Dec 23
Merry Christmas to All Our Readers!
Thanks to our regular artist Joseph Tey, for the artwork! Note: Before any of you ask, I did NOT model for this picture.
Dec 22
Is KM a Pseudoscience?
There was a bit of a spat on the actKM forum over the past week or so. One of the Forum’s members (who’s now left in high dudgeon) was testifying to the utility of NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) in KM, which met with a notable lack of sympathy and a reading list from Dave Snowden on why NLP is a pseudoscience. On that list was Barry Beyerstein’s wonderful paper “Distinguishing Science from Pseudoscience” which led me in turn to Charles Frankel’s 1973 paper in Science “The Nature and Sources of Irrationalism”. Both helped me clarify for myself the characteristics and dangers of “magical thinking” in knowledge management, which I’ve blogged and spoken about before
The Beyerstein article in particular caught my attention for the clarity it brings to the conduct of a rational pursuit. To quote from a post I made to the actKM Forum: I was especially taken by Beyerstein’s reference to Broad’s fourth limiting principle: “It is impossible for a mental event to produce directly any change in the material world … without the mediation of muscular effort”. Management theory in general and KM theory in particular sometimes seems to forget that.
Now KM is neither a science nor a pseudoscience, but the basic principles of rationality versus irrationality articulated by Beyerstein turn out to be a pretty good checklist for scrutinising the theory and practice of KM as a rationally and “scientifically” conducted pursuit. In fact, some of Beyerstein’s characteristics of a pseudoscience form a very useful charter for how to critically question an emerging field of knowledge and practice such as KM, not least to sniff out the charlatans. Here’s the scorecard as I see it on 12 of Beyerstein’s criteria, where the score represents how well we in KM are doing in NOT being a pseudoscience – we have a way to go, it seems:
(1) Isolation – we need to do better in KM at connecting to prior and parallel disciplines in both theory (eg cognitive and social psychology, anthropology, brain science) and practice (eg learning, information management, records management) – without falling prey to sin #7 (impenetrability and obfuscation). 7 out of 10
(2) Non-Falsifiability - we need to find ways of understanding and characterising the differences between success and failure in KM, and of being clear about for a given hypothesis and intervention, what would count as a falsification of that hypothesis or an invalidation of the intervention. 4 out of 10
(3) Misuse of Data – this is back to the quantitative qualitative discussion we have been having on the actKM Forum – the KM academic literature (it’s not alone) is prone to highly leveraging both qualitative and quantitative findings, leveraging them far beyond the point their real substance warrants. We need a better understanding and mechanism for collecting, comparing, validating and understanding data. 5 out of 10
(4) No Self-correction, Evolution of Thought - it seems to me like we are currently just going round in circles around the same basic ideas. There has been no real innovation in KM in the past decade (though lots of rushes to support or privilege aspects of the KM domain above others). This is largely due, I think, to the instability of the KM profession (people don’t stay for long in it) and the weakness of the links between academia and practice. 5 out of 10
(5) Special Pleading – we are masters of saying “you can’t measure the results of KM, we’re different” – the fact is, we don’t understand our practice until we can understand the relationships between interventions and impact. We may not be able to give a good account now, but that doesn’t exempt us from a more systematic investigation of what we do. 4 out of 10
(6) Unfounded Optimism – well, we actually do need this for many KM interventions, in some cases it may be all that keeps us going. But this also results in having (or not challenging) unrealistic expectations of what we can achieve, leading to both cynicism (in our stakeholders) and burnout (among ourselves) when our rash promises don’t come to fruition. 4 out of 10
(7) Impenetrability - we do encounter from time to time among our community ideological stubbornness and an imperviousness to argument or genuine dialogue; or articulations so abstruse that it’s hard to fathom what’s being discussed. I think we have got better at tuning into each other, having meaningful dialogues around strong differences, with the odd exception here and there (the ideologues, thankfully don’t stick around), but we haven’t done so well in managing clarity of communications or commitment to that clarity. 6 out of 10
