Archive for April, 2008

Lowering the sharing threshold

A common meme in knowledge management is that “people don’t share knowledge.” Here are a few examples:

The non-sharing statement is usually coupled with a set of purported justifications, and may also include a solution. However, I am not sure that the basic proposition is correct. In my experience, people are naturally willing to share what they know, except that some other factors might intervene. Some of those factors have their roots in professional habits, others in workplace politics. One of the core tasks of knowledge management is to investigate them and to demonstrate their falsity. If this is correct, non-sharing is a symptom, rather than the disease itself.

In a speech entitled “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus” at the Web 2.0 Expo (video | transcript), Clay Shirky identifies another obstacle to sharing: mother’s ruin. That is, the modern equivalent: television. In case this seems facile, consider Shirky’s argument. Referring to the argument of an unnamed historian, he proposes that just as excessive gin consumption was the way that British society coped with the societal and cultural rupture caused by the Industrial Revolution, with an eventual outpouring of civic energy when we sobered up, so we have dealt with the post-war lifestyle revolution by excessive consumption of television.

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan’s Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.

In this analysis, people are beginning to realise that instead of sinking time into television-watching, they could be doing other things — editing Wikipedia, making videos for Youtube, writing and commenting on blogs, and so on. 

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is…

There is another part to the jigsaw. It is not enough to realise that there is another way of spending this time — the activation energy to engage in this alternative has to be sufficiently low. That is the power of these social technologies — they lower the threshold of participation, and they draw people in:

I’m willing to raise that to a general principle. It’s better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, “If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too.” And that’s [sic] message–I can do that, too–is a big change.

Not surprisingly, not everyone understands this.

This is something that people in the media world don’t understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race–consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you’ll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it ‘s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.

[My emphasis.]

In my mind, this raises a challenge for people involved in knowledge management. Putting aside other excuses for not sharing knowledge (which we can deal with separately), it is inevitable that a range of displacement activities have grown up in businesses to create the illusion of busyness and thereby make it possible for people to argue that they have no time to share their knowledge. Here are three off the top of my head:

  • Meetings
  • E-mails
  • Self-justifying reports

Each of these can serve a useful purpose (just as gin and television have their place). Often, however, the production and consumption of meetings, e-mails and reports generates vanishingly small amounts of value for the enterprise. (Probably on a par with watching repeats of Friends.) At work, in blogs and on mailing lists, more and more people are declaring themselves to be fed up with these value-minimal activities. If we make it easier to share, collaborate, and engage meaningfully with our colleagues, then I think it will only take a small push to tip people into these new forms of interaction.

Perspectives on different traditions

Reading Legal Week this morning, I was impressed by an article drawing on reports from a journalist embedded with the Baghdad Provincial Reconstruction Team. Ben Hallman, who is a reporter with The American Lawyer, spent ten days looking at how Iraq’s civil justice system is being restored.

In the middle of his account, one sentence leapt out at me:

[An Iraqi] lawyer told me that Iraqi law students, for example, don’t read cases.

This failure to study cases may be a shock to lawyers working in the Anglo-American common law tradition, which is founded on the doctrine of stare decisis, but Iraq’s legal system is (still) part of the civil law tradition. As such, the judicial function is stereotypically to apply the law to the facts without reference to the way similar cases might have been determined in the past. (This stereotype is not as accurate as it used to be, but it will suffice for now.)

Without this understanding, Hallman assumes that a number of the things he sees in the Iraqi system are deficiencies. He is rightly critical of the standard of criminal investigation, but goes on to extend the same criticism to the system itself:

Criminal courts function somewhat better, to the extent that there are trials and judgments that are usually carried out — but they are hardly just. The Iraqi authorities regularly torture suspects until they confess and their justification is that the system for gathering evidence and presenting cases is in such a shambles that they wouldn’t win any cases otherwise.

Defense lawyers, meanwhile, are also undertrained. In Iraq there is no tradition of a lawyer serving as an advocate for their client. They don’t know how to cross-examine witnesses, how to challenge evidence at a trial and neither they nor the judge is accustomed to them playing an active role. Furthermore, they often meet their clients minutes before a trial is to begin.

The adversarial approach, on which advocacy and cross-examination is predicated, is one that belongs in common law systems. It is not present in the French and German legal systems, for example, but the investigatory process is markedly better. To conclude that investigation and presentation of cases could be improved is reasonable. To imply that the system precludes such improvement is not.

