Month: February 2010

A quotable week on Twitter

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Here are some words of wisdom, gleaned from Twitter this past week.

Knowledge

@snowded: Narrative as Mediator:

Without the mediation of narrative there can be no knowledge transfer or learning.
Without the symbolic, learning will not diffuse to broad populations & there will be no advance.
Without embodied knowledge there will be no wisdom.

@ken_homer “The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.” ~ Hans Hofmann

@exectweets “Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.” – Peter Drucker

Learning

@mfrancone A single conversation across the table with a wise man is worth a month’s study of books ~ Chinese proverb

@valdiskrebs: Social learning -> You are as smart as the network you are embedded in!

@eduinnovation: “You weren’t born to be a cog in the giant industrial machine. You were TRAINED to become a cog.” ~ Seth Godin | via kdwashburn

@mglazer: Myth: the “training dept” is responsible for the learning that goes on at the company.

@zecool Nous sommes comme dans un mega-buffet mais chacun a 1 assiette seulement; il ne faut prendre que ce qu’on aime, pas tous les plats!

@jarche [result of a conversation with @janebozart & @denniscallahan] “When you learn with and from your customers, learning and marketing are the same.”

@BFchirpy Next step in Informal/Social Learning? If you want to cut out the middle man, go direct to your customers.

Working

More Trust Yields More Innovation via @CharlesHGreen

HBR: To be effective in this new world, you will need to master the skills of empathy & teamwork.

@jackvinson: PKM [personal knowledge management] in the enterprise? It’s all about the enterprise recognizing the importance of individuals getting work done.

@sebpaquet Thought-provoking quote … “The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government.” – Cornelius Tacitus (56-117 A.D.)

Can we formalize informal learning?

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One of the reasons that informal learning has become a hot topic for workplace performance is that we now have an incredible array of communication tools, especially web social media. These enable knowledge-sharing on an unprecedented scale and we are just beginning to understand how to use them for personal and organizational learning, the latter of incredible importance for business performance. Social media enable us to get work done in a knowledge economy.

ecollab2---social-learning-blog-carnival

Join in the discussion at the bilingual & multi-cultural eCollab blog carnival and weigh in with your experiences and perspectives on informal learning in the enterprise.

Communication and working together

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Lilia Efimova is looking at teams, communities & networks in terms of communication forms:

One of the things I came up when playing with different ideas was to position teams, communities and networks in respect to the most prevalent forms of communication in each case (in all cases the other forms of communication are there as well, but are not at the core of it).

This is her model in progress [please read Lilia’s full post]:

communication_efimovaThis maps to the group work matrix I developed, based on TIMN and the Cynefin framework. For types of work that have clear goals, then communications for getting things done can be mostly coordination (traditional project management), as there is structure and clearly understood goals. With less structure and goals, collaboration entails working together, with less management but shared objectives (communities of practice). In informal environments, where group work seeks opportunities, then cooperation is the best way to work together (networks).

CCC_ based on mathemagenic

One can easily envision someone working on all three levels on any given day:

  1. a small team producing a deliverable on a deadline for a client (coordination);
  2. members of that team providing advice and information to other teams on related projects (collaboration);
  3. team members working with a larger and looser network in identifying new business opportunities (cooperation).

It would be important for an organization to allow for collaborative and cooperative communications and activities, and not constrain all work and communications with too much structure and the need for controlled coordination.

Seek Sense Share

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Note: my blog is where I hammer out ideas, so you may be finding some of these posts a bit repetitive. Sorry about that ;)

My working definition of personal knowledge management:

PKM: a set of processes, individually constructed, to help each of us make sense of our world, work more effectively and contribute to society.

PKM is also an enabling process for wirearchy: ” a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results enabled by interconnected people and technology”

Some Observations:

PKM is part of the social learning contract.
PKM works best when knowledge is shared.
Organizational Knowledge Management (KM) is dependent on effective PKM processes.
Standardizing PKM destroys it.

Explaining PKM:

I have looked at the PKM process as:

Sort-Categorize-Make Explicit-Retrieve
Connect-Contribute-Exchange
Aggregate-Filter-Connect.

Currently I use:

Seek > Sense > Share

Talking about PKM

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KMers.org runs a regular TweetChat on knowledge management (KM) issues and today’s was on Personal Knowledge Management, with the following agenda [dead link]:

  • What effective means have we found to aggregate, filter and share information?
  • Is personal KM a good foundation for corporate KM, or are they competing efforts?
  • What are the corporate benefits of individual KM efforts? Should a company deliberately seek to take advantage of individual KM efforts?
  • How do we build a corporate culture in which individuals take responsibility for personal KM or personal sense-making?

