Dave Snowden, the well-known if not iconic figure known to most everyone who attends KMWorld, finished off this year’s KMWorld conference with a three-hour session which introduced (or further familiarized) attendees with the Cynefin model and Cognitive Edge methodologies for addressing complexity.

Dave instructed participants to sit at round tables, in groups of approximately 6 people, evening things out.  He noted that there were several CE practitioners in the room as well, and asked us (I am one of them) to ensure that we were evenly distributed around the room so that we could help if and when any table ran into the need for additional clarification, etc. (though in my case, it’s just as likely that I would add more confusion than clarity to the group’s understanding of the issue or the methods).

Dave then asked each group to come up with:

• the three key learnings that they have taken away from this year’s KMWorld conference, and
• three key challenges to organizations that stem from those learnings
• a proposal for addressing those challenges that they would present to a fictitious senior management team

(I may not have those key tasks articulated quite correctly, as I am writing this post a day and a half after the session and I am relying on my memory).

After completing that first task, Dave asked a representative from each group to move to the next table and present the proposal to the fictitious management team sitting at that table, and then apply the Cognitive Edge method known as Ritual Dissent (the person presenting the idea sits with their back to the table whilst the group attacks the idea as savagely as possible, tearing it down from as many angles as possible).

The rest of the session was essentially several more rounds of this exercise, with brief theory bursts about corporate anthropology (ably supported by Beth Meriam, who has helped Dave on the Children of the World project) and use of the Cognitive Edge method interspersed between these rounds of the exercise.

The session was effective at demonstrating in a brief manner the key tenets of the Cynefin model and some of the core concepts of the Cognitive Edge methodology.

A good time was had by all.

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KM World Sessions: Is Semantic Technology Real?

KM World Sessions: Evolve From a Tactical E-Discovery Approach to Search and E-Discovery

KM World Sessions: The Role of Social Techniques in Search & How It Impacts Your Organization

KM World Sessions: From Birth to Billions: The Life Story of Google Enterprise Search

KM World Sessions: Fundamentals of Enterprise Search

KM World Sessions: Enterprise Search Technologies

KM World Sessions: Resetting the Enterprise With 2.0 Collaborative Tools

Here’s a recent Harvard Business Publishing blog post on its “How We Work” blog (Peter Bregsman) that’s attracted quite a few comments.  It obviously struck a nerve.

The premise of the post underlines and reinforces one of the key points that KMWorld speaker and teacher emeritus Dave Snowden keeps ramming home for everybody.  Real and honest stories (narratives) can make a big difference in how people see their work, the place they work, why they work, how to work, and so on.

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A Good Way to Change a Corporate Culture

“I’d like to talk to you about a big project,” the woman told me on the phone. “We need to change our culture.”

She was a senior leader in a professional services firm, where people really are their most important asset. Only it turns out the people weren’t so happy. Theirs was a very successful firm with high revenues, great clients, and hard working employees. But employee satisfaction was abysmally low and turnover rates were staggeringly high. Employees were performing, they just weren’t staying.

This firm had developed a reputation for being a terrible place to work. When I met with the head of the firm, he illustrated the problem with a personal example. Just recently, he told me, a client meeting had been scheduled on the day one of his employees was getting married. “I told her she needed to be there. That the meeting was early enough and she could still get to her wedding on time.”

He paused and then continued, “I’m not proud of that story, but it’s how we’ve always operated the firm.” Then he looked at me, “So, Peter, how do you change the culture of a company?”

Such a simple question. I wanted to give him a simple answer.

But a culture is a complex system with a multitude of interrelated processes and mechanisms that keep it humming along.

Performance reviews and training programs define the firm’s expectations. Financial reward systems reinforce them. Memos and communications highlight what’s important. And senior leadership actions — promotions for people who toe the line and a dead end career for those who don’t — emphasize the firm’s priorities.

In most organizations these elements develop unconsciously and organically to create a system that, while not always ideal, works. To change the culture is awkward, self-conscious, and complex. It’s better to avoid it if possible.

“Why do you want to change the culture?” I asked him. “The firm seems successful. Highly profitable. The culture seems to be working to support those goals. Why not keep it?”

He had to think for a few moments. “It’s not sustainable. Eventually we’ll lose our best people. No one will want to work here.” And then he paused. “I won’t want to work here.”

