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.

Iceberg metaphor for information and knowledge management

I've used the iceberg as a metaphor for group dynamics or group processes in teams versus content. The content and what's being said is the tip of the iceberg and the groups dynamics are all under water. Anecdote has published a white paper called: Our take on 'how to talk about Knowledge Management'.

They use the same metaphor of the iceberg to explain the difference between data, information and knowledge and it works very well too. The tip of the iceberg represents data and information. It is the domain of data and information management. It requires a certain skill set. The bulk of the iceberg below the waterline represents the knowledge in people's heads. The water the iceberg is floating in represents the organisational culture. In this domain below the waterline, a completely different language is used.

A great metaphor because it explains how professionals working above and below the waterline may clash and may find it hard to collaborate. However, if you understand the complementarity, it may help. It may look like advocating the underwater knowledge management, but both approaches are equally valuable and necessary. When a knowledge management initiatives focuses too much on data and information management, it may not have the expected effect on the (invisible) knowledge creation and innovation side.

Conversations in communities of practice

I had dinner with a friend and suddenly we were discussing how to do the laundry. It made us laugh because we never discuss how to do the laundry. Basically over dinner, we always cover our work (and what doesn't work in work), work/life balance, gossiping over other friends, children and sometimes a bit of politics. Did you ever notice that with certain friends or colleagues you always cover the same topics, though with variations on how you cover it? I once saw the play 'Painicilline' by Alex d'Electrique where 3 scientists are nominated for a price and waiting for the result. It takes long and you see a pattern of conversation between the 3 men that gets repeated and repeated. The same topics come up and get discussed in just a slightly different way.

In communities of practice, the same phenomenon occurs. The same topics are covered and others become 'undiscussables' or simple 'not discussed'. A facilitator can play a role in introducing new subjects of conversation, by changing the medium, inviting new participants or inviting new experts to interact with the community.

Clay Shirky on collaboration via the internet

I bought Clay Shirky's book 'Here comes everybody' to read during my holidays. I hesitated because not everyone was positive, it might not have so many new insights. But I decided I would read it after all.

Yesterday, I found this video from the tedtalks with Clay Shirky talking about collaboration via the internet versus institutions. Interesting to watch (20 minutes). He points to the fact that coordination costs have come down tremendously so that collaboration is possible on a scale and at a speed that can't be reached by institutions. Institutions are the slow ones with relatively high coordination costs. Smarter collaborations are coming up. Planning is no longer necessary as it used to be, like the mobile phone made us lazy in planning our meetings carefully. An example of this collaboration he mentions is the pro-ana movement. (which I also blogged about). The infrastructure offered by the internet is generic, accessible to anybody. I liked his statement that the question of whether bloggers are journalists is a wrong question. Journalist used to be a solution to the problem of public information. Now the whole field has changed. (like when the book- press was invented leading to 200 years of chaos). He predicts 50 years of chaos to come.

At times I think, like electrons, we start spinning at increasingly higher speeds.
I hope that his book will address some of the questions around power and leadership. Probably without some visionary Ana's there wouldn't be the pro-ana movement.

It's easy to miss something you're not looking for

By coincidence I found Jayson's blog and this video. We all know the phenomenon that you see pregnant women when you are pregnant (or want to be pregnant), children with braces when you child need one etc. This clips illustrates what you might miss in the process. Have fun!

Bad teamwork can produce good results

(Cartoon via Jayson Joseph Chacko)




In Ghana I once did a casestudy of a multi-cultural team with difficulties. I discovered a lot of emotions underneath the surface of collaboration, working together and team meetings. Lots of misunderstandings. Lots of unspoken and untested ideas. I thought I could relate this team's functioning with the outcomes of the team's work, which weren't always impressive.

Recently I had two experiences of teams that were having similar difficulties. I was part of a Dutch team organising a conference. I was not part of the second team but was helping them in their work. For both teams, I felt the teams were not doing well in terms of teamwork, not leveraging the individual strengths of its members, and not able to work through the important differences in opinion about the work and the working modalities. In both cases individual team members held underlying assumptions that were not discussed, due to time constraints. (this ofcourse means not prioritising this).

