Knowledge-at-work

Informal learning - the root of KM?

Been reading through Jay Cross's new book - "informal learning - rediscovering the natural pathways that inspire innovation and performance" during the holiday break.

Way more learning happens in the coffee room than the classroom, but firms continue to spend way more on formal training than informal learning - there is a huge disconnect right there. The theme is similar in KM - formal structured tools, top-down mandates, ROI and the smells of project management dominance, do little to enhance agility, awareness, creativity, shared understanding and meaning - which add the real value.

Jay talks about unblended learning, emergence, grokking, envisioning, unconferencing, connecting, conversation, community, web2.0 and JDI (just do it). He makes the point that classes are dead, that every learner needs to cultivate an ecology, share via voicing, communicate using stories and build common text by collaborative editing (wikis).

Formal learning is like riding a bus, it goes, starts and stops when & where someone else decides (bus driver and urban transport committee) - informal learning is then like riding a bicycle, you choose the time, route and destination.

Jay has written this timely book in the form of short stories and vignettes, recounting his experiences and perspectives. I did not find much new stuff, although there are many interesting examples and truths, but Jay managed to hit the high spots so often, I was nodding in agreement as I read along. Clearly we have to assume responsibility for our own awareness, learning and critical inquiry, Jay neatly illustrates the tools, hints at the practices (which need more refinement) and paints the landscape.

http://informl.com/

On a different note:

I really like this distinction by JSB around the difference between learning to 'be' and learning 'about', which I feel gets at the core of the quest for informal learning - It is a new individual orientation that we need to master the changing nature of knowledge.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.04/learn.html 

and his reflections on stolen knowledge

http://www2.parc.com/ops/members/brown/papers/stolenknow.html

So when last did you reflect on your informal learning practice(s)?

Commutation or factoring? in S2

The decision to commute or factor is simple or complex depending on how deep you dig and where you stand!!

Through my partner Patrick Hinderd, I've been involved in the S2 (structured settlement) industry for the past 6 years. This is a complex legal area, ripe for the application of KM practices.

The recent, 12/25/06 release of a paper by  Rob Wood calls into question the legality and economics of Insurance Companies that seek to 'factor' their issued structured settlement agreements through  commutation, as this may violate IRC Section 130(c) that prohibits acceleration.

There is a fine line between 'acceleration' and the legal safe harbor afforded by IRS 5892 that merits a deeper look at assignments, 'automatic' commutation and potential conflicts between State and Federal laws. This is an area that clearly cries for clarification via concept mapping.

What say you?

 

Reworking k representation

Knowledge representation is complex, confusing, difficult, emerging and evolving - So how do we deal with it?

What is k representation?

Ad hoc sketches, informal, qualitative and physical models, scenario construction, concept maps, rule sets, structured text, voice and video recordings all serve as representation, reflecting the expectations and experience of their creators, they connect collaboration to future use. They serve a dual role: (a) to facilitate design and critique and (b) to serve as the holder for the product to be, they are affordances in design, which they can enhance or inhibit.

Representations, clarify, extend, complete and move unique experiences and abstract ideas toward the essential and typical. Representations are physical, tangible and material, they allow ideas and experience to have an independent existence in an externalized form, they help to capture emergent thought. Like a lump of clay, a representation is tangible and tactile, it can be pointed to, passed around, played with, reshaped and stored. It takes thought experimentation one step further, eliciting new ideas.

On the formal side representations can be used for inference, in reasoning and as symbols, think rule sets, cases, predicate logic, spatial reasoning.

Representation as container

Boundary objects (concept maps, ontologies, source documents) serve as a vehicle, container and carrier, for ideas and meaning (reification). When a representation crosses (community) boundaries, there is often a loss of meaning and context, which is counter-balanced by an opportunity for new negotiations, different views and altered meaning. This points to the importance of establishing rationale & context in use or practice, an essential non-represented aspect associated with any formalism. All representations are situated in use. An important aspect of a memory object is its trajectory, i.e. the consequences of later use.

