Knowledge management and weblogs

Knowledge management has been premised on the notion that the knowledge to be managed already exists and simply needs to be collected and organized to obtain the promised benefits.

One reason that so many of us find weblogs exciting in the realm of knowledge management is that weblogs reveal that the most important knowledge needs to be created before it can be collected and organized.

This is similar to the argument about the important split between tacit and explicit knowledge but much simpler. There is a category of knowledge that lies between explicit and tacit–what a colleague of mine, Jeanie Egmon, labels as “implicit.” This is knowledge that is actually fairly simple to write down once you decide that it's worth doing so and once you have tools that make it easy to do so. It's the knowledge of context and the whys behind the whats. It's the knowledge that's obvious at the time and on site, but mysterious even to its creators six months and six hundred miles later.

In the knowledge economy that we all live in, even if we keep trying to stay comfortably ensconced in the industrial economy that used to make so much sense, we need to reflect on and learn from experience on a daily basis in order to maintain any sort of edge. That reflection and learning depends on having high quality raw material to work with. That's what weblogs provide.

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.

Personal computing history – Bob Frankston on implementing Visicalc

Implementing VisiCalc [SATN]

A fascinating bit of the early history of personal computing. Bob Frankston's recollections on how he and Dan Bricklin implemented the original Apple ][ version of Visicalc. I still wish that Bricklin had been more than one year ahead of me at business school. I had to do Finance by hand just like he did. While I was simply suffering, they were implementing a solution to the pain they experienced and launching the first killer app of the PC generation. I did buy my first PC, an Apple ][ shortly after graduating from business school, but sure wished I had been able to have it while I was there. My other regret from that era was selling the Osborne I “portable” computer I bought after the Apple ][. I sold it to a colleague who went back to business school after I did. I think that old Apple ][ is still in my parents basement somewhere, but the Osborne is gone.

RSS feed for Virgina Postrel's dynamist weblog

I'VE MOVED. This blog is at a new URL. Please change your bookmarks and blogrolls to http://www.dynamist.com/weblog/. Thanks…. [Dynamist Blog]

Virginia Postrel's blog has moved and is now running with Moveable Type. Better yet, it now has a lovely RSS feed, although it took a little bit of digging to find it. The RSS auto-discovery isn't quite configured correctly.  But it's there and now I can follow it in my aggregator.

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.