To my surprise, however, (and contrary to my beliefs) both teams produced quite good results. The team I was part of did a learning history. The learning history showed me that I still had some strong frustrations about the team process, but because of the good result (the conference) I can live with it. The other team is going downwards in its performance. Combining both experiences, I now feel that it is possible to be opportunistic, focus on the end result and live with a suboptimal teamprocess. However, in the long run, you do need to address the emotions of the teammembers to be able to function well as a team over a longer period of time.

How Can Nonprofits Use Online Video?

The Netsquared question time time is: 'How can nonprofits use online video to raise funds?' and I took the liberty to delete the last three words because I don't know much about fund raising. I'm not any professional moviemaker either, but that's exactly the clue about online video: you don't need any professional filmmakers anymore!. That makes it much cheaper and a tool that is within reach of ordinary nonprofit workers. If students can film their fellow students and put them on youtube, so can we. I even felt a little ashamed when I was once asked as an online video consultant, because I'm not a professional in video as a medium at all. But there was a need to learn things the simple, short, quick and dirty way.

So it is easy and everyone can learn it. But why should we engage with online video as a nonprofit?

1. Video can be a weapon for non-violent nonprofits. You shoot with images.
See the documentary by Netwerk (in Dutch) about the project 'shooting back'. The projects hand Palestinians cameras so that they can film irregularities and make this known. You can watch some of the videos here on the site of B'tselem.

2. Video brings across messages in a different way. Your message doesn't drown in the sea of text.
At times I get pointers to weird videos and watch them. People like to watch videos in complement to all the reading they do. Furthermore, for nonprofits working in more 'orally-oriented' cultures, with less habits of reading text, it can be good to use video. However, when I'm in a hurry I don't watch a lengthy video. So a combined strategy could be best. The time-span that people can watch videos in influenced by culture too. Some people like very short videos, for others, it doesn't bring the point back home. (probably should have videod this to prove, but I dislike filming myself :).

3. Online video by non-professional filmers has the 'beauty of imperfection' (quoting Mark Fonsceca here). This means it is more authentic and does not have technical perfection that professional videos have. Hence, people can believe in it more easily than in videos that are purposely made to 'sell' the message of a nonprofit.

4. Online videos can walk or run across the internet.
Some interesting videos go viral (as has happened with the commoncraft videos). But even if they don't go viral (sounds like something to avoid), you can host them on hosting sites like youtube or blip.tv. The sites now provide you with a code that allows you to embed the video in a weblog or in a website. In other words, your video can travel. You can read about a practical example from UNICEF (videos going viral).

5. With online video more people can enjoy the face-to-face events that you organise.
When you film a face-to-face presentation, or interview someone about the highlights of a meeting and put that online your event will have a wider outreach. It becomes more transparent what you are doing and organising. This is even more interesting for organisations working in far away places. In other words, you can bridge the gap between donors and your partner organisations in other countries without the donors travelling all the way down.

Some practical tips on how to use mobile phones to make videos can be found on my own blog here. Beth Kanter made a great wiki. And here's my 12 step vlogging process explaining how to vlog a meeting.

Collaboration at the design stage

I can't help but thinking about collaboration every time I take the train at Ypenburg, a relatively new station. The yellow line says "train does not stop along this line". The yellow line is an improvement that was painted only a month ago or so. The first time I took the train at this station, I didn't realize the train stops almost 100 meters further on, would have missed it if the conductor had not allowed me to sit in the 'cockpit' of the train, I was clearly not to first to almost miss the train.

Last week I asked a conductor why the train does not stop at the centre of the station (the obvious place). He replied it is because there is a stop sign for the train. Clearly two engineers (or an engineer and an architect) did not work together while designing this station! It shows that it is very simple to say that you have to collaborate with the relevant professionals, but in practice, finding out whom to collaborate with at the right moment is more messy.

