"If what you are working on is not worth sharing, why are you working on it?"

(This post was first published on my dutch site ennuonline.com)

Jane Bozarth is the writer of the book Show your Work. She is really a multi-talented person, she can talk without stopping, play ukelele and she can work outloud...We experienced all these talents in the webinar with Jane. Though she started by saying  "I don't have anything to talk about" she continued talking  for 1,5 hours :)..

What is Show your Work? "Show Your Work" = working out loud, it is about narrating your work. She did her dissertation about communities of practice and discovered that there is a gap between what we do at work and what we report in staff meeting. We have a lot of information about what colleagues do, but not exactly HOW they do it.Sharing makes it possible for others to learn from you. Knowledge workers have a lot of tacit knowledge and can use the tools available, for instance a phone with camera to actually share how they are doing a certain job. Sharing doesn't necessarily have to be through digital tools, however, the digital tools available make it much easier to share something rapidly and widely. We're coming to an age where we can't know everything alone. We are now dealing with a more complex environment and it becomes harder to do things alone.

Why do people share how to fish and not how they fix things at work? Jane is also puzzled when people don't think about sharing at work. She observes that some people record a video on how to fish and share it on Youtube in their free time but don't do the same at work. One of the reasons may be that "How to" information is easy to find on internet and complex issues, the tacit knowledge are much less shared. Brown and Duguid have written extensively about this aspect of tacit knowledge. Jane illustrated this with the example of a person who got a lot of things done within her organization and documented his work before he retired. However, nobody every became as good as he was despite the documentation. The reason is that the little tricks of the trade are very important and those are not easily captured in documentation. Interviews and questions may help to get tacit knowledge out. However, we are not very good asking the right questions to colleagues either, we don't probe on how somebody managed to do something. We talk about our work all the time, but rarely about 'how did you do this?' Visuals can be helpful too, a cookbook with recipes is explicit knowledge, videos or pictures already provide a view into the tacit knowledge.

"if what you are working on is not worth sharing, why are you working on it?" We all have the experience of doing something and afterwards finding out somebody has done that before. Often in organizations people don't take the time to share. The reason for this is that people don't have the mindset of sharing. In fact in every project you should take a pauze and reflect whether there are other people who might be struggling with the same issues? This doesn't mean that you share every pencil you sharpen.. but "if what you are working on is not worth sharing, why are you working on it?" (a quote from Steve Nguyen working at Yammer).

Starting Working Outloud in organizations In an organization you may start by identifying the people who are already doing it. We may help management change the questions.. "what was your most difficult, successful phone call today?" "what did you learn this week?" in stead of "what did you learn from this project?" A big challenge of working outloud in organization is making sure everything is findable. It helps to have some known spaces like Yammer. It is good to get better in tagging. A search function is also important. Within an organization you may help people in their decisions what to share where; what to share via mail, something else via the internal Yammer and other things in public.

Sharing successes or failures? Sarah Brown Wessling was teacher of the year and got video taped during a lesson when everything went wrong in a drama/literature class. She didn't stop the video but continues and later explains what went wrong. She published it publicly on a teacherchannel. This may be very useful for new teachers. It was possible for her to share this in public because she is very confident, she has been rewarded. It needs quite some courage to do this in public. Doctors who organize a morbidity and mortality meeting to discuss a patient who died also talk about failures, this is part of their professional culture. It is part of working and learning outloud, however it is not share publicly.

Tooling It doesn't really matter what tools are used.Virgin media provided everybody with snagit to take screenshots. Yammer can be a great tool. There is the example of copying machine repair persons who send pictures to others. Even email is possible. Hurray!

A last tip from Jane before she ran out of words: "Remember- it's about showing the WORK, not necessarily photos of your face. That might overcome shyness."

Tip: read also the blogpost 'zoek the learnnuggets' by Marjan Engelen..

Yammer for internal knowledge sharing for health care and policy making

What is Yammer? 
Yammer is booming, especially in the Nederland within Europe. Many companies have started their Yammer groups for rapid internal exchange. If you don't know Yammer:  Yammer is kind of Twitter (micro-blogging) service which can be used within organisation, so it is not public like on Twitter. The messages can be slightly longer than on Twitter and it is easier to reply (looks a lot like Facebook). Someone from KLM told me for instance he was looking for someone who could explain their wiki system to him. He put out a message on Yammer and found someone who could sit with him and explain it, the very next day. Without Yammer it would have been difficult to find this person.
  Yammer on tour started with great online ramp up
Last thursday Yammer organised the Yamtour. It was very well facilitated beforehand using a -you can predict - a Yammer network. People were invited to introduce themselves, everybody got a nice reply or welcome. People were asked to come forward with topics for the unconference part, and had to think of people they would certainly like to meet. For me it worked in order to meet Emile (whom I interviewed, see the video below). There was a bit of a 'selling' atmosphere in the first presentations like focussing on the ROI van Yammer and other figures to convince people of the value of Yammer. 38% of our time we spend looking for information and Yammer can reduce that time span. I thought it was a missed chance not to link and refer more to the real question that came up through the Yammer group beforehand. But nice to see the examples of various uses of Yammer and how it has opened up knowledge in organisations and made it accessible, through the use of a social approach.

