I don't know about you but the first thing I do when I
visit a friends house I've never been in before is take a look at his or her
bookshelves. It gives me extra insight in interests, scope and depth of
interests, and more often than not points me to interesting reads I had not
discovered yet myself.
To create a bit of that
feeling right here in my blog, I've added the titles that I'm reading at the
moment. Adding all the hundreds of titles on my shelves would be to much, of
course. So now you have some impression of what is keeping me
thinking/entertained. And of course, thanks to Amazons associate program, if you
decide to click on the book and go ahead and buy it for yourself, this will
result in some discount on my next purchase with them.
Permalink
| Comments (0) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at November 29, 2002 08:28 AM)
Join a Tribe!
The historical development of western man went from
hunter-gatherers, to nomads, to tribal farming villages, to industrial age
towns, and now to cybernavigating city-dwellers. And this week I took a step
back and joined a tribe. A tribe? Yup! My anthropology teacher already told me
that the steps in western man's history do not form an evolutionary path in the
sense that all other peoples will follow the same pattern in their development.
And then proceeded to give examples of people who took the same steps in a
totally different order but still were growing strong. I probably proved him in
point by joining this tribe.
I am talking about the Bloggers-Tribe over at Ryze, a networking community somewhat like Ecademy, but upon first experience with a
more relaxed take. Andrea Janssen strengthened this impression by telling me
that to her it was another layer to her social network, and not in as much a
place to pick up business contacts. I think that's actually a good thing. From
stronger social ties, business ties will follow where trust is already
established. Ryze organises people around common interests and calls these
groups Tribes. Go have a look if you want, and join in. It already introduced me
to bloggers as yet unknown to me, but with interesting things on their minds.
Permalink
| Comments (0) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at November 29, 2002 08:19 AM)
Knowledge Roles Rolling
The Knowledge Roles are rolling around the
blogosphere, notes
Andrea. Thought?Horizon
warns us not to take these roles as who we are, but as actions, what we do. I
agree totally. Like with Belbin's
Teamroles I see several roles I feel very comfortable with, several that I
don't feel comfortable with at all, and others I'm pretty neutral to. However,
as Thought?Horizon points out, as a lone Knowledge Manager I might have to take
on all 12 roles. I am not really sure I agree to that, but if it is true my job
turns out to be a daunting task. ;)
My gutfeeling says it
might be a way to give some structured view to my activities, as I am constantly
switching between more strategic knowledge issues, and down to earth details of
every day practitioning. This makes the question "What is it that you do" often
hard to answer in one sentence. I do everything, and yet do nothing, is what it
mostly boils down to. These roles might make my activities more recognizable,
more tangible of sorts, to me and others.
Permalink
| Comments (0) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at November 28, 2002 12:52 PM)
The Seeds of Success
Dianne Ford of the Queen's School of Business in
Kingstown, Canada, has written a very useful paper
on Trust in KM. She addresses different aspects of trust, and directly links
them to different knowledge processes in organisations. This paper might be very
useful in translating what I have said earlier on the role of trust in
organisations and km into practical approaches. It is also very worthwhile to
check out the rest of the website of Queen's Business School's
href="http://www.business.queensu.ca/kbe/">Centre for Knowledge-Based
Enterprises.
In Fliegen von ferne, Andrea Janssen's weblog, David
Skyrme is cited on
the roles in KM he distinguishes. The different roles build on different
strengths ands personality traits. Andrea posts it as a means for determining
your career 'anchors'. It reminds me however of the Team Roles by Belbin. Thus David's
roles in KM become not only a means of determining your personal position in the
big picture, but also a way of determining what roles you need to get a certain
KM task done. Sort of building your KM project team. In my organisation I am the
only KM officer. Being able to recognize suitable knowledge roles of my
colleagues might be a way to build stronger and more succesfull KM-initiatives.
While preparing for an exam
Tuesday afternoon, I started correlating the material under study, dealing with
the task description and fields of operation for a 'philosopher of technology',
with what I have said here earlier on trustflows in organisations. First of all
it seems not clear to everyone that organisational structures are able to convey
messages, e.g. concerning trust. This is perhaps easier to understand from this
perspective: Every man made item, whether it be an artefact, or something
uncorporeal like organisational structures, have been designed by human beings.
