Conversations and collaboration

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Robert Kelley, in How to be a Star at Work, describes how tacit, or implicit, knowledge has come to dominate the knowledge economy:

What percentage of the knowledge you need to do your job is stored in your own mind? Or put another way: What percentage of your time do you spend reaching out to someone or something else for knowledge that is essential for you to get your job done? Do you know how much you don’t know?

In 1986, the average answer from responses to surveys or hands in the air at group seminars was that most people had about 75 percent in their heads. In recent years [late 1990’s], the percentage has dropped  15 to 20 points, and in the case of one company I worked with recently, it has fallen as low as 10 percent!

We could extrapolate that this trend has continued since the book was published in 1999 and that a decade later the percentage of knowledge required that is stored in our minds is closer to 10% in many companies. We can also induce that workers today need  to regularly reach out to someone or something in order to access the tacit knowledge they need. They need to be social. Social learning is how we get things done in the increasingly complex modern workplace.

The figure above shows how documentation (explicit knowledge) may be suitable in less complex environments, but we need to exchange tacit knowledge through conversations in more complex environments. In order to apply tacit knowledge, we need to develop emergent practices for rapidly changing (and non-repeatable) tasks. Collaborative work is fueled though ongoing social learning, making the integration of learning and working essential in any organization.

The current challenge is that we have tools and processes for storing explicit knowledge (content management systems – CMS) and for managing training (learning management systems – LMS) as well as platforms for enabling distributed conversations (social media). What we really need are systems and processes for collaborative work (enterprise 2.0). However, the solution is not to enhance a CMS or an LMS, based on assumptions of simplicity and repeatability,  but to develop ways to enhance complex webs of conversations to get work done.

Existing enterprise software systems, and the thinking behind them, are not able to do this. With up to 90% of our work requiring tacit knowledge, the role of enterprise content management is just a minor contribution in how we get work done. Investment needs to done in processes that support conversations and collaborative work as well as tools that support them. Platforms such as Thingamy are an indication of how future work systems can be developed.

If 90% of the knowledge needed to get work done is not supported by enterprise software or organizational learning departments, then there is a significant imbalance in most organizations today. Any time you wonder why things aren’t working in your organization, it’s because you’re in a system optimized for only one tenth of what you need to get done.

Thanks to my ITA colleague Clark Quinn for inspiring me to write this post.

Connected and Crazy

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Here are some of the things I learned via Twitter this past week.

Quote of the Week: @hrheingold “Free, open, multimedia university of tomorrow is here now, technically. Knowing how to self-organize learning with others is another matter”

via @nancyrubin Collaboration – If it Were That Easy We Would all Do It – Well

Five Models of Collaboration:

  • Communities of Practice/Interest
  • Content Collaboration
  • Process Collaboration
  • Project Collaboration
  • Goal-based Collaboration

@davecormier “next time someone makes fun of twitter …  tell them about you guys finding the name of the berry that Posey ate for poison control [baneberry]”

we took the kids into the woods, on a little trail on the back of Dave’s ancestral lands. and we spun our heads back, three of us at once to see Posey in her tutu and her grandmother’s fake plastic pearls chomping heartily away on…something.

three parental mouths opened in unison to say what’s she eating? and then Dave crossed the three steps between him and her in only one and he pried the berry from her mouth. ew, she said.

he grabbed the culprit to ask the internet, once we were back at the house.

Photo & The Culprit

via @helinur the best goal is no goal :

So what does a life without goals look like? In practice, it’s very different than one with goals.

You don’t set a goal for the year, nor for the month, nor for the week or day. You don’t obsess about tracking, or actionable steps. You don’t even need a to-do list, though it doesn’t hurt to write down reminders if you like.