Social online learning = not facilitated? 
Most people I met had the idea that you deploy Yammer, invite people and the rest should be a spontaneous proces. I talked to a member of an IT - company where it had actually worked like this.Someone spontaneously took the initiative to start a Yammer group (a free account). He invited employees from the company and within a few months 80% of the employees was on Yammer. This person explained that it is an IT company and that employees are relatively young. I also meet many organizations where it is set up spontaneously by someone and then it remains a small group of employees who sign up, or people sign up, but very little sharing is going on. I believe in supporting and facilitating the process of adoption. I'm also convinced from a knowledge management/organisational learning prespective you can influence the direction of the conversations that you would like to see on Yammer. Many people I spoke to are worried that facilitation means you are taking the spontaneity away but you can also facilitate and stimulate without imposing conversation topics and rules.


Examples of using Yammer for closing the gap between senior management and the workfloor
I enjoyed the examples of Rijkswaterstaat, Capgemini and Mobile BI. Tim de Waard of Rijkswaterstaat said that they regularly organize Yamjam brainstorming sessions on specific topics. The board of directors was coached to participate during a hands-on laptop session. After the Yamjam, they also wanted Yammer on their Blackberries, because it had given them a good insight into the various complaints and grudges within the company and it gave them the ability to respond to employees. Tim told us he himself currently has a better understanding what the board of directors is doing, before the Yamjams he really had no idea. At Rijkswaterstaat there is a community manager. He ensures that new people join a group called 'new to Yammer' and helps them develop their personalized feeds and filters. He also welcomes new members and organizes Yamjams.  

Capgemini has used Yammer in an interesting way for organizational change. Each year the senior management gets together for a three-days retreat, this time the retreat was planned in Barcelona. They used Yammer to engage a large group of people in the conversations. During the 3 days of the retreat 8000 people have joined Yammer. Presentations were shared in real time, and feedback was collected. This gave senior management a much better understanding of:

•      who the thought leaders are
•      major concerns of employees
•      what excites people

Showing the value of internal knowledge sharing
Finally they spoke about the way to demonstrate actual value created. They recommend to collect cases, every discussion, every question on Yammer may be a case. One tip is to choose a hashtag (# benefit) for conversations that helped people. In one organisation over 1500 cases were collected in this way, that show the variety of ways in which Yammer has helped employees do their jobs. Unfortunately there was no discussion of the advantage of use Yammer above for instance open social media like Twitter.

Practical example of Yammer in healthcare: replacing the client logfile
Afterwards I interviewed Emile de Roy van Zuydewijn from Thuiszorg Emile, about their use of Yammer to replace the client logbook in healthcare. In the Dutch video he explains how they are using Yammer to communicate about clients, using the clients' names as hashtags. There are also clients and other healthcare professionals who can join them in an external network. The advantage is that you can easily communicate with various involved parties. Furthermore, when the client is part of it, it is very transparent.  Emile was the one who thought of it, set it up and introduced it. It wasn't hard to get the students to use it. It might be slightly more difficult though with older groups. He has chosen for Yammer because of the security (closed system), the ease of use and the fact that you can use it on many devices (like via apps).

What strikes me in this case is that there is a pioneer with a clear vision on what a tool can do for a group. You might call that the technology steward role.

Read Dutch?  here's a blogpost by Eric van Oevelen from Avans Hogeschool who was there too. And here's the blogpost by Paul Voors from the NS.

Coining the right term

I used the Tedtalk of Joris Luyendijk 'Share your learning curve' (also here on my blog) for my work with a team in higher education. They are learning about 'facilitation of value chains', networking, reading and interviewing. We had already discussed that it would be interesting for their team to start a blog (to share their learning curve- though we didn't call it like that). In the Tedtalk Joris explains that he will start to explore the financial sector starting from zero knowledge. He would like to take other interested readers along in his search via the banking blog of the Guardian. Share your learning curve is a brilliant term for this. The Tedtalk supported what we had already discussed, and gave the blog a clear focus by coining the term 'share your learning curve'. I noticed it also inspired the testing blog.

What really surprises me in a way that I actually started 'sharing my learning curve' since 2005 on this blog (it was originally called communities of practice for development). I remember we had to capture blogging in three words during a teleconference and I chose 'very public learning'. So it surprises me that you can draw attention with something which is not new, by coining a right term. Probably having a good reputation is crucial too...

The same happened with our webinar with Jane Hart. She coined it the 'flipped webinar' flipping the presentation to a blog beforehand and working with the questions of the participants. It was a great webinar by the way, and it worked very well. However, I have a background in development cooperation and since 1990 I've been busy working on participation and participatory methods. So in a way it is not very new to  me. Again coining the right term which is an attractive one and maybe easy to remember works to draw attention.

I think I'm going to try and do some coining myself in 2012 though it seems like an art in itself. I think a good term can help clients in an advisory trajectory to see something very clearly. And if my own coining is not easy, I can still borrow terms from others that have inspired me like 'the networked non-profit' by Beth Kanter, 'filter failure' from Clay Shirky and 'ambient awareness'.

What can knowledge interventions contribute to development?

I was interviewed for Vice Versa and asked for input. It was a double interview together with Eric Smaling working for the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam. An interesting combination as he is well grounded in the science world as professor. I will blog what I remember as main points and issues. I hope I remember enough- waited a little too long to blog it and didn't make any notes (as the journalist was taping it). Curious to see what she will choose to publish too!