This design process specifically embeds instructions and meanings into the
artefact/structure. This is called scripting. You have to follow the
script for the artefact to fulfull its function. However a well established fact
is that humans think of uses for artefacts other than have been designed into
them. Also humans recognize other scripts than have been embedded, they start
following scripts that were not intended by design. Thus artefacts are no longer
the extension of the designer, but become actors themselves. Lots of
technology implementations fail because of not recognizing this effect. This
means that structures in organisations cannot be seen as neutral contexts of
operation for people, but should also be considered active participants within
that system of meaning. This is what I mean when I say you have to search
for the hidden messages organisational structures convey concerning trust. Also
you have to be aware that there are probably a number of different systems of
meaning, or partial rationalities in place in your organisation. It would
be a mistake to focus only on one of these partial rationalities and then define
generic solutions. Also it will probably prove impossible to find one partial
rationality that covers all the others that exist within your organisation. Yet
this is precisely what general management often tries to do. It is from this
starting point that I have worded the need for looking at boundaries between
different parts of the organisation, the comparison of both formal and informal
structures within the organisation, and social network analysis. It not only
provides insight in all the different partial rationalities at play, but also
narrows down the area where your proposed solution will have the effect you
designed into it. This leads us to a management lesson often learned already:
there are no absolute answers or generic solutions, there are no quick fixes,
but there will be a whole mix of solutions that you have to apply to the precise
spot it is designed to address.
In recent months I have spend
time regularly on trust and its implications for knowledge management. This has
all been sparked by a article of John Moore on the value of trust. Only last
week a whole new Trust Special
Interest Group on KnowledgeBoard.com has been started, which John moderates,
since the topic had become too large to be just a part of the Emotional
Intelligence SIG. A must-go-see for all who are interested in trust. Also I
wrote an article on the role of trust
in knowledge management myself, and among the people reacting to it, was
Frank Kouwe, who is knowledge manager with Waterschap De Dommel, a semi-governmental
institute for regional watermanagement. Last Friday we met and discussed how to
go about getting a picture of trustflows in his organisation. A sort of
temperature reading of trust. As I work for a company that deals with developing
questionnaires, e.g. for employee satisfaction measurement, it seemed likely to
start from there. Normally these types of research address communicational and
leadership issues in a company, topics which can also be viewed from a Trust
point of view. Both leadership and communication probably have large trust
components build into them. We strongly suspected that trust is not something
you can ask about directly. Either you won't get useable answers because the
questions get too abstract, or people will give answers that seem desireable. So
how to ask about trust in questionaires? We came up with the following points:
Give examples and ask what one what would do given this situation. (e.g.
Say, you don't trust a colleague, how would that affect your actions?)
Ask questions that address not only the existence but also the absence of
trust or distrust.
Ask what people think are trust generating actions, and also ask whether
they encounter them often or not within the organisation
Ask questions that give an indication of the general world view of the
person, as the discussion until now seems to indicate that there are people with
generally trusting views and generally distrusting views of the world.
Ask questions that address (organisational) change since this relates to the
previous point. This from the assumption that trust is openminded, forward
looking, and distrust correlates with stagnation, maintaining status quo, and
looking back.
Ask about opposing interests between people
Apart from asking questions,
you can also try to conduct a survey to do social network analysis, one making
an inventory of contacts people have, another doing the same for the people they
trust the most. This would give you a picture of where personal relationships in
your company are sparse, or where trusted people also form important nodes in
the social network. These people could be important trust 'hubs' in your
organisation. ("I trust John, because Peter trusts him, and I already trust
Peter", where Peter is the trust 'hub') A third approach to mapping trust could
be looking at incongruency between formal and informal structures in your
organisation, and also looking at what happens at boundaries between different
parts of your organisation. What messages are organisational structures giving
your people. For instance if you've put your support desk in the basement behind
the boiler room, what are you telling your people about the amount of support
they can trust on getting from you(r organisation)? Other structures to be
examined in this sense are measurements and reward systems. Are they having side
effects as trust-creating or trust-destroying messages to your people? Using an
idea from Chris Macrae, you could also try and map opposing interests and
blockades between parts of the organisation. By charting what obligations and
promises part of an organisations has to meet and keep, and then looking at
where keeping one promise leads to breaking another promise, you'll probably
find trust undermining structures in your organisation. The above is the result
of talking for an hour or so, and certainly needs more work to be useful. I'll
keep you informed of how we will move forward from here.
Permalink
| Comments (8) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at November 24, 2002 09:02 PM)
What is the Mark of a Master?
Gareth published this list of tips
on how to write texts properly, or at least increase the chance of it being
written properly. An article that was referenced to a lot in the last days. Last
weekend in a Waterstone's in Salisbury I picked up a book on how to write
philosophical texts, which is of interest as I am currently studying philosophy.
What is the use of these sort of guides, since well established writers often
say they actually do not know how they write so well, or that it is because of
their inspiration. Yesterday I talked to a colleague of mine about this, who is
also composer. He brought the same question up, albeit in somewhat other words. "If anyone can read these guides and use the tools mentioned in them, how
come not everyone is a writer or composer?" This to me translates into "What
is the mark of a master?".
Two things came to mind trying to answer this question. First a spark of originality. You need
this in order to have a starting point for whatever it is you'll create. Many
people don't get this far, maybe because they do not recognize it when it comes
to them. How often have you had a thought that you tossed aside because noone
else seemed to think about the same thing? Only to find out months later that
your thought has become mainstream, and in fact was an original thought the
first time. Are the creative people better at recognizing their original
thoughts, or passionate enough to keep them, or don't they care that their
thought does not seem to register with others at first? Second is the invisibility of the tools in the final product. In well made artefacts,
of whatever sort or form, there is usually no trace left by the tools that made
them (unless by intention of the maker). Beautiful statues don't show the
chipmarks made by hammer and chisel, finely crafted tapestries don't show the
individual knots they're made of, well composed music does not make apparent the
deliberate tricks to guide your ears in the right direction, or its underlying
mathematical patterns. So even if I have read a guide on writing, this might
mean I still can't write well, because of the all too apparent use of tools in
the texts I produce. It's the stuff where people don't plainly see or know how
you did it, that they find clever. And for those who say they don't know how
they create, it might just be that the tools have become invisible to them as
well! Tools so completely incorporated into your own skills, that you don't
recognize them as such any more. Thus the craftmanship becomes invisible in the
master. Would you agree to these two ingredients that mark the master? Or are
there others you can come up with? This is a very relevant question as it
touches on the tacit/explicit divide in knowledge. The cleft between codified
knowledge (~information) and the ability to put it to use well.
Permalink
| Comments (0) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at November 22, 2002 12:19 PM)
Corporate Blogging
Rick Klau
published an evaluation
of his klog-experiment in his company, which makes a very interesting read.
Valuable lessons can be learned from this posting. He ran a pilot with 12 people
from the 125 in the company for a month. Interesting are the comments on how
blogs were used by these 12 people:
A senior developer saw Radio as a great annotated bookmark tool - a way to
save URLs and provide his own commentary for others in his team.
A marketing manager saw Radio mostly as a clipping service - the ability to
snag snippets from other web sites to save to her own site.
A sales person used Radio to distribute industry news relevant to other
sales people.
A QA tester who frequently lunches with customers in training often provided
recaps of discussions at lunch - sharing the customers' interests and inquiries.
Also Rick addresses the apprehension of the pilot-participants:
People were somewhat overwhelmed at the prospect of starting with a clean
slate. There wasn't any there there (with apologies to Getrude Stein) - and this
gave several people pause. They didn't know what to put "there".
Some people were confused about what should go where - should an interesting
piece of information go into the intranet (i.e., via Radio), in the CRM
application (our own product, InterAction), or be sent by e-mail?
Some users, conditioned to the conventions of e-mail, were worried that
simply posting something wouldn't ensure people would read it - if it was really
important (a subjective assessment, to be sure), they were more comfortable
sending it by e-mail.
Many were in agreement that the k-log would be a great vehicle for senior
execs to share wisdom with others in the company. Oddly enough, those same
people were uncertain whether they as individuals would have information that
would be valuable outside of their team. Somewhat contradictory, however, was a
comment made by one user (and echoed by others) that it would be really nice to
learn what was going on "on the other side of the house."