Capturing knowledge?

We use stories, cases, tags, metaphor, rules, heuristics, diagrams, patterns, templates, FAQs, lessons learned, learning histories...... what we then capture may be information rather than knowledge - if our key knowledge is tacit, embedded, emergent, present as a flow rather than a store, requires continual interaction and negotiation, is situated and distributed. No representation can stand on its own, we need an appreciation of the setting as situatedness, is ubiquitous, subtle and mostly represents a context that is just 'below our radar'.

Annotation (in the widest sense) is emerging as the forgotten stepchild of e-Learning and knowledge creation. This goes way beyond appending PosIt notes, writing in the margin or sequential replies to the editor; to collaborative writing & editing, refractoring, annealing text, awareness, pull notification and joint work at the artifactual level. Annotation is as much about continual 'access to edit your words', i.e., changing from serial static publication to continual revisiting and revising the script, as it is about telling your cohorts to come and 'see', comment, change and interact. These two aspects,: (a) empowerment to change another's text, and (b) unintrusive notation must join the representation dance together.

• Hargadon & Sutton, HBR May/June 2000, 157-166, talk about keeping ideas alive by encapsulating them in prototypes, metaphor, collecting and playing with junk. Stories are recognized as important representation for conveying values and meaning.

Collaborative concept mapping is a useful way to capture, refine and extend ideas and to explicate relationships. There are some interesting tools emerging as part of web2.0 that cover this.

There is no single formalism that is optimal under all circumstances, so be aware of these attributes when you select a way to represent knowledge - rather think in terms of a mix - a representation ecology :

• Do I need to capture values, context and allow for a flexible 'translation'? - stories, analogy, metaphor
• Will I make use of formal (automated) reasoning? - rules, predicate logic, cases
• Is it important to capture emergent thoughts? - wiki, open-space, sketch walls, PosIT notes & white-board, digital audio / visual recorder
• Do we need flexibility to gather and arrange emergent stuff? - index cards, white-boards, tags
• Is context and sequence important? - patterns, flow diagrams
• Are relationships and flows a key aspect? - maps, networks, concept mapping
• What type of knowledge will be involved? - declarative, procedural, inherited, inferential, temporal...

How then do you capture knowledge?

 

Knowledge sharing - a re-think

Knowledge sharing is the primary, most basic knowledge practice - without a sharing ethos, much of KM promise fails. So what exactly is knowledge sharing all about?

It starts with a perception of self-worth, a feeling that you have something to offer, something of value to add or a new idea to present. This confidence is closely tied to your identity and the reason why trust, relationship and reciprocity are the key to enabling knowledge flows.

How can we share?

There are formal avenues such as lessons learned, after action reviews, learning histories, project reviews, meeting notes and more. Of equal, (perhaps greater) value, are the less formal exchanges such as mentoring, coaching, copying, observing, ethnography, dialog and the proverbial water cooler conversations where heuristics are swapped, stories get told, exceptions are handled and solutions are  given or explored.

Have you considered these practices?

Sharing expertise as patterns

Patterns focus on solutions to repetitive issues or combination of forces and store valuable experiences in a very compact representation. Writing patterns encourages negotiation of value and meaning, pattern names give fast access to useful knowledge and help to clarify communication in teams. The problem with re-invention is often not a lack of communication but the lack of an appropriate medium for transferring key knowledge. Patterns are artifacts, not theory laden constructs, and are not tied to any particular discipline or methodology. Their value comes from social consensus and trial by reuse.

The blackboard: a shared information space

Consider the wall map in a busy 'war room' with its colored pins showing spatial patterns, remember the blackboard (now it's more likely to be white) with a to-do list, the current concerns and issues or useful contacts.

• The blackboard is an affordance promoting self-organization, short term coordination and memory

People, documents, meetings and other activities often serve as blackboards,  interfaces and boundary objects.