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To find out how narrative and stories can make a difference, read the rest of this interesting and inspiring blog post here …

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Create learning organizations con necting internal and external; there are  new listening platforms to identify experts – Yammer (internal twitter-like tool, and Yammer CEO, David Sacks, speaking in KMW session A302 on Thurs) and also know the influence of these key people

Create new worksflows, hierarchies moving into more flexibile structures; social technologies disrupting traditional organizations

New announcement from SalesForce: integrating social updates into the enterprise

Openness requires accountability, social media & disclosure policies, e.g. Red Cross handbook

Fail fast, fail smart: identify top 5-10 worst case scenarios; develop migration & contingency plans; encourage risk taking and forgive failures

Social networks like air, everywhere

Social integrated into all aspects of search, information and orgs

Be ready to give up control

;-)

If attendees at KMWorld 09 need any further convincing that working in interconnected environments where people operate in social networks is an important issue, here’s some brand new research out today from the Society for New Communications Research suggesting that C-level execs are increasingly taking this new set of conditions seriously!

Via ZDNet ..

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Wow! Top execs say they are influenced by social networks

This is a new research study from the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR) is very important because it shows that company executives are influenced by their online networks.

And the trend is growing. The influence on business decisions by online communities is at its highest in three years.

The research was conducted by Don Bulmer from SAP and Vanessa DiMauro.

Here are some key findings from this survey of 365 business professionals:

- Professional decision-making is becoming more social – enter the era of Social Media Peer Groups (SMPG)

- Professional networks are emerging as decision-support tools

- Professionals trust online information almost as much as information gotten from in-person

- Reliance on web-based professional networks and online communities has increased significantly over the past 3 years

- Social Media use patterns are not pre-determined by age or organizational affiliation

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These are all very interesting findings. Especially the high level of trust that decision makers have in regards to their online communities. It’s good to have some real data to match the anecdotal stories and observations.

There is more survey data here on Don Bulmer’s blog: Everyday Influence: SNCR Research Reveals Social Media’s Impact on Business and Decision Making

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KM World Sessions: Fundamentals of Enterprise Search

KM World Sessions: Enterprise Search Technologies

KM World Sessions: Resetting the Enterprise With 2.0 Collaborative Tools

Toby Ward

Bill Ives

Rebecca Jones

FastForward Blog

Thanks all for sharing!

In this morning’s keynote address, Andrew McAfee mentioned the book The Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowiecki.  Some of you may remember that Surowiecki delivered the keynote presentation at KMWorld 2007 (a conference about knowledge management and improving the effectiveness of knowledge work).

Yes, everyone gets the concept stated by the title.  Regardless of whether they agree with Surowiecki or not, there’s a fundamental attraction, and empirical evidence, to the concept.  A crowd, faced with a question or a problem, or an idea, is made up of a wide range of different diverse people with as many perspectives as there are people.  Yet there often seems to be a wisdom, a coalescing of sense, that can be deduced or extracted, or “consensed” from the crowd using a range of known processes.  In a given process, the crowd takes on a consciousness, and adopts a perspective or a position on an issue, which represents its ‘wisdom”.

The workforce in any given organization is a crowd of sorts (a crowd that is likely to be more homogenous than a general crowd, to be sure, and the constraint of some homogeneity plays into the rest of my thinking, as I hope will be evident).  Organizations have cultures, and can even be said to have personalities that flow from or are representative of that culture, as individuals in the organization act outwards towards customer, suppliers, vendors and other external stakeholders.

Indeed, many organizations go to significant lengths to ensure that their workforces are aligned, on the same page, hold a shared vision, speak as one .. you get the picture (or the vision, so to speak  .

And the inspiration, the catalyst, the creator enabling the construction of that shared vision, the alignment, the culture in which the vision takes shape and is made manifest, is the job of the leader or (more common today) the leadership team.

But .. and here is where it gets interesting for me .. there is a significant tension in this process between structurally-induced learned behaviours and the sense people have of engaging and channeling the energy of a culture.

For quite a few years now there have been sustained and often clarion-like calls for the development of learning organizations, and for changes to fundamental assumptions and models of leadership and effective management.  And, there have been  hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars spent on culture change initiatives, coaching, and the increased effectiveness of internal communications.  You know it, I know it and employees all over North America and western Europe know it.

There have been scads of organizational development and organization change books trumpeting the need for change, and asserting that one way or another the change is accomplished under a great leader or a magnificent leadership team.  There are competency models galore, climate and culture surveys, and a wide range of other assessment, diagnostic and developmental tools and processes aimed at “harnessing the employees’ and the organization’s potential”.