I don’t know what the end result of the reconstruction process will be, but I don’t think wholesale adoption of common law and adversarial techniques is appropriate if there is a long-standing alternative tradition in place. It is interesting to note that although General MacArthur promoted consitutional change in post-war Japan, the pre-war Civil and Criminal Codes were left largely untouched. (And, if Wikipedia is to be believed, the criminal justice process is closer to Iraq’s than to the United States’.)

On a more general point, this is a useful reminder that: more than one tradition is always possible; things that are different may not necessarily be worse; and, crucially, what you do is almost always less important than how you do it.

Web 2.0: life-enhancing technology

A quick post to draw attention to Scott Berkun’s report from the Web 2.0 expo. Here’s the bit that deserves memorialisation: 

The unspoken nugget / explanation / marketing line that might get me jazzed is this:

We have always been collaborative. Always been social. It’s in our genes and it’s what we have evolved to do well. Good technologies enhance our natural abilities, give us useful artificial ones, and help us to get more of what we want from life. Web 2.0 and social media make the process of collaboration and developing relationships more fun, efficient, powerful and meaningful.

Ok. Now we’re talking. With a statement like this I can walk the halls of the expo, or converse with the greatest web 2.0 pundit, and have a straight conversation. Will this get me more of what I want from life? More of what my customers want from me, or vice-versa? I can make tangible arguments about what I want or my customers need and sort some decisions out. But note that the statement above is devoid of hyperbole like revolution, ground breaking, disruptive or transformative, things that are entirely subjective. If you identify a real problem well enough, you never need those words: the people who have those problems will naturally find what you do revolutionary if you really solve their problems.

 ’Nuff said.

Who am I?

Patrick Lambe has neatly joined Dave Snowden’s challenge to the traditional MBA with a thoughtful piece by Olivier Amprimo of Headshift on the consequences of corporate specialisation. All of these are worthy of reading. For me, however, the post that brings everything into perspective makes no reference to any of these. It is Shawn Callahan’s summary of character — how we define it for ourselves, and how we really act in extremis.

Shawn uses an excerpt from Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting to illustrate how one’s perceptions of character (“who are you?”) are challenged and ultimately forged by crisis.

I would never wish this level of drama upon anyone in real life—remember, McKee is advising screenwriters— but it demonstrates that character is revealed under pressure. It’s probably one of the reasons we intuitively watch our leaders when a crises occurs to see what they do because their actions reflect under pressure their character.

When looking for ‘Who am I?’ stories you will need to seek out those times when you were under the pump, or it didn’t go the way you expected. What did you do? Alternatively find stories of when others were under pressure and you admired how they acted.

Taken together, these blog posts should cause anyone with a management or leadership position to think carefully about their own character. Does your approach to management depend heavily on the flawed and narrowly focussed thinking that Dave Snowden deplores in the typical MBA? Do you rely on technology to solve problems, rather than “thinking things through with people and implementing changes in practices and processes” as Patrick puts it? How would you behave in a crisis? Who are you?

There is even a knowledge management point to this. Shawn’s post finishes with a description of a project he ran for the Australian Geological Survey Organisation:

In 1996 I helped the Australian Geological Survey Organisation document their scientific datasets. We put a heap of effort into designing the database and then went to the scientists and asked them to describe their datasets. They scoffed at the suggestion, reminding us that they had a mountain of data and little motivation to do anything with it apart from publishing papers. We were stumped until we cottoned on to the fact that their culture was defined by the imperative to publish or perish. We revisited our project design and created the idea of a published dataset. It was linked to their performance management systems but most importantly each published dataset could be officially cited in their personal bibliographies. We went back to the scientists and asked whether they would like to publish their datasets and there was an instant line up.

Knowing what constitutes a crisis for the people around you can help to define the purposes and outcomes of a KM project.

Ceci n’est pas un pipe

A story in the New York Times about Nokia’s work on human behaviour illustrates beautifully how things we create often end up being used for very different purposes.

Someone working in Kampala, for instance, who wishes to send the equivalent of $5 back to his mother in a village will buy a $5 prepaid airtime card, but rather than entering the code into his own phone, he will call the village phone operator (“phone ladies” often run their businesses from small kiosks) and read the code to her. She then uses the airtime for her phone and completes the transaction by giving the man’s mother the money, minus a small commission. “It’s a rather ingenious practice,” Chipchase says, “an example of grass-roots innovation, in which people create new uses for technology based on need.”

Rather than ignoring this innovation, Nokia employs people (like Jan Chipchase, quoted in the snippet above) who explore how their phones are used in the wider world. And Nokia acts on what they find.

Influenced by Chipchase’s study on the practice of sharing cellphones inside of families or neighborhoods, Nokia has started producing phones with multiple address books for as many as seven users per phone. To enhance the phone’s usefulness to illiterate customers, the company has designed software that cues users with icons in addition to words.

