Knowledge management: the newest battle between the neats and the scruffies

“There are two groups of people, those who divide people into two groups and those who don’t.” –Robert Benchley

Years ago, when I was doing work in the field of AI, I came across one of those binary splits that continues to be useful for my thinking; the split between “neats” and “scruffies.” In the field of AI, the split differentiated between those favoring highly structured, logically precise approaches and those preferred something more along the lines of “whatever works.” Wikipedia offers a nice summary of the debate from that field.

Back in my school days, I think I was a neat (philosophically, not in terms of my room or study skills). When I first delve into new areas I am drawn to those who argue the neat case. As I get older and, I hope, more experienced, however, I find myself increasingly scruffy.

Much of the recent debate in the narrow field of knowledge management can be interpreted as one more recapitulation of the neats vs. scruffies argument. The technologies of blogs, wikis, and social media that collectively comprise the emerging notion of Enterprise 2.0 celebrate scruffiness as the essence of success in knowledge-intensive enterprises. The claim, backed by appropriately messy and sketchy anecdotal evidence, is that a loose set of simple technologies made available to the knowledge workers of an organization can provide an environment in which the organization and its knowledge workers can make more effective use of their collective and individual knowledge capital. Grass roots efforts will yield value where large-scale, centralized, knowledge management initiatives have failed.

Several implications flow from adopting a scruffy point of view. For one, “management” becomes a suspect term. If you can manage at all, you must do so at another level of abstraction. You aren’t managing knowledge; instead you are trying to manage the conditions under which knowledge work takes place and within which valuable knowledge might be created or put to use. At that point, it becomes more productive to think in terms of leadership rather than management; particularly if you subscribe to Colin Powell’s characterization of a leader as someone you’ll follow to discover where they’re going.

Second, you will need to deal with the problems that the neats have created in previous runs at knowledge management without alienating them at the same time. In most large organizations, knowledge management has been characterized as a technology problem or as a analog to financial management; placing it squarely within the purview of the organization’s neatest neats. This is a recipe for disappointment, if not outright failure.

It might possibly be an open question whether knowledge management can be eventually reduced to something as structured as accounting or library science. But it is a lousy place to start. Most organizations aren’t yet mature or sophisticated enough about knowledge work issues and questions to be obsessing about taxonomies or measurement and reward systems for knowledge work. But those are activities that are neat and specifiable and only superficially relevant. They lead to complex efforts to get to the right answer when we would be better served by simpler efforts to make things better.

 

David Weinberger’s latest thoughts on our digital world

  Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, Weinberger, David

In Everything is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger turns his attention to how unexamined assumptions about stuff in the physical world have constrained our attempts to organize information and the opportunities implicit in leaving those constraints behind in a digital world. An excellent storyteller, Weinberger takes us through tales of the Dewey Decimal system, Linnaeus’s taxonomic efforts, the history of UPC bar codes and why neither card catalogs or ISBN numbers shed as much light on Hamlet as we might think. He contrasts these with digital approaches such as Amazon’s multiple and multiplex paths to books you might want to buy, and Flickr’s and Technorati’s choices to create and exploit folksonomies in place of controlled taxonomies. While David occasionally veers a bit too close to his roots as a philosopher, he has assembled a rich and thought-provoking array of materials that warrant your attention. In keeping with his commitment to conversation, David has also created a rich website to ensure that there is a digital counterpart to accompany the physical container.

Weinberger starts by examining what he terms “orders of order.” Rooted in the physical, his first order of order emerges when we make choices about where to put a book on the shelves or how to stack dishes in the kitchen. Physical limits dominate; putting a book on one shelf means that we can’t place it on another, stacking the dishes limits their usefulness if we need to wash them or eat off them.

A library card catalog provides Weinberger’s archetypal example of the second order of order. By abstracting information from the physical object, and introducing a layer of indirection, you overcome some of the limits imposed by the physical object. For example, you can have more than one card catalog entry and file them in multiple places.

Weinberger posits a third order of order that arises in the digital world when the assets we wish to organize and their potential catalogs are both digital. Amazon’s multiple ways to help you find books that they will happily sell you provide his most straightforward examples. There’s no question that Amazon’s user reviews, lists, and recommendations of books to consider have all increased my book buying and reading habits well beyond the risks of browsing the physical shelves of my local bookstore.

On the other hand, I am not entirely convinced that this constitutes something worthy of labeling a new “order of order.” At some level, this revisits Nicholas Negroponte‘s argument of atoms vs bits. Relative to atoms, bits are cheap to manufacture, so we need to learn to start taking advantage of that when we design systems and services.