What do you do, then? Lay around on the couch all day, sleeping and watching TV and eating Ho-Hos? No, you simply do. You find something you’re passionate about, and do it. Just because you don’t have goals doesn’t mean you do nothing — you can create, you can produce, you can follow your passion.

via @markwfoden Case study on using micro-blogging to support informal learning [PDF] at Pitney Bowes:

  • Better Employee Learning: Yammer facilitates and augments the highly valuable “casual learning” that happens every day within Pitney Bowes.
  • Easily Searchable Knowledge Base: Each discussion is archived and accessible to all within the organization for future access.
  • Better Knowledge Flow: Knowledge isn’t siloed into specific regions or departments.

via @elsua Starting another day with this required reading: Am I Crazy? Or Is It The Whole Firm Where I Work? by @stevedenning

A century hence, when historians come to write the history of the current age (assuming our species survives so long), they will, I believe, be puzzled as to why so many people managed—and so many more people allowed themselves to be managed—in ways that were known to be unproductive, crimped the spirits of those doing the work, and frustrated those for whom the work was being done. Why, they will wonder, did this continue for so long on such a wide scale?

Trust

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A while back, Charles Green responded to my post about the knowledge economy being a trust economy:

Your title captures an important insight; the knowledge economy allows significant distribution of nodes of knowledge, means of production, etc. To get the value of that, resources have to be distributed. If people can’t figure out how to trust other people, all that value goes unachieved. Or, more likely, it accrues to other organizations or networks who HAVE figured out how to trust each other.

I’ve referred several times to articles at the Trusted Advisor because trust is such an important factor in knowledge work as knowledge and innovation cannot be effectively coerced from workers.

Here’s Charles on Measuring and Managing:

If you can measure it, you can manage it; if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it; if you can’t manage it, it’s because you can’t measure it; and if you managed it, it’s because you measured it.

Every one of those statements is wrong. But business eats it up. And it’s easy to see why …

The ubiquity of measurement inexorably leads people to mistake the measures themselves for the things they were intended to measure.

And a post on measuring ROI for soft skills training [because we don’t trust workers] and the perversion of individual measurement:

Most soft skills deal with our relationships to others. The drive to individually behavioralize, then metricize, has the effect of killing relationships—an ironic outcome for relationship-targeting training.

In the learning & development business there is much focus on compliance training, especially since regulatory compliance accounts for a significant amount of learning content development and learning management technology sales. However, there are few sales pitches that say, go ahead, let your employees decide what’s best for them. Trust, it seems, doesn’t sell stuff. If you trust workers to manage their learning, you don’t need an LMS. If you trust them to get things done, you don’t need a tracking system. If you trust them to learn you don’t need as much pre-programmed training because they will find what’s best. If you trust them to be self-directed or group-directed learners they would have a say in their own training budget and I doubt they would vote to buy an LMS.

There is little doubt that organizational structures need to change and that management models need to adapt to deal with increasing complexity. Shifting from a hierarchy to a wirearchy requires a foundation of shared information, knowledge, power and trust. Trust shifts not only how an organization works but also many of traditional relationships with customers and suppliers. If all businesses trusted employees, how many training companies would go out of business?

Active sense-making

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Yesterday, during my presentation on personal knowledge management to IBM BlueIQ I was asked about the role of blogging in my own sense-making processes. For almost seven years, my blog has been where I try to make sense of my observations. I’ve called it my home base. As I’ve said before, this blog is mostly for me. These are my half-baked thoughts which I make public in order to share and to learn. Many posts get built upon or edited several times and may become part of a longer article or white paper. Most of what is posted here is raw material. Much of the nuance or context is in the flow of the conversations here over the years. The process is often more important than the product.

In my Seek>Sense>Share model, seeking and annotating information is important but cannot stand on its own. As much as I may add feeds into my RSS reader, bookmark web pages or upload photos, these are nothing more than senseless digital constructs until I put them to use. Seeking information is an important foundation to PKM online but it’s of little use without action. The sense-making part of the process requires action and it takes practice to be good at it. How to make sense of one’s experiences is up to the individual. Sense-making is an activity, a regular practice. It can be as simple as creating a list (Filtering) or as complicated as a thesis (Customization). People with better sense-making skills are able to create higher value information and when this is shared, they contribute to their networks. This strikes me as the core of collaborative knowledge work.

