Harold Jarche

All things to all people

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It was reported that only 2% of social sharing happens on Google Plus (G+). I too, do not share much on G+. I recently posted on G+ that it did not fit in with my professional use of social media, even though discussions are often fun, interesting, and informative. That G+ post I made now has 52 comments, more than any post on this blog has had.

In that post, Jeff Roach described G+ as “a network that looks like Facebook (media rich) but functions more like twitter (streams etc) but is more friendly to conversations and sharing than both of them.” Joachim Stroh suggested that I create a community on G+ but I countered that I preferred to cooperate in the open, not in another social media walled garden:

I think one of the problems today is that many online social networks are trying to be communities of practice. But to be a community of practice, there has to be something to practice. One social network, mine, is enough for me. How I manage the connections is also up to me. In some cases I will follow a blogger, in others I will connect via Google Plus or Twitter, but from my perspective it is one network, with varying types of connections. Jumping into someone else’s bounded social network/community only makes sense if I have an objective. If not, I’ll keep cooperating out in the open.

Nollind Whachel then weighed-in with several thoughtful comments and Joachim Stroh continued to engage. I stood on the sidelines, and a few others added comments, including one commentator unknown to me who felt I was being unprofessional because I did not understand G+. By the way, all of my G+ posts have been public, so anyone can jump in.

Nollind provided a good way to describe the sense-making process in these online social networks:

Connect = producing content
Empower = making sense of content patterns
Inspire = leap of logic, the patterns form a story, you see the bigger picture

Joachim made an interesting subsequent comment:

So, I’m still looking for the connection to go from unstructured to structured content, without doing a lot of curation. It’s not easy if you are doing this on your own (as you describe), it’s almost impossible to do this collectively (without a CM role).

Nollind added an emergent thought, that I think is important, and is partially what this blog post is all about:

Hmm, just had an interesting thought. It actually may be easier to do the writing and sense making within one community and then do the outlining and structuring in another community.

My interest in all of this comes down to PKM, and so far, G+ is a mere extension of my PKM processes. Perhaps it could be more, but I strongly believe in the centrality of my blog, which I own and control. I am not ready to give that to Google or any other third party. Nollind also made an excellent comparison of my PKM framework with his own methodology,

Seek = Connect = Play
Sense = Empower = Learn
Share = Inspire = Work

At this time, G+ provides a nice place for deep discussions with people who probably would not post as much on my blog and would be throttled by Twitter’s 140 character limit. I know that others use it much more, adding tags to make search and retrieval easier, and engaging with communities. G+ does add to my weak & diverse ties and even enables the sharing of complex knowledge. Perhaps G+ is trying to be all things to all people, and for those of us with existing PKM processes, that’s just too much.

social ties collaboration cooperationImage: Social Ties for Cooperation & Collaboration

An organizational knowledge-sharing framework

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There is a lot of knowledge in an organization, some of it easy to codify (capture), and much (most) of it difficult to do so. Understanding how best to commit resources for knowledge-sharing should be in some kind of a decision-making framework that is easy for anyone to understand. This is a first attempt to do that.

[This post is a follow-up from my building institutional memory post].

Brian Gongol made an interesting observation on three categories of institutional memory. Decision memories are probably the most important, and likely the most open to rationalization in hindsight. The good decisions always seem obvious after the fact.

  • event memories, which are things like the construction of new facilities or the arrival of new employees

  • process memories, which note how things are done in order to save time and ensure their reliable repetition in the future

  • decision memories, which explain how the institution chose one path or policy or course of action over another

We can expand these three categories with Ewen La Borgne’s observation on the types of artifacts left by work projects. Outputs are quite explicit, while expertise is mostly implicit knowledge. Networks can be mapped, and are therefore explicit, but interpreting them requires implicit knowledge.

