Dave Snowden once again hones in on "trust", and creating conditions for it, as a naturalistic approach to knowledge sharing. Rather than focusing on "knowledge sharing" itself, we are focusing on shaping our efforts to human behaviour, so people are ultimately sharing of their own accord.
Trust
This is how he said it last time (gee I've linked to this post about 5 times):
"Knowledge is a voluntary act, if people trust each other they will share. If they work together and create interdependencies then they will share...Good management (including knowledge management) is about creating the right sort of environment and interactions. Creating a set of explicit targets is an abrogation of management responsibility not its assumption."
Anticipation
And the time before that (I quoted it in this post as well):
"Its critical to realise that no one will refuse people knowledge in the context of real need, but few if any people will publish what they know in anticipation of need. That means that it is more important to focus on the channels through which knowledge flows than on the knowledge itself. That means linking and connecting people and there are a range of techniques of which SNS is the Rolls Royce It's also true that using social computing in the way I advocated above will hugely increase the connectivity and the ability of the network to create a resilience and responsive mechanism for distributing knowledge."
And here's how he said it recently which explicitly points at the faults of how KM was run in the past:
"My general response to people who ask the question How do we get people to share what they know, is If you have to ask the question then you have probably taken the wrong approach. In my experience people generally do want to share, but they may not want to share in the manner prescribed by the corporate KM department. If you ask someone for assistance in the context of real and immediate need it will rarely be refused. Ask someone to share knowledge in the absence of that need, or in a form or manner determined by a centralised function then it will nearly always be refused.
Sharing needs to be linked to tools that support the way in which humans have evolved to share knowledge, not the way that IT departments have designed most current systems. They also need to be linked to common perceived need. Look at the success of blogging between platoon commanders in Iraq compared with formal distribution of doctrine if you want a good example."
I first mentioned this naturalistic realisation to knowledge sharing, in my post Knowledge sharing in the new KM (includes Jon Husband interview with Dave Snowden on Web 2.0):
"1. If people need knowledge in the "context" of need it will always be shared
- people will share in the context of your immediate need
2. People don't share knowledge in the anticipation that you need it
- if you ask people (perhaps someone you may not know) to put it in a common data store for a possible need in the future, on the basis you might need it...it just doesn't happen."
Weakness of codification
Dave also explains the weakness of codifying anticipated material:
"We urgently need to shift from working with chunked documents that seek to summarise material, to increasing direct access to fine granularity raw data in the form of anecdotes, sound files, pictures etc. etc. The process of chunking, or abstraction involves loss of content which may well contain weak signals or subtle clues and more importantly involves making the material specific to the context of its creation in time and socio-cultural context."
The past doesn't always help us
In a past post I quoted Jay Cross:
"Workers need to be able to assess new situations, learn in real time, and improvise solutions. That's an entirely new learning agenda, for it means putting enough trust in workers to give them the wheel"
Seeking people
There's no need to get into the other end of the knowledge sharing scenario, which is the knowledge seeker. Rather than go to a database to fill a need (that you hope you find because some altruistic person decided to share their know-how for no apparent reason, but for potential use in the future), we are implying that people go to people for information...for more see Ross Dawson's quote on my k-flow post.
NOTE: reading a blogosphere is similar to going to people, rather than a database, because blog content is informal and conversational
In KM 2.0 we have a publish and subscribe model, where we are learning off each other daily whether we have a need or not. Although we may share know-how that is not needed now, it's not totally altruistic, it's to generate conversation, you know your sharing is worthwhile as people are subscribed and listening or they can visit your blog at any time and leave comments.
Anticipatory Awareness
My post Adapting to change with enterprise 2.0, has yet another quote by Dave Snowden, here's a a little piece:
"Faced with an intractable problem, do you go and draw down best practice from your company's knowledge management system, or do you go and find eight or nine people you know and trust with relevant experience and listen to their stories?"
"...we live in a world subject to constant change, and it's better to blend fragments at the time of need than attempt to anticipate all needs. We are moving from attempting to anticipate the future to creating an attitude and capability of anticipatory awareness"
"The free flow of the blogosphere, ad hoc collaboration, Facebook and many other tools work because they conform with the patterns of expectation that arise from our evolutionary uncertainty"
Actually I'm finding "anticipatory awareness" a hard thing to succinctly define, see more here.
This post has focused on contributing what you know, which draws on the concept of people sharing knowledge with others they trust or in the context of a real need, rather than the highly resisted, codifying what they know into a database in case it becomes handy in the future (which has value loss anyway).
In this respect KM 2.0 is more about living in the present (living in the moment), rather than spending our time and focus on possible future needs (supply-side KM). When that future comes it will no longer be the future, it will be the present, and in that moment we will use KM 2.0 methods to get our work done.
I'm not neglecting the future, I'm just saying we can't spend all our time (and money) codifying information that may never be used in the future, at the expense of spending our time creating new knowledge now. In KM 2.0, when the future comes we can network or look at past blog posts, etc to fill our needs. These past blog posts were not created for this future need, they filled a past need, if their content extends to aiding tasks in the future, well that's just great
Plus the fact that the process of codification can leave behind valuable content; sanitised and summarised documents may leave out handy peripheral information and context. We have to be aware of situational differences, and not be prone to blindly following a method from the best practice master file like a recipe.
...and beyond
By using this new approach with simple participative networking tools, we go beyond achieving knowledge sharing, ie. the more static end-to-end method of knowledge store and knowledge seek. KM 2.0 generates an ecosystem where people are connected and become more autonomous in getting things done...in all we become a learning organisation. Further to this it may indeed change the way organisations are managed (management 2.0).
From aiming to achieve the KM task of extracting and distributing know-how, these same tools have taken us to even greater places of an evolution in management, and ultimately how this transparency may alter the decisions we make, and how the result of the way we use these tools may change or shape our culture.
Related
Conversations, Connections and Context
KM 2.0 culture
Link to original post