For me, this is an example of how our knowledge needs to step beyond the temporary boundaries that we have set for it. Nokia is a really interesting company. It started as a paper company, but diversified very early — into electricity generation. The other two companies that merged into the Nokia Corporation in 1968 operated in the rubber industry and in cable and electronics. With such a hybrid background, it is not especially surprising that Nokia moved so well into telecommunications.

This link between diversity of influences and innovation has been made in the context of law firms as well: Law Firm Innovation out of Purposeful Imagination. A quote:

Opportunities are also created by events. But those at the right place at the right time usually didn’t get there just by accident. As the French scientist Louis Pasteur said, “Chance favors only the prepared mind.” Purposeful imagination should include thinking about things that could happen and then imagining how they could happen differently. It is about doing so with an eye toward the opportunities those events would present for the firm.

In case one might think that this is something one can pick up from a book, Dave Snowden puts us right (“..sapping the vigor of the mind”):

There is a huge difference between a chef and a user of recipe books. The recipe book user (for which read the manufacturing model of consultancy) uses best practice to assemble the same ingredients in the same context to produce the same meal, time and time again. If they come into your kitchen, it will have to be re-engineered to confirm with the requirements of the recipe before they start to work (and you will pay in many ways for that). The Chef in contrast can work with whatever ingredients and utensils you happen to have to hand and create a great meal.

It is all about preparedness, imagination, ideas, innovation and expertise.

If books were valued according to their price per page, A Technique for Producing Ideas would be one of the most valuable that I own. In fact, its real value is entirely consistent with its cost of 10 pence per page. The book outlines a simple technique to generate ideas. Although it dates from the 1940s and is directed at people working in advertising, it contains insights that we can all still benefit from. (The author, James Webb Young, is ranked above Rupert Murdoch in a list of the top 100 players in advertising history.)

It feels a bit strange to summarise a book that is already very concise, but I’ll give it a go, using quotations from the text.

The starting point is one that should be familiar to people working in knowledge management:

In learning any art the important things to learn are, first, Principles, and second, Method. This is true of the art of producing ideas.

Particular bits of knowledge are nothing, because they are made up of what Dr. Robert Hutchins once called rapidly aging facts. Principles and method are everything.

So with the art of producing ideas. What is most valuable to know is not where to look for a particular idea, but how to train the mind in the method by which all ideas are produced and how to grasp the principles which are at the source of all ideas.

So what are the principles and method?

There are two principles:

  • An idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements
  • The capacity to bring old elements into new combinations depends largely on the ability to see relationships

The way these principles work can be seen by looking at the method, which has five stages (as summarised by Anecdote):

  1. Gather raw material
    You need to collect specific and the general information about the issue you are working on. It’s important to be a maven and get interested in the peripheral areas and keep saying to yourself, “this might be useful.”
  2. Digest the material
    “This part of the process is harder to describe in concrete terms because it goes on entirely inside your head.” Play with the material you’ve collected. Look at it from different angles and perspectives. Don’t be too literal, use metaphors and most importantly jot down partial ideas as they come to you, regardless of how crazy they seem. Keep going until you get to the hopeless stage and everything seems like a jumble.
  3. Put the issue out of your mind completely—an incubation period
    Forget about the problem and just like Sherlock Holmes, abruptly drop the case mid-way through and got to a concert. Do anything that keeps you mind off the issue at hand and engages your emotions.
  4. An idea will appear
    At some point the “ah ha!” moment happens. Don’t let it slide past. Write down the idea immediately.
  5. Expose the idea to reality
    The idea is likely to need work. So now is the time to build it up, think about the practicalities, and work out how it might really work in practice. Test the idea with colleagues and clients and be ready to adapt.

The more widely one reads and digests, the better the source material for ideas (in any walk of life). This is an area where knowledge management can help. When talking about the first and second stages of idea generation James Webb Young refers to his habit of keeping a scrapbook of things that occur to him, and a set of index cards to help categorise the things he sees and likes, so that they can readily be brought back to mind when necessary. These are tools for personal knowledge management.

Nowadays, however, we can do better than this. Del.icio.us is a kind of digital scrapbook, consisting of things that people see on the web that might be of interest at some point. Rather than index cards, users can use tags to classify things in a way that makes sense to them. Because the ’scrapbook’ is online, anyone else can see it too. (Although it is possible to mark it as private.) You can see my things at
http://del.icio.us/innominate_lex
.

