Teaching in a paradigm shift

The first weblog message in 2011! Why did it take me so long to add a new message? The reason is that as of January 2011 I am one of the columnists of the Intellectueel Kapitaal - a KM-kind of journal from the Netherlands. Every week I write a short column (in Dutch) about what is keeping me busy in the field of innovation, organisational learning and knowledge sharing. The next column will be about this weblog message in general and Euan Semple's message called 'Can the web be taught?' specifically, because in this message Euan asks a very useful question:

How to pass on what works in terms of using the web to achieve things and make the world a better place? Should we be teaching the ethics of the web, the sociology of the web, the history and politics of the web?

Euan encounters this issue in business. He adds to this that 'most people ... may use Facebook at home and share their documents in a "knowledge repository" at work but have little experience or understanding of the transformative power of the tool that is literally at their finger tips".

I can confirm that I also encounter this. Therefore, social media workshop are both theoretical and practical in nature. However, I also encounter that most people have different expectations of social media workshops. Their attention span is much higher when they are just using it as they prefer. When it is about theory, sociology, cognitive science and so on I loose their attention very fast? Why is this? That's exactly what Euan is referring to: most people have little experience or understanding of the transformative power.

The comments on Euan's weblog post are also interesting because it shows some arguments or experiences which confirm Euan's observation. Mika Latokartano thinks that we should be teaching ethics, sociology, history, politics, anthropology, philosophy. Mika believes that what we learn from those disciplines can be applied to all facets of human interaction, technology enabled or otherwise. They're the sense-making tools for the information age. Mika continues by saying that he thinks that "we're dealing with a much broader issue here than just making people Web and tech-savvy. Western society in general is undergoing a socio-cultural transformation, and we almost seem to be entering a period of second Renaissance, and Enlightenment". 

This discussion reminds me of Clay Shirky latest book called 'Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age'. In this book he writes among other things what the motivation is of using the latest communication technologies. He argues, for example, that "we now have tools for comminicating and sharing, new means for indulging ourselves in those <intrinsic> motivations ... We also have to account for opportunity, ways of actually taking advantage of pur ability to participate in concert where we previously consumed alone". By focussing on intrinsic motivations (rather than extrinsic motivations), this book focusses on behaverioul economics (derived from the cognitive science) rather than neoclassical economics.

So giving all these highly detailed and sometimes academic findings I can only agree that we should focus on areas like sociology, psychology, philosophy and so on, because we are in the middle of a paradigm shift, or in the words of Mika 'a socio-cultural transformation'.

I will finish this weblog post by referring to one citation from Clay Shirky that refers to this change:

We memorized phone numbers when we had to. but we never liked memorizing those numbers and we were never very good at it. We did it because it was a requirement for other things we did like, such as talking with our friends. The minute phones provided us with speed dials and address lists, that accidentally unfroze and melted away. Many of our behaviors are like memorizing phone numbers, held in place not by desire but by inconvenience, and they're quick to disappear when the inconvenience does. Getting news from a piece of a paper, having to be physically near a television at a certain time to see a certain show, keeping our vacation pictures to ourselves as if they were some big secret - not one of these behaviors made a lick of sense. We did those things for decades or even centuries, but they were only stable as the accidents that caused them. And when the accidents went away, so did the behaviors.

Strategy to improve internal & external knowledge sharing with social bookmarking

Last couple of months I have been working on rolling out social bookmarking in an organisation. You would probably think: why social bookmarking? Luis Suarez once labelled social bookmarking in his post The Business Case for Enterprise Social Bookmarking: $4.6 Million a Year in Cost Savings as "one of the fundamental pillars from Enterprise 2.0". And I believe that it is a powerful tool which organisations can use to enhance both internal and external knowledge sharing.

After rolling out a start-up programme in using Delicious as social bookmarking platform for a couple of the client's staff members, I moved to a part in which I offered them a way or strategy how they should re-use personal social bookmark collections in order to enhance internal and external knowledge sharing.

To me social bookmark tools - together with all the other social media tools - can only become a success when staff members are using these tools from a personal point of view. If the staff member can answer the question:"what is it in for me?", it could become a big success.

So, will a staff member answers the question 'what is it in for me' positively when an organisation imposes many rules and restrictions on the use of social bookmarking (like you need to include this tag, or you cannot add stuff that is related to things outside working hours). No, the adaptation to social bookmarking will not be embraced and therefore organisations should give staff members to social bookmark what they want.

Another issue why organisations should not impose rules & regulations on the use of social bookmarking, is that it will then become fun to social bookmark, but also messy and fragmented. In particular these two elements are crucial for a learning culture. Dave Snowden once listed the 7 principles on rendering knowledge and three of them relate to the messiness and fragmentation. He argues that:

1. Knowledge can only be volunteered, it cannot be conscripted;
2. we only know what we know when we need to know it, and;
3. everything is fragmented

So this means that organisations should let staff members do what they want to do with their PERSONAL social bookmark accounts. With regard to Delicious, this means that organisations should not ...:

1. ... ask staff to add a unique tag when it is organisational-related;
2. ... ask staff to forward the specific social bookmark directly to someone in charge of keeping organisational bookmark accounts clean;
3. ... ask staff to mark bookmarks as private if not related to the organisation
4. ... ask staff to social bookmark in a common social bookmark account (i.e. just one account for the whole organisation)

It is clear that all of the four potential strategies are harming a learning culture in which internal and external knowledge sharing improves. Because how nice would it be to find out that somebody in the organisation is also bookmarking about fishing and you like this too. By letting staff bookmark what they want an organisation is certainly improving internal knowledge sharing / communication. Social bookmarking is then becoming the organisational water cooler where conversations flow. But on the other hand, when you let everybody bookmark what they want, an organisation cannot automatically re-use and re-mix it on, for example, the organisational website or publish it on Twitter through which Flipboard can make a content-specific magazine uniquely to the organisation. Ways that improve the external communication and knowledge sharing

To make sure that social bookmarking is helping on both sides (internal and external knowledge sharing) I propose a social bookmarking adaptation strategy.

Not surprisingly I argue that there should be a moderator. This could be someone who already made his or her living to filter information. In organisations they are often known as librarians, or in modern times they are called information professionals or brokers. These people should moderate the accounts of colleagues and filter the ones interested to the organisation into an organisational account. This is how an organisation can maintain a clean list of high-valuable resources.

This strategy is about that the organisation is pulling the content from staff instead of that staff is pushing content to the organisation. 

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.