I added a sense-making activity about a year ago when I realized I was losing track of what I was finding on Twitter. I could have saved interesting tweets to my social bookmarks but instead I decided to do a weekly review of what I had found. This requires little effort during the week, other than clicking the “favorite” star. At the end of the week, I re-read these tweets and their links and then decide which ones are still of interest. The activity of reading, writing and perhaps commenting helps to internalize some of the knowledge. The result is Friday’s Finds and a byproduct is that some other people find it interesting and useful as well.

Agility through collaboration

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Instead of factory-style production teams, agile programming uses far fewer, but better, programmers. The principles of communicating, focusing on simplicity, releasing often and testing often are also applicable to developing good instructional programs. Does instructional systems design (ISD) need more agility? An ISD project team should be able to return to the Analysis or Design phase and make changes while instructional content Development is taking place. If not, changing conditions cannot be accommodated and the programme is outdated before it’s even finished. I wonder how many content development shops actually have a process that enables them to rebuild after the design specification has been signed off.

The root of the problem is that ISD views instruction as separate from work. Instruction is perceived as something that can be designed, developed and delivered as a programme, not integrated with the work to be done. Subject matter experts are consulted, but the ISD professionals remain in control. It’s a good model when things change slowly. The current fascination with rapid e-learning only exacerbates the problems with ISD. Rapid is just a faster version of ADDIE, with less time for reflection and feedback: Garbage-In; Garbage-Out.

I think that ISD and agility are fundamentally incompatible. Clark Quinn proposes a better approach, collaborative co-design:

Things are moving so fast, and increasingly the work will be solving new problems, designing new solutions/products/services, etc, that we won’t be able to anticipate the actual work needs.  What we will need to do, instead, is ensure that a full suite of tools are available, and provide individuals with the ability to work together to create worthwhile working/learning environments.

In short, tying back to my post on collaboratively designing job aids, I think we need to be collaboratively designing workflows. What I mean is that the learning function role will move to facilitating individuals tailoring content and tools to achieve their learning goals.

Collaborative co-design is one more way to integrate work and learning, and give our organizations more agility. Embedding the principles of communicating, focusing on simplicity, releasing and testing often; just make sense in an increasingly complex workplace. Once again, the major barrier, like Enterprise 2.0 or social media for work, is that the traditional gatekeepers have to give up control.

Changing times

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Here are some of the things I learned via Twitter this past week.

Why focus on informal & social learning? by @CharlesJennings | Related Slide Presentation

In many cases non-formal and social approaches will replace formal learning. In a few cases they won’t.

There are 8 drivers for this change:

1. There is a strong imperative for continuous learning – the world is changing so fast that we need to continually update our knowledge, skills and productivity. Doing it in discrete steps just doesn’t work any more – even if the steps are small ones. We all need to develop the mindset of continuous, always-on learners. Informal and social learning approaches fit this need better than staccato formal learning …

via @roundtrip – 10 ways the “world of work” will change in the next 10 years @Gartner_inc “non-routine” work = adaptive innovative

  1. De-routinization of work
  2. Work swarms
  3. Weak links
  4. Working with the collective
  5. Work sketch-ups
  6. Spontaneous work
  7. Simulation & experimentation
  8. Pattern sensitivity
  9. Hyperconnected
  10. My place

@johnniemoore Is there a real innovator’s dilemma in an age of abundant creativity. Or just a bureaucrat’s dilemma pretending otherwise?

From HBR: Higher education is overrated; skills aren’t [as I wrote in the university myth]

Foolish New York Times stories notwithstanding, education is a misleading-to-malignant proxy for economic productivity or performance. Knowledge may be power, but “knowledge from college” is neither predictor nor guarantor of success. Growing numbers of informed observers increasingly describe a higher education “bubble” that makes a college and/or university education a subprime investment for too many attendees.

via @nomad411 New Zealand rejects software patents.

In updating its policy position, the New Zealand government acknowledged the growing importance of open source, and the logical reasons for excluding software from the list of patentable inventions.