  • Information and outputs produced

  • Expertise (knowledge and know-how)

  • A network of connections

Put all of these together in order of difficulty in codifying memories/artifacts and the following graphic is my working interpretation. Explicit knowledge is easier to codify and more suitable for enterprise-wide initiatives, while implicit knowledge requires personal interpretation and engagement to make sense of it. Note that these six categories only serve as examples and are not a complete spectrum of knowledge representations.

codifying knowledge

So what types of knowledge management (KM) frameworks could help us support the codification of these knowledge artifacts? One way to look at it would be from a perspective discussed by Patti Anklam a few years back. Patti explained the differences between Big KM, Little KM and Personal KM and this distinction could be useful. Big KM is good for knowledge that can be easily codified, and Little KM can provide a structure for teams & groups to try out new things (in a Probe-Sense-Respond way). PKM puts individuals in control of their sense-making, but the organization can benefit from this by making it easier for workers to share knowledge.

structuring knowledge

Finally, there are certain types of tools and and platforms that would be more suitable for sharing of each type of knowledge artifact. I describe only a few in this image, but it gives an idea of how one could structure a full spectrum of knowledge-sharing in order to support institutional memory.

knowledge sharing

From here, one can now ask what types of platforms would help to codify and share the knowledge that is important to any organization. For larger organizations, all three types of KM are most likely necessary. Too often, Big KM is seen as sufficient, but in complex work environments, Little KM and Personal KM are also needed and should work in conjunction with Big KM. These are three important pieces, that should remain loosely joined in order for each to do what it does best.

Some big reads for Friday

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Friday’s Finds:

friday2“Any enlightenment which requires to be authenticated, certified, recognized, congratulated, is false, or at least incomplete. – R.H. Blyth” – via @cyetain

“McLuhan (ca.’75); Academics “have been asleep for 500 years and they don’t like anybody who .. stirs them up” – via @wodekszemberg

You are not an Artisan

The artisan delusion is important because almost everything artisans want to do — all the local-and-sexy work — is actually algorithmically scalable once you filter out the noise. There just isn’t much requisite variety there. Which means it is more vulnerable to being taken over by post-industrial modes of automated production, not less. Because software makes assembly lines more capable, not less.

Dave Pollard: Will the Collapse of Civilization Begin With Global Corporatist Totalitarianism? – via @C4LPT – “while financial, commercial and political collapse are inevitable, social collapse is not”

Corporatist Totalitarianism is the creation of a state that disenfranchises the majority and funnels all decision-making, wealth, power and security to an integrated Corporatist few. They do this ostensibly on the basis that this few know better than the masses how to deal with crises, but in fact they know there just isn’t enough of anything left to go around any more. So, like alphas in an overcrowded rat cage, they deem it appropriate to lie, mislead and deny, and to hoard everything they can steal for themselves and let the rest suffer and starve.

@gleonhard: The coming data wars, the rise of digital totalitarianism and why internet users need to take a stand

Here is my bottom line: the very same data oil that to a very large extend already fuels the $600 Billion advertising industry will fuel something in the neighborhood of a $1 Trillion global data monitoring and surveillance business – and it’s you and me that will make this happen by allowing them to drill into our data i.e. into us.

Building institutional memory, one story at a time

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Institutional memory, which I wrote about recently, is a mixture of explicit and implicit knowledge sharing. It can be as explicit as Harvard Business School’s Institutional Memory site, or as implicit as the feeling one gets from a well-known local legend. A lot depends on what the organization wants to preserve. Is it how-to knowledge, like a trade secret formula, or is it certain practices and norms that define the culture? Or is it both? Each institution has to define this for itself.

Implicit knowledge is difficult to share and is usually complex. We know that this type of knowledge cannot easily be codified. However, it’s often what gives institutions sustainability and even competitive advantage. Finding ways to collect and share both types of knowledge is important for institutional memory. Stories can be an effective medium for these exchanges. The Ritz-Carlton provides an excellent example with Stories that Stay with You. Stories do not have to be exceptional to be effective, and simple anecdotes may be better on a large scale, rather than sweeping epics, or one can wind up in the uncanny valley of business storytelling.

stories.001

Institutional memory is a close cousin of knowledge management. Both can be strengthened with a firm foundation of personal knowledge management (Seek-Sense-Share). While seeking and sense-making are mostly individual activities and people should be allowed to use what’s best for them, the organization can overtly support knowledge sharing. One suggestion is to create more opportunities for “people to have coffee together”. Though it’s not the coffee that’s important, the act of gathering, combined with an environment that encourages capturing and sharing knowledge artifacts, serves to build institutional memory.

IM_coffee.001

Learning mobility

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How would you like a ‘genius bar’ to take care of you at work, instead of having to request a support ticket from IT or get an appointment with HR? It’s something that could easily work with mobile device support and help in implementing an effective BYOD (bring your own device) program.

