Knowledge-at-work

Beliefs around learning

If you are involved with KM, you likely will have reflected on the connection(s) between learning and knowledge.

Here are thoughts from Anecdote shared in their monthly newsletter:

• people don't think they've learned anything until they've reflected on what happened.The learning comes at this point of reflecting not in the act of work in many cases.
• learning is social—it benefits from conversations. Learning richness increases as multiple perspectives are described, discussed, challenged and explored.
• learning is social, intellectual and emotional. It's no coincidence that we are better able to recall stories (our experiences) when they are attached to strong emotions.
• we learn through experience, and experience is shared through stories. I remember spending 2 months researching the geomorphology of macro-tidal rivers. I then spent six weeks in the Ord River in Western Australia only to learn that it is never as clear as the diagrams in the text books make it out.
• we learn best when there is a reason to learn—I think this is an important aspect of sense-making. We are awash with experience and information and we only notice things we care about.
• we get better at what we learn through practice. It takes about 10 years the be proficient, perhaps expert, in a practice. But action without reflection through conversation doesn't build proficiency.
• we all have different learning preferences and ways of interacting.I invited everyone to arrange themselves along an imaginary line. At one end were those people who would prefer to avoid technology, even the phone was something they didn't love using. At the other end were the techno-maniacs who love using blogs, wikis, and a raft of other web 2.0 gizmos.

Here are my learning thoughts:

The importance of cohorts

You may obtain information from the 'sage on the stage' a book or CBT, but you learn on the playing field, where your identity is forged, your opinions are tested and validated, values mediated, beliefs formed and assumptions are tested. Social mediation is key, and this is where cohorts help you make meaning and gain understanding. We own a social brain and apprenticeship is the natural way to learn. We need cohorts and community to build a shared repertoire of key concepts, evolve tools, craft language, gather stories and highlight sensitivities. 

Sharing meaning

Shared meaning is the difference between personal knowing and acquired understanding or social knowledge. This is the power behind language and communication. Points to the essential role of sharing critique, alignment and reflection in learning. Meaning is established through patterning, emotions play a key role. To make meaning explicit and ensure alignment, it is essential to test assumptions.

Crafting distinctions

Creating new knowledge comes from bringing forth new worlds, from agreeing and naming subtle signs, symptoms, patterns, making the connections and perceptions that enable alternative courses of action. Mostly this happens as a natural byproduct of conversations within groups and is recognized by the issues, the values, the beliefs and in the language of a community of practice. Often encoded in the 'slang' and group talk that sets the community apart. Distinctions are closely related to ontologies and to making meaning. They contribute a large measure to identity.

Deep learning, identity and dialog

Knowing is an act of participation, knowledge is more a living process that acquisition of an object, it is closely tied to who we are and emerges in dialog or through repetition, copy and practice. Lasting knowledge is knowing more than definitions, concepts and relationships, it is feeling what is right in a particular situation, requires personal engagement, passion and a community to consult with. Learning and knowledge require an ecology to thrive and evolve.

Generative learning

New insights arise at the boundaries between communities, connections and reflections, are key to synthesis and access to new ideas. The learning potential of an organization lies in maintaining a tension and a balance between core practices and active boundary processes. Identity and meaningfulness are the wellspring of creativity, sharing is a natural by-product of belonging. Learning is more about connection and community than content

Creative abrasion, high challenge and safety

To change your mindset you need to raise the energy levels, increase the attention and focus. This is difficult to achieve in a placid conversation. Exposure to alternative assumptions and frames, some strong advocacy, deep dialog, emotional engagement and a pure clash of ideas help to unsettle, and resettle meaning. Prior beliefs are difficult to change using classroom instruction and teaching as telling. Taken too far, increasing stress levels will reduce the learning opportunity, there is a fine balance to be maintained.

Boundary hopping and busting prototypes

The sweet spot for learning is at the boundaries of individual and community. Here you are less sure and secure , core rigidities are lower, you are flooded with new thought forms, alternative analogies and metaphors. Making connections is key and often follows trusted relationships.

You may wish to read two books covering new ways to think about learning:

George Siemens - KnowingKnowledge, November 2006

Jay Cross - Informal learning, October 2006

Please share your learning insights.

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'.

Knowledge managers

The knowledge manager may well be an endangered species as the KM meme fades and firms rush to stay abreast of complexity, social networking and chaos theory.

So exactly what did a knowledge manager do and what were they responsible for?

Strategic issues related to individual and group networking & learning, business intelligence, customer relationships, intellectual assets and agility.

Influencing, building and changing organizational culture, practices and policies to enable greater innovation, cultivating awareness, knowledge sharing and creativity.

Introducing advanced practices to improve knowledge creation and sharing, such as, tools for building a corporate memory, enabling virtual forums, stewarding communities of practice, assisting with informal learning. Helping create climate that fostered collecting good practices, documenting pitfalls and sharing heuristics.

Knowledge managers are expected to engage and mentor executives in the finer points of KM - creating open space, building trust, showing a tolerance for learning via errors, helping with hiring qualities that promote knowledge flows.

Depending on circumstances, you may be involved with knowledge audits and mapping, development of taxonomic policy, decisions on software procurement and adoption and will be expected to lead the firm in working with tacit knowledge assets.

There are many more roles and competencies:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_management

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KM_concepts

IMO these imperatives have not gone away - if anything they have become more important as firms struggle to understand web2.0, deal with the ever decreasing half-life of knowledge and faster decision cycles, battle global competition and rising customer expectations and power.

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Thoughts?

KM practices

Which KM practices are the most important in your opinion?

I've been giving this some thought and have this short list:

Facilitate conversations - this is where connections are made, trust is built, new knowledge emerges. Fostering deep dialog, creating a meeting space to surface issues, heighten awareness, exchange ideas, increase understanding and deepen learning is a critical first step. This can develop into a community of practice, an informal center of excellence, a Q&A forum or a below the radar think-tank.

Enable connections - publish contact lists, attribute content, include informal channels such as IM, cell phone, Skype and e-mail addresses.  Find ways to make people aware of the skills, interests, experiences and networks of others.  Being aware of the competencies and backgrounds of possible team / group members is a critical part of making KM happen.

Support knowledge sharing - get leaders to walk the talk, seed forums with 5-7 active contributers, encourage self-publishing via blogs & wikis. This is not about providing incentives, but about tapping the intrinsic interests, learning desires and identity building  aspirations of staff.

Provide mentors - to help with technology, make social introductions, encourage content development and assist with establishing conversations & connections. There is nothing more powerful than having a trusted confidant who can show you the ropes, help you avoid cultural clashes, point you to accepted norms and steer you to people that matter.

Clarify meaning - help groups surface distinctions, maintain diversity and engage in creative abrasion, i.e. create a Ba. Here we are talking about applying knowledge practices to improve innovation, helping to build a common language, leveraging group communication, building and testing advanced concepts.

If you wish to move to advanced KM practices, consider forming a pattern community to capture experience, record repetitive associations and surface pitfalls to avoid.

http://kmwiki.wikispaces.com/Pattern+promises

Please notice information related activities have been left out - tagging, repositories, launching software, building search abilities, content structuring.....

I'm wondering what your key Knowledge Management practices really are?