Posted by: Mark Gould | 10 March 2010

Choosing focus

I am part-way through a long post on personal knowledge management, which may see the light of day sometime this century. In doing so, I have been reflecting on something that I mention a lot in these posts: focus. I have been guilty of using the word in a very loose “I know it when I see it” fashion, but I am beginning to realise that a bit more explanation is in order.

Monochrome grass

I have an interest in photography, where focus is clearly a part of taking good pictures. However, there is more to it than that. Cameras come with a number of settings that affect the image — what is actually in focus. All of these settings require the photographer to make choices, which are similar to the choices we make when we talk about focus in a more general sense.

The first choice to be made is selection of a lens (or a zoom setting, for lenses with a variable focal length). Is the subject of the image distant or close? Do you want to concentrate on a single item or a large landscape? Variants of these questions can be used when considering personal focus as well. Is your objective finely detailed and distinct? If so, make sure you concentrate on it to the exclusion of other things (the telephoto or macro lens). Is it more diffuse — exploratory, perhaps? Then use a more inclusive approach (a wideangle lens).

Then there is a set of choices that are all interlinked — aperture, shutter speed, ISO (sensitivity or film speed, for non-digital photography). These need to be set to take into account the depth of field required (how much the subject stands out from the background or foreground), whether the subject is moving, and how much ambient light there is. Again, similar considerations can be borne in mind in a non-photographic context. Does your objective stand apart from other issues or do you need to consider it in a wider context? Are things moving fast, so quick action is required, or is a slower, more reflective pace acceptable? How much information is there on the topic — do you need highly sensitive receptors or is a strong filter preferable?

Once you have thought about all those variables, it is time to compose the image. Like everything else, careful thought about these preparatory questions improves the quality of the output. Equally, whether the output is good or not, it can be used to refine the initial settings before repeating the action. A plan-do-refine approach can also be useful in other contexts too. I can’t pretend to be a great photographer, but I do try to get better.

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Posted in Creativity, Development, Personal, Work

Posted by: Mark Gould | 21 January 2010

What do we do with knowledge?

Every now and then, I discover a new way in which my assumptions about things are challenged. Today’s challenge comes in part from the excellent commentary on my last post (which has been so popular that yesterday quickly became the busiest day ever here). I am used to discussions about the definition or usage of ‘knowledge management’, but I thought ‘knowledge sharing’ was less controversial. How wrong can one be?

Table at Plas Mawr, Conwy

The first challenge comes from Richard Veryard. His comment pointed to a more expansive blog post, “When does Communication count as Knowledge Sharing?” Richard is concerned that the baggage carried by the word ’sharing’ can be counter-productive in the knowledge context.

In many contexts, the word “sharing” has become an annoying and patronizing synonym for “disclosure”. In nursery school we are encouraged to share the biscuits and the paints; in therapy groups we are encouraged to “share our pain”, and in the touchy-feely enterprise we are supposed to “share” our expertise by registering our knowledge on some stupid knowledge management system.

But it’s not sharing (defined by Wikipedia as “the joint use of a resource or space”). It’s just communication.

I agree that if people construe sharing as a one-way process, it is communication. (Or, more accurately, ‘telling’, since effective communication requires a listener to do more than hear what is said.) In a discussion in the comments to Richard’s post, Patrick Lambe defends his use of ’sharing’ and Richard suggests that knowledge ‘transfer’ more accurately describes what is happening. I also commented on the post, along the following lines.

I can see a distinction between ’sharing’ and ‘transfer’, which might be relevant. To talk of transferring knowledge suggest to me (a) that there is a knower and an inquirer and that those roles are rarely swapped, and (b) that there needs to be a knowledge object to be transferred. (As Richard puts it, “a stupid knowledge management system” is probably the receptacle for that object.)

As Patrick’s blog post and longer article make clear, the idea of the knowledge object is seriously flawed. Equally, the direction in which knowledge flows probably varies from time to time. For me, this fluidity (combined with the intangible nature of what is conveyed in these knowledge generation processes) makes me comfortable with the notion of ’sharing’ (even given Richard’s playgroup example).

In fact, I might put it more strongly. The kind of sharing and complex knowledge generation that Patrick describes should be an organisational aspiration (not at all like ’sharing pain’), while exchange or transfer of knowledge objects into a largely lifeless repository should be deprecated.

I think Richard’s response to that comment suggests that we are on the point of reaching agreement:

I am very happy with the notion of shared knowledge generation – for example, sitting down and sharing the analysis and interpretation of something or other. I am also happy with the idea of some collaborative process in which each participant contributes some knowledge – like everyone bringing some food to a shared picnic. But that’s not the prevailing use of the word “sharing” in the KM world.

This was a really interesting conversation, and I felt that between us we reached some kind of consensus — if what is happening with knowledge is genuinely collaborative, jointly creating an outcome that advances the organisation, then some kind of sharing must be going on. If not, we probably have some kind of unequal transfer: producing little of lasting value.

Coincidentally, I was pointed to a really interesting discussion on LinkedIn today. (Generally, I have been deeply unimpressed with LinkedIn discussions, so this was a bit of a surprise.) The question at the start of the discussion was “If the term “KM” could get a do-over what would you call the discipline?” There are currently 218 responses, some of which range into other interesting areas. One of those areas was an exchange between Nick Milton and John Tropea.

Nick responded to another participant who mentioned that her organisation had started talking about ‘knowledge sharing’ rather than ‘knowledge management’.

Many people do this, but I would just like to point out that there is a real risk here – that sharing (“push”) is done at the expense of seeking (“pull”). The risk is you create supply, with no demand.

See here for more detail: http://www.nickmilton.com/2009/03/knowledge-sharing-and-knowledge-seeking.html

The blog post at the end of that link is probably even more emphatic (I will come back to it later on). John had a different view:

Nick you say “sharing (“push”) is done at the expense of seeking (“pull”). The risk is you create supply, with no demand.”

This is true if sharing is based on conscription, or not within an ecosystem (sorry can’t think of a more appropriate word)…this is the non-interactive document-centric warehousing approach.

But what about blogging experiences and asking questions in a social network, this is more on demand rather than just-in-case…I think this has more of an equilibrium or yin and yang of share and seek.

People blog an experience as it happens which has good content recall, and has no agenda but just sharing the raw experience. Others may learn, converse, share context, etc…and unintentionally new information can be created. This is a knowledge creation system, it’s alive and is more effective than a supply-side approach of shelving information objects…and then saying we are doing KM…to me KM is in the interactions. We must create an online environment that mimics how we naturally behave offline, and I think social computing is close to this.

