. But Dave’s post connects nicely to a post last month by Olivier Amprimo of Headshift, which I’ve been meaning to blog for a while… suggesting that there’s a more subtle dynamic behind the suppression of tacitness (and with it thinking) in modern business:
“Corporations rely on specialisation, outsourcing and tacitness. Specialisation is here to manage complexity, outsourcing here to evacuate complexity and tacitness here to hide complexity. It is not perfect. Specialisation impeaches getting the big picture. Outsourcing concretely relocates knowledge out of the organisation. Tacitness prevents management as “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” and favours egocentric “political” games. Besides those defaults, it offers managers a simple life (and very similar to the one of a Museum keeper).”
One of the consequences of this is that technology is always favoured over real consulting (read: thinking things through with people and implementing changes in practices and processes).
Olivier uses the metaphor of a Museum (which is how many organisations are managed, as if they are static arrays of artefacts) and a Zoo (a complex and dynamic environment full of living creatures). Read the full post to get the full argument. I’ve blogged in a similar direction before. But what’s the answer? Dave’s new age MBA programme? Or is this problem more than just education?
Apr 18
Marketroid Oppression and the Word Triage Game
Here’s a fantastic little paddle game from BoingBoing which involves knocking words out of an HP vice president’s press release about a product upgrade. You can see the original quote and the result of a couple of minutes’ bashing below. The insight for me was that I have always thought marketing-speak like this to be meaningless. This game however clearly demonstrates that meaninglessness isn’t quite the right way to look at it, because the peculiar character of this communication survives the elimination of over two thirds of the words. It still has an identity. You can still tell what’s going on.
Meaninglessness proper arrives only when you’ve knocked out all the nouns, verbs and adjectives. Now they say that you can survive the loss of two thirds of your brain as well… although specific brain locations do perform specialised functions, the brain also works as a distributed system so can adapt to loss of brain matter. So there is clearly some form of intelligence at work here – though I’m not sure whether it’s a property of the producer or an emergent intelligence just produced by certain words happening to find themselves in close collocation, a bit like slime mould colonies. What we do know, however, is that marketese, like the brain, fails gracefully. Try it yourself, and let’s wait for the second version of the game where you can insert the quotes of your choice and test them for word-loss resilience. Thanks to David Weinberger for this.
Apr 17
Mind Reading Devices
And while on the topic of knowledge transfer, here’s a very cool set of (real) mind readers aka brain scanners. They make Professor Gervaise Germaine look like an amateur! My favourites are snipped below, but go visit the site for the full set and the details of what they are used for. Thanks to Johanna Reed for this!
Apr 17
Training and Coaching in Knowledge Sharing and Knowledge Transfer Techniques
For those of you in or near Singapore, we’re about to launch a comprehensive training and coaching programme in different techniques for knowledge sharing and transfer. They are selected for use in communities of practice programmes, expertise transfer programmes, and injecting learning and knowledge capture processes into project management. You’ll get practical training and coaching in group facilitation techniques, interview techniques and knowledge packing techniques. Find out more here.
Apr 17
A Taxonomy Journey at EMC
From Chuck Hollis, who’s a VP with EMC, this nice story (which is still evolving) about how their internal collaboration communities are grappling with the issues of order versus emergence – to taxonomise or to tag? They started with an emergent approach, but as the volume and messiness grew, thought they could help by putting in a taxonomy.
It’s a good lesson in taxonomy development, you need to either go and investigate the language and content thoroughly if it’s a mature content collection, or let it grow for a while until the patterns of language and organisation emerge, then look for consistent organising principles that will help the communities navigate and exploit the content effectively.
For a short while, Chuck thought that activity-oriented organisation principles might work best for the communities. But in opening it up for discussion, he seems surprised that there is so much argument about how to organise and categorise. Second lesson in taxonomy development – you will NEVER get a consensus. Chuck seems all set to run for the hills at the first sound of gunfire. Wisely he focuses on the problems that need to be solved – newbie orientation, proliferation of communities which produces what I call “jungle fever” (impossible to navigate), different human dispositions towards messiness and order.
