Articles
How and Why Do Organisations Inhibit Insights and Innovation?
Why do organisations seem to impose frictions on insights and ideas in ways that as individuals we find stupid and bureaucratic? Why do organisations fail to exploit the smarts and common sense of their people? In this paper, written for a Masterclass on Insight and Storytelling with Gary Klein and Shawn Callahan, I explore the idea that social collectives have cognitive behaviours that sit above our individual cognitive awareness, and that have strong and often unperceived influences on how we behave and feel.
Read or download the article here (pdf)
Posted by Patrick Lambe on 01/09/11 at 04:26 PM | Categories: Change Management, Culture, Ignorance Management, Innovation, KM Critiqued | Permalink
Money, Testosterone and Knowledge Management
This article chronicles an acrimonious schism in the KM association KM Pro in late 2004, and puts it into the context of other KM association schisms in the USA during the late nineties. I wrote this article originally for the Global Knowledge Review in early 2005. They decided not to publish it after one of the protagonists in the drama claimed there were “serious errors of fact” in the article and hinted at legal action (as you’ll see, lawyers were liberally used as instruments of intimidation during the KM Pro episode). Despite several attempts to find out what those “errors” were, I didn’t get any clear answer, so I shelved the article. However, I keep getting asked to share it, so am now posting it here. Feedback appreciated! The drama, by the way, continues, with the shutting down of three Yahoo Groups KM communities in early 2006 directly attributable to the differences between the warring parties in this fight.
Posted by Patrick on 26/08/06 at 01:10 PM | Categories: Communities, KM Critiqued | Permalink
Why KM Is Hard To Do: Infrastructure, KM and Implementing Change
We recently did a small information management/knowledge management internal initiative at Straits Knowledge. The relative ease with which we did it, compared to the problems faced by several of our clients (much larger organisations) has got me pondering on the way that existing infrastructure impacts an organisation’s current effectiveness, both positively and negatively. In this article I use the case study of our internal initiative to analyse the way that infrastructure in large organisations imposes friction on the rate of change, and propose some project management and change management strategies to deal with that friction.
Posted by Patrick on 15/06/06 at 06:21 PM | Categories: Change Management, Information & Records Management, KM Applied, Taxonomy | Permalink
Conflict, Gender and Identity in Online Communities
In this paper, I look at how conflict within a community can function as a social device for identity-building. In particular, I look at a conflict that took place in late 2003 in the online public sector community of practice, ACT-KM . Shawn Callahan has described the evolution of ACT-KM in general terms. I compare the 2003 conflict discussion with a couple of other systematic online community conflict studies (there are not many). The analysis raises some interesting questions about the role of gender in influencing online behaviours, the role of conflict in community-building, and a community’s ability to self-moderate.
Posted by Patrick on 26/05/06 at 12:29 PM | Categories: Communities | Permalink
Practical Techniques for Complex Knowledge Transfer
Knowledge Management practice is heavily preoccupied by the problems, processes and technologies associated with explicit knowledge transfer. However, much of the most important knowledge to organizations resides in the heads and abilities of people, and is extremely difficult to transfer. This article reports on a research project that was focused on using practical techniques for eliciting and representing a particular form of complex, tacit knowledge described as “knowing as sensing”. It outlines the processes and methods used in the project to build realistic, complex and ambiguous case studies for businessmen who want to acquire greater sensitivity to the China business environment, using the input of experienced China hands. A technique for facilitating the final stage of knowledge transfer, internalisation, is also described.
Posted by edgar on 01/03/06 at 05:27 PM | Categories: Knowledge Representation, Knowledge Transfer | Permalink
KM Competencies: Is Certification The Way To Go?
How does a knowledge manager acquire the appropriate competencies in a professional, structured way? Knowledge management novices often look to certification programmes to give the necessary assurance, and there is no shortage of providers to step up to the mark. But to evaluate the merits of certification programmes, we really need to have a clearer understanding of the competencies we want to build.
Posted by maish on 13/01/06 at 04:48 PM | Categories: KM Competencies | Permalink
Mapping the Culture of an Online Community
These archetypes were derived using complex facilitation techniques developed by the Cynefin Centre for Organizational Complexity (http://www.cynefin.net) in the fringes of the ACT-KM conference, involving many different participants at different times (important as a means of containing individual biases).
Posted by edgar on 10/01/05 at 04:25 PM | Categories: Communities, Culture | Permalink
Knowledge and Tragedy: Or Why We Shouldn’t Share Knowledge
When Julius Caesar walked into the Forum in Rome on that fateful March day in 44 BC, he was hard pressed by petitioners. Caesar was not in Rome often: he had spent much of the previous fourteen years enlarging the dominions of Rome, fighting a bitter civil war against those who thought him too powerful, and flirting with Cleopatra in Egypt. And he was about to head east, to Parthia, to fight another war. A lot of people wanted his attention before he left.
Posted by edgar on 12/07/03 at 05:24 PM | Categories: KM Critiqued, Knowledge Sharing, Knowledge Transfer | Permalink
The Perils of Knowledge-Based Warfare
For fifteen years, the US military has been striving to apply technology and information applications to achieve what it calls agility. The objectives will be familiar to business leaders: scale, reach, speed and flexibility in the face of changing conditions. For thousands of years, the military have been leaders in adopting and advancing knowledge management practices for reasons that become very obvious very quickly…
Posted by edgar on 12/07/03 at 05:14 PM | Categories: KM Critiqued | Permalink
Getting It All Mapped Out: SARS, Terrorism and Knowledge Management
One evening in the second half of August 1906, the well-to-do Warren family, vacationing in Oyster Bay, Long Island, had their favourite dessert: fresh sliced
peaches, served with ice cream. It was a speciality of their cook for the summer, Mary Mallon. Ice cream was still a small luxury, and August had been hot. The temperature in central New York had peaked in the mid-thirties Celsius at the start of the month, and it had been thundery and humid, with frequent storms, followed by a prolonged dry spell. It was much healthier to be out of the city in such weather – typhoid, an endemic disease in the United States at that time, was particularly active in the hot summer months, and it thrived in urban environments.
Posted by edgar on 30/04/03 at 05:32 PM | Categories: Social Network Analysis | Permalink