He concludes with the
lessons drawn from this pilot, lessons that have a familiar ring as they seem to
coincide with lessons learned from many different general management situations,
e.g. motivating your knowledge workers:
Have a problem to solve. Just telling people "things will be better" when
they don't know that there's a problem is tricky. As mentioned above, weblogs
are many things to many people. In our pilot, we started out by simply saying we
wanted to see if people found them useful. In other words - we weren't trying to
solve a problem.
Reward participation. A number of people stated that they had trouble
working blogging into their daily routine - that they had a number of other
priorities competing for their time. Not surprisingly, they tended to gravitate
to things for which they received recognition. A successful deployment of a
k-log will need effective rewards to help reinforce the desirability of
participation.
Define what you're looking for. This is related to the first point, but I
think it's important enough to discuss on its own. I was surprised at the number
of people who understood conceptually what the weblog did but who were still
unclear on what they could contribute. People are very used to a fairly formal
communications format - and weblogs are highly unstructured. Without a focus,
inertia seemed to dominate.
Ensure senior participation. I tend to believe that grass-roots KM is the
most difficult to achieve. When a program like this is supported from the top
down, people are more likely going to appreciate the importance of the project -
and appreciate the connection between the project and the company's overall
success. If we are to increase the k-log's success, we will need to involve more
of the senior management team.
Reading Rick's evaluation makes me think
about the feasability of such an experiment in my own company. I have been
keeping this blog for three weeks now, and I have found it to be a somewhat
addictive and most certainly worthwile activity. This is probably due to the
fact that I had no inhibitions regarding "what to post", as I am used to jotting
down comments and notes for private purposes. The blog puts that in the public
domain. And that to me is where the reward is: My personal notetaking has
surprisingly become a way of establishing new relationships with people. Readers
comments, referral linking etc, create a whole new network of people around me,
and this I find hugely stimulating. An effect which Andrea
Janssen also commented on when she said that [meeting other k-bloggers ...]
"creates something of an European network". Other descriptions of rewards were
given in the discussion
on KnowledgeBoard.com that made me start my blogging experiment in the first
place. This leaves the question as to what rewards others in my company might
want from blogging wide open. Something clearly to put some thoughts into,
before expanding the blog-thing into our company. A first step probably is
bringing my blog to the attention of my colleagues, and let them see what it is
I do with it. Or better yet, I might set up an internal blog, where I give
insight into my activities as knowledge manager. This because to too many
colleagues this often still is somewhat obscure, and an issue I need to address
anyway.
Permalink
| Comments (0) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at November 22, 2002 10:56 AM)
Alma Mater up in flames
This morning around 8 I logged on to work from
home. While discussing (by phone) and jointly editing a file with a colleague,
suddenly my connection to the office was lost. In the office, 30 minutes later
(yes I live only 5 mins from work!), an internal e-mail made clear why: one of
the buildings of Twente University stood ablaze. This building accidently not
only houses my own faculty, philosophy of science, my girlfriends faculty,
applied communicational sciences, but also the university's computercentre. Our
offices are connected to the internet's backbone, you've guessed it, there.
Fortunately there are no casualties.
(pictures taken from the make shift
webpage of Twente University) From
a KM point of view this is also a disaster. Notes from PhD-students, primary
sources of their research, all the paper-based material of the courses currently
under development to fit the new Bachelor-Master structure of the faculty, all
lost. All the digital stuff is still there, back-up procedures have certainly
proven their worth today. But most of us deposit the real clues to our work and
knowledge, especially of the work currently in progress, in the stacks of paper
on our desks. So to most people who work and study in these buildings this must
be a huge setback, and in some cases might even mean startig all over again on
whatever research project was at hand. It might take some time to get back
on-line again from work. To those of you whom I have promised to send material
on last weeks conference, I ask for patience, because it is all stored on my
computer at the office.....and no connection to the outside world.
Permalink
| Comments (0) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at November 20, 2002 07:45 PM)
Three days very well spent
Yesterday saw me getting up as early as 06:00
to reach the Ally Pally in time at 09:10, for Karl Erik Sveiby's keynote speach. An journey
that should not take more than little over an hour, can get quite challenging
when there's a strike on. It wasn't too bad however, and I actually arrived too
early. Sveiby's speech really was worth getting up early, no doubt about that.