(8) Magical Thinking – this was a theme of my talk at the actKM conference this year; we are strongly prone to this (it partially results from #6 Unfounded Optimism); this is the belief that good things will result from willpower (read design) alone, without the need for “muscular effort”; Noah Raford recently referred to belief in “best practices” as akin to sympathetic magic: “It’s like building a model of something, building a doll that has a likeness of something else, and hoping that the effects will transfer.” 6 out of 10
(9) Ulterior Motives – many of the players in the space have commercial interests in the theory and practice they are espousing (eg consultants, pundits and technology developers) and if this is combined with Isolation #1 and Impenetrability #7 it’s hard to challenge such special interests (the certification debate is a case in point – Douglas, you said you would share your curriculum?) – I actually think we’re getting better at this, a decade ago the KM space was rife with snakeoil and their salesmen; but I don’t think we’re by any means immune from more of them once KM-like stuff becomes sexy and affordable again (watch Enterprise 2.0 for a re-hash) – and because #4 means that there are always new and inexperienced people coming into KM and trying to make decisions based on no prior knowledge; progress on this depends on making progress in #2, #4, #5 and #7 - 7 out of 10
(10) Lack of Formal Training - KM is full of practitioners and academics who have wandered or been teleported into KM from something else, sometimes related (like Library Science or Learning & Development) and sometimes unrelated; we have very few mechanisms for validating or falsifying the authority of pronouncements based on prior discipline; there is a crying need for accreditation, but very little in the way of provision beyond an onerous though usually useful Master’s level qualification; we need some way of ascertaining and validating the relative authority of the voices in our space other than the fairly crude ones we have now – I believe communities like actKM are an important force in achieving this; we need better professional development and accreditation structures – 6 out of 10
(11) Bunker Mentality - pseudoscientists like to proclaim how they are misunderstood, persecuted or treated badly by the rest of the world (this definitely cropped up in the NLP discussion), and there are shades of this kind of self-pity in the KM community I think; we do have a hard time getting acceptance and understanding because of many of the items above, so I can see why this happens, but overall I think we’re pretty robust on this, and open to engagement with the rest of the world, so I’d give us an 8 out of 10 on this point.
(12) Lack of Replicability of Results – we are really bad at this, partly arising from #5 Special Pleading; we are very bad at giving full, objective and examinable accounts of our work, not to mention or lack of ability to characterise success and failure clearly. This is why we are so prone to #8 Magical Thinking, and the application of simplistic recipes and best practices, whipped up with a handsome dollop of #6 Unfounded Optimism, and #7 Impenetrability to make sure our doubts about our success are nicely covered up and free from examination. We need to get much better at journaling and sharing our practices, warts and all, having them competently examined by experienced professionals, and collecting and sharing meaningful data across the community, both academic and professional. 3 out of 10.
This gives us an overall average score of 5.4 out of 10 – must do better
These of course are just my own impressionistic views – how would YOU score KM as a rational endeavour?
Dec 21
Knoco on KM Metrics
The latest issue of Knoco’s newsletter has a very good, practical feature on the different kinds and purposes of KM Metrics. I prefer now to use the wider term monitoring and evaluation, because metrics implies a very narrow focus, but apart from that, there’s a lot of good stuff in this coverage (compare with our white paper on How to Use KPIs in Knowledge Management):
- Measuring implementation
- Measuring value
- Measuring compliance
- Measuring activity
- Measuring outcomes
Dec 18
Competencies Redux
There’s been a burst of interest in the notion of defining competencies for KM, most recently on actKM. I’ve started putting together some references on prior work on The Knowledge Bucket (this is a wiki reference resource for KM professionals), and it would be good if you could add references to any other work you know about. This is what I have so far:
- Karl Wiig developed a spidergram approach to KM competencies and proficiency levels in his 1995 book KM Methods (vol.3 of his KM Trilogy) (Thanks to Janice Keeler).
- This was developed further by Abell and Oxbrow’s work for TFPL in 2001 (Competing with Knowledge).
