A year ago I had a fabulous opportunity to attend a very short seminar given by Peter Block. A multitude of conversations later, with friends and collegues, in my head and scattered around the web, I have begun to appreciate his ideas of gifts and art and silence.

A tribute to Peter Block

Stories explain mysteries,
Poetry encapsulates tension.

Visual art opens the mind,
Music channels the brain.

Talking together brings us closer,
Silence lets us integrate these gifts.

Thank you!

Thinking about Forests and Trees

Many Knowledge Management strategies are based on the idea that an enterprise, which is any big organization - and all bureaucracies - is a bounded place. Hence, to communicate within the enterprise you will need some common framework such as email to facilitate that exchange. This logic applies to websites as well as email, and to document management systems, payroll systems, financial systems, travel systems ...

So far, that's good. All too soon though it seems that economics gets in the way. Since you have a need for at least one common tool as the logic goes, well, your incremental cost for other related tools will probably be lower, particularly if you can share some of the costs, technology and customer base. Quite obviously, it is a short step from KM need to Enterprise Solution. I am afraid that it is a short step, and a long fall. At least that has been my experience.

"SocialMe" has done a great job of stepping outside the box of conventional technological thinking to survey the new landscape. I particularly enjoy the illustrations, along with the tag line

"There is no tool to rule them all."

Highly recommended reading!

Real people

This is a sad and a funny story. It is also a reminder that bureaucracies are populated not by scarecrows, but by everyday people.

Is KM Dead?

I’ve been following a conversation coming in from the far side of the world on the state of KM these days. Patrick Lambe, who hosted the video "Is KM dead", captures the mood quite effectively in a recent post http://www.greenchameleon.com/gc/blog_detail/on_staying_grounded1/

There seems to be a nexus between the video and other reports from out of recent KM conference in Australia. A lot of pessimism to be sure, still Death is a strong metaphor. Perhaps the KM community has reached a fork in the road. Or maybe we are rounding a turning point and are heading back to our roots. The interest suggests that something has died; but what?

What is that smelly fish under the table? We may agree that KM is the management of something, but that begs further questions:

What is that 'thing'? And what are the 'somes'?

Is KM the management of knowledge work? Or is it the management of knowledge workers? Or is it managing knowledge itself? And if it is about knowledge, are our managers more interested in the products and artifacts, or the processes that produce them?

The artifacts and process views of knowledge may well be trips back to the future on the first and second generations of KM. If we are interested in managing people, we should be asking "Who are the somes?" and the conversations should be about leadership and stewardship. However, it may well be that knowledge work is more than the sum of these three parts (people, process, technology). In which case, as managers, we still have a lot to learn.

Within a bureaucracy we do all of the above. We can't avoid the managing if we choose to participate in the organization and the acts of organizing that bureaucracy entails. Perhaps our questions should not be about the 'somethings'. Rather, to borrow a line from Patrick, maybe we should be asking of KM: What ground are we walking on today?

The Inside Scoop on Intellipedia

Here is a short rundown of Chris Dorobek's interview with Chris Rasmussen, one of the community managers for Intellipedia. Timing is approximate:

1. 6:00 - Chris Dorobek starts, talks about collaboration
2. 10:30 - Chris Rasmussen introduced, background
3. 12:00 - how the added value of the wiki collaboration comes more from the discussion pages than the article pages, which carry the traditional products
4. 17:30 - anecdotal evidence of how Intellipedia is useful
5. 18:30 - discusses how wiki collaboration differs from more conventional knowledge management in a "need to know culture"
6. 19:30 - Intellipedia is attributional, a disinfectant for [the abuses] of anonymous participation
7. 22:00 - Intellipedia is one of a number of different tools for different purposes, it boils down to "practice with the tools"
8. 26:00 - Mashups is the next step, not portals or websites
9. 26:30 - Chris Dorobek concluding remarks

Informative and enlightening!

What's in a Name, Part 1

As I was working through the references in a draft document recently, I ended up for the first time in a corner of Intelliepedia. Intellipedia is an open source, unclassified Wiki project hosted by the Intelligence Community, a diverse group of agencies with a common agenda. This seems to be a vital resource which supports some number of groups and it should be considered as an emerging community of practice. It is an interesting experiment, one that I hope will continue for a while and not, like most Government programs, be stifled by the misperceptions, internal politics and under-funding which are the nature of bureaucracy. Does anyone remember the fate of the “e-Gov” initiatives which were the darlings of the new administration just a few short years ago?

For deep background on Intellipedia and it’s leaders, see the “FCW Insider” story http://www.fcw.com/blogs/editor/153195-1.html

My First Post

A new debate about bureaucracy is desperately needed when we pause to consider the fundamental social shifts we are observing at the moment. I found a new and interesting blog on Business Week today under the heading of "Business At Work, Negotiating Bureaucracy." The title of the post, The Mechanistic Mindset and Bureaucracy pulled me in.

I firmly agree with all that John says, with the exception of two little things. Experience suggests that John suffers from a bit of wishful thinking when he says "And when organizations operate with a clear and well-aligned purpose, then they become great and influential." This is most highly desirable, but I'm afraid, impractical in the real world. The public sector in general, and all Government organizations in particular, operate with the utmost clarity and hundreds of years of as well-aligned purpose as any human endeavor. A career spent in public service is a calling, without the hope of the remunerations of our private sector partners. But do we, individually or collectively, consider public service to be great and influential. Unfortunately not. There are several disciplines of academic work that substantiate our perceptions on this paradox, and enough evidence to argue on any side.

John is spot on about unlearning, except where he says that "Unlearning is forgetting." If we forget as we unlearn, we lose sight of our purpose and values and reasons for our service, falling back into the paradox that a Mechanistic Mindset is blind to.