Adventures in Knowledge

Climate change - a compelling arguement

A friend of mine Stuart Kay pointed me to this You Tube video "The most terrifying video you'll ever see". Can I suggest that you take the time to view it. It posits a compelling arguement to take action on climate change. If you think it worthwhile, pass it on to your friends - it will make a difference.

Face your fears

I just came across this article Facing your fear of Facebook which premises the argument that to really understand Facebook or Social Networking sites you need to actively participate in them. The one quote which stands out is:

"We are digital immigrants. Our kids and perhaps many of the people we're now hiring are digital natives. We need to get over the "them vs. us" mentality. Bottom line: Digital immigrants will never be as fluent as natives, but that doesn't mean, as immigrants, it's OK to pretend we don't live in a new world."

I have blogged about previously in the Rise of the Participation culture and how if we don't "get it" we will not be able to attract the best talent to our organisations. To "get it" means not only understanding new ways of connecting, but participating in them, giving blogs, wikis, RSS, Social Networks etc a go. The cost is only time - the reward is an enlightened view. You might not necessarily want to use these tools to connect, but at least you will have an informed viewpoint and a right to participate in the conversation. I know I am preaching to the converted here, but I am sure there are people in your organisation who have no idea - can I suggest that instead of explaining how this all fits together, take them on a real journey of experiencing connection through these tools. I can guarantee that they will start to "get it" in a more meaningful way.

A Leaders framework for Decision Making

I would like to draw your attention to the leading article in the November edition of the Harvard Business Review. The article is called A Leader's Framework for Decision Making. It covers the Cynefin framework, complexity, with a focus on the importance of context in decision making.

It is great to see the work of Dave Snowden get mainstream recognition, as the whole area of complexity and use of narrative to make sense of the world so we can act in it, is beginning to get noticed in government and business. Being an accredited practitioner, this certainly will help me get leadership to consider its application in my business.

As also mentioned in earlier postings, we are also using the Cognitive Edge framework in the Future of Volunteering project which uses these tools in a public policy context.

Congratulations David and Mary for your contribution!

Give staff Facebook or risk losing them

Ross Dawson in his blog "Trends in the Living Network" pointed out this article in the Daily Telegraph (Australia) titled Give Staff Facebook or risk losing them about construction company John Holland initially withdrawing Facebook access to its staff, but several weeks later reinstating it due to fears that it would lead to talent not wanting to work in the company.

I have been alluding to this for a while in my views on the Rise of the Participation Culture and my previous post Gen Y and Beyond. I would take this one step further and say that it is not only applicable to social network sites, but all Web 2.0 applications that this generation use to connect and network. The war for talent is such that this does become a business issue and not a "nice to have". It also raises the question - would you not prefer to have your people participating in Web 2.0 apps to connect in a supportive environment behind the firewall, or risk the fact that it is human nature to find ways of connecting anyway - these will be the apps which have been restricted inside the company being used outside the company for business purposes anyway.

Lessons learnt or a learning ecology?

The concept of gathering stories of lessons learnt is not new. Traditional thinking is that by gathering a library of lessons learnt we will ultimately not make the same mistakes, avoid previous pitfalls and garner insights to allow us to provide greater value to our clients. However, something just does not gel with me when considering this approach. Below are some thoughts:

1. We are thinking retrospectively - how much detail is actually remembered after the event - especially in the consultancy game where everyone is looking for the next assignment. This also can lead to retrospective coherence - it is much easier to make sense of an issue after the event - but are we putting our own bias and spin on understanding what happened?

2. Is it not better to avoid an issue or not make a mistake in the first place, rather than revisiting it after it has occurred? If one is to endeavor to do so, then connecting the right people up front becomes even more important that identifying missed connections and opportunities after the engagement.

3. Structured processes or environments to capture lessons learnt will ultimately dilute what originally occurred and the context with which an which an event happened will be lost. In fact one can question if people are willing to "modify" the truth for fear of punishment further minimising the ability to extract meaning. The more formal the "lesson learnt" the more likely it is to be pigeon holed with some artificial classification or taxonomy.

4. We all love a good story, and getting narrative from the source / practitioner will allow the real "gems" or "nuggets" of value to emerge rather than be filtered out. However, to only capture stories after the fact will limit the benefit of the insights being provided. We need to think of narrative as part of a living system where stories captured are continually being added to, where trends can become apparent in real time. Just think of the power of being able to see emerging issues and areas where patterns of behavior as becoming apparent. To be able to then perform experiments to encourage or discourage behaviors that are occurring - in essence having a dynamic learning environment founded on narrative - a learning ecology if you will.

On another note - tonight I leave India and move onto Tokyo for meetings (via a 12 hour lay-over in Bangkok).....

Tales from the crypt

I have been to India more times than I can remember (I was born in Bombay - now Mumbai to be politically correct). So what happens here is normally not suprising. However.........

I must tell you a story about my current experience in Baroda (polically correct "Vadodara").

I arrived here after a marathon trip from Philadelphia via the UK into Mumbai arriving at 2 am for a futher excursion to Baroda at 10 am the next morning. Needless to say I could not sleep, so arrived at the hotel with the expectation that I could spend the remainder of the day/night recuperating before undertaking local meetings......

Wishful thinking!!!!! The hotel is under renovation - I have been given the room closest to the renovation i.e. jack hammers, nail guns, anything that can make noise.........