Nick’s response was interesting:

John – “But what about blogging experiences and asking questions in a social network, this is more on demand rather than just-in-case”

Asking questions in a network, yes (though if I were after business answers, i would ask in a business network rather than a social network). Thats a clear example of Pull.

Blogging, no, I have to disagree with you here. I am sorry – blogging is classic Push. Its classic “just in case” someone should want to read it. Nobody “demands” that you blog about something. You are not writing your blog because you know there is someone out there who is waiting to hear from you – you write your firstly blog for yourself, and secondly “just in case” others will be interested.

Blogging is supply-side, and it’s creating stuff to be stored. OK, it is stored somewhere it can be interacted with, and there is a motivation with blogging which is absent with (say) populating an Intranet, but it is stll classic supply-side Push. Also it is voluntary push. The people who blog (and I include myself in this) are the ones who want to be heard, and that’s not always the same as “the ones who need to be heard”. Knowledge often resides in the quietest people.

This exchange puts me in a quandary. I respect both Nick and John, but they appear to be at loggerheads here. Can they both be right? On the one hand, Nick’s characterisation of supply-side knowledge pushing as something to be avoided is, I think correct. However, as I have written before, in many organisations (such as law firms), it is not always possible to know what might be useful in the future. My experience with formal knowledge capture suggests that when they set out to think about it many people (and firms) actually rate the wrong things as important for the future. They tend to concentrate on things that are already being stored by other people (copies of journal articles or case reports), or things that are intimately linked to a context that is ephemeral. Often the information stored is fairly sketchy. One of the justifications for these failings is the the avoidance of ‘information overload’. This is the worst kind of just-in-case knowledge, as Nick puts it.

I think there is a difference though when one looks at social tools like blogging. As Nick and John probably agree, keeping a blog is an excellent tool for personal development. The question is whether it is more than that. I think it is. I don’t blog here, nor do I encourage the same kind of activity at work because someone might find the content useful in the future. I do it, and encourage it, because the activity itself is useful in this moment. It is neither just-in-case nor just-in-time: it just is.

In the last couple of paragraphs, I was pretty careless with my use of the words ‘information’ and ‘knowledge’. That was deliberate. The fact is that much of what we call KM is, in fact, merely manipulation of information. What social tools bring us (along with a more faceted view of their users) are really interesting ways of exposing people’s working processes. As we learnt from Nonaka all those years ago, there is little better for learning and development of knowledge than close observation of people at work. (Joining in is certainly better, but not always possible.) What we may not know is where those observations might lead, or when they might become useful. Which brings me to Nick’s blog post.

We hear a lot about “knowledge sharing”. Many of the knowledge management strategies I am asked to review, for example, talk about “creating a culture of knowledge sharing”.

I think this misses the point. As I said in my post about Push and Pull, there is no point in creating a culture of sharing, if you have no culture of re-use. Pull is a far more powerful driver for Knowledge Management than Push, and I would always look to create a culture of knowledge seeking before creating a culture of knowledge sharing.

Nick’s point about knowledge seeking is well made, and chimes with Patrick Lambe’s words that I quoted last time:

We do have an evolved mechanism for achieving such deep knowledge results: this is the performance you can expect from a well-networked person who can sustain relatively close relationships with friends, colleagues and peers, and can perform as well as request deep knowledge services of this kind.

Requesting, seeking, performing: all these are aspects of sharing. Like Richard Veryard’s “traditional KM” Nick characterises sharing as a one-way process, but that is not right — that is the way it has come to be interpreted. Sharing must be a two-way process: it needs someone to ask as well as someone who answers, and those roles might change from day to day. However, Nick’s point about re-use is a really interesting one.

I suggested above that some firms’ KM systems might contain material that was ultimately useless. More precisely, I think uselessness arises at the point where re-use becomes impossible because the material we need to use is more flawed than not. These flaws might arise because of the age of the material, combined with its precise linkage with a specific person, client, subject and so on. Lawyers understand this perfectly — it is the same process we use to decide whether a case is a useful precedent or not. Proximity in time, matter or context contributes significantly to this assessment. However, an old case on a very different question of law in a very different commercial context is not necessarily useless.

One of the areas of law I spent some time researching was the question of Crown privilege. A key case in that area involved the deportation of a Zairean national in 1990. In the arguments before the House of Lords, the law dating back to the English Civil War was challenged by reference to cases on subjects as varied as EC regulation of fisheries and potato marketing. That those cases might have been re-used in such a way could not have been predicted when they were decided or reported.

In many contexts, then, re-use is not as clear-cut an issue as it may appear at first. My suspicion is that organisations that rely especially highly on personal, unique, knowledge (or intellectual capital) should be a lot more relaxed about this than Nick suggests. His view may be more relevant in organisations where repetitive processes generate much more value.

On the just-in-case problem, I think social tools are significantly different from vast information repositories. As Clay Shirky has said, what we think is information overload is actually filter failure. Where we rely solely on controlled vocabularies and classification systems, our capability to filter and search effectively runs out much sooner than it does when we can add personalised tags, comments, trackbacks, knowledge about the author from other sources, and so on. Whereas repositories usually strip context from the information they contain, blogs and other social tools bring their context with them. And, crucially, that context keeps growing.

Which brings me, finally, back to my last post. One of the other trackbacks was from another blog asking the question “What is knowledge sharing?” It also picks up on Patrick’s article, and highlights the humanity of knowledge generation.

…we need to think laterally about what we consider to constitute knowledge sharing. This morning I met some friends in an art gallery and, over coffee, we swapped anecdotes, experiences, gripes, ideas and several instances of ‘did you hear about?’ or ‘have you seen?’… I’m not sure any of us would have described the encounter as knowledge exchange but I came away with answers to work-related questions, a personal introduction to a new contact and the germ of a new idea. The meet up was organised informally through several social networks.

The key thing in all of this, for me, is that whether we talk of knowledge sharing, transfer, or management, it only has value if it can result in action: new knowledge generation; new products; ideas; thoughts. But I think that action is more likely if we are open-minded about where it might arise. If we try and predict where it may be, and from which interactions it might come, I think it is most probable that no useful action and value will result in the long term.

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Posted in KM, Knowledge, Sharing, Web2.0, Work

Posted by: Mark Gould | 19 January 2010

Knowledge sharing: it may not be what you think it is

John Tropea is one of my top Twitter friends for sharing interesting links and insights. Yesterday, he unearthed a great blog post from Patrick Lambe dating from 2006 (“If We Can’t Even Describe Knowledge Sharing, How Can We Support It?“). Patrick’s post starts calmly enough:

A combination of two very different incidents reminded me this week of just how incompetent we still are in KM at capturing the complexity, richness and sophistication of human knowledge behaviours. In the first incident I was asked to do a blind review of an academic paper on knowledge sharing for a KM conference. In the second, knowledge sharing was very much a matter of life and death. Although they shared a common theme, they might as well have represented alien universes.

