Adventures in Knowledge

Facilitating Knowledge Transfer and Retention in the Modern Workplace

I have just returned from making two presentations and participating in the Ark Group conference - "Facilitating Knowledge Transfer and Retention in the Modern Workplace". I made two presentations that are available on Slideshare:

Shift happens: how to share knowledge in a network centric world

Knowledge transitions: using narrative to understand the issues of attracting and retaining volunteers

This certainly was an enjoyable conference with active discussion and participation from attendees. What was encouraging was the discussion being based around people and connection. It seems that as knowledge professionals we have an important role to play in talent attraction and retention - in fact the alignment between HR and knowledge sharing is becoming even more important and valuable to the business. It was encouraging to see communities and collaboration being a key theme of the conference.

Future of Volunteering - mid project update

On Friday last week, I had the pleasure of hosting Dave Snowden at Deloitte in Sydney to give a mid project update on the Future of Volunteering project. It was interesting to see an independant report on the session by Brad Hinton in his blog "Plain Speaking". I will let you read his report on the session as it effectively sums up the proceedings.

One thing I will say is that whilst we do have an unbalanced survey set - the majority from the 17 - 59 yr age group (little from the under 17 age group, some from the over 60 and manager of volunteers groups) already some of the insights are beginning to challenge traditionally held assumptions about volunteers - for example, we are seeing a significant number of the stories being told by people who work full time, are degree educated, volunteer weekly and volunteer because it is their passion.

We are currently working on strategies to redress this imbalance and get more stories from the under represented groups with tweaks to the survey language and a phone-in to a call centre being held on 31 Jan - 2 Feb (more details early next year). We also will have a release of the Sensemaker package in January that will allow us to get stories through Facebook - an exciting development and one which will hopefully extend the reach of this project.

The Future of Volunteering - a real experience

As you would have seen in previous posts, I am involved in a project called the "Future of Volunteering" where we are looking to uncover the drivers of volunteering in Australia.

A key tool we are using in this process is the Cognitive-Edge Sensemaker suite. Now this is NOT a plug for Sensemaker, but rather me voicing an opinion on how powerful this tool is. We are now at the midpoint of the project and are assessing the initial data collected. We now have over 800 stories, but require LOTS more. In doing the initial analysis of the anecdotes that we do have, it is impressive to read the views and heart felt sentiment of people involved in volunteering. No where else have I been able to immediately start to spot patterns and trends emerging and understand REAL insights behind them. It has also been refreshing to be able to undertake some statistic analysis around issues correlation.

What is already apparent is that we have more work to do on getting a representative cross section of the community as we have had no responses from the indigenous community or other language groups. It is also interesting to see the minimal response we have had from under 17 years demographic, pointing to the need to develop a specific programme to target this group.

Next Friday, Dave Snowden will be in Sydney to present a mid-project review to the Stakeholder group for the project. After this meeting I will post some more detail on some of the initial findings, issues and feedback we are getting on the project.

What does the Future of Management look like to you?

I have just been rereading a post by Gary Hamel on his blog Management 2.0 called "What does the Future of Management look like to you?". He asked a question a while ago:

Looking twenty years out into the future, what one characteristic—principle, practice, or structural feature—of the “modern” industrial organization will appear to be the most antiquated or anachronistic?

It is interesting to see some of the responses he has received to that question. Whilst the responses are made with the frame of Management, the views and observations equally apply to organisations holistically and reflect the rise in importance of Social Capital and the demise of "command and control" structures that is even occurring today.

I previously have covered the move to a networked world and we are seeing more organisations start to consider what this means for them. More importantly it is also revealing that there is no one right answer / solution to the impact this will have. This says to me that we need to embrace the complex world in which we live, acknowledge that we don't know the answers and look to understand the present in order to influence our future direction. We need to make sense of our environment today if we are to be successful tomorrow.

Will this make sense and resonate with a lot of people today? Probably not, but I am willing to wager that as change remains the only constant and the goal posts shift even faster, the organisations that thrive will have made this shift in mindset.

The earliest social network?

I am currently reading a book called Linked by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi. It is a fascinating look at an area in which I have an intense interest - the development of networks. One of the anecdotes Barabasi uses is his pointing arguably one of the earliest social networks:

Early Christians were a renegade Jewish sect that were persecuted by both Jewish and Roman authorities with a reach that should have by all intents and purposes been bound to the scope of Judaism. In a time where news and ideas traveled by foot, distances were long and society was very fragmented, Christianity would it seem doomed to oblivion. So how despite all the odds do approximately 2 billion people call themselves Christians today?

Many credit the rise of Christianity due to the message offered by Jesus of Nazareth - his message was "sticky" - resonating and passing down the generations whilst other religions faded away. However, it has been pointed out that the success of Christianity arguably could be credited to an orthodox and pious Jew who never met Jesus. His Hebrew name was Saul, but was more commonly known to us by his Roman name, Paul. Paul's life was to curb Christianity. He traveled from community to community persecuting Christians because they put Jesus condemned as a blasphemer on the same level as God. He used every means at his disposal to uphold the traditions and force these people to adhere to Jewish law. However, historical records have shown that Paul went through a sudden conversion in the year 34 and became a fierce supporter of the new faith, making it possible for a small Jewish sect to become the dominant religion in the Western world.

Paul's success was due to his understanding that the message had to spread, so using his firsthand knowledge of the social network of the first century's civilised world from Rome to Jerusalem, he set out to reach and convert as many people as he could. He walked nearly 10,000 miles in the next 12 years of his life. However, he did not walk randomly, he reached out to places which held the biggest communities of his era, to the places where faith could germinate and spread more effectively. He was the first and by far the most effective salesperson of Christianity, using theology and social networks equally effectively. In effect he was a bridge builder between Christian communities and a master of first century social and religious links - the only network at the beginning of the modern era that could carry and spread a faith.

One could start to ask if this was a small world network.

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!

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.