The first difference I remember is about what knowledge is. In my practitioners view- knowledge resides in the head of people, practitioners or policy makers. Eric Smaling would consider a phd research as knowledge. I would prefer to call this information rather than knowledge (if it does not reside in anybody's head except the phd student's head..). Or if you'd like to call this knowledge too, then I would like to clearly distinguish it from 'actionable knowledge', knowledge that leads to changing practices. Smaling pointed out that there is a gap between research and practice. A lot of research never gets transformed into changing realities. So how to close this gap? My solution would be to think of dynamic learning communities and networks where scientists, researchers and practitioners can meet. This solution is so logical to me, but I am now conscious of the fact that it is not all the solution for many others. I pointed out my belief in the power of south-south learning to increase the impact of development efforts. The World Bank has done a survey and the results tell us many respondents agree with this.

One of the first questions was 'what kind of knowledge should the Netherlands 'export' or 'transfer'?. I explained my vision that in my idea the counterpart model in development (the northern expert working with a southern person for a longer period of time) has disappeared because it is not how people learn and change happens. Rather, I look with a learning lens knowledge and change. Hence I start with the learner and his/her learning journey. Then it is more logical to talk about what are the knowledge needs and questions at stake. I'd say that depends on the sector and type of knowledge workers. A finance manager or minister could probably learn a lot from another manager or finance minister (through a network or community, though trainings, workshops and exchanges help too). But I guess the question of relevant knowledge within the Netherlands could be asked at a global, policy level in the sense of what are the strengths and expertise areas of the Netherlands.

This kind of led us to jump to the reciprocity in learning and knowledge sharing. Is learning north-south? Can we in the Netherlands also learn from developing countries? I definitely think so (and Smaling agreed). It is a pity if we feel that learning is north-south only, like I mentioned before, I believe in south-south learning and south-south-north learning. I gave the example of the forest landscape restoration learning network. A network where people from Brasil, Indonesia, Ghana and other countries learn, but also people from Scotland. Smaling and I both felt strongly that openess to learning is necessary. If you are in a relationship where you feel you are the expert or know more, you are not open to learning from others (but you may share). I have seen this between participants from two African countries (one looking down upon the other), I have seen it between departments in organisations and I've also noticed it myself as a trainer. What is, for instance, obstructing southern NGOs from learning is that they feel that they have obtained funding for a program because they can implement it. That doesn't favour asking questions or visiting others who may have undertaken similar programs. And sometimes it is simply lack of time. I feel when you start a new project, you should always ask around for experiences. That's not the common way of working.

Given my focus on south-south learning and networks (and alliances too by the way) to enhance learning for more impact on development, the interviewer was wondering 'but what's the role of the Netherlands'? Well, there is definitely a role to be facilitate south-south learning, to spot innovations, to compile information. As Lucia Nass, a former SNV colleague also observed there is a mindboggling number of website and manuals and even studies to compile and compare all manuals on climate change. We focus on collecting, but not enough on connecting the learners.

And ofcourse social media play a huge role and have an enormous potential to facilitate south-south-north learning, but there is a need to learn to make effective use of these media. To find information, to connect with the relevant people, to participate in online communities in ways that change and improve development practices. That's why I focus on helping people to start and facilitate communities, or to develop themselves using internet and social media. I think that we are starting to see a shift but to quote Clay Shirky "social media will not become socially interesting till they become technologically boring". In other words the real change in connecting likeminded learners and speeding up learning and change is still ahead of us.

We ended (if I recall well) with a kind of philosophical question about the role of internet and social media with regards to learning and working together in this globalised and connected world. Can we learn our way out of the global problems? On the one hand I'd like to be a sort of cyberutopian believing we will all learn to solve all global problems like poverty, climate change, feeding the growing world population. Peace through the internet. On the other hand I can imagine that there is a limit to collaboration when there is a scramble for dwindling resources. A kind of fighting for a piece of the cake. No matter how empathetic we may be, in the end we will try and make sure we and our closest families and friends are fine.

Working on knowledge flows in your organisation with social media

Here's an interview with Andrew McAfee from MIT (source McKinseyquarterly), talking about organisational change, related to improving knowledge flows with social media. He reaffirmes that it works to start with thinking about the challenge you want to address and from there work towards the tools and the way of measuring changes. For instance, the US intelligence had a serious knowledge sharing and expertise location problem. Through use of wikis and blogs with good search functions, the situation was improved. Another organisation had a problem with redundancy. They created a central and accessible space to ask questions and had others answer the questions. So his main adivse is: think upfront what you want to improve with social media, don't just introduce it for the sake of introducing technology.

Two tips:
* Find pockets of energy and work from there
* Signal from the top what you want to achieve and want to see (eg if it's people blogging, start blogging yourself)

What can really undermine adoption processes in organisations is dumping the tools without patience and encouragement, or being too concerned about the risks.

Unfortunately I have seen a case where both has been done. However it was really hard to introduce a new way of working. I thought in that case it would have helped to see it as a change process whereby tools are just one of a series of interventions.

You might watch the whole interview, it lasts about 10 minutes

About blogging, tunneling visions and knowledge entrepreneurship

I had the pleasure to attend a presentation by Julie Ferguson. Julie is doing research for the university of Amsterdam (VU) into (micro-)blogging as part of her PdD research about knowledge and power in the development sector. The research has not yet been published.

