Oct 15
actKM, Dr Vaine and Method Cards Again
Looks like some good stuff is happening in Canberra at the actKM conference, from Cory Banks’ account and the presentations being posted at the actKM website. Matt Moore has invented a KM awareness game of “Dominoes” using our KM Method Cards. Cory reports:
“Discovered a new way to use the KM Method Cards by Straits Knowledge. It was a version of Dominoes where each person was given a number of cards and one was placed face up on the table (a big table is required). Each person had to place a card next to the upturned card and show or ‘sell’ it’s relationship. If you can’t put a card down then you have to pick up a card. Some interesting discussion and ‘selling’ took place. Got very interesting when you had to put a card in gaps and it had to match on all sides. It was good to familiarise people with the cards and the KM concepts.”
And here’s a special message to the actKM delegates from Dr David Vaine who was supposed to speak at the conference dinner but then couldn’t make it “when something more important came along”. Highlights include his new KM certification programme, a new KM Award, and a special accolade for Dave Snowden and David Gurteen.
Oct 14
Method Cards in Use
When we send out our KM Method Cards to the people who buy them, we always ask them to let us know how they end up using them.
Here’s a really nice way of using our KM Method Cards from Christine Harding of Thiess in Australia, presented here with her permission. I REALLY like the “yes/no” pile idea, and the pyramid of discussions (a) to create a shared understanding of what KM can do for a group (b) allow the group to take some ownership of what KM can do for them© open up a fairly limited view of KM in a very “discovery” oriented way.
I also like Christine’s suggestion for providing blank card templates – and am mulling over whether there’s a way of getting some online sharing of this kind of innovation around the core pack.
Let us know what you think, and also your examples of use!
——
“I am working with a group of engineers around innovation. What they have discovered is that a culture of trust and knowledge sharing is particularly important. At the last meeting I attended they asked me to address KM, what it was, how they could apply it etc.
Just as I left my office I popped a pack of cards in my bag. What I quickly discovered is that they had no real idea of just how big and wide spread the behaviour of knowledge sharing can be. They were also keen to come up with some very tangible outcomes to use for their senior leaders.
After a presentation on KM and how it fits in our business and some really good conversations I broke them into two groups of 3 and gave them a section of cards each (starting with methods and approaches). I asked them to go through them each and read anything they didn’t understand then make a decision on whether they could relate to the cards and whether they thought their business was ready for or in need of any of the approaches and methods. They had yes and no piles.
They then swapped and looked at each other’s yes and no piles and either agreed or disagreed and resorted. We then had a conversation over the ones they didn’t agree with until they understood each other and made a final decision.
I then had them go through the tools in the same way and swap the piles and follow the same process. The comments I got were very positive and they all felt very enlightened.
For guys who are not experts in this stuff, it provided a smorgasbord for them to select from.
I am now writing up a report which states their desired methods and approaches back by the tools. They will then take that and build it into something applicable for their business unit.
I understand it was a bit of crash course, and there were some things which went over their heads even after reading about them, yet it gave us a very solid starting point and very clearly demonstrated the many and varied ways KM can come into your work life. Prior to this they were very narrow-focused on only document control.
My suggestion I would make to you is to provide some blank cards in each pack so you can add your own new ideas. This group for example, has come up with their own technique of generating and sharing ideas. It would be great to be able to type these up and print them to add to the pack.”
Oct 13
Knowledge Management Competencies
It’s been very busy on the publishing front recently! Apart from our KM Method Cards in June, and the KM Approaches Methods and Tool Guidebook last week, in my other identity as President of iKMS, I also helped produce the first competency-based self-development guide for knowledge managers (that we know of).
It’s a 56 page booklet, based on narrative research into the operating challenges that knowledge managers face working in the Singapore context. It can be used to identify competency gaps, depending on what the challenges are, and also ways to improve competencies. The video below introduces the project and the book (the video was originally produced for the Cognitive Edge network, whose techniques we used). My compliments to iKMS colleague Awie Foong for leading this 18 month project so ably.
Oct 10
The Book of the Cards
We’ve followed through on our KM Method Cards by publishing a “how to” guidebook on 24 of the most useful techniques and approaches in the Method Cards pack. We got it from the printer on Wednesday and launched it at the KM Singapore conference yesterday. It looks very nice (though we say so ourselves)! The printer did a great job.
Each technique has some notes on where it came from, what it’s good for, when it’s not going to be so useful, and with some suggested templates to help structure it when you first start trying it out. There are also links to additional resources, many of them on the web, and cross-connections to other techniques in the book if it can be used in combination.
As with the Method Cards, the material in this guide has evolved over several years of working with clients and teaching the use of these techniques in the “real world”, and we’ve deliberately selected them for their usefulness in three major types of KM effort:
- Fostering Peer Collaboration and Communities of Practice
- Instilling learning and knowledge capture processes into Projects
- Supporting an Expertise Transfer programme.
