E2.0 Blogcast: July 31, 2009

July 31, 2009 at 11:30 am · Filed under Collaboration, Culture, KM, Social Media

A brief survey of recent Enterprise 2.0 posts (title links clickable).

…How Knowledge Must Be Applied

Colleague Bill Ives adds his own perspectives from his experience to one of my posts on his personal blog. His experiences seem to reinforce mine.

Social Media Advice for Businesses

While Bill Ives already covered this, it’s worth repeating. Former FFB colleague, Euan Semple, was filmed in a series of short pieces to share his thoughts on Social Media within the enterprise. Euan’s perspectives are always quite sound, based on his own experiences bringing Enterprise 2.0 solutions to bear. The series includes 15 segments (each, just over a minute).

It’s clearly a great reference to point others to.

Enterprise 2.0: We Got it All Wrong — a Cross-Cultural Misunderstanding

The human factor is what powers the enterprise, not the procedures.

The major question mark this piece raises for me is the concept of emergent consensus. What we haven’t figured out yet is how this will work. For E2.0 people are busy — unless you throw them all into a room together, it is not likely that they will collectively give attention to a particular issue. This still needs some study — which issues are that important that they need such a focus (which is expensive), will the relevant facts be available for a decision to be made? [the list goes on]

The Smartest Guy in the Room vs. Teamwork

Based on my experiences in the recent past I’m often left saying, “Trust? What’s that?” Because our financial mechanisms aren’t focused on such things, I’d contend that this is a huge issue that kills productivity and adds to project failure. I’d also contend that if HR wanted to really add value they’d be heavier on ‘behavioral’ consultants to bring into teams.

“Once you have been part of an Agile team it is hard, maybe impossible, to go back to a dysfunctional team. In the Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team the core foundation for TEAMing is TRUST. I assert that this issue is the same in social media, or collaborative communities online, where we must find tools and take risks to establish the trust between ourselves and our potential teammates. When the TRUST is threatened the entire TEAM is threatened.

It’s only through TRUST is the team willing to have CONFLICT. And without the ability to disagree the TEAM cannot work through difficult tasks”

Be sure to check out the diagram — it tells a phenomenal story, as well.

Enterprise 2.0 Adoption Best Practices from Yakabod

While product focused, colleague Bill Ives brings out relevant points:

“Like a number of enterprise 2.0 providers, they realize that many of the issues for a successful adoption of their offering are not technical and they have broadened their offerings to include adoption support.“

Are you listening technology providers? There’s a larger picture here that has to be addressed. I will say that I do not agree with much of what they’re recommending (perhaps that’s a post worth working on). It’s less a matter of disagreeing, but things like “They realize that you need middle management support for the initiative to be successful” is a goal but not a focus — it’s achieved by other means.

Footnotes

This seems to have turned into a bit of a Bill Ives celebration. Purely incidental — or maybe Bill just covers really relevant stuff.

I did not cover @dhinchcliff’s assessment of the E2.0 market — because it’s not about the technology — but it’s a great general reference.

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Knowledge Must Be Applied

July 10, 2009 at 10:49 pm · Filed under Information Management, KM

As conversations continue to go sideways over Knowledge Management vs. E2.0 (with comments bursting forth today on a post from June 2007), I realized that there is a fundamental disconnect in understanding. As one individual kept pressing for a definition of KM from me, I realized that the basis for the definition would fundamentally fail at “Knowledge” — specifically within the context of the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom continuum. So let’s start there.

I was fortunate 2 decades ago to be taught at the feet of Enterprise Architects from Boeing (where every inch of a plane is entirely designed and constructed from data — they deal with a LOT of data). The distinctions I learned about the Data…Wisdom continuum, fundamental to Information Sciences, have been invaluable throughout my career. These distinctions are relevant to the KM disconnects.

Even Tom Davenport declared in 1997, “I reist making this distinction, because it’s clearly imprecise…for years people have referred to data as ‘information’. Data, information, and knowledge aren’t easy to separate in practice; at best you can construct a continuum of the three.”

Davenport even suggested that data and knowledge take their meanings from information. The man responsible for TED, Richard Saul Wurman (RSW), proclaimed himself in the late ’80s to be in the understanding business: “You don’t have to know everything, you just need to know how to find it.” In his book, Information Anxiety (now out of print) RSW proposes that it’s not information until it informs:

Raw data can be, but isn’t necessarily, information, and unless it can be made to inform, it has no inherent value. It must be imbued with form and applied to become meaningful information. Yet, in our information-hungry era, it is often allowed to masquerade as information.

So the great information age is really an explosion of non-information; it is an explosion of data.

Yet, data can be “imbued with form”, have implied meaning, and still fail to inform. The classic example I share:

You’re in the middle of the Mojave desert. You come upon a gas station, but it’s abandoned. Lying on the counter is a map. Most would consider the map information: data in context. But there’s another criteria. It isn’t information until it’s in individually-relevant context — it has to be both important and understandable to you. In the middle of the desert, with no reference to the gas station on the map, there is no context. The map is useless noise.

