Anecdote on Collaboration

Anecdote has just released a new white paper titled Creating a Collaborative Workplace that explores the nature and value of collaboration from a practical perspective.

I find it a very nice piece of writing. It's jargon free enough to use as a tool to align goals and actions across the spectrum of KM partners (HR, IT, IM, strategic planning, facilities etc.).
I like the definition and contexts they've laid out for collaboration, the "cause" for collaboration, and the focus on culture - implying that how things are done are as important as what things are done.

It might be interesting to supplement the ideas in the paper by moving into an exploration of what collaboration is not - or if you're inclusionary, the full spectrum of collaborative processes and practices. Why I'm saying this is that for many people collaboration is synonymous with coordination, cooperation, co/joint creation, debate, co-evolution, and a variety of other interaction processes. I do hate to get overly definitional, but I do believe that for people to work together they need to share some common language, and an understanding and agreement about the process to get things done. This type of agreement can provide a framework to evaluate individual and group performance, and mitigate situations where "buddy" trumpets his collaborativeness, while all he does is criticize others' ideas and contributes none of his own.

I'm reading Albrecht's book The Power of Minds at Work, and he maps out 10 learnable macro-skills related to what he calls 'practical intelligence':- mental flexibility, or "tolerance for ambiguity"- openness to new information- capacity for systematic thought- capacity for abstract through- skill at generating ideas- positive thinking- sense of humour- intellectual courage- resistance to enculturation- emotional resilience or "emotional intelligence"

This reads to me like a list of collaborative skills, which could be a good idea supplement as well.

The Role of Colleagues in Careers

A perceptive quote from a colleague today: "In my career, there have been people along the way whose greatest value was to remind me of what not to become."

Influencing Others With Transparent Dignity

I was again struck in a recent meeting how people seem to think about "change management" as communications - if people are told something over and over again, maybe in a few different ways, they'll do something different. We certainly can't deny the power of mass communications, as evidenced by its impact on our society over the last number of generations. But we also can't overlook all those instances where, despite the evidence that a clearly communicated message has been understood, people do not change what they do - some examples include "smoking is hazardous," "speed kills," "reduce, reuse, recycle," "a heart attack is looming if you don't change your diet and get some exercise."

True, effective communication of relevant information is vital for everyone to make good decisions, but change takes much more.

I've just finished a brilliant book, Influencer: The Power to Change Anything that provides a very useful, proven framework for change that can be applied to virtually type of personal or organizational change initiative - the scope of the case studies included in the book are powerful proof.

What I've taken away from the book is that enabling change requires:

• a clear understanding of current behaviours and what is supporting /encouraging them
• a clear identification of target vital behaviours - just the few that matter
• personal motivation and personal capability to change
• peer / social support, and the knowledge and capability of the peer group to provide the support
• appropriate rewards and recognition (called structural motivation in the book)
• removal of organizational barriers to the new vital behaviours (called structural ability in the book)

Enabling and encouraging changes is certainly not a "quick fix" as case studies and many of your own personal examples no doubt demonstrate. The authors point to the need to combine a number of strategies to encourage change when the status quo is very deeply rooted in a complex situation.

I found the book very consumable, easy to read, with surprisingly clear connections between theory and practice. Most importantly to me is the tone of the book - it does not imply or present change as something you do to others, but instead something that we can all engage in and benefit from. I highly recommend it.

For more information, visit a web site created by the authors, which contains a chapter preview, and good supporting resources.

Joseph Grenny, co author, is also featured in a Business Week Interview.

Launch of a new KM community - APQC's KMEdge

Yesterday I had the privilege of participating in conference call and pre-launch look at APQC's new web site http://kmedge.org/, which will be officially launched at the upcoming APQC KM conference. More than just brochure-ware or an exercise in self promotion, APQC is attempting to bring together a community of people interested in knowledge management from a full range of client and practitioner perspectives. Yesterday's conference call, which was also an opportunity for interested parties to suggest and influence features and functionality, was certainly a good step - people support what they help create.