Crafting joint concept maps

Concept mapping provides a highly visual way to show relationships between core ideas. Combined with the AHP (Analytical Hierarchy Process)the maps may be used to build qualitative models, elicit gaps, test assumptions and check for consensus. The knowledge sharing advantage is to invent best practices for interpreting and annealing concept graphs. The promise of electronic whiteboards is to offer us a new way to anneal pictures rather than text. A graphic introduces spatial reasoning, allowing qualitative visual clustering, distance metrics and intuitive affinity measures.

Although it is nothing more than a feeling right now, I believe there is much value in 'seeing' how we interpret graphics, looking for ways to elicit group consensus and including diversity. Developing a practice and a language for 'looking' at graphics is an important component of knowledge building in groups.

• MGTaylor KS practice: http://www.knowherestore.com/methods/knowledgesharing.html

Sharing metaphors & stories

Sharing knowledge is comparable to sharing your lighted candle: you have the opportunity to share your flame with others who have unlit candles, increasing the visibility for everyone and losing nothing yourself or you may keep your candle to yourself and get by with a feeble flickering single candle which is eventually going to burn out anyway. By sharing the fire with others, we enable others to keep the fire going and grow it, benefiting everyone.

Stories are a natural way we garner attention, pass along wisdom and share experiences.

Inquiry and reflection as sharing

Sharing is more than access, it is helping others make meaning and obtain understanding. Deeper sharing is possible if the domain is partitioned, the core concepts are negotiated, the environment is scanned and the feedback is shared in community. There needs to be reflection around joint meaning and reciprocity to have quality sharing.

• Denham's article: http://www.smithweaversmith.com/Ksharing.htm

Developing ontologies

Possessing a reduced, very focussed terminology, where everyone understands the meaning and applies the right term, has profound advantages for companies when they come to apply search engines, construct navigation aids, use visualization tools, implement agent technologies or index their electronic documents. Benefits: faster and more relevant retrieval, more effective communication, meaning templates promote alignment, ease mentoring, reduce training costs. Ontologies are  reuse strategies applied to language.

Sharing as commentary and annotation

Blogging where you add commentary to shared links, point to insightful remarks and ideas of other bloggers and highlight views that interest you is an emergent form of sharing. When this is combined with RSS feeds, categorization, specialist search engines and blog rings it becomes a powerful genre for sharing.

• facile annotation

So then how exactly do you share your knowledge?

Social search - KM thinking

Social search is touted as the next big thing for improving information retrieval, relevance and awareness. Let's take a look.

What exactly is Social Search?
There is no clear answer as the field is emerging and changing at a rapid pace. Here is one early definition: "..a collection of Internet wayfinding tools informed by human judgment. That judgment takes place in the form of tags, click-through activity, search history, and other actions". Source These technologies are being applied to bookmarks, images, tags, blogs, bibliographies.

Social search comes in many favors. New engines are riding the web2.0 wave making it difficult to evaluate progress in this heaving landscape.

Subscribing to a Flickr, del.icio.us, diigo or technorati tag via RSS - allows you to connect to a community, annotate, scan for recency, popularity or some rating measure as applied to posted images, bookmarks, URL links or blog posts. This brings new finds directly into your aggregator helping keep you up-to-date and raising your awareness.

Scanning or searching Digg or Wink - helps you quickly zero in on news, posts and items others have rated as interesting, worthwhile or can be used for finding experts.

Social search engines such as Eurekster, Prefound, Searchles,  Gravee, Collarity, Zimbio,  .... claim to use collaborative filtering, relevance rankings, community activity & behavior, 'collections', unique ranking scores to improve search returns, provide a 'personal touch', guide inquiry and add 'meaning' to those coded search algorithms the big boys use.

Affordances
What do we need to make social search really work?