Once something informs it allows for action. Knowledge, is the context by which action occurs.

Respected colleague, John Tropea, was hot on this trail when he wrote a piece similar to this one. From one source he quotes: “Knowledge is the stuff in people’s heads which enables them to do things.” But his quotes of Frank Miller and T.D. Wilson provide the basis for the KM disconnect:

Frank Miller
…knowledge was only ever tacit. Once we attempt to make knowledge (i.e., what we ‘know’) explicit, it reverts immediately to an ‘information’ state again and requires human intervention anew for sense to be made of it.

Knowledge is, after all, what we know. And what we know cannot be commodified.

Knowledge (ie ‘what we know’) is only ever ‘tacit’ and can never be ‘explicit’. It must never be thought of as a commodity to be captured, processed, stored, transmitted, managed etc.

T.D. Wilson

‘Explicit knowledge’, of course, is simply a synonym for ‘information’.

…’tacit knowledge’ involves the process of comprehension, a process which is, itself, little understood. Consequently, tacit knowledge is an inexpressible process that enables an assessment of phenomena in the course of becoming knowledgeable about the world. In what sense, then, can it be captured? The answer, of course, is that it cannot be ‘captured’ – it can only be demonstrated through our expressible knowledge and through our acts.

John then goes on to conclude:

This nullifies the concept that you can capture knowledge, as it’s not possible to capture meaning, the meaning is derived by the person encountering it, all the capturing we do is simply information management. [emphasis added]

The term Information Technology has been used for years, but most IT activities focus on data, not information. I would contend that based on the earlier definition of information that in most cases what is labeled Knowledge Management is at best Data Management, but given that term has specific meaning that is different, what we’re really dealing with is Content Management — but that would start an argument with a whole ‘nuther set of practitioners.

As I’ve said before, you can’t manage knowledge — anyone who claims that’s what they’re doing is just…mis-informed.

Knowledge is something that is applied — for action — within specific contexts. This is not the realm of what is portrayed as Knowledge Management, but it something that is facilitated by Enterprise 2.0.

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Bridging analytic and managerial cultures, Part 2

April 26, 2009 at 6:15 am · Filed under KM

Suppose you buy the notion that management is fundamentally an oral culture and analytics a literate one (see Part 1). How does that influence how you manage analytics? How can you take full advantage of technology?

In an oral culture, what you can think is limited to what you can remember and tell–without visual aids. Oral thinking is linear, additive, redundant, situational, engaged, and conservative. The invention of writing and the emergence of literate cultures allows a new kind of thinking to develop. Literate thinking is subordinate, analytic, objectively distanced, and abstract. It’s the underlying engine of science and the industrial revolution.

Management understands something that those rooted in literate thinking may not. Knowing the right answer analytically has little or nothing to do with whether you can get the organization to accept that answer. What literate thinkers dismiss as "politics" is the essential work of translating and packaging an idea for acceptance and consumption in an oral culture.

The critical step in translating from a literate answer to an oral plan of action is finding a story to hang the answer on. The analysis only engages the mind; moving analysis to action must engage the whole person. Revealing this truth to the analytical minded can be discomforting. It’s equivalent to explaining to an accountant that the key to a Capital Expenditure proposal is theater, not economics. You might want to check out Steve Denning’s book, "The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations," for some good insights into how to craft effective stories inside organizations.

In addition to helping the analytically biased see the value of creating a compelling story, you need to help them see how and why story works differently than analysis. The best stories to drive change are not complex, literary, novels. They are epic poetry; tapping into archetypes and cliché, acknowledging tradition, grounded in the particular. You need to bring them to an understanding of why repetition and "staying on message" is key to shifting an oral culture’s course, not an evil invention of marketing.

Assume you teach the literate types in your analytic organization how to repackage their analyses for consumption. They’ve now learned how to pitch their ideas in ways that will stick in the organization. What might you learn from their literate approach to thought? Is there an opportunity if you can get more of your organization and more of your management operating with literate modes of thinking?

Being able to write things down done permits you to develop an argument that is more complex and sophisticated. On the plus side, this makes rocket science possible. On the negative side, you get lawyers.

On the other hand, if you are operating in an environment whose complexity demands a corresponding complexity in your organizational responses, then encouraging more literate thinking by more members of the organization is a good strategy.

What would such an organization look like compared to today’s dominant oral design? The mere presence of e-mail and an intranet is insufficient. E-mail tends to mirror oral modes of thought, particularly among more senior executives. Intranets tend to be over-controlled and, to the extent they contain examples of literate thinking, are rooted in an organizational culture that strives to confine the literate mind to the role of well-pigeonholed expert. The presence of particular tools, then, isn’t likely to be a good predictor, although their absence might be.