I also like what I perceive to be APQC's "let's try it and see what happens, and learn from it" approach. This initiative has the potential to be very interesting to participate in and watch unfold. APQC has built many solid relationships with client organizations and thought leaders who could contribute actively to the community. And, with their wealth of documented information and expertise about KM, they are in a great position to seed the community with thought and conversation provoking ideas.

I find a certain admirable degree of courage in an organization who, after researching, analyzing, informing and promoting communities and their expertise in this area, are taking the initiative to launch and "garden" such a highly visible one. No pressure there!

Bravo and I wish the APQC team much success.

Want Employee Engagement - Re-humanize the Workplace

There are a couple of topics I've been muddling about the last few weeks, and I've come to realize that there may be a connection.

First, "employee engagement" has been emerging as a hot topic in recent years, most notably as extension of the typical human resource professionals' mantra of "attract and retain." What concerns me somewhat is the tone of conversations that seem to take place about engagement - that it is something that can be managed, controlled or commanded, and that it is some target state that employees need to get to 100% of the time.

In his book Getting Engaged: The New Workplace Loyalty, Tim Rutledge defines engagement as the state of being attracted, committed, and fascinated, which is obviously different than simply being involved, and which Tim also differentiates from satisfied (feeling good, fine, comfortable.) By this definition, engagement includes some strong, positive emotion, and also seems to imply a high degree of focus.

I don't think it's possible for employees to be "engaged" all the time.

Organizational contexts and situations changes constantly, including but not limited to colleagues and managers, project and initiatives, organizational structure, policies, practices, work processes, company direction. Some of these changes attract, and others repel.

As well, I've met very few people who are so good at compartmentalizing as to completely exclude external / personal distractions during work hours - whether ailing family members, looking forward to an upcoming vacation, or obsessing over the state of global economy, ecology, poverty, or conflict.

And engagement as Rutledge defines it is very tiring! I don't imagine that too many people can maintain peak mental/emotional energy on an-ongoing basis without some down-time.

I'm not saying that employee engagement shouldn't be a target. I think employees and companies benefit from staff and managers "attracted, committed, and fascinated," and applying the full extent of their knowledge, and expertise to issues and opportunities in the workplace. I also think that in some cases, other states like involvement or satisfaction are perfectly acceptable and all that can/should be accepted.

So, for the second topic I've been thinking about - how can employee engagement be encouraged (if you agree that it can't be mandated/controlled/managed?)

I suggest managers spend some time thinking about "re-humanizing" the workplace by doing things like:

• balancing accountabilties for achieving outcomes with how employees treat each other
• banishing toxic behaviour in the work place (see McKinsey article Building the Civilized Workplace, and Bob Sutton's work) and treating everyone with dignity and respect
• effective recognition practices
• recognizing a set of cultural practices (behaviours) that engender trust, productive relationships, information sharing, being productively candid, collaboration, learning, innovation and fault tolerance
• rewarding and recognizing managers for creating humanizing work environments that support and encourage everyone to "be there," and apply the full extent of their learning, knowledge and experience to the work at hand
• referring to people by name and not purely as aggregated numbers on a spreadsheet so as not to disengage from the human consequences of decisions and actions

"Wisdom of Crowds" - The Right Answer is Somewhere in the Middle

In Could Twitter Threaten Free Speech, Tom Davenport has for me tabled an interesting point in his last line: "We have to balance the idea of unfettered self-expression with civility. If we’re not civil, it will probably lead to less free speech, not more."

Once again it proves that social / emerging technologies are about people - who they are, how they work, and what they do, and though technologies enable some new behaviours, behind it all are still the promise and peril of human nature. We humans often lack civility in a wide variety of circumstances in the face-to-face world, and it's not unexpected that it also translates into the online world.

People who are reluctant to explore / approach using new social technologies inside organizations could point to this article as a reason for "why not to, " or as a rationale for continuing to exercise deliberate, innovative-killing controls on information creation and flow.

True, social technologies have the potential of making lack of civility more visible, but at the same time this visibility can also encourage greater personal accountability. If individuals know that their colleagues and managers can track their comments and contributions, I think a bit of "auto-policing" takes place - who really want's to "shoot themselves in the foot?"

