Loose hierarchies for knowledge management

Posted on Wednesday, 10 April 2013 by Harold

Knowledge-sharing practices are highly contextual. I have seen this with clients in multiple locations, across national borders. This makes sense when you consider that knowledge sharing is deeply personal as well as social, so it reflects the larger culture and the particular workplace. A 2011 study (via David Gurteen) concluded that even in the same company, knowledge management practices are different (note that the authors define Ba as shared context in motion).

Each subsidiary, although part of the same corporate group and including the same functional teams, displayed very different patterns of KM and organizational features. The regression model showed that different organizational factors – especially Ba, work styles, and organizational control – were responsible for the resulting KM profiles of each local office: formal Ba in the U.S. office, clear objectives in the French subsidiary, formal Ba in the Chinese branch, and a self-directed vision in the Japanese head office.

Source: A study of knowledge management enablers across countries, by Rémy Magnier-Watanabe, Caroline Benton & Dai Senoo, in Knowledge Management Research & Practice (2011) 9, 17–28 (PDF).

This need for contextual knowledge management practices aligns with the advice of Snowden & Kurtz who recommend “loose hierarchies & strong networks” in complex environments, as shown in this image by Verna Allee.

So, for large organizations, not only will no single technology platform meet all your knowledge-sharing, collaboration and cooperation needs, but no single approach will either. While there is a need to create a balance between individual and enterprise
knowledge-sharing tools, there is also a need to balance the needs of the central organization with those of external locations. In our distributed economic world, this is workplace reality.

With loose hierarchies and strong networks as a guiding principle, departments need to have the ability to try out different KM practices and see how they work in their unique contexts. Of course, this flies in the face of standardization of processes and the search for best practices that have been drilled into management heads for the past century. For knowledge management today, industrial management just won’t cut it.

Play, explore, converse

Posted on Tuesday, 9 April 2013 by Harold

Was the dominance of morality usurped by responsibility at the beginning of the industrial era? (Nine Shift: Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3).

In the Industrial Age of the 20th century, you didn’t have to be of good moral character to work in the factory. But you did have to be responsible. And so teachers in the 20th century schoolhouse and college taught (still teach) responsibility. And by that teachers mean specific behaviors.

Those behaviors are now obsolete. They made sense in the factory … But not in the virtual office.

As we moved from morality to responsibility one hundred years ago, are we now shifting from responsibility to creativity in the network era? Just last week a creative teenager sold his mobile start-up to Yahoo! for $30 million. If creativity, and especially any resulting innovation, is what is valued and profitable in this era, then why are we teaching and reinforcing responsibility to its exclusion?

If creativity has made responsibility obsolete, then most of our organizational tools and measurements about work and productivity may have to get thrown out. Our own notions about what is important in life and work may need to be rethought as well. We may need to give our collective cognitive trees a good shaking.

Perhaps we can learn from the edges of the economy and society, where creativity seems to be in higher supply. Take for instance the hacker, defined as “one who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations”. Here is more from The Hacker Manifesto (1986):

We explore… and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge… and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias… and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it’s for our own good, yet we’re the criminals.

Richard Stallman says hackers are much more than ‘crackers’ [security system breakers] as they are often typified in mainstream media.

It is hard to write a simple definition of something as varied as hacking, but I think what these activities have in common is playfulness, cleverness, and exploration. Thus, hacking means exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness. Activities that display playful cleverness have “hack value”.

Playfulness, cleverness, and exploration constitute essential parts of creativity as well. Like hacking, creativity requires an ongoing commitment. We cannot merely take creative time; it has to be part of our working flow. David Williamson Shaffer says that we need to make space for conversations in order to be creative.

Creativity is a conversation – a tension – between individuals working on individual problems and the professional communities they belong to.

Practices like personal knowledge management (PKM), and its potential for enhanced serendipity can give us the underlying structure to become better hackers and more creative. Behaviour change comes through small, but consistent, changes in practice. So how do you move from responsibility, to creativity, and potentially to innovation? Play, explore and converse. But first you need to build a space to practice. PKM can be your cognitive sandbox.

Making sense of complexity and innovation

Posted on Friday, 5 April 2013 by Harold

Friday’s Finds:

Gall’s Law: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system. – John Gall

@euan : “My discomfort with case studies is the inclination to force things to make sense in retrospect when they didn’t in advance!”

