 One problem
of blogs is that, since they are principally organized in reverse date
order (i.e. most recent at the top), some profound wisdom falls off the
bottom of each page every day and, unless special effort is made to
keep it in people's minds, it is effectively lost forever. Euan Semple
brought to my attention one
such wise post, by the incomparable Doc Searls, written almost
three years ago about the essence of knowledge, and what that implies
for the role of blogs in business and for Knowledge Management (KM).
For the past two weeks I have had the honour of moderating the
Association of KnowledgeWork (AOK) online forum, in a wide-ranging
discussion of precisely this topic. Here is what I learned from that
experience:
- Hierarchy, and background knowledge of the other
conversants
(i.e. relationships), factor strongly in trust, and trust is a critical precondition to knowledge
sharing. Specifically, we trust peers more than either bosses or
subordinates, and hence share what we know with them more readily. And
we trust people we know well (by virtue either of face-to-face contact,
or from reading their blog and other writings), and hence accept and
share knowledge from them more willingly.
- We need to learn,
and teach, how to organize, create, and
record excellent stories (both
oral and written) and great
conversations (both
face-to-face and virtual), and one key to doing so is
to be sensitive to who the audience is and what their needs are.
- We
need KM leaders to encourage those who could most obviously benefit
from them (newsletter writers, Subject Matter Experts and Community of
Practice co-ordinators) to experiment
with weblogs and other
fledgling PCM and social networking tools in business, and we need KM leaders to use them themselves,
so that they understand
their true potential and so they can advise the designers of the next
generation of such tools how to build
them right.
- Improving the effectiveness of front-line knowledge workers
is a delicate balancing act, requiring both
- consistent, reliable,
accessible top-down knowledge transfer, education and instruction,
and
- tools
and resources that enable and encourage human agency, i.e. the
freedom to apply individual experience and peer learning to solving
always-unique customer and business problems.
- We
have perhaps put too much stock in 'teaming', collaboration, and
'community' enablement. Although communities are very useful for
identifying 'like minds' and expertise, and projects that involve many
participants do need coordination, I believe most useful knowledge transfer, and most valuable conversations, are iterative and between two people
(though it is possible for one person to carry on several 'binary'
conversations at a time, and the upcoming generation is quite adept at
it), most collaboration comes down to individuals agreeing who will do what and, while consulting regularly, largely staying out of each other's way, and most innovation is the application of insight that one individual had while listening to another.
We are at heart, at least in the West, incorrigibly individual thinkers
and workers, and the general 'mess and imprecision of meaning' makes
effective knowledge transfer almost impossible other than one-to-one.
That is why the best speakers make everyone in the room believe s/he is
talking exclusively to them.
And here are five verbatim excerpts from Doc's brief, brilliant post, words of
wisdom that still hold true three years later:
- Blogs
are somewhere between conversation and writing [for
publication]. They're printed blurts that lithify into
word balloons that float in cyberspace for the duration, making them
searchable transcripts of
thinking-out-loud.
- Most of what we know isn't highly
explicit, and our
expressions of it start with approximations of what we mean, or think
we mean, or might eventually discover we mean — often with the help of
the other person in the conversation. But when we speak, every word
vanishes like snow falling on water. If we're lucky the other party
reflects back a sign of understanding, or an improved expression of the
same point. Whatever else happens, if the conversation is successful it
proves that we traffic in
meaning more than words.
- Blogs
are heaps of words that stick to the water:
annotated transcripts of conversations that have no sides. They are the
accumulata of What We Know,
of open-ended conversation with
who-knows-who. And perhaps I mean that last phrase a bit more
literally
than I intended when I wrote it eight seconds ago.
- Polanyi's point was that knowledge is profoundly
personal, and his only quotable line to that effect was "we know
more
than we can tell." (That he worked seven single-syllable words into one
sentence is such a remarkable exception that it may by itself provide
evidence of God.) What we know is tacit and what we can tell is
explicit... John Seely
Brown outlined*
an epistemology that began by borrowing Polanyi's classification of
personal knowledge — tacit and explicit — and extending
it to the social space, showing (see the drawing above), in other
words, that lots of knowledge is social.
- Blogs
organize themselves around whatever topic gets
us going, for as long as the topic stays interesting. Then we —
whoever
we are — move on, keeping safe in the tacit what those who operate only
in the explicit will never understand, much less "manage."
(* This presentation by John Seely Brown includes a
wonderful story about the profession of troubleshooting, and how it's
best accomplished by conversations and co-developed stories -- not
through expert systems and repositories of 'best practices')
Together, these ten statements -- about trust,
stories, conversations,
experimental incremental improvement of tools, top-down knowledge
transfer, human agency, the inherently personal and individual nature
of learning and innovation and work, the unfeasibility of teamwork and
collaboration, communities as merely collections of one-to-one
connections, learning and teaching by thinking out loud,
conversation as process not content, blogs as open-ended conversations
with people with know-who, knowledge as both personal and social, and
the transience and 'self-organizability' of knowledge and blogs -- distil the essence of a decade of critical learnings about knowledge in
business, about blogs, and about how we learn and do work.
But
much of what KM has been 'about' since its inception a decade ago --
bringing about 'culture change', creating vast repositories of content
for reuse, and designing standardized, centralized knowledge
architectures, infrastructures, and taxonomies -- has ignored the
axioms implicit in these ten statements and mostly overlooked the
fourteen concepts in red above. In other words, most KM to date
reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the essence of knowledge,
learning and work.
What KM should have been about
was understanding and accommodating people's behaviour, which is almost
invariably well-intentioned, and, thanks to human ingenuity, usually
quite efficient. And, as Drucker has been telling us for a generation,
KM should then have been 'about' improving front-line knowledge worker
effectiveness, not by burying
them in mountains of unnavigable and context-free content, but by
providing them with simple tools, training and suggested processes to
help them learn better, and do their mostly conversational,
consultative, social, individual jobs, better.
If your organization doesn't have a deep understanding of the fourteen
concepts listed in red above, and programs to leverage its
understanding of these concepts to help improve front-line knowledge
worker effectiveness, then it's probably wasting much of its IT &
KM resources, and much of the time and energy of its front-line people.
And its approach to Knowledge Management is probably seriously
misguided.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
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