Bridging the gap between knowing and acting
March 6, 2010
Bridging the gap between knowing and acting is one of the main challenges for knowledge management. Organizational reality is often seen in terms of processes and actions that are based on plans and designs. Acting should thus be based on this knowledge. Thinking is seen as preceding acting.
Databases and documents are usually thought of as stores of knowledge. From the mainstream Knowledge Management perspective, knowledge is understood to be stored in individual heads, largely in tacit form. It can become the asset of an organization when it is extracted from those individual heads and stored in documents as explicit knowledge.
But the everyday live interactions we experience do not exist in a meaningful way in any documents. What has happened can seldom be understood from the Excel sheets explaining the results of our actions. What really takes place is very rarely a predictable repetition of our plans.
The actions always vary, as those with whom we interact change and as the context of the interaction changes. In other words, there is normally always variation in processes, routines and actions. Actions are thus not based on knowledge that is separate from those actions. Accordingly actions are never fully explainable through documentation. Knowledge, in this sense, cannot be seen as residing in databases and attempts to store it in documents of some kind will capture only partial aspects of it.
Knowing cannot be separated from acting. Interaction is the process of knowing!
From the point of view taken here, knowledge is always a process of responsive contextual, live interaction as Ralph Stacey points out. It cannot simply be located in an individual head to be extracted as an organizational asset and then shared. Knowledge cannot be shared!
Knowledge is the act of interacting and new knowledge is created when ways of interaction, and therefore patterns of relationship, change. The knowledge assets of an organization are the patterns of interaction between its members and knowledge is destroyed when relationships are missing or are destroyed, as is happening widely in the corporate world today. Key corporate assets are lost through mismanagement!
Organizational change, learning and knowledge creation are the same as changes in communication. Enabling new habits of communication and improving the quality of the conversation are the most important processes of knowledge management, and management.
Thank you Ralph Stacey
Leadership in the time of Social Media
February 25, 2010
We are used to thinking that what happens in organizations is the realization of the choices of powerful people. They are supposed to know what is going on as they make those choices. However, the stories about decision making during wartime, or during the recent financial crises, make it very clear that politicians and executives are far from sure of what has been happening and they simply don’t know what is now happening.
Partially, it is because of corrupted communication. The results of failing communication can be catastrophic. In today’s FT Tim Harford quotes a study on communication and decision making during the Vietnam War: “The joint chiefs of staff were warned that Lyndon Johnson did not like split advice. Robert McNamara also argued that government would be inefficient if department chiefs were to express disagreement with the president.”
The leader who isolates himself from dissenting opinions is bound to make disastrous decisions. The failures in communication in Vietnam continued in Iraq. According to researchers, Donald Rumsfeld and his immediate subordinates made dissent extremely difficult during the first years of the war. It is normal, but costly in corporations and disastrous in politics to filter out information that contradicts preconceptions.
Failures of leadership are failures in communication.
All organizations are power and communication structures. Very often communication is corrupted just because of power. “If you deliver differing views to your boss, it is highly likely that you are not going to be listened to in the future.” For ambitious people, this is the worst possible fate. What social media try to achieve, is subordinates giving truthful information about what is going on, which they don’t do, and bosses listening attentively, which they don’t.
If this dynamic is taking place at every level of the organization, you are in big trouble. Each organizational level that creates a strong boss, ambitious subordinate relation is a distorting barrier to communication and informed decisions.
Business leaders try to know what is going on in the corporation through employee surveys and 360-degree appraisals. Organizations are full of local knowledge, but if bosses need to ask outsiders to tell them how their organization really works, there is trouble in store. If organizations want to be relevant and effective, they will need to incorporate elements of bottom-up, real-time information delivery and real-time listening into their management thinking. Be that pushing real-time updates or subscribing to people who matter.
The role of the effective leader during the time of social media is to widen and deepen communication. Leadership is participating and exercising skills of conversation which uncorrupts information, keeps the necessary paradoxes alive, and keeps on opening up the possibility of new meaning rather than closing down the further development of thought.