- Angela Abell and Val Skelton of TFPL subsequently published a Knowledge and Information Management Competency Dictionary (2003) – it is very asset focused, very little on human capital development (beyond competencies for KIM), or sense of the importance of learning.
- In 2006 TFPL published a white paper ‘Who’s Managing Information? Information Responsibilities in the Digital World’ which looks at emerging trends in information management stakeholders and roles, and sets out a framework for roles and responsibilities across the enterprise. It’s a free download but you need to register to get it.
- The British Standards Institute published ‘Skills for knowledge working. A guide to good practice’ (PD 7505:2005)as a follow through from PAS 2001 the BSI’s standard for knowledge management (2001).
- The Information and Knowledge Management Society in Singapore conducted a research project on a KM competencies framework for self development which took a narrative, role-oriented approach to competencies (Foong & Lambe KM Competencies: A Framework for Knowledge Managers, iKMS 2008).
- The UK civil service has developed a “Government Knowledge and Information Management Professional Skills Framework” in a matrix form covering roles (practitioner, manager, leader, strategist) and activities (strategic planning, using and exploiting knowledge and information, managing and organising, governance).
- The UK government framework referenced the Skills Framework for the Information Age which is highly developed and structured but focuses on information management.
Then there are a couple of papers on certification and competencies from this blog: here and here.
Dec 17
Wheel of Knowledge Revisited
Bill Proudfit has done a very nice riff on our “wheel of knowledge” (which is based on Dave Snowden’s ASHEN framework). Visit his post for his commentary on how it works in practice!
Dec 16
Representing Complexity
From Rick Davies of Most Significant Change fame, a very thought-provoking post on the application of Dave Snowden’s Sensemaker software suite. Rick probes the notion of self-signification – especially how the categories or filters for self-signification are derived. He also discusses how to assess the validity and implications of different modes of representing very large scale content. There is also a fascinating discussion of an innovative use of social network analysis software to represent associations between different pieces of content, which started the taxonomic side of my brain twitching. Thanks to Dave for recommending this.
Dec 15
Cynefin, Collapse, and Adaptive Change
VERY interesting interpretation of Dave Snowden’s Cynefin Framework from Noah Raford, adding a temporal, cyclical dimension to it by blending it with Gunderson and Holling’s cycle of adaptive change. What interests me most is the notion of collapse from simple to chaotic, and then into complex as we re-learn. I think there are all sorts of interesting implications for how we work within infrastructure to the point that large sections of the infrastructure becomes unsustainable, triggering mini or major collapses. The cycle as presented is still too purely sequential, though in the final minute Raford hints at the fractal nature of the changes – in fact we encounter aspects of simplicity, complicatedness, complexity (less commonly chaos) in most situations we face – we therefore need a better account of the simultaneity of activity in all four Cynefin domains. I am beginning to think of the Cynefin domains as a stack of interacting layers, with little (or large) explosions of activity in different parts of the system triggering cascades – but I think I either need a lot more time or a bigger brain to think this idea through to something practical.
Thanks to John Bordeaux via the actKM listserve for flagging this.
Dec 14
Gremlins in the Expertise Video
It seems there was a bug in the upload of my expertise videos a couple of weeks ago (thanks Tony for pointing it out), and it’s taken me this long to get it fixed. So I have re-posted the videos and they should work ok now, they can be accessed from here.
Dec 10
The Long Pause of KM
Allan Crawford went around with a video camera at KM World recently asking people for their takeaways from the conference and on the state of KM. Here’s his compilation, which does show some interesting themes around the people/organisational dimension of KM. (Check out his new blog, “KM is Alive” and his recent post on the “KM Elephant”.
I’m on the video too, and I said I thought KM was “in a long pause”. That was being polite – to be frank, the picture I got of the state of KM at KM World was that it’s tired. I don’t subscribe to the “KM is dead” school, and I don’t think KM is going to go away, because the organisational dysfunctions that call it forth are not going away, but I do think it’s moribund.
