As Melanie summarises it:

Simply put, the more broad your experience and interests, the more opportunities there are in your life to connect the dots and bring a fresh and creative perspective to the table.

Law is no different, and some would argue more in need of creative energy: the best patent attorneys usually have a background in science and chemistry and a passion for photography might fuel a leading copyright lawyer’s quest to represent image right-holders.

I have made a similar point in the past here, and also in a long comment on a post by Jordan Furlong about legal education. But on reflection, I fear I may have overstated the case for breadth of interests.

Steven Johnson (whose book The Invention of Air was one of my fascinating reads of last year) has just published a study of scientific creativity, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. His publisher has created a neat animated summary of the book, embedded below.

In the summary, Johnson says ”the great driver of scientific innovation and technological innovation has been the historic increase in connectivity and our ability to reach out and exchange ideas with other people, and to borrow other people’s hunches and combine them with our hunches and turn them into something new.”

This is where the difference lies. The route to insight, creativity, or innovation depends only partly on being personally committed to an open-minded quest for different perspectives. It also requires connection and collaboration with other people. And the balance between the two constantly shifts. For some people, or some problems, the right response is to look at alternative disciplines or ideas. For others, wider connections might be a better answer.

Over the Summer, I read The Strangest Man — a biography of Paul Dirac, who was probably Britain’s least well-known most influential physicist. Dirac was born in Bristol of a Cornish mother and Swiss father. Even allowing for the fact that his father was an overbearing bully, Dirac’s communications with his family were sketchy at best. He would send his mother a postcard every week, but it would usually only refer to the weather in Cambridge. When he won the Nobel Prize in 1933, his parents only found out when they read a report in the newspaper.

By contrast, Dirac clearly engaged deeply with his fellow physicists. He travelled widely and made connections in his own fashion — he tended to listen only as long as he was interested and speak only when he had clear (almost brusque) contributions to make. He was no conversationalist, but he is regarded as a real link between Einstein and Richard Feynman. So he made connections as well as he could, and he also drew on talents beyond theoretical physics. As a boy, he had been educated in a technical school: his perspective on atomic physics was therefore different from many of his contemporaries because he always sought elegantly calculated solutions.

Today’s Financial Times contained its annual survey of innovative lawyers. I don’t make a regular study of this publication, but I was struck this year by the fact that many of the instances of innovation embodied some form of connection or collaboration. It is just the beginning, but perhaps the trend is set for lawyers as it has been for scientists for many years. As Isaac Newton, Dirac’s predecessor as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, put it: “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”

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.

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.

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).

In late 1991, the Harvard Business Review published an article by Ikujiro Nonaka containing some key concepts that would be used and abused in the name of knowledge management for the next 18 years (and probably beyond). In “The Knowledge-Creating Company” (reprinted in 2007) Nonaka described a number of practices used by Japanese companies to use their employees’ and others’ tacit knowledge to create new or improved products.

Nonaka starts where a number of KM vendors still are:

…despite all the talk about “brain-power” and “intellectual capital,” few managers grasp the true nature of the knowledge-creating company — let alone know how to manage it. The reason: they misunderstand what knowledge is and what companies must do to exploit it.

Deeply ingrained in the traditions of Western management, from Frederick Taylor to Herbert Simon, is a view of the organisation as a machine for “information processing.” According to this view, the only useful knowledge is formal and systematic — hard (read: quantifiable) data, codified procedures, universal principles. And the key metrics for measuring the value of new knowledge are similarly hard and quantifiable — increased efficiency, lower costs, improved return on investment.

Nonaka contrasts this with an approach that is exemplified by a number of Japanese companies, where managing the creation of new knowledge drives fast responses to customer needs, the creation of new markets and innovative products, and dominance in emergent technologies. In some respects, what he describes presages what we now call Enterprise 2.0 (although, tellingly, Nonaka never suggests that knowledge creation should involve technology):

Making personal knowledge available to others is the central activity of the knowledge-creating company. It takes place continuously and at all levels of the organization. And … sometimes it can take unexpected forms.

One of those unexpected forms is the development of a bread-making machine by the Matsushita Electric Company. This example of tacit knowledge converted into explicit has become unrecognisable in its repetition in numerous KM articles, fora, courses, and so on. Critically, there is no actual conversion — the tacit knowledge of how to knead bread dough is not captured as an instruction manual for bread making. What actually happens is that the insight gained by the software developer Ikuko Tanaka by observing the work of the head baker at the Osaka International Hotel was converted into a simple improvement in the way that an existing bread maker kneaded dough prior to baking. The expression of this observation was a piece of explicit knowledge — the design of a new bread maker, to be sold as an improved product.