Thank you Tim Harford
Productivity and mobile devices
February 24, 2010
Lenovo unveiled their new tablet-capable business laptop last Monday. The company made a conscious decision not to bring out an iPad like tablet PC. They said customers don’t want it. “The feedback was that for our customers it would not work because of the need to have a physical keyboard.”
The discussion around a virtual or physical keyboard caught my attention. The purpose of a keyboard is fairly straightforward: to get words onto the recording medium. The ability to capture a symbolic representation of spoken language for storage or transfer frees information from the limits of individual memory or location. But do we need a physical keyboard for that?
The patent for the typewriter was awarded in 1868 to Christopher Sholes. An early problem of the typewriter was the jamming of the type bars when certain combinations of keys were struck in a very close sequence. As a solution to the problem, Sholes arranged his keyboard in such a way that the keys most likely to be struck in close succession were approaching the type point from opposite sides of the machine. The keyboard is actually configured to minimize speed of input. At the time, reducing the speed of the typewriter was the best way to prevent it from jamming. The QWERTY keyboard was designed to accomplish a now obsolete mechanical requirement. It can be claimed that it is very unproductive to use a keyboard as an interface to productivity tools. The situation would of course be different if we all used ten fingers and did not need to look at the keyboard as we type.
Mobile phones are still mainly associated with communication, not productivity software. As a result a knowledge worker needs two devices: a laptop and a mobile phone.
No mobile phone has created as much of a buzz as the Google Nexus One since Apple launched the iPhone. As in other Android-based mobile devices, there is no physical keyboard. Text input relies on a virtual keyboard. But there is also a voice-to-text input functionality. We could use our voice and video instead of a keyboard! And additionally the camera is paving the way towards augmented reality!
The third device category is tablets: bigger than mobile phones but smaller than laptops – and often without a physical keyboard. The critiques claim that tablets like the iPad are just laptops without keyboards, while others are really mobile phones with proper-sized keyboards, without any definition of a real market need. At least the Lenovo customers don’t want them. Hopefully the Lenovo case is not a matter of history repeating itself, as when Ken Olsen was explaining that DEC customers didn’t want PC’s.
The question here is not only how we think about the means of input. In the corporate context, it is even more about how we think about productivity and what kind of software can be called productivity software.
Productivity is a function of interaction
Instead of thinking about productivity as if it were associated with certain types of documents, it is closer to experience to think that productivity emerges or does not, in people’s interaction with each other and in interaction with the devices we use. Productivity is a function of interaction. Interaction is the content of social media! Therefore, it may not be a very good idea to bring the old document-based productivity software to mobile phones, or use Lilliputian keyboards.
The key productivity focus should be on widening and deepening interaction and reflection. This leads to a new perspective on information-related practices and productivity tools. Rising productivity requires changes in the way we communicate. Can there be a richer and easier way to use our devices? This, by the way, is the main sales argument behind the iPad.
The fastest immediate increase in productivity comes from either learning touch typing or using voice and video as means of input. Perhaps the keyboard of the future is speech combined with transcription? Anyway, the productivity software of tomorrow needs to be interaction-based. The most efficient productivity suit of tomorrow may well be a combination of Twitter, blogs and Facebook.
You only need one mobile device! The decision as to whether the device you need is a mobile phone, a tablet or a laptop may not be the most important one what comes to the quality of interaction. An artist friend of mine said that when he paints, he does not interact with the canvas, “the recording medium”. He interacts with the world beyond the canvas.
Thank you Kuutti Lavonen
Background
On cognitive and social presence
February 22, 2010
Have you ever wondered why you don’t see anyone reading a book when you visit companies? We associate reading with finding information and learning, but we also involve qualities such as contemplation, solitude and mental privacy when we think about books.
There is a mental framework that is used when dealing with books, and another distinct mental framework regarding information related practices in the corporate world. Basically, you are not allowed to read a book but you can read a document.
Documents and word processing are part of the mental framework of management today. Documents were born from the needs of a hierarchical, systemic approach to management. Information flowed down from the top in the form of PowerPoint slide decks containing vision statements, Excel sheets with goals and Word documents explaining corporate procedures. Information, which flowed up from the bottom, was used mainly to provide reports and data for managers, helping them to keep their employees accountable and to ensure the smooth operation of the business process.
