Dec 10
Do Knowledge Managers Belong Together?
The actKM discussion group occasionally ascends into agreeable festive banter, and our 2006 pre-Christmas season is no exception. Andrew Mitchell asked the other day on the actKM Forum what an appropriate collective noun might be for a gathering of knowledge managers. Some of his suggestions were tongue in cheek, but decidedly unflattering: “a wisdom of knowledge managers” was ok, but a “bumble” or an “extinction” of knowledge managers?? Dave Snowdenwas no more positive with a “babble” of knowledge managers as his suggestion, perhaps reflecting the discontinuity of KM discussions. Thoughtful as ever, Luke Naismith waded in with a series of options for each different species of KMers, reflecting again the great diversity of focus and practice in the field:
Technology focus – “a pod of knowledge managers” (citing Arthur Shelley’s Organizational Zoo)
Content focus – “a page of knowledge managers”
People and Social focus – “a collaboration of knowledge managers”
Philosophical focus – “a ponder of knowledge managers”
Narrative focus – “a crow of knowledge managers”
But when all types conjoin, Luke suggests, again, a fractious term: “a disconnect of knowledge managers”.
I think it’s true that we are a very diverse and often fractious profession, talking at cross purposes more of the time than we should. But we also try pretty hard to work together and understand and integrate our different perspectives. So I’m not so sure about that final collective noun: personally, I prefer “clutch” of knowledge managers, to express the wholeness we try to work towards, but also the effort involved in getting there. Thanks Andrew!
Dec 04
Leadership as Theatre
I was intrigued the other day to see a photograph of Pope Benedict in the Blue Mosque, in a typical Muslim prayer stance, alongside leading Muslim clerics. The visit to the Mosque had been a last minute invitation from his guide, and though the Vatican had hotly debated whether the Pope should visit a Mosque during his trip, he readily accepted. Photos of the Pope praying were spashed all over Turkish press and suddenly he was the conciliatory friend to Islam, forgiven for his remarks about Islam and violence some months ago.
It reminded me how important theatre is in leadership. I don’t mean theatre as “pretend” but theatre as simple, dramatic public actions, full of resonance and symbolism. Actions that tell their story very powerfully in a photograph, or a couple of seconds of video footage, or a ten second sound bite. Princess Diana was the mistress of this kind of theatre. Adolf Hitler, who operated pre-TV and made his impact on huge crowds from high podiums, rehearsed huge, dramatic gestures in a mirror, because he knew if they were not huge, they would have no impact when scaled to a crowd of ten thousand people. His dramatic simplifications of the issues facing Germany were horrible but incredibly powerful influencers.
Pope Benedict, is by background, an intellectual, and he seems more comfortable with analysis and exposition than theatre. But the analytical treatment of Islam, taken out of context, got him into serious trouble. Simply standing in a Mosque with Muslim clerics in a prayerful stance for five minutes won him widespread enthusiasm.
There’s clearly a link between storytelling and theatre, but while stories can be both simple and sophisticated, theatre thrives on simplicity and symbolism. In KM, we tend to focus a lot on vocabulary, analysis and complexity. Small wonder we find it hard to gain acceptance, or even sustained attention. Is there a theatre of KM?
Nov 22
Waking Knowledge Management
Dave Snowden wrote a brilliant blog post yesterday on “whence knowledge management?”. He thinks it’s on it’s last legs in its present life, hence the “wake” – but as he says in his post, “waking” something (in the Celtic tradition) is a celebration of life and a moving on. His appreciation of the contributions of KM and its resilience, together with its flaws, the best I’ve seen. I’m not as sure as he is that we’ve quite reached the end of the fad cycle, for example we’re still trying to process the distinctions and crossovers between KM and information management. And the technology focus in conferences is not surprising (the vendors who sponsor the conferences sell mostly software) – but we are still very far from intelligent design and use of technology at an enterprise level for KM – the technology is still very mechanistic for what is essentially a naturalistic discipline. But for a state of the notion address, this is a fantastic summary.
