In uncertainty lies resilience

This post is illustrated with Body of Knowledge, a steel sculpture created in 2010 by Jaume Plensa, located at the Westend Campus of Goethe University Frankfurt. From my perspective it represents knowledge as ephemeral collection of unchanging text; an androgynous form that provides a semblance of humanity at best. Ironically the search which produced this also throw up Rodin’s Le Penseur which has greater solidity. Yesterday I talked about knowledge in the context of mountain safety, both theoretical knowledge of what to do, and practical experience of when to do it. In the river crossing I mentioned I was encountering severe conditions for the first time, but I knew what to do and was with others who also knew without the need to make things explicit in the context of need. The wider knowledge not to get into that particular set of circumstances was more complex, fragmented and blended from multiple experiences, readings, conversations, failures, stories of failures and so on. In other words it was messy but coherent and enabled capability.

Now contrast that with the explicit content focus of what normally goes under the title body of knowledge. Wikipedia as of today defines it as: A body of knowledge (BOK or BoK) is the complete set of concepts, terms and activities that make up a professional domain, as defined by the relevant learned society or professional association. The focus again is on text, on material which is written down and agreed through a consensus based process. Now don’t get me wrong, this has utility. I linked yesterday too a simple guide on how to cross rivers which is written with a few illustrative pictures; it has utility. I the absence of anything else it is better than nothing. In cross in that river I hadn’t faced exactly the same circumstances but I had partial and related experience and I had confidence in those who were with me. We had walked and talked for several hours, we had swapped stories and their practice in descending the ridge provided evidence of competence. Out body of knowledge was not just our own experience, but the links with other similar experience in others, a recognition of common shared experience.

Now that experience is not unique to those whom I or the others encountered. We are part of a flow of such experiences over a long period of time. We see this in all professions. The knowledge that allows an operating theatre to work is not just the training of those participants, but it is the accumulation of knowledge and procedures over several generations. A body of experience of failure and learning within the constraints of theory, that develops pragmatic capability. The whole idea of Cynefin as a concept, independently of the explicit representation in my framework, is that we live in a flow of knowledge and experience over time which we can only possibly understand in part, as through a glass darkly (1 Corinthians 13:12). The danger in the various bodies of knowledge is that they seek to make explicit what can never be fully understood explicitly and the rendering if knowledge results in loss that may not be retrieved.

In various conversations this week I’ve talked about the need to map dark constraints, or rather the evidence of dark constraints, before you make changes. Most Bodies of Knowledge I have encounter focus on simplistic rendering avoiding the inconvenient truths of knowledge which has evolved over time. Just as people think they can render a culture into a set of platitudes in a value statement, when real culture is evolved practice over time, not fully understood and never fully articulated. In uncertainty lies resilience ….

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How do pilots stay disciplined in their use of knowledge?

One of the biggest challenges is knowledge re-use. How does the aviation industry address this challenge?

Image from wikimedia commons

I often refer to aviation as a successful example of knowledge management, with lessons captured from every accident and incident and provided to pilots in the form of checklists, or shared through site such as the Skybrary.

But how does the aviation industry address the issue of knowledge re-use? Why don't experienced pilots skip the checklist?

We know that this is a big challenge in other industries, and that experienced doctors, engineers, programmers and consultants often do not re-use knowledge, but rely instead on the knowledge they already have. How do you make sure that experienced airline pilots, with thousands of hours under their belt, stay disciplined and use the checklists, even after they have become routine?

This question was asked recently in Aviation Stack Exchange, and here are some of the answers.