A great insight into practical issues surrounding the need for taxonomies.
Apr 15
Wisdom Management
The actKM community has been debating whether it’s time to extend knowledge management into wisdom management. The great and the good have waded in.
Joe Firestone thinks the definitional ambiguities of KM would be far exceeded by the definitional ambiguities of wisdom management, making it an unproductive endeavour. Steve Denning believes there is already a growing literature and service provision in the field of wisdom management, citing the work of Dorothy Leonard and Gary Klein. Gary, by the way, doesn’t think he is doing wisdom management or even exploring wisdom, but Denning knows best.
Dave Snowden in characteristic fashion believes that wisdom management pundits should be taken out and shot. Yet others say they would never have imagined themselves delivering services in managing “knowledge”, so why should it not become possible for wisdom?
One can understand Steve Denning’s progression from storytelling to leadership to wisdom. He has already covered two thirds of that path in his influential books. Both storytelling and leadership, in different ways, depend on what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called “the willing suspension of disbelief”. The storyteller asks his audience, “trust me, follow me, even when my story seems to defy the way everyday life works”. The leader asks her people, “trust me, follow me, even when the path looks difficult and against your immediate interest”.
And the idea of wisdom management does seem to have that “trust me, I know best, you’re not really qualified to question me” character to it. “Wisdom” is sufficiently imprecise to make its possession effectively unverifiable in a general objective way, and sufficiently confusable with charisma to make its claims believable at least by some. There are two problems with this.
The first is that the risks of asking for a willing suspension of disbelief escalate as you move from stories, to leadership actions, to general claims for “authentic” wisdom management. We know when we’re listening to a story, and we generally know how to understand and trust stories. We also know how to assess the track record and reputation of leaders – often through stories – though it’s easier to be let down badly by leaders than it is by stories.
But asking for generic trust for unverifiable wisdom management processes smacks of what cults do. If the message is at any point “you’re not qualified to comment or think about this, you’re not wise enough, trust the people who know” then you are definitely in cult-like territory with all its associated dangers.
The second problem is that wisdom management as an evolution of knowledge management takes KM in a retrograde direction. Wisdom management cannot but focus on the knowledge and ability of privileged individuals. It’s possible to do good work in expertise transfer, and in building the capabilities of employees beyond information management, but this is only one aspect of KM and not its most critical.
If KM has learned anything in the past decade it is that a focus on the knowledge of individuals gets you only so far. Most of the really big knowledge problems affecting organisational effectiveness are about how organisations process and use knowledge collectively, how they learn collectively, how they make decisions collectively.
Show me a disaster – Katrina, Enron, 911, Challenger, Columbia – and I will show you problems with how individuals’ knowledge fails to scale to an effective organisational response. The notion of wisdom management is a gigantic red herring based on an increasingly outdated individualism.
Apr 10
Dr Vaine’s Phoric
Courtesy of the inimitable Johnnie Moore and Robert Paterson Dr David Vaine has released a new video and audio podcast after a long absence from the intertubes. The format of The Phoric is to invite a guest to share three YouTube videos that mean something special, and talk about them with the co-hosts. Dr Vaine uses this opportunity to describe his company’s approach to optimising office space for sharing and socialisation, as well as his innovative Wisdom Management Programme. Many thanks to Johnnie and Rob for providing this opportunity. The video version is below, visit The Phoric for the three YouTube clips and to download the audio version of the podcast.
For those who’d like to see the previous videos in the “Explaining Knowledge Management” series, including some Dr Vaine classics, see below the fold.
Explaining Knowledge Management #6: Knowledge Transfer
Apr 06
Cross Posting: Taxonomies, Politics and Censorship
From the Organising Knowledge book blog:
Popline is the world’s biggest database on reproductive health, with about a third of a million articles. It’s funded by federal agency USAID, and managed by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. If you do a search in its database today under “abortion” you’ll find over 26,000 articles. Between February and yesterday, you wouldn’t have found any articles. What happened?
