Mopsos

Through Jean-Paul Taravella (Thanks !), my colleague at AREVA, I had the privilege to meet Lamis Zolhof of SNCF today. Lamis, an architect by training, has implemented one of the very few successful intranet applications I have seen so far to share best practices. Many companies present similar concepts at conventions and trade shows, usually along with the software company who developed the application, but actually very few go beyond a vague proof of concept.

The platform, nick named ISIBOL (don't ask why - only SNCF insiders can understand) is actually used!  Several new good practices have been posted each day for the last three years, and some of them have been downloaded for reuse hundreds and even thousands of time.

To me this was an eye opener, because I have always had serious doubts about the general concept of sharing "best practices". The whole idea of transferring a collective way of doing things from one business location to another regardless of the context appears to me like a daunting task even if it it mandated by the CEO, which is seldom the case, if ever. It's like transplanting a full grown tree. But ISIBOL is different. Here it's not about collective best practices such as a new business process, but about personal ones such as excel macros or survey templates. It's about sharing reusable methods and tools for personal productivity. Not only are these much easier to transfer, but the benefit is primarily for the users themselves. The benefit for the company is not an objective but an outcome.

Aside from this sensible starting point, Lamis has managed to focus her attention on something that most intranet program managers tend to take for granted, i.e. the user experience. Since the beginning, Lamis wanted the platform to be user-friendly and straightforward, with zero training need. She copied some of the features of the successful internet applications, both in the e-business and collaborative fields, and went into extreme details, never compromising on clarity, simplicity and ease-of-use, raising hell if the developer did not meet her expectations. She ended up with a lively collaborative platform that everyone could understand and relate to. It is also fun to use because contributions and downloads are rewarded by a point system that can be redeemed with token gifts.

But this was still not enough. Lamis had to put a lot of energy in the first 18 months of roll-out to actively sell the platform to key users, making sure that all people she met actually subscribed to the service. She put professionally designed posters on the wall, sent flyers, e-mailed reminders, etc. never giving up. And it finally paid off.

But in the end, the key achievement of this ISIBOL platform is the initiation of a deep behavioral change whereby employees have been provided with a way to present to their colleagues what they are proud of, which is a good step towards presenting what they are currently doing, which is the essence of social networks. And that is the next step.

Just came back from the ECLF conference in Feldafing near Munich, where we talked extensively about the "Social Infrastructure of Learning".
It was actually a great conference with great people, and I was really pissed off for having to leave half way for a stupid meeting in Paris.

We had presentation, but let me just share a few words of wisdom from our keynote speakers:

Etienne Wenger

"The real learning issue of the 21st century is not access to a curriculum, but being able to manage multiple membership, i.e. managing identity."
"Verticality in organizational structures is usually associated with accountability. But there is acountability in horizontal structures too: you cannot give any kind of advice in a community of practice without being held accountable for it. Your reputation is at stake."

Henry Mintzberg :

"Leaders that don't manage don't know what is going on"
"We should never talk about leadership without using the term communityship in the same sentence".
"There should be no bonuses for executives. Period."
"A company is not a collection of human resources, but a community of human beings"
"Why talk about 'empowering'? Real professionals know what to do, and don't need to be 'empowered'!"
"Management is NOT taught in MBA programs. Case studies may be good to gather insights, but not to make decisions. How can you make a decision based on 20 pages of reading?"
"To learn, managers need to step back and reflect thoughtfully on their own experience"

 

What failed to materialize in the conference though - at least when I was there - is the recognition that a company is also a political system, by and large autocratic, i.e. based on shared mental models of heroic leaders developing a strategy and human resources executing on that strategy. It seems to me quite naive to believe that we can introduce "communityship" (term coined by Dr. Mintzberg) in a bonus-driven company. It's a radical cultural change. When you build communities, you change communication patterns, and therefore you change the power structures. It takes a lot of patience and determination to do this, and you will losse your job if you don't have the support of the CEO to introduce such a change.

Reading Legacy of Ashes - The History of the CIA. The author, Tim Weiner, argues that, in the 1950s,  the CIA was so focused on clandestine operations ("doing") as opposed to intelligence gathering ("knowing") that they sent hundreds of agents to a certain death, unaware that soviet agents had infiltrated local CIA offices and that the KGB knew everything about their plans.

Funny to see the eery parallel with companies, where management ("doing") always has the upper hand, and expertise ("knowing") is often downplayed, with consequences that might not be as awful, but still terrible.