The structure of most organizations of any size is still clearly hierarchical, and it is the rare “authentic” or natural leader that possesses, finds or grows in him or herself the wisdom to bring humility, purpose, values, clarity and inclusive decision-making to the challenging role of creating  and leading a responsive, adaptable and effective organization.  Jim Collins codified these rare qualities in a concept and articles about “Level Five Leadership“, which was a featured central article in the Harvard Business Review’s Breakthrough Leadership issue.

When going back into that literature or that field, the fundamentals I have always returned to  are the key points of humility and listening.

And I think that there’s the rub, and the lesson on offer with the possibilities of acknowledging and working to access the wisdom “collective intelligence” of the organizational crowd.

Most leaders, executives and senior managers are still of an age where they have been steeped in industrial-era management science assumptions, and they have reached the levels of senior decision-making and leadership with the help of the models of leadership and management effectiveness that preceded this digital and hyperlinked environment that includes the Internet and wide, deep and rapid access to information and other people.

They are to inspire culture, shape and direct the organization’s personality (expressed through its service and execution) and use power, access knowledge and acumen wisely.  But most still (and it may only be semi-consciously) know best how to operate top-down, even if their personal leadership or management style is not coercive or directive (note:  leadership & management styles and the related competency models come today mainly from David McLelland’s seminal work at Harvard in the ’60’s on Power (P), Achievement (Ach) and Affiliation (Aff), said to be the three motivational drivers common to all people in a workplace setting).

By and large, the people in today’s organizational structures charged with the accountability for leading to results, still like and know how to use the power of hierarchy.  Let’s please remember that regardless of the relatively rapid changes in the fields of leadership development (viz. Level Five Leadership and Breakthrough Leadership, noted above .. or evenBuckingham’s “First, Break All The Rules”), not so very much has changed.

Notwithstanding Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence work and more recently, more from him on Social Intelligence ( derived from the basic constructs developed by David Mclelland, noted above), there remains in my opinion fundamental dissonance between these critical human attributes, the actual dynamics that demonstrate their use, and the social architecture in which they are used (the organization’s structure).   The concepts and the words in the latest and greatest competency models may have changed, the coaches and professional leadership developers will have trotted them out, and you can’t get onto an airplane and look at the magazines without some article about the “new leadership”, but the banal reality is that most compensation philosophies and methods and performance management scheme objectives have not.  Yes, these leaders and managers will have performance objective related to the new competency models, and yes, there will be invoices from consultants to show that the leaders and senior managers have been trained during the last twelve months, but … the basic dominant organizational structure of today still mitigates against the use of these relatively new concepts.

Enter social software .. blogs, wikis and various widgets (like IM interfaces that help people connect, converse, swap ways of doing things and feedback from colleagues and customers … giant, wide always-coursing feedback loops that will not be stopped.

What of the wisdom collective intelligence of the interconnected of the organizational crowd ?

Well, in spite of more than a decade of much work by many organizations that have involved themselves in much more inclusive, organizational democracy-oriented initiatives, it only takes a little bit of perceived ambiguity, loss of perceived control, shifts in markets or constituents … and control-oriented hierarchy usually reasserts itself very quickly.

Don’t believe me ?  Read The Economist’s The New Organization, published 24 months ago (damn, it’s now behind a pay wall.  I must have linked to it one too many times 

We’ve probably all worked in jobs in sizeable hierarchical organizations.  We know that many, if not most, people who work want to do a good job and also know a lot about what’s really going on – in the company, in its industry, in its markets, in the world out there and in the world they inhabit daily.

We also know that there is indeed something … something tangible, observable, useful and able to be developed and put to use … to the notion of the wisdom collective intelligence contained in and offered up by crowds when faced with an issue.

I and many others have maintained for a long time now that the adroit, open and sincere use of social software in an organization, and the listening and the tapping into wisdom … the wisdom of a given organization’s crowd … will help leaders and managers develop and grow as quickly, or more so, into leaders who do not rely on charisma or positional power or coercion or dishonest political manipulation, but rather face and embrace the crowd they are part of with humility.