@Cory_Foy – “Innovation comes from slack. Slack comes from saying no. If you’re afraid of both, no startup bubble technique is going to help you.”

Deconstructing Innovation: a complex concept made simple; by @ShaunCoffey

So it is important to understand that there is no one-size-fits-all philosophy in terms of successful innovation. The one constant is that you have to be open to change and new points of view. Innovation is continuous.

Successful innovators and entrepreneurs all embrace change and the risks that they pose. In fact, innovation is the poster child of the mantra that there are no rules. Only by trying out new things, by failing, by discovering what works and what doesn’t, do you gain answers to the innovation question.

Knowledge Leadership in the Era of Convergence -via @JonHusband

In an environment where speed, access, and tools allow workers to seamlessly collaborate across time zones, store massive amounts of data, and crowdsource the answers to difficult organizational issues, organizations that trend toward openness in the knowledge management arena will be better able to use new technologies and react to cultural and business changes. This makes leaders responsible for developing an open, collaborative culture, and suggests that inspiring these attitudes toward knowledge management will have positive individual and organizational consequences.

stop talking about jobs

Posted on Thursday, 4 April 2013 by Harold

Andy McAfee reports in HBR that United Technologies is laying off workers, even though its stock is at an all time high and sales have increased by 35%.

I simply want to point out that if this example is part of any larger trend, then we cannot rely on economic growth to fix our current problems of unemployment or underemployment. Because even for individual companies, economic growth has become so decoupled from employment growth that the former goes up while the latter goes down.

I have been observing for quite some time that most work is getting automated and outsourced, while only complex and creative work remain valued, and therefore wealth-generating for those who do it. The construct of the JOB highlights this problem, because jobs are designed around work that can be copied and workers who can be replaced, but anything that can be reduced to a flowchart will be automated. Relying on the job as society’s main wealth-sharing mechanism is a major mistake in the network era, but one that politicians and many others continue to make. We are entering a post-job economy.

Part of the solution is taking control of our own professional development. Another is developing new systems of wealth exchange, such as the many new models examined at Shareable. But most importantly, we need to change our language as we discuss work, wealth, and economics. We need to stop focusing on job creation and figure out better systems of wealth redistribution for a networked society.

Productivity tools for the networked workplace

Posted on Tuesday, 2 April 2013 by Harold

* This post is sponsored by Microsoft Office 365 *

I have noticed that the Microsoft Office suite is used by pretty well every one of my clients. All of the larger organizations have and use Sharepoint. These tools are ubiquitous in business and government, so I have agreed to write a few articles on how they can be used to improve work productivity. Since these are the tools that are already in place in many organizations, it might make sense to understand how best to use them.

One of the gaps between enterprise work and more open and serendipitous cooperation is a lack of ways to quickly connect to others in the organization. Email and telephone are often the only choice. Instant messaging may be available, but is not used intensely, like email is. A Forrester research report - The Total Economic Impact Of Microsoft Office 365 Midsize Customers – describes these collaboration needs of mid-size companies:

“Everyone being able to work in a collaborative environment is essential. We can work smarter and fewer hours.”
“We are a knowledge company. IT has to make us more productive, smarter.”
“Without Lync we have no mechanism for communicating across the company – except phones and shouting. Lync will be a huge improvement in terms of time savings.”

The addition of Lync has made a significant improvement to the Microsoft suite, according to several of my clients. I developed my enterprise social network tool analytical framework at the request of a client who wanted to know what mix of platforms and tools was optimal for collaboration and knowledge sharing. From their perspective, Lync was a game-changer.

I continued to refine this analytical framework with two more clients over the past year and all have found it useful. The slide presentation below looks at Microsoft’s Office 365 suite from that perspective. Please note that I do not use any of these tools myself. The analytical framework is my creation but the perspective on each tool were based on client user feedback and other third-party sources. I would suggest doing your own analysis of all your enterprise collaboration and productivity tools, based on the framework.

Office 365 productivity tools from Harold Jarche

In the slide presentation, one conclusion offered is that content creation is a way to capture knowledge, even though we know that we can only “capture” a small part of our implicit knowledge by making it more explicit. Conversations and the ongoing narration of work must still be supported. This again shows the gap that Lync is filling; it provides opportunities for impromptu knowledge sharing. As the content creation tools of the Microsoft Office suite become more networked, it will be easier to connect cooperative and collaborative behaviours.