The framework of computerized word processing is associated with terms like information flows and the sharing of information. This is not something you normally talk about when discussing a book. While a book provides a view of the contemplative mind, documents create a view of controlled content. Do you still ask why you can read a document but you are not allowed to use Facebook?
Instead of predictive process flows, knowledge work in practice follows a very different logic. A senior executive in one of the most successful multinational corporations in the world explained what was going on:
- There may be a triggering event that needs to be explored.
- The exploration is performed most efficiently through transparency, wide area engagement and a communal process of distributing the cognitive load of the case.
- People don’t perform job roles. People participate in tasks. You don’t delegate, you invite!
- People from the whole community should participate through voluntary self-organization as widely as possible at the same time, not sequentially.
- The industrial process was long, sequential and divided. The knowledge based process is short, parallel and interactive.
- As many people as possible with applicable skills should contribute, each spending as little time as possible.
- Finally, the contributions and comments that are received should integrate into a modular solution than can be iterated.
Knowledge work is about a community-based cognitive presence. But cognition is just part of the answer. Work today is even more about social presence. To manage is to participate in the live conversations.
There cannot be management without a social presence.
A dramatic shift is needed in the mental framework of information, communication and work. Without this changing mindset, no efficient implementation of social media can be made in the corporate world. Work is communication. Conversations and narratives are the new documents. Conversations cannot be controlled. The only way to influence conversations is to take part in them. The most meaningful conversations are the ones where customers voice their views. Those conversations take place outside of the firewall in the new world of mass communication.
As much as we need to associate Facebook with work, we need moments of slower pace. We need to combine the qualities of contemplation, solitude and mental privacy with work.
Thank you Walter Ong. The photo is of an interior detail of the Alvar Aalto architecture in the Academic Bookstore in Helsinki
On Apple and Nokia
February 14, 2010
The terms “knowledge worker” and “knowledge society” are around fifty years old. Peter Drucker and Fritz Machlup, a less known Princeton economist, coined them at roughly the same time around 1960.
Although the concepts have now been around for a long time, it seems that the implications for corporations are not clear yet and don’t show in the way competitive strategies are made. What is quite evident is that the emerging society is different in many ways from the industrial society.
There are some things we know about knowledge work.
Effective skills are always specialized, as regards both, successful companies and effective people. This means that highly knowledge-based companies are always, by definition, only a partial answer to the opportunities available. Michael Porter made us to think that the players in the game of business were (1) companies, (2) customers and (3) suppliers together with old and new (4) competitors coming with alternative (5) offerings. This was called the five forces model. The company was seen as an independent, self-contained unit of competition.
Seven years ago, Bill Gates spoke often of the pet project of his. It was going to change computing for millions of people. It was the touch screen tablet PC. The device is still on sale, but it never raised a fraction of the interest that the iPad is now generating. Was it because Microsoft did the project alone?
Because of specialized, narrow skill sets, a new role with a new role definition is needed in knowledge work. Nobody, not even Microsoft, can be successful without supporting contributions from network partners. The new role is a “complementor”. A complementor is not the same as a supplier. The connection is based on a non-hierarchic network relation, not the hierarchic value chain. Complementary contributions may be the most important explanation of business success today. What would the iPad or the iPhone be without the applications made by people outside Apple?
A classic example of complements is computer hardware and computer software. The greatest hardware engineers are in dire straits without the greatest software programmers, as Nokia has found out. Though the idea of complements is most apparent in ICT, the principle is universal: you can never have in-house all the specialized skills you need. A complement to an offering is another offering that makes it more attractive. People value hot dogs more when they have mustard. Because knowledge work is specialized, it never pays to try to make both.
The new strategic imperative is to identify complementors and to be inviting to them. To be competitive, is to be “selfishly” collaborative.
Thank you Barry Nalebuff
The Google lesson for management
February 13, 2010
Eugene Garfield founded the Institute for Scientific Information in 1960. His pioneering work was in citation indexing. This allows a researcher to identify which articles have been cited most frequently and who has cited them. Garfield’s studies demonstrated that the number of citable items, i.e. the number of papers, together with the frequency of their citation, meaning how many scientists link to the paper, is a good measure of scientific success. Nobel laureates write more papers than other scientists and these papers are more linked to than other papers. The system effectively measures quantity and quality at the same time.