That is where the critical difference is. To have any value at all in an organisation, peoples’ tacit knowledge must be able to inform new products, services, or ways of doing business. Until tacit knowledge finds such expression, it is worthless. However, that is not to say that all tacit knowledge must be documented to be useful. That interpretation is a travesty of what Nonaka has to say.

Tacit knowledge is highly personal. It is hard to formalize and, therefore, difficult to communicate to others. Or, in the words of philosopher Michael Polanyi, “We know more than we can tell.” Tacit knowledge is also deeply rooted in action and in an individual’s commitment to a specific context — a craft or profession, a particular technology or product market, or the activities of a work group or team.

Nonaka then explores the interactions between the two aspects of knowledge: tacit-tacit, exlpicit-explicit, tacit-explicit, and explicit-tacit. From this he posits what is now known as the SECI model. In this original article, he describes four stages: socialisation, articulation, combination and internalisation. Later, “articulation” became “externalisation.” It is this stage where technology vendors and those who allowed themselves to be led by them decided that tacit knowledge could somehow be converted into explicit as a business or technology process divorced from context or commitment. This is in direct contrast to Nonaka’s original position.

Articulation (converting tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge) and internalization (using that explicit knowledge to extend one’s own tacit knowledge base) are the critical steps in this spiral of knowledge. The reason is that both require the active involvement of the self — that is, personal commitment. …

Indeed, because tacit knowledge includes mental models and beliefs in addition to know-how, moving from the tacit to the explicit is really a process of articulating one’s vision of the world — what it is and what it ought to be. When employees invent new knowledge, they are also reinventing themselves, the company, and even the world.

The rest of Nonaka’s article is rarely referred to in the literature. However, it contains some really powerful material about the use of metaphor , analogy and mental models to generate new insights and trigger valuable opportunities to articulate tacit knowledge. He then turns to organisational design and the ways in which one should manage the knowledge-creating company.

The fundamental principle of organizational design at the Japanese companies I have studied is redundancy — the conscious overlapping of company information, business activities, and managerial responsibilities. …

Redundancy is important because it encourages frequent dialogue and communication. This helps create a “common cognitive ground” among employees and thus facilitates the transfer of tacit knowledge. Since members of the organization share overlapping information, they can sense what others are struggling to articulate. Redundancy also spreads new explicit knowledge through the organization so it can be internalized by employees.

This silo-busting approach is also at the heart of what has now become known as Enterprise 2.0 — the use of social software within organisations. What Nonaka described as a natural form for Japanese organisations was difficult for Western companies to emulate. The legacy of Taylorism has proved too hard to shake off, and traditional enterprise technology has not helped.

Which is where we come to the second text: Andrew McAfee’s Spring 2006 article in the MIT Sloan Management Review: “Enterprise 2.0:The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration.” This is where the use of Web 2.0 technologies started to hit the mainstream. In reading this for the first time today — already having an an understanding and experience of the use of blogs and wikis in the workplace — it was interesting to see a different, almost historical, perspective. One of the most important things, which we sometimes forget, is McAfee’s starting point. He refers to a study of knowledge workers’ practices by Thomas Davenport.

Most of the information technologies that knowledge workers currently use for communication fall into two categories. The first comprises channels — such as e-mail and person-to-person instant messaging — where digital information can be created and distributed by anyone, but the degree of commonality of this information is low (even if everyone’s e-mail sits on the same server, it’s only viewable by the few people who are part of the thread). The second category includes platforms like intranets, corporate Web sites and information portals. These are, in a way, the opposite of channels in that their content is generated, or at least approved, by a small group, but then is widely visible — production is centralized, and commonality is high.

So, what is the problem with this basic dichotomy?

[Davenport's survey] shows that channels are used more than platforms, but this is to be expected. Knowledge workers are paid to produce, not to browse the intranet, so it makes sense for them to heavily use the tools that let them generate information. So what’s wrong with the status quo?

One problem is that many users aren’t happy with the channels and platforms available to them. Davenport found that while all knowledge workers surveyed used e-mail, 26% felt it was overused in their organizations, 21% felt overwhelmed by it and 15% felt that it actually diminished their productivity.In a survey by Forrester Research, only 44% of respondents agreed that it was easy to find what they were looking for on their intranet.

A second, more fundamental problem is that current technologies for knowledge workers aren’t doing a good job of capturing their knowledge.