One of the best overall strategies I've heard for organizations is not creating a 'wild wild west' through indescriminate unleasing of social technologies, but instead a purposeful, guided implementation with built-in continuous learning and improvement for system users, service providers, managers, and the organization as a whole. Most organizations have resonable code of conduct / conflict of interest guidelines that easily apply to new technologies, provided the guidelines have been well socialized with new and existing employees.

Yes, despite these seemingly resonable measures, some people will behave in an uncivilized or disrespectful way, as we all tend to do from time to time. Fortunately, social technologies also present an opportunities for colleages / peers / community members to self-police through feedback and support, all the way to potentially harsh consequences - exclusion from important conversations, inability to access information, ostracision from a community.

Managers might just find this a refreshing alternative to being solely responsible for dealing with lack of civility / respect in the workplace.

Howard Rheingold Talks About Collaboration

Via Paul McDowall on the Interdepartmental Knowledge Management Forum discussion group. Howard Rheingold suggests that "pure" self interest is not the predominant motive we think it is, and explores new (economic) forms of cooperation that move human interaction beyond the "prisoner's dilemma". Rheingold references open sourcing, opening up patents to competitors, passing on knowledge and capability to suppliers who also supply competitors. He points to real world organizations and examples. A very interesting listen. And some of his slides are funny too.

Mysterious Art of Collaboration

In a recent presentation about linking knowledge management and the Balanced Scorecard, a colleague pointed to "focussed dialog" as necessary for any effective business planning / management framework and process. Part of the conversation turned to the general observation of how a lot of planning and management activities arrange for the right people to be in the right room for the right reasons, but there often seems to be an implicit assumption that when the doors close "magic" happens - productive conversations take place, issues & problems are well identified, cause is effectively determined, decisions well made, and innovative thinking takes place.

Granted that some of this magic must take place, or we would not have the many successful organizations we've seen in the public, private and NGO sectors. It safe to say, then that in many cases the opposite is true and there are ample opportunities for improvement?
A few very interesting blog entries have touched on the topic of collaboration:

• Just what do you mean by 'collaboration' - Jack Vinson


• From the team at Anectode: Collaboration's resurgence, Developing a Collaboration Capability Requires more than Wishful Thinking, Collaboration Conditions, Three Types of Collaboration, Why People Don't Use Collaboration Tools
  
  Some thinkers/writers have drawn the distinction between collaboration and other forms of interpersonal/group interaction:


• From Dave Pollard - Will That Be Coordination, Cooperation, or Collaboration?
• Leo Denise, in this article titled Collaboration vs. C-Three (Cooperation, Coordination, and Communication) , Arthur T. Himmelman in his article titled Collaboration for a Change (Collaboration Defined: A Developmental Continuum of Change Strategies, and in Collaboration: What Makes It Work from the Wilder Research Center.

I think that for people to collaborate effectively they need the following:
A) Common understanding of what is meant by collaboration and what distinguishes it from other forms of interaction
Himmelman has some good basic, incremental definitions:

• Networking - Exchanging information for mutual benefit
• Coordinating - Exchanging information for mutual benefit, and altering activities to achieve a common purpose
• Cooperating - Exchanging information for mutual benefit, and altering activities and sharing resources to achieve a common purpose
• Collaborating - Exchanging information for mutual benefit, and altering activities, sharing resources, and enhancing the capacity of another to achieve a common purpose
• Co-Evolution - An interesting term I stumbled across after discovering "Beyond Partnerships" report on the Really Learning web site, it defines Co-Evolution as "... the ‘deepest’ form of partnership. It can consume considerable time from key players, so it is not for the fainthearted! It should, therefore, not be attempted if one of the other forms is more appropriate. It requires new thinking, new insights, new generosity about opportunities or problems, and these problems or opportunities are as yet unarticulated or not understood. As the outcomes aren’t at all clear, neither party can simply pursue their existing goals; they will need to be prepared to develop new goals as they become apparent. Thus it will be important to be able to examine assumptions, invert thinking, acknowledge where things (or thinking) have gone wrong, and where partners may need to let resources go in order to achieve the greater good. "

