Jul 02
Narrative Unbound
An interesting piece from the Financial Times a couple of weeks ago about “the author as performer” (thanks Liam). It starts with Malcolm Gladwell “performing” his book Outliers (a great read, wonderfully written, but with a tinge of the “so-what” after-taste), and digresses via the TED talks phenomenon to a discussion of how contemporary artist Mark Leckey has turned to performance lectures as a verbalised, storied form of performance art.
There’s good thinking material in here about the theatricality of storytelling (ie good storytelling goes beyond the telling technique, and can involve the context, situatedness, deliberate placement in space and time).
This is a tad different from the recent Wharton-profiled thoughts on the role of narrative in leadership from movie-maker Peter Guber. He has a couple of interesting thigs to say about narrative eg “Narrative bonds information to an emotional experience” but then he undoes it all with the appalling acronym of narrative-use in management as MAGIC: Motivating your Audience to a Goal Interactively with great Content.
Somebody hand me a gun. If I have to deal with thinking like that, give me a lecture anyday.
Jul 01
Alter Egos
I seem to be shadowed by alter egos the last few days. When your name is not particularly common and you’ve become accustomed to thinking of yourself as unique, that’s a thing of note. On my flight back home from France (lovely holiday, thanks, only touched email once via the iPhone, but my out of office auto-responder drove lots of people mad and left me nearly 4,000 messages!) there was apparently another “Patrick Lambe” on the flight with me (he had 1.2kg less baggage). Now I find that “I” have been posting questions about cross-dressing on one of those yada yada social networking sites Yedda.
Now I don’t know if this is a real Patrick Lambe question or a bait for ego-surfing Patrick Lambes out there (how many can there be?) to discover themselves and Yedda and somehow get persuaded to sign up. If it’s a real one, which one is it? The Fresno lawyer? The Irish teenager? The open source guy? The Chicago lawyer? The New Jersey crime fiction author? The Pennsylvania technology trainer? The long haired Brummie?
And which Patrick Lambe was on the flight with me? And if I actually meet another Patrick Lambe, will we cause a disturbance in the space time continuum and implode into a black hole?
Jun 30
Simple Things
Everybody, it seems, is using Sharepoint. For a product which does enterprise document and content management (including metadata and taxonomy handling) badly in its native state, and collaboration only in a mediocre fashion compared to competitors, it’s not the best deal for knowledge managers to have to grapple with. You really need to have ingenuity and a good understanding of its workings to use it well (and there are some excellent KM implementations of Sharepoint out there, Bonnie Cheuk’s implementation at ERM is just one of them).
But ubiquity combined with shortcomings does at least create a market for improvements, and here’s a report of a new release by Colligo, one of the many companies making a living out of Sharepoint’s native failure to reflect the normal working environment of users.
What I liked about this was the way in which adding small and apparently simple features can make the tool much much easier to use – and more useful than intrusive :
- integrating windows explorer with Sharepoint document libraries, so that you can share files via Sharepoint, weaning users off the jungle of badly managed shared folders
- giving drag and drop ability to reorganise document library folders in Sharepoint (I hope there’s some governance process around this, because free licence to change could turn a structured library into areplica of the shared folder madness we are all trying to escape from)
- adding an upload feature in Outlook so that instead of attaching documents to emails, you just send a link to the document in Sharepoint, limiting multiple version (and space consumption) madness
It’s small and basic things like this that should be got right first, not last. The design of a system has to stay close to the user, not migrate towards them painfully, inch by inch. On a side note, a plea for help from a colleague battling with Sharepoint workflow right now: her legal department has discovered (9 months into the project) that approvals associated with documents in Sharepoint are automatically de-linked after 60 days. This is not a good thing for anyone who cares about approvals, and it makes one wonder what piece of code was dragged and dropped unthinkingly to deliver this workflow process in Sharepoint. But does anyone know a fix? Small things, helpful or maddening. Let’s not forget them.
Jun 17
An Arabian Experience
Earlier this month, Patrick and I travelled to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia to conduct a workshop for the Islamic Development Bank. The gentleman who invited us, Naguib Chowdhury, blogged about his thoughts regarding the workshop here.
Jun 15
Without Internet
I’m off for two weeks internet free in France and nervously looking forward to it. It’s the first time in years I have travelled without a laptop and here at the airport, I’m getting my last shot of internet before setting out into the unwired unknown. No email! Will we all survive it?
Jun 12
Please Take Our Survey on Expertise
We’re at an interesting stage in our open research project on how expertise is valued and leveraged in organisations. We’ve collected something close to 200 stories (which are still feeding into the project blog) and we’ve conducted four sensemaking workshops so far, three in Australia and one just completed yesterday in Dubai (thanks to Luke Naismith and the Knowledge and Human Development Authority), with more planned for Singapore, USA and maybe Hong Kong.