• Dedicated community - people who share your interests, are sincere, active, honest and helpful - not always easy to find and maintain.
• Visual help and tools to refine a search - Quintura looks interesting with their interactive keyword clouds.
• Permanent URL - so individual searches can be stored, shared and updated.
• Ranking or scoring mechanism - simple but intelligent enough to prevent obvious spamming and gaming.
• RSS feeds - so you are alerted when rankings change, a repeated search yields new findings or friends provide annotations.
• An intuitive back-channel and community directory - to converse around results, rankings and relevance.
• Critical mass - there is a tipping point when social search offers greater value, improved relevance and increased awareness - no single engine is there yet.

So is your search social- yet?

Perennial KM issues

What are some of the perennial KM issues business firms are dealing with?

• How to speed learning, increase awareness and share experiences.  With an ever deceasing half-life of knowledge , just keeping up has become a major corporate imperative. Sure we have improved search engines, more stuff on the web and many ways to make connections, but the difficulty is making sense and finding people really 'in-the-know'. We need practical ways to build personal informal networks.
• Helping groups learn from mistakes and errors, practices to carry over learnings from project to project and improve corporate memory. We have made little progress in preventing those repeating errors, as firms grow in size and complexity, building relationships that enable knowledge flows, keeping in the loop and finding stuff becomes a huge issue. Could we improve the situation by adopting some emergent mindsets & web2.0 practices?
• Discovering opportunities and gaps in knowledge flows, improving personal networking and finding experts (in larger firms). This requires ethnographic digging, an understanding of the organization, a deep appreciation of knowledge practices and emergent affordances. Not many firms recognize or care about sub-optimal performance in this area - the results you see, are diffuse, obtuse and difficult to fit into classic ROI models.
• Providing environments, tools and processes that encourage informal learning, knowledge sharing of effective practices and stimulate innovation. Communities of practice, incentives & recognition for personal mentoring, story collection and telling, cross-domain and silo sharing can be useful, but there needs to sustained executive drive and support for this to have an impact.
• Improving competitive advantage, agility and adaption by making staff more aware, sharing the small insights, building on incremental improvements. Open space methods, creating forums and 'Ba' for trusted exchanges,  blogging and informal wikis may help. Once again top level support, legitimization and walking the talk - leading via example is the key.
• Finding tacit knowledge sources and helping to put these to work. Tacit knowledge discovery is tedious, slow and difficult - most firms shy away from allocating resources to projects dealing with intangibles, where outcomes are unknown and ROI is hard to prove. As knowledge retention becomes an issue due to workforce transitions, this problem is not going away soon.

Solutions are available - but it seems we are quite happy ignoring the issues or too busy shooting our self in the proverbial feet, content to repeat mistakes, letting others do the innovation and hoping things will 'just take care of themselves'.

Library2.0 and KM

The library 2.0 (L2) movement shares many interesting activities with KM as I understand it.

Library 2.0 covers a wide field, from tagging OPAC, IM at the reference desk, to forming virtual communities and encouraging participation in content development, policy formation and asset selection & management.

Library2.0 meme    Library 2.0 in wikipedia   Library2.0 tag in Del.icio.us

The L2 has been branded a 'movement' and passing 'fad' by some of the more traditionalists, but I believe the pioneers like Michael Casey,  Ed Vielmetti and Michael Stephens are bringing a form of knowledge ecology to the library world and doing real world KM stuff.

Here are some of the L2 heresies:

• Users can modify library services, content and policy
• Participation is more than a book on loan
• Libraries should be open source
• L2 changes, authority, strategies, orientation and mission - it is disruptive
• L2 encourages library - library collaboration, co-operation and activities - moving beyond inter-library loans

Libraries need to pay attention to ephemeral content, provide blogs and virtual community, annotation affordances, move into myspace, encourage community and conversation, move into gaming, IM and more.... oh such horror!

What comes next? Recommender systems, Amazon feeds, iPod downloads.....????

If L2 is all about participation, collaboration, community, creative content, changing the context and bringing more people into the conversation - that is core KM stuff. I see the SLA has recently started a new KM division (about time!) and hope they will be embracing much of this L2 excitement.

Do you any L2 thoughts to share?