Dave Pollard also defines collaboration as "... finding the right group of people (skills, personalities, knowledge, work-styles, and chemistry), ensuring they share commitment to the collaboration task at hand, and providing them with an environment, tools, knowledge, training, process and facilitation to ensure they work together effectively." A fairly holistic view.
B) A reason to collaborate - where there are issues / problems that cannot be tacked by a single group acting alone.
C) Defined, explicit, facilitated group processes roles and responsibilities for fundamental processes - planning, cause analysis, decision making, issue identification & prioritization, and innovation / idea generation.
E) A collaborative attitude (you could call this principles / values), which I suggest comes directly from Roger Schwartz' work on Facilitative Leadership, specifically:

• seek to collect and share valid information. Valid information includes all the relevant information you have on the subject (whether it supports your position or not)
• seek to encourage free and informed choice so that people agree to do things because they have the relevant information and because they believe the decision makes sense, not because they feel manipulated or coerced into it.
• seek internal commitment to the decisions, which often flows from the first two values—with this level of motivation, people will do whatever is necessary to implement the decisions.
• value compassion, which means temporarily suspending judgment in order to appreciate others’ perspectives. It means having empathy for others and for yourself in a way that still holds people accountable for their actions rather than unilaterally protecting others or yourself.

Robert Hargrove's work in Mastering the Art of Creative Collaboration includes a Collaborative Model that points to key collaborative behaviours including:

• designating new possibilities, seeking creative & entrepreneurial results
• building collaborative networks and new patters of relationships and interactions
• showing authenticity and vulnerability
• showing attitude of learning, and equating success with questions
• balancing advocacy of views with inquiry into own and others' thinking
• listening to understand others
• acknowledging talents and gifts of others and providing an enabling environment

Collaborative-oriented competencies in areas such as active listening, written & verbal communications, coaching, facilitation, negotiation, empathy, analysis, synthesis, creativity, and too many to go into here.
I think that improving how people interact, both the processes and the way people work together (approach, attitudes, principles, values), are fundamental to meaningful success in knowledge management. Its also fundamental to ACHIEVING success in KM and any other change initiative.
And yet, it seems to often be the last thing considered. I expect that's because, since we humans are involved, it's complicated, challenging, time consuming, frustrating, difficult, often requiring somewhat different skills and perspectives.
But in terms of outcomes, the rewards are "priceless."
(BTW, Collaboration: What Makes It Work from the Wilder Research Center includes a Collaboration Factors Survey/Inventory that is well worth a look.)

What does a Creative Generalist Do?

Via Daryl at Anecdote ..

Steve Hardy has a wonderful post on his Creative Generalist blog titled "What Specifically do Generalists do?"

I won't do you or the author a disservice by trying to ... interpret ... it. I strongly suggest you read it yourself.

Perhaps what Steve describes is a "facilitative leader?" Or that role/individual in organizations intent on improving how knowledge and information are managed?

What I Would Like in a Corporate Library System

How well do you know your librarians? I think I know the ones in my organization quite well. As has been my experience all the way back to high school, librarians are a wealth of knowledge, and not just about subjects and collections, but often what is "going on" in the organization. And they're pretty terrific people too.

If you'd like to have an interesting conversation, bring a book on a general business topic back to the front desk and ask, "Can you tell me the names of the last 20 people who borrowed this book? I'd like to talk with them about their thoughts on the book, what they learned from it, and how they are thinking about applying what they learned to their work context."

That type of question is typically met with "We can't give you that information! That's personal / private!"