In the practice of doing their jobs, knowledge workers use channels all the time and frequently visit both internal and external platforms (intranet and Internet). The channels,however, can’t be accessed or searched by anyone else, and visits to platforms leave no traces. Furthermore,only a small percentage of most people’s output winds up on a common platform.

So the promise of Enterprise 2.0 is to blend the channel with the platform: to use the content of the communication channel to create (almost without the users knowing it) a content-rich platform. McAfee goes on to describe in more detail how this was achieved within some examplar organisations — notably Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein. He also derives a set of key features (Search, Links, Authorship, Tagging, Extensions and Signals (SLATES) to describe the immanent nature of Enterprise 2.0 applications as distinct from traditional enterprise technology.

What interests me about McAfee’s original article is (a) how little has changed in the intervening three years (thereby undermining the call to the Harvard Business Press to rush his book to press earlier than scheduled), and (b) which of the SLATES elements still persist as critical issues in organisations. Effective search will always be a challenge for organisational information bases — the algorithms that underpin Google are effectively unavailable, and so something else needs to be simulated. Tagging is still clearly at the heart of any worthwhile Enterprise 2.0 implementation, but it is not clear to me with experience that users understand the importance of this at the outset (or even at all). The bit that is often missing is “extensions” — few applications deliver the smartness that McAfee sought.

However, the real challenge is to work out the extent to which organisations have really blurred the channel/platform distinction by using Enterprise 2.0 tools. Two things suggest to me that this will not be a slow process: e-mail overload is still a significant complaint; and the 90-9-1 rule of participation inequality seems not to be significantly diluted inside the firewall.

Coincidentally, McAfee has posted on his blog today, asking for suggestions for a new article on Enterprise 2.0, as well as explaining some of the delay with his book.

Between now and the publication date the first chapter of the book, which describes its genesis, goals, and structure, is available for download. I’m also going to write an article about Enterprise 2.0 in Harvard Business Review this fall. While I’ve got you here, let me ask a question: what would you like to have covered in the article?  Which topics related to Enterprise 2.0 should it discuss? Leave a comment, please, and let us know — I’d like to crowdsource the article a bit. And if you have any questions or comments about the book, I’d love to hear them.

I have made my suggestions above, Andy. I’ll comment on your blog as well.

In no particular order, here are the things I had in mind. Feel free to add more (or detract from these) in the comments. (And I apologise for inadvertently stealing a idea.)

Conversation. As mentioned in my last post, this is a critical part of knowledge sharing. Be aware, though, that this realisation is not enough:

simply being smarter isn’t the whole story. Clever people still do stupid things, often on a regular (or worse, repeated) basis. Wise people, on the other hand, change their ways.

Collaboration. Good collaboration may be a product of good knowledge sharing. It may even produce it. We need to be confident that what we think is collaboration really is that: 

So what is collaboration then? It’s when a group of people come together, driven by mutual self–interest, to constructively explore new possibilities and create something that they couldn’t do on their own. Imagine you’re absolutely passionate about the role that performance reviews play in company effectiveness. You team up with two colleagues to re-conceptualise how performance reviews should be done for maximum impact. You trust each other implicitly and share all your good ideas in the effort to create an outstanding result. You and your colleagues share the recognition and praise equally for the innovative work.

The important factor is mutual self-interest. When people create things they really want to create, and it is also good for the company, it energises and engages people like nothing else.

Communication. Don’t forget that this is not something you can judge for yourself. Good communication comes when someone else can understand what you say. They will judge whether you are communicating well. Empathy is required.

One way of talking that inhibits the exchange of knowledge is speaking with conviction. That may seem contrary to what we’ve all learned in communication and leadership workshops, where one of the lessons often taught is to speak with confidence- “sound like you mean it”. Yet, as I examine conversations in the work setting, stating an idea with conviction tends to send a signal to others that the speaker is closed to new ideas. When speaking with conviction people sound as though no other idea is possible, as though the answer is, or should be, obvious.

Connection. I can’t decide if this flows from the points above, or if it is a necessary pre-condition for them. The fact is, it is pervasive. Without good connections, we cannot function properly as good knowledge workers.

As the economy has worsened, there’s been some talk about eliminating “nice to have” functions such as KM.  Think again.  Without good matchmakers, it’s hard to have good matches.  Without good matches, it’s hard to have much productivity.

Creativity. This is not something that is reserved to highly-strung artists. We all need to think in interesting ways about the problems that we face. Unless we do so, we will just come up with the same old answers. And in many cases the same old answers are what created the problems in the first place.

