Curiouser and Curiouser!

Curiouser and Curiouser! on organisations http://matt.blogs.it/ RSS feed for topic organisations Copyright 2006 Matt Mower Squib/0.1 self@mattmower.com self@mattmower.com en-gb You cannot make people smarter Thu, 22 Aug 2002 17:07:26 +0100 <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/">Curiouser and curiouser!</A> raises some unresolved <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/2002/08/19.html#a286">Klogging issues</A>: <UL> <LI>Klogs can overlap with existing formal systems - does klogging means that the same thing is not reported in formal way? <LI>Decentralised klogging vs. organisational trends to control.  <LI>Does klog makes it easier to control you? <LI>As klogs are not really secure, could you post anything anything sensitive? <LI>Are big-KM vendors missing the point?</LI></UL> I love this issue popping up again and again: how control and formal structures can coexist with natural informal networks. I'm not sure that I want to tackle the whole issue, but at least I want to look at the learning side of it. <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> [from my PhD proposal] Learning is best described by the metaphor you can lead horse to the water, but you cannot make it drinking, or as <A href="http://www.kessels-smit.nl/Introductie/Employees/Joseph_Kessels2/joseph_kessels2.html">Joseph Kessels</A> says you cannot make people smarter. Even in the case of formal learning an organisation does not have control over employees brain and heart, so in order to benefit from employee learning, companies have to find the way to support and encourage it without full control. The author believes that the answer lies in supporting interplay between individual and organisational needs by relating and integrating employee-driven informal learning and organisation-driven formal learning. </BLOCKQUOTE> [<A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0109961/">Mathemagenic</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » Thanks to [<A href="http://www.gurteen.com/">DG</A>] for putting me on to Mathemagenic. <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> "You cannot make people smarter."</BLOCKQUOTE> I believe this to be true.  However I also think that: <OL> <LI>Not every organisation believes that, e.g. the amount of money spent each year on training that <A href="http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&q=why+training+doesn%27t+work">doesn't work</A>.</LI> <LI>Not every organisation cares how smart it's people are (no matter how much they spend on investors in people logos)</LI></OL> All that downsizing.  All those drives for efficiency at any cost.  They have created environments of paranoia and hostility where there is no interplay between individual and organisation. My fear is that klogging will only thrive in organisations that are healthy, and that there may not be enough of them.  Or, worse, that klogging will thrive as a control mechanism imposed by insecure and fearful management.  I don't want to be a part of that.</BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000431.html A kloggers strength... Fri, 23 Aug 2002 18:44:09 +0100 Lunch break: switching from work to reflection... <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/">Curiouser and curiouser!</A> in <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/2002/08/22.html#a323">You cannot make people smarter</A>: <BLOCKQUOTE>My fear is that klogging will only thrive in organisations that are healthy, and that there may not be enough of them.  Or, worse, that klogging will thrive as a control mechanism imposed by insecure and fearful management.  I don't want to be a part of that.</BLOCKQUOTE> I don't think that klogging could be imposed: in "no trust culture" even if someone asks me what I'm thinking about, I can always say something else. If imposed, klogs can only capture formal activities, that in many cases go to all kinds of reports in any case. Klogs can turn in a new kind of reporting tool. This could be not so bad if it replaces all other reports. If we think about <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/2002/08/09.html#a253">klogs as project management tool</A>, why not to extent it to the reporting tool? Finally, I would put it broader: I don't want to be a part of unhealthy (in cultural sense) organisation. I simply wouldn't be able to realise my ambitions in this case. [<A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0109961/">Mathemagenic</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » I feel I should clarify my remark. I agree that valuable klogging activity cannot be imposed, I am worried about the darker aspects of klogging techniques as they might be employed by weak and insecure management. To paraphase a master of KM: "Remember, a Klogger's strength flows from the Force. But beware. Anger, fear, agression. The dark side are they. Once you start down the dark path, forever it will dominate your destiny." My hope is that they're all too busy giving their employees random drug tests and installing spy cameras to figure out what we're doing.</BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000451.html Would you like a test drive? Sun, 06 Oct 2002 08:44:47 +0100 <A href="http://www.ashleyit.com/blogs/brentashley/archives/000413.html">Before you get in the car, you need a driver and a map.</A>. Matt Mower comments on my altruism as a cultivated resource comments: ... I listened to a Geoffrey Moore webcast recently... [<A href="http://www.ashleyit.com/blogs/brentashley">brentashley</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » Brent makes a good point.  Much of the difficulty with business blogging is not technical in nature:  <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> It's a problem of an entrenched culture of insecurity that results in hoarding of knowledge and attempts to steer personal and corporate destinies by controlling knowledge flow.</BLOCKQUOTE> And he goes on to say: <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> Our problem is that we're trying to sell sets of fancy wheels to people who don't know how or why to drive, let alone have a map of where they're going. They get in, crash into the first obstacle they find, get out and slam the door, muttering about how this damn car can't drive straight.