So, this scenario started me thinking about what I would like to see in a library system or related functionality. Here's what I've come up with so far:

• see who else is interested in particular topics based on the books/ articles / references they access
• find out (discover & ask) what they thought of the books, what they learned
• use this information to tap into / form a community / discussion group about the book/article/reference or general topic area
• maintain a compose a "wish list" of what I'd like to read, share it with others, and have library acquisitions teams automatically acquire access to popular requests based on popularity/frequency across multiple lists
• have a personal list of books / resources accessed / read / currently reading that I could share
• find out who is reading what now
• easily generate automatic bibliographic references for writing papers/reports/documents etc.
• include, and share (aggregate) references in a different context (e.g. on a blog/wiki etc.) for all external/internal, reference links, documents, presentations, graphics, photos, podcasts, video clips, charts etc.
• access an organized / grouped subset of these in various contexts (general responsibilities, projects, communities etc.)
• have references suggested to me based on identified interests roles / responsibilities / activities, existing references, interactions with others, search patterns etc.
• "references" I define here as quality, relevant links / actual content of all types, in internal systems, library collections, external / 3rd party collections & content, blogs, news media, social media, etc.

I suppose this list is a bit like Amazon meets LibraryThing, meets EndNote, meets Delicious, meets Slideshare, meets RSS, meets Facebook etc.

More on Community Leadership

In December of last year (2007) I posted on community of practice leadership, and offered a few questions in that context.

Stan Garfield, on the HP Weekly KM blog has done a very good job summarizing a number of conversations /emails that took place as a result(on community leadership) and has offered a few links as well. Well worth reviewing. Thanks Stan.

Best Practice Knowledge Transfer - Practical Ideas

I participated in a recent SKIM Leaders community conference call, featuring a presentation by Kent Greenes about best practice knowledge transfer.

I captured a number of interesting explicit/implicit ideas that have merit.

1. "Best" or "better" practices are not adopted, they're adapted.
2. A very interesting quote: "You don't have a better or best practice until someone else is using it." - Jack Welch
3. The leaner is important, and making learning (identifying, accessing and adapting) easy is critical, or people will re-create "good enough."
4. There is high value in focusing on general, broadly applicable practices first, rather than choosing highly specialized practices.
5. Do something, see what works, then broaden the scope.
6. Peer Assist is a critical tool to begin, and even conclude, the process.
7. Uncover success stories, communicate the stories, and assist learning and adaption process.
8. Facilitation is critical to the process - both the role and the capability.
9. Documentation / video / audio artefacts are the starting point for discovery and productive conversation - it is vital to put people with the learning needs and the people who have the leveragable practices together to enable transfer.
10. To facilitate discovery of best/better practices, short (<1>Leverage communities wherever possible - knowledge transfer is what these forms are all about.

Barriers to Knowledge Exchange

A recent post on Jack Vinson's blog pointed to a very interesting article titled Why We do Dumb or Irrational Things: 10 Brilliant Social Psychology Studies.

Psyblog also recently featured a post titled When We Are Fools To Ourselves.

I've grown somewhat infatuated with subjects like social psychology, social anthropology, cultural anthropology etc. in the context of enabling personal and organizational change, and facilitating knowledge creation and knowledge/information exchange.

I think Psyblog is one to watch. It seems to present complex psychological topics in simple language.

Meeting Rules

David Meiser, author of numerous books (my favourites being the Trusted Advisor and First Among Equals), started a conversation on Meeting Rules. Funny how making meetings more productive seems to be a recurring theme and common problem in organizations, despite the volumes of information and proven practices available out there.

In the blog entry, David asks: "What meeting rules would you propose?"

In my comments, I suggested that the MOST IMPORTANT RULE, maybe the only one is "We will respect each other and ourselves."

Meeting organizers should respect participants by creating an environment that maximizes participation and contributions, and minimizes unnecessary negative impact on workloads - by being clear and explicit about outcomes, objectives, roles, responsibilities, preparation required, meeting structure and underlying process.

All meeting participants should respect each other by:

• "being there" - being cognitively present in the meeting and focused on contributing to outcomes, and yes, that means turning off cell phones and Blackberry's .. perhaps every meeting room / meeting organizer needs one of these - http://www.phonejammer.com/cell-phone-jammer/p2jbz-r.asp
• tabling all relevant information to enable everyone to make fully informed choices and decisions
  listing to others' opinions and ideas for value, and not just criticism - balancing advocacy with inquiry
• being productively candid, and discussing the "undiscussable"

These are a blend of a few principles found in Roger Schwartz' "Using the Facilitative Leader Approach to Create an Organizational Culture of Collaboration." and some of the principles in that video FISH! that you may have seen a few years back.