From there, he becomes a bit more immoderate:

Let’s look at the conference paper first. After working my way through the literature review (a necessary evil), I started into the research proposal with my stomach starting to knot up and a growing sense of incredulity.

Although the authors had adopted Davenport & Prusak’s perfectly respectable definition of knowledge as a “fluid mix of framed experience, values, contextual information, and expert insight” it was becoming increasingly apparent as I worked my way into the paper that what they really meant by “knowledge sharing” was confined to contributing to and consuming from an online KM system. The research being described was designed to identify the factors that would indicate propensity for or against said behaviours. A knowledge sharing system that could, theoretically, be engineered.

Shame on them. After a good decade of practical effort and research focused on KM, how can people still think so mechanically and bloodlessly?

Justly immoderate, I think. Read on to see why.

Tonderghie Steading

It has to be right that knowledge in action is more valuable to organisations than inactive knowledge. Rory Stewart’s walking and engaging with people, as I wrote yesterday, shows one way in which high quality insight into complex systems can come from simple interactions rather than formal organised learning and knowledge. This is a point that Patrick made at greater length in an excellent paper he wrote in 2002 called “The Autism of Knowledge Management” (it’s a 23-page PDF downloadable from the linked blog post).

It depresses me that I have only just discovered this paper. Patrick wrote an incredibly useful critique of some traditional and ingrained organisational attitudes to e-learning and knowledge sharing. It should be much more widely known.

Here is his starting point:

There is a profound and dangerous autism in the way we describe knowledge management and e-learning. At its root is an obsessive fascination with the idea of knowledge as content, as object, and as manipulable artefact. It is accompanied by an almost psychotic blindness to the human experiences of knowing, learning, communicating, formulating, recognising, adapting, miscommunicating, forgetting, noticing, ignoring, choosing, liking, disliking, remembering and misremembering.

Once he has expanded on this, carefully defining what he means by ‘autism’ and ‘objects’ in this context, Patrick then presents and deals with five myths that arise as a result of this way of thinking. These are the myths of reusability, universality, interchangeability, completeness, and liberation. Of these, the one that struck me most was the myth of completeness:

The myth of completeness expresses the content architects’ inability to see beyond the knowledge and learning delivery. Out of the box and into the head, and hey presto the stuff is known. The evidence for this is in the almost complete lack of attention to what happens outside the computerised storage and delivery mechanism – specifically, what people do with knowledge, how it transitions into action and behaviour. How many people in knowledge management are talking about synapses, or the soft stuff that goes on in people’s heads? Is it simply assumed, that once the knowledge is delivered, it has been successfully transferred?

[…]

Knowledge only has value if it emerges into actions, decisions and behaviours – that much is generally conceded. But few content-oriented knowledge managers think through the entire lifecycle of the knowledge objects they deal in. Acquiring a knowledge artefact is only the first stage of what’s interesting about knowledge. We don’t truly know until we have internalised, integrated into larger maps of what we know, practised, repeated, made myriad variations of mistake, built up our own personalised patterns of perception and experience.

I can think of few more succinct and clear expressions of the process of knowing. In the organisational context, we need to be sure that everyone takes responsibility for developing their own knowledge — they cannot just plug themselves into a knowledge system or e-learning package. This statement shows why. The impact of this personal responsibility becomes clear within the section on the myth of interchangeability, where Patrick makes a valuable point about information and insight that resonated especially given my blog post from yesterday.

Beyond a basic informational level (and value added knowledge and learning need to go far beyond basic informational levels), when I have a specific working problem such as how to resolve a complex financial issue, the last thing I want is a necklace of evenly manufactured knowledge nuggets cross-indexed and compiled according to the key words I happen to have entered into the engine. Google can give me that, in many ways more interestingly, because it will give me different perspectives, different depths and different takes.

What really adds value to my problem-solving will be an answer that cuts to the chase, gives me deep insight on the core of my problem, and gives me light supporting information at the fringes of the problem, with the capability to probe deeper if I feel like it. Better still if the answer can be framed in relation to something I already know, so that I can call more of my own experience and perceptions into play. Evenness and interchangeability will not work for me, because life and the situations we create are neither even, nor made up of interchangeable parts.

We do have an evolved mechanism for achieving such deep knowledge results: this is the performance you can expect from a well-networked person who can sustain relatively close relationships with friends, colleagues and peers, and can perform as well as request deep knowledge services of this kind.

I suspect that (whether inside our organisations or otherwise) we can all identify people whose personal networks add significant value to their work and those around them. (And probably plenty whose silo mentality brings problems rather than focus.)

In his conclusion, Patrick presents “six basic principles that seem to work consistently in our knowledge and learning habits; principles that knowledge management and e-learning technologies need to serve.” These are:

  1. Highly effective knowledge performers prefer knowledge fragments and lumps to highly engineered knowledge parts.
  2. Parts need to talk to their neighbours.
  3. The whole is more important than the parts.
  4. Knowledge artefacts provide just enough to allow the user to get started in the real world.
  5. Learning needs change faster than learning design.
  6. Variety is the spice of life.

I need to read this section again — it didn’t resonate as well for me as the rest of the paper. That said, reading the paper again will be a delight rather than an imposition. I recommend it highly to anyone with an interest in knowledge and learning processes, and the systems we create to support them.

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Posted in Conversation, Irrationality, KM, Networks

Posted by: Mark Gould | 18 January 2010

Walking into knowledge

Until this weekend, I didn’t know of Rory Stewart. Now that I do, I am not sure whether to admire him or not. His political alignment and social background are poles apart from mine. His lifetime of achievement (at the tender age of 37) makes me jealous. But I love the way he works.

Mellor ChurchStewart is, at the time of writing, Conservative prospective Parliamentary candidate for Penrith and the Border. However, at least one commentator believes that he has a more significant political future ahead of him.

You heard it here first – Rory Stewart will become prime minister of Great Britain.

I think this is a long shot. However, Stewart’s record so far  suggests that it is not impossible.

After a privileged upbringing (Dragon School, Eton and Balliol), he served briefly as an officer in the Black Watch, joined the Foreign Office, and in 2003 was appointed Deputy Governor of an Iraqi province by the Coalition Provisional Authority. By the age of 31, he had been appointed OBE for his work in Iraq. In 2004, he became a Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. In 2006 he was appointed by Prince Charles to run the Turquoise Mountain Foundation — an organisation working on the regeneration of an area of the Afghan capital Kabul. Most recently, he was appointed Ryan Family Professor of the Practice of Human Rights and Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.