</BLOCKQUOTE> However I think this is a best case scenario right now.  It seems to me that only organisations with a <A href="http://www.windley.com/">Phil</A> at the helm that even go for the test drive.</BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000652.html Nonaka's knowledge transfer patterns Sun, 13 Oct 2002 20:42:41 +0100 Nonaka and technology. Last week, I ended a <A href="http://kumquat.weblogs.com/2002/08/15">blog entry</A> with the question, "Do current collaboration tools effectively facilitate Nonaka's four patterns of knowledge creation?" [<A href="http://kumquat.weblogs.com/">Kumquat's Musings</A>] <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> » Unfortunately I haven't found a reference to the Nonaka paper on-line.  Nevertheless Andy's summary is interesting.  Nonaka, he say's, identifies four interaction patterns that describe how knowledge is created/transferred in a company. <OL> <LI>Tacit - Tacit (knowledge transfer by socialization) <LI>Explicit - Explicit (formal and systematic, e.g. RTFM) <LI>Tacit - Explicit (someone documenting their knowledge, e.g. a weblog posting) <LI>Explicit - Tacit (as people read formal documentation it becomes, over time, part of their greater understanding)</LI></OL> Since tacit knowledge is, by and large, hardest to come by that makes capturing it the more interesting problem. The question in my mind is: <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> How important do most companies think it is to capture tacit knowledge?</BLOCKQUOTE> It seems to me that it is only those organizations that see themselves as learning organizations are interested in this sort of stuff and willing to invest time and money in it.  I need to find people who see the capture & transfer of knowledge as bottom-line activities. I haven't come across too many organisations like that.   Oh well, networking is a major part of my Get Clients Now! program for the coming month.  If there out there I'm going to try and find them. [The <A href="http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/journal/sj/404/marwick.html">Marwick article</A> referred to in the posting looks very interesting]</BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000720.html Can you see the light? Tue, 22 Oct 2002 23:05:17 +0100 I don't know where to start, so I'm just going to start. Keys problem in my efforts to define services for klogging have been: <UL> <LI>Blue Sky - Klogging is a better tomorrow, golden path, etc...</LI> <LI>Scattershot - Ooh it does this, and this, and this, and...</LI> <LI>Where do I fit in?  "He doesn't look like a real consultant.  Quick! Don't let him get away!"</LI></UL> Well I've seen the light ladies and gentlemen.  In the time left to me, before the great job in the sky beckons, my approach shall be: <UL> <LI>Klogging as an applied business tool.  How much money will this save you today, tomorrow, this week, next week</LI> <LI>1 problem at a time</LI> <LI>I am providing consultancy, implementation and product.  I may not look like a consultant but I know how many beans make 5.  Also this is a non-existant market, there's nobody else doing this stuff to make me look bad.</LI></UL> Only when I've got some success from this approach will I broaden it out, leveraging case studies and satisfied customers.  Sound sensible? I'm open to suggestions about what people think is the most fertile ground to start on but my own preference right now is visbility.  I choose this because it is: <UL> <LI>a recognised problem, I don't think anyone claims that visibility within companies isn't an issue for them anymore (or do they? I don't want to kid myself again)</LI> <LI>affects all companies large and small, in all markets and sectors, i.e. universally applicable</LI> <LI>klogging provides a unique and, hopefully, compelling solution</LI></UL> I'm going to try and flesh this out into a proper paper/article/story in the next couple of days but here is the main gist. Organisations have difficulty knowing what is going on both internally within their own systems and at their edges (in interaction with customers, partners, suppliers and so forth).  The tools most commonly used to address this are (in no particular order): <UL> <LI>e-mails</LI> <LI>mailing lists</LI> <LI>bulletins</LI> <LI>magazines</LI> <LI>news letters</LI> <LI>web pages</LI> <LI>meetings</LI> <LI>telephone calls</LI></UL> Each of these can under the right circumstance be an appropriate tool for improving visibility, but they are not a general solution and as organisations have discovered they have many shortcomings and pitfalls.  In short they don't address the real problem. The issues I have identified are: <UL> <LI>Asynchronous / Synchronous</LI> <LI>Passive / Interruptive</LI> <LI>Self-archiving / Self-destructing</LI> <LI>Lateral / Hierarchical</LI> <LI>Deep / Opaque</LI> <LI>Public / Secret</LI> <LI>Connected / Disconnected</LI> <LI>Matrix / Linear</LI></UL> There may be more formal, well known terms for each of these, and I will explain more later to allow people to guide me.  It may also be that there is considerable overlap here.  But what I've tried to do is think about the various attributes of the problem and solutions and come up with axes that describe them and allow judgements to be made. In my opinion, for improved visibility, the left hand choices are important and the right hand choices lead to solutions that, whilst they may be effective in specific cases, are generally sub-optimal. It is also my opinion (although this may be self-fulfilling prophecy at work) that k-logging fulfills all of the left hand choices. Hopefully I will get enough down tomorrow for you to judge for yourselves. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000765.html Contributing to an intranet Fri, 29 Nov 2002 10:59:59 +0000 I'm trying to come up with more models for thinking about communication.  I came up with a question: What affects my contributions?  