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?

Comments

[David Locke]

Economic utility functions favor the generalist, so your candle will be subject to a pail of water soon enough. Share if you like, but your value will diminish.

It is geek culture that asserts that knowledge must be shared. The wealthy know better.

[mcewen]

'feeble flickering single candle which is eventually going to burn out anyway.' Good metaphor, lets hope it works out.
Cheers

[David Locke]

Ontologies are all about difference. Ontologies are not about language. They are about meaning.

When two groups get together to negotiate a joint ontology, they might use the same language, but they will have to bend or clip their meaning and practice, so meaning is lost. Beyond that some meaning is not negotiable.

The construction of a shared ontology inadvertantly creates an in-crowd, a social and cultural partition. It could produce a multitude of social and cultural partitions depending on the number of base ontologies involved.

[David Locke]

There is no joint meaning. There is individual interpretation of the joint artifact, or there are upwardly bound generalities that erase the joint meaning.

When you use dialoge to think together, you have to say to yourself, that you are no longer a guy in shipping, you are a business owner. The expertise of shipping is almost irrelevant as you take on the more generalist position, so forget shipping. At some point, expertise is worthless, aka knowledge is worthless, in the face of generalist errasure. That's fine if you are a generalist, who knows nothing, has no knowledge, but not so fine if you an expert.

We are different so we do different things. I suppose by imposing the "correct" economic utility function, we could all be the same. But, in terms of knowledge, we lose, so this stance doesn't increase the value of knowledge. Instead, it increases the value of the generalist.

So don't go to school. Be a business person, aka the person that KM hawkers sell this stuff to.

[David Locke]

Joint concept maps work only when the participants are from the same domain culture and are at the same place in adopting any inbound paradigms. Otherwise, they are fiction, so many people live in these fictions, but only for so long.

Words, nodes, links, associations do not mean the same thing to different people, even if you put different people in a room and for the purpose of being in the room they agree that this is what that means. They become the boundary objects to their worlds.

I read something over the last week that asserted that we now live in a post-discipline world. If so, all the value of knowledge has been destroyed. This it doesn't matter thinking ignores how we got here. And, creates a dismal place to head.

[David Locke]

The funny thing about patterns is that their originator moved on to other things as pattern ubiquity was aesthetically unsatisfying. And, still, he is the citation. When he did it, it was a theory. His experiments didn't prove out under his utility function. Which means that for others, the theory of patterns can still prove out.

[David Locke]

Patterns are not theory? Then, what the heck is a theory? Patterns might start their life as a hypothesis, but they become a theory. They are shared within a discipline. They are not discipline free no matter how universal the model-view-controller pattern happens to be.

Patterns are more than an artifact. They are a product, like all theories. A pattern, if well written, contains enough information to sell itself. So once you adopt patterns as a general construct, then patterns become easier to adopt. Like all adoption, patterns are adopted socially and add terrain to a cultural topology. It is unlikely that someone from a distant culture will traverse that terrain.

In computing, you meet people everyday that still don't know anything about patterns at all.