Nov 21
A Taxonomy of Ignorance
This from Dave Pollard, summarising an essay in a recently reprinted book by Wendell Berry:
Varieties of ignorance:
Inherent ignorance —ignorance that stems from the limitations of the human brain
Ignorance of history —due to our unawareness of what we have forgotten, and never learned
Materialist ignorance —willful refusal to recognize what cannot be empirically proved (narrow-mindedness)
Moral ignorance—willful refusal to come to a moral conclusion on the basis it may not be ‘objective’
Polymathic ignorance—the false confidence of knowledge of the past and future
Self-righteous ignorance—ignorance arising from our failure to know ourselves and our weaknesses
Fearful ignorance —stemming from the lack of courage to believe and accept knowledge that is unpopular, unpleasant or tragic
Lazy ignorance—stemming from not being willing to make the effort to understand what is complex
For-profit and for-power ignorance—deliberate obscuring or withholding of knowledge (e.g. advertising, propaganda)
Interesting how so many of these varieties are attitudinal! Thanks Matt for the reference.
I’ve been playing with my own taxonomy of ignorance (for my next book but one) which goes something like this:
Secrecy – can be attitudinal or structural (for structural secrecy see Diane Vaughan’s The Challenger Launch Decision)
Forgetting - can be accidental or deliberate
Inattention – can be attitudinal or structural
Incomprehension – can be naive (insufficient experience) or paradigmatic (incompatible mental models)
Surprise – can result from inattention or incomprehension
Denial – for self protection or comfort
Outsourced - where we rely on other people’s knowledge to perform key tasks and do not seek to gain it for ourselves
Nov 20
Crowd as Author
You might think that social software spells the end for big book publishers. Pearson, one of the biggest, doesn’t think so. Working with Wharton Business School and the MIT Sloan Management School, they’ve just invited the best part of 2 million people to contribute to a “crowd book” on the power of communities in business. It will be written using wiki technology, and Pearson will publish the finished product in a year’s time. All contributors will be acknowledged (which makes you wonder what they’ll do if the author list is longer than the book text) and the normal author’s royalties will be donated to a charity of the community’s choosing. And if you’re a contributor, you get to use the book’s content under a creative commons (attribution) licence. The book is called We are Smarter Than Me - it’s a brave experiment and worth watching. Thanks Liam!
Nov 17
“I Speak-a No KM”
Recently, I had the pleasure of meeting Jerry Ash of AOK. One of the things Jerry said that struck me was his discomfort with terms like “knowledge capture”. Flinging his arms forward and pulling them back, he said “it’s like taking away one’s knowledge – I capture it”. Equally culpable is “knowledge transfer” which seems to imply moving it from one place only to be placed somewhere else. While we know that a person’s knowledge is not removed, whether captured or transferred, these terms still require that accompanying explanation when we use them.
Nov 13
How To Shop for CoPs
Over the past year or two I’ve been encouraged by the quality of knowledge management tenders that I’ve seen broadcast here in Singapore and overseas. It’s seemed to me that there’s been a steady process of maturing in how organizations understand and specify their KM needs. I frequently recall one particularly bad specimen three or four years ago, where an educational organization was asking for a KM system including consulting work around knowledge auditing and establishing communities of practice, but ended with the crucial rider “The consultant shall minimise the involvement of employees time in this process”. How you can legitimately bid for such work with such a lunatic constraint is beyond me – but one major consulting firm did, and I’m told did not do a very good job of it. Surprise, surprise.
Progress notwithstanding, there’s been a bit of a depressing relapse recently. KM teams being told to go ahead with the purchase of multi-million dollar “KM systems” without having a strategy or a real sense of the granular needs that the system is supposed to serve. KM teams painstakingly building a KM strategy and roadmap with their senior executives, and then being hijacked into a rushed technology implementation without the proper groundwork in place – ensuring that their colleagues will forever see KM as intrusive, stupid and inappropriate. Management teams halfway through a technology implementation who are somehow convinced that they need a strategy, so hey, let’s go ahead and buy one…. but why should that have any effect on the technology plans?