Links on the Web are also citations, or votes, as the founders of Google realized. The whole Web is a densely interconnected network of references. It is no different to the age-old practice of academic publishing and citation indexing.
The observation of Larry Page and Sergey Brin that links are citations seems commonplace today, but it was a breakthrough at the time Google started on September 7, 1998.
What Google did was essentially the same as had been done in academic publishing by Eugene Garfield. At this time, relevance and importance were measured through counting the number of other sites linking to a Web site, as well as the number of sites linking to those sites. The PageRank algorithm includes other variables as well, but the measurement of links is still the core functionality of the system.
What Google has proved to managers is that people’s individual actions, if those actions are performed in a transparent way, and if those actions can be linked, are capable of managing unmanageable tasks.
Collaboration and collective work are best expressed through transparency and emergent, responsive linking. The mainstream business approach to value creation is still a predictive process designed and controlled by the expert/manager. This is based on the presuppositions that we know (1) all the linkages that are needed beforehand, and (2) what the right sequential order in linking and acting is. Neither of these beliefs is correct any more. The variables of creative work have increased beyond systemic models of process design.
It is time to learn from the Web.
By relying on the uncoordinated actions of millions of people instead of experts/managers to classify content on the net, Google democratized scientific citation indexing. To be able to manage the increasingly complex organizations of today, the same kind of democratization needs to take place in the corporate world. Companies are transforming themselves from industrial mass production to creating value in wide area networks of mass communication. The transparency of tasks is the corporate equivalent of publishing academic articles. Responsive linking, rather than predictive linking, acts as a measure of relevance and is the guarantee of quality. This has served the academic community well. It made Sergey Brin and Larry Page billionaires. Now is the time to do the same in the corporate world. Complex, creative, knowledge-based work requires new approaches. The Google lesson for management is, that the more work is based on responsive processes of relating and the more organizing is an ongoing process in time, the more value we create!
Thank you Jeff Howe and Ralph Stacey
Knowledge management and lifestreams
January 31, 2010
Social sciences are concerned with understanding and representation of what is going on and what has happened.
Earlier, social scientists took great leaders, cultures and social structures as the topics to be explained. The contextual nature of those topics was a less interesting concern. More recent approaches to social phenomena can be summarized as trying to understand temporality and the process of becoming, a live movement in time that either gives rise to viability or makes us slowly, or rapidly, obsolete. How does this happen? How does continuity happen? How does change happen? What creates agility and vitality? The lifestream of individuals and corporations is the new focus area. Lifestreams are also called activity streams. These are voices against the corporate rhetoric stressing the need for continuous reinvention, without any need to respect the past or even know where you come from. Continuity is seen as just the dead form of the past and memories belonging to the private world of old sweethearts and childhood summers.
Memories do matter. Memories are representations of the past that are manifested in the present, sometimes unconsciously, and carried forward into the future. Accordingly, what is happening as we live on, is forgetting. There are many things and lessons learned that we should not forget. Taking an extreme example: There have been many instances in political history where powerful people have tried to erase the memory of what has happened. This was the case with the Nazis and the case with Stalin re-writing history. In both cases it led to a determined attempt to remember, as a protest, and as means to ensure that such things could never happen again.
In business and management studies, the questions of becoming, remembering and forgetting are not only new concerns. They are the essence of modern knowledge management.
Corporations are outsourcing their activities and downsizing at the same time as the baby boomer generation reaches retirement. The growing concern is what is lost as a consequence? The statement arousing fear was: “People are walking out of the door and taking their knowledge with them.” The solution to this problem then was: “Let’s extract knowledge from the people and put it in databases. This way the individual knowledge is transformed into corporate knowledge.” This never really worked. It was the doomed dream of the IT-school of knowledge management.
Lifestream is the visualization of progress
There is fear about memory loss in business, but there is also the opposite fear that memory produces practices in the present that should best be forgotten. Anthropologists claim that reproduction of the past is easier than change. This often leads us into situations where the past is no longer an adequate guide in the present, leading to a situation where the knowledge asset turns into a liability.