So far Rory Stewart looks like a typical member of the new Establishment. But buried in this list of achievements is a rather unusual preference for personal learning. Rory Stewart walks. Between 2000 and 2002 he walked a total of 6000 miles through Iran, Pakistan, India and into Nepal, and then back across Afghanistan. In the process he emulated his boyhood hero, T.E. Lawrence, living with and learning from the people whose land he traversed. As a consequence, he has a view of our involvement in Afghanistan that is somewhat at odds with the political establishment. Writing in The New York Review of Books, Stewart suggests that President Obama needs to reduce rather than increase troop numbers.

A more realistic, affordable, and therefore sustainable presence would not make Afghanistan stable or predictable. It would be merely a small if necessary part of an Afghan political strategy. The US and its allies would only moderate, influence, and fund a strategy shaped and led by Afghans themselves. The aim would be to knit together different Afghan interests and allegiances sensitively enough to avoid alienating independent local groups, consistently enough to regain their trust, and robustly enough to restore the security and justice that Afghans demand and deserve from a national government.

What would this look like in practice? Probably a mess. It might involve a tricky coalition of people we refer to, respectively, as Islamists, progressive civil society, terrorists, warlords, learned technocrats, and village chiefs. Under a notionally democratic constitutional structure, it could be a rickety experiment with systems that might, like Afghanistan’s neighbors, include strong elements of religious or military rule. There is no way to predict what the Taliban might become or what authority a national government in Kabul could regain. Civil war would remain a possibility. But an intelligent, long-term, and tolerant partnership with the United States could reduce the likelihood of civil war and increase the likelihood of a political settlement. This is hardly the stuff of sound bites and political slogans. But it would be better for everyone than boom and bust, surge and flight. With the right patient leadership, a political strategy could leave Afghanistan in twenty years’ time more prosperous, stable, and humane than it is today. That would be excellent for Afghans and good for the world.

He made a similar argument in the London Review of Books.

After seven years of refinement, the policy seems so buoyed by illusions, caulked in ambiguous language and encrusted with moral claims, analogies and political theories that it can seem futile to present an alternative. It is particularly difficult to argue not for a total withdrawal but for a more cautious approach. The best Afghan policy would be to reduce the number of foreign troops from the current level of 90,000 to far fewer – perhaps 20,000. In that case, two distinct objectives would remain for the international community: development and counter-terrorism. Neither would amount to the building of an Afghan state. If the West believed it essential to exclude al-Qaida from Afghanistan, then they could do it with special forces. (They have done it successfully since 2001 and could continue indefinitely, though the result has only been to move bin Laden across the border.) At the same time the West should provide generous development assistance – not only to keep consent for the counter-terrorism operations, but as an end in itself.

A reduction in troop numbers and a turn away from state-building should not mean total withdrawal: good projects could continue to be undertaken in electricity, water, irrigation, health, education, agriculture, rural development and in other areas favoured by development agencies. We should not control and cannot predict the future of Afghanistan. It may in the future become more violent, or find a decentralised equilibrium or a new national unity, but if its communities continue to want to work with us, we can, over 30 years, encourage the more positive trends in Afghan society and help to contain the more negative.

Stewart’s perspective, which does not fit any simplistic model — whether pro or anti involvement in Afghanistan, is not the kind that arises from traditional learning processes. As such, it feels more like the kind of sensemaking approach suggested by the Cynefin framework as a response to complex scenarios. He is using a similar approach to find out more about the constituency he will seek to represent in the next Parliament. Walking around the largest and most sparsely populated constituency in England is, for him, the best way to make sense of what is going on.

Walking has given me more than I hoped: living in Cumbrian homes and experiencing the great distances between communities. It allows me to learn from a hundred people I might never have encountered by car. But it has not provided neat solutions. It is easy to see they should have listened to the gritter driver about his truck — but I’ve found out that the government has spent three times as much on upgrading a mile-long footpath as on the entire affordable housing for the district. This is not just about an individual’s decisions, it is about budget lines and regulation insurance and a whole way of looking at the world. I realise that to change government needs not just cutting regulations or giving parishes control of money, but also shifting an entire public culture over decades.

It will be interesting to see how well this works for Rory Stewart, and whether it really makes him fit for high office. There is a real possibility that his very different approach to knowledge and learning might make it hard for him to be accepted within the traditional systems of British government and politics.

Whatever comes to pass for Rory Stewart, I think there is a wider point for knowledge and learning within organisations. Getting out into the organisational community and listening to people’s stories, worries, concerns, interests, views is likely to have more of an impact than reading case-studies, theories, position papers or the like. I read something else today that makes a similar point. That’s another blog post.

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Posted in Knowledge, Learning, Stories

Posted by: Mark Gould | 14 December 2009

How different is the social web (and why)?

When I spoke at the Headshift insight event back in September, one of the points I made was that new forms of interaction on the web might feel subtly different from older ones. A couple of recent blog posts have called this to mind again. So here are some of my thoughts.

Barn Owl in flight

Over at the 3 Geeks… blog, Lisa Salazar argues that there is nothing new about social media.

Social networking isn’t new. I t has been around since the very first introduction to the internet. Just like Alexander Graham Bell, the first sign of life on the internet was an communication between UCLA and Stanford computers in 1969. And that certainly was social–the internet was built in response to the threat of USSR dropping bombs onto the US. Not exactly friendly but certainly social.

Through the internet, I have met people from all around the world. As I like to say on my job, I have traveled “virtually” everywhere.

Like Lisa, I have been online in one way or another for many years, but I feel that things have changed significantly between my early experiences and now. (This may just be a function of who we are — it is quite possible that Lisa invested better in her early online community than I did — so we should just be regarded as two anecdotal data-points.)

It is true that, as Lisa points out, people have built communities using e-mail lists, IRC and Usenet (as well as the closed networks such as Prodigy, AOL, Compuserve, The WELL, CIX, and all the others) since the late 1980s or early 1990s.  Those networks have been used to create content and connect people, just as we do now with the plethora of Web2.0 tools. Where is the difference? I am still trying to work it out.

I used to have an interest in Internet governance. I was a member of the CYBERIA-L mailing list (now apparently defunct); I spoke at conferences in the US and UK; I wrote journal articles. But I never felt a connection with the governance community in the way that I do with the KM community now. It was as if we were all operating in our own focused silos. (That may also have been a result of the academic ivory towers that many of us inhabited.) I also pursued personal interests in Usenet newsgroups and on CIX. Those activities rarely spilled over into my work interests. I think that partitioning of lives is a hint as to how the old online world differs from the new one.

