Knowledge-at-work

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?

Making connections!

Louis Suarez has bestowed the dubious honor upon me by tagging me in his recent post. I notice others have beaten me to the post and thus contributed to the propagation of this meme - nothing more powerful than asking a blogger to reflect on themselves!

What others may not know (or care to know?) about me:

My introduction to expert systems (hence KM) came during a visit to Saasveld South Africa in January 1985 by Professor Tony Starfield He talked about modeling decisions and capturing expert heuristics - a transformation on 01/13/1985 that changed my thinking forever.

Roughly 80% of my personal memory is still available via the Web Archive. We leave larger footprints than we ever imagine!

We have a very international family - daughter-in-law from Japan, son-in-law from Zimbabwe.

My roots are in ecology - forestry, soil science and geomorphology - now I make high tech carbon fiber bicycle components for Zipp, working on RFID, responsible for web site management, podcasts and internet sales.

I met Nancy White way back in 1998, Louis  Suarez in 2006 and  Patrick  Hindert in 2001, all virtually before we  connected f2f.

Tagged:  my KM  mentors:  Verna Allee,  Etienne Wenger, Philippe Baumard,  George von Krogh and Edwin Hutchins.

Reflecting on corporate memory

Sharing via explicit, evolving documentation is receiving more attention as wikis and blogs move into the enterprise. Let's take a deeper look:

Why and how does explicit knowledge sharing make a difference?

1. Reflection: in the fast and furious pace of f2f there is no time for deep reflection. An explicit documented exchange gives you the opportunity to review without the pressures imposed of 'thinking on your feet'. Many of our insights come from making connections and changing our internal models. There is something about 'seeing the text' that helps here. Perhaps it is the very process of moving thoughts from the brain to your finger tips as you type that does it?

2. The Record: so often we forget the bits and pieces that do not matter on their own, but when presented in context, when connected or experienced together, can deliver magic. Having a record you can return to, that reminds you of commitments, resurfaces tacit ideas and helps with synthesis is a major help. Often my clients find it is not the actual text that is important, it is the associated ideas and the insights that crop up and pop up that make this worthwhile.

3. Getting in deep: most groups, teams or communities of practice do not take the time to dig down to the differences that really matter. They gloss over assumptions, meld or skip different mental models, do not make the effort to clarify terms or wrestle with distinctions. Using language to 'bring forth another world' is an advanced skill that is enhanced by asynchronous virtual exchange. This approach can surface vision and build alignment that is often not easy face to face.

4. Helping novices: the biggest hurdle new folk face is understanding why: things are done this way, why we believe xyz, why we say abc. A written record (summarized at strategic intervals) goes a long way to bridging the gap between old timers and newbies. Conversations are a lot like stories, after reading through an on-line discussion, you have a different feel and appreciation for people, their beliefs, their interests, drivers, fears and their values.

5. Communication: how often have you not wished we had recorded the reason or taken notes of the other things we talked about? Having a sustained practice of recording the context behind key decisions, helps to spread the word, surface new connections & ideas, test assumptions, gives the group a decided leverage and advantage.

Issues

• Capturing ideas, thoughts, context and rationale on the fly
  
• Adding and enabling notification & interactivity (connecting and annotation)
• Moving seamlessly between structured formalizations and informal conversation / critique
• Using the repository to elicit and capture evolving insights (idea generations)
• Validation, weeding, summarization, encouraging engagement, creative abrasion & critique
• Navigation and intuitive access
• Integration of news with archival functionality
• Making forward links, i.e. from existing documents to new stuff.

The key to building a corporate memory, is not the content, not the review and 'editing' process, not the structure, ontology or indexing, not the meta-data and the search facility - it is the informal affordance(s) that permit or allow access and empower annotation.

Any repository that does not enable dialog, promote awareness, encourage back-channel connections, make it easy to connect to the source person, push notifications or foster diversity of opinion and offer affordances for annotation, is unlikely to survive.

What we need is explicit conversations.

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?