The job of a leader in today’s hyperlinked and transparent organizational world is to instantiate the crowd’s wisdom with a clearly-stated and purposeful mission and objective, and then listen. This is where social software can shine … in my opinion it can replace or augment even the most sophisticated culture or internal communications surveys and diagnostics.  It can help leaders and managers learn to really listen, and to respond in intelligent and mature ways to the conversations that will carry the wisdom collective intelligence of the organizational crowd. It can help them engage with that wisdom intelligence through leading and managing by blogging around (blogging around being the virtual electronic equivalent of “walking around” from the famous MBWA meme).

These days (and certainly “tomorrow”) it’s less and less about charisma, command and control, and more and more about conversations and championing, catalyzing and coordinating the wisdom collective intelligence of any given organizational crowd (and increasingly that crowd includes the customers, the suppliers, the vendors .. the whole shebang).

Collect content; connect people

Try things out; improve & iterate

Lead by example; model behaviors

Set goals; recognize and reward

Tell stories; get others to tell theirs

Enable innovation; support integration

Include openly; span boundaries

Prime the pump; ask & answer questions

Network; pay it forward & share relentlessly

Let go of control; encourage & monitor

Just say yes; be responsive

Meet less, deliver more

Thirteen is the magic number — this is the 13th KMWorld conference; Stan provided 13 insights as well as 13 reasons people don’t share knowledge, 13 recommended blogs, recommended sites, communities, conferences, and more.  Thanks Stan for great content.

Here’s a post I wrote a few months ago about why, in a networked age,  it’s generally a good idea

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Years ago, when I was doing work in the field of AI, I came across one of those binary splits that continues to be useful for my thinking; the split between “neats” and “scruffies.” In the field of AI, the split differentiated between those favoring highly structured, logically precise approaches and those preferred something more along the lines of “whatever works.” Wikipedia offers a nice summary of the debate from that field.

Back in my school days, I think I was a neat (philosophically, not in terms of my room or study skills). When I first delve into new areas I am drawn to those who argue the neat case. As I get older and, I hope, more experienced, however, I find myself increasingly scruffy.

Much of the recent debate in the narrow field of knowledge management can be interpreted as one more recapitulation of the neats vs. scruffies argument. The technologies of blogs, wikis, and social media that collectively comprise the emerging notion of Enterprise 2.0 celebrate scruffiness as the essence of success in knowledge-intensive enterprises. The claim, backed by appropriately messy and sketchy anecdotal evidence, is that a loose set of simple technologies made available to the knowledge workers of an organization can provide an environment in which the organization and its knowledge workers can make more effective use of their collective and individual knowledge capital. Grass roots efforts will yield value where large-scale, centralized, knowledge management initiatives have failed.

Several implications flow from adopting a scruffy point of view. For one, “management” becomes a suspect term. If you can manage at all, you must do so at another level of abstraction. You aren’t managing knowledge; instead you are trying to manage the conditions under which knowledge work takes place and within which valuable knowledge might be created or put to use. At that point, it becomes more productive to think in terms of leadership rather than management; particularly if you subscribe to Colin Powell’s characterization of a leader as someone you’ll follow to discover where they’re going.

Second, you will need to deal with the problems that the neats have created in previous runs at knowledge management without alienating them at the same time. In most large organizations, knowledge management has been characterized as a technology problem or as a analog to financial management; placing it squarely within the purview of the organization’s neatest neats. This is a recipe for disappointment, if not outright failure.

It might possibly be an open question whether knowledge management can be eventually reduced to something as structured as accounting or library science. But it is a lousy place to start. Most organizations aren’t yet mature or sophisticated enough about knowledge work issues and questions to be obsessing about taxonomies or measurement and reward systems for knowledge work. But those are activities that are neat and specifiable and only superficially relevant. They lead to complex efforts to get to the right answer when we would be better served by simpler efforts to focus on productive questions.

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These days there are incessant debates about the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 platforms, tools and practices.

We’ve been here before … we just did not have the infrastructure or the tools, nor the awareness or skill levels of large numbers of people.

As information technology first began its relentless march into the daily lives of people in the areas of work (mainframes, early integrated systems, desktops computers in the workplace) and general information-seeking (early days of websites and the Web), thinkers and organizational development conultants began paying attention to the intersection of technology and sociology.  Many of the grandfathers and grandmothers of the field of organizational development will find the material on socio-technical systems familiar, and perhaps refreshing in the context of networked workplaces.

The material outlined below comes from a comprehensive Wikipedia entry on Socio-technical Systems, and I have edited it for the purposes of this blog post.

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Sociotechnical systems (or STS) in organizational development is an approach to complex organizational work design that recognizes the interaction between people and technology in workplaces. The term also refers to the interaction between society’s complex infrastructures and human behaviour.

