Jim McGee: Personal KM

Knowledge sharing, knowledge logs, and the unexpected

One of the pleasures of a vacation at the beach is a chance to do some serious reading. Among others, I had a chance to work throuhg a recent book by Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe, Managing the Unexpected: Assuring High Performance in an Age of Complexity. If you're interested I've posted a brief review.

Their essential argument is that organizations need to become more mindful in two ways. First, they must become better at anticipating the unexpected. Second, they must become more adept at containing the unexpected. Containing might either mean keeping a small error from mushrooming into a disaster or seizing and running with an opportunity before others do.

Their arguments dovetail nicely with the recent discussions around the role of knowledge logs or klogs as a tool for knowledge sharing. The essence of dealing with the unexpected is in separating weak signals from the background noise and then understanding who in the organization has the requisite expertise to deal with the signal. The knowledge sharing enabled by the effective use of k-logs is squarely focused on precisely these two issues.

A loose network of knowledge workers maintaining weblogs represents that early warning system for an organization. Weblogs applied to organizational knowledge problems provide an outlet for picking up early signals of the unexpected and amplifying them so they can be better heard. They also serve as a system for surfacing diverse expertise in the organization that may bear on how to respond effectively to those signals.

More formal and structured knowledge management systems are focused on getting more mileage out of known solutions to known problems. That has a place, particularly in large and dispersed organizations. But all organizations today are also faced with the problem of responding effectively to the unexpected. Weick and Sutcliffe make a compelling case that this is the more important problem for most organizations. And they offer a series of prescriptions for increased mindfulness to respond to that problem. For me, they provide the puzzle piece that links my intuitions that knowledge sharing and k-logs are an essential element of effective knowledge management to the critical items on the strategic agenda.

The coming era of notebook computing

Bob and Dan are dead-on: The browser has served us well. It has provided a means by which we can have universal access to applications, transactions, and published information. But in the meantime, the PC has become a powerhouse: cpu, gpu, storage, price. The Great Conversion to notebook computers is well under way, and it's now clear that the most wildly successful wireless mobile productivity device won't be the 3G phone, or even the BlackBerry, but the ubiquitous and inexpensive WiFi notebook. In a shape and size to suit every need.

And as we deal with more and more PCs in our lives, and as we use them in more and more locations, we're finally beginning to realize again why we need upgrades to our systems and application software that bring them into an era of ubiquitous computing and communications. We need to prepare for, and to embrace a whole new generation of system and application software that leverages this powerful hardware specifically and tangibly to increase our personal productivity, and to increase our business agility. To enable us to spin more plates; or to keep them up in the air in a more measured manner.

Software that embraces mobility, synchronization, security, and manageability as transparent core attributes. Software that recognizes "people" as being just as important as "documents". Software that recognizes transparent peer communications as being equal in importance to server communications. Software with a new model that synchronizes applications and activities, not just data or documents. We need to use multiple devices as seamlessly as we use one device; we need to be able to use them collaboratively as intuitively as we've used them alone.

Servers and browsers are like two peas in a pod, and the Web has largely run its course. In terms of the value that we can get from our own personal computers and the Internet, however, we're still at the dawn of a new era. An era in which software matters, and architecture matters. [Ray Ozzie's Weblog]

Having lived as a notebook user now for nearly 10 years, it will be a pleasure to start seeing applications and services that take the notion of portability and connectivity seriously. Lotus Notes was the first system that understood those needs and Groove is probably the second. Most other software is built by developers who are essentially chained to their cubicles and don't really appreciate how mobility works for knowledge workers.

Weblog as my backup brain

Blog This at Con Jose.

Towards the end of the panel, Bill Humphries said "The web log for me is a research tool," and pointed (verbally any way!) to Cory Doctorow's reference to Dorie Smith's explanation of her web log as her "Backup Brain." Teresa Nielsen Hayden said "One of the reasons I have a web log is to keep track of all the things I find incidentally." The Live Journal folk said the same thing, and so I'm going to point (yes, again) to the commonplace book as a close relative if not a distant ancestor of the web log.