…we need two processes, one to generate things we can’t think of in advance, and another to figure out which of the things we generate are valuable and are worth keeping and building upon. In science, the arts, and other creative activities, the ability to know what to throw away and what to keep seems to arise from experience, from study, from command of fundamentals, and—interestingly—from being a bit skeptical of preset intentions and plans that commit you too firmly to the endpoints you can envision in advance. Knowing too clearly where you are going, focusing too hard on a predefined objective, can cause you to miss value that might lie in a different direction.

Culture. We can use this as an easy escape: “I am doing what I can, but the culture doesn’t support me.” Yes, there are dysfunctional organisations which cannot accept that the world around them is changing. But we have a part to play in bringing a realisation that the wrong culture is wrong.

…the magic of the corporation (and the thing that makes the corporation the best problem-solving machine we have at our disposal) is that it can be all things to all people. Anthropology can help here because it understands that the intelligence of this complicated creature exists not just in the formal procedures and divisions of labor of the organization, but in also in the less official ideas and practices that make up the corporation. Once again, anthropology is about culture, but in this case the culture is the particular ideas and practices of a particular organization. Anthropology can help senior managers re-engineer their organizations.

Clients/customers. Why do we do this? It is easy to forget that the organisation does not exist for its own reasons. It exists to fulfil a purpose, and that purpose often means that there are consumers, customers or clients. When we know what they need, we are in a better position to understand what the business should deliver. That may hurt. Things would obviously run better if we didn’t have to worry about client demands, but that is just facetious.

This is a hard lesson for marketers, particularly technical marketers, to learn. You don’t get to decide what’s better. I do.

If you look at the decisions you’ve made about features, benefits, pricing, timing, hiring, etc., how many of them are obviously ‘better’ from your point of view, and how many people might disagree? There are very few markets where majority rule is the best way to grow.

Five continents

There are some additional things that are often linked to knowledge activities. I am not entirely sure about some of these. 

Change. This is often linked with culture. In addition, some knowledge management activities bring change with them. Doesn’t it seem odd (and a serious risk) that one project is supposed to bring about significant organisational change? Surely we should try and fit with what people are already doing?

Why won’t this work for you?

Capture/conversion. Traditionally, KM projects have focused on squeezing knowledge out of past actions, or in converting so-called tacit knowledge to explicit. John Bordeaux torpedoes both of these.

Lessons learned programs don’t work because they don’t align with how we think, how we decide, or even an accurate history of what happened.  Other than that – totally worth the investment. 

and

…it should now be evident that relating what we know via conversation or writing or other means of “making explicit” removes integral context, and therefore content.  Explicit knowledge is simply information – lacking the human context necessary to qualify it as knowledge.  Sharing human knowledge is a misnomer, the most we can do is help others embed inputs as we have done so that they may approach the world as we do based on our experience.  This sharing is done on many levels, in many media, and in contexts as close to the original ones so that the experience can approximate the original. 

Content. Otherwise known as “never mind the quality, feel the width.” Need I say more? We shouldn’t have been surprised by the Wharton/INSEAD research, but in case people still are:

The advice to derive from this research? Shut down your expensive document databases; they tend to do more harm than good. They are a nuisance, impossible to navigate, and you can’t really store anything meaningful in them anyway, since real knowledge is quite impossible to put onto a piece of paper. Yet, do maintain your systems that help people identify and contact experts in your firm, because that can be beneficial, at least for people who lack experience. Therefore, make sure to only give your rookies the password.

Control. David Jabbari nailed this one:

This trend is closely related to the shift from knowledge capture to knowledge creation. If you see knowledge as an inert ‘thing’ that can be captured, edited and distributed, there is a danger that your KM effort will gravitate to the rather boring, back-office work preoccupied with indexes and IT systems. This will be accompanied by a ritualized nagging of senior lawyers to contribute more knowledge to online systems.

If, however, you see knowledge as a creative and collaborative activity, your interest will be the way in which distinctive insights can be created and deployed to deepen client relationships. You will tend to be more interested in connecting people than in building perfect knowledge repositories.

Before we leave the alphabet, a quick word about ‘M’. If we dispose of the continental Cs above, what happens to measurement and management? That is probably enough in itself for another post, but for now a quick link to a comment of Nick Milton’s on the KIN blog will suffice:

Personally I think that dropping the M-word is a cop-out. Not as far as branding is concerned – you could call it “bicycle sandwich” as far as I am concerned, so long as it contained the same elements – but because it takes your attention away from the management component, and taking attention away from the management component is where many KM failures stem from.