For those who are interested, here is the background of the framework. Ian McCarthy’s honeycomb of social media was an initial inspiration, showing how one could quickly and graphically portray differences between social media platforms. The Altimeter Group’s 2012 report on making the business case for enterprise social networks provided more detail on what happens inside organizations. Finally, Oscar Berg’s digital workplace concretized gave a good picture of what people-centric, service-oriented businesses should look like.

The seven facets identified by Oscar Berg align with some general digital competencies that are necessary for connected knowledge workers everywhere. These also align with the PKM framework that can support the flow of cooperative and collaborative work in a coherent organization.

In my next post in this series, later this month, I will discuss the digital competencies described in Slide #6.

Sharing openly
Communicating effectively in communities & networks
Contributing to knowledge networks
Creating content to share inside & outside the organization
Coordinating tasks with minimal time & effort
Conducting & participating in meetings to maximize impact & minimize wasted effort
Quickly finding people best suited to solve a given problem

Disclosure: This post was sponsored by Office 365 but I retained editorial control and take full responsibility for what is posted. Contract writing is one of the ways I make my living.

Notes on social learning in business

Posted on Monday, 1 April 2013 by Harold

We just finished a month-long workshop at the Social Learning Centre which involved over 50 participants from many countries. The workshop was on social learning in business, and followed on from previous ones like the PKM workshop on individual, informal learning, and the Training to Performance Support workshop on tools that can often replace instruction. This was my last in a series that Jane Hart and I have done over the past year. Jane is conducting an April workshop on enterprise community management and sign-up ends this week. Jane and I also have a Summer Camp scheduled as our final joint offering, and it will cover a wide variety of topics, to be announced prior to starting in June.

The core themes in this workshop were around social aspects of learning at work: narrating our work for others; communities of practice & understanding networks. Social learning can happen in both formal instruction and informally. Many of the structures and systems that can support informal learning can also help social learning. While not interchangeable terms, they can often apply to the same activity. For example, when I learn informally in a social network, it is social learning as well. However, reading a book alone may be informal, but not social. As Albert Bandura wrote; “most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action.” This is most often outside of formal instructional activities.

People learn socially at work, which is why organizational design is so important. We automatically ask those close to us for help, but they may not be the best people to ask. Social enterprise tools can help expand our social learning networks. Understanding that social learning is natural, we should look at ways to support and enhance it.

Training and instruction are all about control, with curricula, sanctioned learning objectives, and performance criteria. This works when the field of study is knowable. But fewer fields remain completely knowable, if they ever were. Many institutions and professions have been built on the premise that knowledge can be transferred in some kind of controlled process. If you question that premise, you threaten people’s jobs, status, and sense of worth. This is why you see some violent reactions to the notion of informal and social learning having validity within organizations.

A major difference between communities of practice and work teams is that the former are voluntary. People want to join communities of practice. People feel affinity for their communities of practice. You know you are in a community of practice when it changes your practice. If the groups are mandated by management, they are work teams, or project teams etc., but not communities of practice.

“Communities of practice are groups of people who share a passion for something that they know how to do and who interact regularly to learn how to do it better.” — Etienne Wenger

For those who want to promote social learning in the workplace, start by modelling good networked learning skills. Be the example and wait for opportunities. For instance, narrate your work for others to see. Consider the Buddhist proverb; “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” Be ready to appear once their eyes are open.

Becoming comfortable with narrating your work takes time, practice and feedback. When I have worked with companies, it has taken several months for people to get comfortable with working and learning out loud. It also takes modelling of new behaviours, a gentle hand to guide, and once in a while, a bit of cajoling. I have not figured out a way to do this quickly, or without allowing time for practice and reflection. I don’t think it’s possible. That is often the problem with enterprise social software implementations. Once the initial training is over, management thinks all problems have been solved. Getting to social takes time.