• Because if they skip it and it was not OK they can be fired and lose their license
• In four years in an airline cockpit I only encountered 1 person who didn't respect checklists. Perhaps not coincidentally he did not make it through his probationary year and was fired 
• Because if they skip it and it was not OK they could DIE
• On commercial flights, key checklist items are forced by using a procedure call a "cross check". The one pilot must "challenge" another for those specific check list items. 
• The cockpit consists of two people, one reading/actioning the checklist, the other one monitoring and checking/cross-checking. If you say: "Nah, no checklist today", your copilot is bound to say: "Sorry, but we have to!" 
• The importance of a proper preflight is drilled into you by your primary instructor from day one in light aircraft, and that mentality carries through all the way up to heavy transport-category aircraft: You want to find any problems you can while you're on the ground, because if you take a problem into the air with you it's a decision you can quickly come to regret.
• If you do it often enough, it becomes a habit. It then feels wrong to not run the checklist. 
• You stay vigilant by having seen things go wrong.
• Everyone expects everyone else to do the checklists properly and if you don't do it you will get called out. 
• In an airline environment you will have recurrent checkrides every 6-12 months and captains will have line checks every year and proper checklist usage is among the most basic requirement to pass these checks.
• Every year we sit through a day of crew resource management training and part of that day involves looking at past accidents and understanding what the first thing was that set the accident events in motion (pilot error!). These often serve as vivid examples of how bad things can get if you start ignoring the checklists (among other things) 
• There are a few tricks that are used to stop you falling in to that "Yeah, everything will be fine" mindset and just skipping the checks 
• • Not doing the checks from memory, but actually doing them in reference to a physical check list. 
  • A prescribed order of checks, starting at a point on the aircraft and moving around methodically 
  • The fear of missing something, such as engine oil levels, which gets very serious once airborne. 
  • Once carrying passengers, especially nervous ones, they tend to feel safer when they've seen you PHYSICALLY checking the aircraft before flying it. 

We can see several factors at work here, including

• a logical and emotional case for learning (we might die, our passengers might die, better to fix things on the ground, fear of missing something), 
• peer pressure from the copilot (you will get called out) and passengers
• you might lose your job if you skip it
• an awareness of what might go wrong (looking at past accidents)
• training (from day one, and every year)
• audit (checkrides)
• physical lists (not relying on memory)
• logical lists (prescribed order of checks)
• habit

Many of these can be transferred from the aviation sector into other sectors. You could imagine a company where the re-use of existing knowledge (in checklists or procedures or
other guidance) was mandatory, trained, supported, checked, believed-in (perhaps through regular analysis of failures), audited and habitual.

I agree this is a long way from where many of us are at the moment, but it is a vision for how one industry supports the re-use of knowledge.

To finish, here is a personal story from the Stack Exchange thread of how one person re-learned the importance of checklists

•  In my case, I learned the discipline to use a checklist for every action on every flight the one time I decided not to use a checklist while taxiing from the fuel pump back to the parking ramp. It was winter, and a snowplow pulled up behind me, so I decided not to use the checklist in the interest of expediency (ha!). I primed the engine, checked the fuel valve, engaged the electrical system, keyed the starter, and the engine responded by firing up and then immediately dying. Repeat about a half-dozen times, at which point, I finally decided to use the checklist because something obviously wasn't right. Once again, primed the engine, checked the fuel valve, move the mixture to the rich posi-- Oh...I had left the mixture in the idle-cut-off position. Oops. I've used a checklist religiously ever since then ;)

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Discovering your strategy with a business strategy story

Companies often mistake planning for strategy. This seems to be particularly true of large organisations.

A few years back, we got a call from a large company headquartered in the Netherlands. Their head of strategy felt that their people didn’t understand the company strategy – a common concern across most big businesses. The strategy group consisted of 20 people, which is a lot by any measure. When I asked them to describe their strategy, they could spell out initiatives but were unable to put their fingers on the strategic choices the business had made to win.

Strategy involves choice

In his seminal book on strategy, Richard Rumelt makes it clear that unclear choices make bad strategy: ‘Strategy involves focus and, therefore, choice. And choice means setting aside some goals in favor of others’.* The 20 people in the strategy group were planners. There was a portfolio of things to do, goals to reach, stretch targets to make, but as Rumelt says, when the hard work of making clear choices isn’t done, ‘weak, amorphous strategy is the result’.

Choices are the grist of strategy stories. When the leaders in a business decide to offshore certain services rather than keep them in-house, they have made a choice. The strategy story can help them explain why that choice has been made.

