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?

 

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?

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'.