By contrast, my Web2.0 journey has been more open and fruitful. Apart from a couple of abortive attempts at blogging (I had no real focus, so they withered away very quickly), I started as most people do — reading other blogs and then graduating to comments. Once the comments became longer I felt I had found my voice and it was time to start blogging. At the same time, Facebook and LinkedIn gave me connections with and insights into people on whose blogs I had commented. As people started reacting to my blog posts with their comments and on their own blogs, I found that I was part of a real community. That sense of community has only deepened over time and with more interactions via Twitter and the like. I have even met some people face to face.

The difference between then and now, for me, is that the variety of interactions and ‘places’ where I engage with this community has broken down the silos that I experienced in the past. Because it is impossible not to see more facets of someone’s life and personality in their blogs, comments, tweets and status updates, it becomes easier to see them as real people — not just participants in a mailing list discussion, a conference or a newsgroup. We talk of work-life balance, but as Orson Wells points out early in this interview (from 0:48), there isn’t really a distinction.

Interviewer: Would you say that you live to work or work to live?

Welles: I regard working as part of life. I don’t know how to distinguish between the two; I know that one can and people do. I honestly think the best answer to that question that I can give you is that the two things aren’t separated in my mind.

Interviewer: There are people who devote everything to their work and have no life at all, but you have lived in a big way and you have worked in a big way…

Welles: And I don’t separate them. To me they are all part of the… Work is an expression of life for me.

For many of us, I think this is now true of our interactions with each other via online networks. Earlier this week, John Bordeaux provided a magnificent example of this in his post, “A Year Ago.” This time last year, John was laid off. His reaction was unconventional, but may offer a taste of future convention.

Using online social media tools, I stitched together a loose network of future colleagues and relationships to be tended.  Rather than broadcasting my increasingly urgent need for income, I trusted the network effect would work in time.

And it did.

Today I find myself engaged in meaningful and rewarding work to redesign a failed education system; working alongside leading professionals in innovation, public policy, and social change.

A year ago, I could not predict where I would be today.  Such is the nature of complexity and networks.  The theory suggested I should place myself in conversations, expand my connections into new networks, and a vocation would emerge.  (While I embrace the notion, I hope I never again have to conduct such experiments with my family’s financial health.)  I saw the traditional reaction to job loss as creating one-to-one intense conversations trying to match my talents to a company’s need.  Instead, I took this path.  Which amounted to no path at all, certainly not one any could predict.  To paraphrase Mr. Frost, that has made all the difference

The thing is, we knew that John was going through this. Not from his blog, but from changes in his LinkedIn status, from clues in his tweets. I hope he felt that the support we were able to give (often from a distance) was enough.

Ultimately, I think John’s experience shows that effective participation in online networks allows one to see a more authentic picture of people. Perhaps it is becoming less true that “on the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog.”

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Posted in Conversation, Personal, Sharing, Web2.0

Posted by: Mark Gould | 11 December 2009

Knowing together, better

I am a bit of an e-mail hoarder, so occasionally I go back into the store and find an apparently random message that strikes a new chord. So it was when I stumbled across a message from Kaye Vivian to the ActKM mailing list dating back to July 2008. Her e-mail simply drew attention to an article by Richard McDermott on communities of practice (CoPs). More significantly, Richard had listed six characteristics shared by CoPs that successfully matured into dynamic entities (rather than withering away).

Cloister, Canterbury Cathedral

To date, I have not explored the potential benefits of CoPs for knowledge purposes. Within law firms, self-organised or mandated groups are the norm. At one extreme, there is the practice group or client team, and at the other there may be groups of like-minded individuals with a common interest (such as trainee solicitors) who cluster together for support when necessary. Some of these groups work as CoPs by sharing knowledge and learning incidental to their main purpose. Reading Richard McDermott’s article, however, I thought his conclusion probably had wider resonance than just for CoPs.

So what are Richard’s six characteristics? Kaye’s e-mail referred to a post of Stan Garfield’s in which he summarised this part of the article, but Richard actually started by pointing to factors inhibiting flourishing CoPs:

When starting, communities often need to build momentum as they discover what knowledge is useful to share. Once they’ve been going for a few years, three other problems often inhibit communities’ ability to maintain the spark they had during their early years — loss of momentum, loss of attention and localism.

Once these problems are overcome, six factors are evident in successful CoPs:

Not all communities at mid-life suffer these limitations. Some are vital, full of energy and add value to both their members and the company. The most vital of the communities we reviewed shared six characteristics — clear purpose, active leadership, critical mass of engaged members, sense of accomplishment, high management expectations and real time.

Whilst I have no experience with CoPs, I think these characteristics also hold good for successful collaboration of many different types. For example, organisational wiki use works well and adds value when we see the factors manifested in the following ways.

  1. Clear purpose: A wiki which has a defined purpose (creating a resource, for example, or managing a project) flourishes where unfocussed efforts fail.
  2. Active leadership: As Stuart Mader points out in his book, Wikipatterns, a number of key roles have grown up around good wiki use. One of those is the wiki champion: “A passionate, enthusiastic champion is essential to the success of wiki…”
  3. Critical mass of engaged members: Because of the 90:9:1 principle, a significant number of people is necessary to generate valuable wiki contributions.
  4. Sense of accomplishment: One of the advantages of good wikis over traditional CoPs is that as they grow the contributions of members naturally accrete and can provide a real sense of accomplishment. By the same token, if nothing is happening with the wiki people will see it and are unlikely to be encouraged to turn it round.
  5. High management expectations: Whilst many wikis are established as grass-roots activities, they can still benefit from interest being shown by senior people in the organisation. Whilst there is an argument that Enterprise 2.0 might result in less hierarchical organisations, it is still the case that people respond to traditional management and leadership.
  6. Real time: This is where wikis can score over traditional CoPs. Whereas CoPs may require additional time (McDermott refers to one organisation where there was an expectation that 10% of people’s time was dedicated to community activities), wikis can be the place where some aspects of work actually take place (in preference to e-mail, for example). This success factor is probably better worded as real commitment.

And what does success look like? For Richard McDermott, CoPs are successful when they achieve a significant level of influence in the organisation.

But to play this role effectively, communities need to be more than informal discussion groups. They need to be empowered to be full-fledged elements of the organization, legitimately exercising influence without formal authority.

The same is probably true of wikis.

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Posted in Lawyering, Rationality, Success, Web2.0

Posted by: Mark Gould | 11 November 2009

Getting attention — the comedy approach

One of the joys of Twitter is that people one follows often point to things that one would otherwise have missed. It was by that route that I became aware of the work of Chris Atherton. She is a specialist in visual perception, cognition and presentation skills. I first encountered her work when someone pointed me to her Slideshare presentation, “Visual attention: a psychologist’s perspective”, which provides a high-level overview of the issue of cognitive load in presentations.