Play with wordle and put a tagcloud on your tshirt

Here's a wordle tagcloud for this blog. (through Patti Anklam) You can find the words community, practice and domain as well as facilitator/facilitated/facilitatitive/facilitatorobot.... As well as some of my stopgaps like interesting, use, good, ... It seems to overrate the last content, my last blogpost was about LinkedIn and LinkedIn stands out as the main topic.

Anyhow, it is a fun tool because you can either enter a list of words, a delicious user, or a URL of a blog or website. You can choose the font, the colors etc. You can not create a .jpg file, but you can print it or turn it into a pdf.

Here's another one for my Dutch blog:

Use LinkedIn to make your work easier

I've been using LinkedIn as a passive repository of my face-to-face network. Occasionally, people find out we have a common acquaintance and that's fun to know. Not a life changing application for me.

I've been wondering whether I should/could use LinkedIn in more ways. Friends told me that they find/receive CVs of interesting candidates through LinkedIn. Get in touch with conference organisors etc. A new teacher at the Masters was found through LinkedIn contacts.

Though I never have to find candidates for vacancies, we recently looked for a partner for a consultancy, using our good old face-to-face network. We found a great one, but it would have been a nice experiment to try and use LinkedIn.

Commoncraft has made a video about LinkedIn. (their videos hardly need to be spread as they are widely known by now). However, I liked this video about LinkedIn because it doesn't explain the basics of LinkedIn but explains how you can use LinkedIn to facilitate your work.

Exploring the language of facilitation

I bumped into a fascinating article about the 'language of facilitation'. By coincidence, one of the authors works for Anecdote, a company with a great weblog. The researchers wanted to find out what it means to speak 'facilitatively', from the premise that it is through the act of talking and speaking that sense is made and action enacted (Weick). They talk about face-to-face facilitation, not online facilitation.

To speak facilitatively means:
1. saying something that invites more thought
2. is behavioural and incorporates elements of body language
3. an attitude style emerging in language
4. using engaging and opening words like 'exploring', 'possibilities' rather than closing words like 'givens'.

A highlight to check out are the metaphors that facilitators use to describe their style of facilitation, most using movement with the elements, like 'flight of an autumn leaf' or 'sailing, going with the flow'. (too fluid for me by the way!)

A major conclusion of the article is that verbal and non-verbal communication of a facilitator should be in congruence, to ensure authenticity and show genuine curiosity and openness, otherwise the facilitation speech becomes a learned technique (my addition). There is an implicit understanding amongst facilitators of what it means to speak facilitatively, opening up discussions to become dialogues.

You can read through the lines, that the definition of a facilitator is someone who guides a discussion and is in front of the group or at least has a special, designated role. The definition of facilitator is a little shallow, but basic. What he/she does are things like providing a climate of trust, being neutral, ensuring clarity and encouraging inclusiveness. When you think of a facilitator of a community of practice the language of facilitation may be important too, but in my opinion you'd need to bring along a lot more like knowledge about communities of practice and the domain, and ability to read what's going on in terms of community, domain and practice development. Would be interesting to do a similar research what a facilitator of a community of practice 'does'. Similarly, in a group, I'd expect the facilitator to read group dynamics and try and intervene or feed back observations.

For the Dutch speaking people, there is an interesting article by Julien Hafmans in Dutch about 'vrijplaatsen'. She argues that it is interesting to share the facilitation role with all participants, since we all have the capacity to summarize, ask questions, listen, probe. So not one facilitator would speak 'facilitatively', we would all speak 'facilitately'.

Communities of practice and bulldozers

CPsquare invited Mark Bennett of Rio Tinto to talk in a teleconference about his experiences with fostering communities of practice within Rio Tinto, an international company. I missed the call because I thought GMT= London time, but I discovered that London is not the same as Greenwich. Fortunately, the call was recorded and I could listen to it while driving around. Since I was driving, I couldn't take any notes. However, I recall that Mark Bennett said that a good definition of the domain can be very compelling and attract new members to a community like a magnet. This is something I have observed too. The definition and formulation of the domain is an intervention that contributes (with lots of other factors) to the success of a community of practice. The definition should be such that people recognise it as one of their own interests. He further talked about the place of community builders and knowledge managers in the organisation. Research and development, human resource department or IT department? ?The last seems to be the worst option.

