Author: Jim

KM, blogs, dialogue, identity building. Good summary of an interesting discussion between Jim McGee, Sebastian Fiedler, Lilia Efimova, Denham Grey on Blogs, dialogue and identity… [elearnspace blog]

Nice point about how this thinking in public is a set of parallel threads that intersect and separate. You get the freedom to reflect on what you're reading in other blogs, but you also get to engage in this loosely coupled interaction.

I wonder if part of what I'm finding valuable in this addition to the broader set of tools for thinking is this degree of “loose coupling?” You're not wrapped up in the middle of an argument, but you also don't have a real opportunity to wander off into the poppies and contemplate your navel. I think this is particularly so if you add in the aggregator/news reader side of this interaction. I'm able to track this evolving exercise in collective reflection without having to go from place to place to follow it. At the same time, all of my reflections are collected in this one spot (and shared via my news feed).

Got an interesting email from one of my readers, Jack Vinson. I'm reposting it with his permission.

I have to mention a concern that will arise as blogging gets higher on the corporate radar screen.

In today's blog you summarise that weblogs enable people to “think out loud” in a convenient way. This is something that corporate lawyers will wince to read. And prosecuting attorneys will drool. The problem is the way the US court systems have developed: A prosecuting attorney can dig through any and all relavent documents, looking for damning content. And this content is frequently devoid of context. “Look what that manager wrote in the marginalia!” Or “Look what 'evil' comments I found in the original version of this document” (from documents that have used the Track Revisions tool in MS Word). Never mind that the larger context has nothing sinister happening.

I could easily imagine that weblogs could be host to all sorts of “thinking out loud” discussions that would be ripe for the picking.

Of course, companies have to deal with these kinds of things all the time. They must get business done, while at the same time protecting themselves as much as possible. Most will encourage their people to “write smart” when committing anything to a potentially permanent record.

First off, it's clear we need to encourage Jack to join the ranks of bloggers. And I suspect that he's right about what some of the early reactions are likely to be from corporate counsel. How do we work through this objection?

For most companies the focus will remain on doing business and doing whatever best contributes to getting the job done. I remember a conversation a few years back with an attorney who had done some work with Cisco. Cisco managers basically said “we're using email to run our business, we're making commitments and binding agreements with it, and it's your job to figure out how to make that work, so deal with it.” While there may be some initial hemming and hawing, the concerns Jack raises won't be show stoppers.

I think there are two reasons to believe that internal weblogs will actually prove to be a better solution than email and newsgroups for this category of concerns. First, weblogs directly address the out of context problem created by email and newsgroup and exploited in discovery proceedings. Weblogs keep the context visible both in terms of the chronological and archive structures of the weblog format and in terms of the practice of linking across weblogs. Second, is the point that Jack raises at the end. The public nature of weblogs does encourage more attention to “writing smart” than email and newsgroup formats. It helps keep you focused on the notion that you are writing for the record. I sometimes wonder what would have happened at Enron if they had done more of their thinking “in public.” If an extensive weblog culture had been in place, could they have done wha they did? I don't know what the answer to that thought experiment might be. But if you had a choice between joining an organization with an active weblog environment or one that discouraged them, which would you choose?

Lilia, Sebastian, and Denham are picking up on and adding to my attempt to figure out where blogging fits in the world of knowledge work. Thinking in public was the way I chose to label a talk I'm giving later this week at Seabury Western courtesy of a gracious invitation from AKMA. It's the next stage in a idea I started working out a while back of “knowledge management with a small k.”

Weblogs are the latest in a long line of tools being applied in the realm of what has been loosely labeled knowledge management. I say “loosely” because so many different tools and techniques have been thrown under the knowledge management umbrella that I'm not sure there's any room left for the knowledge workers this is all supposed to help.

I've owned the knowledge management problem in one medium sized consulting firm and I've tried to communicate some of what I've learned in one MBA level course at Kellogg. I've been online since 1980 when I took an online seminar at NJIT run by Starr Roxanne Hiltz and Murray Turoff after devouring The Network Nation. I've used Lotus Notes, threaded discussions, email, IM, web pages, various collaboration tools and group decision support systems, and now weblogs with varying, and generally less than satisfying, degrees of success.

Denham suggests “thinking together” as preferable to “thinking in public,” and suggests the following interpretation:

Thinking in public is all about taking a stand, being open to alternative views and engaging in thought exchange. Here is where I think I differ from bloggers – the value of thinking in public is not about personal risk taking, publishing or pushing (your) ideas, it is about being receptive to the thoughts of others – that listening & dialog thing again.

I think he takes my notion a step farther than I was intending. I agree with Denham that the goal is to be receptive to the thoughts of others and that “thinking together” can indeed lead to better results than thinking alone (as does drinking together instead of drinking alone).

My problem is this. Most of the technology tools for supporting thinking together (e.g. discussion forums, threaded discussion, wikis) depend on skills and norms that I've found to be rare in practice and challenging to promote. My intuitions tell me that there are important differences with weblogs that address at least some of these issues.

[As an aside, I use the word “intuitions” quite deliberately. Gary Klein in his excellent book, Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions, shows that intuitions are a form of pre-packaged knowledge in the form of situational awareness. They are your experience base telling you something worth listening too. Klein focuses on how these intuitions guide actions, but it's also worth thinking about how these intuitions might be unpacked into a deeper, more explicit, understanding of a problem.]

One of the primary reasons that thinking together is hard is that it requires both that we think in public and that we think collaboratively. I suspect that thinking together fails at least as often because we don't know how to think in public as it does because we don't know how to do it collaboratively. Further I think that order matters. You need to learn how to think in public first. Then you can work on developing skills to think collaboratively.

Thinking in public is a precursor skill to thinking collaboratively that's been ignored. We want to get to the fun stuff (ooh, brainstorming!) and skip over the hard part.

Weblogs make the hard part easier. They make it possible and permissible to go public with an idea while you're still working it out. Their structure of time-ordered, generally short, posts feels less intimidating than having to produce a finished, completely worked out, properly structured report. Their organized, permanent, structure of archived posts give you something to go back to and to build on. Pulling it all together under the umbrella of an individually identified place makes it visible and sharable with others without forcing it on anyone. Finally, syndicating the results via RSS makes it available to those who are interested in a way that enables dialog without demanding dialog.