[Instructional Technology]

This nicely captures some of my key goals with keeping this weblog. It's the primary reason that I tend to take advantage of "Radio"'s news aggregator to post mostly complete copies of the items that I want to remember. I also use Mark Paschal's Kit tool to search my weblog archives. I can usually manage to remember some fragment or key phrase about something I've posted. I can then usually find the original item in my archives.

The notion of personal knowledge management hasn't been explored enough. Maybe I'm sensitized to it because of my aging brain cells and general absent-mindedness. But I can't see how organizations are going to progress with knowledge management unless the individuals in those organizations learn how to unpack what they know. Think back to the heyday of expert systems in the mid 1980s. The show-stopper was not the limitations of the AI technology (although that was an issue). It was the huge challenge in getting experts to figure out what they were expert at and make it accessible.

KM - what if?. Jim McGee has write on track with his response to 'we can't make people smarter'. Actually, what if we wanted to make people dumber! No jokes please. I blog to get my thoughts out of my head. I can assume that they'll be there for review in the future. So I've allowed myself to clear out some memory for new ideas. Effectively - I've freed up extra space in RAM..... hmmm - re-stating the obvious. [How do you know that?]

Site update: more topics added.

I have grown to really like liveTopics. Converting from Radio's categories to liveTopics has been cumbersome (as it matures, I imagine Matt might offer a conversion utility), but worth it. You can now browse a topical outline of all posts on this site here; it is now complete for July and August. I will periodically go back and add past months as well.

Even if you're not very interested in sharing your topics (you can keep them entirely private), I've found they're a great way for keeping track of past posts. When I want to pull up a post I made in the past, I just need to open the allTopics.opml file on my desktop and can immediately see when I made the post (and link to it from the file).

Of course, the advantages to your readers - if you're interested in giving people an easy-to-navigate road-map to your posts - are big as well. In all, liveTopics is a great tool.

[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]

XTM export of a weblog.

Anyone with an interest in XTM want to check this out?

It's my weblog + topics exported as a topic map via liveTopics. I'd be interested in any opinions as to the correctness of my XTM implementation, use of tags etc...

[Curiouser and curiouser!]

To Michael Rogers. To Michael Rogers who asks how frequently a person writing a weblog should update (I hate calling these people bloggers, as Rogers does, that's a trademark). My answer is As frequently as something happens and you have the time or inclination to write it up. Rogers then says something provocative: "The kind of article that a writer produces after a week of thought is fundamentally different than one produced after a few hours." True. But you can keep lots of ideas in your head, and think about them for hours, days, weeks, months, years or decades; and even repeat them and expand on them, and (rarely) change your mind about something. Even great writers like Hemingway repeated themes. People who blog do this even more. It helps fill the space. Every event is an opportunity to "prove" ones' pet theories. I do this a lot. It's okay because everyone else does it too. [Scripting News]

Making people smarter isn't the point

You cannot make people smarter.

Curiouser and curiouser! raises some unresolved Klogging issues:

Klogs can overlap with existing formal systems - does klogging means that the same thing is not reported in formal way?
Decentralised klogging vs. organisational trends to control.
Does klog makes it easier to control you?
As klogs are not really secure, could you post anything anything sensitive?
Are big-KM vendors missing the point?

I love this issue popping up again and again: how control and formal structures can coexist with natural informal networks. I'm not sure that I want to tackle the whole issue, but at least I want to look at the learning side of it.

[from my PhD proposal] Learning is best described by the metaphor “you can lead horse to the water, but you cannot make it drinking”, or as Joseph Kessels says “you cannot make people smarter”. Even in the case of formal learning an organisation does not have control over employee’s brain and heart, so in order to benefit from employee learning, companies have to find the way to support and encourage it without full control. The author believes that the answer lies in supporting interplay between individual and organisational needs by relating and integrating employee-driven informal learning and organisation-driven formal learning.

[Mathemagenic]

» Thanks to [DG] for putting me on to Mathemagenic.

"You cannot make people smarter."

I believe this to be true. However I also think that:

Not every organisation believes that, e.g. the amount of money spent each year on training that doesn't work.
Not every organisation cares how smart it's people are (no matter how much they spend on investors in people logos)

All that downsizing. All those drives for efficiency at any cost. They have created environments of paranoia and hostility where there is no interplay between individual and organisation.