Anyway - I know this is India - to make a fuss will only cause more angst so I endure thinking that by evening this will diminish - OH so wishful thinking..... 9pm still happening, so I lose my cool and explain in a definitely "not happy" voice the situation to the on call hotel manager - by 11pm the action subsides.

Oh naive Chris - I hope they have got the message..... I return today at 7.30pm from the local office to be greated by a cacophony of sound - not Mozart's 5th if you know what I mean.... I walk up to reception and meet the manager (YES the MANAGER) who confidently directs that all works will be stopped.......

8.30 pm Jackhammer city - yes - Chris decides it is time to play "pissed off foreigner" - not a normal part of the repitoire. My call to reception must have been a stellar performance to get the on duty manager to appear at my door in 5 minutes. After inviting him in he realised what the situation was and asked if a coffee or tea  would help (Baroda is in an alcohol free state). Always always ready for a "free bee" I asked for a coffee. He also asked that I move to another room and my clothes would be send in the am!! to which I simply asked that the noise go away and we could talk in the morning.

Anyway - to cutshort my diatribe - I am still in my room, the noise has abated and hopefully I can get some sleep.....

Sweet dreams!!!

What is your conversation strategy?

This is a question that I typically pose to people when discussing what is a relevant frame for Knowledge Management. What I am trying to do is to take out all the complexity and jargon that is sewn into "KM speak" today. The essence I am trying to get to is that we are looking for the context around information that exists in our many "knowledge repositories" in order to distil the knowledge that exists. To do that means that we must connect, and the easiest way to do so is through conversation, be it face to face, phone, teleconference, blog, wiki or any other medium.

I have just finished participating in a three day KM conference for my organisation. It was interesting to see the tension building between a content versus a context focus. Yes it was acknowledged that both were necessary, but the willingness to step up and shift the focus towards connecting our people was fraught with inertia. Comments such as my day job is 100% commited to content - how do you expect me to do more, the organisation politics will not allow us to make a difference in connecting people any day soon, we are like an oil tanker, it will take years not months to shift our focus were not uncommon. I must also admit to being very open and forthright about my views on this which was an attempt to at least polarise the debate. Over a few drinks in the bar I was told that I was on one extreme end of the spectrum i.e. connecting people and others were at the other end with a myopic focus on content and that we needed to end up somewhere in the middle. Whilst I don't disagree, the issue from my perspective is that change is happening so rapidly, that the window of opportunity to get up the learning curve and be innovative is rapidly closing. We need to develop a "safe-fail" not "fail-safe" environment in which we can conduct experiments with our people and see what works in our culture i.e. use of wikis, blogs, social networks etc. What did encourage me though, was the number of people who saw the opportunities to discuss these types of issues as extremely valuable. Feedback was that more informal time for connecting would be useful in future meetings. A number of conversations focusing on this tension between content and context have commenced and I sincerely hope that they will continue now that everyone has gone back to their day jobs.

Well I have now moved onto India for some local KM meetings. I only just got used to the Philadelphia time zone and now I am having to readjust again as I am blogging at 4.30am....

Interesting who you meet - on a plane

I am always amazed by the interesting people you meet on planes. On the Sydney to Auckland leg of my current trip, I struck up a conversation with "Bob from Austin". Bob has retired and is spending his time seeing the world. A quiet spoken gentleman, but one with a wealth of knowledge and insight. We spent three hours talking about the world, how complex it is getting and about my view of a networked world. Bob certainly was well read and indeed versed in Web 2.0. What I found rewarding from this conversation was to see a gentleman who had seen major change in his lifetime able to provide perspectives I had not considered and indeed add new trains of thought to my thinking. One "gem" that I picked up was in our discussion about narrative and story telling. Bob is greatly concerned about the the use of narrative by the media as a thinly veiled way to project the opinion of certain interest groups. He rightly pointed out that narrative is only as good as the experiences being shared. Many people are more willing to provide their opinion rather than tell a story about an experience which will significantly skew interpretation.

Well three hours certainly flew by (pardon the pun). I am looking forward to seeing if there are any other interesting characters to be met in my travels - I will let you know!

On the road...again

Greetings from Philadelphia!

I am on the road in a literal "around the world trip" for the next 3 weeks. First stop Philadelphia for the company annual Global KM conference. I arrived via Auckland (New Zealand), LA and Chicago at 1am this morning. Next is India (Mumbai and Baroda via London) for three days, then onto Tokyo (via Bangkok) for three days, then Seoul for three days and home to Sydney (via Hong Kong).

During this time I will blog where I can. This trip should see my travel out to the end of this year (hopefully!).

Future of Volunteering - update

It has been a while since I updated you on what is happening with the Future of Volunteering project I have been working on.

To date we have collected approximately 700 stories about volunteering. However, this number is well short of the 000's of stories we are wanting to collect. Our biggest challenge has been to get the word out in the community about the project and garnering participation. This can partly be attributed to the fact that the nature of volunteering is such that not all people have this as their highest priority - after all we all have to make a living and meet other obligations! In order to give this project the greatest opportunity for success, we have delayed holding the sensemaking workshops planned for last month until early February when we will have significantly more stories and have had a greater opportunity to engage community support.

We will not be resting on what we have achieved to date - the next several months will entail  a significant marketing effort to raise awareness and collect more stories. We are planning on holding a volunteer story "phone-in" over a week in mid November - the idea being to get people to call in with their stories to the call centre we have been able to secure. I will let you know how this goes in a future post.

Working on this project has certainly been interesting with many lessons already being learnt - especially as this is the first time the Cognitive Edge tools and processes are being used in a public policy setting.