We’ve written the supporting notes specifically to support such practical implementations. We hope you find the book clear, supportive and useful!
If you want to know more about what’s inside, do visit our store and take a look at the free preview.
Sep 30
Sharepoint and Magic
In Singapore we’re surrounded by people who are struggling with dense jungles of Lotus Notes databases and Team Rooms which, because they were so easy to use, sucked up vast amounts of wonderful collaboration… but because they had very little governance or structure, grew like Topsy in all directions and eventually became too confusing to use. So they’re all migrating to a “simpler” document sharing solution in the form of Microsoft Sharepoint which, because it’s so easy to use, will… well you get the picture.
Sharepoint, by all accounts (I mean user accounts, not salespitch accounts) is a good collaboration platform, but it’s not naturally good at large scale enterprise document management. It doesn’t handle metadata, taxonomy management or search well for that kind of function – at least out of the box. If you work it pretty hard and add non-native functionalities, you can make it serve your knowledge organisation purposes. But you need to know what you want it to do beyond “get me out of my Lotus Notes jungle problem”.
The actKM forum has been discussing the idea of Sharepoint as a perceived “magic bullet” for some weeks now. In the midst of a generally good discussion came one of those occasional lucid, brilliant, succint, experience-based summaries you sometimes get on listserves and for which they are worth their weight in email. Mike Gardner of EDS wrote:
“From someone who has been very closely involved with SharePoint / MOSS over the last few years in terms of implementing it as an information repository for our company I can certainly talk about the tool and the related business requirements. SharePoint is like any other tool, implement it without thinking about what you are doing and you can end up in a bigger mess than you started with.
Many companies have looked at SharePoint as a useful collaboration tool and allowed their folk to use it that way. This can be appropriate, but you need to think of the potential consequences. This can easily result in everyone starting to create their own siloed repositories and want started out as a way to get folk to collaborate has resulted in thousands of little repositories with mountains of duplicated content, making finding what you need even more difficult than before. If you just want folk to have a collaboration area then SharePoint can be appropriate but you need to think what happens to the content in these collaboration areas. How does it get promoted in to the corporate information repositories (in whatever tool these are)? Do you simply allow collaboration sites to exist for a period of time and then delete them (and all their content)? – could be appropriate but are you losing the value of the content?
SharePoint can be used as an information management repository for the corporation and then this can be supported by using it as a collaboration environment as well (which is what we have done). However, this needs to be properly structured so that the “best” content can more easily be identified and found by search tools (be they out of the box SharePoint search or other search tools). It also needs some careful consideration of metadata management (column management, something SharePoint is currently very weak in).
By building (or buying) additional tools you can maintain consistent metadata across thousands of sites enabling very effective metadata search capabilities across millions of documents. You then have an information management repository solution that can be fairly simple for the users to use.
However, the tool needs to be supported by the right business processes to encourage folk to store and share their content (as well as to look to reuse content where it is already available). This may also mean looking at reward cultures and thinking about these (do you reward subject matter experts? if so, are you encouraging them to hoard their knowledge and not share it?) If people are not sharing, think about why not? Look for ways to encourage them. These may even be short term to get them in to the habit of sharing. Make sure the senior managers are exhibiting the right behaviours. All of the obvious KM type factors.
SharePoint can be a very effective tool, but it does need to be thought through.”
Nuff said. Thanks Mike for permission to quote here.
Sep 29
Ambiguity, Trust and Common Ground
There are some ideas that one just keeps circling back on. Once of those for me is the notion of common ground as a shared understanding among members of a team. Crandall, Klein and Hoffman describe the process of maintaining common ground as:
”...the continuous maintenance and repair of calibrated understanding among members of a team. It is necessary for coordination; otherwise, the team members can misinterpret intentions and messages.” (p.140)Some months back I had a long conversation with Gary Klein about this topic in the context of team knowledge – the ability of a team to work effectively together. What struck me then was the importance of gaining a strong mutual familiarity among the members of the team, since this allows team members to form reasonably accurate expectations about how their fellows will react in different circumstances, even when they are not co-located, and in the absence of explicit communications about what they are doing.
Following on from that was Gary’s suggestion that common ground is always in the process of being broken down as individual team member circumstances and understandings change, and as they meet the limits of their mutual familiarity. This is why maintenance of common ground – essentially regular re-calibration of mutual understandings – is a critical team process. It can be as simple as regular meetings, habits of keeping each other informed, habits of checking one’s understanding and not making too many assumptions, or it can be as complex as having formal verification and validation mechanisms. This is important in the military, where the breakdown of common ground can lead to fatal friendly fire incidents.
Recently however I have been in a team situation where familiarity was not the issue but trust was, and it had some interesting effects on common ground – specifically, absence of trust accelerated the breakdown of common ground astronomically. In a nutshell, two of us in the team simply didn’t trust each other, though we are very familiar with each other. It started when one party stopped engaging in the small common ground maintenance activities. What happened then, I realised, was that whenever ambiguity arose about what the other party was doing, where in a trusted relationship we form our expectations based on assumptions of best efforts, in this case we were both imagining – and worse, communicating – our imagined worst suspicions.
Small ambiguities, and small lapses in common ground maintenance (like keeping each other informed of small steps) quickly got inflamed into conflicts, which further inhibited both of our motivations to engage in the common ground maintenance activities. In the end, it simply got to a point where one of us had to be very explicit about how and when actions and communications were to be conducted – less of a team effort and more of a reporting relationship.
It wasn’t pretty, and it was very uncomfortable (I am sure for all the team members including the reluctant observers to the fireworks show) for a few weeks, and I am not sure that the relationship is repairable, but at least we are functioning again. But it struck me how much for granted we take those small common ground maintenance activities, and how fragile we are as teams when trust is not there to carry us through the lapses and ambiguities. At one point in the conversation I mentioned earlier, Gary Klein remarked that he was sometimes surprised at how resilient teams are, given the ease with which common ground can be threatened. My uncomfortable adventure leads me to suspect that trust takes us a long way towards that resilience.
Sep 19
Wikilogical Warfare
A hilarious post from Seth Gottlieb on how to drive your colleagues to distraction with multiple uncontrolled edits of drafts in Word, and then off-handedly let them know it would have been much easier using a wiki. The serious point is “If you can’t eliminate the learning curve of a wiki, you can expose the inefficiency of collaborating without one.” Thanks again James!
Or you could just try this. (Original here, thanks to Mick for this lead).
Sep 18
Enterprise 2.0 is not Web 2.0
From Thomas Vander Wal the clearest statement yet of why Enterprise 2.0 is substantively different from Web 2.0. Some gems include:
- Web 2.0 is like building a tunnel through land – it can have defects and still work; Enterprise 2.0 is like a tunnel under water, failure tolerance levels are very low
- Adoption rates for Web 2.0 are low (5% of the internet population in the USA) and this will make executives nervous if translated to the enterprise
- “Build it and they will come” works on the web better than in the enterprise – Enterprise 2.0 needs change management effort
- “Web 2.0 does not work well in enterprise, but the approaches and understandings of Web 2.0 modified for enterprise work really well.”
Thanks James.
Sep 17
Stories, Spin and the Loss of Intellect
I was watching this advertisement for Adidas in the cinema the other day and reflected on how pervasive storytelling has become. Here’s an ad that says practically nothing about the product but is clearly aimed at re-personalising a brand. To do it, Adidas corporate needed to have recognised the power of narrative.
And then I thought a number of things (not sure they were what Adidas wanted me to think):
1. Storytelling is becoming more pervasively recognised in corporate culture, as a spectrum of folks from the pragmatic Anecdote guys all the way to Dr “Cure-All” Denning keep reminding us.
2. This is probably because the world is more complex and we (the audiences in the markets or the audiences in the companies) crave simpler frames for looking at this complexity – stories are extremely powerful ways of making complexity comprehensible while maintaining its richness
3. Over-enthusiasm for story can have bad effects – when it is allied with a distaste for thinking things through analytically and critically, story becomes less of a sensemaking device and more of a spin-device. Two weeks ago I visited the House of Terror in Budapest, the former secret police headquarters where thousands of Hungarians were tortured and killed by both Nazis and Soviet-advised Communists. The building is full of the stories of survivors reflected from every wall on video screens (it was one of the most depressing afternoons of my life). But behind all of those stories and of the half-century of social apparatus they reflected were the bigger spin stories of Fascism and Communism, stories that subverted reason, diversity and even the right to think.
4. We may not have such a proliferation of vicious, simplistic regimes to deal with now (though they are still around, and they are still capable of flourishing again), but we have the same intellectual laziness in our societies and our organisations, the same willingness to relax and switch off our minds for a good tale. In a newscast from the Republican convention the other week, I saw one delegate rave about Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin: “She spoke to us in simple words we could understand” in an obvious jab at the “intellectual” Barack Obama. Clarity of communication is wonderful, but wanting to be spoonfed easy messages that fit a cartoon-character story is dangerous.
And then the movie started.
Sep 16
Eliciting Stories by Telling Stories
A nice tip from Shawn at Anecdote about how to elicit stories when the “tell us a story about…” question doesn’t work:
“When I see my teenage daughter after school I would often ask how her day went, whether anything interesting happened at school, and the standard response is often monosyllabic: yep, nup. In fact the more questions I’d ask the shorter the answers. So I changed tack and rather than ask questions I simply recounted something that happened in my day. I would launch into something like, “I met a bearded lady today. This morning I drove down to Fitzroy to run an anecdote circle for …” and immediately my daughter would respond with an encounter from her day. A conversation starts and it’s delightful.”
Of course if you’re doing an anecdote circle to discover something about how a group thinks, you’ll have to be careful about not priming the group to tell the stories you want to hear. But I like this idea of using narrative to stimulate narrative.