When it comes to customer support, the genius bar is a revolution in customer care. The idea that you don’t have to make an appointment, don’t have to call in a trouble ticket, don’t have to deal with a traditional support team that is “way backed up” is nothing short of amazing for most people. Yes it requires resources, both human and capital-based. But I can’t imagine a better way to get a grip on what is happening on the mobile user front of an enterprise than by opening up a genius-bar like outlet. – Paul Kapustka, Mobile Enterprise 360

As workers get more mobile, for better and worse, supporting a mobile workforce’s learning and performance needs requires a more flexible approach. Screen size limits what you can do, so it has to be short and focused. It also has to be personalized. Jane Hart describes the role of learning concierge as providing “personal advice directly to workers on how they can address their own workplace learning and performance problems in the way that works best for them“. Mobile devices are perfect for personalization and direct to the end-user delivery.

Mobile delivery and support could be a great opportunity to make training & development departments more relevant. Start with just-in-time service, such as genius bars. Combine technical support with learning and performance support. For instance, the last time I was at an Apple Genius bar, I showed up at opening time and saw many people attending training sessions. These people showed up voluntarily and it looked like they were interested and engaged. Shouldn’t all training sessions be like this?

The future of work is social, cooperative & mobile. This should also be the future of performance and technical support. As I noted in the future of the training department, the main objective should be to enable knowledge to flow in the organization. The primary function of learning & performance professionals in the networked enterprise is connecting and communicating, based on three core processes:

1. Facilitating collaborative work and learning amongst workers, especially as peers.

2. Sensing patterns and helping to develop emergent work and learning practices.

3. Working with management to fund and develop appropriate tools and processes for workers.

Using mobile platforms can support listening and analyzing by staying in direct contact with workers. They can also help the organization stay connected in order to set context and build consensus. Connecting leadership with the work being done, or learning as we go, should be a prime function of learning professionals in the mobile enterprise.

supporting 21c work—

This post is brought to you by Mobile Enterprise 360 Community and Citrix

Note: I retained editorial control and take full responsibility for what is posted. Contract writing is one of the ways I make my living.

The Storytelling Animal

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storytelling-animalIn The Storytelling Animal, Jonathan Gottschall tells us how stories make us human. The book looks at gender differences in weaving our own stories, the cultural significance of stories, and some of the science and pseudo-science on story, narration and memory. It boils down to a simple formula, says Gottschall.

Story = Character + Predicament + Attempted Extrication

This made me consider how this could be important for institutional memory. Would this be a good formula to try to capture past events from those who have experienced them? It could be, but it might be highly dependent on how much time has passed and how important accuracy is, as we are not very good at remembering, especially critical, or ‘flashbulb’, events. “Memory isn’t an outright fiction; it is merely a fictionalization“, says Gottschall.

“The signature flashbulb event of our age is 9/11, which led to a bonanza of false-memory research. The research shows two things: that people are extremely sure of their 9/11 memories and that upward of 70% of us misremember key aspects of the attacks … In one study, 73 percent of research subjects misremembered watching, horrified, as the first plane plowed into the North Tower on the morning of September 11.

The research shows that our memories get worse over time, but our stories, as we remember them, become much clearer. We have a propensity for self-delusion, something every jury member should always keep in mind. But fiction (story) is much more powerful than non-fiction. Gottschall discusses the power of Wagner’s mythology on Hitler, as well as how the book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, influenced the 19th century anti-slavery movement.

“When we read nonfiction, we read with our shields up. We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story, we drop our intellectual guard. We are moved emotionally, and this seems to leave us defenseless.”

Consider the above statement and think about training. Would it not be more effective if content was developed as stories? How about knowledge management? I think stories would be most effective for new hire training. Perhaps we should focus less on instructional design or knowledge repositories. Instead, organizations could engage good story tellers. We hear a lot about the importance of curation in the digital workplace today. The best curators are also story tellers.

I enjoyed this book and learned a fair bit from it, but it is not a book that deals much with how stories can be used for KM or other organizational purposes.

PKM and competitive intelligence

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What’s competitive intelligence? The Wikipedia says:

“A broad definition of competitive intelligence is the action of defining, gathering, analyzing, and distributing intelligence about products, customers, competitors and any aspect of the environment needed to support executives and managers in making strategic decisions for an organization.”

Several years ago I advised a client on how to develop a CI process:

1. Start by asking questions internally and seeing what kind of answers you get. Use your existing social media tools to do this.

2. As a distributed team, each person can be responsible for a specific information source that is monitored regularly. This should be narrated and posted for all to see and comment.

