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change management: Once sitting in a change management meeting I felt like I wanted to cry, I felt like my head was going to explode. Several years later, I realize it isn’t because I hate change management, it merely that I didn’t understand it.
Sure, its someone’s job to be a change manager, and sadly that’s how conventional ‘cog in the wheel’ type employees treat change management……but
I had to sail a wide wide sea and climb up a tall tall hill to talk to a man who gave me the answer. His simple words, “change management is there to preserve the integrity of your data.” Certainly!, is my answer many years later. Change management gives oomph to your intellectual property.
How do you keep up with information?: the portals, the word documents, the blogs, the tweets, not to mention all the tacit knowledge stewing around? Do you throw more tools at it? Do you create another process that is only valid in pockets?
An answer I recently threw out to the table, taken from Kevin Kelly’s Book, What Technology Wants, was one that the natives mastered, but slips the newly ‘civilized’ world….”Affluence without abundance.” We can influence what we choose to influence, and we have to make these choices wisely.
Why blog if not to make money and gain influence?, a friend once asked. I never thought about making money or gaining influence by blogging in the information age….at first thought I considered it a path to wisdom, learning step by step. Now I think, I’m not here to influence the mass, I’m here to influence the few that count, to provide a beacon to establish kinship to others….My version of affluence without abundance.
We’ve all worked in those organizations in which colleagues take their personal constraints to be those of the group, or where finger pointing and name calling is rampant, or individuals scurry to a corner to create the next best thing without a feedback loop.
In knowledge management, a hyper feedback loop is required to accomplish great things. The tools and mantras of the trade to connect the right people are simple and easy to use. Often km shops lose focus of these tools and the cadence for which they were commissioned.
The meat and potatoes of knowledge management.
- Building an expert network – I’m an American philanthropist / investor that wants to find subject matter experts on finance in the Democratic Republic of the Congo that speak Chinese to help articulate the commodities for infrastructure trade between the two countries. This individual wants to access the difference between the American model of giving handouts to the nation vs. the Chinese model of cutting business deals and wants to exploit the advantages of both systems for the betterment of the local population suffering from malaria. You want to also understand the political and civil instabilities in the country. Immediately I’d need a local entrepreneur, a Chinese business person who speaks English, government officials, doctors and lawyers. All are necessary, but the most important asset you need is the person who knows how to connect the dots, they are your most valuable player.
- Establishing Communities of Practice – The challenge has now been established, you’ve provided a framework in which the doctors, lawyers, businessmen, politicians and philanthropists have a forum for exchanging ideas. The infrastructure is there, ready to integrate.
- Using the Knowledge Cafe – Taking into account the questions above, you now sit the lawyers, doctors, businessmen, politicians and philanthropists at 5 different tables, let them stew over the questions, then ‘shake’ the tables according to best way the knowledge coordinator sees fit to enable the most efficient way of sharing information…only the moderator / librarian of the table remains to add to the queue of ideas generated, the rest of the of the members rotate.
- Generating Lessons Learned to achieve continuous improvement – A great deal of insight often gets lost without proper cataloging for re-use. Next time doctors, lawyers, philanthropists, politicos and businessmen want information about complex problems regarding health, business, risk, and geopolitics its all there for them in a nice wrapper of simplicity.
Several institutions agree on the hierarchy of data to information, information to knowledge, knowledge to wisdom.
Data – Facts that are relevant to an endeavor
Information – A PowerPoint containing facts
Knowledge – Integrated powerpoints by label
Wisdom – Actionable, second nature
The information age has produced more documentation than anyone can consume. Technological and social filters are the first mechanisms to correlate data. Filters work much better when they have something to queue, hence the advent of meta-data.
If the information age has brought us all the policies, procedures, white papers and technical manuals we can handle, knowledge allows us to see the potential overlap in policies, procedures, etc.
Once all the fluff and overlap are identified and eliminated, governance is simple and effective, one step closer to wisdom.
The sage wisdom of Marshall McLuhan‘s ‘The medium is the message’ has become dated with the arrival of social media. Modern day choice allows for an infinite combination of inputs, tool, techniques and outputs. The curse of knowledge is alive and well.
The abundance of choice makes digital life hard to manage.
When someone goes on a trip, they will not take the time to blog at Travel Buddy, upload pictures to Flickr, share video at youtube, share with friends on Facebook, and provide play by play on twitter. People compromise on the available mediums; the paradox of choice.
Similarly, when an executive goes to a meeting, the ease of disseminating the vision to to middle management in dissectable chunks to optimize performance is an art.
Words like integration and orchestration have extreme relevance, the CEO’s should look to autonomous agents to hear the symphony.
Discussions with colleagues will reveal different interpretations of the truth. The job of an autonomous agent is not to own an interpretation or the path ahead; meandering the river to the collective wisdom of an organization is the objective.
Human nature is to find a subjective truth, stop, kick your feet up, and have a beer. Objective truth assumes the quest goes on forever, a Kaizen approach to the collection of knowledge.
