Blogging as one of my New Year's resolutions

The New Year has started! All the good New Year's resolutions are flying around. From losing weight to visiting family members. Everything that we already did in 2011, but then just a little bit better. 

My New Year's resolution is to blog more!

In the last couple of years I blogged a lot on my website and for one of my clients. In these small articles I have often emphasised on the importance of blogging. I still believe in this, even though it took me 2.5 months to write a new article. This also happened with the blog of one of mt clients. I did not write something for a long time and as a result of that my special spot with all my articles on their frontpage was gone. This is a normal development when you put this in to the perspective of networked working.

While working in networks, it is not recommended to be passive. The one who is not active in a network will lose his or her position within a network. In my case the frontpage of my client's website. This also counts for social networks like Twitter. When you only absorb information via Twitter instead of share yours with other, you will hardly become the centre of a network. You will probably be suited on the edges of networks. As a result, new information and knowledge will probably reach you not as fast as others who are more an integrated part of a network.

Is this my reason to have this good resolution about blogging? Yes! However, it is just one of the reasons. An other reason why I would like to write more was being written down by Euan Semple in his latest book 'Organizations don't tweet, People do: A Manager’s Guide to the Social Web'. Among other things he writes about the following: 

“Much has been made of the business benefits of “knowledge retention”. Organizations have instigated various practices to achieve this lofty aspiration, from exit interviews to “knowledge capture” exercises ... In contrast to all of these conventional methods, what if you were creating your legacy as you worked? If you run your project in a wiki, discuss what is working, or not, on a forum, or write your interpretation of what you are doing on a blog, then all of that contextual richness is captured. Not captured in the usual knowledge management sense as dry business stuff stored in a knowledge coffin, but lively first person narrative, revealed as it is being thought through and worked out. Blogging is very powerful in this context.”

Are you interested in reading more about why and how you should the social web? Buy the book and use it is a reference while experiencing the ins-and-outs of the social web.

Some reflections on innovation made by Steven Johnson

Following up on so many blog posts about the new way of thinking, working and designing, I just want to share another quote from Steven Johnson in a recent New York Times article about innovation:

Why has the fourth quadrant been so innovative, despite the lack of traditional economic rewards? The answer, I believe, has to do with the increased connectivity that comes from these open environments. Ideas are free to flow from mind to mind, and to be refined and modified without complex business development deals or patent lawyers. The incentives for innovation are lower, but so are the barriers.

....

The choice shouldn’t be between decentralized markets and command-and-control states. Over these last centuries, much of the history of innovation has lived in a less formal space between those two regimes: in the grad seminar and the coffeehouse and the hobbyist’s home lab and the digital bulletin board. The wonders of modern life did not emerge exclusively from the proprietary clash between private firms. They also emerged from open networks.

New way of management: why should they?

In traditional management managers are looking for laws, or regularities, to explain behaviour. They seek to apply the principles of logic. In doing this, they take the position of the objective observer who stands outside the system of interest and make hypotheses about it. They build models of the system to guide behaviour. The emphasis is on the ability to control. Little importance is attached to the notions that people may construct reality in their social interaction with each other. When a manager takes this position, the manager immediately assumes that it is his or her role to design and install some system, set of actions, motivators and so on.

This small quote from Ralph Stacey illustrates the way of thinking witinin organisations that is concerned with the traditional production factors which could relatively easily be measured through logic. However, with an economy that is increasingly more dependent on knowledge - the new production factor for innovation - organisations should look for other ways to let knowledge flow successfully in- and outside the organisation. 

Knowledge: from alpha to beta

Increasingly we are understanding that we cannot control this process of knowledge flows. That’s why there always is a heated debate about what knowledge management means and why some of us do not want to use this kind of terminology. In my eyes, knowledge should be seen as beta, or as in Cohen’s et al. (1972) writing: a form of garbage-can decision making. Knowledge is an ever-evolving process that emerge over time and cannot be tracked back logically as many different factors are affecting it’s development. 

Knowledge: from dependent to independent

Another reason why managers cannot maintain their tool-set - which they have used for such a long time - to model a system of behaviour, is that the holders of knowledge - the people - are increasingly being detached from the organisation. In the traditional organisation the manager was managing the people, through which the people were not free as the manager was designing and installing the system. However, while people increasingly have the ability to set-up their own office/business (I already wrote about this in an earlier post) by only using a laptop and internet connection and do not feel the need to have one job for life, there is a movement that organisations do not own the people and consequently its knowledge anymore. 

Therefore, in order to make sure that the organisations still have access to the latest knowledge, organisations should become better in a networked world. This means that organisations should rethink their structures and cultures, because it is about how organisations are interacting with the holders of knowledge. People were first thought as a part of the organisation and now more as autonomous. 

Are we therefore moving from a knowledge management perspective to a knowledge facilitation perspective?