Because companies don’t always make clear choices, it’s often necessary to first get everyone on the same page when it comes to strategy. We’ve found that working with an executive team to craft their strategy story helps their choices to emerge and then clarifies them, so that everyone around the table not only understands what choices were made, but also why they were made. Most importantly, after working on the telling of that story, they will be able to relate it to anyone face-to-face, without a PowerPoint crutch.

The benefits of the business strategy story

There are two advantages of doing this exercise as a team. First, the group co-creates the strategy story and therefore each person takes away a strongly similar meaning (it would be hard to claim they can all take away an identical meaning, as each individual’s background influences their understanding). I can’t underscore the importance of this process and the role the narrative plays in it. Here is an example of what can happen in the absence of a shared strategy story.

My business partner, Mark, was coaching the CEO of a global primary resources company. The CEO told Mark that two of his country heads were hurling abuse at each other because they found themselves at loggerheads over the company strategy. They both claimed they understood the strategy and were acting in line with it, yet they each had a different interpretation of it.

It turned out that this company had undertaken what many organisations believe is a clear and succinct way to convey strategy: the plan on a page (POAP), which typically includes the purpose, mission, goals, strategic themes, values and perhaps some big initiatives. But the problem with the POAP is that it lacks meaning. There’s no story that glues things together. And more often than not, the strategic themes in a POAP are not choices, they’re focus areas. In the worst cases, they just represent each part of the business, so that everyone in the company feels included in the strategy. The result? A ‘weak, amorphous strategy’.

The second benefit of a team approach to developing a strategy story is that each person walks away owning the story. There are always many possible stories that could be told to explain a strategy. The job of the executive team is to choose the through-lines that reflect an authentic and compelling telling of the strategy story, something that is meaningful to all of them. Then, when the story has been completed, they all have a narrative that makes sense to them. They have imbued it with their own experiences and it accords with what they know.

This shared meaning becomes the foundation for a strategy story to be told more widely across the business.

* Rumelt, R. P. (2011). Good strategy, bad strategy: the difference and why it matters (1st ed.). New York: Crown Business, p. 59.

Employees can only act strategically if they really know the company’s strategy. Craft and embed your strategy story so that everyone’s on the same page. Learn how Anecdote can help you do this

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one person at a time

Are networks the new companies? Can our markets shift from capitalism to cooperativism? Can our institutions become networks? Can any of us escape our tribal roots and become network era citizens of the world?

We still lack good network models for organizing in society. Instead, many turn back to older, and outdated organizational models, like nationalism and tribalism, in an attempt to gain some stability. But our institutions and markets will fail to deliver in a network era society because they were never designed for one.

“It seems obvious to me that an individual value proposition for an organisation or nation state that makes a promise (which in itself is an outdated industrial concept) and fails to deliver will have to cope with every customer, citizen and employee holding them to account. In real time. From *within* their own organisations; not just by the hardening of their perimeters. The recognition that individual pathways transcend organisational boundaries is a good place to start.” —Robert Pye

It may be that the only unit of organization that is up to the task of working and living in networks is the individual human (the node). Perhaps this is where we should focus our organizational and societal change efforts. Let’s get people working as weavers, facilitators, and coordinators of networks. Help them develop sense-making disciplines like personal knowledge mastery. If a critical mass of people can adapt to perpetual beta, AKA life in the network era, then they can build the new structures necessary to organize society. I have more faith that thousands of cooperating individuals, with all their inherent complexity, can create better structures than a group collaborating under the direction of a positional leader. If so, the biggest challenge we face is in supporting and educating individual citizens for the network era.

Image: perpetual beta series

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The difference between lessons and best practice - another post from the archives

Here is another post from the archives - this time looking at the difference between Best Practice and Lessons Learned.

Someone last week asked me, what's the difference between Best Practice, and Lessons Learned.

 Now I know that some KM pundits don't like the term "Best Practice" as it can often be used defensively, but I think that there is nothing wrong with the term itself, and if used well, Best Practice can be a very useful concept within a company. So let's dodge the issue of whether Best Practice is a useful concept, and instead discuss it's relationship to lessons learned.

My reply to the questioner was that Best Practice is the amalgamation of many lessons, and it is through their incorporation into Best Practice that they become learned.