My fear is that klogging will only thrive in organisations that are healthy, and that there may not be enough of them. Or, worse, that klogging will thrive as a control mechanism imposed by insecure and fearful management. I don't want to be a part of that.

[Curiouser and curiouser!]

The question of whether you can make people smarter or not isn't the point. That suggests that only smart people can benefit from knowledge management or other initiatives? I don't think that's the point, although I've been known to be less than smart about things myself over the years :).

I think you absolutely can demonstrate and be a model for behaviors that are more effective than others. That it happens rarely in formal training or that some organizations pay only lip service to learning are secondary issues.

There are lots of issues tangled up under the broad rubric of knowledge management or knowledge sharing. That's one of the reasons that progress has been so difficult to make. Weblogs in general, the notion of klogs (whatever we end up calling them), and the recent discussions going on in blogspace are all contributing to my developing a much deeper understanding of the issues.

It's Alan Kay's old point - point of view is worth IQ points (the actual number being in dispute as is the relevance of raw intelligence to the discussion). Maybe it's a philosophical point. For me, if you're still alive, you're learning. If you're learning, you're at least potentially getting smarter in some practical sense.

Granted most organizations do a piss-poor job of helping people learn intelligently (I include schools as organizations in this context). That doesn't mean that those organizations and those individuals who can do it should quit trying.

As for insecure and fearful managements, I suspect that the market will take care of them for us although perhaps not quickly enough. Call me a Pollyanna, but I think healthy organizations dominate statistically and economically. But as the norm, they are less visible in places like the media. We seem to be much more inclined to see and hear stories of trauma and problems than ones of normalcy and health.

Knowledge needs to be shared before it can be managed

If taken in an organizational context, successful KM depends in part on people sharing the right information. And because different individuals have different skill sets and different experiences, it's unlikely that one individual would know what another would find valuable. This compounds Phil's comments: not only can't you dig ideas out of people's heads, but you wouldn't necessarily know which ones you would want to pull. (Which I guess means knowledge isn't like pornography: you wouldn't know it when you saw it.)

One of the advantages to blogs is that they make it easy to simply jot down some thoughts. You don't need to give too much thought to what is valuable and what isn't - not only wouldn't you know, but value to one individual is worthless to another. The key is to ensure a simple, reliable way for capturing the ad hoc thoughts. Blogs make capturing this info about as simple as it can be.

[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog][emphasis added]

Rick adds some more insight to the question of getting knowledge shared in the first plac e so that you might have an opportunity to manage it in an intelligent way.

To me this discussion is finally beginning to address the first issues that need to be thought about - how do we make sure there is something worth managing. It's easy and all too tempting to gloss over that issue, but my experience has been that it's critical.

Solving the right problem

Digging Ideas Out of People's Heads.

Dave McNamee is doing a good job on his weblog of narrating his work and keeping his co-workers updated about where his head is at on any given day. Good work Dave!

I worry sometimes about the public expression of information that should be kept confidential, but I worry more about the exponentially worse problem of keeping confidential that which should be publicly expressed. I can think of ways to solve the first problem, but I can't dig ideas out of people's heads. They must be expressed to be used. [emphasis added]

[Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog]

Phil Windley is rapidly becoming one of my favorite reads. I wish that more executives in organizations were as wise as he is. Nothing about knowledge management or knowledge sharing can accomplish anything until you focus on this.

Sharing time and expert knowledge management

Our meetings have not had any specific objectives in mind but were simply to have a conversation around the subject of KM and share thoughts, ideas and insights. This evening we kept coming back to creativity and the fact that so often in our organizational lives we try to control meetings to the extent that they are no longer creative. We talked about the fact that a lot of the real insights and decisions take place at the periphery of meetings - before they start, after they have finished, in the corridors or at the coffee machine.
We also discussed the fact that we had talked so much during the evening but had not captured any of it explicitly ... apart from my taking the odd note in a little red note book I always carry around with me ... how best do you capture the output of a creative conversation without destroying the spontaneity of the conversation itself. This blog is a poor attempt to do that a little later in the evening! So what else did we talk about ...