An ecology behind the firewall

How can business best use web2.0 tools?

The trick in any community is maintaining that delicate balance between diversity, individual opinion (voicing) and collective, reflective insight, finding applicable content, having the freedom to annotate and receiving timely notification.

Encouraging personal views, commentary, opinion, critique and news, helps to ensure diversity, brings in new voices and memes, creates the space for innovative ideas. A RSS enabled blog is the ideal tool for this. Think personal control & ownership, fast learning curve, permanent pointers via unique post URLs, simplified time-based structure, ways to gather feedback via comments and trackback, auto-archiving and more.

The blog allows bottom-up inputs, promotes cross-linking, seeds connections and captures distributed 'conversations'. If the posts are tagged, searchable and available for subscription, these affordances help to promote self-organization.

At another level, we need permanent concept level aggregation, a space where we can get collective information, where current views are synthesized, best practices are made explicit, information is continually updated, sources are referenced and there are pointers to people to contact for help, mentoring, advice and consultation. Here the wiki comes into its own.

Imagine if every business built its own wikipedia!. Authoritative, applicable, crafted, aggregated multimedia content available as text, images, audio files and video.

To tie this ecology together, provide notification, annotation and back-channel links, we will need social bookmarking applications similar to flick'r and Del.icio.us. This will allow cross content notification and referencing, provide the affordance that links items on the wiki with uploaded images, interesting podcasts and points to relevant conent on blogs. The tags allow us to browse related concepts using the tag cloud, giving a broader view than keyword search and avoids the trouble associated with maintaining a strict classification system and taxonomy.

This mix of tools will help promote self-organization, bust functional silos, increase corporate agility, speed decision - action cycles and help to keep employees on the same page.

Now tell me I'm dreaming big time.

The essence of KM?

A recent spurt of posts on the Act-km list, has respondents trying to define knowledge management in a single sentence that can be grasped by a 13 year old - quite a task.

I've been intrigued by the number of respondents who have (improved, better, faster, more correct...) problem solution, decision making, competitive position... and storing stuff in knowledge bases in their replies.

The key to KM  (to me) seems to be:

increasing awareness
Helping you (or your group) become aware of new things, changed situations, emergent players that may influence the domain you have chosen to work in.

fostering learning
assisting with making novel and useful connections between concepts, improving understanding and enabling environments for making and testing new insights.

supporting sense-making
KM needs to be proactive, help surface consequences, avoid past errors, generate worthwhile & inventive alternatives.

Decisions, solutions, agility, competitive advantage and other benefits follow from sustaining a questioning environment, encouraging creative abrasion & experimentation, promoting deep dialog and allowing space for learning from mistakes.

The essence of KM then lies deeper than pragmatics, it gets close to sustaining an environment, building trust, promoting continual inquiry and testing beliefs.

Capturing corporate memory

How do you best manage corporate memory when company size exceeds tribe level?

At Zipp we are crossing that threshold where personal contacts, passage talk, and informal communication no longer work. Our tacit knowledge is not openly visible, we are re-inventing key stuff, vital lessons learned are falling through the cracks and new insights are not being effectively integrated. We find new employees starting from scratch with little access to corporate lore, no way to ask the right questions or find the people who may 'know'.

We have tried wikis, threaded forums, public folders, a home-grown CMS using MySQL and comments within our ERP system - all with little sustained success.

In common with others, we have key insights locked in e-mail threads, useful ppt presentations and Word docs hidden on multiple hard drives, process dos and don'ts that are not updated, useful heuristics that walk with staff turnover, business intelligence that is gathered but not sifted, collated or dispersed, vendor and customer feedback that gets lost or never relayed.

I'm thinking we need to tighten up on documentation, agree on a corporate taxonomy, apply meta-data, tag key files, make related content visible via maps and browsing aids, move away from keywords to essential meta-concept tags, enable & allow object annotation, notification & alerts, promote PKM and 'voicing', encourage and capture dialog, listen & report weak signals.

HOW ?