Why do we help each other out

I am always interested in why people help each other out and have used the concept of reciprocal altruism in my talks on knowledge management.
I've been reading over my lunch today an article by Martin Nowak about co-operation. He views co-operation as interesting as it means that you help someone who is a possible competitor and that you reduce your own success in order to increase the success of someone else.

He highlights some types of reciprocity that knowledge managers might find interesting.

1. Direct reciprocity - individuals interact repeatedly - if I help now you may help me later.
2. Reputational (my phrase) Indirect reciprocity which takes place in groups - where people see you interact with another person and reach the conclusion that you are a helpful person.
3. Spatial selection - where neighbours help each other - they survive by being in clusters this could be of interest in communities of practice but also in organisations especially departments which consider themselves in danger.
4. Finally Group selection and he says' it maybe that our group of co-operators is better off than another group of defectors, here selection acts on two levels because in our group there is more co-operation

Back and mea culpa

Well I'm back after a tiring trip to Hong Kong which was eventful and also dealing with the aftermath of the event as well as dealing with a house move and so on and so forth. I will be now trying to do my weekly blog now that things are back to normal. Certainly after seeing the ease with which video is being used, I will be certainly looking at increasing the use of video to not only capture knowledge and other things but also as a means of communication. I think that looking at HD video is the way forward. Steve Jobs about two years ago said this was the year of High Def. I think he was two years early - certainly for the UK. Video camcorders can now be bought with high def for under a £1k mark and I can remember 3 years ago where a video camcorder cost roughly £800 and now it is down about £300. Credit crunch or not - I think that in about 2 years time technology will bring hi def to being the de facto standard. I'd certainly like to try that as an experiment at either a COP or another skills network.

Knowledge Management on the decline??

There has been an interesting article from the Harvard Law school that I saved last year and from time to time I re-read old articles to see if they are still relevant and it is. Looking at this article a year later the debate has moved on, though companies still believe that giant databases of information will solve their problems. Knowledge management to my mind is still predicated on people processes and technology as well as organisational culture and norms (back to Hawthorne). But a bit like the bible the most important of these are people and giving them the ability to connect and share information be it over a coffee, doing an after action review, sharing a story about how to deal with a client. It is allowing people to meet and make that primitive connection that encourages you to share that tacit knowledge. However if you are in a large organisation you can't always meet everyone and so the rise of social web 2.0 technology that I ramble about on supports the social sharing of information.

Here is the article from March 2007.

Knowledge Management on the Decline?: The law of diminishing returns is affecting those firms that invested heavily in giant IT databases - because a lot of that information is becoming available on line and it’s quality is steadily improving. It does beg a question as to say in 5 years time will in house precedents (or at least the vast majority of them) be as quaint as a buggy and whip.

Therefore firms will need to look at the way that people share knowledge if they wish to maintain a competitve advantage over their rivals.

Competitive advantage comes from possessing some attribute that is valuable, rare and not easily substituted - the tacit or people knowledge in a firm is that advantage not as previously perceived what is held in a database.

Another article highlights the rise of Generation Y lawyers who want to have their own internal blogs as a way of advertising their expertise to other people in the firm, so that they can undertake work on interesting projects.

Firms have noted a significant rise in the number of requests for blogs especially and even Microsoft has noticed - putting a blogging facility into Sharepoint 2007.

Also they want to have a say in developing more flexible taxonomies than the ones that they feel are foisted on them by IT departments that aren’t lawyers and don’t always bear reality to what and how they work.

Always remember, the technology is there to help people with their day to day work and that without the people getting involved - you end up with an expensive white elephant.

Great questions at the end of a major project or bid

Thank you to Matthew Homann at the non billable hour for capturing some of the great questions that you should try to capture at the end of every project.

I have made some alterations in respect of my own experiences but direct quotes via Matthew are in italics. 

These are as follows:-

• What was the outcome of this project?
  
• What was good for our client about the outcome of this project?
• What were the areas of improvement for myself and the team
• What was the best part of the project? 
• What was the biggest pinch point in delivering this project?
• What new abilities or knowledge have we learned from doing this project? (though see my point later in this post.)
  
• What do we wish we had known when we started this project?
  
• Briefly what were the 3 lessons of this project that other colleagues need to know?  (I suggest taking 5 good lessons and 5 areas for improvement. - but don't make that an inflexible rule)

The important element to do is not to just file it away as part of some closed file but to share it  - this could either be via a blog but ideally with a wiki style approach - so that people can add additional comments especially if you are doing a number of projects for the same client and want to capture points say about a clients preferences or key areas of concern or praise expressed on an issue.

I think though that it time is pressing then you can use these four steps which tries to cover all the points earlier - but still does not obviate the need to capture these in a electronically searchable format.

• What were our intended results?
• What were our actual results?
• What caused our results?
• What will we sustain/improve?

Interestingly though this article neglects the need for people to carry out a before taking action review which covers the following points that people should ideally carry out before carrying out a major project and to some extent a bid

 This might then deliver an answer before the need to say - what things did we wish we had known before starting.

• What are our intended results and measures?
  
• What challenges can we anticipate?
  
• What did we/others learn in similar situations? (hence searching a wiki)
  
• What do we think will make the biggest difference to success ?
  

About to start a project - do you use prospective hindsight

One of the ideas, that I worked on was a variant of that well known practice within knowledge management of carrying out an after action review to gather the lessons and knowledge from every major project. The area that I looked at was going to be a before action review. The aim was two fold - one was to gather some of the participants  thoughts on the project and to tap in to their tacit knowledge. The other was to stop projects failing which they tend to do at regular intervals. I wanted people to bring their experiences to the table and to contribute any reservations or benefits before the team set off down the road so to speak.

There is an interesting article within the Harvard Business Review for September 2007 which highlights work done in the 1980's by Mitchell, Russo et al which discovered that 'prospective hindsight - imagining an event that has already happened increases the reasons for future outcomes by up to 30%. 

Gary Klein has utilised this research to suggest a pre-mortem approach to projects, which is used to identify risks - and asks team members to imagine that the project has failed spectacularly.  

Project members then write down independently every reason that they can think for the failure. Then team members are asked to read one item from their list (bit surprising this one as people depending on the culture of the firm will probably read out the one that is the least politically sensitive). 

It was interesting to read how this had been used to tap into a participants tacit knowledge and the groups social network to solve a potential project stopping issue.

It is interesting that Klein concludes as I did in my proposal - in that project team members then feel valued for their intelligence, experience and that other team members can learn valuable lessons from them. 

Also by examining problems at the start it also acclimatises people to look for early signs of trouble in the project and hopefully avoid the need for a painful after action review where people are too busy avoiding blame that useful knowledge doesn't get discovered and used for the benefit of the organisation.