I
had the great pleasure yesterday of making presentations to the
Knowledge Cafe and the graduate Knowledge Management class of Queen's
University in Kingston, Canada. I also met separately with several of
the professors and graduate students of the university. They were a
great audience and a source of inspiration and great intellectual
conversation. I'd especially like to thank Professor Yolande Chan and
her assistant Karey Barr for organizing my visit brilliantly. I welcome
my Queen's visitors to How to Save the World. You can access my table of contents of business posts here,
or by clicking on the link at right. I am merging the slides and text
from yesterday's presentations and will have them posted on the right
sidebar for downloading by tomorrow. Thank you all!
I am delighted to have been asked to be this month's moderator of the online forum Association of KnowledgeWork
(AOK) featuring some of the founders of, and some of the brightest and
most creative thinkers in, the discipline of Knowledge Management (KM).
My subject for the discussion, which runs from March 15 to 26, is
officially "Weblogs and other Personal Content Management and Social
Networking Tools in KM", but the discourse is always wide-ranging, so
just about anything about KM may be discussed.
If you are interested in this subject, I welcome you to join AOK (sign up here -- it's free), read the introduction to this month's discussion here,
and contribute your two cents' worth by replying to any of the
discussion threads, or starting your own, either by e-mail reply (if
you sign up to receive the discussion by e-mail) or by responding on the archive pages. All comments are reviewed and edited by Jerry Ash, AOK's extremely friendly and competent manager.
Some of the members of AOK are a bit impatient with
"technology-obsessed" KM practitioners, so to keep them interested in
the discussion, I'm going to broaden the issue to encompass dialogue on
the principles underlying my belief that Personal Content Management
(PCM) and Social Networking applications are critical to the survival
of KM in large organizations. Here are those principles:
Pollard's Principles of Knowledge Management
KM should be about Front Line Worker Effectiveness:
The key 'value proposition' for KM must be improving the effectiveness
(not the efficiency) of knowledge workers (defined by Drucker as
'anyone who knows how to do their specialized job better than anyone
else in the organization including their boss' -- i.e. almost everyone
on the front lines of the organization). In other words, don't worry
about what 'knowledge' or 'knowledge work' is -- as long as what you're
doing improves front line knowledge worker effectiveness, it's KM and
you're on the right track.
There is an Urgent Need to Improve Front Line KM & IT:
If you talk to knowledge workers, they will almost unanimously tell you
that they desperately need help in improving their work effectiveness,
and that little of what KM & IT have provided thus far has been
useful to that end.
Knowledge Workers Don't Know How to do Knowledge Work:
Knowledge workers perceive a crisis of information overload, and feel
they do not have the time nor the skills to manage information
effectively.
Knowledge is Best Transferred by Conversations:
The principal and most effective means of knowledge transfer in
organizations is conversations, the best of which are oral and
face-to-face, iterative and context-rich.
Everyone Learns, Organizes and Processes Information Differently:
Taxonomies, tools and processes that force people to use a different
model for doing these things than the one they use naturally, will be
resisted.
Most KM & IT Tools are Unintuitive and Over-Engineered:
Simpler is better. If you have to teach people to use tools they're
probably too complicated. Best are tools and processes that emulate the
natural 'information behaviour' and artefacts of workers i.e. mimicking
their physical workspace (desk), the physical media (paper), and the
processes (conversing, subscribing, stacking, shuffling, filing
documents, highlighting, annotating, writing in and crossing out with a
pencil) they intuitively use to acquire, process and disseminate
information.
Conversations Rarely Include the Best Possible Experts: The risk and cost of misuse (theft, hacking, inappropriate use) of knowledge pales in comparison with the risk and cost of not
using the best available knowledge. That includes not knowing who the
best experts are (inside & outside the organization), and relying
on lesser expertise.
Management Doesn't Want or Need KM Decision Support:
Executives are hired and paid top salaries because they supposedly have
the skills, experience, judgement and instincts to make near-optimal
decisions quickly. They pride themselves on their ability to make
decisions with imperfect information. They use their selected inner
circle of advisors as a sounding board. They (mostly) don't use KM
systems. KM is not for them, it's for the Front Line Knowledge Worker.
A major KM challenge is that management is paying for it, but they
don't use it themselves -- a hard sell.
Stories are Critical to Knowledge Transfer:
More than just examples, stories are a language for translating
knowledge between our personal, unique, unfathomable mental models. A
good narrative is almost inherently more effective, clearer and more
persuasive than a good exposition or a good analysis. If we can teach
knowledge workers to tell, and write, good stories, we can massively
increase the value of stored knowledge.
Humans are Inherently Poor Collaborators:
You can't just blame poor tools for the lack of progress in virtual and
asynchronous collaboration in business, and the failure of team and
community knowledge tools and 'spaces' to get much traction -- at least
beyond the short life and limited purpose of specific projects.
Business by nature is undemocratic and uncollaborative: The hierarchy
exists to reinforce that instructions flow down, work is done by individuals
according to those instructions, and the results are reported back up.
There is little room (and often little perceived need) for consensus
building or any of those warm fuzzy things we are taught to do in
Teamwork 101. In fact, most teams exist principally to dole out tasks
to their members and aggregate the status and results of that
individual work. Even inherently collaborative tasks like editing are
usually done sequentially by individuals. If it's really important to
improve collaboration and teamwork in organizations (i.e. if it's not
just a smokescreen by management to make the organization appear
more democratic), we're going to have to fundamentally change the way
businesses are organized and operated. You might even have to change
our human culture (or at least fire all the males).
Much of What We Do at Home is Also Knowledge Work:
The commercial applicability of tools developed to improve knowledge
worker effectiveness could also be leveraged for home use. Example: If
you want to move videoconferencing out of the stone age, figure out how
little Janey in Seattle can use it to chat and play with Grandma in
Florida (and remember principle 6).
My argument for focusing KM first and foremost on improving (and
simplifying) the Personal Content Management and Social Networking
tools available to knowledge workers follows directly from these
principles. Without good tools we cannot support effective processes
and bring about productive behaviour change.
Inherent, too, in all these principles is the need to stress quality
over quantity -- we need fewer, simpler-to-use tools with fewer,
intuitive functions, and less, better-quality, more useful content.
I am hopeful that much of the AOK discussion will be about principles
4, 7 and 9, because even with best tools in the world, there will
remain cultural and learning obstacles to effective knowledge work and
effective knowledge transfer. I look forward to seeing you on AOK
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
I
had the great pleasure yesterday of making presentations to the
Knowledge Cafe and the graduate Knowledge Management class of Queen's
University in Kingston, Canada. I also met separately with several of
the professors and graduate students of the university. They were a
great audience and a source of inspiration and great intellectual
conversation. I'd especially like to thank Professor Yolande Chan and
her assistant Karey Barr for organizing my visit brilliantly. I welcome
my Queen's visitors to 
I am delighted to have been asked to be this month's moderator of the online forum 
