IFLA 2010: How should we roll-out global KM initiatives (2/3)?

This blog post is a part of a presentation I gave at the 76th World Library and Information Congress. In the presentation, I explained why we should embrace KM initiatives, how we should do this, and how a global KM initiative has successfully been implemented. 

After mentioning in the previous weblog post that there are two incentives in global development aid why they should embrace global KM initiatives, I will now continue to explain how institutes, NGOs and many more of these clubs should roll-out a global KM initiative. It will be a bit of theoretical background to the third and final weblog post in this collection, which is about the Focuss.Info Initiative and will be submitted at the end of this week.

Moving from knowledge stocks to knowledge flows

By focussing on knowledge flows we manage to get the latest information and knowledge that is available. Let me give you an example.

Think about the old fashioned KM way. We work on a project and at the end of this project we write a report that describes the process. After writing such a report it is often stocked in a database, and will be made retrievable to others who might be interested in this specific knowledge about running a project.

A year later, a colleague is starting a new project. She accesses the database and uses some time to find and evaluate documents that could help her to manage her project in a good way. She finds the document from this colleague, but it is already one year old, and what was the context of that particular project? Is it applicable to this project, because in a year time some things could have changed a lot.

So, in this so-called old-fashioned KM way, people are creating stocks of knowledge which is time-consuming. We need to make knowledge explicit, phrase language so that it can be understood by others, and eventually others should retrieve the knowledge in a database.

And by making knowledge explicit we also lose a lot of context: the context we need to know in order to judge whether it is applicable in an other situation. Dave Snowden, one of the major KM thinkers of this time, argues in one of his most-cited weblog posts that "we always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down". So, he argues that the process of taking things from our heads, to our mouths to our hands involves loss of content and context.

Therefore it is important to focus on knowledge flows. Get in contact with the person who managed the project, follow her, and tap into her current knowledge base. And by starting conversations, we can create a stimulus for recall, because we only know what we know when we need to know it. Small verbal or non-verbal clues can provide these ah-ha moments when a memory is recalled.

Cultural impact on knowledge flows

Snowden also argues that knowledge can only be volunteered and it cannot be conscripted. We cannot go to someone - virtually or physically - and ask him or her to share knowledge. We cannot make someone share their knowledge. We first need trust someone fully before this person will share his or her knowledge. Therefore KM initiatives should create a culture of trust and transparency.

And when we start to embrace the latest information sharing and collaboration technologies, we often do not know each other because we can be someone from the other side of the world, and by using these technologies we are often missing the physical contact.

We therefore need to obtain new skills or conditions in order to be trusted in networks and to be successful in knowledge sharing initiatives. We need to change our culture where we are working in, because for decennia we created trusted bonds by looking straight in the eyes. By using these new information sharing and collaboration tools we often cannot do this, and this can give an uncomfortable feeling (sharing something without knowing the other person). In order to make sure that people are not becoming uncomfortable with these situation - situations which will be more common than rare - we should also focus on the cultural issues when launching a KM initiative.

2-folded strategy to roll-out global KM initiatives

Working in a network-based environment is indeed requiring new cultural abilities. KM initiatives should therefore focus on two abilities. I describe these abilities as promoting structural knowledge and cultural knowledge. 

Structural knowledge means that people should have the ability - or the knowledge so to speak - to use the new information sharing and collaboration tools. This ability helps people to benefit the ease to connect, which eventually helps them better to collaborate and tap into ongoing conversations.

But what are technologies that improve the ease to connect worth when there is no willingness to connect? Therefore, people should also have the ability to work in these new cross-border and cross-cultural collaborative environments. And in my view this kind of culture should feel real and enhances transparency.

This two-folded approach of structural and cultural knowledge has successfully been adopted in the field of global development cooperation with the Focuss.Info Initiative. The third, and final, weblog post will describe more about this

Knowledge sharing through conversations - a homage to Twitter

KM is not the management of knowledge itself, but rather the management of the organization with a particular focus on knowledge. It is exactly what Daniel Bell in 1976 argued that we are moving away from traditional management where the focus is on static production factors (such as land and labor), to a new type of management where the focus is on the dynamic production factor 'knowledge'.

Knowledge is dynamic because it is created through changes in cognitive structures. Dave Snowden describes the dynamics of knowledge as that 'we only know what we know, when we need to know it'. So we should create an environment where people can make use of their long-term fragmented knowledge to enhance the organizational's ability to make sense of and decide over new challenges in a fast and innovative way. But how do we get such a A-HA moment. Is there a role for social media in this?

Yes, there is. Over the years we have seen that KM practices moved from a focus on the content (controlling knowledge by making it explicit in big databases) to a focus on context through conversations. Or how Clay Shirky highlights it in his book Here Comes Everybody: from publishing to interacting. He argues that with the new (mobile) communication technologies of today we can now connect, communicate, produce, share, replicate, locate and distribute information and knowledge. These new (mobile) communication technologies are often described as social media. But why is this way of communicating so 'social'?

Social Media is social because it has created a big shift in our social and cultural practices. In the 1980s it was normal to have a pen pal. A person with whom you communicated by sending a letter to a particular location (most of the time an address). Even when Internet was becoming a part of our daily life in the beginning of 1990s there were many websites that connected people with each other and let them start becoming pen pals. Not by communicating on the digital highway, but still by dropping off a letter in the mailbox in the hope it would be delivered a week later. So before you got an answer back, it probably took weeks or even months. The difference between the Internet age of then and now is that we can connect to persons directly, rather than to locations. This makes it more social. However, the biggest driver why our (mobile) communication technology is so social is that there is a time issue. We connect to people directly and can instantly get a reply, no matter where we are. Therefore I argue that the new (mobile) communication technologies give us the possibility to have cross-border, cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary conversations.

These conversations are valuable to generate and share knowledge, because through these real-life conversations it can help us to get a A-HA moment. By talking in an space that crosses cultural and disciplinary border, there is more diversity and we can create innovative ideas and - hopefully - solutions. In my blog post 'The Painful Truth of Best Practices in 2010' I already argued that:

Without having diversity we would all look through the really small hole in the hoarding at the same time. However, social computing is exposing us to people who are looking at the same object through other holes in the hoarding. And when we can easily connect to these people, our view on reality will certainly improve. This certainly results in more sustainable improvements while making a decision.

Let's show an example why these types of conversations are so valuable. It is a conversation I recently had via Twitter:

So, as you can understand from this conversation, I had sent out a message that people could apply for free tickets for the TedxOresund conference. Even though I did not know Rasmus, we were still able to generate and share knowledge with each other (not to mention the free beer - which he still owes me :-) ). 

Additionally, you can see that the conversation didn't take months. Sometimes we were replying to each other instantly, an other time we replied within a day. So, within only a short period of time we managed to generate and share knowledge, but create trust. For many years I argued that it is far more easier to destroy trust than to create the most powerful forms of trust that accumulate over long periods. This can be true, but as you can see in this example it shows the opposite. Why? The conversation via the new (mobile) communication technologies let us generate trust via direct interpersonal contact and a reputation through a network of other trusted parties.