This research had the goal to investigate how knowledge related to a shared organising vision (in this case (ICT4D, about ICT for development). It analyzes the behaviour and perception of the bloggers. She interviewed 7 professional ICT4D bloggers (used interviews to identify those) and analysed their blogs. She has some remarkable conclusions.

Blogging has some so-called 'affordances':

• Many to many communication


• Reflection in practice
  


• Open and interactive
  

Because of these affordances blogs may enhance participation in ICT4D policy and practice, creating an organising vision. It has the potential to close the gap between the discours at policy level and the discours at country level, by organisations and 'the poor'. This was what the bloggers believed in. In practice things were slightly different. The findings:

Blogging as 'reflective practitioner'

All bloggers basically blogged for themselves, not for marketing or other purposes. Blogging helped them in sense-making, development of ideas and reflection on their practice as 'reflective practitioners'. Blogging may hence be an important activity for professional development of knowledge workers and can help develop their professional identity.

Blogging outside the organisational boundaries

All bloggers were pioneers and ahead in thinking of their own organisations. For some their blogging activities were controversial within the organisation. Blogging offered an important space for professionals outside the organisation, to exchange ideas with a wider group of people, mostly outside their organisation.

Bloggers contributed to a tunneling vision instead of organising vision

The idea of creating an organising vision through participation on blogs was not found through analysis of the blogs. The number of comments were relatively low (an average of 1,1 comment per blogpost); even though there were quite some readers. Most of the comments were positive, so the fear for negative comments that many organisations have was not confirmed by this research. (if I recall well, she said only 2% of comments were negative). On the contrary, many comments were appreciative like 'What a great post!'. By lack of real content interaction, the blogs were most of all a reflection of the individual professional bloggers, who we may see as 'knowledge-enterpreneur'. As a result, there was an overall fragmentation of ideas, instead of convergence. She could not discover an emerging organising vision. (it was not clear to me whether the bloggers were reading each other's blogs). Rather, ideas went into all kind of different directions.

New discours

However, despite the fragmentation of ideas, there was a new discours, outside the accepted visions of the organisation. You might say there were new lines of thinking, new directions explicited by these knowledge entrepreneurs. I asked Julie whether they influenced actual practice or policy, but that was outside the scope of her research. In some cases, she did get that impression though, that the blogs did influence policy and practice. This means that blogs can be a good tool for knowledge-entrepreneurs to stimulate innovative thinking within a sector. Though the research focused on the fragmentation, I do see this a something very positive.

Facilitators: we are needed!...

Simply by bloggers a new organising vision does not emerge spontaneous. This is the part where the obvious comes up: there is more needed than blogs to cultivate a collective vision, eg to cultivate a bloggers community, organise meetings, discussions of ideas presented in blogs. Think of what Global Voices ("the world is talking are you listening?") is doing to amplify the voices of bloggers in different countries. Also a teamblog might be an interesting alternative, like thes teamblog of NVO2. A teamblog might be more conducive to read each other's contributions than individual blogs.

The dynamics of managing/nurturing networks of practice

Image by D'Arcy Norman via Flickr

I received a beautiful article (thanks to Julie Ferguson!). Just got a tip through the comments that it's also online. This is the full reference to the article:

Agterberg, M., Van den Hooff, B., Huysman, M., & Soekijad, M. (2010). Keeping the Wheels Turning: The Dynamics of Managing Networks of Practice. Journal of Management Studies, 47(1), 85-108

The authors make a distinction between NoPs and CoPs; networks of practice and communities of practice. In their definition CoPs are co-located and NoPs are dispersed. I would not make that distinction, because the closeness between members does not depend on distance, people can really feel part of and identify with a community of practitioners who are based in different location all over the globe.

CoP or NoP doesn't matter, there are important insights into the management interventions to support NoPs (or CoPs I'd say...). The research question was: how can intra-organizational NoPs be managed without being 'killed'? Research has been done in a development organization founded in 1965 and headquartered in the Netherlands (Dutch people can easily guess :). Twenty-two NoPs were formalized with the goal of integrating existing, dispersed knowledge. Management created the formal position of a manager or functional line manager responsible for the NoP. This brings a central dilemma: how to balance emergent self-organization and autonomy on the one hand and some degree of formal management influence on the other hand?

I've never held the belief that communities are fully self-emergent and that you can not intervene/facilitate in communities of practice. Wenger has also written a lot about this management paradox and prefers to call it nurturing rather than managing. Managers should support and energize communities, not neglect and ignore them. (see also my previous post which includes an interview with Wenger).

What are the findings from the study of 22 NoPs in one organisation? Data reveal four sets of dynamics that influence the way NoPs function to integrate dispersed knowledge:

1. Organizational embeddedness- the extent to which the knowledge shared is relevant for the organisation. It includes institutionalization, the extent to which outcomes of the network can be applied in the formal organization as rules, routines, strategies, trainings etc and relevance for the organisation- the extent to which knowledge in the network is considered valuable for the organization.

2. Embeddedness in practice- the extent to which the knowledge being shared and created s relevant to and integrated in members local practices. It includes relevance to practice, as connection to daily local practices and common practices, extent to which the network members use the same practices.

3. Relational embeddedness- the presence of strong social ties. It includes the group feeling, trust, reciprocity as willingness to help each other and face-to-face contact.

4. Structural embeddedness- The structure of connections among people. It includes connectedness and Know who is where and knows what (and how to reach them).

Personally I feel relational and structural embeddedness are very connected to each other and both relate to the level of social capital.

But what did the study find out about management interventions in all these types of embeddedness? Management can enforce the dynamics or degrade the dynamics (which Wenger call 'energize' or 'de-energize'). A few examples of enforcing/energizing interventions:

• Translating experiences into formal publications and training
• Informing members about relevant developments in the domain
• Kick off meetings (to support relational embeddedness)
• Formalizing networks
• Providing tools like the E-group (online tool) and travel money to meet face-to-face
  

A few example of degrading interventions (de-energizing):

• Asking the networks fo formulate strategies (lowers embeddedness in practice)
• Setting the agenda (topics introduced by management were not the topics advisors perceived as relevant)
  
• Requiring specific outputs from the network (lowers embeddedness in practice)
• Making top-down decisions which counter the principles of commitment and organisational learning (lowers trust)
• Giving assignments without focusing on social issues
• Instruct people to attend a network meeting without the interest of advisors to be connected
• Install a network without encouraging advisors to participate
  

In the end, management interventions can have both a reinforcing and degrading effect and it sometimes depends on the context what the effect is. A strong focus on organizational embeddedness denies the practice based and socially embedded nature of learning and turns NoPs into teams.

Another conclusion is that managers "who play the role of primus inter pares seem better able to intervene successfully, but it is no easy task to identify such people." This relates directly to CoP literature indicating that the role of coordinator should be taken up by a practitioner in order to be effective. CoP literature makes a better distinction between the role of the practitioner- coordinator as member of the CoP versus management who are outsiders/sponsors. Nevertheless, I find the list of management interventions very useful, concrete (and even recognisable from experience!).

What motivates knowledge workers?

I just listened to a teleconference where the presentor has an accent and it was tough to listen. In those situations using visuals like a presentation or typing on an etherpad page or whiteboard can help too. Then I found this wonderful video here ... a cartoonist draws the story while it is told. A beautiful form!

But the content is equally appealing to me. Daniel Pink (I liked his book A whole new mind) explains how motivation of knowledge workers works. When paid more, they perform less. It does work to motivate people with payment when the tasks are mechanical. For knowledge workers, it doesn't work. What they are really looking for is self-direction and autonomy, mastery and making a contribution. That's what drives them. An example is giving of a firm where employees were allowed 100% self-direction for 24 hours. And then asked to share, which yielded nice work.

I recognize this from my own experiences working in organizations. I'm much happier working on my own, enjoying my autonomy. I think it is hard for organizations to offer that space. One thing I'm missing is that knowledge workers in organisations also need recognition. I had a hard time because I was always searching for recognition of my work, whereas managers were hardly interesting in what I was really doing. I hear this too in the experiences of friends who work in organizations. Managers tend to want to take the credit, which bereaves workers of the needed recognition for their contributions.

Well, if you have 10 minutes and are interested, watch it..

Related articles by Zemanta

• Book 60: A Whole New Mind (mootbox.com)

Interview with Chris Collison about the role of technology in knowledge management

I saw this video twice already on different blogs, but going to post it nevertheless. It is an interview with Chris Collison about the role of social media in knowledge management.

He states that he used to see technology as an enabler or driver for knowledge management. But social media has become more than that: it can be a disruptor in a positive way. He uses the example of Twitter, the connection to new people invites linking and sharing in new ways. It is not enabling more of the same behaviour, but disruptive because it leads to new possibilities.

Nevertheless, the term knowledge management 2.0 frustrates Chris because it seems like KM1.0 is thrown away. Whereas there are useful lessons from KM1.0 that need to be blended with enterprise2.0 tools.

Well, see for yourself if you haven't seen it yet.

Communities of practice in organisations: Interview with Wenger

On the learning conversations blog I found a video interview with Etienne Wenger in which he answers quite some basic questions about communities of practices in organisation. What they are, when not to foster them (they are not a panacee), how sponsorship of communities in an organisation differs from managing communities. Highlights: think about communities when there is a dynamic knowledge problem. Practitioners need to be in the lead. When there is a clear knowledge gap, just produce a manual. When there is a problem with an organisational process, don't try and solve it with a community of practice. And when there is really no-one who is passionate about the domain, forget about it too. Watch it if you have some 15 minutes and are interested in communities.

Communities of Practice from Multi Media Vision on Vimeo.

Internal micro-blogging for knowledge sharing within a department

Godfried Knipscheer works as digital communications advisor to the Flemish government in Belgium and is project leader of a social media project. I interviewed him about the use of Yammer as an internal microblogging tool.

At our department with 50 people there was a need for more knowledge and news to share. There are many meetings, meetings and seminars, but knowledge was not structurally shared. What have people learned in a conference or meeting? What valuable experiences do we have at work?

We have created a site with a blog and wiki functions (using Drupal). The site's name is Quagga. We have tried to find a name that people will remember. Quagga is an extint zebra species by the way. To ensure that people regularly visit Quagga and see what happens, we have put in Yammer. Yammer is a internal sort of Twitter. If you put something on Quagga, you can use Yammer to share it and visit Quagga.

