Category: Knowledge Management

Thinking in public, part 4 – impact of loose coupling among weblogs

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).

Thinking in public, part 3 – risks and barriers

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?

Thinking in public, part 2

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.

Weblogs in my tool mix

Yet another “what are blogs?” article in the general press (the Las Vegas Review-Journal of all places) including the obligatory do they threaten journalism question. Normally I probably wouldn't bother to link to the article, except that I do get quoted. The reporter, Matt Crowley, and I had a good conversation several weeks back that helped me pull together some of my thoughts on the topic.

I would have preferred a little more attention to the business and organizational implications, but I really can't complain. They spelled my name right and they quoted me accurately:

Nevertheless, Blood and Jim McGee, an adjunct professor of technology at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, say traditional news channels are safe.

…

Also, McGee added, reading a blog is less like reading a story and more like reading a reporter's notebook; thoughts are stream-of-consciousness and disorganized.

“The signal-to-noise ratio in a blog is much different,” McGee said. “It's information and ideas they may not necessarily turn into a story. I think of a blog as a backup brain, a place to remember stuff and a place to work out ideas.”

Although chat rooms and messaging software allow instant idea exchange, McGee said blogging may make for better conversation because it allows time to compose thoughts. Also, because blogs present ideas straightforwardly, they may beat e-mail for data sharing.

“When stuff is buried in an e-mail or conversation, it's hard to manage,” McGee said. “When you move to e-mail to PowerPoint to Word documents, unless you get them printed, you may not know what's going on.”

We all try to make sense out of the new in terms of what we already understand–the “horseless carriage” phenomenon. It's a necessary step in working our way to understanding the new on its own terms.

There were a couple of things we talked about that didn't make it into the final copy that have to do with organizational uses.

One was the value of using a news aggregator, such as “Radio”'s. Coupled with blogs, aggregators let me track an order of magnitude more sources than I could using conventional surfing. Right now, for example, I'm subscribed to almost 200 sources with my aggregator. What that has created is an early warning system of sources (mostly other weblogs) that I've learned to trust over time. Moreover, these weblog sources of experts in topics I'm interested in generally have a one to two week lead time over conventional news sources that I follow.

The second was a prediction that weblogs in organizations would become as indispensable as email and would take on some functions that now get done in email for lack of a better place.

Here's what I expect will occur. Email will remain the place where I manage shared activity (instant messaging may take some of that over – something I'll talk about another time). Weblogs will be where I start and share my thinking. The tools that now comprise office suites will support specialized tasks (e.g. spreadsheets for quantitative analysis) and will be where I sometimes package materials for broader consumption or distribution to audiences who can't or won't visit my weblog. I'm finding, for example, that I now do 80-90% of my writing inside “Radio”. Granted I use its outliner rather than the desktop website for most of that, but it does represent an interesting shift in my work habits.

Knowledge work, weblogs, and fair process

I’ve just been rereading an article from the Harvard Business Review called “Fair Process: Managing in the Knowledge Economy.” Written by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, two professors at Insead, it helps me understand one of the reasons why I think that weblogs have an important role in making knowledge work in organizations more effective.

Kim and Mauborgne’s fundamental insight is that “employees will commit to a manager’s decision–even one they disagree with–if they believe that the process the manager used to make the decision was fair.” Doesn’t sound especially profound until you think about how often it is ignored on the premise that all the matters is the final outcome.

They define three principles of what constitutes fair process: engagement, explanation, and expectation clarity. Many managers ignore all three. Those who do attend to process tend to get stuck at the first principle of engagement and ignore the other two. They make some effort to involve everyone in the process, but too often short circuit the rest of the process in the rush to get to the “right answer.” Managers feel the pressures of time and assume that as long as the final outcome is fair and logical, they will be forgiven for rushing ahead. More likely, they will be punished in terms of sullen compliance or outright sabotage.

Now apply this in the realm of knowledge work. Kim and Mauborgne quote Friederich Hayek

“Practically every individual…possesses unique information” that can be put to use only with “his active cooperation”

You don’t get voluntary cooperation without paying attention to what they term “procedural justice.”

As I’ve argued before one of the principal benefits of weblogs is the way that they can make knowledge work more visible. In this context, weblogs serve as a tool that makes fair process a natural byproduct of the work itself. They are a place where explanation can be developed and shared as it is worked out in real time. Moreover, if you can get an institutional environment in which everyone can potentially contribute their perspectives by way of their own weblogs and these perspectives can flow through the system by way of RSS, then you also increase the degree of engagement.

The flip side of this is that without a belief in and commitment to the notion of fair process, weblogs by themselves aren’t likely to last very long inside organizations. While they can be a tool to promote those values, I don’t think they can create those values if they are otherwise absent.

More on agenda setting and weblogs

Kevin Marks. Kevin Marks rebuts Andrew Orlowski's rant, yesterday. [Scripting News]

Good response to the piece on Google and second superpower that I picked up on yesterday. Lots of people are responding to Orlowski's piece, which does qualify it as thought provoking, although most seem to be more upset than it warrants. Flame wars are moderately entertaining, as long as you're not in the direct line of fire, but they're not terribly productive. It's one of the reasons I prefer blogging to threaded discussion. It helps keep the discussion more civil and more focused on the content instead of the rhetoric. If you want to have intelligent conversation, you need to dial the volume down, not up.