If we believe that learning must lead to action, that lessons are the identified improvements in practice, and that the actions associated with lessons are generally practice improvements, then it makes sense that as more and more lessons are accumulated, so practices become better and better.

A practice that represents the accumulation of all lessons is the best practice available at the time, and a practice that is adapted in teh light of new lessons will only get better.

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The Not-So-Incredible Adventures of Equani-Mouse

cartoon by Felicia Bond on wikimedia, CC-SA 3.0
The people were worried. The Evil Drumpf had seized power in the kingdom. He had installed his corrupt Minions in positions of power, and was plundering the Commons and threatening war with any neighbour who did not accept his absolute edicts. On the ramparts, the people looked hopefully toward the horizon. The children were crying.

“We need a miracle”, said one man.

“If only a hero would come and rescue us”, said another.

Suddenly there was a flash in the sky, and a luminous grey creature descended to Earth in front of the crowd.

“Get back, it’s a giant rodent!”, warned an observant woman.

“Eeew!”, cried the children.

But the giant rodent was undeterred, and turned to the crowd, speaking in a calm voice.

“Don’t be afraid”, the creature said, in a voice that seemed to reverberate around the ramparts. “I am here to help you in this time of need. I am — Equani-Mouse!” His name echoed through the crowd.

“Are you going to kill the Evil Drumpf and restore peace and democracy to the land?”, asked a young boy.

“Just tell us what to do to get rid of this demon, and we’ll follow you”, urged an anxious mother.

Equani-Mouse shook its head and smiled, beseeching the crowd to listen. “I am an expert in complex systems, and what you are dealing with is not a problem with one man, but a predicament. The Evil Drumpf is only one of a million connected variables, evidence of a system in late-stage collapse.”

“Drumpf isn’t a predicament, he’s a whack-job”, interrupted an adolescent. “He needs to be confronted and stopped, now.” The crowd buzzed and nodded in agreement.

Equani-Mouse sighed. “What you must realize about predicaments is that they cannot be ‘fixed’. The only approach to them is to understand and accept what they represent, and learn to cope with and adapt to them. Chop wood and carry water, before and after Drumpf, who is only a symptom of a much greater malaise.”

Many in the crowd frowned, and some outright scowled.

“Boo!”, one boy cried out. “The Evil Drumpf is destroying everything. He’s sick, and incompetent. Don’t tell us to accept him.”

“You’re a fraud!”, a man said, looking at Equani-Mouse menacingly. “You’re not here to help us at all. You’re trying to discourage us. You are probably one of the Evil Drumpf’s Minions!”

The crowd grew increasingly agitated and hostile. Finally, a woman called for order and said to Equani-Mouse: “Look, maybe you’re the wrong person, er… creature, for this job. All we want is justice, what our people have always sought: global human equality, a cosmopolitan world civilisation, fair and free trade, the spread of personal liberty and secular democracy to all corners of the globe. These goals are so obviously desirable that it is inconceivable that we should ever stop progressing towards them. Your telling us to just accept this aberration Drumpf is cowardly and unhelpful. Perhaps you could send us a super-hero better equipped for the task of liberating us and getting us back on track.”

The crowd cheered and applauded this comment. Equani-Mouse took a deep breath. and then replied: “You seem to think that civilization is destined to greater and greater levels of progress and humanity. Your textbooks and media and leaders lie, telling you only what you want to hear. You may be living a much better life now than your species did a couple of centuries or millennia ago, but compared to prehistoric humans, you’re less happy, less healthy, less resilient, less sustainable, more destructive, and most importantly less attuned and connected to the wisdom of all life on this planet. Your civilization is a hubristic affront to millions of years of astonishing evolution on this fragile and beautiful planet. Yet all you want from me is to enable you to try to continue what you have been doing, which is disastrous.”

There was silence. One boy said what others were apparently thinking: “What a loser. The giant rodent wants us to accept the Evil Drumpf as punishment for something we didn’t do, as if it were a plague or pestilence from God. Its advice is hopeless. I say we send it packing. We don’t need another hero. All we want is life beyond the Evil Drumpf. We have leaders, let’s follow them instead.”

