Metaphor on the problem of over-constraining

I just read a useful metaphor in the book Gut Feelings: Short Cuts to Better Decision Making by Gerd Gigerenzer. This metaphor illustrates that simplifying complex situations or filtering complex situations into simplistic decisions is not very helpful:

To date I have met only one man, an economist, who reponded that he followed the Benjamin Franklin method to choose a partner. He sat down with a pencil and listed all the possible partners he could think of and all possible consequences he could image (such as whether she would still listen to him after being married). Next he put a number on the utilities of each consequence and then estimated the probabilities that each might come true. Finally, he multiplied the utilities with the probabilities and added them up. The woman he proposed to and married was the one with the highest expected utility, though he didn't tell her about his strategy. By the way, he is now divorced.

This metaphor is quite similar to Dave Snowden's Children's Party. Overconstraining a situation will not necessarily result in the outcome you expected. I also highlighted this issue in the column published for the Dutch KM journal 'Intellectueel Kapitaal'. In this column I agrued that businesses should be better in sharing and creating knowledge in order to plan scenarios and avoid profit warnings (something that happened quite a lot in the Netherlands over the last couple of weeks). 

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. 

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.