No cookie cutters for complexity

Posted on Thursday, 28 March 2013 by Harold

Five years ago I noted that big consultancies were jumping on the Web 2.0 bandwagon but more nimble upstarts (like me) could now significantly engage in a conversation with our markets using our own tools, like blogs, with which we have developed a certain advanced level of expertise. Jon Husband had written a good observation on how large consultancies work:

Big firms either 1) develop standardized methodologies and practices (their business models depend upon it), or 2) if their business model does not depend upon the standardization, they will charge you a mint and a half (McKinsey?)

The organization(s) [clients] will in my opinion get better advice rooted in critical thinking and experience and focused on results, as opposed to maintaining an expensive dependency on canned rhetoric that may not be based in much experience. For example, what exactly is “Advanced” Web 2.0 technology ? Blogs with lots of colourful widgets?

Five years later, Dave Snowden makes a similar observation, sparked by a KPMG marketing brochure on “cutting through complexity”. Dave concludes:

If a consultancy firm really wants to help their clients they they should support them in living with complexity, riding its potential, avoiding reductionist approaches, engaging customer and staff in a sensing network. The trouble is that would not allow large teams of recently graduated MBA’s to reuse recipes and documents from over codified knowledge management systems.

So while we upstarts may now have a greater voice online, there is still a large demand for cookie cutter solutions. As social learning, collaboration, and even complexity become mainstream concepts, the array of products and services around them are becoming commoditized. Making a value proposition around behaviour and culture change is therefore very difficult.

I have noted in the past year clients wanting more products and fewer customized services. Some of this is due to their own difficulties in facing complexity and not having the time or energy to dig into these concepts. It’s just easier to buy a product, and nobody makes shinier products, such as case studies, than the big consultancies.

Case studies abound in business and many sell for a significant amount. But other than for general education, they’re rather useless. Each organization’s situation is not only different, it’s changing. Case studies and best practices in business are like the arbitrary subjects in our schools. They’re easy to package but don’t transfer well into real life.

Few managers ask the tough questions, like what are the underlying assumptions of how we do business and do they make sense? Are any of our practices self-defeating?

Complex problems require different thinking. In the book, Getting to Maybe, the authors say that in complex environments:

Rigid protocols are counter-productive
There is an uncertainty of outcomes in much of our work
We cannot separate parts from the whole
Success is not a fixed address [what I call perpetual Beta]

Rigid protocols are prescriptive and tell you what to do. To understand complex systems one must marinate in them, as John Seely Brown advocates. The problem with best practices is they presume simplicity, like being able to ‘cut through complexity’. The next time you pick up a report on best practices, ask yourself:

Has anything changed since this report was written?
How is my organization different from these?
Who stands to gain from the report?

Many best practices are self-evident. They’ve worked for years and address relatively simple systems. But the business issues that consume us are most likely complex. Instead of looking for best practices, take that time and money to invest in an experiment (a probe).

Beware the cookie-cutter salespeople. They abound, and are aided by marketing departments that do not have a clue about complexity. There are some real advantages in avoiding the large consultancies and going with smaller companies and free-agents. These include:

Personal relationship based on knowledge and trust
Work is usually done by senior consultants
Responsiveness and flexibility
Ability to innovate faster
Fewer costs to pass on (shareholders, marketing, advertising, bonuses)

One should never bring a knife to a gun fight, nor a cookie cutter to a complex adaptive system.

Only open systems are effective for knowledge sharing

Posted on Wednesday, 27 March 2013 by Harold

Seth Godin makes a very good point about trusting the select few to curate information, whether they be leaders, managers, certified professionals, researchers, or any other group of experts.

We have no idea in advance who the great contributors are going to be. We know that there’s a huge cohort of people struggling outside the boundaries of the curated, selected few, but we don’t know who they are.

When it comes to knowledge, we often do not know in advance what will be useful in the future. I discuss this when coaching people how to narrate their work, an essential part of encouraging social learning in the workplace. Overly editing one’s own work is similar to overly editing who does the curation of our knowledge flows. Seth Godin explains it with this graphic.

In software programming, the saying is that with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow. Or put another way, the more people who look at a problem, fewer errors will get through. In the case of enterprise knowledge-sharing, an incredibly inexact practice; with enough voices quality will emerge. Only an open system can ensure this, which is why I highlighted the knowledge sharing paradox.

When it comes to knowledge, and learning, only open systems are effective. All closed systems will fail over time, especially if discovery and innovation are happening outside that system. The question for organizational leaders is whether they think they can create an artificial, closed system that can compete with almost 3 billion people connected to that hive mind called the internet. The good news is that they do not have to. Encouraging cooperation, along with workplace collaboration, ensures more open knowledge sharing.

