Dave Snowden on sharing knowledge

From Dave Snowden: If you try and set targets for knowledge sharing you have failed to understand the subject

Knowledge is a voluntary act, if people trust each other they will share. If they work together and create interdependencies then they will share. If the context requires it even political rivals will share. Good management (including knowledge management) is about creating the right sort of environment and interactions. Creating a set of explicit targets is an abrogation of management responsibility not its assumption.

Be careful what you count- words of wisdom for sure.

Geez, I like Dave Snowden. I'm thinking I may have to spring and go to one of his courses. (Oh oh, I see there is one in San Francisco in June. Right when I'm there on vacation. I've already signed-up for a one day unconference on online communities while I'm in California. How much work can I cram into vacation? :))

Incentives and disincentives for knowledge work

Matt Moore at Engineers Without Fears takes on the topic of killing-off the conditions that allow for truly collaborative, altruistic sharing of knowledge: incentives schemes and behavioural economics. It speaks clearly to the idea I've discussed many times in the past that once you've corrupted the conditions that make these systems work you are toast.

When people share their experiences, skills or knowledge they either do it in a social context or a market context. If they do it in a market context they will expect to be rewarded appropriately - and if they are highly experienced (and expensive) it will cost you a lot. Conversely, if they do it in a social situation, they do not necessarily expect financial reward (but they will often expect some form of social reciprocation). However once you replace a social context with a market context it becomes very hard to bring social norms back. You are stuck in "**** you, pay me" situation. The interesting thing is that a gift is OK in a social situation provided you do not link it explicitly to money.

The issue with most incentive schemes designed to encourage collaboration is that collaboration is built on social norms that you destroy when you make it all about the money. And most KM programmes do not have enough budget to pay participants for their collaboration at the market rate.

Yep! It's a slippery slope.

QOTD: Patrick Lambe on Wisdom Management

Patrick Lambe discussing the latest meme making the rounds in knowledge management circles: Wisdom Management

Show me a disaster – Katrina, Enron, 911, Challenger, Columbia – and I will show you problems with how individuals’ knowledge fails to scale to an effective organisational response. The notion of wisdom management is a gigantic red herring based on an increasingly outdated individualism.

QOTD: Dave Snowden on putting people in boxes

From Dave Snowden: Archetypes, foolishness and false categorisation:

Putting people into little boxes and thinking that you have accounted for the complexity of a human being is crude, stupid and at times down right evil. Why anyone spends money on this I will never understand.

We attempt to do this with learners all the time; and it is crude, stupid, and at times down right evil.

Above the flow

I found a new blog through Andrew McAfee that I am rather liking: Transparent Office. The blogger, Michael Idinopulos, works at Socialtext, and the blog is focused on the use of social software in the enterprise. One of his very first posts addressed the concept of in-the flow versus above-the-flow kind of work.

In the old world of emails and knowledge management systems, our tools and processes force a rigid distinction between "doing your job" (i.e., in-the-flow activities, usually in email) and "giving back to the organization" (above-the-flow contributions to a knowledge management system). That framing of the issue ensures that people will spend almost all their time in email and very little time contributing knowledge--hence the "culture and incentives" problem that has bedeviled Knowledge Management since the very start.

Too often we approach knowledge management tasks from a naive perspective. We approach it as a Field of Dreams type of problem, if we build it they will come... The problem is, it doesn't matter what you build (i.e. what tools you use), because it's a far more complex problem than just providing the means to manage knowledge. You have to first address the will, the incentives, the really big questions.

Reading Michael reminded me of the Dave Snowden interview that I had posted about previously: The Impact of Web 2.0 on Knowledge Work and "Knowledge Management"

One of the things I've always argued very strongly is that you shouldn't provide any incentives to knowledge work because, for example, to reward people for contributing to a knowledge management database fails to understand the basic trust implications of the knowledge interaction. If you ask me for something that I need in the context of genuine need, very few people if anybody other than the obdurant is going to refuse to give it to you... but if you ask me to share my knowledge in anticipation of possible need in the future by somebody I don't know, then you're never going to get it. It's the immediacy of the context that matters.

Here we have three people (McAfee, Idinopulos, Snowden) with expertise in enterprise knowledge management telling us it's an almost impossible task to accomplish. It's a very complex issue that defies overly simplistic attempts to try to explain away failure. What makes it more difficult is trying to find some places where it has worked in order to try to replicate success. It's almost impossible to find above-the-flow success stories beyond the large scale open example of Wikipedia.

The strategic importance of Twitter

I've been thinking about Twitter and this piece of the Dave Snowden interview that I posted last week:

You can't create a knowledge sharing culture, but you can increase the interaction between people. You can increase their interdependency, and you can increase the immediacy of the knowledge management request...

I can't begin to explain to people why Twitter works, but the elements are in this Snowden quote. It absolutely leads to greater interdependency, and increases the opportunities for interaction. It functions as a gateway to greater communication. It is anything but trivial, but you'll never understand this unless you dive in.

Just be the ball, be the ball, be the ball. You're not being the ball Danny.

We need to be able to describe Twitter in 140 characters. It wouldn't take too much editing of the Snowden quote to get there.

QOTD: David Weinberger on un-managing our information

David Weinberger via Joe McKendrick at FASTForward: Let’s Start ‘Un-Managing’ Our Information:

By using tools that allow that information to be broken out of its assigned categories, you will discover relationships you didn’t know were there. You’re going to spur innovation, you’re going to discover efficiencies and you’re going to enable people across your organization to find other people who share their passions.

Which sounds wonderful to me, but we also need to realize that many people are fat-and-happy hanging out in their comfy silos.

If you want openness, flatness, ideation, collaboration, peer production... all of the great things that these new ways of working are enabling, the very first thing you'll need to do is to free your information. You need to know, however, that your efforts will be fiercely resisted.

The walls of the silos are very thick. You'll need to call in the bunker busters to get it done.

Dr. David Vaine mini-marathon

I finally got around to watching the rest of the Dr. David Vaine (courtesy of the Green Chameleon) knowledge management videos on YouTube. These are required viewing:

Explaining Knowledge Management #2

Explaining Knowledge Management #3 Part One

Explaining Knowledge Management #3 Part Two

Explaining Knowledge Management #3 Part Three

And my favorite:

Explaining KM #4 Corporate Blogging

What do these medical wikis have in common?

Science Roll has a good article on Medical wikis: the future of medicine? It details twenty-four wikis in the medical field and makes for some interesting reading. What struck me as significant, however, is the software being used to drive these sites. Twenty-two of the twenty-four sites are powered by MediaWiki.

Wikipedia continues to get all of the attention by the media, but the importance of MediaWiki to that story is being missed. I've mentioned the network effect occuring around MediaWiki in the past, and it looks to me like the trend is accelerating. The growing role of MediaWiki in managing a good portion of the world's knowledge is a significant story that is going untold.

Embracing wiki chaos

I came across this quote by Ken Tyler while reading the post about wiki patterns :

It's best to start with as little structure as possible and only add more structure when it proves to be needed.

The quote wasn't sourced with a link so I went searching for Ken Tyler and came upon Seedwiki. I'd looked at this before, but it'd been some time ago. Seedwiki allows anyone to create a wiki on any topic they want. It's basically anything goes. What blew me away though was the homepage. Now, y'all know that I love a good tag cloud, but this is pure nirvana.


After navigating Seedwiki a while I soon realized that structure is never needed. This is the future of knowledge management. Linear thinkers need not apply.