Management is how we organise work in companies, and if we don’t organise it with knowledge in mind, we lose huge value. What doesn’t get managed, doesn’t get done, and that’s true for KM as much as anything else. See http://www.nickmilton.com/2009/03/knowledge-management-in-defence-of-m.html for more details.

The word ‘conversation’ is scattered throughout this blog. Like many others, I have made the assumption that people at work converse readily with each other and that one of our challenges in making knowledge use at work better is to capture those conversations or their product in as simple a way as possible. Zeldin’s argument is that in fact we do not know how to converse.

[T]he more we talk, the less there is that we can talk about with confidence. We have nearly all of us become experts, specialised in one activity. A professor of inorganic chemistry tells me that he can’t understand what the professor of organic chemistry says. An economist openly admits that “Learning to be an economist is like learning a foreign language, in which you talk about a rational world which exists only in theory.” The Princeton Institute of Advanced Studies [sic], established to bring all the world’s great minds together, was disappointed to find that they did not converse much: Einstein, a colleague said, “didn’t need anybody to talk to because nobody was interested in his stuff, and he wasn’t interested in what anybody else was doing.”

No wonder many young people hesitate to embark on highly specialised careers which make them almost feel they are entering prison cells. … Even a BBC producer I met in the corridors of Broadcasting House, when I asked how his job was affecting his brain, said, “The job is narrowing my mind.”

Poor quality conversations don’t just happen at work — Zeldin sees the problem manifested (in different ways) in the family, in love and generally across our social interactions. Our focus, however, is work. What is Zeldin’s prescription?

Almost everyone says that the more varied the people they meet at work, the more fun it is, though often they exchange only a few words. But creativity usually needs to be fuelled by more than polite chat. At the frontiers of knowledge, adventurous researchers have to be almost professional eavesdroppers, picking up ideas from the most unobvious sources.

Zeldin’s book was published in 1998. A year later, David Weinberger made the link between good conversation and KM.

The promise of KM is that it’ll make your organization smarter. That’s not an asset. It’s not a thing of any sort. Suppose for the moment that knowledge is a conversation. Suppose making your organization smarter means raising the level of conversation. After all, the aim of KM was never to take knowledge from the brain of a smart person and bury it inside some other container like a document or a database. The aim was to share it, and that means getting it talked about.

This view puts KM at the heart of business since business is a conversation. … It’s not just that good managers manage by having lots of conversations… All the work that moves the company forward is accomplished through conversations —oral, written, and expressed in body language.

So, here’s a definition of that pesky and borderline elitist phrase, “knowledge worker”: A knowledge worker is someone whose job entails having really interesting conversations at work.

The characteristics of conversations map to the conditions for genuine knowledge generation and sharing: They’re unpredictable interactions among people speaking in their own voice about something they’re interested in. The conversants implicitly acknowledge that they don’t have all the answers (or else the conversation is really a lecture) and risk being wrong in front of someone else. And conversations overcome the class structure of business, suspending the org chart at least for a little while.

If you think about the aim of KM as enabling better conversations rather than lassoing stray knowledge doggies, you end up focusing on breaking down the physical and class barriers to conversation. And if that’s not what KM is really about, then you ought to be doing it anyway.

One of the ways that we can encourage good conversations is to expose people to a wider variety of experiences and inputs than they would expect for themselves. I mentioned in a previous post how important this is for designers. It is important for all professionals. Likewise, one of the key factors improving people’s collaboration and knowledge sharing through better conversations is familiarity with other people. In most workplaces, it is obvious that different groups engage with each other in different ways depending on how their physical proximity and familiarity. We can influence these factors architecturally.

Brad Bird (director of The Incredibles and Ratatouille) makes this point in an interview in The McKinsey Quarterly. Talking about the Pixar studio building, he said:

Steve Jobs basically designed this building. In the center, he created this big atrium area, which seems initially like a waste of space. The reason he did it was that everybody goes off and works in their individual areas. People who work on software code are here, people who animate are there, and people who do designs are over there. Steve put all the mailboxes, the meeting rooms, the cafeteria, and, most insidiously and brilliantly, the bathrooms in the center — which initially drove us crazy — so that you run into everybody during the course of a day. He realized that when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen. So he made it impossible not to run into the rest of the company.