Equani-Mouse smiled sadly, and replied:

“You may not realize it, but the Evil Drumpf won’t be able to do anything different from what your last leader, HopiumMan, did. He won’t do anything that is more than symbolically different from what your usurped leader MoreOfTheSameWoman would have done. Look around you. All the systems you’ve built are crumbling. Nothing is working the way it was designed to. You have inadvertently and foolishly desolated the planet and brought about the sixth great extinction of life on it. All your civilized systems are doing is speeding up that process, and causing universal suffering. There’s nothing you can do to change that but accept it, live joyfully in the time that’s left, and do your best to help all the creatures you share this part of this amazing planet with, in small ways that are within your control. A thousand small acts of loving kindness, compassion and understanding, taking joy in others’ joy, and equanimity — these are the ways you all have to do that. What the Evil Drumpf does is of no consequence, and all the news about his deeds is just a distraction causing you stress and grief for no reason.”

“Not buying that Buddhist crap”, said a woman standing near Equani-Mouse. “We can get rid of the Evil Drumpf and his Minions, but we need to be united and forceful, not stand meekly and idly by while he pillages our land and mistreats our people. Let’s join together and send up a prayer to show us the way. Who’s with me?”

The crowd moved toward the woman and slowly the group joined hands and once again turned their eyes to the horizon as the woman uttered her prayer. Suddenly the sky darkened with the shadows of two more flying figures. The wind picked up, and with a flourish a caped woman and a caped man landed in front of the crowd. Equani-Mouse was jostled aside. The woman spoke first:

“Equani-Mouse is wrong!” she shouted. “We can show you the way! I am BeTheChangeHumyn, and this is DeepGreenGuy. A better world is possible. Together we can help you defeat the Evil Drumpf and restore peace, democracy and progress to this great land!” Equani-Mouse winced at the word “progress” but said nothing, shaking its head sadly.

“We must organize, resist, refuse to give up”, BeTheChangeHumyn continued. DeepGreenGuy nodded and chimed in: “There is no honour in passivity. We are all by nature activists, and when we listen we know what needs to be done. We may fail, but we will if necessary die trying”.

Some people in the crowd looked nervous when they heard these last words. But almost everyone in the crowd agreed with either BeTheChangeHumyn or DeepGreenGuy, and as the pair walked away from the ramparts toward the Tower where the Evil Drumpf was, the crowd followed eagerly behind.

Equani-Mouse was left nearly alone, but it shrugged off the rejection. The only people left were a woman and her daughter, who walked over to Equani-Mouse to offer thanks. “They’re not ready for your message,” the woman said. “Their humynism, their activism, their hope, their outrage, it’s a religion to them, a salve, their way of coping.”

“I know,” Equani-Mouse replied, hugging the pair. The little girl smiled at the large grey creature and said, smiling “I thought you were going to try to convince them that there was no Drumpf, that everything that seems to be is an illusion”.

As they walked off toward the forest Equani-Mouse responded, laughing quietly, “Yeah, like that would have worked.”

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The Illusion of Community

graphic of four types of community and the qualities that make each cohere, by Aaron Williamson (my suggested additions are in red)
Much is being written these days, in political, social, business and collapsnik circles, among others, about community. Most of it assumes that there is such a thing.

A few years ago I wrote a response to Aaron Williamson’s then-new model of community and identity, diagrammed above. Aaron acknowledged that “a community or potential community is a complex system” and that “community itself is an emergent quality — community, per se, does not exist; it is a perceived connection between a group of people based on overlaps of intent, identity, interest and experience”. These four aspects of our ‘selves’ are shown as green circles, above. Elements of each aspect are shown in orange circles.

In this model, overlaps between ‘selves’ can result in the emergence of different types of community:

• If the overlap is mainly common interests, it will emerge as a Community of Interest. Learning and recreational communities are often of this type.
• If the overlap is mainly common capacities, it will emerge as a Community of Practice. Co-workers, collaborators and alumni communities are often of this type.
• If the overlap is mainly common intent, it will emerge as an Intentional Community or Movement. Project teams, various communal living groups and activist groups are often of this type.
• If the overlap is mainly common identity, it will emerge as a Tribe. Partnerships, love/family relationships, gangs and cohabitants are often of this type.