When I first started designing database systems (some thirty years ago), you might have to plan for 15-20% extra space for the database overhead. For every hundred characters of “real” data that you needed to manage, you’d need an extra 15-20 for indexes and catalogs. As disk space got cheaper and database designers more clever, that ratio flipped. Today, we call it metadata instead of overhead. It’s not unusual for metadata to take up 10 to 100 times the space of the “real” data in many systems. Sometimes this can seem counterintuitive, but I’m not sure that what Weinberger gains by labeling it a distinct order of order is worth the cost.

If you’ve never thought about the interplay between atoms and bits, Weinberger’s book offers useful and interesting new perspectives. If you’ve been immersed in that interplay, you’re likely to become frustrated that he doesn’t push on farther than he does.  On the gripping hand, every author has to make decisions about what ends up in the physical package and what gets left out.

Everything is Miscellaneous frames important questions, provides a wealth of raw materials, and will likely launch a wealth of productive discussions about new design tradeoffs. Weinberger’s focus is on digital services targeted at consumer audiences, which makes Everything is Miscellaneous more accessible to a general audience. The tradeoff is that Weinberger doesn’t have the opportunity to probe more deeply into the implications of his insights for meeting organizational needs. Perhaps he will in his next efforts.

Video: Wikis in Plain English from Lee LeFever

Another excellent and quick tutorial from Lee LeFever.

Video: Wikis in Plain English 

We made this video because wiki web sites are easy to use, but hard to describe. We hope to turn you on to a better way to plan a camping trip, or create the next Wikipedia.

Length: 3 minutes 52 seconds.  

If you’d like to share this video, you can grab the code at Blip.tv or YouTube. A transcript is here and soon we’ll have a subtitled version on DotSub.

Video: Wikis in Plain English

 

MindManager 7 is now available from MindJet

The folks at MindJet officially have launched their latest upgrade to MindManager Pro, now at version 7. Here’s their press release, although you’ll probably find Chuck Frey’s preview comments more useful. I’m still getting used to the Ribbon interface, but that is also the case for Office 2007. If you’re using this tool, you’ll want to upgrade. If you haven’t started mindmapping, today would be a good day to get started.

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Andrew Hinton on Architectures for Conversation

Courtesy of David Weinberger, here is an excellent presentation on information architecture. It is also a good lesson in effective communication/presentation techniques.

What is information architecture? The slide show.

The always enjoyable Andrew Hinton has an insightful, witty, surprising set of slides ‘n’ text that tries to explain not only what Information Architecture is, but why it’s been so hard to explain. Along the way he has things to say about communities vs. communities of practice, how to attract flies, and why Wikipedia is more like an AK-47 than like an M-16. Great stuff, entertainingly and elegantly communicated. [Tags: ]

Solving puzzles or framing mysteries. Dealing with wicked problems

There’s in interesting essay in the most recent issue of Smithsonian Magazine on the importance of understanding whether you are working on a puzzle or a mystery written by Gregory Treverton, who is the Director of RAND’s Center for Global Risk and Security.

There’s a reason millions of people try to solve crossword puzzles each day. Amid the well-ordered combat between a puzzler’s mind and the blank boxes waiting to be filled, there is satisfaction along with frustration. Even when you can’t find the right answer, you know it exists. Puzzles can be solved; they have answers.

But a mystery offers no such comfort. It poses a question that has no definitive answer because the answer is contingent; it depends on a future interaction of many factors, known and unknown. A mystery cannot be answered; it can only be framed, by identifying the critical factors and applying some sense of how they have interacted in the past and might interact in the future. A mystery is an attempt to define ambiguities.

Puzzles may be more satisfying, but the world increasingly offers us mysteries. Treating them as puzzles is like trying to solve the unsolvable—an impossible challenge. But approaching them as mysteries may make us more comfortable with the uncertainties of our age. [Risks and Riddles.]

Treverton’s essay focuses on the distinction in the context terrorism and law enforcement, but it is worth pondering more broadly. Most of our training and experience in organizations is focused on puzzle-solving skills. MBA programs focus on equipping their graduates with toolkits for solving a host of problems; once those problems have been appropriately identified and bounded. They offer far less guidance on the far more difficult task of framing issues in ways that can be addressed.

Absent good practices in framing issues, the temptation is always to force issues into puzzle structures that can be solved. Treverton offers an important reminder of the risks of forcing mysteries into puzzles.

