The power of collaboration

Collaboration is one of the central issues when talking about what need to be done within an organisation in order to embrace learning, innovation and knowledge sharing.

The organisational structure should collaborate better (for example 'how to avoid departmental 'islands' in the organisation' or 'how IT-system should not be over-constained in order to retain control of an environment which should become evolutionary when thinking of using social computing tools").

In addition the organisational culture should also collaborate better. It is believed that innovation occurs when people are being exposed to a diversity of fragmented knowledge. However, organisations should promote a culture in which it is normal to share knowledge. There should be a willingness of everybody to connect, collaborate and share knowledge. And this is often a topic that is under-estimated in organisations. It is not only about introducing social media tools that ease the way people can connect. People should also have the cultural ability or knowledge to connect!

So, with a better collaborative ability, organisations become more innovative. One of the best example of such a collaborative project is the World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee described in an article of the Scientific American the World Wide Web as:

The Web evolved into a powerful, ubiquitous tool because it was built on egalitarian principles and because thousands of individuals, universities and companies have worked, both independently and together as part of the World Wide Web Consortium, to expand its capabilities based on those principles.

Focuss.Info Initiative receives interests from Social Media agency

One of the projects I am working on as independent consultant is the Focuss.Info Initiative. This is a is a web portal in the domain of global development cooperation and is remixing different social media tools in order to improve knowledge sharing and creation. With regards to this initiative I have written a blog post (for Mindjumpers: a social media agency) about social media in general and the Focuss.Info Initiative specifically. I have copied the weblog post in this message

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Copy from: http://mindjumpers.wordpress.com/2009/10/28/getting-started/

Many of us have played with Lego.  By remixing bricks of different shapes and colours, it is possible to build different objects (from cars and houses to space ships). This sounds like an easy thing to do. However, appearances are deceiving! In most cases, people cannot manage without the instructions to make sense of all the different bricks and decide over which brick should connect the other in order to build the particular object.

This small anecdote can also be translated into the issue of social media. Social media is everywhere and is increasingly shaping our daily life as a way to share and create new knowledge. With social media we communicate (by (micro)-blogging and social networking) and collaborate (by using Wikis and social-bookmarking) through different types of multimedia (by photo-sharing with Flickr  and video-sharing with YouTube ).  As a result, all these different tools – social media tools – create a lively environment where people can tell their own stories, connect with other people who are telling their own stories as well and, as a result, engage each other.

In order to create an environment where people engage each other through lively conversations, the trick is to successfully combine social media tools.  Businesses should make sense of all these different tools and decide which combinations will best work for them.  This means that there are different combinations of social media tools that can add value to your business. That is why it is difficult to only give one instruction (as highlighted in the Lego anecdote) to build a social media environment for the business. Social media expertise is required!

A practical example

The Focuss.Info Initiative is a web portal in the domain of global development cooperation and is remixing different social media tools. The domain of global development cooperation aims at collaborating in local, regional, national and international initiatives, in order to get agreement from the developed and underdeveloped countries on a universally accepted way for the development of a greater quality of life for humans. As a result, many institutes from all over the world are being engaged in researching how we best can create a better world.

The institutes are increasingly using the Internet to globally push and pull that knowledge. Additionally, the Internet with its social media tools is also making it possible to communicate and collaborate on a global level. As a result, the Focuss.Info Initiative is asking students, researchers and individual practitioners from all over the world to start using the social media tool Delicious . By using Delicious you can store, share and discover e-resources in their specific domain.  By using Delicious, the collections of favourite e-resources are available on the Internet rather than locally on computers.  Everybody can access and re-use these collections.  As a result, Focuss.Info is indexing the individual collections from peers by another social media tool: the Google CSE search engine.