How have we implemented it? In an information session for one hour, we explained the whole system: what is it, how it works and why we have chosen these web2.0 tools. We have also made a number of agreements for the use. It is now obligatory if there is an important meeting to put a report on Quagga. If anyone has been to a conference Quagga is used for sharing. If you have any read something fun and professionally, we find it valuable if you share, but it's not an obligation. In addition, a small group that has the role to encourage people to use Quagga. It was not necessary to encourage use of Yammer, which was very easy to use, the threshold for use of Yammer is very low. And we have communicated everything in a very practical manner, for instance, we said Yammer is a kind of chat whereby everyone can join the chat. The combination of compulsory and voluntary contributions has also worked well.

What are the results? Actually very good. Yammer has been played the role of an internal Twitter. People post little news, interesting sites, and there is sometimes an intense discussion. I myself feel that it works for team bonding. We have not evaluated it, but people are definitely more active knowledge sharing. Some people, such men that are building the stands, are now more visible. Joining a conference is less binding. You win not so much efficiency, but it improves your quality. There are a number of people who do not participate. Some indicate that it is not for them. Others have an excessive workload, such as the editors of the magazine staff. They don't find the time to read articles on Quagga.

Monitoring and evaluating communities of practice

We did a research for the IKMemergent program on monitoring and evaluating knowledge management strategies. The full publication will be up soon, but I already discussed the results in a teleconference in CPsquare and had a nice discussion how this relates to assessing results of communities of practice.

There are quite some challenges to overcome in monitoring and evaluating the effect of knowledge management strategies and interventies.

- One of the challenges is dealing with the time lag between the intervention and the impact. Sometimes benefits surface quite rapidly. We once had a new member who picked up an idea for elearning in the community, went back to her organisation and started implemented it organisation-wide. In other cases, ideas need greenhousing and it takes time for things to materialize or practices to change. On the other hand, the sponsors or donors may be eager to see results.

- Another challenge is quantifying the unquantifiable. You can measure whatever you can measure and use whatever data you have available, but you need stories to understand reality and how the community may have influenced the figures. You collect stories to understand the relationship between the figures: “this is where I took the idea and this is how I implemented it”. This will also help to prevent story-telling turning into success story telling.

- Yet anther challenge is to match inherent evaluation goals with extractive goals. An inherent evaluation is for people involved in the community or other effort, an extractive evaluation is for outsiders. At times a donor or manager starts asking for an evaluation at the time when doubt about the effectiveness has arisen. This is not the best time for an honest and open process. The question to be asked then is : does an assessment of results in itself imply a lack of trust in the leaders or the strategy?

In the end we realized that these dilemmas can not be solved by choosing a good method. It is the decision-making about whether or not to monitor and evaluate and ho wit will be done that matters. Therefore we wrote down 12 decisions that need to be taken in the form of answers. Hopefully that will guide people who are starting up a new initiative to improve knowledge management leading to innovation. You will find the 12 questions in the presentation. You will find the slides below.

Monitoring and evaluating knowledge management strategies

View more presentations from Joitske Hulsebosch.

the power of metaphors

Image by fataetoile/ Cinzia Rizzo via Flickr

I'm always amazed by the power of metaphors. Sometimes I try to 'cook' one myself and then it doesn't work so formulating or rather designing a good metaphor is not easy. In Ghana, people were generally strong in using metaphors, but unfortunately I didn't write them down. But if you like proverbs too, you can follow the twitter stream of African Proverbs.

Some strong metaphors I've come across: We all know the metaphor about marriage as a sailing trip. You step into the marriage boat and you will face rough weather, storm and the boat will rock. A little overused, but probably popular because it appeals to couples.

A very strong one that I still remember, even though I've come across it some years ago, is about the integration process by immigrants in the Netherlands. There is a lot of political debate about integration and integration problems and usually the immigrants are blamed for not speaking the language, not adapting etc. Then a person said: "it is like the highway; you can try to merge with the traffic on the highway, but you need to be given the space to pull your car over". This is such a good metaphor because it show that it is a two-way process.

And two weeks ago Irene Guijt gave a presentation about accountability at Partos Plaza. What I now recall from her presentation is the metaphor of the goose and the golden eggs. Talking about accountability she explained that you need to be aware of not only counting the golden eggs (the results) while killing the goose at the same time. Because you will not have any golden eggs in future. I think that's a strong metaphor to warn about for looking short-sightedly at (short-term) results without caring for the organisations and other actors that produce the results.

Do you have any metaphors that stick with you? What makes them so strong?

Follow the instructions or think for yourself?

I found this cartoon on the blog of Marnix Catteeuw. If you can't read the text, you can go to his blog. It was originally posted on the xkcd blog.

I fell into the same trap when I was trying to locate a physiotherapist with google maps. I thought it was handy that you can locate them on the map immediately. I discovered later that the good old fat yellow pages had many more referrals than google maps..

Great reminder that good professionals think for themselves and don't routinely follow the instructions..

Be aware of the fourth time assignment

I read somewhere about Sweden's 1967's shift in left-hand driving to right-hand driving. On the Monday following the shift, there were less traffic accidents, 125 reported traffic accidents, compared with a range of 130 to 198 for previous Mondays. Most had anticipated more traffic accidents. It is likely that the higher attention by drivers contributed to the lower number of accidents.

When my daughter learned how to cycle at the age of 4, I was very careful. When we cycled I cycled real close to her and held her neck near traffic. So she learned to cycle steadily. After roughly 6 months, I slowly started to pay less attention to her and got more confidence in her skills. Then, once when we were very near home she rode her bike behind me (normally in front of me), and a man came from the side and ran into her. It wasn't too bad, but she had some wounds because she fell with her face on the steer of the cycle.