You can see a video he used to demonstrate the value of the community of practice here. It took quite an investment to make the video because he wanted to be absolutely sure that the innovation worked. The video tells the story of a coalmine in Australia with problems with bulldozer brakes. They used collaborative forums to ask for advice. They found out that two engineers in other parts of the world had experienced similar problems and had already solved them.

Join Be The Media

I was triggered by a blogpost by Beth Kanter on the web2.0 Kool Aid. Kool aid is a reference to the 1978 cult mass-suicide in Jonestown, Guyana. It means acting non-sensical through (strong) peer pressure. Not seeing things in perspective! At times people become over optimistic about web2.0 and what it can do. After all, it will not change the basic nature of human beings. So it is good to be critical. I always say that I don't think everyone should use blogs, wikis or bookmark. However, you should know about the tools in order to decide whether you want to use it or not.

Through Beth's blogpost I learned about the Be The Media project of Nten, which she is leading. The Be the Media project is "a community of people from nonprofits who are interested in learning and teaching about how social media strategies and tools can enable nonprofit organizations to create, compile, and distribute their stories and change the world."

If this sounds interesting to you, you can join the google group. Or read about the other ways to participate in the wiki. You can use the tag bethemedia (initially I read it like Beth the media :). I wonder how it is overlapping with the nptech tag?

What does online community mean to you?

Via Bob Stumpel I found this video with almost 100 (?) respondents to the question : 'What does online community mean to you?'. They're all young except one, who answers: 'young and old being friend together'. It video is about 8 minutes.



The answers range from crazy, addictive via revolution and inspiration to boring comedy and popularity contest. Listening to them, I realized that I'm using the same tools in a very different way. I'm on youtube, and blip.tv, but not feeling part of the 'youtube' community. I'm using it to connect smaller groups of people, networks and communities of practice. By using online means I'm actually hoping to get different conversations than when it's face-to-face. By the way, there were also a lot of answers refering to the worldwide connections.

Re-connecting with Modibo, Soledad and Jamlick

(picture by Ptorres)

Yesterday I got a message on Facebook from Soledad, a girl I met in Portezuelo, Chile, in 1987 during my practicals (don't start counting how old I am!). I couldn't remember Portezuelo, because I had started to twist the story. When people asked me where I worked in Chile, I mentioned San Bernardo, Chillan and Temuco, and I believed I worked in Chillan, forgetting that it was actually Portezuelo, a village near Chillan. As soon as I found this picture via google maps, I remembered Portezuelo, the vineyards and Soledad with her long beautiful hair. Reconnecting on facebook means being able to hear her whole life story, it's like watching a film. She is married, has a daughter and is composing music and writing stories and poems! In similar ways I reconnected with Modibo (via skype) and with Jamlick (via a weblog project). All people I met across the globe in the writing-letters-with-stamps-age. Somehow, I never managed to keep writing letter for a long period.

The natural limit to friendship circles is said to be 150, the Dunbar number. The question is whether online social networking will increase that number. I think it will- we can keep much lighter connections with more people. I am able to leverage my 'old' face-to-face friends contacts online. At time I wonder whether we are too optimistic about the possibilities of internet, but when this kind of things happen, I can't help raving. Thanks to Facebook and skype these people with whom I lost contact were able to track me down. We can keep loose connections in future. Know how they are doing, and connect when possible. It's still not possible to be in close contact with all the nice people I knew in the past, Jamlick and I called each other on the phone twice, but we did not keep this up. However, I am now aware of Jamlick's project and Kenya, and it will be easy to meet up if your schedules allow it one day.