The knowledge sharing paradox

Posted on Sunday, 24 March 2013 by Harold

An effective suite of enterprise social tools can help organizations share knowledge, collaborate, and cooperate – connecting the work being done with the identification of new opportunities and ideas. In an age when everything is getting connected, it only makes sense to have platforms in place that enable faster feedback loops inside the organization in order to deal with connected customers, suppliers, partners, and competitors. It takes a networked organization, staffed by people with networked mindsets, to thrive in a networked economy.

Getting work done today means finding a balance between sharing complex knowledge (collaboration) and seeking innovation in internet time (cooperation).

Individual workers can develop sense-making skills, using frameworks like PKM, to continuously learn and put their learning to work. For example, they can seek new ideas from their social networks; make sense of these ideas by connecting with communities of practice; try new ideas out alone or with their work teams, and then share these ideas and practices.

But there is a major issue that gets ignored, by software vendors, managers, IT departments, and most everyone except the workers themselves. People will freely share their knowledge if they remain in control of it. Knowledge is a very personal thing. Most workers do not care about organizational knowledge bases. They care about what they need to get work done. However, if we are going to build organizational knowledge from individual knowledge-sharing, we have to connect the two.

The knowledge sharing paradox is that enterprise social tools constrain what they are supposed to enhance. Why would someone share everything they know on an enterprise network, knowing that on the inevitable day that they leave, their knowledge artifacts will remain behind? I could not imagine having this blog (AKA my outboard brain) cut off from me. I would not put anywhere near the effort I do now if someone else controlled my access to this blog.

The elephant in the room is human nature. Enterprise knowledge sharing will never be as good as what networked individuals can do. Individuals who own their knowledge networks will invest more in them. I think this means that innovation outside of organizations will continue to evolve faster than inside. It may mean that the half-life of organizations will continue to decrease, as more nimble businesses continuously emerge to compete with incumbents. Whoever creates an organizational structure that bridges the individual-organizational knowledge sharing divide may have significant business advantages.

Friday’s Finds #189

Posted on Friday, 22 March 2013 by Harold

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via social media during the past fortnight. My Friday’s Finds are a collection of what I have found of interest but have not blogged about. I have been curating these collections for several years, this one is the 189th.

“If I were unemployed, I would spend my non-job hunting time learning to code. It’s a skill that can be applied in just about any field.” – Nedra Weinreich

“I think the reward for conformity is that everyone likes you except yourself.” – Rita Mae Brown, via Marcia Conner

O’Reilly Radar: GitHub gains new prominence as the use of open source within governments grows. via JP Rangaswami

When it comes to government IT in 2013, GitHub may have surpassed Twitter and Facebook as the most interesting social network.

The Atlantic: Young people are desperate for learning that is relevant … without it all being mapped for them in advance

It is no wonder my daughter wants to mess around with the guitar and the Internet and pursue some interests at a pace that doesn’t feel like the relentlessly scheduled pressure of school and structured activities. For her, the Internet has been a lifeline for self-directed learning and connection to peers. In our research, we found that parents more often than not have a negative view of the role of the Internet in learning, but young people almost always have a positive one.

Three reasons to keep the name with the knowledge – “personal” knowledge management for organizations, by Nick Milton

When you’re publishing knowledge,there are three main reasons why it’s important to keep the name of the originator attached to the piece of knowledge. Whether it is a blog post, a lesson in a database, a contribution in a call centre knowledge base, or a couple of paragraphs in a Knowledge asset, it is important tokeep the name with the knowledge.

HBR: How WordPress Thrives with a 100% Remote Workforce. via Florence Dujardin

Not all remote work is the same. To evaluate remote work as a singular idea is a paper tiger. There are many policies to choose from and those choices matter. Managers of remote workers at older companies need to make adjustments to enable remote workers to thrive, especially during a trial period when everyone is experimenting and learning what will work for them. But to try remote work without making any allowances or adjustments is foolish. Any progressive idea can be made to fail if the people in charge don’t support it.

The best ever review of standing desks why and what to buy from Wirecutter. via Robert Paterson. Here is my new standing desk