At the time I wrote “You cannot create community, all you can do is try to create or influence conditions in such a way that the community self-creates (self-forms, self-organizes and self-manages) [and emerges] in a healthier, more sustainable and resilient way.” I identified what I thought were 8 key qualities of such healthy communities and their members: Effective processes for invitation, facilitation, and the building of members’ capacities, strong collective processes, and members’ individual skills of self-knowledge, self-awareness, self-caring, attention and appreciation.

It’s hard to find good enduring examples of such communities. The late, great Joe Bageant taught me that “community is born of necessity”. He showed me what that meant by telling me the story of the isolated village of Hopkins, Belize (while I was visiting him there). Hopkins was formed when a group of slave ships ran aground in a storm 300 years ago, and the survivors escaped and made their way up the Caribbean coast and created a new community there, one which thrived without intervention until it was wrecked just in the last generation by foreigners through trawler overfishing of the Gulf, and the imposition of land title laws (and fences, and walls) on their ‘free’ indigenous common land.

Why did this community succeed for so long? Because the escapees had no choice but to make it succeed; it was life-and-death. This is the ultimatum the collapse of our civilization’s systems and culture will soon present us all with, as possibly two billion climate refugees in a Great Migration bring about the ultimate clash of cultures and the final demise of all of our civilization’s systems.

This is why few of what we would like to call communities today, are actually that: It’s too easy for most to just pick up and leave when they don’t like the people, processes or circumstances of their adopted, emergent communities. There is no necessity holding us together when things get uncomfortable, no requirement to live with and love neighbours we don’t particularly like.

We seek community now for a number of non-essential reasons driven by individual wants and ambitions: attention and appreciation, collaboration on projects, movements and enterprises where we share goals, skills, needs or passions, as well as for protection from perceived threats. The people I met in Hopkins sometimes sought these things, but they weren’t what created or held together the community. And as that community is being destroyed from outside pressures (the loss of their primary food source and their land), what brought and kept them together won’t help them withstand its demise. To anyone who’s studied indigenous cultures, it’s an old story.

So we look for others with whom to form community, individually — online in social media and virtual worlds, in dating services, in ‘meetup’ groups, in clubs, in social organizations. But most of us drift in and out of such groups, dissatisfied with their offerings, mourning their inability to find what we really want — existential connection. All that expectation is loaded up on the shoulders of spouses, governments and employers to fill the existential gap, which they can’t hope to deliver.

The traditional places where people seeking community congregated — churches, higher learning institutions, guilds, cooperatives etc, are in disarray, their memberships falling. This is partly because we’ve become too picky about what we want from so-called community organizations. We want them to cater to our individual wants and needs, and their ‘commercial’ replacements assert that they offer that, though they do not.

So what is this ‘existential connection’ that is lacking in modern ‘communities’? At its heart, I think it is connection to place and to all other life on the planet, which most of us have become disconnected, even dissociated from. We all ‘know’ somehow that living naturally is communal, connected, mutual, integral, unselfish, and loving — the very opposite of individual and isolated and competitive and the ‘optimizing of self-interest’ that underlies our entire modern dysfunctional and massively destructive economic systems.

When I go to meetups of new groups now, I often find such a sense of absolute desperation for community (of all four types), that when they achieve even the brief illusion of that integral sense of community, many present will start to cry in unrestrained (and infectious) appreciation and joy. They will swear to have made vital lifelong connections. But a month later those apparent connections will have vanished. Desperation is not yet necessity. We return to our fragmented, community-less lives.

If you’ve been reading my stuff in the last few years, you’ll know I no longer proffer any ‘solutions’. This predicament is endemic to our modern, global, dog-eat-dog, utterly individualistic culture, a culture that has crushed all of the remaining sensible ones. The system has to fall before we will once again learn what it means to know the necessity of living in community, of being community. There is no cure, no ‘fix’ for Civilization Disease, the disease of disconnection, fear and antipathy.

