Its not that hard to understand!!!

I had to laugh when I came across this cartoon today.



Occasionally when I talk about Knowledge Management (often without using the term KM) people react as if the entire idea of thinking about what you know is totally new to them. Nevermind that fact they spent years increasing their knowledge at school university, TAFE college, not to mention the hundreds of books, videos, meetings, lessons people spend just on their hobbies!!

Managing your personal or company's knowledge is not a dark art, it simply involves thinking about that you know and how it might be needed by you or somebody else down the track. Sure there are those like me who decide to go deep and become an expert in all the ways this can be done on larger scales, but really KM is something everybody should be thinking about in a small way every day.

Yes, you may use an accountant to pull your taxes together each year, but you don't consult her when you need a bottle of milk and a newspaper. In the same way, you may need a Knowledge Manager to help implement better knowledge sharing across company departments of different sites, but most of the time it is just about getting in the habit of asking yourself one simple question: "How is the next person who needs to know this going to find it?"

Preferably before you are dead.

Governing Wiki Governance

A friend of mine today asked what I knew about governance and wikis so I thought rather than just sharing with him I would write a blog post and hopefully help a few others in the process.

Goals of Governance
As Ross Dawson shares in this excellent little interview, the goal of corporate governance is to understand both the risks and opportunities associated with an area and then set policies in place to provide objectives and constraints on behaviour in line with corporate strategic goals. Wow, what a mouthful! Sounds good though right?

In knowledge intensive organisations, communicating expectations to authors within the organisation is important. It guides users toward expected outcomes, outlines what information should and shouldn't be shared, and limits the chance of harassment in the collaborative fray.

With public Wikis, like the online encyclodaedia Wikipedia, governance is a more democratic affair, although even here there is structure. At a talk in Melbourne 3 years ago, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales declared it is really a monarchy with many issues requiring a final ruling by him to settle disputes about proper usage and profitable procedures. So what is the best way to govern wiki use inside a corporation?

When is a duck not a duck?
Recently quite a few bloggers have spoken about Social Media Policy, many pointing to public examples like Coca-Cola, Intel, Kodak and IBM. I particularly like the IBM policy because it includes a focus on the positive value of social-media, helping less technical managers understand why they would allow staff to participate. Oracle's policy is concise and is a good combination of clear constraints such as not allowing staff to comment on mergers and acquisitions, while giving a lot of freedom for staff to use social media both inside and outside the firewall so the benefits can be realised by broad participation and discussion.

The question is though, is social media really so different from other corporate IT systems or even personal information security? It is laudable to discuss the special implications and threats presented by the open information architecture that these tools represent, however in many cases the risks are already present in more analogue ways. You may wish to consider simply refining existing policies rather than adding another. In fact with ageing policies and staff turnover, this may be a great opportunity to re-educate your staff on your information policies in general.

Making it happen at the coal-face
Developing policies around publishing is one thing, how they interface with the business is another. When it comes to distributing and enforcing policy, I tend to think a focus on

With social-media tools like Intranets, Podcasts, Wikis and Blogs, different publishing models can offer advantages in different environments. James Robertson's post on Five different publishing models gives a good breakdown of some of the options, but I encourage you to see this as a moving banquet. Even if a more restrictive, fully centralised publishing model works in current systems you may find it limits participation and may even smother a wiki project entirely.

The key is to balance risk and value. Sometimes people strategies can convey and enforce policy better than threats and punishment. Take Disney TV President Anne Sweeney's practice of weekly executive breakfast meetings that use peer-review to mediate new ideas and strategies and at the same time make expectations clear.

A simple taxonomy for starters
Ross Dawson suggests corporate information be broken in to three distinct categories:

1. proprietary, which you maintain inside your organisation
   
2. information that you share with trusted business partners, clients, suppliers or alliance members, and
3. information that you actively disseminate to the public at large.

Communicating examples of each type can go a long way to helping prevent loss of IP or damaged to your brand while allowing the efficiencies of collaborative systems like wikis to flourish in your organisations.

One last word on getting it right
More important that the perfectly worded policy or precisely aligned implementation strategy is actually the way these are developed in your organisation. Even if it is possible to have the ultimate governance program for your wiki, it may not remain that way for very long.