Thinking in public – knowledge management with a small k

Reminder. Paul McCann asked me to remind him (and other Chicago-area bloggers) when the upcoming presentations by Jim McGee and David Weinberger were scheduled, and this morning I got a message from Eric Sinclair renewing the plea for that reminder. So here we go: Jim will come to Seabury on Thursday, April 10, to talk about sharing knowledge via blogs (the title of his presentation will be, “Thinking in public — Can you do that? Is it safe? Is it wise? Weblogs in organizations.” He’ll be in the Seabury Lounge, I think, and the presentation will start at 7:30. David Weinberger… [AKMA’s Random Thoughts]

I'm flattered that AKMA was kind enough to sandwich me between David Weinberger and Ben and Mena Trott who presented last month. Hanging out in such company has to be a good thing.

I'll be sharing some thoughts, observations, and questions about how weblogs are beginning to be used as one more tool to help make knowledge work more effective inside organizations. The perspective I've been poking at for some time now is what happens when you begin to revisit the idea of knowledge management from the point of view of making individual knowledge workers more effective.

Think of it as knowledge management with a small k. The wave of solutions offered under the rubric of knowledge management prior to weblogs was largely driven by vendors with a centralized, top-down, organization centric view of the problem. At best they were attempting to solve the problem of knowledge management (whatever that might be) from the perspective of the organization, not the perspective of the knowledge workers doing the knowledge work. A good portion of the resistance to these knowledge management efforts is sensible resistance to extra work that has no demonstrable payoff for me as a knowledge worker.

I started experimenting with weblogs and precursors to weblogs several years ago and began to publish a public weblog about 18 months ago. I've found the notion of weblog as backup brain to be a powerful metaphor for finding the value of weblogs to the work of an individual knowledge worker within an organization. 

One of the central things that occurs with this strategy is that you have to start learning how to think in public. That certainly can feel like a risky thing to do. In some organizational settings it might well be risky. But I'm increasingly convinced that developing that skill will be an important aspect of what organizations must learn to do to survive and thrive in today's world. If you're going to be near Evanston next Thursday night, do drop in. If you're lucky AKMA's wife will provide molasses cookies again. Then it won't matter whether I have anything useful to say or not.

Weblogs as filtering tools

Why blogging isn’t a fad. Arnold Kling offers one of the best explanations I’ve seen of the value of blogging as a distributed information filtering mechanism.

“This filtering process makes all of us more efficient. Information with low value does not travel far. Information with high general value tends to travel the farthest. Information with low general value but high local value tends to reach interested people but then die out because as it gets passed along its value decays below the threshold. Everyone tends to receive information with a high value to them, and they avoid having to read information that has low value to them.”

[Werblog]

Gradually working off the backlog of items lurking in my news aggregator. This is, indeed, an excellent explanation of the value of weblogs in organizational settings and in communities of practice. I might have gotten to it earlier, but it’s from another of those Corante blogs that continue to refuse to offer RSS feeds. I have yet to hear the argument about why RSS feeds are a bad thing from Corante’s point of view. But until I have time to scrape these blogs into my aggregator I just don’t have time to track them, no matter how excellent the content may be.

Blogs as an ugly term

There seems to be a consensus that ‘weblog’ and ‘blog’ are ugly terms. Many worry that this ugliness adds an element of additional challenge to realizing the value of weblogs within organizations. Recently there’s been some effort to coin more appealing terms.

One of the central features of knowledge based organizations is that individual knowledge workers are the people in the best position to evaluate and design their work. This is a radical departure from industrial-logic organizations where the coordinated design and definition of tasks and jobs is the norm.

Part of the generally disappointing results from centralized efforts at knowledge management follow from this disconnect between organizational logics. Shoshanna Zuboff and her husband James Maxmin have recently published a new book that may shed light on this. It’s titled The Support Economy: Why Corporations are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism. I say may because I am only about a third of the way through it. What Zuboff and Maxmin argue is that the logic of managerial capitalism has run its course and needs to be replaced. Managerial capitalism represents the organizational and economic logic and norms that worked to create mass markets to match up with the production capacity of mass production.It essentially drove much of the economic growth of the 20th century.

From a variety of perspectives, the logic of the emerging knowledge economy is more distributed and decentralized. The work itself requires local perspective and initiative.

What I find interesting is the emerging alignment between several distinct threads. One is this decentralized logic of knowledge based organizaions. The second is the strength of intellectual capital arguments such as the end-to end argument, Dan Isenberg’s notion of stupid networks, and Doc Searls and Dave Weinberger’s most recent piece on the a world of ends. Finally, in this context, we have the application of weblogs inside organizations as a tool to promote knowledge sharing. Here, this alignment of weblogs with these parallel trends suggests that weblogs are a technology well matched to the problem.