Another Reason Why KM is more than just IM

On the Anectode blog, Daryl referenced an interesting Star Article by Louise Brown titled The fine art of (not) lecturing. In it Brown references criticisms of the typical lecture model used in post-secondary education by Nobel laureate Carl Wieman, leader of the $2 million-a-year Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative for improving science learning.

The article references some interesting points:

• people don't remember what they don't pay attention to
• short-term memory can only process four ideas at a time - reduce the load and stimulate the brain
• vigorous interaction – the guessing, answering and arguing and persuading – stimulates protein in the brain, which in turn helps anchor ideas into long-term memory
• we remember only those things we think have meaning at the time, and ignore everything else (Ever re-read something months or years from the original read only to take away a whole new understanding? I certainly have.)
• we can remember only seven items at a time and can process only four ideas at once

Given the relative truth in these statements, and the old axiom in the facilitation world that "the brain falls asleep 2.8 seconds after your posterior does," I wonder why lecture based "training," with a typical talking head at the front of the room, is still often equated with effective learning. Why so many corporate communication, or "change management" programs focus on pushing information, presuming that once communicated, it will be consumed, understood, accepted and duly acted upon. And why groups often resist efforts to facilitate the interactivity necessary to generate mutual learning in support of problem solving and decision making into meetings and workshops.

If you at least notionally agree that knowledge is created through active learning in context, supported by quality, relevant content, then it is critical for the exchange / transfer of knowledge to be highly interactive, with active engagement by the learner in the process. Passivity is counter productive.

Sounds a bit like adult learning 101, doesn't it? At least it seems to be the common ground for collaboration between human resource management and knowledge management.

Another Spin on Management Innnovation

Interestingly, The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits (a Fast Company excerpt from the book Forces for Good by authors Leslie R. Crutchfield and Heather McLeod Grant) contains remarkable similarities to the new management principles suggested in Gary Hamel's book The Future of Management.

Community of Practice Leadership

In my previous post, I mentioned new management principles suggested in Gary Hamel's book The Future of Management:

• variety, diversity, experimentation, depoliticizing / depolarization of decision making
• resource allocation flexibility through a market model
• enabling activism through democracy (devolution of accountability, distributed leadership, unalienable dissention rights)
• engagement and mobilization through meaning and common cause
• increasing the odds, and successful contribution, of serendipity

These are in stark contrast to the principles of "modern management," generally comprised of standardization, specialization of tasks and functions, goal alignment, hierarchy, planning and control, and extrinsic rewards. (Well summarized in Gary's book, page 151)

I'm currently working with the leadership team of a project management community of practice to enable them to grow the community and enrichen knowledge conversations and member learning and development. Many of the ideas and concepts in Gary's book have me thinking about what leadership really is in the context of a community of practice, and in turn, their relavence to the specific community I'm working with.

Much has been written about communities of practice (what they are & how they differ from task teams, how they work, value propositions, what the challenges are, nascent vs. seeded, etc.). Much of the writing talks about a variety of roles and responsibilities in the context of communities (e.g. facilitator, coordinator, information manager/librarian), and talks generally community leadership and its importance.

Gary has a very intreaguing reference in The Future of Management to some points from Mary Parker Follett's book, Creative Experience, first published in 1924:

• leadership is the capaticy to increase the sense of power amonng those being led, in essence to create more leaders
• difficult problems are best solved by creating "higher-order solutions" through the integration of diverse perspectives of all relavent stakeholders
• growth of organizations is maximized when the local communities within are effectively self-governed

Certainly visionary thinking for the time.

I'm not sure anyone has specifically, and with any great degree of depth, succintly explored the leadership dimension in communities as it has been explored more broadly in the context of business. At least, I haven't found it yet.

The questions that form in my mind are:

• What core principles (should) guide community leadership?
• What should effective community leaders do/act/practice to align with the core principles?
• What is community leadership and what makes it different than other forms or contexts of leadership?
• What are the key leadership processes in communities and how are/should they be shared across a leadership team?
• How can visibility, horizontality, transparency, inclusivity be woven into community leadership, while maintaining or increasing leadership effectiveness?
• How should community leadership be rewarded/recognized in the context of organizational hierarchy?