Evaluating knowledge workers – a cartoon essay by @tonykarrer

Ten reasons

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Jane Hart posted a tongue-in-cheek video on 10 reasons to ban social media with the caveat, “Be careful who you show this video to – they might actually believe it  ;)”. One comment to her blog post really struck me:

Strange thing is that I wasn’t laughing as he is far too near the truth – the senior management and IT departments that I know DO think like this. What is now needed is a rebuttal of this video. Not just saying that’s not the case but giving good cogent business arguments to each of the 10 (or indeed 11) points. How for instance would you answer this one. “What sort of learning process takes place in the minds of learners when using Twitter?” Just saying communication, keeping up to date, exchanging information is not enough for these doubters. It may seem ludicrous to suggest it but how do we link social learning with the bottom line? We had to do that for e-learning….

I must say that “good cogent business arguments” abound, but first they must be read and then understood and then put into contextual practice. Many people, including my partners at the Internet Time Alliance, have been discussing and using social media for business and publishing frequently on how increasing networks and complexity are influencing workplace design and human performance. Here is just a sampling of what’s already been discussed, much of it via social media.

10. Social media is a fad. Social media are an extension of the Internet and the Web, and are becoming embedded in our work and leisure time. If the Net is a fad, then so are social media – place your bets.

9. It’s about controlling the message. Networks, the new organizational model, mean giving up control and our hierarchical work models are no longer effective nor efficient.

8. Employees will goof off. What looks like goofing off, such as Twitter, may actually be knowledge work.

7. Social Media is a time waster. Not if you use some methods and processes (like PKM) to make sense of all those networks [that’s how I’m able to write this post so quickly].

6. Social media has no business purpose … other than to foster innovation and collaboration.

5. Employees can’t be trusted. The knowledge economy is the trust economy, so you either have to hire new employees or change your business model. More resources at The Trusted Advisor.

4. Don’t cave into the demands of the millennials. The whole idea of digital natives is dying – the changing workplace affects everybody.

3. Your teams already share knowledge effectively. Really? Homeland Security: information sharing is still not where it should be. How about BP?

2. You’ll get viruses. Not if you use a Mac ;) Dave Snowden: “Since I’ve left IBM I’ve had fewer virus attacks working in an open Web environment than I did in a secure corporate environment.”

1. Your competition isn’t using it, so why should you? Unless your competition is one of the thousands of start-ups coming to market, or incumbents like Cisco or IBM. Even dairy farmers use social media. You can be sure your markets are using social media to talk about your products and services.

Leveraging collective knowledge

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This week, a few related knowledge management (KM) articles crossed my path and I’d like to weave them together.

Here’s a model that shows how KM has progressed over the past 15 years. Nancy Dixon discusses three eras of knowledge management as moving from Explicit Knowledge (document management) to Experiential Knowledge (communities of practice; expertise locators)  and now to Collective Knowledge (social media). This post and Nancy’s previous ones, are well worth the read as a primer on KM.

Leveraging collective knowledge may be our collective challenge but there are no guaranteed solutions at this time. This is still new territory.

“Although the first thinking about Leveraging Collective Knowledge began to appear around 2005, there are only a few leading edge organizations that have developed new practices for making use of their organization’s collective knowledge. Most organizations are still centered in the perspective of the second era and some, who have come late to knowledge management, are still struggling with getting good content management in place.”

The need for KM is evident. In the gorilla illusions, Nick Milton points out that we need to create knowledge artifacts in order to counter the tendencies of our brains to make things up over time. These illusions include:

  • The illusion of memory
  • The illusion of confidence
  • The illusion of knowledge

As Nick concludes, “The implication is that if you will need to re-use tacit knowledge in the future, then you can’t rely on people to remember it.” With more information passing by us from multiple sources, our ability to keep track of it with only our brains is rather limited. We need systems, but more powerful and more flexible ones than currently offered by enterprise software systems like document management, expertise location, learning management or communities of practice.

Each person’s knowledge needs and knowledge use are unique. For example, Owen Ferguson explains that experts shouldn’t design online resources for novices:

The curse of the expert when it comes to online presentation is that they often decide they know better and produce a design that matches their own knowledge map – totally confusing the user. IT experts design the IT part of the intranet, HR experts design the HR part of the intranet, product experts design the product information parts of the intranet and all express surprise that users never seem to use them.