In this sense, society itself, and most of its substructures, are complex sociotechnical systems. The term sociotechnical systems was coined in the 1960s by Eric Trist and Fred Emery, who were working as consultants at the Tavistock Institute in London.

Sociotechnical systems theory is theory about the social aspects of people and society and technical aspects of machines and technology. Sociotechnical refers to the interrelatedness of social and technical aspects of an organisation. Sociotechnical theory therefore is about joint optimization, with a shared emphasis on achievement of both excellence in technical performance and quality in people’s work lives.

Sociotechnical theory, as distinct from sociotechnical systems, proposes a number of different ways of achieving joint optimisation. They are usually based on designing different kinds of organisation, ones in which the relationships between socio and technical elements lead to the emergence of productivity and wellbeing.

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It’s too intensive an experience to go into the deep details of STS here, but let me draw out a few of the core elements of socio-technical systems theory and principles.  It should be self-evident that they are central to the examination and adoption of collaborative social computing in todays modern organizations

Sociotechnical refers to the interrelatedness of social and technical aspects of an organization. Sociotechnical theory is founded on two main principles:
- One is that the interaction of social and technical factors creates the conditions for successful (or unsuccessful) organizational performance. This interaction is comprised partly of linear ‘cause and effect’ relationships (the relationships that are normally ‘designed’) and partly from ‘non-linear’, complex, even unpredictable relationships (the good or bad relationships that are often unexpected).
- The corollary of this, and the second of the two main principles, is that optimisation of each aspect alone (socio or technical) tends to increase not only the quantity of unpredictable, ‘un-designed’ relationships, but those relationships that are injurious to the system’s performance.
Therefore sociotechnical theory is about joint optimisation.

Principles of Socio-technical Systems Theory

Some of the central principles of sociotechnical theory were elaborated in a seminal paper by Eric Trist and Ken Bamforth in 1951.

[ Snip ... ]

The key to responsible autonomy seems to be to design an organization possessing the characteristics of small groups whilst preventing the ‘silo-thinking’ and ‘stovepipe’ neologisms of contemporary management theory. In order to preserve “…intact the loyalties on which the small group [depend]…the system as a whole [needs to contain] its bad in a way that [does] not destroy its good”.

In practice this requires groups to be responsible for their own internal regulation and supervision, with the primary task of relating the group to the wider system falling explicitly to a group leader. This principle, therefore, describes a strategy for removing more traditional command hierarchies.

Adaptability

“…the organisation tries to deal with the external complexity by ‘reducing’ the internal control and coordination needs. …This option might be called the strategy of ‘simple organisations and complex jobs’”.
Many type of organisations are clearly motivated by the appealing ‘industrial age’, rational principles of ‘factory production’, a particular approach to dealing with complexity: “In the factory a comparatively high degree of control can be exercised over the complex and moving ‘figure’ of a production sequence, since it is possible to maintain the ‘ground’ in a comparatively passive and constant state”.

In Classic organisations problems with the moving ‘figure’ and moving ‘ground’ often become magnified through a much larger social space, one in which there is a far greater extent of hierarchical task interdependence. For this reason, the semi-autonomous group, and its ability to make a much more fine grained response to the ‘ground’ situation, can be regarded as ‘agile’.

Added to which, local problems that do arise need not propagate throughout the entire system (to affect the workload and quality of work of many others) because a complex organization doing simple tasks has been replaced by a simpler organization doing more complex tasks. The agility and internal regulation of the group allows problems to be solved locally without propagation through a larger social space, thus increasing tempo.
Whole tasks

Another concept in sociotechnical theory is the ‘whole task’. A whole task “has the advantage of placing responsibility for the task squarely on the shoulders of a single, small, face-to-face group which experiences the entire cycle of operations within the compass of its membership.”  The sociotechnical embodiment of this principle is the notion of minimal critical specification. This principle states that, “While it may be necessary to be quite precise about what has to be done, it is rarely necessary to be precise about how it is done”
The key factor in minimally critically specifying tasks is the responsible autonomy of the group to decide, based on local conditions, how best to undertake the task in a flexible adaptive manner.