Proving versus improving

I'm involved in the accreditation process of the Business School where I'm teaching one subject of the Masters course: Interactive Project Design. Educational accreditation according to wikipedia is: a type of quality assurance process under which a facility's or institution's services and operations are examined by a third-party accrediting agency to determine if applicable standards are met.

During the test interview for the accreditation process I participated in, I had an interesting experience. I realized how quickly as a group of teachers, we were becoming into a 'convincing the accreditors' mode, ready to twist information, or withold some information smartly if that yields a better result. I did not express any of my criticisms or constructive feedback I might have had. It's clearly not a learning process, it's an accreditation process. Nevertheless, I learned something about the other courses and the views of other teachers, you cannot turn off your personal learning process.

It made me think about all the evaluations that are taking place to evaluate development projects and/or programs, I have been part of them in different roles, as project staff and as evaluating consultant. I have been struggling with the popular concept of using evaluation for learning purposes, as there is a friction between the two. The friction is referred to as the dilemma between 'proving' versus 'improving' or 'accountability' versus 'learning'. In the accreditation case, it is a clear case of assessment for accountability, proving the quality of your masters education is of an adequate level. There are no separate learning objectives. When development projects/programs are evaluated often a learning objective is added. Though people involved in a evaluation always learn something, the process is enormously flawed by the need to prove that you are right. I've know it, but I've not felt it as strongly as when I was part of this team trying to convince the accreditors.

Today I found an interesting online resource from the Society for Organisational Learning called Assessing to Learn or Learning to Assess. A quote from Senge: "... re-establish a healthy balance between assessing for learning and assessing for evaluating. If the balance has tipped to emphasis on evaluating to the extent that it actually impedes learning, learning processes will benefit from increasing emphasis on assessing for learning. It is low leverage to complain that there is too much emphasis on evaluating, outsiders wanting to know if learners are adding value. It is probably much higher leverage to build our 'assessment muscle,' to help learners to get better at assessing for learning."

I believe the emphasis in the development sector has been on assessing to evaluate projects and programs to prove value to donors, rather than structuring assessments for learning. In doing so, it leaves important opinions, criticism and constructive feedback unheard.

How much time does web2.0 take?

I often get the question how much time it takes to blog... Since I'm a meticulous time-writer, I know this blog takes me less time than I'd imagine myself- 4-6 hours per month with 2-3 blogposts per week - but then I measure only the writing of blogposts. If you'd include reading other blogs and thinking through topics for blogposts it'd be much higher.

I was delighted to find the museum2.0 blogpost talking about the time it takes a nonprofit organisation to engage with web2.0. The image was copied from museum2.0's blogpost too. It describes what you can do in a week or less of web2.0. Got 1-5 person hours each week? Become a participant, but don't start running an online community. If you have 5-10 hours per week, become a content provider. With 10-20 hours per week, become a community director!

As my example shows- you can be a blogger with less devoted time- but is it meaningfull to blog without taking part in the rest of the blogosphere? Then it becomes a PR tool with a different purpose - just to inform. To find all kind of practical things to do with the hours you have, you can go to the blogpost and read the great suggestions.

But yes, it DOES take time, and if you don't pay attention, people will experience it as extra workload. I think this is a huge problem that organisations underestimate the time it takes to network or engage with others online. For a face-to-face meeting, you get your hours, but networking online is often not costed (enough) in hours. Or people think that an online community runs itself...

From a meeting to a community of practice: lessons from the ecollaboration community facilitation

From a meeting to a community of practice - Upload a Document to Scribd

Read this document on Scribd: From a meeting to a community of practice

Sibrenne Wagenaar and I co-facilitated the inter-organizational ecollaboration learning community for two years, basically from a meeting to a community of practice. Since there seems to be an interest to better understand what facilitating a learning community from a communities of practic theory means we decided to document our actions, observations and reflections in a wiki. We used those meticulous observations to describe our way of facilitating this learning communities. Maybe because of our own enthousiasm, or because of the detailed documentation, the article has become rather long: 20 pages. It was accepted by the Journal of the International Association of Facilitators and can be found online here, but you have to be a member to access it there. The full citation is:

Wagenaar, S., & Hulsebosch, J. (2008). From 'a meeting' to 'a learning community' Community of Practice theory-informed facilitation of an inter-organizational community of practice: the case of the e-collaboration learning community. Group Facilitation: A Research and Applications Journal, 9, 4-25

Fortunately we are allowed to make it available more widely. Therefore I have uploaded it using Scribd (I first tried Edocr, but that didn't work) and you should be able to access it through this link.

