Knowledge-at-work

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.

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.

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?

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".

KM in wikipedia

How would you write the definitive entry for knowledge management in Wikipedia?

We have seen many attempts to define, circumscribe, explain and codify KM within Wikipedia. The current version still leaves much room for improvement. So where would you start and what would you alter?

The article IMO tends to be written from 'software' perspective rather than an attempt to cover the topic, show the difficulties with KM definitions and bound the domain.

The initial section does not cover the KM domain adequately IMO. Key concepts that are missing are:

• A short definition - What KM is all about
• A summary (with links) to KM framework documents
• The origin and history - how and why did KM arise? What makes KM a worthwhile and pertinent distinction? What are the related domains?

I would like to see the section on key KM concepts expanded to cover:

• Knowledge types & nature - why this has been a difficult topic within KM
• Knowledge acquisition - missed anything on ethnography, narratives, metaphor, patterns, knowledge mapping
• Knowledge sharing & transfer - collaboration, innovation, awareness, learning, agility
• Intellectual capital - role in competitive advantage and innovation
• Corporate memory - approaches to 'knowing what we know' and retaining experience

KM drivers - this is great as is

KM enablers can be improved by:

• Linking to Web2.0 efforts and technologies
• References to advanced practices - concept mapping, pattern languages, visual thinking, ontologies, folksonomies, open editing, VoIP and more.
• Adding a piece on KM affordances - facile annotation, personal profiles & portfolios, voicing via blogs, social network analysis

I would rewrite the piece on 2nd generation KM to include KM maturity / capability models, explain recent thoughts on KM and complexity and the role of emergence, knowledge landscapes and core attractors.

The lack of any reference to PKM, and the omission of key authors such as George von Krogh, Dorothy Leonard, Karl Wiig and Etienne Wenger needs urgent correction.

So what is your take?

Creative abrasion or appreciative inquiry?

If you seek to increase knowledge which road should you travel ? creative abrasion vs. appreciative inquiry or do they both lead to the same destination?

Creative abrasion
A clash of ideas helps to focus attention, forces us to take a hard look at validation, raises the energy level helping to break ingrained mental models. Strong critique is not for the faint-hearted, knowledge is so closely linked to our identity, it hurts to be wrong!

In its quietest form, writes Beth Agnew, creative abrasion is the catalyst for producing a pearl. The oyster is so bothered by the unpleasant abrasive effect of the sand inside its smooth shell, that it works on the sand to smooth its rough edges and coat it with essence of pearl. The result? A beautiful, valuable gem.

In its most energetic form, creative abrasion brings two teams, people, or ideas together like flint on steel. It creates sparks that ignite a wildfire of ideas or innovation. More

Appreciate inquiry
Finds and builds on the positive, seeking strength and re-framing discourse to praise rather than critique.

Appreciative Inquiry is based on the premise that from the moment of inquiry, the individual, team and organization experience a change. By using a strength-based  approach, the social structure, whether it be a team or organization,  moves in a positive direction accepting change guided by their initial input. More

For me creative abrasion is closely linked to deep dialog. Deep dialog is:

1) A spirit of genuine quest, when we add a goal, have an agenda, select members or impose time-frames, we surrender the freedom to explore.

2) Most of us use our energy to build and sustain our personal identity (a false image of ourselves!), we operate from unexamined, fixed and non-negotiable positions. The power of dialog brings these assumptions, positions and tacit beliefs into the open for examination.

3) The road to meaning is a rhetorical environment that encourages critique, rather than exploring and holding multiple views we most times rush to resolve them.

4) Discussion that holds value, is of necessity, messy, full of self-interest (advocacy) and always under tension. Insights do not emerge from logic, ordered sequence, rules or formal agreements, they are born at the edge of chaos.

5) Real-time discussion develops by addition and accretion rather than synthesis and categorization, reflection, interpretation and emergent meaning; it takes second place to maxims, truisms and repetition. Immediacy often reigns over reflection.

6) Deep dialog is not characterized by a specific method, technique, style or format; but is an attitude,an orientation that emphasizes meeting the needs of the participants.

7) Deep dialog is a rhetorical competency, it is the ability to argue, discuss, debate, confer for advice and exploration, it goes beyond gathering information and articulation of a position to enter the world of sharing. It involves a separation of ideas and identity and understanding of position as something other than personal opinion.

There is currently a discussion underway at the Virtual Chautauqua led by Carol Metzker please join us.

Building blocks of knowledge

When you put knowledge formation or creation under an ethnographic microscope what do you see?

At the heart of knowledge creation lies conversation, shared language, agreement on key distinctions, naming of prime concepts, sharing of experiences or beliefs, the explication and testing of patterns.

We need engagement, deep dialog and creative abrasion to suspend individual mental models, grab attention and overcome inertia, we need purpose, perceived value, common goals and difficult questions to drive inquiry, surface and explore connections, deepen our understanding and make sense of things.

Distinctions are knowledge atoms, the way we separate an object from its background and from similar objects. Once we recognize a meaningful difference and apply a name, we start to seek & make connections, explicate tacit feelings and beliefs, test utility, classify and assimilate, make predictions and examine assumptions.

Questions are the key to turning tacit know-how into social knowledge. Questions help knowledge emergence, test beliefs, guard against personal bias and incorrect mental models. The empowering environment or culture for knowledge formation is one where no one is afraid to ask dumb questions as there are really no dumb questions - just think back on the many times you have benefited when someone else had the courage to ask first!

Metaphor and analogy help with explanation, contrasting, connecting and meaning making. A metaphor establishes relationships, encourages finding obscure similarities, exploring emergent differences and improves communication. Metaphors are how we code experiences.

A shepherd that helps with pattern drafting, introduces the pattern to the community, assists with revisions and final scripting, is a key player in knowledge crafting.

When you next practice ethnography, looking to discover how knowledge flows, where it emerges, why it is hard to capture, who has it - think: distinction, questions, metaphor and pattern - those building blocks will help you make sense of a difficult task.

The essence of KM?

A recent spurt of posts on the Act-km list, has respondents trying to define knowledge management in a single sentence that can be grasped by a 13 year old - quite a task.

I've been intrigued by the number of respondents who have (improved, better, faster, more correct...) problem solution, decision making, competitive position... and storing stuff in knowledge bases in their replies.

The key to KM  (to me) seems to be:

increasing awareness
Helping you (or your group) become aware of new things, changed situations, emergent players that may influence the domain you have chosen to work in.

fostering learning
assisting with making novel and useful connections between concepts, improving understanding and enabling environments for making and testing new insights.

supporting sense-making
KM needs to be proactive, help surface consequences, avoid past errors, generate worthwhile & inventive alternatives.

Decisions, solutions, agility, competitive advantage and other benefits follow from sustaining a questioning environment, encouraging creative abrasion & experimentation, promoting deep dialog and allowing space for learning from mistakes.

The essence of KM then lies deeper than pragmatics, it gets close to sustaining an environment, building trust, promoting continual inquiry and testing beliefs.