To focus on a robust policy that restricts in order to avoid failure at all costs will likely introduce a fear of failure that cuts of the participation wiki's need to succeed. On the other hand taking a laissez-faire approach could allow damage to occur without you even realising it. Jessica Scarpati says "Regulatory bodies treat social media compliance no differently from instant messaging compliance" and employees can innocently place the company at risk without proper education.

I suggest a strong focus on monitoring and a gentle hand when it comes to correction, with a focus on education and resilience to error. Start with basic policies that capture the spirit of your wiki venture, clearly outline a few definite taboos and then review frequently so that the guidelines co-evolve with practice.

Expect a failure or two but insist the organisation learns from its mistakes and doesn't repeat them and you should have the best of all worlds: creative collaboration, communication of corporate objectives & managed risks.

GO forth and Complexify!

A while ago David Snowden of Cognitive Edge commented that Chess and Go can be used to highlight the differences between the “Complicated” and “Complex” domains respectively.

happyseaurchin commented that it would be good to understand more about Go and then talk about it, and I decided I was the man to make such a thing happen given I have played Go since my teen years.

This week at KMLF in Melbourne, I had the opportunity to run a session and it seems everybody enjoyed it very much. I had such a great time I am looking forward to opportunities to run another one and spread word, both about Go and Complexity theory.

Below are the slides from the presentation. Apologies for the fonts. It seems Slideshare didn't like the one I used in PowerPoint. I will post an animated version with audio in a few days when the editing is finished.

Stuart French KMLF Complexity And The Game Of Go

View more presentations from Stuart French.

For more about Go, check out the article on Wikipedia or an interactive tutorial. This 10-day introductory course is for the brave souls who would like to get a good grip on how such a simple game can be so complex!

Trust, weak ties and building effective networks

The public has recently been introduced to the concept of the Dunbar number through a series of news articles about how we are all really only capable of maintaining relationships with around 150 people. Some have even suggested that we should limit our Social network connections in order to not break this number.

I read a great blog post by Jacob Morgan today that spilt some light on the way I was thinking about this issue and how networks are powerful way beyond those we actually know and interact with regularly. A response to his post by Robert Paterson claimed that Dumbar's number was still relevant because trust is critical for influence. As such I thought I would wade in with my 2 cents worth which I share with you below.

Access to a wider network of weak ties allows the "long tail" to be mined, both for information and for opportunity.

I agree with Robert in terms of trust to a certain degree, however trust takes time to develop and often it is credibility that can hold sway in a distributed network.

Each member of the network makes a value judgement as to whether their help is valuable enough to warrant their time and resources. Due to the nature of weak ties and early signal detection, sharing a very simple piece of information may have enormous impact for the searcher, giving a higher value to the effort.

Both the credibility felt by the remote giver and the indebtedness perceived (due to the effort and resources already invested into the network by the searcher) should also weigh into the value equation.

So building a network involves building credibility and indebtedness (some would say loyalty) which then through closer interaction may lead to trust and the two remote parties possibly becoming part of each other's "Dunbar group".

What do you think? Should we limit ourselves? If a valuable benefit comes to you at little cost from somebody you hardly know and share little in common with, is it any less valuable to you? And given your differences to them present a similar value, is trust as important as credibility and indebtedness at a distance?

Write your responses on $100 notes and mail then to me! I'm saving for an Apple iSlate :-)

QUiCK THiNK & CoNVeRSaTioN!

Well, although I began the QUiCK THiNK idea just to get people to think for 90 secs, many wish to share their answers and discuss them with others. The resulting excellent conversations between my Facebook friends from around the world and difference backgrounds has really excited me. Not just because people are interested, but because of the diverse views that are being respectfully shared.

My Facebook profile though, is just too restricted to do this justice. I have created a Facebook Group called QUiCK THiNK so anybody who wishes to can join in even if they aren't my friend on Facebook which I keep mainly for family and very close friends.

I will still post the QUiCK THiNKs on Twitter and Facebook, but I encourage those who want to talk about them to join the QUiCK THiNK Facebook Group and see how other people THiNK too!

Take time for a QUiCK THiNK each day

What is knowledge?
Wow, what a question. What an important question. And yet such a hard one to answer.

I have heard David Snowden say that we have struggled as a civilisation for thousands of years to try and define "knowledge" and failed, so I along with David are highly sceptical when some management consultant spouts out a definitive explanation. Until Cognitive Neuroscience moves down to the detail of tracking individual neurons, nerves, synapses and hormonal systems I don't think we are even capable of guessing at the answer, and even then....