The location of these assets in the corporate world has been databases and the process of knowledge management has been the production, maintenance and retrieval of written documents. These documents and databases then are the main resources for reflection and re-use. However, “remembering” does not happen until the documents are actually worked with. Files are assets only when used. A book is just a pile of paper before it is opened. Knowledge related practices should therefore be much more in the focus than the form and location of data storage.
Knowledge intensive work takes place in communication. The process of knowing is the process of communication. The most important knowledge management challenge is to understand what takes place in that interaction: what is being discussed? What is not discussed, what is silenced? Who is included in the conversation, who is excluded? The most important measurements are how the common narrative develops, how fast, and where to? An organization should be seen as a pattern in time, a lifestream, a continuing story without beginnings. Everything we do is built on what has happened before.
New people join this narrative and people leave. Work is dynamic participation and influencing how the story develops towards the future. Without understanding where we come from, our history, it is impossible to know whether we move at all, whether the flurry of daily activities is actually keeping us stuck in repetitive patterns without any progress. The same people having the same conversation again and again, as seems to be the case in politics today.
Our past, together with our intentions for the future are present in the daily, mundane actions and interactions that often pass without notice. Lifestream is the ongoing storyline.
Lifestream is the means for pattern recognition to help create the future we truly desire.
Thanks @chrismessina for your thoughts.
.
Networked knowledge and the process of knowing
January 21, 2010
Most of the information on the Internet is worthless to the majority of people. This obscures the transformative change going on at the moment. People are storing less and less information “inside”, inside computers, in private folders or in their memory because there is a new, better alternative: in the always on, always connected world, information is available “outside” on the Internet, more easily and more cheaply, with considerably smaller search costs. This is causing a fundamental shift in the way we manage information, use our ICT tools, or understand the competencies needed in the knowledge-intensive economy.
Before the Internet and efficient mobile communication devices, most professional occupations required individual competencies that in most cases had accumulated over years. This experience base, often called tacit knowledge, was used to retrieve answers from memory and to independently solve situations arising at work. Knowledge was situated in the individual. In order to help individuals cope with the challenges of everyday life, individual competencies needed to be developed. Our whole education system is still very largely based on independent individual learning and knowing.
The cognitive load of work has increased as a result of manufacturing giving way to knowledge-intensive work. As a consequence, the content of work is changing from generic, repetitive practices to contextual, creative practices. This makes the individual experience base, by default, too narrow a starting point for efficient work. Experiences can be a huge asset but experiences can also be a liability, creating recurrence where there should be innovation. Knowledge work is not performed by independent individuals but by interdependent people in interaction. A new way to understanding work and competencies is unfolding: many knowledge workers claim that today they can know, on demand, by communicating with their network and retrieving answers from the Internet, more easily than from their own “inside” sources.
Knowledge used to be understood as the internal property of an individual. Today knowledge should be seen as networked communication. This requires us to learn new ways of talking about education, competencies and work itself. What is also needed is to unlearn the reductionist organizing principles that are still the mainstream. Work is communication and the network is the amplifier of knowledge.
The process of communication is the process of knowing. You can only know what you are doing in conversation. If we want to influence the process of knowing we need to develop new habits of participation and new habits of communication. This is what the new interaction technologies and tools allow us to do. This is also where agile practices impact on knowledge work in a similar way to that in which lean practices impacted on manufacturing. The creation of new habits of agile participation and new habits of communication is the primary focus of my research and my practice.
Thank you Doug Griffin for thinking and working on this with me.
Mobile phones, high definition and complexity
January 10, 2010
The future for mobile phone companies and telecoms industries lies in leveraging HD-audio and HD-video as the new primary media for knowledge work. The implementation of high-definition voice and high-definition video utilizing mobile broadband and mobile handsets is going to make the mobile phone a useful alternative in contexts that presently require getting together in a meeting room. I believe that voice and video derivatives for many to many communication are going to be the main ingredients of the office suites of tomorrow. The computing power of a modern high-end mobile phone makes it a viable alternative to a laptop as the primary tool of a knowledge worker. A mobile phones is no longer a phone. It’s now a mobile, internet-enabled device that also (occasionally) works as a phone.