3. Ask a weekly question and see who can get some information that may be able to answer part or all of it.

4. In the feedback to these questions people may ask you to re-frame the questions. Continue to learn and refine this process for your unique context. Better questions will make for better CI. Keep this process visible.

5. You may not need to hire anyone else to collate the data, but if you do, keep your team (who have industry knowledge) involved.

6. Don’t just hand CI over to a junior staff member. CI should be part of the conversational flow in the company. Marketing, sales, developers and management should be actively involved.

7. The process of asking questions, seeing if there are answers and in turn asking questions about the questions can hone the team’s ability to gather competitive intelligence.

8. If you decide to purchase access to information sources, only buy one at a time. Use that source as much as you can (squeeze it dry) until you realize you should eliminate it or augment it with another purchased source.

CI, like knowledge management, needs people to be continuously involved and engaged. CI is really just a focused type of knowledge management. Therefore, people with good PKM skills should also be better contributors to CI.

In How to Map Sources for a Competitive Intelligence Project, Cate Farrall provides a basic set up guide to those practicing CI, and describes a 3 step process.

competitive-intelligence-project-source-map
Image: Cate Farrall

This map can also be used as a way to initially set up the Seek part of a personal knowledge mastery framework. Once your PKM objective(s) is/are clear, then identify one or more resources from each part of the map. This should give a fairly broad selection of knowledge resources.

Institutional Memory

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Roger Schank has several interesting articles posted on his site in the Corporate Memory section, which I decided to dive into recently.

In The Future of Knowledge Management, he says that the main problem with KM systems is that they do not copy how real people think and that unlike a person, a “KM system simply gets slower as a result of more information”. He proposes creating software scripts to organize information, but these must be capable of self-modification. I have not seen any systems that really do this well, yet. Schank concludes:

There is a lot of knowledge in an enterprise that can be used to organize new knowledge that is coming in. People understand new knowledge in terms of what they already know. A smart KM system must know a lot of about an industry and a particular enterprise before it starts up. This is hard but by no means impossible. And it is the future of software – namely software that really knows a great deal about your business.

Until these types of systems are available though, I would encourage individuals to practice personal knowledge management and use enterprise social networks to share within the organization. It may not be as elegant, but I know it can be implemented today, with existing technologies and skills that can be developed by anyone.

Algorithmic search filters that can push things out, based on certain criteria are what Schank calls “Information that Finds You”. Add geo-location and you can get immediate feedback on things around you. These exist, but take time to setup and maintain. In organizations, providing coaching and support on how to optimize our software & hardware tools (our outboard brains) is often lacking. Not only is there a need for a learning concierge but also a basic digital concierge, so that we can use our tools optimally. For instance, even doing an advanced online search query is beyond the grasp of most people on the Net.

Schank also writes about the need for a Reminding Machine, which is based on the premise that knowledge is best communicated just in time.

A reminding machine has thousands of stories from experts in various areas of life telling about important aspects of their lives that have lessons about life in them, the kind of stories you might tell to colleagues or to students … In order to build this machine it is necessary to collect people’s stories and index them according to the goals and plans that a story instantiates.

In his keynote at DARPA in 2010, Schank discusses story telling and KM in great detail. Here are some highlights

  • Stories: should be full of details but short
  • Lecture: people cannot think about what they are thinking and listen to the speaker at the same time
  • Stories, to be effective, must not be too abstract for the person listening. Listeners must be able to absorb the stories.
  • Comprehension means “mapping your stories onto my stories”. It’s difficult to communicate with someone who has different stories.
  • In good stories, we do not give answers.

There are 12 Fundamental Cognitive Processes, according to Schank:

  1. Prediction
  2. Modelling
  3. Experimentation
  4. Evaluation
  5. Diagnosis*
  6. Planning*
  7. Causation
  8. Judgement
  9. Influence
  10. Teamwork
  11. Negotiation
  12. Describing*

* These processes are what Schank calls “The Big Three”.

Several examples of the 12 processes are presented as stories in the second video of the keynote.

For anyone interested in institutional memory, story telling, or knowledge management, all four videos are well worth watching. Roger Schank concludes that the most difficult part in all of this is actually collecting the stories. The best people to collect stories from are those who are able to admit that they mismanaged, botched, or bungled something. This can be a real challenge in organizations that do not discuss failure.