The problem with systems, as I’ve explained before, is that they don’t really exist. So while in a way the ‘system’ is the problem (it’s associated with our incapacity to reconnect and hence rediscover true community), it’s actually just a label our pattern-seeking brains use to try to understand why things are the way they are. Yet our minds, our ‘selves’ that supposedly sit at the centre of our communities (as depicted in the chart above) are themselves just labels, concepts, pattern-making, attempts to make sense of what ‘we’ cannot hope to understand. (Aaron, as a non-dualist, hints at this, though perhaps wisely he doesn’t really get into it in his writings aimed at business clients who are likely addicted to these illusions, and fiercely ‘self’- and ‘system’-driven.

Some day, in a world probably millennia hence with many fewer human creatures, there will likely once again be real community everywhere on what’s left of our planet. But they will not be communities of interest, practice, experience, capacity or even identity. The ‘selves’ in the centre of Aaron’s model will not exist. There will be no need for these parochial communities, or the selves that cohere them. There will be community of necessity, delight and wonder, non-exclusionary, embracing all life, free from self. There will be no choice. In the meantime, there is nothing to be done. One day, everything will be free.

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Why you need to place some demands on the knowledge sharer

Sharing knowledge is a two-sided process. There is a sharer and a receiver. Be careful that making knowledge easier to share does not make knowledge harder to re-use.

Image from wikimedia commons

Sharing knowledge is like passing a ball in a game of rugby, American Football or basketball. If you don't place some demands on the thrower to throw well, it won't work for the catcher. If you make it too undemanding to throw the ball, it can be too hard to catch the ball.  Passing the ball is a skill, and needs to be practised.

The same is true for knowledge. If you make it too simple to share knowledge, you can make it too difficult to find it and re-use it.  In knowledge transfer, the sharing part is the easier part of the transfer process. There are more barriers to understanding and re-use than there are to sharing, so if you make the burden too light on the knowledge supplier, then the burden on the knowledge user can become overwhelming.

Imagine a company that wants to make it easy for projects to share knowledge with other projects. They set up an online structure for doing this, with a simple form and a simple procedure. "We don't want people to have to write too much" they say "because we want to make it as easy as possible for people to share knowledge".

So what happens? People fill in the form, they put in the bare minimum, they don't give any context, they don't tell the story, they don't explain the lesson. And as a result, almost none of these lessons are re-used. The feedback that they get is "these lessons are too generic and too brief to be any use".  we have seen this happen many many times.

By making the knowledge too easy to share - by demanding too little from the knowledge supplier - you can make the whole process ineffective. 

There can be other unintended consequences as well. Another company had a situation as described above, where a new project enthusiastically filled in the knowledge transfer form with 50 lessons. However this company had put in a quality assurance system for lessons, and found that 47 of the 50 lessons were too simple, too brief and too generic to add value. So they rejected them.

The project team in question felt, quite rightly, that there was no point in spending time capturing lessons if 94% of them are going to be rejected, so they stopped sharing. They became totally demotivated when it came to any further KM activity.

 Here you can see some unintended consequences of making things simple. Simple does not equate to effective.

Our advice to this company was to introduce a facilitation role in the local Project Office, who could work with the project teams to ensure that lessons are captured with enough detail and context to be of real value. By using this approach, each lesson will be quality-controlled at source, and there should be no need to reject any lessons.

Don't make it so simple to share knowledge, that people don't give enough thought to what they write.

The sharer of knowledge, like the thrower of the ball, needs to ensure that the messages can be effectively passed to the receiver, and this requires a degree of attention and skill. 

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Making knowledge work visible

Invisibility is an accidental and troublesome characteristic of knowledge work in a digital world. What makes it invisible? Why does it matter? What can you do about it?

How did knowledge work become invisible?

As a knowledge worker, I get paid for what happens inside my head but not until I get the work outside where it can be seen. Before the advent of a more or less ubiquitous digital environment, that head work generated multiple markers and visible manifestations. There were handwritten notes from interviews, a presentation might start with rough mockups of slides scribbled on a pad of paper. Flip charts would document the outcomes of a group brainstorming session. A consulting report would start as an outline on a legal pad that would be rearranged by literally cutting and pasting the paper into a new order and organization. Computer code started as forms to be filled out and forwarded to a separate department to transcribe the forms onto punch cards.