The final stage in the ideas process is probably the hardest one. This is where Nokia’s experience shows. They take the insights from their research and create prototypes and examples of potential designs. Those are then tested out with potential users, generating new ideas and insights. Nothing could more clearly demonstrate how development is never static. Our knowledge should also be dynamic, and therefore any systems we design and use to improve that knowledge must reflect that dynamism.

Express, or all floors?

Mary Abraham asks the critical question: “if we can’t explain succinctly what it is we do, how can we expect others in our organizations to know what we do?” Her query was triggered by an experience of being in a group of people all of whom professed to be knowledge managers but all of whom had a different elevator speech.

(There is another question, for those of us who use lifts rather than elevators. Why do we still refer to an ‘elevator’ speech, when that word is not in common use in our dialect?)

We have been doing quite a bit of work on our self-definition, including an elevator script. I think one source of the variety that Mary refers to is that cultural differences, even between organisations as similar as law firms, produce different KM needs. In one firm there might be a strong emphasis on KM being driven by common institutional needs and goals, so that the KM focus is virtually the same in different practice areas. In another, the culture may militate against centralisation so that facilitation of personal knowledge management is more common.

Whatever the individual context, Mary is right. Without a “value proposition”, it is difficult to justify why one needs resources to do what one does.

Tenses and legal dominance

In an Easter-flavoured post on Language Log, Geoff Pullum summarised the argument that the English language has no future tense.

The claim I’m making is not that reference to future time cannot be made in English; of course it can. And the claim is not that will cannot be thus used: probably over 80 percent of its occurrences involve some kind of future time reference. My claim — Huddleston’s claim — is simply that the varied ways we have of referring to future time in English are not part of the tense system; they involve a significant-sized array of idioms and periphrastic work-arounds — and the modal verb will has no particularly privileged place in that array.

Geoff’s article prompted an tangential thought: Is this linguistic anomaly — the extensive use of the verb ‘will’ to denote future time and its potential for confusion with ‘will’ as an expression of volition — one of the factors that has contributed to the dominance of Anglo-American law in commercial law?

Let’s get the dominance question out of the way first. Bruce MacEwen, in his analysis of last year’s Global 100 list of law firms, points out “the continuing domination of the lists by firms headquartered in the former British Empire.” His explanation?

I believe it’s fairly obvious:  Anglo-Saxon common law has a particular genius for innovation.  Imagine trying to structure a complex multi-jurisdictional project financing vehicle under French Civil Law.  I’m no expert, but I don’t think it could be done.  Not only does the common law presume that the wishes of voluntarily transacting private parties should be honored, every time such a transaction is challenged and either enforced or overturned, we have future guidance for our behavior.

(I agree with Bruce that imperial hegemony is not enough to justify this dominance. Britain’s historical geo-political power is long-gone and was not several orders of magnitude greater than the French, Spanish or Dutch empires: each of these modern nations can claim one firm in the Global 100 list. The USA’s current commercial power is fickle and does not necessarily support the global spread of its law firms.)

But where does the genius for innovation come from? Bruce’s example of structuring a complex transaction suggests the ingenuity of the Anglo-American draftsman. I wonder if the ingenuity originally rests with litigators. The common law tradition depends heavily on oral argumentation. In a language where there is an inherent confusion in the statements people make (when I say that I will do something, can you be certain that I am making a promise rather than a prediction?), the resolution of disputes is almost certain to involve the most imaginative propositions. Those propositions are then reflected in an immense juristic corpus (the common law itself) which is at the heart of the most imaginative contractual drafting, even if only implicitly.

Arguments about alleged promises are at the heart of all legal systems. There are undoubtedly many other elements that contribute to the current Anglo-American dominance in the law, but the special privilege of English-speaking lawyers that their language captures that argument in its grammar surely plays a part.

My mate, not yours

In my last post, I said that I wanted to refer constructively to something that Doug Cornelius wrote in his series of blog posts on Household KM. Here it is.

Doug’s posts are an interesting review of the tools available to manage domestic calendars, contacts, libraries and information. I found his take on contact management particularly insightful. As Doug puts it, “the contacts issue is still a knowledge management failure.” I don’t think this is unique to household contact management, and Doug pinpoints the problem:

the line between personal and business contacts is very gray. With the calendar it was easier to develop the taxonomy between personal time and business time based on the time of the appointment. With contacts I have not found a meaningful way to distinguish between contacts. Some contacts are clearly personal. My mother for instance. But what about my college roommates? After many nights of [drunken fraternity parties] serious studying, many of them have become respectable and should be part of my professional contacts. The same is true for my law school classmates.

There is also a big overlap of contacts with The Wife. There is not a clear distinction of who “owns” some of the contacts and therefore who has the better information.

