March 2004 Archives

From apophenia: an aversion to mail

As i get older, i learn to despise all forms of mediated communication. The problem is that context is lost. When i look focused, my roommates know not to interrupt. With mediation, i can usually cue people that i can't IM. But then there are the spammers. They've invaded. Every. Aspect. Of. Mediated. Communication. We've got the telemarketers and the junk mail. Email is crawling with them. I turned off SMS because of them. Hell, i have to do blog cleansing more often than car flyer cleansing these days.

A key problem for our knowledge society. Indeed, when I use personal communication tools like e-mail or weblogs, my fundamental liberty is too be able to choose the community I am communicating with. Every identity I have (as a citizen, father, employee, friend, painter etc.) is within a community. This identity is reflected for example by the e-mail address I use and the website behind the address. This web site is associated with my identity as a corporate knowledge manager. Is is a public site, which means that anybody in the world can quote me on what I write here. On the other hand, I don't welcome any comment which is not relevant to the topic (and I do have a lot of those). In the future, I may have a semantic filter that will eliminate as spam any comment made on my weblog that is irrelevant to my identity here, even if it comes from my wife. Same for e-mail.

Harvard Weblogs: Weblogs at the Harvard Law School

A milestone case study from the Shorenstein Center was released on Friday last week. It tells the story of Trent Lott, his talk at Strom Thurmond's birthday party in December 2002, and how the news flowed through professional channels, to the blogosphere, and back, ultimately resulting in Lott's resignation as majority leader of the US Senate.

Definitely worth reading if you haven't yet.

From Carlos Ghosn, in Les Echos of yesterday

Many [business] alliances finally end up destroying value. For us [Renault and Nissan] the alliance is a tool for optimizing the performance of each one of the two companies. Such flexibility is not possible in mergers and acquisitions

This reminds me: I came to knowledge management when I started to think that communities of practice were key foundations for successful business alliances.

Supporting enterprise knowledge management with weblogs: A weblog services roadmap by Michael Angeles though Jim Robertson is one of the most inspiring presentations I ever saw.

Indeed, weblogs have a very important role to play in the innovation process, and thus should be considered very seriously in corporate environments. Three reasons for this come to my mind after going through Michael’s presentation :

Report from a Blogwalk 1.0 discussion last Friday. The topic was: "Can blogging replace communities of practice ?"

Background of discussion: Before the development of weblogs, « online community » tools like forums, mailing lists and bulletin boards were predominantly used for community building. Experience seems to show that weblogs are proving far more effective in creating meaningful interpersonal connections than centralized community spaces on the web. Can networks of bloggers be seen as the future of online communities ?

I just came back from Blogwalk 1.0, an informal conference on weblogs for business organized by Ton, Lilia and Sebastien at the Telematica Instituut in Entschede, Netherlands.

It took me ages to get there and to come back, and I looked like an old rat in such a young assembly (see Andy's and Ton's and Martin's photos for documentary evidence of this), but it was really worth the journey. Thanks for the invitation, guys!

I came out of curiosity. I was obviously interested by the topic itself, but I really wanted to know if a gathering of people of such diverse origins, experiences and personalities only on the basis of what they wrote on their weblogs daily could produce anything of good quality. Well, I must say I was impressed. The organizers really did a great job of facilitation, the participants literally covered the walls of yellow post-its, and for the first time in my life, I actually thought that 80% of these little notes were relevant to the topic and actually useful for me.

In two words: It worked!

I came out with three new ideas:

1- As they are deep conversations with oneself and with the world, weblogs connect like-minded people, thus playing a key role in the grassroots formation of communities of practice.

2- A necessary enhancement of weblogging technology is the ability to choose your audience by ticking a box just before saving. Some entries would be made accessible to the entire world (Internet), others would be restricted to your company (Intranet), to one or the other of your communities of practice (Extranet), to your family and friends etc... This by the way is coherent with Microsoft's Weltanschauung.

3- The core issue underlying any knowledge management technology (weblogs being one of them) is really information architecture. One must really understand the morphology and syntax of web-based communication, understand the differences between data, content, information and document, dig into XML tagging etc. Weblogs are the simplest form of content publishing because they provide very little structure and are easy to use. They convey rich and contextual -but not actionable- information . The more structure is given to a publication, the more actionable it becomes. But at the same time the publication process becomes more constrained (workflows, taxonomies etc.)

Will Blogwalk morph into a community of practice for professional blogging? I sincerely hope so.

From Sebastien Paquet (le bien nommé), this quote

...one can view blogging as a personal "coming out" experience, going public with what was once private. And I think this process that many people are undergoing has the effect of speeding up the change and diversification of overt personal practices and social norms.

Definitely. That's why I am blogging. In my daily life as a senior manager in a global corporation, I often get frustrated by some of the decisions made, which appear to me as inappropriate for the company. But the tyranny of org charts and top-down bureaucracy prevents me from openly disagreeing with my boss (especially in times of cost-cutting...), so what should I do?