Chris’s blog is full of valuable insights, as is her twitterstream. Her recent post on giving presentations is a great example. I especially like the way it starts — she was going to send some thoughts about presentations to a friend, but it got out of hand.

So instead of sending my friend an email, I wrote this blog post. It’s ostensibly about the mistakes students make when they give presentations, but really it’s about how the only rules you need to know about giving a good presentation are the ones about human attention.

It’s a great post, and full of really usable advice. Unlike many pontificators about Powerpoint, Chris shuns all those rules about structure.

Knowing which rules to follow and which to break is mostly a matter of practice and experience — which you may not have. So ignore, or at least treat with extreme suspicion, anything that sounds like a rule. Common rules include:

  • Use X lines of text/bullet-points per slide
  • Plan one slide for every N seconds of your talk
  • The 10/20/30 rule

These all sound perfectly sensible, but the trouble with rules is that people cling to them for reassurance, and what was originally intended as a guideline quickly becomes a noose.

Ultimately, good presenters just need to bear one thing in mind:

Concentrate on the rules of attention. The thing you most want during a presentation is people’s attention, so everything you do and say has to be about capturing that, and then keeping it. The rules of attention are more or less universal, easier to demonstrate empirically than rules about specific slide formats, and can be neatly summarised as follows: people get bored easily.

Chris then elaborates on what some of those rules are. I would summarise them here, but that would deprive you of the experience of reading her post and the excellent comments on it. I just want to single out one of those comments because it threw something into sharp focus for me.

At the end of a substantial comment, Martin Shovel remarked:

A thesis should be expressed in the form of a proposition – i.e. a sentence – the simpler and shorter the better! – that asserts or denies something about the content. ‘My holiday in Italy’ isn’t propositional; whereas ‘holidays in Italy are a nightmare’ is. It’s good to think of your proposition in the following way. Imagine you’re about to give your presentation when the fire-alarm suddenly goes off. Now you find yourself with only 30 seconds in which to sum up the point of your presentation – what you say in those 30 seconds should be your proposition.

Reading this, I was reminded of Robert McKee’s Story, and of the experience of watching a good comedian. In his exposition of good screenwriting McKee is clear that the script needs to hold the audience’s attention (the theme of bonding with the audience runs through the book), and that it often does that by tantalising the audience. Here he is at the very start of the book, for example:

When talented people write badly it’s generally for one of two reasons: Either they’re blinded by an idea they feel compelled to prove or they’re driven by an emotion they must express. When talented people write well, it is generally for this reason: They’re moved by a desire to touch the audience.

[…]

No film can be made to work without an understanding of the reactions and anticipations of the audience. You must shape your story in a way that both expresses your vision and satisfies the audience’s desires. The audience is a force as determining of story as any other element. For without it, the creative act is pointless.

A good stand-up comedian often does a similar thing. For example, here (jump to 3′33″ for the relevant section) is Alun Cochrane sharing his thoughts on trains, peaches and Red Bull (depending on where you work, this may contain language that is NSFW):

The way he builds the scenario layer by layer retains the audience’s attention and even allows him room for digressions. It is a lesson worth learning. Few comedians or screenplays use bullet points to make their point (apart from the rare examples where bullet points are the point). They command attention by tantalising, asking questions without obvious answers, by engaging the audience’s brains.

Getting attention isn’t just a necessity for scriptwriters, comedians or lecturers. I think anyone who has a message to convey, in whatever format, (including driving organisational change) needs to be good at this.

3 Comments

Posted in Rationality, Science, Stories

Posted by: Mark Gould | 4 November 2009

Transplanting practices between organisations

It is time to revisit the best practices meme again. Over the past few months I have been struck by the way the term is sometimes used in an all-encompassing way, without necessarily clarifying its scope.

Lamb House, Rye

One relatively recent post of this type “Innovation Builds on Best Practice” was written by Tom Young of Knoco, and refers to their intriguing Bird Island exercise. Over the last ten years, Knoco have been running workshops in which the participants build a tower with a given set of materials, then improve their designs following a number of KM interventions. The decade of experience has been documented in a set of ‘best practices’ which are used as part of the exercise. As the exercise progresses, tower heights increase significantly, and the maximum heights have also grown over the ten year period. (There is a longer account of the exercise in the April 2009 issue of Inside Knowledge magazine.)

Tom defines ‘best practice’ by reference to work done with BP:

A recognised way of [raising productivity or quality level across the board] is to identify a good example of how to do it and replicate that in other locations. We used the term ‘good practice’ in the BP Operations Excellence programme. After we had identified several ‘good practices’, we developed from them, the ‘best practice’. It was only after the ‘best practice’ was identified (and agreed by the practitioners) that it was rolled out and all plants encouraged to implement that method. After all if there was an agreed ‘best practice’ to do an activity, why would you not want to use it? Learning was captured on an ongoing basis and the ‘best practice’ updated periodically.

If I understand him correctly, Tom is comparing performance in an activity, process or task in one part of an organisation with the same activity, process or task elsewhere in the same organisation. In this context, I can see that practices may well be comparable and replicable across silos. (Although, to answer his rhetorical question, I can easily envisage situations where the context may well require a ‘best practice’ to be ignored. Offshore oil extraction will be very different in the different climatic conditions of the Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea.)

However, greater problems arise in attempts to transfer ‘best practice’ between organisations, or even within organisations where more processes or activities are at stake.

More years ago than it is comfortable to recall, I studied Comparative Law. (I even taught it briefly at a later stage.) One of the key readings was an article by Otto Kahn-Freund, “On Use and Misuse of Comparative Law” (1974) 37 Modern Law Review 1. (The article is not online, but I found a very good summary of its key points, together with a later piece by Gunther Teubner.) Kahn-Freund’s argument is that a law or legal principle cannot be separated from the culture or society that created it, and so even when there is a common objective, transplanting the law from elsewhere will rarely work. There is a useful example in the criminal law. The way in which criminal investigations and prosecutions proceed varies wildly between countries. It would make little sense to take a rule of evidence from the adversarial system used in England and transplant it into the French inquisitorial system. William Twining has elaborated considerably on this argument in an interesting lecture given in 2000 (PDF).

The problem that I have with much of the ‘best practice’ discourse is that it often strays into assertions or assumptions that such practices can readily be transplanted. However, like the law, such transplants will often be rejected.

The other aspect of Tom Young’s post that, frankly, confuses me is his treatment of innovation. Here’s an extended quote.

Now I hear some mention the words like ‘innovation’ and ‘creativity’. Perhaps you are thinking that the use of best practice will inhibit innovation and creativity. For me this is where context is vital.