I think there are some tricky underlying issues here that resonate with contact management within a business too.

In professional services firms, the client relationship must necessarily be at the heart of the business. This is not always well-managed, but CRM technology is a side-issue. These are personal relationships as much as commercial ones. There is immediately a tension between what the firm needs — as much accurate information about its clients as possible — and what people are prepared to share.  When lawyers, architects or accountants share knowledge about their work, they can be reasonably confident that someone else’s use of that knowledge will not adversely affect either the object shared or the sharer. For example, a lawyer who writes a briefing note about issues arising out of a novel transaction will not find when that note is used by one of their colleagues that their status is diminished as a consequence, or that the transaction itself is affected. However, the same is not true when information about people and relationships is shared.

When I tell the firm about the people I know, I run the risk that this information may be used in ways that could reflect badly on me, harm the relationship that I have with those people, or even cause the relationship to cease. Given this risk, it is not surprising that people are often reluctant to engage fully with their firm’s CRM systems. Paradoxically, the better a relationship that someone has with their client, the less likely it may be that detailed information about that client is provided to the firm. Imagine someone in Doug’s position — some of his law school friends may have become senior in-house counsel. Potentially, those relationships could generate real benefits for the firm. However, allowing the firm access to the information that could produce those benefits may also jeopardise the personal relationship. Which would you put first?

When firms were smaller, and technology was not a driving force, client relationships could be managed with much more respect to the personal relationship. People within the firm could have more confidence that they could control the use made of their contact information, because they could monitor either the people using the information, or the use itself. As firms grow, the distances between the owner of contact information and the user become too great to allow that monitoring. When technology is introduced to the equation — making it easier for contact information to be used without seeking the consent of, or even notifying, the person with the original relationship — people’s fear that their client or personal relationships might be misused increases significantly.

For those reasons, I think effective firmwide (rather than personal) client relationship management is the hardest KM nut of all to crack in a professional services firm. It may be easier in other sectors; I am not familiar with them.

Defining KM

In an earlier post, I mentioned Joe Firestone’s insistence that we define knowledge management. The ‘defining KM’ meme is currently a hot topic. This is partly due to Joe’s article, and partly a result of Ray Sims’s listing of 43 (now 54) knowledge management definitions. When I read that list, I was disturbed by the wide variety of aims illustrated by the definitions. I thought that this was probably a reflection of the different contexts in which the definitions were originally created. Some were abstract and academic, drawing on epistemology and philosophy. Some were concrete and managerial: clearly driven by the need to sate an internal organisational need.

Today, however, I have discovered that this is not the only reason. I am tempted to buy The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. (At more than £100, I am very unsure that I need it.) The first two chapters are available as samples of the greater work, so I have been leafing through them. I came across this in the first chapter (in section 4.4 “Defining grammatical concepts”.)

It is useful to begin by considering the kind of definition familiar from dictionaries and traditional school grammars, which are known as notional definitions, i.e. they are based on the meaning of the expressions being classified, not on their grammatical properties…. To determine whether a word is a noun, for example, one asks what it means or denotes; to determine the tense of a verb one asks in what time period it locates the action or state expressed by the verb; and so on.

Such definitions have long been criticised by linguists. Indeed, it takes only a moment or two’s reflection to see that they do not provide satisfactory criteria for determining the correct classification of words or verb-forms or clauses.

The problem with notional definitions is that they do not refer to the kinds of property that motivate the use in the grammar of the theoretical concepts being defined.

A satisfactory definition or explanation of concepts like noun, preterite, and imperative clause must therefore identify the grammatical properties that distinguish them from the concepts with which they contrast.

The definitions of knowledge management that disturbed me most in Ray Sims’s list are, I now understand, notional definitions. Worse than that, they are in some cases wishful notional definitions: they describe something that someone wants to be knowledge management, whereas someone else may equally justifiably call it something else.

Examples of wishful KM thinking abound. For instance, consider Doug Cornelius’s short series of blog posts on Household Knowledge Management. It is not clear to me that the very interesting systems that Doug has identified as potentially improving the management of his family’s domestic affairs are necessarily KM-related. They could equally well be time management or process management tools. (This is a bit unfair, because I want to use one of Doug’s posts more constructively as the basis for another blog post of mine, but I hope he will forgive me.)

The crux of finding a good (or even just a working) definition of KM, for me, is for it to distinguish what is unique about KM from general good management or business practices. If KM is a distinct activity (and there is a strong view that it is not), then it needs to be able to do more than say, rather weakly, that KM is “the way a company stores, organizes and accesses internal and external information” or “consciously managing knowledge as a resource and using it in a targeted manner within the company.”


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