Another helpful language system to employ here is Horst Rittel’s notion of “wicked problems.” Jeff Conklin, at the CogNexus Institute has some excellent materials to help get started down this path. Take a look at “Wicked Problems and Social Complexity” (PDF file) and “Issues as Elements of Information Systems” (PDF file) which is Rittel’s original paper on the topic. Conklin has also written an excellent book on the topic: Dialogue Mapping : Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems. Finally, there is an open source software tool, Compendium, available to support some of the techniques for framing and working on wicked problems that Conklin advocates.

Better thinking about performance improvement

  Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, Gawande, Atul

I’ve always been troubled by the phrase “best practices” thrown around loosely in business settings. In certain engineering and professional settings, the term can have an important legal meaning. Even then, “best practice” is always a moving target. Better, Atul Gawande’s most recent collection of essays nicely crystallizes my reservations and offers useful insight into how to think about performance and performance improvement in knowledge work environments.

Drawing on his experience as a surgeon, Gawande reflects on the connections between learning and practice; both as an individual practitioner and as a field. His essays provide fascinating insights into how the practice of medicine has evolved over time; ranging over such diverse topics as hand-washing, battlefield injuries, and obstetrics. For that alone, Better is well worth reading. But it offers broader lessons as well.

Rooted in science and medicine, one thread that Gawande examines is quality of evidence. The gold standard is that of the double-blind, controlled laboratory experiment. However, action in the world and the demands of day-to-day practice cannot always wait for that standard to be met. There’s a wonderful quote from Samuel Butler that captures this problem; “Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.” Many of Gawande’s stories shed light on the reality that we often must make decisions on the basis of imperfect information and knowledge. We may not be able always to meet a gold standard of evidence, but we still benefit from a methodological commitment to hypothesis, experiment, and measurement.

Gawande’s observations on measurement and performance evolution in obstetrics provides one good example. He starts with the development of the Apgar score; a simple, concrete, measure of a baby’s condition at one minute and five minutes after birth. I am particularly struck by the insight and cleverness represented by recording the score twice in such a short interval. That creates a connection between measurement and action that drives performance improvement; it creates a feedback loop well matched to the human system it is embedded in.

Moving up a level from an individual delivery to a hospital’s performance, the Apgar score also serves to drive performance improvement at a more systemic level. In addition to informed clinical judgments about performance, we now have some numbers we can compare against one another and over time. Because these numbers tie to clinical judgment and performance, they can be used to evaluate changes in practice. Changes that improve the scores stick; those that don’t are abandoned.

This logic sheds some interesting light on a tension between “evidence-based medicine” and performance improvement more broadly conceived. Careful, clinical studies of problematic deliveries showed that Caesarian-sections had no measurable advantage over forceps assisted deliveries. Yet, no obstetrician uses forceps anymore and C-sections are used more and more routinely to the point where some claim they are over-used.

Understanding why has important lessons for anyone interesting in improving the performance of knowledge work in organizations. The difference comes from whether you are looking at performance at the systems level or the individual practitioner level. Learning to use forceps is a complex skill; difficult to observe, difficult to learn and difficult to teach. A C-section, on the other hand, is straightforward as surgical procedures go, highly observable, and teachable to a wider range of competent OB/GYNs. If you are trying to improve the outcomes and reliability of the system as a whole, your payoff from pushing C-sections over forceps is much higher. This is a classic example of improving a system by reducing variability. It is also an important reminder to be clear about where you are trying to improve performance.

 

 

Congratulations to Jack Vinson on four years of blogging

Although, I would prefer to think of it as taking credit for encouraging Jack to add his insight and voice to the blogging world., rather than blame 

It’s been four years

Hard to believe that I have been at this for four years now. 

Thanks to all my readers (FeedBurner says there are ~1300 on the feed; 40 readers via FeedBlitz; 2000 visitors a day at the website), and thanks to the hundreds of inspirations I have out there who take me down interesting paths and teach me new things.

All blame lays on the shoulders of Jim McGee, who told me to start writing on my own blog instead of peppering him with comments all the time.

Mindjet Recommends Mind Mapping Blogs and Resources

I’m very flattered to be included on this list. More importantly, there are quite a few other blogs talking about mindmapping that I wasn’t aware of that I will now be checking out.

Mindjet Recommends Mind Mapping Blogs and Resources

Hi Everyone,

We asked the Mindjet Blog reading community to share with us their own mind mapping / MindManager blogs.

The map available for download below is the result of this outreach and shares with our community a nice range of mind mapping blog sites and resources.

Enjoy!

Mindjet Recommended Blogs Map

PS- Please note: We’ll be adding the larger “Writing an Article” map from our previous post onto Mindjet Labs as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience.