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Managing the visibility of knowledge work

by Jim McGee

June 23, 2010 at 3:10 pm · Filed under Adoption, Enterprise 2.0

Debates over whether the Internet is making us smart or stupid are entertaining in the bar and can serve as a pleasant background noise for ruminating during a keynote address in a dimly lit hotel ballroom. When I get back to work on Monday (or more likely on Sunday night) I return to the reality of working in a fundamentally digital environment. My files are digital, my tools are digital, and most of my interactions are digital.

As a knowledge worker, much of what I get paid for happens inside my own head. Before the advent of a more or less ubiquitous digital environment, however, that head work used to generate a variety of markers and visible manifestations. That visibility was important in several ways that weren’t evident until they disappeared:

Seeing work in progress in front of me made it possible to gauge my progress and make connections between disparate elements of my work.
Different physical representations helped to quickly establish how baked a particular idea was.
Physically shared work spaces supported rich social interactions that enriched the final deliverables and contributed to the learning of multiple individuals connected to the effort.

For all the productivity gains that accrue to the digitization of knowledge work, one unintended consequence has been to make the execution of knowledge work essentially invisible, making it harder to manage and improve such work. The benefits of visibility are now something that we need to seek mindfully instead of getting them for free from the work environment.

Knowledge work is better understood as craft work; its products are valuable because they are creative and original. Delivering identical consulting reports to different clients is grounds for a lawsuit, not an example of good knowledge management practice.

From a craft perspective, examining and understanding what constitutes a quality client report, for example, is an important part of the apprenticeship that transforms a recently minted MBA into a seasoned advisor. The visibility or invisibility of knowledge work products can make this process more or less difficult.

Before PowerPoint, crafted presentations began with a pad of paper and a pencil. You knew by looking at a roughed-out set of slides that it was a draft; erasures, cross outs, and arrows made that more obvious. You then took your draft to the graphics department, where you were yelled at for how little lead time you provided. A commercial artist tackled your incomprehensible draft spending several days hand-lettering text and building your graphs and charts.

From there you started an iterative process, correcting and amending your presentation. Copies were circulated and marked up by your manager and hers. Eventually, the client got to see it and you hoped you’d gotten things right.

Work was visible throughout this old-style process. Moreover, that visibility was a side effect of the work’s physicality. Junior members of the team could see how the process unfolded and the product evolved. You could see how editors and commenters reacted to different parts of the product. Knowledge sharing was a free and valuable side effect of processes that were naturally visible.

With e-mail, word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation tools, maintaining visibility of your knowledge work (at both the individual and workgroup level) requires mindful effort. An office full of papers and books provided clues about the knowledge work process; a laptop offers few such clues. A file directory listing is pretty thin in terms of useful knowledge sharing content. In an analog process, it’s easy to discern the history and flow of work. When an executive takes a set of paper slides and rearranges them on a conference room floor, a hidden and compelling story line may be revealed. You can see, and learn from, this fresh point of experience. That’s lost when the same process occurs at a laptop keyboard at 35,000 feet. The gain in personal productivity occurs at the expense of organizational learning.

In the digital process, who creates and what they contribute risks becoming more an exercise in political posturing and interpretation than simple observation. The abstracts in a document management system reveal little about what work is exemplary, new, or innovative, and obscures emerging patterns.

Invisibility is an accidental and little-recognized characteristic of digital knowledge work. Seeing the problem is the first step to a solution. While better technology tools will play an important role, the next steps are changes in attitude and behavior at the individual and work group level. For example, organizing your own digital files into project-related directories might help, but not if you continue to name files "FinalPresentationNN.doc" where NN is some number between 1 and 15 representing a crude effort at version control. Embed more information in the file name where you know it will be visible even as you e-mail it around the organization. Use more informative subject lines on your email. Those file names and subject lines should provide the best clues possible as to what will be found inside.

Systems developers have learned that time invested in naming standards and conventions pays off. Teams crafting knowledge-work products should make the same investments. Better yet, spend time with good development teams and look for ways to adapt their practices to more general-knowledge work.

New disciplines take time to become habits. Fortunately, they also eventually become "the way we do work here." As the disciplines take root, taking a more aggressive look at technology tools becomes appropriate. Many of the office suite tools offer some form of internal revision tracking or auditing tools. What’s missing is any systematic way to integrate these tools into a disciplined practice. The capabilities are there but they are irrelevant if they aren’t used intelligently. A version control system doesn’t do anything until you incorporate it into the routine practice of creating a new document.

The right starting point is to simply make the flow of work more visible. I suspect that this is one of the underlying attractions of social networking and micro-blogging. They promise to restore some visibility to digital team work that we lost in the first generation of tools.

If visibility is, indeed, important to effective knowledge work what else would you recommend as ways to manage and increase the visibility of the intermediate and end products of knowledge work and the people-to-people interactions that take place in cerating those products?

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Joe McKendrickJune 26th, 2010 at 8:25 pm

Great post, Jim. Agreed that transparency is key to knowledge work, and the right technology needs to be put in place. But I wonder if there’s a certain “invisibility” that’s preferred… for example, a consultant doesn’t necessarily want to show clients how the hot dog is made; what matters most is the deliverable. (Sure, there are draft versions of work reviewed along the way, but clients may not even not want to know all the details around hours of debate and rewrite that went into a particular draft — and it’s understood.

Jacob UkelsonJune 28th, 2010 at 6:02 am

Jim,
You are right, especially since the most knowledge workers use email for flow and people-to-people interactions – ensuring that the flow remains opaque. We can try to get people to work differently – but that is a very difficult, up hill battle. I don’t see social networking or micro-blogging replacing email anytime soon (if anything they just seem to increase email usage).

Another option is to rethink email – extending the email metaphor to make it more appropriate for knowledge work – a kind of “business class email”. Complementary to regular email and similar in look-and-feel, but tuned for managing knowledge processes, not just one off messages. Done correctly it can provide users with the visibility you advocate within a familiar email metaphor. I wrote about this here: http://blog.actionbase.com/human-process-management-and-the-email-filter-failure-problem

Jacob Ukelson – CTO ActionBase

Jim McGeeJune 29th, 2010 at 8:08 am

There’s no question that email remains one of the core contributors to making knowledge work effectively invisible. One potential benefit to thinking in terms of managing visibility is that is can provide an argument for shifting away from email within work groups and project teams. Luis Suarez and his experiment at eliminating email provides an interesting case in point.

Work groups and teams that have successfully adopted tools like project blogs and wikis also appear to experience a significant drop in email traffic as well. It’s certainly a slow process, especially given the most people give little thought to these problems in the pressures of getting things done.

Jacob UkelsonJune 29th, 2010 at 8:33 am

I think the jury is still out on whether social media can actually decrease email usage. Take a look at the Nielsen report (http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/is-social-media-impacting-how-much-we-email/) where they found “It actually appears that social media use makes people consume email more, not less, as we had originally assumed – particularly for the highest social media users”.

But realistically it doesn’t really matter since email is here to stay (at least for the near future) and is the tool of choice for most knowledge workers. So why not take what we know and try to blend email and social media. I think Google Wave is an interesting attempt in that direction.

Jacob Ukelson – CTO ActionBase

Jim McGeeJune 29th, 2010 at 10:22 am

Jacob,

I agree that grand attempts to replace email with something new and better aren’t likely to be very fruitful. Further, I am suspicious of all claims of “silver bullet:” technology solutions. One of the reasons I’ve been thinking about notions like “visibility” is that they are independent of technology and can be pursued at both an individual level and a team level without needing permission and without requiring tool changes. Perhaps if we start focusing on the behaviors that help we will start to see knowledge workers begin to make more effective use of the tools they currently have and more thoughtful about what kinds of improvements to those tools they could take advantage of.

You might want to take a look at a follow up blog post on my personal blog where I try to point to some of the discussions elsewhere that these notions have sparked. You can find it at Observable work – more on knowledge work visibility

RotkapchenJuly 2nd, 2010 at 3:35 pm

Jim: Love this stuff. All fits right in with the concept of ‘flowing work on conversations’ (which would include related artifacts).

Jordan Frank brought this all to my attention today when I was mentioning a focus today on the concept of Apparitions — a different (and yet more prevalent) form of transparency (similar to another comment): businesses operate on unvalidated myths that often turn out not to be true at all, even though they pay people to manage/defend the apparitions. It’s mindboggling.

Making work visible would indeed debunk these productivity draining boondoggles.

Gordon RaeJuly 9th, 2010 at 3:29 am

I’m an ethnographer, and I noticed two things in your post that come across very strongly:
1) You feel very comfortable with paper.
2) You use spatial metaphors to describe time, and how your work develops over time.

I really understand how, for you, you start off with something in your head, and you end up with something in a document, but in between you put bits of it on paper, and you spread the pieces out all over the place, and show some of the pieces to other people. And you have a tacit understanding of your own way of working which lets you intuitively convert spatial arrangements into temporal arrangements: you can look a sprawl of papers and see ‘work in progress’, and you know how far you’ve got and how far you still have to go.

This is one of my favourite parts:
When an executive takes a set of paper slides and rearranges them on a conference room floor, a hidden and compelling story line may be revealed. You can see, and learn from, this fresh point of experience. That’s lost when the same process occurs at a laptop keyboard at 35,000 feet. The gain in personal productivity occurs at the expense of organizational learning.

I can discover a hidden and compelling storyline on a laptop. I fell in love with a product called PC-Outline in 1988, and I’ve worked with outliners ever since. I can look at a directory listing, and see work in progress. But I get that you can’t . For you, paper is really grounded. It’s down there on the floor. And computers are the opposite – they’re way up in the sky, literally above your head, 35,000 feet.

When we talk about the visibility of knowledge work, this is the exactly the kind of thing that needs to be made visible. Not that paper is good and software is bad, but that the act of handling paper triggers all kinds of tacit knowledge inside you that greatly enhances your personal productivity, and you haven’t yet found a way to get those triggers from working with a screen.

Jim McGeeJuly 9th, 2010 at 7:34 am

Gordon,

Fascinating take on aspects I hadn’t fully worked out. I guess ethnography can work through multiple observational lenses.

In point of fact, I do the vast majority of my own work directly on my PC. I, too, am a great fan of outliners and of mindmapping, both of which allow me to “see” my work as it evolves. The particular example I shared above was drawn from a colleague who remains more comfortable with paper. I’ve also used the technique when developing a presentation with a team. I also storyboard presentations on whiteboards to help focus on high level structure and story line questions.

I particularly like your point that different ways of handling your work in progress can trigger different paths forward. Something worth mulling over.