That’s great if one has the opportunity to influence architecture. What can we do otherwise? Zeldin might be able to come to the rescue. He has created The Oxford Muse: “A foundation to stimulate courage and invention in personal, professional and cultural life.” One of their projects is Muse Conversations:

At the invitation of the World Economic Forum held in Davos, we organised a Muse Conversation Dinner. The participants sat at tables laid for two, each with a partner they had never met before. A Muse Conversation Menu listed 24 topics through which they could discover what sort of person they were meeting, their ideas on many different aspects of life, such as ambition, curiosity, fear, friendship, the relations of the sexes and of civilisations. One eminent participant said he would never again give a dinner party without this Muse Menu, because he hated superficial chat. Another said he had in just two hours made a friend who was closer than many he had known much longer. A third said he had never revealed so much about himself to anybody except his wife. Self-revelation is the foundation on which mutual trust is built.

Even short of this, there are all sorts of small things that we can do. I think the important thing is to be aware (and to spread the awareness) that there are always more interesting things to know than what we already know, and that the people who know them are interesting in their own right. We just need to seek them out.

[A credit and an apology. The latter is due to Raymond Carver for corrupting a title of his. Mary Abraham is owed the former: colleague mentioned Conversation after I referred him to Mary's post, "Confessions of a Corporate Matchmaker", which underlines the point that those responsible for KM have an essential part to play in generating good connections from which good conversations should flow.]

James Dellow makes this point in his blog post, “Time for an upgrade? Wiki 2.0” and Luis Suarez drives it home with a pointer to a really engaging video on the impact of these technologies on learning (and therefore on business).

One of the interesting people speaking in the video is Stephen Heppell, who has been an educational innovator in the UK for what seems like decades (I certainly first encountered him in the early 1990s).

Children are living now in a different space. They are living in what I call a “nearly now”. Nearly now is that space that they text in, the space that they update their Facebook entries in, the space that they twitter in, you know, the space that is not quite synchronous. It’s a really interesting space because it’s not adversarial, it’s not pressured. It’s a space where people can — it’s all the R-words — they can reflect, and retract, and research, and repeat. It’s a very gentle world. I tell you what: it’s a great world for learning. (1’14″-1’45″)

Now we’re looking at a whole different range of schools. We are looking at schools that produce ingenious, collaborative, gregarious and brave children who care about stuff — like their culture. To build schools that do that is a whole other challenge. And around the world, you know, people are testing out the ingredients of what makes that work. Those ingredients are being assembled into some just stunning recipes in different places. It’s a very exciting time for learning. It’s the death of education, but it’s the dawn of learning. That makes me very happy! (4’31″-5’00″)

This idea of the pervasive “nearly now” is implicit in James Dellow’s post, and some of the things he links to. One of those things is an article by by Matthew C. Clarke, “Control and Community: A Case Study of Enterprise Wiki Usage“. He concludes as follows:

I predict that Wikis will disappear over the next 5 to 10 years. This is not because they will fail but precisely because they will succeed. The best technologies disappear from view because they become so common-place that nobody notices them. Wiki-style functionality will become embedded within other software – within portals, web design tools, word processors, and content management systems. Our children may not learn the word “Wiki,” but they will be surprised when we tell them that there was a time when you couldn’t just edit a web page to build the content collaboratively.

As James Dellow puts it: the wiki will become more of a verb than a noun. This is the future that Stephen Heppell sees, and will come more quickly than the mechanisation of the textile industry. We need to be prepared for it, not by resisting it like the destroyers of the spinning mule, but by being open to the opportunities it offers. As Clarke puts it in his penultimate paragraph:

By putting minimal central control in place an enterprise can gain significant benefit from this simple technology, including improved knowledge capture, reduced time to build complex knowledge-based web sites, and increased collaboration. Although enterprise Wiki use requires a greater degree of centralized control than public Wikis, this need not impinge on the freedom to contribute that is the hallmark of a Wiki approach. The balance of power is different in an enterprise context, but fear of anarchy should not prohibit Wiki adoption.

James Dellow is not quite so starry-eyed, but his note of caution is not a Luddite one.

I’m not sure its good enough to add wiki-like page editing functionality to an information tool and expect it to behave like a social computing tool suddenly (if that’s your intent). I think what’s more interesting is the evolution of enterprise wikis, as they add other types of social computing features. Other social computing platforms may also threaten these wiki-based solutions by adding the capability to manage pages and documents.

The key thing here is that we need to blend our corporate demands with the opportunities that working and collaborating in the “nearly now” will bring. The result of that blend will inevitably mean that the technologies will develop in slightly different ways. Modern textile machinery is very different from Crompton’s mule, if only because a modern health and safety regime requires it. Similarly, the openness of some of our current social networking and collaboration tools will need to be toned down in a corporate environment, to allow for the right level of knowledge and information sharing consistent with regulatory and ethical compliance.