Not that he told me many things that were totally new, but it is interesting to
hear on which things he places emphasis in all the material he wrote. It
triggered a lot of thoughts while I was listening. The people next to me must
have thought that I was writing everything down verbatim, as I was scribbling
away frantically, trying to get down as much of the associative thoughts and
ideas that were going through my mind as possible. It was a pleasure to hear
this "founding father" of KM speak. I met up with Dominic Kelleher, to see how I
could get involved in the work of the CEN Workshop that looks to describe enough
of the field of KM for sme's new to KM to quickly find their way, and start
applying km-initiatives. David Gurteen introduced me to both Andrea Janssen, who
writes the Fliegen von
ferne-blog, and to Sam Marshall who writes Intellectual Capital Punishment.
Meeting all these people, who's writings and contributions you saw passing your
screen, putting faces to the names, really feels like discovering a map of a
community that I suddenly happen to be part of. Quit nice really. While I was
just about to leave the convention, Angele Nobre (she leads the Quarere-sig on
KnowledgdeBoard.com) came up to me and engaged me in what turned out to be a
very interesting conversation, as she is already doing what I hope to do in my
mastersthesis: building bridges between philosophy and managing businesses.
Where for me until now this was just a sort of daydream based on the intuitive
connections I saw between my work as a knowledge manager and my studies in
philosophy of science, she has now put me firmly on the track of really thinking
about this. Turning the no-strings-attached dreamy thinking into the real thing.
So all in all it would seem that have a lot of work cut out for me. The
Knowledgeboard sigs, the CEN workshop, philosophy in relation to KM, all the
nuggets of ideas to evaluate, the new contacts to follow up on, etc. But this
certainly does not seem a daunting task. I am extremely satisfied with the
results of my visit to London. Not only have I addressed all the things I set
out to do, but I got much more than that too. Do they know yet where KM Europe
2003 will be?
Today was a motivating day.
After struggling through the tube-system, with the Picadilly line out of service
due to the fire-fighter strike, and taking the bus from Finsbury Park up to the
venue, I met up again with the same lady I already talked to shortly yesterday.
Then, as today, we just happened to walk from the busstop to the main entrance
at the same pace, and started talking. It turned out we both knew Chris Macrae.
As we entered the convention floor we both commented on the fact that most of
the exhibitors were promoting software. Already yesterday I had felt some unease
at this, and today I put that unease into words. I feel like going to an art
convention, and finding nothing but people trying to sell me brushes and paint.
I am certainly not saying that these tools are useless, but they are not the key
issue, and presenting them as a goal in themselves makes me feel uneasy. Sally
wasn't the only one I had pleasant conversations with. I also met up with Chris
Macrae, who turns out to be what I would describe as a classic thinker. Closing
his eyes when talking to you. I could see him struggling to get some sort of
order in all the associations that are racing through his mind, and from which
he has to choose and tell me about it. It's actually wonderful to see him in
action. John Moore I also met, over tea, and meeting him too added a lot of
perspective that was created from the discussion we had via Knowledgeboard and
e-mail. It was for these sort of conversations that I came to London, and I am
grateful to those that were willing to engage in conversations. I spent the
afternoon at the KnowledgeBoard meeting where all the special interest groups
presented themselves. Apart from kmei sig, I guess there are a few others I feel
the need to get into. And all for different reasons. SME's for one, as I work
for an SME myself. The ngo and the public services SIG, because this bears
relevance to the majority of our clients. The upcoming trust SIG naturally,
because that's what I'm passionate about. And then there's the Quarere sig, that
aims at bringing together students and KM-practitioners, which appeals to me as
I'm both a KM-professional as well as a student. Building bridges between
academia and business is precisely the kind of thing I can get excited about.
For the Quarere-sig I linked up with Angele Nobre from the Lisbon business
school. It seems that Lilia already pointed me out to her last week, but the
interest in this project is certainly coming from both sides. All in all an
exciting day, and plenty of stuff to think about. Lucky for me the return
journey to Reading tonight took me more than 3 hours, which provided me with
ample time to do just that.
Some quotes that sparked my
attention (I’ll expand on it after my return) Dr. Panagiotis Damaskopoulos of
Insead talked about the causal links between knowledge and innovation. His
proposition is that the basic unity of the economy is no longer the company, but
the network it resides in. Organisational capital then is the (quality of)
relationships within the company and the relationships with the outside world.
