Jul 07
Why Do We Share Knowledge?
In my previous post What is Knowledge Sharing? I wanted to challenge the assumption that all knowledge sharing is created equal. From a KM point of view we need to be more specific about what kinds of knowledge we are interested in, how it needs to be shared, and by what means.
There’s another common assumption in the knowledge sharing literature that I think needs to be challenged, and that is that knowledge sharing is essentially an engineering problem somehow associated with motivation. It’s an input/output problem. If you can understand the levers of motivation, you can design a system that will create the right input, and hey presto, out will come the desired knowledge sharing.
Now I’m sure it’s perfectly true that motivation matters in many cases, but I can think of lots of instances where knowledge sharing is not obviously instrumental and cannot be said to have motives driving it. Here are a few examples I can think of:
Inadvertent knowledge sharing – I let something slip by accident (I’m not a Freudian, things CAN happen by accident!)
Habit - it’s just something I’m used to doing, maybe I had a motive for starting, twenty years ago, now I don’t think about it
Copying – I see other people doing it, so I do the same (primates and monkeys have observation and emulation practices built into their genes)
Experimentation – I try it out because I’m curious about the consequences, I don’t have to have any kind of theory
Reflex – I see an obvious knowledge gap so I fill it instinctively, just like termites will instinctively start working on the opposite side of a nest chamber from its companion
Whim – I just feel like it, maybe I’m in a good mood today
I think we can probably get a richer account of what drives knowledge sharing if we look at a spectrum something like this:
The model assumes that knowledge sharing can be examined from different levels of generality. At the most abstract level, it’s useful to look at the conditions in which knowledge sharing can occur (eg knowledge asymmetry, collocation of parties). Next up, we look at non-intentional causes for knowledge sharing (eg accidental, reflexive, habitual). The model also assumes there’s a possibility where you can explain a knowledge sharing act which is intentional but where analysis of motives and instrumentality are just not interesting or useful (eg I just felt like it, random acts of kindness, whim, it’s just part of who I am). Finally we get to areas where motives count.
Jul 07
What is Knowledge Sharing?
We had a good evening yesterday discussing KM implementations in Australia and Singapore at iKMS. One of our participants was Awie Foong who’s studying knowledge sharing motivation for his PhD (by the way, he’s looking for companies to participate in his knowledge sharing culture study next month - you’ll get a customised report if you participate as a company).
Now he’s got me all fired up to continue with my earlier rant on how the current KM literature treats knowledge sharing as a flat, one dimensional, equi-valent thing. KNOWLEDGE SHARING IS GOOD.... KNOWLEDGE HOARDING IS BAD… WE MUST SHARE KNOWLEDGE. There are so many assumptions bound up in this, and such a lack of richness in how we describe or think about it, that I really don’t see how we can do anything remotely useful in the real world around knowledge sharing unless we can start describing some of the richness and complexity of it.
For example: what’s the opposite of knowledge sharing? Many assume it’s knowledge hoarding - ie, there’s an assumption that both sharing and hoarding are always intentional acts. But what about simply failing to share knowledge? Isn’t that also the opposite of sharing? For example, you don’t notice or know that somebody could benefit from the knowledge you have? Or you intend to share and forget? Or the assumption that all knowledge is created equal, that knowledge sharing of the type where I give my phone number to a new acquaintance is the same as knowledge sharing where I teach someone how to blow glass, or let a colleague know that they have fallen foul of the big boss.
Now nobody’s going to unpick the mysteries of knowledge sharing in a single blog post, but blogs are good for thinking out loud and trying ideas out with people passing by. So here’s a random selection of sharing (and non-sharing) incidents that I want to use to keep us on real, human ground:
49 Ways to Share Knowledge
Jun 27
Buying Pearls From Swine
*Sigh* ... it’s happened again. A few weeks ago I blogged about a KM conference company I called VECK who don’t believe in knowledge sharing unless they are collecting a lot of money for it. I got quite a lot of comments, including some private emails about similar stories, some of them almost as peculiar as mine.