Maybe it was just the conference, because there are pockets of high and applied energy out there (the actKM conference this year was absolutely stellar, the KM Asia conference was a lot of fun) and there can be a clear sense of learning from peers in the event’s main content, not just at its fringes.
KM World’s greatest benefit was the networking and some nice keynotes from Andrew MacAfee and Thomas Vander Wal, but the format of the conference (huge warehouse, dim lighting, serried rows, poor powerpoint visibility) would suck the energy out of the most dynamic content and audiences, and dynamism levels were certainly mixed. That conference format needs to be woken up big time (isn’t that what knowledge managers are supposed to be good at?), and we might then get a chance to do some more applied, conversational, cutting edge stuff at these conferences. The sort of thing actKM is starting to excel at.
Ok, conference rant over. Back to KM. When can we stop going round in circles and make some genuine, cutting edge progress? I’m not hungry for a fad, just some solid new insights that give us a sense of progress.
Dec 01
Obituary: David Eusebius Vaine, 1959-2009
It is with great sadness that I have to report the sudden passing in an accident of Dr David Vaine, partner in consulting firm Apparently KM PLC, and founder of the Institute for Minimal Impact KM™. Dr Vaine was a member of our advisory board, and while we had substantial differences of opinion on many matters, and never actually took any of his advice, he had served as a valuable sounding board and a true compass of where not to go in our consulting practice.
The circumstances of his passing are still emerging, but there are some clues in a speech he delivered at his last public appearance, at the actKM conference in Canberra, in October 2009. At that event Dr Vaine announced that his firm had been working for some time on what he called a Knowledge Amplification Programme (KAMP) using a device he called a Temporary Spatio Temporal Multi Projection System, and that he had been using this device to enable KM guru Dennis Snowden to appear simultaneously at multiple KM conferences.
In private remarks to friends, Dr Vaine had also expressed some despondency about the moribund state of KM in general and the lack of vitality and interest in KM conferences in particular. It is well known that Dr Vaine considered that the only original thinker in the KM space apart from himself was Dennis Snowden.
It now appears that Dr Vaine had conceived a plan to remedy this moribundity and inject new intellectual vigour into the theory and practice of KM by using his device to convene a KM conference comprised solely of Dennis Snowdens, thereby amplifying his intellect across the KM domain. Dr Vaine’s notes suggest that up to 120 versions of Dennis Snowden were convened for this experiment.
A postmortem on Dr Vaine’s remains has reportedly discovered that his skull had internal scorch marks but was otherwise completely empty. Investigators are working on the theory that the wisdom acceleration effect of hyper-competition among the multiple Dennis Snowdens striving among themselves for intellectual supremacy reached in a matter of moments a Point of Cognitive Singularity and that the resulting cognitive blast wave flash evaporated Dr Vaine’s brain.
Fortunately Dr Vaine was conducting his work in complete secrecy in a remote location and nobody else was harmed, including Dennis Snowden, who was successfully resolved back to his original state when the projection system was shut down in the blast. Snowden reportedly has no recollection of the event, though he was briefly in a deleuzian delirium immediately afterwards.
Dr Vaine was educated at institutions proximate to Oxford, Cambridge and Edinburgh, and his interest in KM started early. His PhD dissertation on Information Processing Viscosity and Impermeability Factors Affecting the Enacted Hierarchy of Needs in Rattus Norvegicus Commercial Colonies won high praise from one of its readers.
Dr Vaine worked as a top level administrator and thought leader in a number of commercial settings, including several posts in management, before his latest role as a leading consulting guru. He was highly sought after as an inspirational speaker and podcaster, and his highly successful KM exercise video series entitled Low Impact? No Impact! has topped the video rental charts among KM practitioners at least twice in the past five years.
In years to come Dr David Vaine will be remembered as Knowledge Management’s first martyr to progress. He will be sorely missed.
Note: I would like to express my appreciation to Edgar Tan and Arthur Shelley, who were with me when I received the tragic news, and were very supportive.