And some attributes of an answer: <UL> <LI>inertia - how hard is it for me to make a contribution</LI> <LI>reward - what do I get in return for contributing</LI> <LI>value - how much use can be made of my contribution</LI></UL> A powerful intranet system makes it easy for people to contribute, gives them a direct return on investment and allows what they have added to be re-used in as many ways as possible. Typically an employee can contribute via: <UL> <LI>e-mail</LI> <LI>bulletin board / discussion list / group mailbox</LI> <LI>document management system</LI> <LI>database</LI></UL> A cursory examination of these options follows: e-mail <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> It is very easy to write e-mails but often harder to know who to send them to for maximum value.  They often go unacknowledged, its very hard to tell if they've had the desired impact and it's increasingly hard to know if and how to re-use the content of an e-mail.  Also with the quantity of e-mail people receive these days I think the law of diminishing returns is at work.  More e-mail (even better e-mail) isn't going to make things any better.</BLOCKQUOTE> bulletin board <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> On the face of it bulletin boards and other discussion groups work very well.  However as long time users will attest they have many significant drawbacks.  The first is that it is very hard to keep on track as an initial discussion widens out in collaboration.  Inevitably people look to take the traffic "elsewhere".  Popular discussion groups can get croweded very quickly which is a curse and a curse.  A crowded group can intimidate new comers and makes it harder for members to find what they are interested in.  A corrolary of this is that it soon becomes impossible to find anything for re-use.</BLOCKQUOTE> document management system <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> These days web-based document management systems (which all call themselves knowledge management systems in the hope you won't know the difference) tend to be pretty easy to use.  As ways of storing and indexing large collections of documents they work very well, but they often fail to solve the underlying problems of managing an organisations knowledge.   This is because, often, the knowledge isn't in the formal documentation. Example:  I'm an engineer working for a company who make handheld wireless workstations.  I acquire through on-site testing some valuable knowledge about a problem with making our equipment work in their situation.  I could write this up in a document and post it in the DMS but more likely I will put it in a notebook or on a post-It or just tell my colleagues about it. This kind of micro-knowledge (micro-content) is often where the useful knowledge lies and it can be very hard to get at if your systems all work at the macro level.</BLOCKQUOTE> database <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> What company doesn't have at least a CRM system today?  Supposedly the channel for storing all information.  But if you take my previous example where does that knowledge go?  It's not information about the customer (at least not really).  And that assumes that your CRM system is flexible enough to handle unexpected data.  Most either aren't or are never properly implemented. Databases are often cumbersome, unfriendly and inflexible.  Also where information goes in, it is often much harder to get it out again in any sensible form (another Access report anybody?).</BLOCKQUOTE>   As I have written before I do believe that all of these systems have a valuable role to play in building a successful intranet, however they address only the macro level and much of the knowledge an organisation needs to gain an understanding of itself and a competitve advantage over it's peers is micro-content. What is required is a communication medium that has low inertia, rewards the constributor and builds shared value.  Answer: weblogs, or more accurately knowledge-logs. More later. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000915.html A context for k-logging success Tue, 25 Feb 2003 13:43:22 +0000 I've been spending some time thinking about how to employ k-logs in a business and, in particular, in a business which does not primarily see itself as a "knowledge business" but as a production business.  I'm thinking about the challenges of getting people who don't routinely use computers as part of their work to not only become part of a KM project but to thrive in it. It's probably no surprise that I think k-logs are a good idea but, in the 6 months or so since I took up this sword I haven't really seen the practical evidence of this.  Where are the big deployments?  Where are the articles and papers? I think k-logs struggle when it comes to practical implementation because, good idea or not, they do not stand on their own.  They struggle without a wider context in which they can make sense.  This leads me back to a question I have mulled before which is about the boundary between k-logs and the legacy intranet. k-logs, to me, should be the living, beating heart of an organisation.  The posts racing from aggregator to aggregator are like the blood pumping around the organism, connecting parts together and ensuring they are healthy.  But if these posts are not to be ephemera then they have to go somewhere, they have to gain a context within the wider organisation and it's memory systems. I predict that successful k-logging will require an interface between k-logs themselves and more established systems & groups.  At the moment I think the 3 most likely candidates are: <UL> <LI>Communities of Practice</LI> <LI>Best Practice Programs</LI> <LI>After-Action-Reviews</LI></UL> Each of these has a review element and a sense of producing something in aggregate from what they review.  I think it will be these groups who will mine an organisations k-logs and make best use of them.  And it will be participation in such groups that will create loops back into the heart of the organisation, keep it connected, keep it alive. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001204.html