I think knowledge workers may be at their best when they do a similar job for roughly for the third time. The first two times they gain experience. The third time is the best, small mistakes from the first times can be corrected. The fourth time assignment there is a risk that you loose attention and make unnecessary mistakes. Of course there may be individual difference and task differences. And you can argue that for knowledge workers, every assignment is unique, so it's hard to have a really similar job.

I started thinking about this when I thought about learning from mistakes. Somehow I don't believe in learning from mistakes. Most of the times, we know the mistakes but there are other reasons for underperformance like lack of attention.

What do you think? Do you recognise this? Or do real masters never loose their attention?

Learning from mistakes versus learning from feedback

On the knowledge management for development list there was a discussion about learning from mistakes. Matt Moore pointed to the mistakebank ning platform. I decided to join because I was curious to understand whether you can really learn from mistakes. Some of the examples I felt were rather blunders. For instance, I bumped into another cyclist today- that was clearly my mistake or rather blunder but nothing that you can really learn from, unless maybe to watch out more carefully but hey this is life... so you just say sorry.

And can we only learn from our own mistakes or also other people's mistakes? Through the mistakebank I found a blogpost citing Eleonore Roosevelt who said "learn from the mistakes of others, you can't live long enough to make them all yourself" which was contrasted with the idea that you can only learn from your own mistakes. That would imply we can observe others, their mistakes, and incorporate that in our own practices.

However, most mistakes are not as obvious as bumping into another cyclist. Most mistakes may go unnoticed, may not be recognised like mistakes by the mistaker (did I hear someone mention Bush??) or only by some and not by others. Or the effect of the 'mistake' may take long to become visible. I went back to Kenya where I worked and found out the whole irrigation scheme we built was flooded again because the water levels had risen. And at times it is easy to label something as mistake in retrospect.

In terms of changing practices, learning from honest feedback may be more important, in the form of spontaneous feedback or in organised processes like After Action Reviews. Today I got positive feedback about my blog by being mentioned in this list of knowledge management bloggers. I also got positive feedback after a meeting I conducted "may I give you a huge compliment for this meeting" someone said spontaneously. Since I became freelancer I got much more positive feedback than when I was an employee. I have the impression it is much harder to create a culture of feedback in organisations, after all, it is quite sensitive and may alter your relationships. I also got feedback recently I don't recognize. Hence, it's important the receiver recognises the feedback in order to act upon it, by giving clear examples.

Maybe we need to distinguish levels and types of mistakes? Or rather talk about experiments? Or is it more worthwhile to improve feedback? And how do we learn from mistakes as organisations?

The institute for minimal impact knowledge management

Green Chameleon made a funny video about the institute for minimal impact knowledge management (KM). You can learn to be seen involved in knowledge management without disturbing your real work. It is really funny, making fun of appreciative inquiry, corporate vlogging, six sigma, knowledge cafes and complexity. Knowledge cafes- the more you talk about something the less you understand it and the less you want to do something about it. Complexity is a great contribution to minimal impact KM, the more complex you can make it appear, the less accountable you are for the impact. Can you win the 0 impact award?

Watch it here:


It helps in our study of monitoring and evaluation of knowledge management strategies: if you have become an expert in minimal impact KM, can you become an expert is showing the maximum impact of your minimal impact KM? Maybe that's an idea for the next course for the institute?

Impact assessment of knowledge management interventions

Let me use (part of) a rainy saturday afternoon to try and organize some of my new thoughts about impact assessment. We (team of 3) are doing a study about Monitoring and Evaluation of Knowledge Management Interventions. I have been in 8 interviews and read a pile of papers around this topic. We are blogging some of it on the Giraffe team blog on this topic. We are currently working on a draft of the publication hoping to do justice to all interviews and literature. Here are my personal insights- developments in my own thinking. When I worked in development project I wasn't always enthused about monitoring and evaluation, apart from some participatory impact monitoring (PIM) efforts. However, working with various communities of practice, I come across the need to monitor and evaluation the impact. After all, the aim is not to have a community of practice, but to have a functional community of practice and which functional I mean stewarding knowledge and innovating practices. What has struck me in the interviews and literature is the following:

1. One remarkable thing is the concept of Knowledge Management itself. It is such an accepted, ordinary term for me, but not all others. It is a discipline I like, because of its integrated nature, fed by information technology, psychology, social sciences etc. The people who have negative associations with the term seem to find it difficult to see how you manage 'knowledge'. Personally, I don't think knowledge management is about managing knowledge, but about managing knowledge workers, organisational structure, process and systems. In our definition it is very close to terms as Organizational Learning. Chris Mowles felt knowledge management is coopted too much by management science, but I don't think it is in the development sector.

2. I see that I need to be more careful in distinguishing between measuring (using metrics like nr. of kilos etc), assessing (to determine the value), and reading (picking up signals, evolving understanding). Often I used these terms interchangeably, but they are different. Reading organizations is a powerful term that we used in Ghana when I worked with SNV (thanks Laurent!), but it took some time to see the link with this subject, I think reading is underestimated. Formal evaluation exercises take quite some investment, but informal readings by actors and sponsors take place all the time. Maybe we can more often trust the informal readings by actors instead of waiting for the report of an 'objective' evaluator.

