Time I started work on the sequel – “KM – The Musical” perhaps?
November 9, 2011
Time I started work on the sequel – “KM – The Musical” perhaps?
November 2, 2011
Geoff Parcell pointed me in the direction of this brilliant RSA Animate video, featuring renowned psychiatrist and writer Iain McGilchrist. There is so much in this 11 minutes that you’ll want to watch it two or three times to take it in, and a fourth, with the pause button to appreciate all of the humour in the artwork. Just superb. Do watch it.
It got me thinking again about parallels between how the brain manages knowledge and how organisations manage knowledge.
Ian debunks a lot of myths about the separate functions of left and right hemispheres and emphasizes the fact that for either imagination or reason, you need to use both in combination.
We share some (but not all) of these left/right distinctions with animals. However, as humans, we uniquely have frontal lobes.
I think a holistic approach to knowledge management which mirrors the brain will pay attention to breadth, depth, living connections and reflection. This has implications for the way we structure and navigate codified knowledge – moving between context and detail, abstract to interconnected – and also reinforces the relationship between KM and organisational learning (the frontal lobe bit).
I believe that an effective knowledge management strategy will creatively combine each of these components in a way which is balanced to the current and future needs of the business.
In a way, a lot of first generation KM was left-brain oriented. Second and third generation KM have combined the learning elements of the frontal lobes with the living, inteconnected right brain. That doesn’t mean that first generation KM is no longer relevant – I would assert that the power is in the combination of all three – see this earlier posting on KM, Scientology and Top Trumps!
It’s probably the last minute which is the most challenging. Does your KM strategy, led self-consistently by the left hemisphere, imprison your organisation in a hall of mirrors where it reflects back into more of what it knows about what it knows about what it knows?
The animation closes with Einstein’s brilliantly prescient statement:
“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift. The rational mind is a faithful servant. We live in a society which honours the servant, but has forgotten the gift.”
October 19, 2011
Ten year ago, we were hearing that London Taxi drivers have an enlarged hippocampus because of their encyclopedic (or should that be atlassian?) knowledge of London’s roads.
Now the same research team in UCL are questioning whether social networking has a similar impact although the researchers do confess:
It’s not clear whether using social networks boosts grey matter or if those with certain brain structures are good at making friends.
…so perhaps slightly cyclic reasoning?
I’ve wondered for a while whether we have a finite “namespace” in our brains, and once it’s full (see why I didn’t make it as a neuroscientist!), it starts to overflow and we forget people’s names.
I can testify that changing my work relationship pattern from a single slowly-evolving large corporation to short assignments in 100 client organisations over the last 6 years has certainly helped to fill it up. My wife reports similar name-overflow challenges working a supply teacher.
Or perhaps it’s just that we’re just getting older!
October 15, 2010
I’m currently working with the Henley KM Forum on a project which is exploring how the rise of social media have changed knowledge-sharing competencies and behaviours – and how we can help people to understand and embrace this
We’ve set up a LinkedIn Group entitled Knowledge Sharing 2.0 to engage a wider group in the discussion – please sign up and join in!
Meanwhile, to give you a flavour, here are a couple of posts from yesterday:
3 comments
Chris Collison • Hi Susan,
I think there are several dimensions of knowledge sharing where social media have significantly accelerated, amplified, or positively skewed good old-fashioned KM. [You know – the kind of knowledge-sharing activities that we’ll tell our kids about one day, and they’ll laugh at us… just like they can’t believe that we once used land-line telephones with wires connected to the receiver]Here are five areas/behaviours which I can think of for starters…
Immediacy: – Presence, IM and microblogging have all changed expectations in terms of how quickly people respond and react. Most transactions happen within minutes or hours. I almost hesitate to respond to things what are a few days old now… That never used to happen.
Imperfect incompleteness: – This is related to the immediacy point above. People don’t wait until they have the ideal solution before they share now – you get raw, partly formed ideas, suggestions, contacts, 140 characters. Responding is now less pressurised – it’s no longer about competition, it’s about contribution. That has to be a good thing in not-invented-here cultures. There’s less pressure to reject something which is delightfully imperfect.
Serendipity: – Twitter and its equivalent now connect me with people and content that I would have never have stumbled across. It’s like those Brownian motion experiments we did in chemistry – increase the intensity of temperature or pressure, and the chances of a collision increases.
Connectivity: – It’s just so easy now to get plugged into everything. Barriers to entry are minimal. And the connections you don’t know about, you get alerted to.
Transparency: – I’ve had to get used to doing more of my thinking out loud, and have often been surprised by a proactive response to something as simple as a status update. Sometimes help comes when you didn’t even ask.
Any more, anyone?
1 day ago
Ron Donaldson • Hi Susan
I fully agree with the five areas Chris has identified and would like to add five more:Diversity: – I now have connections with people with a huge diversity of interests and perspectives across for example storytelling, complexity and Nature. This results in much greater crossover of ideas and occasionally avoidance of mistakes already made in a different field.
Pheromone Trails: Pursuit of new knowledge is now unbelievably similar to ants foraging. Anyone can find something and blog or tweet it. This is then retweeted based on how useful that knowledge might be for others. Trending themes quickly emerge and highlight areas of common interest.