Now it’s happened again. Another company in Singapore, let’s call them Judgement Day, gave us a call a couple of weeks ago. They want to move into the KM seminar space, and they asked if we would provide marketing support for an upcoming seminar in August. Well, they were mistaking us for iKMS a KM non-profit membership organisation, but never mind. When they realised their mistake, they sweetly offered discounts for our clients as well as iKMS members, if we provided support, in email blasts, etc etc, the usual deal.
Jun 27
Developing Policies to Support KM
It’s often difficult to approach KM in any large scale way in an organisation without bumping into the policy infrastructure. The organisation will need to make decisions and give clear guidance about how knowledge and information sharing is to be balanced with information security, for example. The requirements for a knowledge sharing system, including taxonomy and metadata requirements, will need to be balanced with the need to manage records according to legislative and regulatory requirements. Knowledge, information and records form a continuum that needs to be managed holistically, and an integrated policy framework helps to support this. In this paper by Patrick Lambe and Marita Keenan we spell out a framework and process for information and records management policy development, in support of knowledge management goals.
Jun 27
Pity the Man Who Knows More
Recently, I happened to be switching from tv channel to tv channel and stumbled upon a documentary on the BBC on child labour in one of the African nations. It featured the plight of 3 young boys, the older aged 15 and his brothers who were twins, aged 10. The boys would wake up early every morning and walk for some 2 hours to the copper mines to work. They would sieve sand and rock to uncover the copper and I saw that as they did this, they had a whole lot of dust floating all about their faces – no masks or scarfs to cover their noses or mouths. The boys would use their tiny hands, more so their fingernails to scrape the rock to find tiny copper bits. The British reporter shared that the boys would only get paid if they collected enough copper for the day, 1 kg in weight I vaguely recall her saying. At the end of the 16-hour work day, the boys gathered around with the other children waiting to be called upon to have their copper weighed. They clasped the little copper bits in their hands, every bit so precious. It was obviously impossible for them to collect that much copper given that did not have any tools and were already quite undernourished. So off they went, heading home with nothing in their hands for their day’s work and a 2-hour walk home ahead. The reporter said she asked them what they would do now that they had no money for food and they said they would drink some water and go to sleep. It was also reported that children were preferred because they get paid less for the copper they collected. It was a heartwrenching sight indeed.
I shared this with a friend of mine recently. He was also moved by the story and perhaps in offering some words of consolation, commented that it is probably the only life they know i.e. they did not know any other life. It occurred to me then that one of the boys had said that he wished he could be like the children in Europe, who get to go to school. He had seen it on television once. When I told my friend this, he remarked “Pity the man who knows more.”
Pity the man who knows more. It struck a chord with me. It seems like we usually pity the man who knows less, especially in an increasingly competitive and materialistic society. While it seems like we are driven as part of our human nature to seek knowledge and understanding, it also seems like knowing may not always be the better option. We discuss in our KM circle about knowing the unknown but what about unknowing the known – not in the sense of reversing what is already known for that is impossible, but avoiding knowledge for whatever specific reasons we may have. Have you ever been in a situation when you wished you didn’t know?
I pity those children although people say pity is a bad word. In my mind, I just keep seeing their little hands scraping the ground.
Jun 22
Seven Ways to Use a Wiki
Maish Nichani over at Pebble Road has written a case study of wiki use in the British Council Singapore’s Professional Development Centre.
“Wikis are increasingly being used on the intranet to help in collaboration around shared work. However, many case studies only briefly cover the actual work practices that successfully accommodate wikis; the focus is still on the overall reactions of the managers and staff on their use. In this article, I will describe how wikis are used in the Singapore branch of the British Council and highlight the characteristics of the work practices that accommodate them.”
Maish describes seven practical ways that wikis are being used by normal people doing normal work, in a “bottom-up” KM approach. Some nice practical substance to back the Enterprise 2.0 ideas.
