A great example of how to
use a graphic to convey a ton of information. It shows all the sources
and uses of energy consumed by the US, and how much of it is lost, in a
single picture. It's from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and it's slide 31 of 50 in this PowerPoint deck by Marty Sereno of UCSD on Peak Oil.
Here are six important discoveries I've made as a result of fifteen years' work in so-called 'Knowledge Management':
- Almost
none of the 'just-in-case' archived content of most corporations gets
used at all, and the older it gets the less likely it is to be used
- Most
public Internet sites are used mainly by job-seekers and by students
for homework, not by customers or even the general public
- What is valued is know-who (not know-what) – connection not collection
- What is valued is just-in-time knowledge acquired through context-rich interaction (i.e. conversation)
- But
even most conversations are only valued by their participants, and only
until a few days after the conversation has passed (by which time it
has either been internalized or forgotten)
- What is valued is
information to which value (meaning, suggested action) has been added
through visualization, synthesis and analysis
I don't think
any of these discoveries should come as a surprise to anyone, yet we
blithely continue to behave, in most organizations, as if they were not
so. The cost and energy that goes into acquiring 'raw' information,
organizing, presenting at and attending conferences, and populating and
maintaining Intranets, public Internet sites, document repositories,
groupware etc. is staggering, even though most of this work has little or no value.
What does have value, but only for awhile, are these five types of content:
- Conversational content -- face-to-face, Open Space, phone, Skype, desktop videoconferencing, IM, blogs, podcasts
-- mostly of value to the participants in the conversation (who have
the necessary context to understand it), and only until they have
internalized it (shelf life: maybe a week)
- Visualized and otherwise synthesized, filtered and analyzed content -- the work of information professionals that (like the example visualization above) tells readers/listeners succinctly either what something means, or what should they do about it (shelf life: maybe a year before it's obsolete)
- Project content
-- the organized collection of stuff relating to an active project, in
wikis, file folders or other places accessible to the full project team
(shelf life: the duration of the high-activity stage of the project)
- Know-who directories
-- the (rare) up-to-date lists of who knows what (not to be confused
with internal phone directories or organization charts, which are
generally valueless unless you are studying how management wishes things worked) (shelf life: as long as they're relatively complete and current)
- Stories
-- context-rich anecdotes about things that have actually happened,
from which we can learn, and which can provoke good ideas to respond to
(not to try to change) those realities (this includes cultural
anthropology stories -- direct observations of and conversations with
customers 'in their native habitat') (shelf life: as long as the
culture that gave rise to the story remains unchanged -- usually a long
time)
I have excluded technical/learning content from this
list because it is so subject-specific; many of us, especially those in
entry-level jobs, need technical manuals and regulatory reference
materials until we reach the level at which we basically know these
cold or depend on subordinates to know them. Procedure and policy
manuals, despite the energy that goes into them, are generally ignored
or worked around by those who are supposed to use them (usually for
good reasons) so I would not include them in the above list. 'Best
practices', as I and many others have explained elsewhere, are rarely
worth the paper they're written on.
How much of the work of
information professionals and 'knowledge managers' is actually focused
on these five types of information? In my experience, much less than
half. And much of that work is spent maintaining these collections way
past their shelf life, to the point that they're no longer valuable,
and start to add to the clutter that makes it harder to find the good
stuff, and may actually be so obsolete that they're dangerous.
Most
bloggers (and those in other media like radio, TV and print) have
figured this out. It's not just that we have short attention spans that
causes us to forget what was printed or broadcast last week -- we lose
the context, so if it's important, we need to be re-briefed anew
anyway.
This has been a hard lesson for me. I keep a table of
contents of my past blog posts by subject (though I confess I'm slow to
update it). That's because I naively think people (beyond just students
working on assignments) will actually be inclined to go back and
re-read what I wrote a month or a year ago about a subject. For the
same reason, I hotlink back to earlier articles, in the hope that this
is a 'shorthand' way of providing readers with context when I write
about a relatively complex subject. Even though when I read others'
blogs I almost never click back or read their tables of contents.
