Dave Pollard's papers on business innovation & knowledge management

	August 11, 2008

Working Smarter Last week in Quebec City I had the pleasure of meeting with about 20 senior librarians and information directors at a workshop to discuss the trends in and future of Knowledge Management and research, and the evolving role of Information Professionals.This included an interesting debate on the different "information behaviours" of most members of Gen Millennium, such as: Their preference for just-in-time, conversational, real-time knowledge exchange (e.g. face-to-face, voice-to-voice or IM rather than e-mail or voice-mail). In this, they are much like their grandparents, except they use technology (such as videoconferencing with screen-sharing) to expand their reach to anyone, anytime, anywhere. Their aversion to e-mail, groupware and other one-size-fits-none and over-engineered tools. The fact that their learning style is self-directed and self-motivated; they don't expect or wait for their employer to tell them what learning programs to sign up for. The fact that they mark a return to an oral culture, and lack the patience (and some think, the ability) to craft well-articulated written research or arguments; they do have a skill for telling stories more effortlessly than previous generations however. They expect to have 12 different jobs during their career; the downside of this is that they're unlikely to ever know the business of their employer (as distinct from their particular area of specialty) well enough to know how what they do fits with and adds value to (or could add value to) what everyone else in the organization does. Over the past year I've been writing about KM 2.0 (I've given up calling it KM 0.0 -- a little too cute I think), and last week's discussion refined my thinking somewhat about what this will entail. I'm now convinced that "knowledge workers" in the 21st century (i.e. anyone who spends a significant portion of their time processing information, which these days is most of us) need skills (S), tools (T) and processes (P) in six areas, none of which they currently possess: Personal Content Management (S,T,P): Help, and tools, that enable workers to organize their own knowledge (on their hard drives and wherever else they keep it), and 'subscribe' to others' content and 'publish' their own. I put the terms 'subscribe' and 'publish' in quotes because this is simple, informal, RSS-based publishing of and subscribing to informal content (blogs etc.), for no charge. This is the model that is replacing the old KM 1.0 process of 'submitting' information to large, centralized, indexed repositories. Simple Virtual Presence and Enabling Conversations (T,S,P): Real-time, intuitive technologies that enable recordable IM, VoIP, desktop video, file-sharing and screen-sharing, and allow users to switch between them simply, and to find and connect with the people who have the knowledge they seek. This technology is needed to help people self-organize communities of passion and converse easily and competently with people in these communities. Environmental Scanning and Sensemaking (S, P, T): The capacity to add meaning, sense and value to information, in at least five ways: Alerts and Briefings: Filtering the firehose of new information to decipher what's both new and important, and précis what people in the organization need to be aware of Research: Asking the right questions about information to distil what it all means, what it implies, and the risks and opportunities it presents Guidance: Competent, understandable, practical, strategic advice on what actions are recommended in the organization Events: Peer-to-peer, community-of-passion-organized and -managed events (physical and virtual) that allow knowledge-sharing and collaborative conversations among the people who care about the issue Self-Assessment Tools: Means by which those affected can self-assess their knowledge, skills, strategy, and capacity to act on an issue Professional Research Capacity and Risk/Opportunity Assessment (S,P): Everyone needs to be a competent researcher -- this is essential to innovation. Most people think research is the same as search, and very few schools teach how to do research properly. Information professionals need even deeper research skills, to teach and assist the other employees of the organization, and they also need to learn their employer's business, to make effective use of the research they do. In doing so, they develop the capacity to understand and articulate the risk implications and innovation opportunities that emerge from new information, and the cost of not knowing. Some current examples of risk areas for assessment: The impact of climate change, the threat of pandemics, exposure to currency collapse, interest rate spikes and oil price spikes and shortages, business continuity and reputation risks, and the threat of disruptive innovations by companies not currently seen as competitors. Just-in-Time Canvassing (P, T): Only rarely do front-line employees have sufficient lead time to obtain precise, accurate, detailed information, and most of the time they don't need it. They need a fast, approximately-right, summarized answer, now. To get it they need a process for quickly canvassing all the people who might provide that approximately-right answer, in next to real time. Story Crafting, Story Telling, Story Collecting and Story Recording (S,P,T): We are learning that one of the most effective ways of conveying information with the necessary context to know what it means is through stories. Crafting a story entails re-creating it in an understandable, visual, concise way. The new book Back of the Napkin presents a simple and compelling way to do this, but there are many other methods. Also needed are multimedia tools that collect and record stories and anecdotes, and the skills to use them. I see the role of Knowledge Management and of Information Professionals in the 21st century as facilitating the development of these skills and introduction of these processes and tools in their organizations. I'm not sure what we call it. Probably not KM. I've referred to it as Personal Knowledge Management (PKM), Work Effectiveness Improvement, Personal Productivity Improvement (PPI) but none of these accurately encompasses the six enabling roles above. Maybe we should call it Working Smarter, and staff it with a cross-functional project team with a five year mandate to measurably improve these six capacities in organizations. A couple of years ago I wrote about creating a magazine called Working Smarter that would address this capacities; perhaps it's time to resurrect this idea, and not fuss about whose function it is. This would be a big undertaking in most organizations. In order to free up resources for it, many organizations would have to face the distasteful prospect of admitting that their KM 1.0 investments and infrastructure, including intranets and websites, are ineffective and could be substantially dismantled at a considerable saving and without significant consequence to the organization. I don't expect to see this happen overnight. Many organizations are quite wedded to their existing websites, groupware and centralized repositories, and have employees whose full-time job is just indexing, maintaining and creating search tools for all this content. But in order to rise to what Peter Drucker identified as the greatest business challenge of the 21st century -- improving the productivity of "knowledge workers" -- we will have to make the transition from content to context, and from collection to connection. Category: Personal Productivity Improvement PS: Several of my readers have asked me why I bother writing about knowledge and innovation when I'm predicting cascading crises and the collapse of civilization in this century. It's a good question, and here's how I answered it in a recent comment thread: I have no difficulty bifurcating what is happening and what needs to be done in the short-term (which, human nature being what it is, will be business as usual until we have absolutely no choice but to change everything we do), and what will inevitably happen in the longer term (and I'm learning that most predicted crises happen later than when the brightest prognosticators think they will, but ultimately end up changing things more than they think). What happened in 1929, and in 1939, and in 1989, and in 2001, were all predictable decades in advance by those with foresight and the knowledge of history. We will continue to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic even after the first of the civilization-ending catastrophes befall us, because that is what humans do -- we concern ourselves with the needs of the moment, and prolong the inevitable as much as possible. I don't think we'll see any sea-changes in behaviour in my lifetime (statistically another 20 years) and that's a whole generation. So I think it's useful, and fun, to prognosticate about technology changes over that period. My guess is that we'll face another Great Depression in the 2030s (although there will be some grim recessions before that) and the cascading crises will increase thereafter until it becomes impossible to deny that our civilization is coming to an end (about 2060s or 2070s). By then it will be too late. This is essentially what John Gray says, and I find his argument compelling. I'm not depressed about it, nor do I think it's avoidable. Just going to do my best to create some working models for the (few) survivors to follow, which is now taking up half of my time. The other half is having fun, here, now, in the context of all the ultimately irrelevant issues, toys and inanities of the day. Short of suicide, it's the only way I can see to deal with things. Musical deck chairs, anyone? 11:48:37 PM  trackback []  comment []

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