In some situations, you don’t want innovation or creativity, you just want it done in a standard, consistant fashion.

If you are running a chemical plant, you don’t want the operator to innovate. If you are manufacturing microchips, you don’t want the technicians to innovate. If you are launching a new product into a target market, you perhaps don’t want innovation but standardisation. If you are decommissioning a nuclear power plant, perhaps you don’t want innovation during the work phase.

I am comfortable with this so far. Where things are working well, we should carry on. However, there is always room for improvement, even in simple systems.

Innovation should be built on current best practice. One of the key lessons from the Knoco Bird Island exercise is that if you ask people to do something, they will frequently start based on their own experience. When you illustrate the current best practice that has been achieved by several hundred people before them, they are frequently overwhelmed as to how poor they achievement was compared to what has already been established. 

Where appropriate give them the best practice and ask them to innovate from there. For example if by the introduction of AAR’s the time to change filters has been reduced from 240 hours per screen to 75 hours and a best practice created illustrating how this is achieved, innovate from the best practice figure of 75 hours, not the previous figure of 240 hours but only if it is safe to do so. In some instances innovation must be done in test area, ideas thought out, prototypes created and tested before the agreed modification is installed in the main plant.

My problem here is that I don’t think Tom is describing innovation. These are improvements in existing processes, rather than adaptations to new scenarios where adherence to the current way of doing things would be counter-productive. In a comment to Tom’s post, Rex Lee refers to kaizen. This is something that is often associated with Toyota. To be sure, the lean production processes in Toyota’s main, automotive, division are partly responsible for its continuing viability. However, another critical aspect is the way in which the company has diversified into other areas such as prefabricated housing, which it has been building since the mid-1970s. This response to crisis is an innovation, and goes beyond process improvement. Toyota encourages both through its well-documented suggestion system.

Going back to the Bird Island, it is certainly correct that no sensible business would expect people to embark on tasks or activities without guidance as to the ways in which they have successfully been done before. However, if the business needs a different way to achieve the same outcome, or a different outcome altogether, getting better at doing the same thing isn’t going to cut it.

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Posted in Best Practice, Culture, Innovation, Law

Posted by: Mark Gould | 16 October 2009

Thinking like a designer?

Over the last week, I have noticed a flurry of blog posts and articles referring to “design thinking.” This may just be a clustering illusion, though — the idea is not new, nor can I see any particular reason why it would surface now more than before. What I read does puzzle me, though.

San Gimignano

Let’s start with what is meant by design thinking.

Compare and contrast: Design Observer, October 2009: “What is Design Thinking Anyway?” and Design Observer, November 2007: “Design Thinking, Muddled Thinking.”

A quote from the latter first:

When the word “critical” is attached to the word “thinking,” the result, “critical thinking,” is a term that has clear, well defined, and well-understood meaning — certainly in the academic community, if not generally. As a counter example, the same cannot, for instance, be said about the term “art thinking.” This is not a term that can be used in any precise or meaningful way. Why? Because it could mean painting or sculpture; it could mean figurative or abstract; it could mean classical or modern or contemporary. Because it embodies so many contradictory notions, it is imprecise to the point of being meaningless — and therefore, completely understandably, it is not much used, if at all.

“Design thinking” is as problematic a term as “art thinking.” Design thinking could refer to architecture, fashion, graphic design, interior design, or product design; it could mean classical or modern or contemporary. It’s imprecise at best and meaningless at worst. More muddled thinking.

But then the more recent article takes a different view:

One popular definition is that design thinking means thinking as a designer would, which is about as circular as a definition can be. More concretely, Tim Brown of IDEO has written that design thinking is “a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.” [Tim Brown, "Design Thinking" Harvard Business Review, June 2008, p. 86.] A person or organization instilled with that discipline is constantly seeking a fruitful balance between reliability and validity, between art and science, between intuition and analytics, and between exploration and exploitation. The design-thinking organization applies the designer’s most crucial tool to the problems of business. That tool is abductive reasoning.

Then there is this. Having adopted the “design thinking is thinking like a designer” approach, this site (curated by one Nicolae) goes on as follows.

When design is stripped from forming, shaping and styling, there is a process of critical thinking and creative solving at the very core of the profession. By consciously understanding and documenting this process, a new field within the design domain emerges that deals with the creativity DNA of the design mind. When properly understood and harvested, one can transfer the creative DNA from design into virtually any discipline regardless of brain direction. This process has been recognized by thought leaders as an extremely valuable tool for fostering creativity and driving innovation.

However, this is as far as it goes — there is no further analysis of what this “process of critical thinking and creative solving” might be (apart from a meaningless allusion to the left brain-right brain dichotomy, which is a widespread fallacy[1]). So that takes us no further. (I confess that in my original draft, I was much ruder.)

The reference in this week’s Design Observer piece to abductive reasoning takes us a bit further. Here is what wikipedia currently has to say about that, by comparison with better-known forms of reasoning.

Deduction
allows deriving b as a consequence of a. In other words, deduction is the process of deriving the consequences of what is assumed. Given the truth of the assumptions, a valid deduction guarantees the truth of the conclusion. It is true by definition and is independent of sense experience. For example, if it is true (given) that the sum of the angles is 180° in all triangles, and if a certain triangle has angles of 90° and 30°, then it can be deduced that the third angle is 60°.
Induction
allows inferring a entails b from multiple instantiations of a and b at the same time. Induction is the process of inferring probable antecedents as a result of observing multiple consequents. An inductive statement requires empirical evidence for it to be true. For example, the statement ‘it is snowing outside’ is invalid until one looks or goes outside to see whether it is true or not. Induction requires sense experience.
Abduction
allows inferring a as an explanation of b. Because of this, abduction allows the precondition a to be inferred from the consequence b. Deduction and abduction thus differ in the direction in which a rule like “a entails b” is used for inference. As such abduction is formally equivalent to the logical fallacy affirming the consequent or Post hoc ergo propter hoc, because there are multiple possible explanations for b.

At this stage, then, abduction doesn’t look too promising as a means of solving problems. However, it might be attractive as a tool to suggest solutions which can then be tested separately. This is the way I imagine it being used — as an exploratory technique. This is supported by exploring a reference later in the article to Charles Sanders Peirce. His lecture “The First Rule of Logic” is apposite here. Peirce argued that whatever mode of reasoning is chosen, “inquiry of any type… has the vital power of self-correction and of growth.” Following from this, “it may truly be said that there is but one thing needful for learning the truth, and that is a hearty and active desire to learn what is true.” We then come to the heart of his argument.