• If I have no spine, I can comply and obey, and become a cynical reader of Dilbert, which accurately portrays daily life in big corporations.
• If nothing really matters but my career, I can enter the corporate political game, and walk my way up the corporate ladder through ad'hoc alliances and betrayals, and honestly, I am not very good at that
• If I do care about my company's future and believe my ideas at least deserve to be debated, then I have to find other people to discuss with. So I will post my ideas on my blog just to see whether they resonate with others from my company and elsewhere, and are strong enough to become a political force for proposals (a community).

Corporate blogging is in essence the alternative to by-passing hierarchies and talking directly to the CEO, which is seldom a good idea.

I am conscious of walking a fine line here, especially since I believe I am the only known blogger in this company. The risk of being squeezed out as a black sheep is real

Very few executives -only the very best actually- actually recognize the need to encourage reasonable behavior of resistance from their employees. Those corporate statesmen are not afraid to encourage out-of-the box thinking to foster innovation and change. They know that the age of productivity by efficient bureaucracy is behind us; they know that what they need is good ideas, and that managers assigned from the top on the basis of their ability to make their numbers are not often very good at identifying good ideas and nurturing innovation.

Dunbar is an anthropologist at the University College of London who hypothesized that there is a cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships, and predicted that 150 is the "mean group size" for humans.

Ross Mayfield wrote a very interesting post last year starting from there on Ecosystem of Networks and came out with this nice summarized graph, which I have been struggling a little with to be honest since I saw it for the first time (are axes consistent from one raph to the other?..) but still it is intriguing.

Christopher Allen just elaborated further on this in a remarkable post on The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes

Essentially, as we increase group sizes beyond 80, to 150, 200, or even 350-500, we typically do so by breaking larger groups down into smaller ones, and continually reducing community sizes down to the point where they can be understood and managed by people -- and so efficiency reasserts itself.

In my experience and vision of communities of practice, I tend to find similar numbers floating around. Typically vibrant communities of practice have around 100 - 150 members. As social structures, they are "onion-shaped", with layers of membership behaviors.

At the center, the "core group" of the community of practice is typically composed of 5 to 7 people. These are the guys who are willing to spend some time together, typically 15%-20% of their time (not much more, because they are busy on their projects anyway), reflecting on past experience and planning ahead for the community's learning activities in a peer mode. Then you have a second layer of 20-30 active contributors, typically those who follow the community ritual: they come regularly at meetings, they often contribute, and they also complain when something goes wrong in the planned schedule. These are the ones, whose attention is grabbed by other topics but have made some time for the community activities in their calendar, typically 2% to 5% of their time. And finally you have the "lurkers", who actually don't follow the community ritual, but participate just enough to be aware of what is going on. They also contribute a minima to maintain a feeling of social belonging, typically a few hours twice a year.

You might add, to try and connect even more to Ray Mayfield's graph, that a community of practice is often surrounded by a larger community of interest: people who are somewhat interested in what the community of practice does, and who will read its publications, and even give feedback in a point to point mode following something like the power law distribution.

From Dan Gillmore's online book project "Making the News"

News organizations in recent times have operated as if the news was a lecture -- we told you what the news was, and you bought it (or you didn't). Tomorrow's news reporting and production will be more of a conversation, with huge implications for producers and consumers of news alike, because the lines between them will blur. The network becomes, in a sense, the medium. This doesn't mean the demise of major media organizations, however, because the public increasingly will retreat to quality as they realize they can't trust much of what they see online. It does mean that major organizations must embrace the conversation, or lose their ability to keep up.

This is to be applied to corporate communication as well. I see huge implications on corporate brand management outside the media industry. Increasingly, brands will reflect much more than the quality of products and services. They will also be associated with the quality of information published in their name.
One day, hopefully, we will all laugh at the corporate happy/empty jargon of the 90's.

My boss has decided that two people to run a corporate KM program was one too many, and my colleague and friend Gilbert Brault has been reassigned somewhere else in the company. Bad news.

Reflecting on four years working together, I was wondering this morning why this decision had such an impact on me, aside from what it says about the relative importance of my work for the company, of course. I just came across "Conversations as a Core Business Process" byJuanita Brown, which explains why:

- There was a sense of mutual respect between us
- We took the time to really talk together and reflect about what we each thought was important
- We listened to each other, even if there were differences
- I was accepted and not judged in the conversation
- The conversation helped us strengthen our relationship
- We explored questions that mattered
- We developed shared meaning that wasn't there when we began
- I learned something new or important
- It strengthened our mutual commitment

If we believe that "markets are conversations" (cluetrain again), we were actually practicing almost daily what should become the normal way of interacting with customers in the future. But it is still a long way to go. QED.

A quote from David Perkins

As a generalization, pooling physical effort is easy, but pooling mental effort is hard. It's a lot easier for 10 people to collaborate on mowing a large lawn than for 10 people to collaborate on designing a lawnmower