Bill Gates and the concept of [Bill Capital] ... the importance and effective use of key people's time in an organization - especially the creative ones ...
[The Mythical Man-Month]- the book by Fred Brooks of [IBM] and some of his insights into Project Management;project management ...
...
And I had what I at least thought was the great idea of modifying the traditional PDCA learning cycle of plan-do-check-act to PDBCA plan-do-blog-check-act []

[Gurteen Knowledge-Log]

Capturing a couple of interesting notions from David from a longer piece he wrote. The best stuff happens at the edges (maybe there's a link to Ray Ozzie's ideas in that respect?)

On the naming of things (klogs as knowledge sharing notebooks)

Personal KM workshop in Singapore ... 18th September. Well it looks as if I am all set to run a 1-day [workshop] on [Personal Knowledge Management] (PKM) in [Singapore] for [Eventus] on 18th September.

I've run a similar workshop a number of time is the past with great success but this will be the first in which there will be a new module - that of "Personal Knowledge Publishing" or maybe "Tacit Knowledge Publishing" - in other words knowledge-logs or klogs.
Thank you [Matt Mower] for the terms. I tend to like the PKP variant as it fits in well with PKM.
I'm greatly looking forward to it and plan to take a few days holiday while I am there. I have been to Singapore just once in the past and love its vibrancy - not to mention Chinese food.
While I am there I also plan to do what I did when I ran a [workshop] in Australia:Sydney last year and that is to mail everyone who receives my knowledge-letter in Singapore and invite them for a drink one evening to network and discuss KM ... in Sydney we went on to have a meal and it was a great evening. [Gurteen Knowledge-Log]

There's been an interesting stream of discussion over the past week about finding a better term than klogs on the premise that "klog" is a bit short in the marketing pizazz department. Matt Mower started the discusion and Roland offered his insights. Now David here is adding his two cents (tuppence I suppose for David).

I've been mulling the issue over as well and I'm not as keen on the PKP or TKP notions put forth. To me "publishing" isn't the key issue, sharing is. I would suggest

Knowledge Sharing Notebooks

both to emphasize the sharing aspect and diminish the pyschological barrier the "publishing" raises.

The notion of Personal Knowledge Management that David raises is important, especially as a counter to the over-emphasis on corporate/organizational interests in KM.

Effective knowledge management isn't going to make much headway until we start paying attention to the ways that knowledge management and knowledge sharing matter to the success of individuals. If we can do that, then we can pick up the organizational benefits largely as a desirable side effect of PKM(Personal Knowledge Management). Klogs, whatever we end up calling them will be central to that strategy.

Digging into k-logs 3

Fixing intranets with klogs.

Fixing intranets. It's interesting how the same issues seem to come up in bunches. Over the last month, I have now talked... [Column Two]

» James has written an interesting post about some of the common problems with intranets that he encounters with his clients. As someone interested in how klogging (I'll use the term for now!) could affect the role of intranets and content management his issues seem particularly relevant to me. In preface to my remarks I should point out that I am choosing to address static content rather than the possible dynamic web applications you might find on a typical intranet.

The issues, re-ordered slightly to suit my responses, are:

The intranet has grown over time.
Manual processes (using Frontpage or Dreamweaver) are used to publish pages.
A lot of information has been published, but the site isn't being used.
There is little high-level structure, and users are not able to find information.

1. If you want a logical hierarchical structure then organic growth is a problem. It's like running water, it flows down along the path of least resistance and doesn't care about the direction. Same with people, they'll squirrel stuff anywhere that makes sense today (have you taken a good look at your my "My Documents" directory lately?). Of course if you're klogging then this organic growth is part of the package. Whether that bothers you is probably a factor of points (2), (3), and (4).

2. This is most obviously solved by klogging software. It's one of the fundamentals.

3. Hard to say but I guess much of the information published may be of low quality. In my experience no matter how hard publishing to an intranet can be, creating information is harder still. This leads to variable quality in that information. Variable quality leads to low usage. Low usage provides little incentive for new information to be created and so on.