Another question he put forward is, what are we moving towards, a knowledge
driven economy (already happening) or a knowledge based society. If the latter
is the case, would a company then not be an unlikely place to be the focal point
of knowledge processes? Mr. Huub Rutten, who gave an online presentation on
Monday on Knowledgeboard, also spoke during the workshop of Cezanne Software
concerning the question how to motivate and retain knowledge workers. From his
background in linguistics he came up with the notion that listening is a form of
speaking to yourself. As you hear the other speak you are actually attaching
strings of what you hear to what you already know. This he uses for instance in
developing comparative document searches to provide knowledge workers with
‘intelligent’ newsfeeds. If I apply this picture to my notetaking, and I think
it’s a correct picture as I always write down not only what I hear but also my
associations, then it’s no wonder that my first impressions here, are what they
are: They all connect to my earlier statements on the organisation as a cluster
of relationships, whose quality is determined by the existence and extent of
mutual trust. Oh yeah, by the way: David Gurteen thought that I looked actually
younger in reality than in the picture on the left hand side. Even though the
picture was taken 4 years ago. Might be weightloss, might be because I feel
happier now than then, or it might be just because I had a haircut last week. ;)
In the latest issue of Management Team, a Dutch magazine, I found a short interview with Muel Kaptein,
professor of management studies at the Erasmus University, and also consultant
with KPMG. He recently wrote a book called "the sincere manager" in Dutch (The Balanced Company: A
Theory of Corporate Integrity in English), in which he explores the
importance of managers that lead by example. He points out that most employees
tend to copy the behaviour of their bosses, where ethics in the workplace is
concerned. Therefore organisational change should target the managers first, as
the employees will follow their lead. This in stead of handing out a set of new
rules to your employees and simply expecting to follow them. He also stresses
the importance of explicitly formulated corporate ethics and values. His
research shows 27% of employees does not honor agreements, because the boss
doesn't either. The same goes for abuse of corporate facilities (25%), bullying
(25%), damaging private activities (25%), internal fraud (23%), and leaking
confidential information (21%). The problem? Businesses see ethics as something
instrumental, and not related to leadership, vision and commitment. However, if
a company wants to steer behaviour they will have to acknowledge the enormous
influence of the personal dimension. Well, that leads us right back on track on
what I've put forward regarding trust, and what Chris Macrae hammers on with
transparancy at valuetrue.com
Xi:blue
offers a course on Essential Web Journaling, which seems to entail not much more
than learning to install and use Userland's Radio. And that for about 500
euro's.
I don't know, I think I've
learned more this last week by reading the Blogger FAQ, and looking how other
blogs were made, than I could learn in these two days Xi:blue is offering. But
hey, maybe it would make blogging look like a respectable activity to my boss?
Permalink
| Comments (0) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at November 11, 2002 10:54 AM)
KM Europe 2002, part II
Here's my rough schedule for the KM Europe 2002
convention, at "Ally Pally", or Alexandra Palace, London from Nov. 13th-15th: Wednesday, November 13th
11:50 - 12:35 Passages from organisational knowledge to innovation
13:00 - 17:00 Workshop by Cezanne Software Thursday, November 14th
12:10 - 12:55 Virtual community, real world problems (by British Telecom)
13:00 - 16:00 Workshop by European KM Forum, BIBA
15:15 - 16:30 Keynote by Dan Holtshouse
16:30 - 19:30 Workshop by European KM Forum, BIBA Friday, November
15th
09:10 - 10:25 Keynote by Karl-Erik Sveiby
13:35 - 14:10 A practical approach to the learning organisation by ABN AMRO
Trust Feel free to e-mail me if you
would like to meet up, or give me a call at 0031-629018150. I will be blogging
my impressions daily from London, so if you're not attending in person, read my
subjective account here.
Permalink
| Comments (0) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at November 10, 2002 05:21 PM)
Business' Prime Directive: Awareness and explicit choice?
Sometimes
different observations lead to the same conclusion. Or maybe it's just that
these observations are made because they fit an intuitive conclusion that was
already brewing somewhere in the recesses of my mind, where there always seems
to be a lot of brewing going on.