It was difficult to keep up with the flow during this intensive one-hour session, so I’ve gone back and picked out some of the highlights [lightly edited for ease of reading].

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@markgould13 For me, PKM is a precursor for social knowledge sharing, so I use Delicious, Twitter and WordPress. Trying enterprise apps.

@mathemagenic blogging! [is an effective means to aggregate, filter & share] however the main problem is the time to be invested now for the future.

@jeffhester @elsua makes a great point about our personal networks being key. Most of the tools mentioned work best when shared.

@dougcornelius I see a distinction between consumption and production. Social Media helps bridge the old gap by combining the two [KM and SM].

@richdurost Although data is stored on the web, going back and finding those knowledge nuggets becomes a huge challenge.

@4KM Just thought of PKM as the narrow point of the hourglass. Reflect, filter, synthesize, organize & go macro again.

@markgould13 I think corporate KM is rapidly losing out to PKM. Good thing too in many sectors.

@VMaryAbraham Perhaps PKM is growing in importance because so few organizational KM methods work for individuals.

@RichardHare Corporate KM still sounds like something done to people, rather than simply the ecology of what exists in an organisation.

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@hjarche: [so I asked the obvious question]: can you have enterprise KM without PKM?

@nitinbadjatia Don’t think so

@markgould13 I think we tried that with KM1.0. Not sure it worked.

@lehawes No. I believe that is one reason we saw 70% failure rates in KM projects 10 years ago. Little focus on PKM then.

@JohnReaves You can have KM without PKM but you shouldn’t.

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@petertwo Incentive for PKM is PCM (Personal Career Management).

@jaycross CIA: From “need to know” to “need to share” as default behavior says Andy McAfee in Enterprise 2.0.

@pekadad Is attention-management a critical piece of PKM? How do I know what to to spend my (precious?) mental time on.

@jaycross @VMaryAbraham So should our focus be on … our focus? Teach priorities and filtering? Good thought, Mary.

@Quinnovator PKM needs to become PKS (Personal Knowledge Sharing).

@lehawes I think all KM is really about sharing, at heart. Need to have something to share, but the act creates the value.

@rickladd As Russell Ackoff used to say – the best way to learn is to teach. Sharing = giving away = getting back exponentially.

@jeffhester PKM is a process. Knowledge flows to me, then through me (as I share with my network and beyond).

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Link to complete Twitter transcript [dead link] at KMers

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I am more convinced now of the importance of Personal Knowledge Mastery in getting work done in knowledge-intensive workplaces. It is a foundational skill, of which only the principles can be formally taught, and like any craft it must be practised to gain mastery.

Yes, I do offer workshops on PKM and other topics.

Social computing in knowledge-intensive workplaces

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Ross Dawson discusses a Gartner report on social software, looking at some particular forecasts for the next three to five years out:

20% of businesses using social media instead of e-mail by 2014

50% of businesses using activity streams, such as micro-blogging, by 2012

20% of businesses will use social network analysis by 2015

70-95% of IT dominated driven social media initiatives will fail through to 2012

I’ve highlighted the last point because it’s time to look at social media as a connecting force in the enterprise. Here are some notes from a Twitter conversation with Treena Gravatt and Dennis Callahan yesterday:

Harold: RT @ecollab The Real Secret to Social Learning Success in 2010 by @LearningPutty

Treena: @hjarche That post made so much sense – I hadn’t seen it framed so clearly before but it makes utter sense & I agree with you. So many parallels

Harold: @tgrevatt I think the training department of the future will be part of marketing (already is at Intuit)

Harold: @tgrevatt I’ve been watching marketing & training moving closer, just as work & learning get integrated in the networked workplace

Dennis: @hjarche – re: marketing & training moving closer. Interesting – what’s the connection? I haven’t seen this trend.

Harold: @denniscallahan when you learn with & from your customers, learning & marketing are the same

Treena: <- nicely put Harold!

Dennis: <good connection>

The lines are blurring between marketing and training just as they are between learning and working. The connectivity enabled by social computing gives us an opportunity to identify overlapping areas and redundancies in organizational human performance support.  A unified support function, focused on really serving workers and helping them grow, could significantly reduce the 77% of CLO Magazine survey respondents who feel that people in their organization are not growing fast enough to keep up with the business.

Every department in the enterprise is part of the problem:

IT: for locking down computers and treating all employees like children, closing off a wealth of information, knowledge and connections outside the artificial firewall.

Communications: for forcing employees to use approved messages that do not even sound human.

Training: for separating learning from work.

HR: for forcing people into standardized  jobs and competency models that do not reflect the person.

It’s time for all departments to become part of the solution.