No one would want to return to that world of knowledge work.

Digital tools—text editors, word processors, spreadsheets, presentation software, email—have eliminated multiple manual, error-prone, steps. They’ve made many low-value roles obsolete—sometimes by unintentionally giving them back to high-cost knowledge workers.

These same tools also reduce the physical variety of knowledge work to a deceptively uniform collection of keystrokes stored as bits in digital files hiding behind obscure file names and equally  uninformative icons. A laptop screen offers few clues about the knowledge work process compared to an office full of papers and books. A file directory listing appears pretty thin in terms of useful knowledge content compared to rows of books on shelves.

Why does the visibility of knowledge work matter?

If you can’t see it, you can’t manage or improve it. This is true as an individual knowledge worker and as a team or organization.

Noticing that digital work is invisible reminds us of benefits of analog work that weren’t obvious. Among those non-obvious benefits;

• Different physical representations (handwritten notes, typed drafts, 35mm slides) establish how baked a particular idea is
• Multiple stacks of work in progress make it easier to gauge progress and see connections between disparate elements of work
• Physically shared work spaces support incidental social interactions that enrich deliverables and contribute to the learning and development of multiple individuals connected to the effort

Consider how developing a presentation has changed over time. Before the advent of PowerPoint, presentations began with a pad of paper and a pencil. The team might rough out a set of potential slides huddled around a table in a conference room. Simply by looking at the roughed-out set of slides you knew that it was a draft; erasures, cross outs, and arrows made that more obvious.

A junior level staffer was then dispatched with the draft to the graphics department, where they were chastised for how little lead time they were provided. A commercial artist tackled the incomprehensible draft spending several days hand-lettering text and building the graphs and charts.

The completed draft was returned from the graphics department starting an iterative process, correcting and amending the presentation. The team might discover a hidden and more compelling story line by rearranging slides on a table or conference room wall or floor. Copies were circulated and marked up by the team and various higher ups. Eventually, the client got to see it and you hoped you’d gotten things right.

The work was visible throughout this old-style process. That visibility was a simple side effect of the work’s physicality. Contributors could assess their inputs in context. Junior staff could observe the process and witness the product’s evolution. Knowledge sharing was simultaneously a free and valuable side effect of processes that were naturally visible.

Putting knowledge work on the radar screen

The serendipitous benefits of doing knowledge work physically now must be explicitly considered and designed for when knowledge work becomes digital. The obvious productivity benefits of digital tools can obscure a variety of process losses. As individuals, teams, and organizations we now must think about how we obtain these benefits without incurring offsetting losses in the switch from physical to digital.

Improving knowledge work visibility has to start at the individual level. This might start with something as mundane as how you name and organize your digital files. You might also develop more systematic rules of thumb for managing versions of your work products as they evolve. Later, you might give thought to how you map software tools to particular stages in your thinking or your work on particular kinds of projects. For example, I use mind-mapping software when I am in the early stages of thinking about a new problem. For writing projects, I use Scrivener as a tool to collect and organize all of the moving pieces of notes, outlines, research links, drafts, etc. The specific answers aren’t important; giving thought to the visibility of your own digital work is.

Teams should take a look at the world of software development. Software development teams have given more thought than most to  how to see and track what is going on with the complex knowledge work products they develop and maintain. Software developers have carefully thought out tools and practices for version management, for example. Good ones also have practices and tools for monitoring and tracking everything from the tasks they are doing to the software bugs and issues they are working to eliminate. These are all ideas worth adapting to the broader range of knowledge work.

Organizations might best adopt an initial strategy of benign neglect. I’m not sure we understand knowledge work in today’s world well enough to support it effectively at the organizational level. Knowledge management efforts might seem relevant, but my initial hypothesis is that knowledge management is hampered, if not trapped, by clinging to industrial age thinking. We’re likely to see more progress by individual knowledge workers and local teams if we can persuade organizations to simply let the experiments occur.

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