Silly
me. My review of the hits on my pages suggests that 95% of the
page-reads on my blog are articles less than a week old, and that
almost no one clicks the links to my older posts (except the
aforementioned students working on assignments). Readers are telling
me: Don't ask me to re-read an old
article, tell me, here and now, the gist of that earlier article and
why it's important, and then get on with the new stuff.
So
why do I still maintain the table of contents and continue to link back
to earlier articles? Because it helps me to organize my own thoughts.
This blog is an extension of my personal memory. It's where I think out
loud about what's important to me. Even my Signature Essays list is a
note-to-myself of my best writing, to use when thinking about future
writing.
So I get it, dear readers: If my blog blew up tomorrow
and the archives were gone, all you care is whether I have my own
back-up copy for my own use, so that I can keep writing tomorrow. If
you're a blogger and you think your archives are valuable to anyone but
yourself, if you think anyone, even your most faithful reader, cares
about what you wrote more than a week ago, think again. Your archives
are for your use, not theirs.
In
a way this is a relief. It means I need not feel guilty about my table
of contents being nine months out of date, except for the fact it is
hard for me to research what I may have written on a subject more than
a week and less than nine months ago. It means I need not agonize about
migrating my blog from the obsolete Radio Userland platform to
something newer -- I need only migrate my most recent one or two posts
on each of the subjects on my table of contents, plus perhaps my
Signature Essays, to the new blog platform, and no one will care about
the lost threads to the rest (though it might be worth paying to keep
the old posts on Radio Userland just to preserve my Google Rank). All
the rest of my writings and their table of contents could be kept on a
flash drive for my personal reference only.
Do any other bloggers find this discovery -- that no one cares what you wrote last week
-- as sobering as I do? When you click on a Google link and find
yourself on on 'old' 2005 or 2003 blog post, do you read it or do you
automatically back-arrow to find something more current?
This is
important, because the same thing applies to 95-99% of what
organizations are trying to keep in their content repositories,
internal and external websites -- what they hopefully call
'organizational memory' -- no one values it and no one cares.
The consolation in all this resonates with my most important learning from 35 years in business:
The
value you bring to an organization is not what you do, what processes
and infrastructure and other 'organizational changes' you implement, or
even what decisions you make. Those things are all transient; they are
gone before you know it. The only sustainable value you bring to an organization is what you show and teach and inspire in other people you work with.
Because those things are infectious, so that even when you've gone,
even when the people you knew there have gone, that learning and that
important information and those mind-changing ideas that you
precipitated will go on and on, passed virally from one person to
another. Those viruses are what makes the organizational culture what it is. That is no small thing.
That's
why the so-called 'leaders' are no more valuable in any organization
than anyone else. We each have the same number of hours to infect
others with our knowledge, our passion, our ideas and inspirations.
Viruses only spread one-to-one. You can't do this 'top-down'. Nothing
of value can be 'cascaded downwards', no matter what they might tell
you in MBA school.
It's also why businesses established by
owner-managers, once the owner-manager leaves, are only worth something
if they have been non-hierarchical -- if the owner-manager has
generously and continuously shared ideas, information and authority to the point the employees left behind have co-created and internalized the culture.
That doesn't just apply to business. The only sustainable value you bring to any
social group of which you are a member is what you show and teach and
inspire in others in that group. That's the value you bring when you
write your heart out on your blog. That's the value you bring when you
raise your children, when you spend time in the communities that matter
to you, when you stay up all night talking with someone about the
things you both care about.
You may never be credited as the
originator of a virus. It is enough to know that it lives, on and on,
in the minds and hearts and beliefs and actions of thousands or
millions of people who have passed it on, mutating and evolving, until
it does produce a collective
change. It is the only way real change occurs. That is what culture is,
and why it is so hard to change it. We all change it, in ways we can
only imagine. Your idea could be the flap of the butterfly's wing that
causes a social tsunami on the other side of the world.
That
should be enough. Enough to keep you working, blogging, creating,
thinking, sharing, conversing, doing what you can to make the world a
better place.
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