Given the match between weblogs and this broader trend toward decentralized and distributed solutions, the lameness of ‘blog’ as a term might actually be one of its primary strengths. It reflects that weblogs are tools coming into organizations from the grassroots, not something imposed from a central source. That may be more important than usual for organizational innovations when we’re talking about an innovation that is in sync with the demands of knowledge economy organizations.

Investing in knowledge sharing – starting on the weblog learning curve

Very helpful discussions lately on weblogs in knowledge management contexts. Matt Mowers starts by taking me to task with the observation that:

I don’t think that weblogs do anything and I’m increasingly of the opinion that the benefits that we are seeing at the moment are simply those of tapping into a particular type of personality, i.e. the enthusiastic early adopters who will do something with anything you throw at them.

So far I’m not seeing the kind of evidence that weblogging (in whatever form you name it) offers a particularly unique solution to the KM problem generally. Those solutions are going to have to come from us, in how we apply what is, after all, just another technology. Otherwise I predict in 12-18 months time, articles about “how weblogging has failed us.”

In my opinion, we do have an opportunity to use the current wave of popularity for weblogging to get people to experiment with this new medium, try to change some working assumptions and the practices that go with them and move things on a little. [Curiouser and curiouser]

Stephen Downes, whose initial post started this round of discussion, continues by observing that:

I’ve been weblogging for the last five years. I’ve long since solved the input problem, the one Jim McGee talks about. But using this information is still a pain, despite a fair bit of thought and work around the problem of information retrieval from weblogs (what do you think my [Research] button is? Most weblog software hasn’t even addressed the problem, much less solved it). [OL Daily]

So Downes has already discovered what I’ve only started to suspect after a little over 18 months of weblogging. We’re still in the early, early stages of understanding how to help knowledge workers be more effective at doing knowledge work.

This is the essential perspective that I believe has been largely missing before the advent of the current round of tools, despite their limitations.

I’ve had a continuing conflicted opinion about the role of technology in making knowledge work more effective. I’m not as anti-technology as my friend and former colleague and co-author, Larry Prusak. There are times when he can sound like a total luddite and he’s certainly a proponent of the social dimensions of knowledge management.

Many of the challenges of knowledge management are either created or aggravated by the information and technology that comprise so much of our organizational context. As technologies like email let us operate organizations of much greater scale and scope, they also create a demand for knowledge sharing across timezones and oceans that we haven’t had to address before. And, as I’ve argued before, these technologies have also complicated our information and knowledge lives by making our work less visible. To the extent that technology has helped create our knowledge management problems, it also needs to be enlisted in solving those problems.

Weblogs by themselves don’t do anything more than any other tool. Someone has to pick up the tool and put it to use. What is it about this particular category of tool that has persuaded someone like Stephen Downes to maintain and evolve a weblog over the past five years? All innovations have early adopters. Successful innovations build on the lessons learned from those early adopters and evolve the innovation in ways to make it more suited to the needs of those who follow on the adoption curve.

I heard a story the other day about a computer science class that assumed that mainframe computer systems were developed by scaling up from the “first” computers, which were the PCs developed in the late 70s and early 80s. I’m old enough to know that it worked the other way and to remember the rhetoric around PCs as the “great equalizer” that was going to shift power from faceless corporate data centers into the hands of the individual. Apple’s marketing is still built around that myth.

Organizations took that general purpose, universal tool and shaped it toward their own specific needs. It’s my contention that those needs were rooted in industrial models of organization and information processing and largely ignored those aspects that make knowledge work different.

Weblogs are one technology component of an important shift in perspective from the organization to the individual knowledge worker. For production work and for much routine information work this shift is irrelevant. It is the increasing percentage of of knowledge work relative to the total work of the organization that is changing the discussion.

Paolo Valdemarin has an excellent post today on the potential contribution of weblogs to building social capital inside (and across) organizations.

…Besides using “social capital” to measure countries’ economic power, I believe that the same concept can be applied to any community. Applied to the weblogs community, this concept help explain the huge power that has been unleashed by blogging.

Reading other people’s weblogs creates trust and efficiency, and it’s an excellent base to build businesses and relationships.

This is interesting also for k-logging (or “business journalling”): if a country with a better community is richer, then also a company with a better developed trust and efficiency amoung its workers is going to be better off than others.

So, no, we are not wasting time writing on our weblogs, we’re investing. [Paolo’s Weblog]

Right now, a relative handful of early adopters are playing with and experimenting with this new tool of weblogs. It’s a tool whose strengths are well matched to a changing shift in emphasis toward a greater role for knowledge workers in organizations.

There are always new tools and innovations promising to solve problems. I’ve been disapppointed by many and helped by a few. My intuitions and my experience tell me that weblogs fall in this second category. Those early adopters and leaders such as Stephen are already figuring out how to solve the next round of problems. But those are good problems to have. They are the problems that surface after you’ve decided to take personal responsibility for managing your own knowledge and learning. That may be an unnatural act for many inside organizations who would prefer that the world not change. I’m convinced it is changing and that most of us will have to start learning what Stephen has. It’s not something that you can wait until everything is already figured out. You’ll be better off the sooner you can get started.