Jun 21
Studentship: MSc in KM by Research in Hong Kong
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University has an MSc programme in KM that’s attracting a lot of interest. (Full disclosure: I teach on it). They’re now offering a full-time studentship for an MSc by research with an option to convert to doctoral degree. The research area will be technology focused, and possibilities right now include a personal knowledge management desktop, or the interface between personal KM, collaboration and social networking.
A monthly stipend will be paid to the successful candidate. This research is full time and requires the student to be based in Hong Kong. Commencement of
project is anytime between July and October 2006. Interested parties please send your CV and contact to:
Professor Eric Tsui
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
E-mail:
Phone: +852 2766 6609
URL: http://www.ise.polyu.edu.hk
Jun 21
Getting Management Buy-in For KM
Back at the end of April we launched a collaborative research project on practical techniques for getting management buy-in for KM initiatives, working with the ACT-KM community and our friends at Anecdote. We are currently in the first phase of gathering examples of successul and unsuccessful attempts at getting management buy-in.
We have now opened up the project contribution page here. KM practitioners are most welcome to visit the project page, review the contributions made by others, and give examples from your own experience. We’ll share the results of the study with all participants. See this article for an example of a previous research project with ACT-KM.
Jun 20
KM is Like Herding Cats
This is a cult commercial made by EDS back in 2001 about “herding cats”. Captures the challenges of doing KM to a tee!
Jun 20
Taxonomies vs Tagging: High Context, Low Context
We have to keep reminding ourselves, in taxonomy work, (a) how idiosyncratic and innovative human beings are in the way we structure our worlds; and (b) the difference between “high context” organisation systems (where you have to be educated into the original context/principle of ordering in order to be able to navigate it) and “low context” organisation systems (where it’s self-evident as soon as you get into it). I’ve taken this useful distinction from Edward T. Hall’s 1977 book Beyond Culture.
We have an experiment we do sometimes in taxonomy workshops. We ask participants to collect all the different ways they organise their music CDs. So far I think we’re up to 20 different ways, including one guy who organised his music in order of the girlfriend he was going out with at the time he bought it. That’s what I’d call a high context approach, obviously not self-evident to the general user (in fact, there’s probably a post-modernist Casanova movie idea in there somewhere). But there are other high context taxonomic systems that work quite well: engineering or scientific taxonomies, for example, where users can tolerate deep and specialised taxonomic hierarchies because they have been educated into them.
This issue of idiosyncratic or high context taxonomies isn’t new. David Weinberger recently blogged about Douglas Wilson’s 2001 book on the 18th century US president Thomas Jefferson’s bookish habits. (Thanks David, have just ordered from Amazon!) Apparently Jefferson compiled reading lists for law students, organised by the time of day that they should be read. David uses this example to push the “everything is miscellaneous” cause, and I’m not sure this is completely right… at least from the point of view of people who are trying to structure content for predictable access within organisations. Internet web content is a different story.
By chance I’m also reading Richard Wurman’s Information Anxiety 2 and here’s a phrase from Ramana Rao that struck me this morning as much more on the mark:
“Use the ‘grain of the wood’. Information has inherent structure, a grain. Trees, tables, time, documents, calendars, these are the spines that organise information. By designing tools based on such canonical information structures, they become potentially applicable in a wide range of situations.” (p.167)
Rao could be describing low context taxonomies when he refers to “canonical information structures” – take one look, and pretty much everyone will know how they work. Most of the corporate taxonomist’s work must be in discovering the shape of these canonical information structures within an enterprise, and shaping their taxonomies around them.
The exhilerating serendipity and scale of the web should not distract us from the virtues of (and need for) structuring and predictable patterns within a corporate environment. As Clay Shirky observed so accurately at the birth of the social tagging boom, the hierarchical taxonomy works fine on small content collections, but becomes increasingly unwieldy as the scale of content and community amplifies; social tagging on the other hand, amplifies ambiguity and confusion on small scales, but produces beneficial patterns at very large scales.
So maybe the enterprise taxonomist’s strategy needs to be like this: emphasising structure and relative control when collections and active communities are small, well defined, or relatively homogeneous; accommodating social tagging (used to be called “free” tagging in the good old days), and exploiting it more as content and active community grow?
