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?

 

Cycling to knowledge

• What do we really know about those knowledge practices that involve a strong cyclic component? 
• Can we alter the rate, depth, relevance and utility of knowledge generation by enhancing the cycle visibility, being mindful of our place in the cycle, changing frequency and other properties?

Idea generations and dialog turns

Would we build shared understanding faster if we supplied regular summaries or if we had strict time-limited events and interactions such as a turn taking rule in conversation and dialog? I guess the essential question is, will ideas (or memes) develop faster, be richer and go further, if we force the generations to turn over quicker? This assumes you buy into the notion of a thoughts or an idea birth, development (mutation?) and retirement / death in the first place.

What I'm trying to understand is the value of regular summarization and open group reflection to those participants already in the conversation? I can easily see the value to new arrivals and can appreciate the need to have diversity and participant churn.

For my money, it goes around the practice, value and depth of reflection, the opportunity for making new connections and surfacing novel insights afforded by good summary. What happens if the role of summarization is rotated in the group rather than falling on the single (same) shoulders each time?

OODA loops

A meta-practice in military thinking is to deliberately speed the Observe - Orient - Decide - Act  or discover - reflect - act cycle so as to disorientate and confuse an adversary. Being agile, willing to alter course, evaluating conditions and going with the flow, has proven to be useful for survival, speeding innovation and building resilience - but can it also improve intelligence and result in greater knowledge formation?

Enumerative description (ED)

Is an interesting way to capture local perceptions and experience of situations. Expert(s) gather to look for invariance across their domain and select the questions that best define the current situation. These questions are distributed in the form of a survey template. Individuals then supply answers in natural language. ED is integrated into a larger picture with work-flow, pre-processing to uncover the invariance and natural language tools to generate reports from the returned templates. The returns can be analyzed for variance (a measure of group alignment?), for longitudinal change and trends, after significant events. This human-in-the-loop may be essential for awareness & anticipation.

Argument mapping

Concept and reasoning mapping makes the rationale visible, explicit and shareable. Mapping revisions assist with making new connections, expose poor logic, capture thinking and augment group memory. The practice of visual thinking is still poorly defined. We know little about sequence, revision frequency, spatial location & clustering, influence of color, typing links and optimal ways to 'interrogate' a diagram.

Altering and imposing interventions on these cyclic activities can have far reaching cumulative consequences - changing how we may think, reason, interact, learn and decide!

Double loops on steroids.

Taxonomy & KM

The distinction between an ontology and taxonomy is subtle and often difficult to grasp. When I first started in KM, taxonomies were hot, hot,but there has been a downplay with time - perhaps in line with loweremphasis on explicit knowledge repositories?

Now I find very few clients who are willing to 'invest' in a corporate taxonomy and even fewer who have been down that road and believe they have gained value - why?

Tagging or folksonomies, have all the advantages of effective individual recall and value without the imposition and overhead of a rigid, formal process and the complex rules that go with it. However I often reflect on the hidden costs of and lost opportunities that go along with this 'open'

route.

Firms that have taken the plunge, made the investment and then followed a more traditional taxonomic approach have gained from:

• 1) sharing a common language
• 2) being able to leverage their distinctions
• 3) improved internal communication
• 4) raised the power, promise and potential of their dialog
• 5) been able to move to higher levels of complexity faster
• 6) recognized 'new' concepts more consistently
• 7) lifted the level of their awareness and 'intelligence' gathering

These are powerful, yet intangible advantages, very hard to quantify the benefits when we are talking agility, awareness and efficiencies in communication - but they are there for the taking.

Far too often KM advocates have an implicit belief in the "power' and effectiveness of taxonomy - this is ingrained in their training and practice. What they tend to miss is the synergy and flow that comes from personal connection, dialog, and ephemeral idea exchanges.

The real power of a taxonomy IMO does not arise from the elegance of classification and organization - rather it happens as a by-product of the connections, wrestling with those difficult distinctions and the joint leverage of taking language to higher level.

What are your experiences?