Actually, designing “for” anybody becomes a problem. Valued professional* work is non-standardized, as standardized work today just gets automated and outsourced.  Who really knows what knowledge needs any professional may have? How many levels of novices, journeymen and experts are there in an organization? Hence the need for the mass customization of (knowledge) work processes.

The relationship with personal knowledge mastery (PKM) is clear. The challenge is to enable “small pieces (individuals) loosely joined” – to seek, make-sense of, and share their knowledge. I use a combination of my blog, bookmarks, and tweets to inform my outboard brain so I can retrieve contextual knowledge as I interact with my clients and colleagues. My process works for me, but it cannot be copied as a standardized process. The real challenge is to help each person find a process that works on an individual basis while supporting the organization in leveraging collective knowledge.

—

* “A professional is anyone who does work that cannot be standardized easily and who continuously welcomes challenges at the cutting edge of his or her expertise.” —David Williamson Shaffer

A personal learning journey

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I became interested in knowledge management (KM) as I was introduced to it in the mid 1990’s while practising instructional systems design (ISD) and human performance technology (HPT) in the military. In the late 1990’s knowledge management was part of our solution suite at the Centre for Learning Technologies (CLT via The Wayback Machine).

The Centre for Learning Technologies is an applied research, consulting and resource centre for the use of new media in learning, knowledge management, and workplace performance support.

I continued to work with enterprise knowledge repositories and KM related projects until I started freelancing in 2003 and was faced with the challenge of creating my own knowledge management system with a minimal budget. Luckily the web had evolved and there were consumer alternatives to enterprise systems. I became a consumer and simultaneously a sharer of online knowledge.

Lilia Efimova (2004) was one of my earlier inspirations, “To a great extend PKM [personal knowledge management] is about shifting responsibility for learning and knowledge sharing from a company to individuals and this is the greatest challenge for both sides.” This still sums up the core concept of PKM. As a free agent it was rather easy for me to take responsibility for my learning and knowledge sharing, but it was much more difficult for people working within organizational hierarchies. I saw a need for PKM inside all businesses so I began investigating and practising PKM while reflecting on my own attempts to manage my knowledge.

I had turned my website into my knowledge base (2005) combining blogs, RSS and social bookmarks to help manage my knowledge flows. By explaining my process in public, I hoped to clarify my methods and get feedback from others. I then played with metaphors to explain my emerging processes (2006); “Basically, you can take a few free web tools and start controlling your information streams (Input). Then you can file the good stuff somewhere you can always find it (Filing & Sharing).”

By 2007, PKM had become my best tool and I had once more revised my processes. My own area of interest was PKM with web tools, though of course a PKM system can be unplugged. I was also seeing the similarities with personal learning environments: PLE.

The need for some type of PKM process for people in many walks of life was becoming clear in 2008. However, it was only part of the solution in creating better workplaces and encouraging critical thinking:

Developing practical methods, like PKM and Skills 2.0 (PDF) can help, but at the same time we need to work on creating and supporting new models of work that are more democratic and human. This means that we need to think about and talk about work differently. For myself, I have found that not being a salaried employee has freed my mind in many ways. I know that this is not the answer for everyone, but it’s time to make slogans like, “our business is our people”, a reality.

I forecast (2009) that PKM would be an essential part of workplace learning by 2019, but it now seems that will happen much earlier in many sectors with the cheap abundance of social learning tools.

Workplace learning in 2019:

  • Much of the workforce will be distributed in time & space as well as in engagement (part-time, full-time, contract mix).
  • More learning will be do-it-yourself and gathered from online digital resources available for free and fee. More workers will be used to getting what they need as they change jobs/contracts more frequently but remain connected to their online networks (online/offline won’t matter anymore).
  • Work and learning will continue to blend while stand-up training will be challenged by the ever-present back channel. Successful training programs will involve the learners much more – before, during and after.
  • Conferences, workshops and on-site training will become more niche and fragmented (smaller,  focused & connected online) as travel costs increase and workers become more demanding of their time.
  • The notion of PKM will have permeated much of the workplace
  • These changes will not be evenly distributed.