Klogging address this in two ways I think:

When you have something to publish it's dead easy: click, type, click.
You can publish in bite-size chunks. This means that if you have a small but useful piece of information you can just klog it. You don't have to pad it into a long document to make it worthwhile. You also don't have to find "just the right place" for it to go, it just gets klogged. That chunk can exist in it's own right, waiting for the day someone needs it.

Which brings us rather neatly to (4)

4. As it stands klogging is a decentralizing technology that doesn't encourage a formal hierarchical structure. You klog and, if all goes according to plan, people will subscribe to you and they will link to you. Will they be the right people? Does it make information any easier to locate? Not automatically no. But then hierarchical structures don't necessarily make life any easier. Once a hierarchy is more than about 2 levels deep it can cause it's own navigation issues.

Some people might argue that a healthy klogging culture coupled with a Google search appliance (or any search engine that has a pageranking algorithm I guess) could well make it easier to find what you're looking for. I think theres something to be said for that.

My own approach is to allow for easy metadata-enabling of klogs. My hope is that combining klogs with topic maps will allow new structures to be grown from them automagically. This can complement the pagerank based search and provide new ways of finding and traversing group knowledge.

So should you scrap the intranet and replace it with klogs?

I don't think so. But perhaps you should think carefully about what you want your intranet to achieve and whether some of your goals for information publishing and dissemination couldn't be better achieved with a klogging strategy.

[Curiouser and curiouser!]

Digging into k-logs 2

Dear Amy Wohl, the Baby Bust is enough reason to klog widely and soon..

Hi, Amy.

You wrote via Ernie the Attorney via snowdeal.org | conflux:

One of the tough tasks in KM is getting expertise located in an organization (that is, figuring out who has it on a subject by subject basis). Tougher still is validating its credibility with other members of the organization. Toughest of all is getting the experts to agree to share their expertise with others, except as part of their regular job. Employees who have spent a career lifetime enhancing their value because they "know" something others don't are logically reluctant to give away their valuable expertise...

Amy, the baby boomers are starting to retire in droves (you know who you are). How competitive is a firm when 20% to 40% of its most experienced people leave? You can fight to get and keep talent but that doesn't fix Mary-who-left-Tuesday being the only one who knows how to get that payroll program to work.

There is no technology fix. Just a human one. Whether you call it a Learning Organization campaign or a Knowledge Management program, you still have to get people engaged. Talking. Sharing. Growing. Enjoying the process. Becoming more effective, more marketable. Making their workplace better.

The only tools that matter are ones people really use.

That's where klogs (knowledge or enterprise weblogs) come in.

KM Systems are to Treacle as Weblogs are to Honey. People gag on most KM systems. And get a sugar high off of blogging. So people use them. Start your engines and gun your motor, your KM go-cart is off and running. It isn't ready for NASCAR, it won't make it to the moon and back. But your project, your people, are going in the right direction. Can you say that now or for any other toolset?

btw, if you know anyone interested in setting up a consulting practice to help large orgs, public or private, survive the coming Baby Bust, drop my name. pwolff@dijest.com.

Ever yours,

- Phil Wolff

[a klog apart]

Digging into k-logs 1

Of Tom Gilbert and K-logs.

A while back, I had offered a challenge for McGee to pass along to his students. He did so, but none of them stepped forward. I was disappointed, but am willing to accept this as an indicator of their intelligence. :-)

So I guess I'll have to do the heavy lifting, and that means all this will dribble out over some time. Bad for my readers who might want to get this in one chunk; Good for me to have more time for reflecting about this.

I'll start off with a direct quote from Tom Gilbert's Human Competence: Engineering Worthy Performance, p178-9. BTW, if you are interesting in management, Human Performance Technolgy, KM/KS, behavior analysis, or performance improvement, you should get two copies of this book (one to keep clutched tightly in your hands, and one for loaning to others).