Just for the sake of clarifying the practical meaning of "knowledge transfer", here are the ten most current approaches to transferring knowledge in business environments:

1. Teaching/Master Class: Presentation of fundamental and operational knowledge; review and discussion of a learner's specific problem or results in a group. (typically performed in corporate universities)
2. Community of Practice: Groups of practitioners in a discipline that connect to seek/share experiences, develop/adopt practices or tools and develop/support a learning agenda.
3. Technical Mentoring: Interaction between expert and learner to help the learner do a job more effectively and/or to progress in their career.
4. Job Shadowing / Apprenticeship: Opportunities for a learner to observe the expert interacting with others or doing more complex work. 
5. Guided Experience / Development Assignments: Carefully selected projects or work assignments that fill gaps in experience or broaden/deepen targeted skills.  "Guided" includes expert observation and feedback. Typically research projects like case studies, lessons learned, documentaries etc.
6. Coaching: Combines mentoring, shadowing and observation to assess learner competency gaps, and guide development with timely performance feedback. 
7. Knowledge Elicitation: Interview-based approach with expert to articulate big picture, mental models and detailed "how to" and "when to" guidance. This was the main approach of KM a few years back. We talked about "knowledge books" at that time, whereas we are more into storytelling approaches today.
8. Group Intervention Methods: Synchronous collaboration methods designed for large groups with a specific outcome in mind. A good example is the Peer Assist of BP:  Experts share experiences and knowledge in a facilitated meeting with a person or team who is looking for advice on a challenge, problem or project. Other similar group collaboration methods are used when the issue is about creating or sharing knowledge e.g. Brainstorming, Open Space, Knowledge Marketplace
9. Codification / Publication: Process of codifying knowledge to make it available to a wider audience, typically with little intermediation. This can take the form of blog posts, scientific publications, books, software code.
10. Bookmarking / Library Management: Experts categorize and tag their database of digitized content, and add glossaries and thesauri, to make it easier for others to search and navigate into for future reuse.

When we talk about collaboration, we actually talk about the implicit relationship between the giver and taker of knowledge in each one of those settings. That's why learning to collaborate is by and large about practicing each one of those methods.

[this list is partly inspired by the work of Kent Greenes]

I had a chat yesterday with a friend of mine working as a knowledge management professional in a big consulting firm I cannot mention here. She was complaining that her KM practice was provided with very little guidance and support from the partners, even though they keep on repeating that knowledge management is absolutely key for the future on the company.

Another example of the knowing-doing gap...

After having worked in the KM field for a while now, I have become utterly convinced that not much can be done in terms of developing a culture of collaboration and knowledge sharing if the very top management is not driving it, albeit in a very special way. The reason is simple: as I said we are dealing with culture here, and the "Chief Cultural Officer" of a company is and will always be either the Chairman or the CEO.

In a consulting partnership, it is far more complex, because the CEO is a sort of "primus inter pares" who has limited influence on the culture of the company, which has sedimented over time. Moreover, if the incentive structure of the company favors partners who sell (whatever that means) by creating P&Ls everywhere, every partner will rush out to sell consulting missions, and will consider Knowledge Management as technical back office stuff, a sort of necessary evil that adds a burden to the overhead structure.

So how can we deal with this?

I believe the best solution, and perhaps the only viable solution, which I have seen at work in the most advanced consulting firms, is to give a partner the responsibility of running the KM program as a temporary assignment - typically two years full time -, with full authority over the associated ressources (librarians, research assistants, collaborative technology, practice leaders). Here's the catch: since the reputation of a partner, and hence her income, comes primarily from clients, she cannot take that responsibility for too long without putting her career at risk. Thus, the only acceptable way to deal with this is to make the assignment a temporary one, so that she can keep her clients.

The alternative, which is the usual 20% of the lead partner's time devoted to KM is pure bullshit. No partner will ever take the time to dig into the highly complex issues of knowledge sharing if she knows that her clients are waiting at the gate, unless the other partners are prepared to pay her for this.

 

 

A few snippets of Clay Shirky's last book, "Here Comes Everybody".

• When we change the way we communicate, we change society.
• The current change in one sentence is this: most of the barriers to group action have collapsed, and without those barriers, we are free to explore new ways of gathering together and getting things done.
• [The value of hierarchies] is obvious- it vastly simplifies communication among the employees.
• (...) no institution can put all its energies in pursuing its mission; it must expend considerable effort on maintaining discipline and structure, simply to keep itself viable. Self-preservation of the institution becomes job number one, while its stated goal is relegated to number two or lower, no matter what the mission statement says.
• because the minimum costs of being an organization in the first place are relatively high, certain activities may have some value but not enough to make them worth pursuing in an organized way.New social tools are altering the equation by lowering the costs of coordinating group action.
• The basic capabilities of tools like Flickr reverse the old order of group activity, transforming "gather, then share" into "share, then gather".
• If you have ever wondered why so much of what workers in large organizations know has been shielded from the CEO and vice-versa, wonder no longer: the idea of limiting communications, so that they flow only from one layer of the hierarchy to the next, was part of the very design of the system at the dawn of managerial culture.
• (...) any forum of public expression is dangerous, because no matter how innocuous the original form form of organization is, if the state is seen to tolerate it, it can become a forum for more focused discontent.
• In the open source world, trying something is often cheaper than making a formal decision about whether to try it.
• Because of transaction costs, organizations cannot afford to hire employees who only make one important contribution - they need to hire people who have good ideas day after day (...) Most of the time, most institutions have to choose "steady performers" over "brilliant but erratic".
• Microsoft simply cannot afford to take any good idea wherever it finds it; the transaction costs that come from being Microsoft see to that.
• No matter who you are, most of the smart people work for somebody else;
• When there is a real revolution going on, (...) net value is useless, since the society before and the society after are too different to be readily compared.
• (...) the important questions [about modern collaboration tools] aren't about whether these tools will spread or reshape society, but rather how they do so.
• collective action is harder to get going because all of the participants stand or fall together.
• What makes such collaborative efforts work is copyright law, where some form of license is created that allows people to come together and share their work freely, without fear of having that work taken away from them later.
• Novices make mistakes from lack of experience. they overestimate mere fads, seeing revolution everywhere, and they make this kind of error a thousand times before they learn better. In times of revolution though, the experienced among us make the opposite mistake. When a real, once-in-a-lifetime change comes along, we are at risk of regarding it as a fad.