I also observed that government managers especially needed to develop ways of prioritizing and coping with information flows while leaving space for real time conversations. In 2009 I wrote 34 posts related to PKM on this blog, as it was becoming evident that there was a need and an interest. I came to the conclusion that PKM was our part of the social learning contract as we increasingly engage in online professional and learning networks.

This year, I engaged with the KM community and gained many insights talking about PKM on Twitter: “I am more convinced now of the importance of PKM (or PKSharing) 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.” My latest metaphor/model  is described in PKM in a Nutshell and of course there are several other models.

I will continue to explore better ways to manage information, encourage reflection and share what we are learning. Technology plays a role in this but changing attitudes is the key.  Learning is a process, not a discrete event and it needs to become part of the work flow, not directed by a separate department, with a separate budget that is itself separate from the work that has to be done. Encouraging and supporting PKM* is one part of this.

*PKM is the term that I have used here, but other terms may become more meaningful to the world at large. I will continue to use PKM but am open to others, especially if they are more useful in getting the work done:

  • personal knowledge sharing
  • personal learning environment
  • personal learning network

Networks, networks, networks

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Here are some of the things I learned via Twitter this past week.

Value creation has thus been shifting from protecting proprietary knowledge, to fostering collaboration, both within the company and beyond its boundaries, in order to help the firm participate in as broad and diverse a range of knowledge flows and thus improve its competitive position.  It is within this context that one has to consider the business value of social networks, and their impact in helping people better connect with each other, and build sustaining relationships that enhance knowledge flows and innovation.

via @bbetts -Oscar Berg: Why traditional intranets fail today’s knowledge workers

To conclude: a major reason why traditional intranets fail today’s knowledge workers is that all information they provide access to is produced with a push-based production model. This model assumes that all information resources on the intranet must be produced in advance (only serving information needs which can be anticipated) by a small subset of all available resources (employees) and that the entire body of information needs to be supervised by a few people for the purpose of controlling the message, format and/or organization of the information resources.

A Man with a PhD: Natural selection: networks & diversity

One thing to remember is that true and pure natural selection would tend to drive genes to the best possible – the most fit – actually removing diversity. To a first approximation, selection would seem to produce a single set of genes that are ‘best’ evolved for a particular environment. Any other set of genes would be less fit.

In reality, selection is often not that fine, there are a range of different gene products that can probably be almost equally fit and most biological systems are designed to support a wide range of diversity.

It’s not the size of your network that matters but how you engage folks of diverse opinion & practice – Neighbor Networks

This argument implies that one cannot hope to get ahead of others just by finding the “right” network. “People think of their network as something they can expand, or buy a new version of, or change in some dramatic way as if it were clothing that you can take off and put on,” Burt says. A network does not give added competitive advantage independent of your effort. Rather, it allows a person to become more skillful at managing various connections so that he gains greater competitive advantage. It is what a person does with his network that counts.

via @jhagel – Generating Serendipity: diversity; sharing; network weaving; provocation

Serendipity is the emergence of desirable novelty from a chance encounter, the discovery of something wonderful, unknown and unpredictable. It is the act of unexpected cross-pollination, the seed of something new.

Much of lasting value comes into being serendipitously. How many of the most amazing things that have happened to you have happened because of an overheard word, an accidental encounter, a connection made by a friend? Serendipity is the antithesis of control.

Connections drive innovation [and learning] by @timkastelle

The moral of the story is simple. Connections drive innovation. We need input from people with a diversity of viewpoints to help generate innovative new ideas. If our circle of connections grow too small, or if everyone in it starts thinking the same way, we’ll stop generating new ideas. And then we’ll forget things like how to make a fishing hook. Or a trident missile.

via @charlesjennings – Paris stages ‘festival of errors‘ to teach French schoolchildren how to think

“I’m a scientist. I had nothing to do with education. But then my six-year-old boy went to school and his teacher told me, ‘He’s a nice kid, but he asks too many questions,'” said François Taddei, the author of an education report published last year for the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

“This is the problem of the French system,” he added.

“You are supposed to know the right answer. You are not supposed to express your own opinions or ask questions.”