As I explore some of these questions with the help of colleagues and experts, I'll share emerging ideas here.

Web 2.0 and the Future of Management

Jim Lee at APQC has recently posted a blog entry titled Et tu, web 2.0? In it he reviews a number of Web 2.0 technologies and rates their usefulness in the context of his own impressions, needs and contexts. At the end of the post, he asks Gen Y'ers to share their experience with Web 2.0 stuff. (Which is why I'm commenting here and not on his blog.. I'm a bit "long in the tooth" to qualify as a Gen Y'er.)

Jim has been exploring the use/usefulness of Web 2.0 technologies for a while, even questioning the value of his APQC blog. I think his questions are in line with what many of us are considering when looking at Web 2.0 in the context of business value and purpose.

I picked up on a couple of interesting themes in his blog;

• the value of Web 2.0 tools if you're on the road almost 100% of the time
• some of the tools don't work for him , which it think is as much related to preferred learning style as anything else
• and most interestingly, he mentions "knowledge marketplace"

The last point really caught my attention, as I'm reading Gary Hamel's absolutely brilliant book (at least in my opinion), The Future of Management.

In the context of key trends and external forces that are affecting individuals and companies alike, requiring dramatically greater adaptability, Gary points to the shortcomings of the current management paradigm built on the core principles of standardization, specialization, hierarchy, alignment, planning and control, and influencing human behaviour using extrinsic rewards. He then suggests that the key is management innovation, which he defines as "anything that substantially alters the way in which the work of management is carried out, or significantly modifies customary organizational forms, and, by so doing, advances organizational goals."

He also suggests that adopting new principles is at the core of management innovation, and offers:

• variety, diversity, experimentation, depoliticizing / depolarization of decision making
• resource allocation flexibility through a market model
• enabling activism through democracy (devolution of accountability, distributed leadership, unalienable dissention rights)
• engagement and mobilization through meaning and common cause
• increasing the odds, and successful contribution, of serendipity

When I think of these, I see a role for Web 2.0 / social media in supporting and enabling management innovation. The effective integration of social media content, features, functions and capabilities (e.g. collaborating, creating, publishing, linking, sharing, commenting, reviewing, rating, aggregating, dis-intermediating, combining and re-combining) has the potential to enable a shift in management paradigm, to support the change from old to new, and provide the part of the support infrastructure for working in new and innovative ways.

BTW: James Gardner has an interesting view of Web 2.0 social media in his blog post titled "The New Divide: The workforce gap."

As well, McKinsey has published a management innovation related article titled Innovative Management: A Conversation with Gary Hamel and Lowell Bryan.

Can't Do KM Until You Get IM Right - Truth or Misconception

I've often seen an interesting perspective from a few information professionals in conversations about knowledge and information management. They sometimes categorize information management as the "hard stuff" and knowledge management as the "soft stuff." I've seen a few of them assert that you can't do the "soft stuff", often pointing at their heads, until you get the "hard stuff" right, pointing to or holding a piece of paper. (The implication there perhaps is that our heads are soft ? )

At first blush, that premise seems to make sense. In many respects good information is very important to creating and sharing knowledge; we are what we read (or don't), information about people's location, experiences and competencies can help us decide with whom to initiate a conversation.

There are couple of alternate perspective that are worth considering.

First, if you subscribe to the metaphor of the knowledge "iceberg," (where knowledge that is codifiable, or codified (information) is the tip of the iceberg above water, and the knowledge that is below the waterline is much larger, and is only accessible during exchanges between individuals), then does it really make sense to think of a linear progression from IM to KM? If, for example, you attribute 20% to what is above the water and 80% to what is below, then you have to ask if devoting 100% of your resources for %20 of your value/potential is a good decision?

And secondly, if you consider "IM" to include developing principle based policies, developing information standards /guidelines / practices, capacity building across a diverse community, generating awareness and encourage compliance & use, you probably know that none of these are possible without working collaboratively with colleagues and stakeholders across multiple perspectives and disciplines. This requires negotiating and agreeing on common objectives and outcomes, the process for achieving them, sharing information and knowledge through the collaborative process to enable effective/efficient teamwork, and sharing in the risks / rewards.

