Being innovative through disconnected connections

Being innovative means that you have thought about an issue in an other way than somebody else. In order to get these different thoughts, it is important to promote diversity. However, we are using social networking platforms like Twitter and Facebook around the clock to share with networks of so-called friends your ideas. The more you are connected with people, the more you are re-using the thoughts of somebody else.

Bas Haring also spoke about this on TedXRotterdam:

All the thoughts that we have in the world now, are shared immediately. I see people twittering now. Sharing thoughts with other people. Who read their thoughts, and have their own. We continuously share all ideas. So there are hardly any islands anymore (the specialists). Our mind are getting more and more connected, which causes less diversity. Which means less ideas. 

Yes, you should take the opportunity to use the ideas of others, because it is helpful and good for you. If two people share each one idea, then you each end up with two ideas; a growth of 100 % which is in market-economics a good argument to proceed with that type of work. However, it is also true that you sometimes should disconnect yourself and make your own ideas.

Knowledge should first be produced before it can be transferred and shared. So, my question is, in what kind of knowledge process should we focus on the connecting power of the latest technologies. Should we use these technologies to produce uniquely, innovative and diverse knowledge. No, as Bas Haring also said, you should produce knowledge alone, isolated from anything and disconnected from anyone. Use a weblog where you put down your ideas or if you have more money travel to an island. After that, you can ask for feedback when you think the time right. And yes, then you can use the latest technologies such as Twitter and Facebook.

So, don't include social networking in your organisation for the sake of it. You should know what it is and what it will give you. The same statement can be placed when talking about opening or closing to the outside world. Also in this discussion 'diversity' is seriously being threatened. And diversity is what we need when we want to become innovative; when we want to compete with global players; and when organisations want to attract the best people.  

Thus, the new governance mechanisms for innovation should give people the possibility (1) to disconnect from others so that they can experiment with their own 'crazy' ideas and produce unique knowledge, and (2) connect inside and outside the organisation to transfer and share the unique knowledge 

Bas Haring - TEDxRotterdam 2010 from TEDxRotterdam on Vimeo.

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. 

The Painful Truth of Best Practices in 2010

Why is it that people are completely beside the mark when they are referring to ‘Best Practices’? Last week, Luis Suarez repeated his thoughts about best practices in knowledge management initiatives in his blog ‘Why Best Practices Don’t Work for  Knowledge Work’. I think he makes it fairly clear what is wrong with best practices by arguing that:

Best Practices are the worst thing you can apply to any kind of knowledge work. Any kind. Social Computing is no different! More than anything else because best practices will always suggest concepts like static, fixed, inalterable, unmodified, unbeatable, perfect. And, as you can imagine, those are the kind of characteristics that would be rather the opposite to what knowledge is all about and the capturing of some of it; knowledge is supposed to be dynamic, flexible, malleable, modifiable, flowing, a continuous learning experience, imperfect. Always leaving room to improve the already existing knowledge by acquiring plenty more!

Even though his point is clear to me, this week I was confronted with the stubbornness of people who argue they are working in the knowledge management field. I attended a seminar with the title ‘Learning Methods and Learning Technologies: Best Practices’. For years a big group of KM practitioners already argued with sound-proof arguments that best-practice is a waste of time, but still - in 2010 - there are professional networks that cannot grasp the field they are working in and still hold themselves to something that ones was being introduced as a way to learn in - perhaps - simple organizational contexts! You cannot apply this in the complexities of nowadays.

During the seminar I realized that some of the ‘specialists’ confronted with the issue how the organization can best learn, do not apprehend the core of learning - which is knowledge. Learning is all about the transfer of knowledge. So, if you were to work within organizational learning, you should understand how particular ways of thinking originate. Ralph Stacey argues that ‘ways of thinking evolve’. They have a history and understanding this history enables us to understand the nature of the assumptions we are making now as we approach important practical issues. So, every organization has its own history, its own context, and you just cannot reuse an example that might have been successful in one organization with another history and context. Take the example of reusing LEAN from a manufacturing context to a service context. Even though LEAN was successful within the factories of Toyota; it is certainly not automatically a success in other factories, or even other areas of practices.

Another point I want to make about best practices is that we don’t want to standardize the learning. Literature is already pointing out to all the learning possibilities social computing is offering us, because it generates diversity. Without having this 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. (By the way: that is also why I think that NING has started to dig its own grave by announcing that the service is not free anymore - connecting easily to each other is the power of social networking sites)

Think about Twitter ... so many people with the same interests ... But they are all looking through a different hole to the same topic. They are filtering their external sensations differently. Based on a set of keywords I try to make sense of what could be interesting for me. I use Google Reader, Delicious and StumbleUpon. However, another person, is using other tools to filter the external sensation and - because they have an other knowledge based, they use a different set of keywords that describe the same topic I am also looking at. Thus, they find stuff I never found before, and by sending this through social networks you give a fragment to the others and if the other are doing the same, you get an other fragment back. 

Let’s go back to the seminar again. The reason why some of the participants of the seminar probably do not grasp the meaning of their area of ‘expertise’ is that they are not aware of the world around them. I have often heard that Twitter is like a echo-room. During the seminar I experienced the meaning of the echo-room. None of the 30+ participants had Twitter, so I was talking to myself. Is this bad? Yes! Twitter and other social media tools and technologies are great ways to understand the working of diversity in learning. But when they are not bothered to experiment with it, how would they know.