What of possible case examples? A few knowledge management success stories hold hints. Buckman Labs used discussion groups successfully to get greater leverage out of its staff’s knowledge and expertise. Whether this success built on literate modes of thought or simply on better distribution of oral stories is less clear. The successes of some widely distributed software development teams are worth looking at from this perspective.

Although it’s a bit too early to tell, the take up of blogs and wikis inside organizations may be a harbinger of management based on literate thinking skills. They offer an interesting bridge between the oral and the literate by providing a way to capture conversation in a way that makes it visible and, hence, analyzable. As a class of tools, they begin to move institutional memory out of the purely oral and into the realm of literate.

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Bridging analytic and management cultures, Part 1

April 23, 2009 at 11:31 am · Filed under KM

Have you ever wondered what’s behind the conflict between geeks and suits? Sure, they think differently, but what, exactly, does that mean? A Jesuit priest who passed away in 2003 at the age of 90 may hold one interesting clue.

Walter Ong published a slim volume in 1982 titled "Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word" that explored what the differences between oral and literate cultures mean about how we think.

Remember Homer, the blind epic poet credited with "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey"? If we remember anything, it’s something along the lines of someone who managed to memorize and then flawlessly recite book-length poems for his supper.

The real story, which Ong details, is more interesting and more relevant to our organizational world than you might suspect. Homer sits at the boundary between oral culture and the first literate cultures.

In an oral culture, what you can think is limited to what you can remember and tell–without visual aids. Ong’s work shows that oral thinking is linear, additive, redundant, situational, engaged, and conservative. The invention of writing and the emergence of literate cultures allows a new kind of thinking to develop: literate thinking is subordinate, analytic, objectively distanced, and abstract. It’s the underlying engine of science and the industrial revolution.

While this may sound interesting for a college bull session, it’s particularly relevant to organizations. For all their dependence on the industrial revolution, organizations are human institutions first. Management is fundamentally an oral culture and is most comfortable with thought organized that way. Historically, leadership in organizations went to those most facile with the spoken word.

At the opposite extreme, information technology is a quintessentially literate activity with a literate mode of thought. In fact, IT cannot exist without the objective, rational, analytical thinking that literate culture enables.

How does the nature of this divide complicate conversations between IT and management? Can understanding the differing natures of oral and literate thought help us bridge that divide?

Technology professionals have long struggled with getting a complex message across to management. In our honest and unguarded moments, we talk of "dumbing it down for the suits." But the challenge is more subtle than that. We need to repackage the argument to work within the frame of oral thought. The easy part of that is about oratorical and rhetorical technique. The more important challenge is to deal with the deeper elements of oral culture; of being situational, engaged, and conservative. The right abstract answer can’t be understood until it is placed carefully within its context.

What management recognizes in its fundamentally oral mind is that organizations and their inhabitants spend most of their time in oral modes of thought. The oral mind is focused on tradition and stability because of how long it takes to embed a new idea. The techniques of change management that seem so obtuse to the literate, engineering mind are not irrational; they are oral. They are the necessary steps to embed new ideas and practices in oral minds.

Repeating a calculation or an analysis is nonsense in a literate culture. Management objections to an analytical proposal rarely turn on objections to the analysis. Walking through the analysis again at a deeper level of detail will not help. What needs to be done is to craft the oral culture story that will carry the analytical tale. It’s not about dumbing down an argument, it’s about repackaging it to match the fundamental thought processes of the target audience.

That might mean finding the telling anecdote or designating an appropriate hero or champion. Suppose, for example, that your analysis concludes it’s time to move toward document management to manage the files littering a shared drive somewhere or buried as attachments to three-year old e-mails. Analytical statistics on improved productivity won’t do it. A scenario of the "day in the life" of a field sales rep would be better. Best would be a story of the sales manager who can’t find the marked up copy of the last version of the contract.

These human stories are much more than the tricks of the trade of consultants and sales reps. They are recognition that what gets dressed up as the techniques of change management are really a bridge to the oral thinking needed to provoke action.

Seen in this light, what is typically labeled resistance to change is better understood as the necessary time and repetition to embed ideas in an oral environment.

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C-words of knowledge

February 3, 2009 at 8:13 am · Filed under KM

I’m working on a report for a client about knowledge management and knowledge sharing and I am deliberately avoiding the question of defining "knowledge." I’ve learned that it’s a rat hole of interesting coffee shop conversation that ultimately produces little of value. On the other hand, I started playing with the idea of words that you might use during the conversation. Combine that with Twitter, constrain the problem, and see what results. I posted the following Tweet yesterday to start things off:

So far that’s led to contributions from @shifted, @hjarche, @hylton, @coyenator, and @rsukumar. Here’s the list as of this morning, which I’ve split between verbs and nouns (we seem to be a bit short on the noun side):

What would you like to add to the list?

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