Chaining: – I love the way simple connections between social software tools allow a simple tweet to flow from Twitter, to Facebook, to Linked-In, to Plaxo and pick up comments from each of the quite different networks which end up back as emails. This means that people can use whichever tool suits them but still be connected and aware of something new.
Maturity: As the first tools in each of their niches mature they are being added as standard to mobile phones, widescreen TV’s and probably fridges and hoovers as we speak. This makes it much easier to maintain connections and thereby keep informed wherever you are which was never possible five years ago unless they phoned you.
Feedback: My favourite aspect of WordPress blogs is the dashboard site stats. This gives you a daly read-out of the terms individuals used to access your daily utterances, which pages they clicked and which links they took to others. Once you get over the depressingly low numbers of visitors it is great encouragement to attract greater interest so the feedback really does build a stronger ‘system’.
My only concern is that Social Media is still the domain of the early adopters. A lot of my ex-colleagues in nature conservation have so much vital and important knowledge, but they have absolutely no interest in social media. They really should be forced or at worst, paid lots of money for opening up their knowledge for the benefit of the planet.
Any more, anyone?
October 1, 2010
Have you ever wondered what it would be like if you combined speed dating and knowledge-sharing? I can’t own up to any firsthand experience of the former, but I’m told by friends who do, that you participate in a merry-go-round of three-minute exchanges on a room full of tables-for-two. When the bell rings you move around to the next person. If you like what you’re experienced, you make a note on your score-card, and, if the feeling was mutual, you take the next steps together. Tremendously efficient and less emotionally risky than the traditional approach – at least for most people!
To save a praying mantis experience, there are websites full of interesting questions that you might ask during your 3 minutes – for example: “What luxury item would you take on a desert island?” and “What are your favourite words and why?”. Incidentally, “knowledge management” is not a good answer to the second question. So if speed-dating is designed to reduce the emotional investment, embarrassment and risk of failure of finding a potential partner – what can we learn from that room-full of tables which we could apply in a KM context?
In my work with communities of practice and networks over the years, I have observed that when someone asks a question in a network, people are sometimes reluctant to offer up suggestions and ideas because they don’t have a complete answer or a polished response. The longer the silence lasts, the more risky it feels to contribute. People hold back, worried that they might be the only one to respond and that their idea will be perceived as being too trivial or too obvious – how embarrassing! If your community feels like this, and you have an opportunity to meet face-to-face, then let me recommend a simple “Speed Consulting” exercise which can help groups to break these bad habits. (I’m indebted to my friend and consulting colleague Elizabeth Lank for introducing me to this technique).
A quick guide to speed consulting.
Identify some business issue owners In advance, identify a number of people (around 10% of the total) with a business challenge which they would like help with – they are to play the role of the client who will be visited by a team of brilliant management consultants. Business issues should not be highly complex; ideally, each issue could be described in 3 minutes or less. Brief the issue owners privately coach on their body language, active listening, acknowledgement of input etc. Remind them that if they are seen to have stopped taking notes (even when a suggestion has been noted before); they may stem the flow of ideas.
Arrange the room You need multiple small consultant teams working in parallel, close enough to generate a “buzz” from the room to keep the overall energy high. Round tables or chair circles work well. Sit one issue owner at each table. Everybody else at the table plays the role of a consultant. The issue owner will remain at the table throughout the exercise, whilst the groups of “visiting consultants” move around.
Set the context Explain to the room that each table has a business issue, and a team of consultants. The consultants have a tremendous amount to offer collectively – from their experience and knowledge – but that they need to do it very quickly because they are paid by the minute! They have 15 minutes with each client before a bell sounds, and they move on to their next assignment. The time pressure is designed to prevent any one person monopolising the time with detailed explanation of a particular technique. Instead, they should refer the issue owner to somewhere (or someone) where they can get further information. Short inputs make it easier for less confident contributors to participate.
Start the first round Reiterate that you will keep rigidly to time, and that the consultants should work fast to ensure that everyone has shared everything that they have to offer. After 15 minutes, sound the bell and synchronise the movement to avoid a “consultant pile-up”.
Repeat the process Issue owners need to behave as though this is the first group and not respond with ‘the other group thought of that!’. They may need to conceal their notes. Check the energy levels at the tables after 45 minutes. More than three rounds can be tiring for the issue owners, but if the motivation is particularly high, you might manage 4 rotations.
Ask for feedback and reflection on the process Emphasise that the issue owners are not being asked to “judge” the quality of the consultants! Invariably, someone will say that they were surprised at the breadth of ideas, and that they received valuable input from unexpected places. Ask members of the “consulting teams” to do the same. Often they will voice their surprise at how sharing an incomplete idea or a contact was well received, and how they found it easy to build on the ideas of others.
Transfer these behaviours into community life Challenge them to offer up partial solutions, ideas and suggestions when a business issue arises in a community. Having established the habit face-to-face, it should be far easier to continue in a virtual environment. The immediacy and brevity of social media helps here – perhaps the 140 character limit in Twitter empowers people to contribute?
So perhaps I should have just tweeted: @ikmagazine http://bit.ly/speed_consulting boosts sharing in communities #KM @elank and waited to see what my followers would respond with! To be published in the next edition of Inside Knowledge.