OK. Now buy it and read it.

Great post form Melanie McBride explaining why her twitter posts are protected. At last someone who raises the privacy issue in a clever way.

[Thanks Guy]

My company just published a survey about the expectations of generation Y regarding work. To summarize:

1. Millennials expect to work overseas - Millennials expect job mobility and want the opportunity to experience overseas assignments.


2. Sustainability and climate change - Today's recruits will choose employers who have corporate social responsibility (CSR) values that reflect their own.


3. Technology and the ability to network - Millennials view technology as key to socializing and networking and believe it will change the way they work.


4. Work place flexibility - Only a small percentage of millennials expect flexibilities such as working at home and outside regular office hours.


5. Sharing personal information - Millennials are comfortable about giving employers greater access to their personal information in the interests of personal and business security.


6. Millennial views on portfolio careers - The idea of employees job hopping in a portfolio working arrangement is not likely to become a reality for millennials.


7. Employee loyalty - Millennials express loyalty to the organization they work for, but by no means are they willing to commit to blind loyalty.


8. Training and development - Training and development is the benefit the millennials value most highly--particularly coaching and mentoring.


9. Retirement - Millennials have accepted the idea that neither the state nor the employer will fund their retirement.


10. Thoughts on 2020 - Millennials envision a world where China, India and Russia will have more economic influence than the US and Europe and believe that companies will be more influential than governments by 2020.

Points 3 and 8 are encouraging. Points 4 and 6 are surprising. Points 5 and 9 are scary.

There has been a lot of bickering lately about authority on the web being or ot synonymous to the number of followers on Twitter. This discussion was triggered by an initial post of Loïc LeMeur. Stowe Boyd summarized the essentials of this discussion in another post written yesterday.
Surprisingly, nobody makes a clear distinction between popularity and authority. Loïc LeMeur or Robert Scoble managed to become some kind of pop stars of the web, meaning that they tend to be everywhere and connected to everyone. Does this mean they have authority? Yes and no. Yes because they have established their names as strong brands on the web, and that they have become valuable sources of information as amplifiers of faint signals. What they bring to our attention is most often very interesting , because they are connected to a lot of very interesting people. But it doesn't mean that their opinion as persons really matters. They are journalists and commentators in essence. But they cannot be compared to web gurus like David Weinberger ("Everything is miscellaneous"), Nassim-Nicholas Taleb ("The black Swan"), Don Tapscott ("Wikinomics") or Tom Friedman ("The Earth is Flat") to name a few, who have written widely acclaimed books on the economy of the web, and who are not all using Twitter as far as I know. Why would social behaviors on the web be so different than in real life?
Something I really worry about is the false idea of democracy that permeates the web like a new ideology. Depending on how you use it, the web as a tool that lowers the barriers to establish both democracy or dictatorship. Democracy in ancient Greece was limited in space (the Agora), and had little to do with equal rights. However, it was based on three principles:

• Your voice equals mine


• Your air time to voice your opinions will be the same as mine


• i will respect your privacy and you will respect mine.

The third point is particularly interesting. The ancient Greeks knew that the essence of democracy is your right to have an opinion and voice it to try and convince other people to act accordingly, not about seducing the people with dreams. That is why privacy was so important. Democracy is built on interconnected communities, whereas dictatorship is built on masses of indistinguishable individuals. So in that sense it can be argued that the world wide web is profoundly both democratic, when it encourages people to enter into conversations and discussions, and undemocratic when it encourages people to worship stars and gurus.
In the end, it really depends on what Loïc and Robert want to do with their fame. Is it just to use the web as an echo chamber to attract morons, thereby satisfying their ego and making money, or is it to bring important stuff to our attention, building their practice and making the world a better place? Nobody can answer that question but them.