Mopsos

Richard McDermott was at the Ark Conference and told us that he was opening a consulting office in London, because he expects business around communities of practice to grow more in Europe than in the US. Sadly, it looks like he doesn't have a blog, which amazes me.

Before we left he asked us the following three questions, and these are my three answers:

Question 1: Is more knowledge always better? Are we better off with too much information than with just the information we need?

I would argue that, once again, this boils down to trust. If you are close to people you trust, i.e. people with great competence on a specific topic and proven benevolence towards you, then you can, and probably should, count on them to keep you posted about what is really important for you in their domain of expertise. One of the key characteristics of communities with respect to information management is precisely that they are quite effective at filtering out relevant information and vectorizing it to the right people.

On the other hand, handing over to the upper levels of a hierarchy or marcom departments the role of filtering out information for the lower levels so that they don't waste time is not only humiliating but foolish. It doesn't work. Employees only pay attention to trustworthy information, and the only trustworthy information that communication departments circulate inside a big organization are good news about contracts signed with customers. Period.
Regarding information sharing, management intervention should exclusively focus on two courses of actions
1- promote and encourage information sharing on a wide scale
2- enforce information management rules to avoid leakage of critical information

Question 2: Is more connectivity better? Are we better off being extremely well connected?

I guess that the human mind sets the limits of the connectivity we can afford. It is physically impossible to know more than a few thousand people, and it looks like we cannot have ongoing relationships with more than 150 people (Dunbar's number) at any given time of our lives. So I guess that we all need to be very selective in the way we choose our connections, and review regularly our social network to adapt it to our activities of the moment.
In a business setting, it is probably advisable to keep connections alive with people who are themselves well connected to other communities we don't know too well.

Question 3:How do we deepen our expertise?

Honestly, I didn't get that question ;-)

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