This principle is isomorphic with ideas like Effects Based Operations (EBO). EBO asks the question of what goal is it that we want to achieve, what objective is it that we need to reach rather than what tasks have to be undertaken, when and how. The EBO concept enables the managers to “…manipulate and decompose high level effects. They must then assign lesser effects as objectives for subordinates to achieve. The intention is that subordinates’ actions will cumulatively achieve the overall effects desired”

Meaningfulness of tasks

Effects Based Operations and the notion of a ‘whole task’, combined with adaptability and responsible autonomy, have additional advantages for those at work in the organization. This is because “for each participant the task has total significance and dynamic closure” as well as the requirement to deploy a multiplicity of skills and to have the responsible autonomy in order to select when and how to do so.

This is clearly hinting at a relaxation of the myriad control mechanisms found in the more classically designed organizations.

In classic organisations the ‘wholeness’ of a task is often diminished by multiple group integration and spatiotemporal disintegration.

The group based form of organization design proposed by sociotechnical theory combined with new technological possibilities (such as the internet) provide a response to this often forgotten issue, one that contributes significantly to joint optimisation.

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I’ve done a significant amount of editing above (by chopping out significant-but-complicated-and-jargon-laden parts of the extract from Wikipedia).  Suffice it for now to say that socio-technical systems theory and principles anticipated the dynamic tension between the (potential) every-which-wayness of hyperlinked human activity while maintaining a fierce focus on the need for concentration ofn setting and achieving meaningful objectives that drive organizational performance.

It seems clear to me that as organizations explore and take action regarding the implementation of Enterprise 2.0 capabilities, knowledge work will need to be designed differently .. away from the linear ’cause-and-effect’ and sequential thinking evident in today’s job descriptions and organizational charts, towards adaptability, autonomy, whole tasks and individuals taking responsibility for the effectiveness of the networks in which they are engaged that address the organization’s objectives.

The socio-technical systems approach involves complex organizational work design that recognizes the interaction between people and technology in workplaces, as a subset or mirror of the interaction between society’s complex infrastructures and human behavior.

The elements of the approach brought to a specific organization are:

Job enrichment – giving the employee a wider and higher level scope of responsibilitiy with increased decision making authority. This is the opposite of job enlargement, which simply would not involve greater authority. Instead, it will only have an increased number of duties.

Job enlargement – increasing the scope and reach of a job’s duties and responsibilities. This argues against over-specialisation and the division of labour whereby work is divided into small units, each of which is performed repetitively by an individual worker.

Job rotation - an approach to employee and management development.  A schedule of varying assignments gives people a breadth of exposure to large parts of or the entire operation.

Motivation – stimulating and enhancing  the initiation, direction, intensity and persistence of positive and constructive behaviors, or more simply increasing the desire and willingness to do something.

Process improvement – actions taken to identify, analyze and improve existing processes within an organization to meet new goals and objectives. ‘Process’ in a networked environment is an emerging area of study, as the linear BPR that has dominated the past two decades will be impacted, sometimes dramatically, by the dynamics of purposeful network activity.

Task analysis – how tasks are accomplished -  information which can  be used for many purposes, such as personnel selection and training, tool or equipment design, procedure design and automation.  Again, the notion of ‘tasks’ will sometimes (often ?) see dramatic impact as networked activity around an objectives increases.

Work design – the application of sociotechnical systems principles and techniques to the humanization of work. The aims of work design to improved job satisfaction, to improved through-put, to improved quality and to reduced employee problems, e.g., grievances, absenteeism.

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Many thinkers and consultants in the Enterprise 2.0 space are recognizing and discussing the need to re-design knowledge work and the small and large structural elements of organizations, due to the growing pervasiveness of today’s information-flow infrastructure.

The principles and elements of socio-technical systems theory, and offshoots like Emery and Trist’s Participative Work Design (on which I have written before), are in my opinion very useful and practical sources for thinking through and implementing some of the changes … in mental models and in practices … that I believe will be necessary to obtain the latent potential available in purposeful social computing aimed at an organization’s objectives for better and more responsive performance.

I’ll be glad to learn what you think.

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I’m pleased to introduce to the KMWorld community a guest blogger, my friend and colleague Harold Jarche.  Harold is a globally-recognized thought leader and practitioner in the field of social learning, which has grown out of the more traditional field of e-Learning (feels funny to call it ‘traditional, but there you have it.

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PKM

We may learn on our own but usually not by ourselves. People learn socially. In looking at how we can make sense of the growing and changing knowledge in our respective professional fields, I see two parallel processes that support each other. One is internally focused, as in “How do I learn this?” and the other is external, as in “Who can help me learn this?”.

