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)?

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?

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.

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?

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.

Follow this thread on KnowledgeBoard

Thoughts?

When learning and knowledge collide

Recently I've been reading (and listening) to Stephen Downes, George Siemens, Jay Cross and Richard MacManus exploring learning networks and connective knowledge. I'm seeing a convergence and emergence of themes:

• Learning is an ecology - remember knowledge ecology?
  
• Connections are key - we talk relationships and patterns in knowledge work
• Informal learning is dominant - think communities of practice
• Learning is a conversation - dialog and creative abrasion facilitate knowledge creation and verification
• Capacity to connect is more important than current knowing - build your network rather than increasing your collection
• Diversity is essential to check cascades - confers adaptability, stability, flexibility

The movement towards collaborative learning is strong, some would argue irreversible, helped by   web2.0 and social software. The personal learning environment has moved from a walled LMS container to an evolving mix of flickr, youtube, secondlife, myspace, 43things.

Stephen says it best:

"Knowledge is a network phenomenon. To 'know' something is to be organized in a certain way, to exhibit patterns of connectivity. To 'learn' is to acquire certain patterns".

Knowledge & knowing

New book just released

George Siemens has kindly released his new book as series of .pdf files  which you are free to download, or you can read and contribute to the wiki conversation, or you can thumb through the excellent graphics on Flickr

In this book George looks at ways the context around knowledge is changing and the influence this is having on knowledge itself:

1. The rise of the individual - ability to voice and show, blogs and YouTube
2. Increased connectedness -  affordances for conversation
3. Immediacy and 'now' - knowledge half-life is shrinking fast
4. Breakdown and repackaging - new tools allow rip, mix and burn
5. Prominence of the conduit - new publishing  media have opened things
6. Global socialization - networking everywhere from MySpace to SecondLife
7. Blurring worlds of physical and virtual - 'on the go' becomes the norm

KnowingKnowledge - wiki

The KnowingKnowledge wiki has been released along with a related wiki where George Siemens has invited readers to critique and contribute to his collaborative keynote addresses.

Thinking back to my review of KnowingKnowledge, it struck me that George pays relatively little attention to knowledge representation in his writing. This may be expected as he concentrates on how knowledge is changing and notes a shift from 'hard' to 'soft' knowledge, where soft = more immediate, more emergent, more closely tied to conversation than content. Knowledge says George is now more than ever about "the now', and connections trump content in a world of immediacy and 'know now'. As we capture more ephemeral content in audio and video files, I'm wondering what we need to do to get the most from these media as representations & knowledge stores?

Here is a screencast of his collaborative keynote address  and an interview text for Online Educa Berlin, in December '06.

IMO KnowingKnowledge is an important event, I'm looking forward to the hard copy book release (now 10/10 I'm hearing), publication of the graphics on flick'r, availability of pdfs for downloading and most of all to the conversations George wishes to build around his thinking.

This is a subject that matters more than most in KM - for without a clear understanding of what knowledge really is and how it is changing - KM will continue to go in circles. Please join in this important conversation, let's hear your opinion, beliefs, mental models, heuristics and practical tips so we can all grow a little wiser together.