3. The need for distinction (and often separation) between a developmental assessment and an extractive assessment. The first type of assessment has the aim to improve the situation and make sure the actors gain insights themselves, upon which they can act. An extractive assessment (or sometimes called for accountability) is aimed at proving value to sponsors or donors who are outsiders, to secure continued support. I think it's useful to keep the two aims more often separate. Lumping them together in one process can be very dangerous, as you will never be completely open when you are keen to prove something. A developmental assessment, or 'monitoring in the service of learning' as CDRA has neatly coined has its limits there is an extractive purpose too. I'm not saying it is impossible to combine the two purposes in one process, I think it is very well possible where there are fairly equal, mature relationships between actors and sponsors. However, in the development sector this is always a tricky thing. Who judges? What kind of decisions will be made on the basis of the results of the assessment? I've done it too, evaluate a network with the purpose to 'learn' but at the same time, everybody is aware that the donor has serious doubts.

4. The language of learning is another powerful insight- the way you talk about learning, the way you experience learning determines your choice of knowledge management interventions and the way you measure. Do you belief in informal learning or in training or both? When the purpose of an assessment is extractive and the language of the sponsors is not aligned with the language of the assessment, it may not have the intended effect. Continuous conversations between the knowledge actors and the sponsors may be more useful in that case. But if a person doesn't believe in an intervention will he/she be convinced by an assessment? Probably only when accompanied by the right conversations, not by a report. Discuss what the change process is that the knowledge management should bring about and choose an appropriate way of monitoring the changes.

5. Balance the cost of an assessment with the expected outcomes - it was very, very remarkable in the interviews with people working in the profit sector, that the whole topic of monitoring and evaluation of impact of knowledge management interventions seems less relevant. Why invest in an assessment when as a manager you see that something is changing in the right direction? When the cost of the knowledge management intervention is relatively small? Unless the outcomes will really be the basis for a change in strategy, or a major decision, why do you want to assess the impact in the first place? The fact that impact is not formally assessed does not mean there is no impact and that people don't have a sense of the impact. Managers have to stay in touch with reality and trust their professional observations. Investments in a formal assessment may only be justified when it's really important and strategic to know. On the other hand, a very light mechanism may do the work.

6. The need to discuss and decide where you stop to assess impact. I am a big fan of the INTRAC ripple model. Which makes the distinction between output, outcome and impact very clear. Etienne Wenger shared another similar model, but focused on communities of practice. Using such a model, you can decide where you stop your assessment. Unless data is readily available going to further levels may mean investing a lot of energy in collecting information that may be useless. The further away from the centre the ripples are, the more uncertainty in attribution. I enjoyed the example of Mattieu Weggeman of a management team that was more open and collaborative. Only to find out that the director had fallen in love with a legal person and this relationship rather than the intervention changed his attitude. However, stories may go a long way in explaining changes in all their complexities.

7. Figures, stories and conversations
Etienne Wenger stressed that figures don't mean a thing without the stories explaining the figures. And without conversation about both, it is not likely that it will lead to change. I find it interesting that a person from outside the sector mentioned this, since in the development sector this 'rule' would apply even stronger because in the south the preference for oral communication above textual communication is even stronger. Chris Mowles added his observation that there are far too many monitoring and evaluation figures and reports, and far too little sense-making.

One thing I'm struggling with is how to avoid that stories become success stories. Maybe by focusing on the right questions?

List of 50 Knowledge Management Blogs

Following the referrals to my blog I found this list of 50 KM blogs. Hard for me, as I'm trying to keep my bloglist under 50, but I'm already at 90. If it is more than 50, I get discouraged to read them, and it starts to feel like an additional duty. And that's not what I want. So maybe I should change my bloglist to this 50? Anyhow, a useful reference for people who learn through reading blogs and want to learn about the field of Knowledge Management

Employees Must Wash Hands

I am back home from a one month holiday in the eastern part of the USA - my first time to visit the US which was very inspiring and revealing! I thought I would blog on the way; but I didn't get to it because I did not spend many hours on computers. Somehow I thought you need to blog regularly to prevent that your readership will drop drastically. It is nice to see that isn't the case. I don't see any noticeable drop after 4 weeks at least.

Visiting the US was interesting because seeing part of the US made me understand a lot of the movies I have seen, and world politics, economy, etc. in a different way. The US is not a new country you don't know anything about, but seeing it with your own eyes makes a huge difference. When you work in an African country, people from the US and Europoe are often seen as 'Westerners'. It was impressive to see the cultural differences between the Netherlands and the US, but also to experience that as a newbie you don't know about many things and don't understand them. At first we didn't know how to fuel our car ('lift the lever') for instance. One of the signs in the bathroom struck me as utterly weird- the sign you see in the picture reading "Employees Must Wash Hands Before Returning to Work". At the end of the trip it felt normal seeing the signs (you see them in virtually all the bathrooms in restaurants-called restrooms by the way). I still wonder whether the reminder is seriously intended for the employees - which seems quite paternalistic to me to be told to wash your hands! Or rather for the customers to show the company cares about hygiene. Anyhow, this is just one example of how a newcomers looks around with fresh eyes.

To make the link to knowledge management in organisations: I guess organisations could make more systematic use of this phenomenon by asking explicit feedback from their new employees after a certain period on job. I heard of an organisation that did a 100- days feedback. Seems that can give very good insights and would allow the managers in the organisation to see the organisation with fresh eyes.