We’ve been discussing the blurring of lines between traditional organizational departments at the Internet Time Alliance and the general consensus is that any organizational change, especially using social computing, needs to look at the whole of the organization and not just the parts. Organizational culture, or its DNA, is an emergent property of the various components working, hopefully, in concert. Enabling only one department to initiate the change to a more cooperative and networked organization, may be a recipe for failure (70-95% of the time).

Wired Work

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Wirearchy may be a neologism, but I’ve found it to be a most descriptive term for discussing what happens when you connect everyone via electronic networks. To paraphrase Jon Husband:

It is generally accepted that we live and work in an increasingly ‘wired’ world.

There are emerging patterns and dynamics related to interconnected people and interlinked information flows, which are bypassing established traditional structures and services.

This presentation covers my interpretation of wirearchy and is a continuation of my presentation on Net Work: learning to work anew. Once again, it is in MP4 format and runs less than 5 minutes.

Wired Work: complexity, the web and business:

2 way flow

wired work (MP4)

With a little help from my friends

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Here are some of the interesting things I learned on Twitter. This week I’m featuring my colleagues at the Internet Time Alliance.

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I remarked earlier in the week that “crowds don’t need wise contributors, but diverse & independent ones; it’s like evolution: simple mechanisms create complexity.”

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We learn through idle chatter, so it seems (via @shareski):

idle_chatter_shareski

@charlesjennings

“if it’s social & engaged there is no us & them, only we”

“It’s not the channel that empowers or dis-empowers the learner. It’s the presence or absence of the ‘course and curriculum’ chains”

“True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing” – Socrates

@c4lpt (Jane Hart)

The Changing Face of Learning & Development

Leapfrog to the Future

@jaycross

“I think of crowd sourcing as tapping the wisdom of the crowd, not getting one idea by asking a large group.”

Go straight to the finish line

Jay’s book on working/learning smarter in the cloud

@Quinnovator (Clark Quinn)

Innovation’s Long Gestation

“lesson from Twitter (for web, mobile design), you don’t *need* full sentences, you DO need to communicate”

“as my colleague @hjarche says, “increasingly, work is learning and learning is work” [yes, I already knew that]

@jonhusband

The HR Problem: the traditional organization is a machine and we are human

The Problem with the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom Hierarchy

The temporary and flexible hierarchies of Fishnet Organizations

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and I also learned that “eMail Is Where Knowledge Goes to Die” via @elsua

Aggregate Understand Connect

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I’ve changed one word, but doesn’t it make more sense like this?

As I talk about PKM here or with this graphic and discussion, “understand” is more descriptive of the human sense-making activities than “filter” is. Perhaps I should go back and change these posts to reflect what we are actually doing – understanding as part of the sense-making process.

This is inspired  partially by The Problem with DIKW as well as comments by Stephen Downes, but I still want to keep the PKM concept as simple as possible, for business reasons, not academic ones.

Aggregate Understand Connect

Create you own blog – review

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CreateYourOwnBlog

I have to admit that I enjoyed reading through Create your own blog by Tris Hussey. The subtitle, 6 easy projects to start blogging like a pro, did not attract me initially but the book is well written, covers a lot of ground and is quite helpful. The first three chapters cover the basics and then there are sections on personal blogs, business blogs, blogs for artists, etc. If you’re 18 years old and a digital native, you don’t need this book and neither do you if you’ve already been blogging for several years. However, there is still a good segment of the population who may be interested in this book.

Create your own blog is quite different from Social Media for Dummies which I reviewed a while back. The introduction says it all, “It’s all about storytelling”. This book is well-researched, based on experience (it seems that Tris started blogging about the same time I began this blog) and includes lots of anecdotes – more learning through storytelling.

There are also details on podcast blogs, video blogs and fairly up to date information on Twitter and Facebook. It’s the kind of book you give your boss, your colleague thinking about blogging, or someone who is looking at a second career as a free-agent. I have several clients for whom this book would be perfect and the list price is very reasonable. On top of that, Tris lives in Canada!

Would I recommend this book to someone starting out blogging? If you’re over 30, definitely yes, because you probably won’t dig through all the online forums to find out what you really need.

You can check out the book’s website for more information sixbloggingprojects.com.

From the Summary:

One of the hallmarks of blogging has been its culture of transparency and openness, which means that it is expected that you will disclose affiliate links and other similar things (like when I receive a free product for review that I get to keep). Not disclosing this information can get you in hot water. It’s happened to even prominent bloggers (who should know better), so don’t feel alone, but it’s best to just avoid the whole issue and let people know.

[Disclosure: The publisher, Pearson Canada,  sent me a complimentary copy of this book and I am an Amazon.com affiliate. If you click through the book link and order a book, I will receive a small commission. Over the past few years I have only used these commissions to purchase more books and write reviews on them. I have given most of these books away – to clients, friends and conference attendees.]