To me, that sounds a lot like knowledge management, which is as much or more about "how" people work, than what they do. So it would seem that you can't do much of IM without using KM approaches to accomplish IM objectives.

So, should you start and finish IM, working on the "hard stuff," before you do the "soft" KM stuff? I'm not so sure.

Group Discussion: A Business Case for Social Network Analysis

Last week I attended the September meeting of the Canadian Conference Board Knowledge Strategy Exchange Network, of which I'm a member and on the Advisory Group.

(Dave Pollard also attended and has a very good write up on his blog titled Introducing Social Networking Tools and Social Networking Analysis to Business: What To Do, which captures some information from those discussions, and a breakout session he conducted.)

(For anyone involved in formulating / implementing strategies and programs involving management of knowledge and information, you should seriously consider joining.)

After presentations and discussions with Patti Anklam and Ted Graham about Social Network Analysis, one of the group discussions was around "How do you build a "jargon-free" business case that will lead to a meaningful project and a valuable outcome."

To set the context for the business case we talked about a number of the cultural and contextual challenges that, in some combination, many public and private sector organizations face:

• acknowledged difficulties across the organization managing workloads, information "assault"


• many long serving employees, strong relationships, long memories, tendency to be more polite/collegial with each other than candid


• shifting demographics as "boomers" retire


• highly regulated environment, subject to a variety of legislation that governs requirements record keeping - e.g. e-discovery, duty to document, access to information


• moderate to high risk aversion, tendency for perfectionism rather than "good enough"


• deep social networks, highly leveraged to get work done, yet often taken for granted


• some degree of "command and control" / hierarchical management culture where subject matter experts have risen through the ranks


• multiple "stove pipes"


• difficulty recognizing / rewarding horizontal collaboration


• many other initiatives competing for scarce attention


• multiple major sub-cultures such as research or R&D / operations / corporate administration (HR/FIN/Audit/Communications / IT etc.)

After two modified "world cafe"-type discussions, I summarize the key learnings as follows:

1. Go "deeper" than broad - target a specific group or 'stove pipe' rather than position SNA at a broad or strategic context



2. "Dance with a willing partner" - see if anyone understands the value of social networks and is interested in exploring them. Look first at the part of the organization that is perceived as most critical / important / visible at the time - someone in our session humorously described this as "suck up to power."


3. Pick articulated pain - find out where needs and issues exist rather than trying to create them, and look to key organizational issues like retiring "boomers", identified collaboration issues etc.


4. Need Proof Points - that the value of SNA has to be proven, which could mean an effective internal pilot, and / or bringing in external case studies


5. Connect the initiative to Risk - financial, operational, reputational


6. Think of SNA as a diagnosis tool - a means to an end and not an end in itself. Position it as part of an approach in a business case, and don't try to build a case for the SNA itself.


7. Look at SNA as not just a vehicle to uncover hidden experts, but also to expose informal leadership, hidden roles, influence, strength of connections, informal communities etc.


8. Look at connecting / blending SNA with an engaging HR strategy e.g. "rapid onboarding", workforce planning, talent development


9. Work with whoever is talking to the Board as a way of adding value to tackling real business issues with SNA


10. Use models and scenarios when communicating with engineers, R&D, economists etc.


11. Expose your own personal social network so you can identify weakness relative to exposing / promoting the use of SNA as an effective management tool


12. Expose the value of "net work" to the organization in the context of key organizational processes and deliverables

When I step back a bit, I think the most important things that the presentations & discussions reinforced were:

• SNA is definitely rooted in the people side of KM - who we are and how we work


• analyzing the results of the analysis in the actual business context is critical


• SNA shouldn't really be done without a strong collaborative partnership with HR who can play a significant role in making sense of the analysis and working with clients on action planning, and of course who will provide some of the data on turnover rates, retirements etc.


• don't try and sell SNA - it's a tool / approach that should be part of a bigger business project