Principles of Information Flow

The requirements of an information system sensibly designed to give maximum support to performance are absurdly simple, and they can be summarized in eight steps:

Identify the expected accomplishments, mission, responsibilities, and duties.
State the requirements of each accomplishment. If there is any doubt that people understand the reason why an accomplishment and its requirements are important, explain this.
Describe how performance will be measured and why.
Set exemplary standards, preferably in measurement terms.
Identify exemplary performers and any available resources that people can use to become exemplary performers. [Gilbert defined (p40) "exemplary performance as the most sustained worthy performance we can reasonably expect to attain." So an outlier achievement (e.g., an NFL running back having back-to-back 1,000+ rushing yards seasons) should not be held up as a standard, since it is unlikely to be sustainable.]
Provide frequent and unequivocable feedback about how well each person is performing. This confirmation should be expressed as a comparison with an exemplary standard. Consequences of good and poor performance should also be made clear.
Supply as much backup information as needed to help people troubleshoot their own performance and that of the people for whom they are responsible.
Relate various aspects of poor performance to specific remedial actions.

These steps are far too simple to be called a "technology," but it may be that their very simplicity helps explain why they are so rarely followed. I suppose that people tend to look for more complex reasons for seemingly complex problems, and therefore more complex solutions.

I believe the following about these principles:

It is indeed a "technology", just as the socratic method might be considered a technology of learning.
A k-log could certainly be used to help accomplish some of these steps.
These are precisely the things a good manager should be doing (and more importantly, has direct control over!), to promote an efficient and effective work environment, whether they use a k-log or not.

[gRadio]

LiveTopics 1

Playing with liveTopics.

Just downloaded liveTopics, an interesting extension of Radio that adds potentially valuable meta data to weblog posts. This is a tool developed by Matt Mower, and represents an important "next step" for Radio as a KM tool.

From Matt's site:

Topics are used on your weblog to provide cross-reference links to related items and can also show what you are and have been talking about in your postings. Cross-referencing is further enhanced by the ability to publish a Table of Contents (ToC) for your weblog (note the ToC uses the excellent activeRenderer by Marc Barrot). The two-level ToC liveTopics creates shows all the topics used in your weblog. Under each topic is a chronological list of each posts associated with the topic. In turn, under each post is listed the other topics associated with that post. This is a powerful addition to your weblog and greatly enhances it's navigability.

Here's what I love. Marc Barrot builds activeRenderer, a great UI enhancement to Radio. Matt takes that and builds on it to extend the UI by creating new ways of navigating through weblog content and adding meta data to boot. I haven't learned all the ins and outs yet, but I think this is big.

Stay tuned.

[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]

Workspace Portals. From an Accenture article entitled Desktops of the Future: The portal as a desktop provides a single view of the... [E M E R G I C . o r g] [StickyString]

Tips for Writing the Living Web

Dramatic arc. Mark Bernstein: 10 Tips for Writing the Living Web. (65 words) [dive into mark]

Good advice for any kind of writing

Rethinking mundane processes

Technography: Meeting Checklist. Major competitive advantage for companies that follow the items on this checklist!Evaluate the "intelligence" of your meeting system by exploring each stage of your meeting process. There are a total of 23 measures, each of which could lead to more productive communication. [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]

As you go through this list, it's worth reflecting on the opportunities for great leverage in revisiting mundane processes in organizations and thinking about how to make them better. While the opportunity is great, there is also a major barrier in getting people to adopt new practices, particularly in areas where they are unaware of their practices to begin with.

Why bother to make meetings more productive? How do you help people see how changing what they do in a meeting today might greatly simplify their life three weeks from now? How do you help them care enough to do something about it?

Radio Wishlist - Support Project Management XML (PMXML)..

Project management systems are becoming web services. See the Project Management XML (PMXML) schema. PMXML is designed to address the project management interchange, content, and publication challenges.

The schema home page.
The pm_xml Yahoo! group.
Pacific Edge Software, whose project and programme management tools use XML for integration with Microsoft Project.

I missed this when Sylvain Carle, A Frog in the Valley, first mentioned it in June.

I wish for Radio (or "MyRadio") to:

Subscribe to project alerts (event starts, completions, milestones, issues).
Lookup and refresh a project's structure (an outline, happily!).
Associate a post with one or more project object instances (projects, tasks, assignments, resources).
Create maps of posts, grouped by project, sorted to align with the project structure.

[a klog apart]