This search engine is made available for free by Google.  Focuss.Info has embedded this search engine in its website and is now only indexing the selected Delicious collections from peers.  Consequently, Focuss.Info is showing search results that have been selected by peers from Africa, Asia, Europe and the America. This means that peers from more local areas in – for example – Senegal can make their domain-specific e-resources better visible to – for example – the big policy and research centers in Europe and North America.  This is a big step forward in sharing information and knowledge, because how often do you find valuable websites in global development cooperation from Senegal when searching with Bing, Google or Yahoo?

Conclusion

By only maintaining a personal collection of favourite e-resources on the Internet (through Delicious), it is possible to directly share it with other peers. Furthermore, initiatives like Focuss.Info add value to existing information by re-using and remixing the information based on other social media tools.  In this example, the information stored in the individual Delicious collections is combined with the Google CSE search engine . As a result, Focuss.Info is an alternative web portal to information and knowledge in global development cooperation besides the more classical and generic search engines such as Bing, Google and Yahoo.

Knowledge Management in Action: Scenario planning through co-created storytelling

this is a translation of the original article in Danish which is available on VidenDanmark.dk

Organizations have widely started to embrace knowledge management in the beginning of the 1990s. This was – among other things – a result of the new economy which is more networked and subject to rapid change. Particularly due to the rapid change, organizations are sensing an absence of the data or information necessary to make an informed judgment concerning a new problem or opportunity. Such an absence creates uncertainty and new knowledge is required. Hence, to generate and share new knowledge effectively, organizations are increasingly developing tools and activities to enhance learning.

In the blog post I present a way how co-created storytelling can be used to generate new knowledge, to migrate the knowledge into an organization and to let it impact the organizational performance.

Why is co-created storytelling crucial for your organization?
First of all, storytelling is crucial for current knowledge management practices because all the changes in knowledge management have resulted in a focus on context and narrative, rather than only on content. In this respect, Polanyi already argued in the late 1950s that we only know what we know, when we need to know it. Hence, human knowledge is deeply contextual and requires a stimulus to recall. Snowden (2008) refers to this as “the small verbal or nonverbal clues [that can provide] those ah-ha moments when a memory or series of memories are suddenly recalled”.

Secondly, storytelling is crucial because we always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down (Snowden, 2002). Thus, the process of speaking out loud your ideas and thoughts will already result in a loss of context, because not everybody have the same richness in their vocabulary and therefore these thoughts and ideas are being translated in limited ways. However, by writing down thoughts and ideas people are losing far more context, because you should also think about the structure of the language.

In order to increase the richness of the spoken words, it is being argued that stories should be co-created. This is because one single story cannot outline the complete truth. Everybody is experiencing new problems or opportunities through their own mental filters and past experiences. Therefore, a story should be constructed in collaboration with more than one person.

How can co-created storytelling be implemented in your organization?
The Future, Backwards technique is a way to implement storytelling in your organizations as an alternative tool to scenario planning. It is designed to increase the number of perspectives that a group can take both on an understanding of their past, and of the range of possible futures through storytelling. Future Backwards is set-up as a workshop format which takes around 90 to 120 minutes. Ron Donaldson (2009) outlined the steps that need to be taken to implement the Future Backward technique.

First, participants of a Future Backwards workshop are being divided in small groups. If there are, for example, 21 participants, these can be divided in three groups of seven participants. Thereafter, each of the groups are being asked to produce their own ‘story’ on a certain topic. They start defining how TODAY looks like by developing a time line backwards, made up of the most important events, decisions and turning points that have led the organization into the current situation. This timeline is made out of tags.

Second, each of the groups will be asked the question, if within three years everything could go wrong that could go wrong, how would HELL look and feel like, and what might be the fictitious events that lead to it. Again, this will also be tagged with keywords.

Third, each of the groups will be asked how HEAVEN would look like in three years, if everything could go right.

Finally, each group then nominates a storyteller who will tell the co-created story. By having three different stories with assigned tags, it is becoming relatively easy to signal future problems and opportunities. Therefore, co-created storytelling is a useful tool to look into a rapidly changing and complex future by using multiple knowledge bases.