But despite this I do run across people every day who make simple mistakes, in business, in hockey, in relationships, in life, because they haven't sat down and thought about what it is to know and to think.

I constantly need to remind myself to reassess assumptions, to question social norms, to overcome mental shortcuts and stupid thinking. So I thought I might at least help my readers move a little way toward understanding knowledge through a daily reminder to quickly think about a question.

Ask yourself a question
We are all capable of so much more than we actually achieve. My hope is that if everyone just takes 60-90 seconds of their day to think about something to do with how they think, both individually and as a group, then I have made a difference in the world.

So keep an eye out on my Twitter stream @DeltaKnowledge for the QUiCK THiNK tweets each day. I hope they get you thinking!

National Culture's effect on E2.0 Implementation

A while ago I wrote this post about culture and its effects on Enterprise 2.0 implementations.

In the meantime, Mark Masterson wrote this cracker on his ideas about English versus German cultures and if Social Software would work the same in non-Anglo Saxon cultures.

This morning I was talking with Emanuele Quintarelli from Rome about the impact of cultures on Enterprise 2.0 success and his concerns that the local corporate culture had more impact than the national one did.

My discussion with him turned into a bit of brief description of Culture-as-Cognition and how it can be applied so I thought I would copy them here for you all.

Hofstede's work is totally brilliant, eminently usable and absolutely wrong!

Here's the thing. There is no such thing as "culture". It is not a thing in the same way that a river is not a thing. We look from a distance and see a flow of water, but actually, that water you see now will never pass that point again.

There are flows in the current that form eddies and turbulence that are static in the way they fill the space and exert forces on things that come in contact with it, like a boat.
You can describe generally how the boat will react, but there is no way of knowing for sure from minute to minute and even in 2009 we have many boating accidents.

A while ago, this site grabbed my attention. Have a read. It is about how a snow flake forms and it is almost identical to the cognitive science view of culture.

Each snow-flake is individual, however thousands can look almost identical if they individually go through the exact changes in temperature, humidity and pressure as they fall. Their life journey.

In the same way, people as just people, but they interact mentally with the world in a way that create common attributes (like the arms of a snow flake or the standing waves in a river rapid).
You can gauge these commonalities (that's what Hofstede's tools do), but in the end each individual is capable of anything, so it is easy to fall into an "ecological fallacy", where we assume the attributes of the individual based on the average of the group they belong to.

The power of the corporation is that it tapped into the large currents. The beauty of social computing is that now all those little eddies and changes in currents can be tapped into and surfed on.

What this means for me, is not that Social computing will work or not work in a given country, like Mark says, but more that how those tools are used will be different in the different environments. A different part of the river will have a totally different landscape and therefore different external forces working on the current. Likewise I have seen different companies using the exact same wiki software in TOTALLY different ways. Ways that for them make sense. That is why the concept of sense-making is far more important than outmoded concepts like Best-practice or Six Sigma when it comes to complex systems. And as Snowden says, any system with people involved is a complex system.

To use a more collectiveist defintion of the word colture. The enterprise "culture" is often stronger, especially on the negative side if there is distinct lack of trust or taboos about corporate communications at a social or informal level.

• The key is not to talk about how we in engineer an E2.0 system to work in a certain culture.
• The key is to talk about how we engineer an E2.0 system to adapt and evolve into whatever that microculture (using the term loosely) will find beneficial. It is about managing the evolutionary capability of the company (to quote Snowden again).

This is one of the reasons I have a problem seeing the tool and the adoption process as separate things. In my mind they are tightly coupled in a complex space. We need to focus on the adaptive capability of both which is why I tend to talk about the company rather than the tools of the projects that implement them.

So, what's wrong with Hofstede?
Well nothing for top-down strategic appraisal of national-level cultural commonalities. But the real world of culture is bottom up. Each man for themselves!

We already know that social tools like this perform sub-optimally when implemented from the top-down rather than organically from the bottom up.

The problem with generalising tools like Hofstede is that they can stop people trying in the first place because they assume the average culture will not suite the tool or system. No trying means no experimentation, no experimentation means no adaptation, no adaptation means no novel applications or beneficial outcomes.