As we tread the path that will lead us towards that future, I agree with David Gurteen that it is our responsibility to engage with the new technologies to help work out what the future will look like. As David puts it in the introduction to his latest Knowledge Letter, “I am surprised at just how many people especially knowledge managers are not using social tools (not necessarily internally but on the web for personal use) and consequently do not really understand their power as knowledge sharing and informal learning tools.” It surprises me too. David drives home the link with learning.

…when I ask people why they do not do the same the answer is always “Oh I’d love to but I am too busy. I just do not have the time.” But I think in reality the truth is that in our busy lives we never have enough time to do all the things we would like to do. So we prioritise things and taking the time to learn tends to fall off the bottom of the list.

I think that many people are so busy they have got out of the habit of informal learning – maybe they never got into it. Its not seen as a priority. So can I make a suggestion – if you are one of those people who are not keeping up with your with new developments and thinking in your field of endeavour then take a few minutes to think about how important is it to you compared with everything else that you do. And if you decide it is important then commit to doing it.

As the video above makes clear, the world of learning is changing fast. Our world of work will change to follow it. We owe it to ourselves, our colleagues and our organisations not to sit back and wait for the changes to overwhelm us. The tide is coming in — swim out to meet it.

Beware Academies — You could take the Platonic or Aristotelian attitude to creating winning sportsmen. The Platonic one is that you have an academy and you tell them how to do it. The Aristotelian one is, let them find out by trial and error what works and what doesn’t. … Sometimes I think that rebranding something as an academy gives it some legitimacy. It gives it none. Too often you get enshrined versions of mediocrity or systematised blandness.

When we think how people learn in organisations, we are often torn between Plato and Aristotle: between the training curriculum and learning on the job. I don’t think Smith’s point is that we should turn our backs on the Academy and embrace enlightened amateurism exclusively, but that we need to think carefully about the outcomes of different types of learning experiences. We also need to consider whether the people in the Academy are actually the right ones.

You have to trick your conscious mind — Bob Dylan said creativity is not a freight train on the tracks. It’s not something you can control. The best thing you can do is not get in the way. Most creative people have a cooperative subconscious. They keep their subconscious and rational minds aligned. The problem is, professionalism wants to understand how that works. You get some young player who’s very inconsistent and try  to make him consistent. …[Y]ou take somebody who is intermittently brilliant and you make them never brilliant.

This is a really perceptive comment about how we nurture brilliance of any kind. Often the hothousing of talent actually flattens it. Just like plants, people become more vigorous when they are subjected to the buffeting of their natural environment. When we take them out of that environment, and isolate them from the wind and rain (in the case of plants) or failure and feedback (in the case of people), we make them weaker rather than stronger. In the end, Smith is probably right that individuals are probably better off managing their own creativity and brilliance. When organisations get involved, they run a real risk of losing the brilliance along with the mystery.

It’s not about passion — Anyone can go around beating their chest; it’s winning that’s so damn hard. … I don’t pay good money to watch a conductor stamp his feet. I pay to listen to good music. The choreographer George Balanchine once said that the more he wanted passion, the more he found himself having to talk about precise, very technical things.

This last sentence is a real gem. So often we see so-called ‘gurus’ or leaders talking about the need for passion, but with very little behind it. Balanchine’s remark is much more useful. People cannot deliver with passion and flair (for the benefit of their clients, the firm or themselves) if they go not have a perfect grasp of the technical details. Some of them will never be able to show that passion anyway, but even so they would still have deep technical competence. That has a value in itself. Passion without command of the detail is worthless.

Unfortunately, the interview is not online, so if you want more you’ll have to buy the magazine. Alternatively, Smith’s recent book, What Sport Tells Us About Life, apparently covers similar ground.

For me, the debate was a chance to go rhetorical about the single cultural principle I hold most dear: that history and tradition are things you build on with pride and conviction, not resorts you scurry back to when you can think of nothing better to do. I believe that to deny the present is to shortchange the future. These things I learnt from Nikolaus Pevsner.

Bayley was reporting on the National Trust ‘Quality of Life’ debate, “Britain has become indifferent to beauty.”

In Bayley’s account, the debate sounds very stimulating. Supporting the motion were David Starkey and Roger Scruton. Bayley caricatures them thus:

Starkey and Scruton see culture as a serial that has been recorded in episodes and canned in perpetuity for posterity. The task, in their view, is not to augment architectural history with up-to-date improvements, but regularly to revisit the past for edification and instruction.