At root, the error is the belief that you can “buy” KM just like any commodity off a shelf, in the phrase from my CoP example above: “minimising the involvement of employees” (or managers for that matter). That KM can be plugged in rather than worked in to an organization. So I’m now cooking up a longer article which will be called “How to Buy Knowledge Management” – which I hope will address some of the multi-million dollar stupidities that are presently incubating in uninformed minds.
And I was therefore pleased to see that Anecdote’s Shawn Callahan is conducting a Communities of Practice workshop at the KMAP Conference in Hong Kong next month (15th Dec). The beauty of Anecdote’s work is that it’s both practical and simple. “Involving employees” in KM need not be so terrifying a prospect, and it’s a trillion times more effective than blind multi-million dollar splurges on algorithmic searches and metadata madness (If you are going to splurge on this stuff, make sure you know exactly what you want to do and why!). Back in June, Shawn blogged about three simple ways of building relationships, focus and momentum in support of a sustainable CoP. That, I gather, is the kind of nitty gritty he’ll be sharing in Hong Kong. CoPs are more like puppies than computer games. Make sure you know how to look after them properly before you buy.
Nov 03
Update on Getting Management Buy-in for KM
For those of you who have contributed to the story collection for this project, many thanks. We have now moved into the first part of the sensemaking phase, where we take the collected material through a series of workshops with KM practitioners. The first was conducted with about 30 participants at the actKM Conference in Canberra last week, followed by a workshop with 30 IM and KM practitioners in Perth early this week. Next week we take the same material to over a hundred KM practitioners at the iKMS Practitioner’s Conference KM Singapore, and then finally we do the same thing at the KMAP Conference in Hong Kong! (I’m exhausted just writing about it).
Meanwhile, just to add some spice, Dave Snowden recently blogged on this very theme and came up with nine golden rules for getting leadership buy-in for new ideas:
1. Have a deep understanding of the change
2. Don’t be an evangelist
3. Create new language
4. Find interpreters
5. Walk away if they ask for case studies
6. Don’t sell a utopia
7. Link funding to deliverables
8. Take a sales course
9. Don’t try to be popular.
Some of these might seem counter-intuitive, so read the full post!
Nov 02
Rich Serendipity through Sharing Narrative, Emotion and Music
This week’s Fast Company magazine has an intriguing article on the latest social sharing trend sweeping internet space. It’s a variant on rich serendipity, but it works to bind emotion, narrative and music into one powerful package. The phenomenon is spreading through the capacity on Apple’s iTunes to mix tracks into your own playlist. Originally, just like social tagging, these playlists were put together and stored for the enjoyment of their creators. But you can publish your playlist too back into the store for others to see and buy, together with the personal story that lies behind it: whether it’s a breakup, a romance or a bereavement.
In the post Titanic social soul searching of Edwardian England, you could buy the sheet music for the music the orchestra played as that doomed ship sank into the icy Atlantic. It came with the songsheets so that you too could sing what the passengers sang, those who were stranded without access to lifeboats as the Titanic tipped them to certain death. It was a strange kind of participative mourning peculiar to that time, one that has been overtaken by an avalanche of words in our own text-heavy time.
So I find it interesting that in the midst of our tagging enthusiasms, we are starting to use our own personal life narratives to string music together into expressive vehicles for sharing meaning – where words take second place.
Oct 23
Find Your Centre in Your KM Spin
Recently, there was a question on actKM from a member who wanted to know where to start his journey in the KM “milky way” (those were my words, btw). As usual, and kudos too, many members of the community put forth their best recommendations in terms of literature (print and otherwise), blogs and websites as well as courses that could help (actually many felt courses were not that critical).