Upon this first, and in one sense this sole, rule of reason, that in order to learn you must desire to learn and in so desiring not be satisfied with what you already incline to think, there follows one corollary which itself deserves to be inscribed upon the wall of every city of philosophy,

Do not block the way of inquiry.

Although it is better to be methodical in our investigations, and to consider the Economics of Research, yet there is no positive sin against logic in trying any theory which may come into our heads, so long as it is adopted in such a sense as to permit the investigation to go on unimpeded and undiscouraged.

This opens the way to the kind of instinctive, hunch-following process that appears to be presented now as “design thinking.” I am far from sure that such thought processes are unique to designers or, even, more prevalent in that community. Peirce’s suggested open-mindedness in seeking solutions, followed by clear-headed assessment of the merit of those solutions, is a model that many professionals follow, designers or not.

Neil Denny, in a post critiquing some lawyers’ thinking, points to Edward de Bono’s concept of Po. This idea is essentially the same as abduction — thinking of answers that are entirely distinct from the obvious answers in order to reach a new and achievable solutions. As Neil puts it,

Po lifts us out of the normal patterns of thinking. It does not ask “Is this a good idea?” which invites a critical progression of “…And if not, why not.” Instead, po says “Let’s just accept that the following statement, however nonsensical, however illogical is a good idea. Now, what is good about it? What would work or how would it benefit our organisation, or our clients.”

The idea or the suggestion itself is put forward to stimulate the discussion. The idea can be discarded later once it has identified benefits or methodologies.

As Neil indicates, it is the discussion, or the process by which traditional logical tests are applied, where the work really happens. Going back, again, to an old post of mine, James Webb Young’s A Technique for Producing Ideas (chronologically only slightly closer to de Bono than to Peirce) is just another expression of the same basic process.

The process can be distilled into a small set of key points:

  1. Desire to learn, adapt, or create
  2. Always be open to possibilities (however odd they may seem)
  3. Choose potential solutions intuitively and imaginatively
  4. Test the chosen solutions rigorously
  5. Discard failed (and failing) solutions (including the status quo), however attractive they may appear
  6. Learn, adapt or create
  7. Return to the beginning

This is a hard discipline, and it has to be maintained for best results.

Interestingly, if you persist in concentrating on the things you already know and are familiar with, if you avoid opening your eyes to the widest variety of options, you are likely to be persistently unlucky. Richard Wiseman has reached this conclusion after studying luck and luckiness for some years.

[U]nlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements and as a result miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for.

My research revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.

Wiseman’s work is extremely interesting, and worth exploring in more detail. (For those in Manchester at the end of the month there is even an opportunity to hear him speak as part of the Manchester Science Festival.)

It is important, however, not to get too carried away with intuition. When dealing with abstract problems, our brains tend to think in a way that can lead inexorably to error. The clustering illusion that I referred to at the beginning, together with a host of other cognitive errors, can be a real problem when assessing probability and statistics, for example, as Ben Goldacre specialises in showing us. If design thinking just means being supremely imaginative and doggedly intuitive, it is not likely to be a formula for success. If however, it is a shorthand for creative thinking coupled with critical assessment against objective standards (whether those are rules of logic or just client imperatives), then it is undeniably good.

But let’s not allow the designers to think it is their unique preserve.

[1] The reasons why this fallacy persists are beyond my scope here. However, the idea of a clear division is a fallacy. Although the mechanism is not fully understood, the brain almost certainly needs to involve both halves to function properly. Take this statement by Jerre Levy, in “Right Brain, Left Brain: Fact and Fiction,” Psychology Today, May 1985, for example:

The two-brain myth was founded on an erroneous premise: that since each hemisphere was specialized, each must function as an independent brain. But in fact, just the opposite is true. To the extent that regions are differentiated in the brain, they must integrate their activities. Indeed, it is precisely that integration that gives rise to behaviour and mental processes greater than and different from each region’s contribution. Thus, since the central premise of the mythmakers is wrong, so are all the inferences derived from it.

The New Scientist has also covered the issue (only available in full to subscribers, although it is possible to find versions of the article around the internet).

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Posted in Creativity, Design, Irrationality, Lawyering

Posted by: Mark Gould | 12 October 2009

Book review: No More Consultants

Sometimes it is too easy to think (and write) of knowledge-related activities in the abstract. I am guilty of this myself, and I have many books which address the topic in that way — even when they provide examples it is difficult to think of them in concrete real-world terms. Geoff Parcell and Chris Collison’s new book, No More Consultants, provides a welcome dose of reality.

Bridge below Haddon Hall

This new book follows their earlier work, Learning to Fly, but has a much narrower focus. As a result, I think it is probably even more useful. The premise of No More Consultants is simple. In part it is provided by the book’s subtitle “we know more than we think,” but that is just the background. What Parcell and Collinson have done in the new book is to provide a workable framework for organisations to ascertain when and why they can rely on the expertise and experience of their own people, rather than calling in consultants. (Consultants can relax — the final chapter explains that better organisational understanding can lead to more fruitful engagements.)

The basic tool that Parcell and Collison introduce, explain, and show in use is what they call the ‘River Diagram’. This is a way of visualising the levels of performance in an organisation with regard to defined competences. A large gap between the level competence in different parts of the organisation provides opportunities for knowledge sharing.

template

In order to get to the river diagram, the organisation needs to identify an area for change and define detailed levels of performance. The next stage is for different parts of the organisation to assess their own level of performance. The sum of all this work is expressed in the river diagram, and each organisational unit can then decide where to focus their efforts to change by calling on the experience of other parts of the organisation (or even externally).

Within this basic framework, Parcell and Collison are able to spend some time fleshing out a number of key techniques, including facilitation, envisioning future developments, and peer assists. They provide a range of examples of the tools and techniques in use, ranging from development of HIV/AIDS programmes in Africa and India to knowledge sharing between Great Ormond St children’s hospital and the Ferrari F1 team. Along the way, they are also able to provide insights into ways of dealing with a number of recurring challenges to change, such as the ‘not invented here’ syndrome.

Despite the fact that the book is an invaluable guide to practical knowledge sharing, it is carefully not positioned as such. Because of this, it is more likely to find a receptive audience beyond the normal KM community. This attractiveness is enhanced by the clarity and concreteness with which its central ideas are expressed.

Finally, this book does not just exist between two hard covers. Just as they did with Learning to Fly, Parcell and Collison have created an online presence for the book. Whereas Learning to Fly was complemented by a mailing list, No More Consultants is supported by a more nuanced Ning community. This allows resources related to the book to be shared and discussed, and makes it possible for people using the book to share their experiences in one place. It will be interesting to watch how people use the space to develop the book beyond Parcell and Collison’s core text.

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Posted in Book Review, Expertise, KM

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