We constantly go through a process of looking at bits of information and trying to make sense of them by adding to our existing knowledge or testing out new patterns in our sense-making efforts. The Web has given us more ways to connect with others in our learning but many people only see the information overload aspect of our digital society. Effective learning is the difference between surfing the waves or being drowned by them and PKM (personal knowledge management) can be your customized surfboard.

Here is an internal process based on repeating four activities:

Sort	Categorize	Make Explicit	Retrieve
Observations & Readings	Tag, List, File, Classify	Write	Look-up as/when needed

These can be combined with three external activities:

1. Connect – with others via various platforms and extend my reach
2. Exchange – ideas and observations
3. Contribute – to conversations

Together, these processes look like this:

These internal and external activities are a way of moving from implicit to explicit knowledge by observing, reflecting and then putting tentative thoughts out to our networks.

Looking Inward

One of the important aspects of PKM is triage, or sorting. It’s the ability to separate the important from the useless. Unfortunately, what you may view as useless today could be quite important tomorrow. Developing good triage techniques takes time and practice.

Categorizing: Once we’ve found something of interest or value, we will need to categorize it. The big change with the Web is that we no longer have to put one object in one file folder, as we did with a physical object or even on your computer desktop. Today, everything is miscellaneous. Tags are labels that can be attached to digital knowledge objects and an objects can have many labels. That means that we can have as many categories as we want.

Making Explicit: There are many ways of making knowledge explicit. We can talk about it, write about, engage in debate, create a video or even develop a hypothesis. The act of making it explicit provides the discipline necessary to examine our thought processes.

Going Public: Even more powerful than making our knowledge explicit is to make it public. This can start some interesting conversations about things that matter to us. Going public makes our professional knowledge much more personal. It also encourages peer discussions and reinforces the outward looking aspect of personal knowledge management. Web tools to help us go public include micro-blogging; blogs and podcasts.

Retrieval: The importance of retrieval becomes more obvious with the passing of time. As years of sorting, categorizing and making explicit develop into a large amount of information we can begin to see its value. These are our thoughts and ideas but they are connected to the ideas that sparked them and have been reinforced or questioned by our peers. The great benefit of using digital tools and Web platforms is that we can retrieve our knowledge artifacts (or information that has special meaning to us) anytime and anywhere. That’s quite a powerful professional asset.

Looking Outward

“No man is an island entire of himself, every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main …” – John Donne

Connecting: We need to be reading, watching and listening to find out what is happening in our professional fields. There are flows of conversation around us all the time. For those of us with access to the digital surround we have no excuses not to connect. Finding conflicting viewpoints on a subject is as easy as going to Wikipedia and reading the comments on any controversial subject. The variety and depth of our connections are indicators of how seriously we take our sense-making efforts. Who we know helps to improve what we know.

Exchanging: We exchange and note ideas and information all of the time. In the age of print we lent out or gave away books, magazines and newspapers. We exchanged opinions, sometime without knowing it. An empty restaurant on a Saturday night may have indicated that the locals did not think it was any good.

Conversations help us make meaning. The quality of our conversations is affected by the quality of the company we keep. If we seek out interesting people with different ideas we may learn more and broaden our horizons.

A stock exchange is designed to help capital flow and we need to use knowledge exchanges to allow ideas to flow. For centuries, knowledge exchanges were limited to elites but we now have access to world’s largest and most open exchange ever created.

Contributing. Clay Shirky has brought up the concept of a cognitive surplus that is a result of the leisure time that we gained about fifty years ago. As a society we were in a state of shock and did not have the tools to deal with all of this time, so television filled the void. Shirky says that television collectively takes up about 200 billion hours in the US per year. Wikipedia only needed 10 million hours to get to where it is today as the leading online encyclopedia. We are poised to be able to contribute to more Wikipedia-style efforts but many of use just don’t know how. Our institutions have not prepared us to be ongoing contributors to human knowledge, as we have been led to believe that this is the domain of “experts”.

In a connected world it is getting much easier to contribute, whether it be with words, pictures, music, or actions. Not only that, it may be our social responsibility to be contributors to our common knowledge.

How else will we be recognized as professionals in our fields unless we actively contribute to them?

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What I have found out over several years of using PKM methods and tools is that I have been creating a powerful resource. My annotated bookmarks and my blog are the first places I search when I have an article or report to write. My PKM process has given me a digital library brimming with my own sticky notes that I can easily find.