There is a change going on at the moment from document centric thinking to communications centric thinking. It is only one of the results of the newer findings derived from the sciences of complexity. Organizations are about complex, wide-area interactions. The scientific modeling of these interactions demonstrates the possibility that efficient local communication between large numbers of people, with each participant responding to others on the basis of her own local goals and organizing principles, can produce coherent patterns on the global, organizational level.
The process of richly connected interaction has the capacity to produce coherence in itself, without organization-level goals and process maps. This suggests that high-quality interaction is sufficient to create coherent actions and development. The approach sees the organization as a process of ongoing organizing and construction of the future with the potential for both continuity and transformation at the same time. More interaction and more divergent and richer local interaction increase the potential for novelty just as repetitive, narrow communication keeps people stuck.
The criticism of mediated interaction has been based on the fact that people communicate with each other not only with words, but through a conversation of gestures: movement, tone of voice and visual representation. This can be achieved through HD-video utilizing mobile devices in a much more efficient and faster manner than through high transaction cost office practices and document-centricity. The knowledge-based organization is a responsive, temporal process of iterations in continuous cycles of interaction. To enable this, IT today should not stand for information technologies but interaction technologies.
All conversations involve more than information; communication is full of feelings. When we communicate we share feelings much more than we share information. With the new HD and mobile approaches to communication these feelings can be as alive in mediated communication as in face-to-face interaction.
Twitter and Facebook in corporate use
December 20, 2009
Information overload is a central knowledge management challenge. The challenge of knowing what to pay attention to has been tried to solve through corporate guidelines. Companies have also worked on information processes to mine nuggets worth the attention of knowledge workers. Neither of these approaches has really helped.
What we have found out is that our attention is a result of the filters we use. These filters can be a mix of habits, company processes or tools. But increasingly these filters are social. They are the people we recognize as experts. Our most valuable guides to useful bits of insight are trusted people who are ahead of us, people whose activities we can follow in real-time to help us advance. Internet social media platforms like Facebook are on the same bandwagon as they are transforming from profile pages to activity streams as Chris Messina and Jyri Engeström have pointed out. Although the updates in Facebook are often of less informational value. the people we follow are the most important filters of information and means of focusing our attention.
Leading is not position-based but recognition-based
There can hardly be a follower without a leader. A lot of management research has focused on the leadership attributes of an individual in the hierarchical and non-contextual organization. Leading and following in the traditional corporate sense have seen the leader/manager making people follow him through motivation and rewards. The leader/manager also decided who the followers should be. Leading and following when seen as a relationship, not as attributes of individuals, follow a very different dynamic. Leading in this new sense is not position-based, but recognition based.
People, the followers, decide who to follow. The leader is someone people trust to be at the forefront in the area, the context, which is temporally meaningful for them. People recognize as the leader someone who inspires and enables them in the present. Another difference from traditional management is that because of the diversity of contexts people always link to, there can never be just one “boss”. Thus, an individual always has many leaders as a default state. You might even claim that from the point of view taken here, it is highly problematic if a person only has one leader.
We are now at the very beginning of trying to understand leadership/management in the new contextual, temporal framework. The relational processes of leading and following should be seen as temporal, responsive activity streams, not only on the Internet but also inside companies. They are manifested as internal Twitter feeds, internal Facebook updates and blog posts from the people you associate with.
Communication patterns are restricting or enabling
Knowledge work is not about acquiring facts or consuming information. It is about associations. Links are more important than information. Knowing in the brain is a set of neural connections that correspond to our patterns of communication. We don’t only connect with people; we link with places and topics/contexts. The challenge is to see all the filters and linkages as communication patterns that are either keeping us stuck or open up new possibilities. We need new skills of dynamically connecting to people, topics and places through efficient tagging. This is a growing challenge for our tools. Social media tools have developed tremendously on the publishing side. The next developments need to take place on the filtering side.
Following is at best a process of learning through observing and simulating desired practice. It is about growing links and filtering links at the same time. Leading is doing one’s work in an open and transparent way and being reflective. Leading is thus helping people link to information and filter information. Leading is writing about work and truly engaging in the community.