Network Era Fluency

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Today, it’s all about networks, something you were most likely not taught about in school. This means that most of our education is useless in understanding the world as it currently exists. Yes, useless.

If you were raised during the past several decades you probably understand tribes and institutions. You likely heard a lot about market forces, especially in 2008. But that is a triform society. What happens as we become a quadriform society (Tribes +Institutions +Markets +Networks)?

There are some interesting things that happen when hyperlinks subvert hierarchy, as the writers of the Cluetrain Manifesto said in 1999 (that long ago). For example, United Breaks Guitars, a video that gave a whack on the side of the head to United Airlines, adversely affected United’s stock price. Wikileaks published some documents and enormous state resources were put against one person, now holed up in an embassy, at significance expense to those who pay the guards. Arab Spring became a force overnight, confusing intelligence agencies (the same ones who never saw the collapse of the Soviet bloc in advance). The Occupy movement came and some say has gone, but it’s likely a field test for more movements to come.

In education, the current subversion is called a MOOC, which has already been subverted by corporate interests, but will likely rise again in another name or form. In the labour movement we are seeing things like alt-labour as well as a growing shareable economy. CSA’s are becoming the norm. Networked, distributed businesses, like AirBNB, are disrupting existing models, with the inevitable push-back as they become successful.

Big data is also networked data. Data is the new oil, according to Gerd Leonhard. While my personal data may not be that important in the great scheme of things, networked data drive advertising, brands, and security systems. To negotiate the network era we need to understand networks – social networks, business networks, government networks, and information networks. We need network fluency.

Tony Reeves wrote a recent post about the 21st century skill set, showing that global fluency could be developed through certain skills like critical thinking, in addition to some key literacies, like information literacy. I have taken these ideas but describe them slightly differently, as shown in the image below.

network era fluencyNetwork era fluency could be described as individuals and communities understanding and being part of global networks that influence various aspects of our lives. For individuals, the core skill is critical thinking, or questioning all assumptions, including one’s own. People can learn though their various communities and develop social literacy. Information literacy is improved by connecting to a diversity of networks. But control of networks by any single source destroys the ability for people and communities to develop real network era fluency, which is not good for society in the long run and may kill innovation and our collective ability to adapt.

Mass network era fluency can ensure that networks remain social, diverse, and reflect many communities. This kind of fluency, by the majority of people, is necessary to deal with the many complex issues facing humanity. We cannot deal with complex issues and  networked forces unless we can knowledgeably talk about them. This requires fluency.

Related: The Network is the Solution

Friday's Finds 196

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Friday’s Finds:

friday2

“When prepping for a big story about a company in crisis, news outlets go to LinkedIn to look for people who have recently left.” – @TorontoLouise

“Culture is what happens when the managers leave the room – doing what’s right in the absence of authority.” – @ValaAfshar

“I actually think that getting schools to change the physical ways kids use the school space is harder than changing pedagogy in class.” – @ChrisLehmann

Innovation is only innovation when it’s sustainable. – by @DonaldClark

All in all, she [a school teacher in Cambodia] was building a sustainable, scalable solution by fitting the technology to her scant resources with a fair amount of cultural sensitivity. This is exactly what I presented at Online Africa, and why I’m so critical of many of Sugata Mitra and Negroponte’s ‘parachute projects’. Innovation should not trump sustainability.

The Brazilian Protests are Existential: an indicator of a crisis of civilization bubbling up at the margins:

Most of the kids I met in Brazil had at least two mobile phones. They monitor their global community of Facebook friends hourly. They are impatient to get on with their lives but as they reach adulthood they find little space for either their aspirations or their concerns. The work available to them (and for 25% there is none) is as low paid drones in faceless corporations or failing public institutions that deliver neither adequate services nor fulfilling career opportunities.  They feel oppressed by massive cultural forces that are making robots out of them. They feel “rage against the machine.”

Fast Co.Exist: Meet Alt-Labor, the non-union workers movement – @FastCoexist

“Brands like Nike, they don’t own factories anymore. They don’t manufacture anything. They don’t even manage manufacturing,” Fine says. She cites the shift from vertically integrated firms to a world of contractors and subcontractors as a central problem for any labor movement, especially since unionizing contract workers is illegal. “We have this dramatic mismatch between 1930s forms of representation and 21st-century forms of employment,” she says.

skills + literacies = global fluency – by @tonyjreeves

Global-fluency-v3_by Tony ReevesImage by Tony Reeves