The workshop outputs are being posted into the project wiki. (If you are interested in hosting a workshop somewhere, let us know… we don’t charge as it’s a community research project, we just need to figure out travel and expenses).
We’ve now got to the point where we’re starting to get some insights that we’d like to check out on a larger scale through a survey. It’s short and snappy, and you’ll get to see the responses so far once you’ve completed (or go back and visit as the survey unfolds). Please do visit and take the survey and pass it on to anyone else you think might be interested.
Here’s the link! http://tinyurl.com/expertisesurvey
Jun 05
Business Narrative in Asia
It’s going to be a real privilege to co-facilitate this business narrative masterclass with Shawn Callahan of Anecdote, 8&9 September. It’s part of the Singapore International Storytelling Festival, and we’re hoping it will stimulate strong regional interest in the application of narrative techniques to real business problems – especially for managing change and influencing corporate cultures. If you sign up now, you’ll save $50! If you’re not based in Singapore but have a strong interest in business narrative, take a look at what else is going on at the Festival, or get in touch with me (plambe-at-straitsknowledge.com) or Shawn (shawn-at-anecdote.com.au) about other useful stuff you can do while here. Let’s try to get an Asian business narrative network off the ground here…
Jun 03
Knowledge Discontinuity in a Downturn
Just caught up with this coverage of our “using expertise” project in the Australian Financial Review from early May.
More is brewing on this project, with a recent sensemaking workshop in Sydney, another coming up in Dubai, and a large scale survey to check some of the insights arising from the narrative work. Stay tuned!
May 22
Getting Started on Your Intranet
I am increasingly of the opinion that no knowledge management effort can avoid the intranet. It is a vital and central instrument of any large scale knowledge management effort, and the ability to work with and through the corporate intranet is also a test of whether knowledge management can really integrate with the work of an organization, rather than being seen as an ancillary – sometimes distracting – exercise. (This means, by the way, that if KM is just a section of your intranet, you have a long way to go). The intranet is not the only instrument of KM, but it is a critical one. And so when I saw the announcement of James Robertson’s new book, What Every Intranet Team Should Know, my attention lit up.
This is a long overdue book from James Robertson. For several years, he has been publishing in the form of short articles his luminously clear (and, one suspects, hard won) insights into the complex work behind making intranets functional and useful. He has also been publishing commercially longer reports and developing a range of methodologies, which lie behind the success of his company’s consulting services.
What’s been missing is the big picture, the integrated view, a simple approach to a complex job, presented in one easily comprehended sweep. This book, in just over a hundred beautifully clear pages, provides just that. James Robertson writes like the intranets he advocates: the book is direct, clean, attractive, simple – and above all, useful.
May 15
Resources for Knowledge Continuity
Five nuggets from various sources to help you in your knowledge continuity efforts (ie making sure your organisation keeps critical knowledge in flow while people come and people go).
This piece by William Rothwell is five years old but nicely captures twelve key strategies for knowledge continuity presented in a clear and practical way (thanks Yvonne). Rothwell is the author of the book Effective Succession Planning, which is also worth checking out for its knowledge-based approach.
Courtesy of the National Health Service’s KM resources library (have you taken the survey that might keep it alive yet?) this is a knowledge capture exit interview questionaire from the the UK’s Police IT Organisation. It’s got some great questions, such as “Who needs to know what you know (apart from your successor)?” “What do you wish you had known when you started the job?”.
Here is a knowledge capture form from a pioneering mega-project in a government agency – they will probably not do this type of project again in the span of duty of the current team, but other government agencies might, so they want to try to pin down the subtler experience/expertise elements that would not normally be captured in project documents or formal lessons learned. They have taken some of Gary Klein’s cognitive task analysis interview techniques and created a really nice and simple capture format. Thanks Doreen!
Over at the Cognitive Edge guest blog, Terry Miller blogged the other day on the “between the gaps” knowledge that people hold (this links to the notion of invisible work referenced by Gordon Rae in my Black Knowledge Economy post a while back).
Here’s what Terry says:
“Structured ordered planning processes, especially within systems under pressure, have a bias to view people as inputs to processes and outputs. Fill in these boxes and report back to me. What’s missing is what is going on in the spaces between those people and processes. What’s not in the binders (I’m being only somewhat facetious here) is a chapter on the importance of hidden knowledge and emotional status of these same players. How about a tab or two devoted to guidelines and templates for gathering stories, mining for metaphors, analysing the social network et al et al. Can you imagine?”
For me, in knowledge continuity this means devising even better ways of asking questions and collecting contextualised evidence of critical knowledge. The resources I’ve included here point in the right direction, but I’m sure there’s a lot more ingenuity to be brought to bear!
Finally, extending the theme of invisible work, Barry Schwartz in this wonderful TED talk, asks whether the key to this invisible work (and maybe also – I’m wondering – to its continuity) lies in a recovery of a sense of virtue (or as he puts it, “practical wisdom” ) .
