December 2003 Archives

In this book, which you can download on the KnowledgeBoard, Harrison Owen draws a parallel between his own experience as the creator of Open Space Technology and his readings about Complex Adaptative Systems from Murray Gell-Mann, the physicist, and self-organizing structures from Stuart Kaufmann, the biologist.

In the world of physics, biology and social sciences, it appears for him that the process of self-organizing is central to reach « Peace », which Harrison defines as « wholeness, health and harmony »

« Given very simple pre-conditions, the process of self-organization commences :
1. A relatively safe, nutrient environment
2. High level of diversity of elements, and the potential for complex inter-relationships
3. A drive for improvement (Search for Fitness)
4. Sparse prior connections
5. Edge of chaos »

Harrison Owen : « Genuine leadership is rarely, if ever, a function of title, position or authority. Indeed one may have all of those, and absent passion and responsibility, not very much gets done. »

Many-to-Many: Not just activist, not just participatory, but connected

About e-Democracy: "It’s not simply that connecting lowers the hurdle when compared with either activism or participating. More important, the rewards of connected democracy are different. Yeah, we (pretty please) throw King W out, but we also get a relationship to the others walking in the same direction. We’re friends, we’re buddies, we know one another by (login) name. That by itself is a powerful motivator."

That's the sort of e-democracy I would like to see in corporations. Not the manipulative and corny participatory meetings where employees are expected to voice their concerns to the management, and where the manager exercizes his "communication skills".

Gary Lawrence Murphy at Teledyn made me laugh by proposing "a new item in the cultural lexicon, the active verb "to powerpoint" with the meaning:

1. to obscure and distract away from following a logical presentation;
2. dumbing down complex data until it appears like a sales pitch, as for example, when gathering support for an ill-advised war effort ..."

There is some truth here. Powerpoints are for salespeople, in the broad sense of the word, i.e. for people who expect the audience to comply, not to commit.

I went this morning to a conference organized by l'Atelier in Paris on behalf of Temis, a text-mining software company.

Temis's presentation was about its software and services offering: semantic technologies for extraction, clustering and categorizing of information. It was brilliant, and Temis undoubtedly has something to say in this area, as their track record suggests.

I was however a little uneasy about their marketing strategy, for two reasons:

1- Temis said nothing about the limitations of text mining technologies in general, and theirs in particular.

2- With prices ranging from 100 to 500 KEuros for a Temis solution, the target clients are clearly the corporate staff of large companies.

"The Marketing of a President" is a great article showing how weblogs and other forms of social computing. are transforming the Internet "from information technology to organizing technology".

I was particularly struck by the following quote from the article:

"Dean's grassroots supporters have come to take care of some problems for the campaign. Blog for America readers, for instance, police themselves in terms of the tone and content of comments. When "trolls" - blog jargon for hostile commenters looking to make trouble -- come in with negative or provocative remarks, pro-Dean commenters react by pledging donations for each negative comment, which creates a disincentive for the trolls. After this idea was posted on the blog, the number of trolls diminished to almost zero."

An intriguing example of self-regulation and collective intelligence, which almost turns the community of Dean supporters into a form of online citizenship.

The conclusion of the article is also worth meditating:

"The pundits still don't get it. They see your incredible fundraising numbers - and that's all they understand. But our campaign was not built just by money - it was built by the full participation of you and thousands of others who believe that each of us has the power and the duty to participate in our democracy."

"...all around us and right under our eyes, a process of great importance is going on. It is favoured by the sudden multiplication of ultra-rapid means of travel and transmission of thought, and consists in the formation of more and more psychic zones or groups. In these the human nuclei are converging their powers of reflection upon one common problem with one common enthusiasm, and so organising themselves into stable functional complexes. In these, surely, it is perfectly legitimate, as a matter of sound biology, to recognize the 'grey matter' of mankind."

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's - Man's Place in Nature

In How to create a know-it-al company (a good article by the way), there is a good checklist of what missteps not to do when instituting knowledge management in corporate settings:

Don't call it knowledge management. Employees don't get it, don't care about it and would rather ignore the whole thing.
Don't sweat the definitions. It doesn't matter how people define "knowledge" and "management." Let them create their own definitions.
Don't offer carrots. Times are tough, but resist the temptation to give payment—a few dollars or points in a reward system—for each knowledge contribution. Such a system is designed to be abused and will result in low-quality content.
Don't wave sticks. Even worse, some companies threaten punishment for failing to contribute. Knowledge shared under threat of negative consequences is likely to be worthless. Don't let desperate economic times lead to silly measures in the name of KM.
Don't bother unless there's trust. Most companies meet the minimum interpersonal trust threshold required to make a go of KM. Most, but not all. If your company prizes competition to the exclusion of all else, best put the knowledge management effort aside.

The last one is a killer.

In his article "Trying to understand the main cultural hurdles to the learning organization concept in France" Dr. Daniel Belet of BLV learning partners makes an insightful analysis of the cultural issues that we face here in France when trying to develop KM approaches and Communities of Practice.
I don't agree with everything though. My first employer, Dassault Aviation, was almost 20 year ago undoubtedly at the leading edge of KM, even by today's standards, and it was a French company. Yes, there is a cultural issue, in the sense that French society has been traditionally highly centralized, but, as I pointed out in a recent post, French society has historically shown some genius in organizing countervailing powers. But the current political environment in France indeed favors autocracy.