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

A failure of intelligence and knowledge management

It is interesting to note that since the recent attempted bombing of the plane in the USA on how failures of intelligence organisations to share knowledge nearly led to tragedy. Since 9/11 the us intelligence agencies have tried to improve this through technology. There has been the well cited case of the use of wikis such as intellipedia as a means of capturing information. I suppose one of the problems is that you can have too much information and you return to the drinking from the fire hose - or as this article puts it sorting the wheat from the chaff.

I think that the article is useful but I think that it needed to look at the people and leadership issues within the intelligence agencies as well as the culture.

Interestingly one of my KM favourites Morten Hansen has a piece in HBR (Click here) he highlights the hoarding barrier where the organisation and its incentives penalised sharing and also the poor ability to search for relevant information. He proposes three areas for improvement and I agree with the one regarding incentives - probably through areas such as the appraisal system and other non monetary inducements - however job rotation may not work in some organisations because of specialisation and recruitment of new people both in public and private sector seems a bit of a no no in the current economic climate.

I've undertaken KM work in the past in that we can provide people with the tools that we think that they need but the problem is that the culture of the organisation needs to be a safe one where people can use the tools and that it is expected that they will use them and that there are no disincentives for people to use them.

We probably also need to look at what is going on in the working environment that the intelligence agencies are working in and the culture - if you are working in a organisation that deals in secrets maybe knowledge sharing amongst other secret organisations is a little more difficult.

I am convinced that a new wave of technology will support improved knowledge management however at best at present it is a marginal revolution with people carrying out work in this area in many cases under the radar - because the organisations that they work for haven't yet caught up or it isn't seen as an organisational imperative in a very competitive and threatening business environment.

It is very easy to snipe from the sidelines when there is a systemic failure - but what current articles fail to look at is the pressure that the intelligence agencies are under and sometimes people don't have the time to share that knowledge even if they wanted to.

Later.... Rosabeth Moss Kanter puts her two pennorth into the discussion - here which talks about the lessons leaders can learn from this - however, there are also lessons that knowledge managers can learn from this.

Positively wrong

Positively wrong
an interesting article by Matthew Taylor looking critically at positive psychology as set out by Martin Seligman. A post well worth reading.

Jack Vinson's thoughts on Knowledge Management

I've been reading a lot of Jack Vinson's blogs on knowledge management and always found him to be a pragmatic knowledge manager. I'm pleased to see he's been quoted by Stan Garfield over at Hewlett Packard - who asked him what words of wisdom he'd want to pass on.

Jack has two points that he makes that chime in closely with mine

Words of wisdom on KM:

• It's not about the knowledge, it's about connecting people who have useful information to those who need it - whether you connect them face-to-face, or it is mediated via technology (and time).
  
• It is very easy to get locked into one method of doing knowledge management. Be curious about options for KM. Test things out, ask your colleagues. Then make your decisions as they work in your environment."

I've always believed that people are the most important element in knowledge management, but I am excited by the range of potential options that are available for firms to use - if they are brave and trust their staff. It reminds me of the conversations that I had when the Internet was in it's infancy and I campaigned with managers to allow it in. They felt that people would goof off and productivity would suffer. It didn't because people used it to access information that they recycled.

The second one is all too easy to get sucked into. The danger of a one size fits all paradigm - there are always some options and try to devise a system that is flexible and meets the internal communities needs. They may not always work first time out - but it is always a learning experience that we can use for version 2.

Team Working and Lawyers - follow up to tonights earlier post

Thank you to a Strategic Legal Technology post from Ron Friedman this evening. 

One of the snippets posted covered recent comments by Jordan Furlong about law schools and team work (and the lack of it). 

I'd always considered that it was law firms and their culture that tended to drum team working out of its trainees but it apparently happens earlier in the law schools. (I'm sure not all law firms are that way - though from reading some of the blawgs and reading Legal Week I'm not so sure now)

When I was studying some of my happiest times where when I was talking to fellow students from all over the world and gaining new insights that I would never have had in the first place - if they hadn't been so open and hopefully they felt that I contributed as well.

Knowledge sharing is an entree into the world of innovation if we have or are allowed to make time for it as well as having a good team working relationship. 

Anyway click on the title of this post to read the article