Bereft of optimism or enthusiasm, bloated with sly and knowing cynicism, they see no value in contemporary life.

Opposing the motion were Germaine Greer (“after Clive James, our Greatest Living Australian National Treasure”) and Bayley himself. The outcome of the debate? The motion was lost resoundingly. Clearly the audience was convinced by the notion that beauty was not fixed at some past time, but is still being made, albeit in a different tradition.

This was not because we were so very clever, but because Starkey and Scruton were so very wrong. And what was the turning point? One, Greer said what a beautiful spring day it was. Whose mood was not enhanced by sunshine and flowers and blue skies? No dissenters, there. Two, in despair at their negativism, cynicism and defeatism, I asked Starkey and Scruton: “Why is it I like what you like (which is to say: medieval, renaissance and Victorian), but why you are so limited and snitty and crabby you see no value in what I like?” No dissenters here, either.

Wonderful to prove that the British are not, indeed, indifferent to beauty.

Reading Bayley’s account, I felt that the traditionalists’ view was not just applicable to beauty. Many things, including language and weights and measures are held by some to be better in some historical form. On the other hand, I am not sure that the resistance to modernity is a related to fear of change, which is how it is often characterised.

The problem, I think, is that we see the past in a sanitised form. The things that are left from bygone eras tend to be the most beautiful. However, we forget this and assume that we see a true picture of what our forbears experienced. Keats’s grecian urn is a prime example.

Famously, Keats’s poem ends with an assertion that truth and beauty are inseparable. For me, however, the phrase before that is more interesting:

When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayst…

Keats appears to be suggesting that the urn will always persist because of its beauty. Given the fragility of antique ceramics, this must be a forlorn hope. In general, however, the probability of survival of any given artefact must surely be proportional to its beauty: people are more likely to take care of such things than they are of their uglier counterparts. As a result, our view of the past is inevitably a sanitised one, containing only the good parts, with little of the bad.

By contrast, we experience all of the present — the good and the bad. Sometimes it is difficult to tell which is which. In the face of such uncertainty, it is not surprising that some people prefer to turn against the present and seek solace in the past. I think this is where Scruton and Starkey sit, whereas Greer and Bayley are happy to explore the present — risking the possibility that what they regard as worthwhile will turn out with the passage of time to be ugly and worthless.

I think they are right to take that risk. To do otherwise is to fail to take part in the process by which the things that are worthwhile are preserved for future generations. We need to remember to do the same in our organisations — not to hold on to repositories of old knowledge just because they are old, but to open our minds to the possibility of the creation of new knowledge by whatever means (and to risk some of that new knowledge being worthless).

As I pondered and wandered, I admired the characteristic brickwork of Manchester’s historic cotton warehouses. Cruelly, I wondered whether many lawyers were simply bricklayers — putting the right blocks together in a particular way to achieve the desired result: an agreement or set of agreements to achieve the commercial aims of their clients. Extending the analogy further, there are significant similarities between the creation of a new building and the conclusion of a corporate or commercial transaction.

At the outset there is a client and the client has a need. No legal work is done without an external driver. Similarly few if any buildings are created purely speculatively. The client’s need (for a building to fit a particular purpose or for a new acquisition) is usually arrived at entirely without interference by professional specialists. However, once the need has crystallised, the professionals are needed to make the need a reality: an architect in the case of a building, a lawyer in the case of the transaction. At this stage, the client’s need might permit innovation (in building design or in legal structure). However, it is almost impossible for that innovation to create an opportunity for a new type of client need.

An example of the kind of innovation I mean is the development of steel-framed structures. Once the potential of that kind of building was realised by clients, the development of densely-built cities like New York and Chicago became possible. I can’t think of a legal innovation with an equivalent impact on the scenery of business, work, trade or commerce. (That is not to say that there isn’t one — it is late and my mind is tired.)

So at least one lawyer seeing to the client’s needs is an architect – creating the best structure to deliver what the client wants, dealing with other professionals (including regulators), managing key specialists (including hod-carrying lawyers), and ensuring that the client is kept happy. Innovation in all of those areas is possible, but it must be secondary to the need to deliver what the client needs as effectively as possible. In many situations (probably the vast majority), that effectiveness is probably most likely to come from doing the usual job. Similarly, many architects might want to be innovative, but ultimately the client wants something from the pattern-book, so that is what they get.

If my analogy is correct, it must have implications for our KM efforts. There is scope for KM to support innovation, but bricklaying lawyers need a different kind of innovation than the key architects. And innovations created by the architects might never relate to technical legal issues. How do we support them without knowing where the opportunities are?