We explain 11 principles that we have tried to put into practice. I think some of these principles are make it clear that facilitating a community of practice is not the same as facilitating a workshop or training, it's a different art. We tried to make it 10 or 7, but couldn't manage to reduce the number!

1. Act as learning facilitator-practitioner
2. Co-facilitate to reduce blind spots
3. Embed learning in actual practices
4. Stimulate self-organisation
5. Facilitate conversations in public and private spaces
6. Use the variety in the community
7. Balance the focus on tangible and intangible products
8. Guide meta-level reflections
9. Distinguish between two layers of practice in the learning community: the level of individual practices, and the level of collaborative practices
10. Manage sponsor relationships
11. Manage the boundaries

In search of germs

On June 2nd, with a group of CoP enthousiasts, we organised a working conference about communities of practice in the Netherlands, which was attended by roughly 75 people. I had the impression not everyone who has experience working with this concept was present, but it's a good start. The start of the day worked well, everyone was handed a quartet card, and had to find the other 3 people to form a quartet. This offered a nice way to start networking, and lateron in the day, we came back to this group to reflect on our experiences. In the picture you see my quartet.

With Sibrenne Wagenaar, I facilitated the 'facilitation circle'. I enjoyed it very much. Though a lot of people are searching for 'how to facilitate a CoP' there were also some people with interesting experiences. The dilemma between 'sturen en loslaten' - 'steering versus let go' appeared to be a key theme for most of the participants. In the afternoon the term 'kiemkracht' - 'germinal force' was coined to represent the seed that you are looking for when you start facilitating. Without germinal force you may start pulling a dead horse and that's not fun!

From my experience I would see the following 4 signals to identify germinal force:

Signal 1: If a group of practitioners are together, conversations flow spontaneously and hardly need any facilitation. The exchange generates energy, it is an endogeneous process.

Signal 2: Different actors have a stake to innovate practices, the actors can be practitioners or sponsors of the CoP or both.

Signal 3: Practitioners are passionate about the domain, and have a personal connection with it, but may be working in relative isolation. One or several persons have a vision that working together may catalyze innovation.

Signal 4: There is already an informal network around the domain of the community, but there is no effort to systematically exchange and generate knowledge. There are possibilities to improve knowledge creation and innovation in practice.

In case of organisational CoPs, you could add a fifth signal:

Signal 5: The domain of the CoP is of strategic importance for the mission of the organisation

Any ideas? Do you need a Yes to all signals in order to invest or are there situations where you can work on a CoP without one of these germinal forces?

If we would use these signals to analyze the germinal force for a community of practice about communities of practice in the netherlands, you can say that signals 1, 3 and 4 are strong, but signal 2 is weak, there isn't really an organisation or actor with a strong interest to innovate CoP practices within the Netherlands.

The lion and the hunter

I found this image on the weblog of my friend Denise who lives in Ghana and she gave me permission to use it. The picture is taken at a mural at Fort Prinzenstein an old slave fort located near the Keta Lagoon Volta Region, Ghana. During my time in Ghana, I enjoyed the lively metaphors my colleagues were using. Unfortunately I didn't write them down. Often there were animals involved. I enjoy this one because it highlights the subjectivity in stories and that there are always different perspectives to take.

Unfortunately the web2.0 is not yet leveraged at large scale by people in developing countries. Ít will need some historians to show that African countries are not only about misery and hunger. Looking at African countries in the misery and they need help way means we don't see what's there to learn (Not that I'd say that they are the lions and we are the hunters!).