When you need answers to the essentials or a fresh perspective and unique results do you go to the person with all the answers, or do you give the curious a shot?
Stephen Malkmus, an indie rock artist from Portland and Colin Powell, the American statesman, have something in common….fountainheads of knowledge.
Malkmus uses artistry as a tool for tapping the unknown, Powell’s prescience commands obedience through earned respect.
If you have 17 people in a room and want to gleam the best information possible for making decisions moving forward, chances are you’ll need to use both artistry and obedience in problem / solution discovery.
People look for kinship in others before you can develop trust, and reputation affects knowledge sharing among colleagues.
Why does the United States Army have such a vested interest in the development of knowledge management? As written in Made to Stick, the army’s challenge is akin to writing instructions for a friend to play chess on your behalf.
The course of action taken by Big Army to accomplish this feat — Build complicated beurocracies, establish empires, cultivate overlapping yet contradictory ideas. Throw SOP’s, General Orders, rules, regulations, and score of skillsets with different titles at the challange. This creates a breeding ground of cognative waste, much like Deep Blue…every move is calculated, at the cost of financial and intellectual opportunity costs.
A cheaper alternative is to tell the right stories, ask the right questions, and truly listen to the answers and seek to simplify. The storyteller and listener’s specility is establishing rapport with an audience and grabbing the appropriate nuggets of knowledge and applying it to the bigger picture. Kasparov ultmately played second fiddle to the machine, but he came close, his path to knowledge came by way of many opponents, learning what their moves had to say.
The forgotten art of storytelling and listening is making a resurgence in the military industrial complexes, when the cultivation of such things happen, we get things like the internet. When corporations realize the effect artistry can have on their bottom line, we’ll see a resurgence of this at Bed Bath and Beyond.
We Are Surrounded by Bureaucrats, Note Takers, Literalists, Manual Readers, TGIF Laborers, Map Followers, and Fearful Employees -Seth Godin
I was left with two impressions rounding out Seth Godin’s book Linchpin
- Empowerment – He says ‘Give Yourself a Well Earned D,’ – In context, conventions of society judge grammar and flow more than the presentation of ideas. The well developed definitions and roles of jobs will pick on you and use their well established principles as a beating stick.
- What would we do without the white collar mass? Without all the people in the above quote, what would the world do? What would the world be like without these positions of white collar commodity? What if they were to all disappear tomorrow? What if they all got ‘creative’ tomorrow, who would be left to wash the dishes?
When I think about all the information and subject matter floating around, I hit gridlock. I think about the establishment in the form of institutions of higher learning, bodies of knowledge, best practice, etc – I think about how they all want to own a slice of the pie and how all these overlapping disciplines all want to be the best, the most accredited, and most importantly to be the ‘right’ methodology.
The yang that is born out of this power struggle is autonomy. The Taoist master owns nothing of these magical features. They want to help you see your information clearer, ownership not included, no brand required.
On one side of the playing field we have the TGIF laborer; on the other you have the transcended. Organizations do not understand these autonomous creatures, yet they are the path to true freedom and enlightenment. They are the ones who can bridge the gap between possible and probable.
Consider the distinct methods of building information portals and you can respect the complexity involved in getting the right information in the right hands.
The Two Dimensional Approach
Portal A is built with functions to aggregate private information to a public space. This involves setting up the appropriate plumbing, arranging hierarchies, and maintaining intricate access control lists.
Portal B is built with target audience, everything is built horizontally, complex rules spring up for who sees what and when.
The challange with both approaches standardization across roles and competency levels.
The Role Based Approach
Glocal thought is just as important to information portals as it is to the flat world. This involves a design that maximizes usability for different customers while simultaneously improving the efficiency of information workers. Syndication of data is paramount for discovering interdependency of information, and aggregation of performance metrics to digital dashboards is a mandatory requirement for competitive advantage.
Devising a system to allow agile local control while nodding and respecting overlaps will put you ahead in the game. The challenge here is balance.
It can be the best of times, it can be the worst of times depending on a slew of variables and how you handle them.
The Scenario: Organizations live in stove pipes. Often this is in the form of departments responsible for different competencies such as accounting, finance, market, information technology, and management. Interdependency and overlap are overlooked in organizing the intellectual property produced. All departments produce ‘Products,’ so we need to create a content type in SharePoint to bridge the gaps. The ‘Products’ content type needs to be created and the appropriate metadata columns assigned.
To make it happen we must set up a site collection level content type and inherit throughout all the sites that create ‘products.’ Once we have the content type established, it’s easy to associate with document libraries and subsequently create templates for re-usability.
Some unique challanges that arise deal with handling large document libraries, the size of your content databases, and synching content types across site collections. Managing large lists and traversing content types should be much easier in SharePoint 2010, I have my fingers crossed.
In conclusion, setting up content types at an enterprise level pays off in organzation that produce thousands of documents. Do you have individuals that want to search documents within this date range that transcends departments pertaining to ‘X?,…’ no problem.
The technology is a slam dunk, the art is in the vision.
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