The first of these observations came when David Gurteen held an interesting on-line
workshop on conversations as a core business process. His main point being
that conversations only take place on the basis of equality of all parties
involved. Somewhere during the session I remarked on the aspect that we tend not
to see conversations as work, but as pastime. I suggested that this might be due
to the fact that we almost never have some sort of routine of feeding the
results of these conversations back into our work processes. The conversations
maybe inspire us, and plant some seeds in the brewery in the back of our minds,
but it does not routinely impact on our work in progress in the here and now.
This to me later on translated into the point that if we are aware what
specific points in the conversations we have were the inspiring and valuable
parts, we could then choose and/or decide what to do with it.
The second observation I made was during the on-line presentation by Dominic
Kelleher on his
experiences with introducing KM at Price Waterhouse Coopers, at the time
when Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand merged. Here again the primary
conclusion was that KM needed to be directed at solving identified needs,
with clear choices being made along the way.
This all already correlated with what I had concluded in the discussion
on Trust earlier on, where I took self knowledge and explicit
choice making as prerequisites for entering into mutual trusting
relationships, both as an individual and as an organisation (of whichever shape
of form). When talking about learning, during a pleasant lunch with Lilia Efimova, and how her PhD proposal
was taking shape, we again returned to this duo of formulating principles
and establishing a clear field of operation in which to then make choices
towards concrete actions.
Then last Friday, while visiting a convention of
our branche network on how research can assist marketing professionals I got
multiple examples of both the presence and absence of awareness and clearcut
decision making. In an interesting, but mediocre executed, presentation by
Research International, a method was explored how, based on scrutinously
testing your views against the general public, you can decide in a
very early stage which innovative ideas you can wisely throw out, and, much more
important, which to keep and take to market. The same point was made by Ed
van Eunen, when talking about the effectivity of sales promotions. Without
knowledge of what you want and deciding on what to do any
promotional campaign will probably only cost you money. Counter examples were
amply provided on the convention floor by loud mouthed, flashy clothed marketing
people that know only how to tell you that it's only the packaging of the
product that matters. That any content will sell if the package is right. These
were the same people that left the earlier mentioned presentations mumbling that
this was all "too far fetched" and that noone would be able to apply it. Even
though that most of both presentations were presenting hardly more sophisticated
ideas than plain old common sense. Maybe they couldn't see the content for lack
of packaging? Talking to these guys made it very clear to me that trust and self
reflection was not on their agenda. A lack they may well intuitively feel, for
why else would they have to shout so much, other than to convince themselves?
In a totally different setting this saturday, in a workshop on what to do to
give a national association responsible for organising local festivities around
national holidays more public face, the conclusion delegates came to was that content is the best pr, and then pursuing discussions on identity
and what decisions to base on that. And these were all volunteers, with
only a couple of professionals around. Thus, the conclusion that self knowledge
and explicit choice are important is not likely to be unconvincing, as it is
clearly apparent to the untrained eye. So why do we practice it so little?
Self knowledge and explicit choice are certainly not the odd couple, but
might well form the Prime Directive of succesfull business. I guess, it's time
to brush up on my understanding of Martin Heidegger's "Sein und Zeit".
Starting a week from now on Wednesday Nov. 13th, the Knowledge Management in Europe 2002
Congress will take place in Alexandra Palace in London. I will be attending
for the full three days. To me it is primarily an opportunity to meet with the
people I have been discussing KM with at KnowledgeBoard since last May. I like
the way the European KM forum, through KnowledgeBoard and face to face meetings
in e.g. workshops, creates a mix of both online and face to face platforms of
interaction. All the ingredients of this mix work to enhance eachother. For
those of you who might be interested in meeting me in London next week, don't
hesitate to drop a line to the e-mail address on the left. On Nov. 13th, 14th
and 15th I'll be there.
The weekend afterwards I'll probably pay a visit with my girl friend to the Blackwell's Bookshop in Oxford, to stock
up on english literature, scifi, and other books (e.g. the new book by David
Weinberger) that are not readily available in Dutch bookshops here. Their cellar
room, the Norrington Room, with over 3 miles of shelving, is certainly worth a
visit imho. And that's just the cellar mind you. The first time me and my girl
friend went into this bookshop on Broad st. in 2000, the first glimpse of the
Norrington Room got me grinning and running to the ATM.
I started this blog only a day ago,
and already I am thinking about moving. Not to quit blogging. As yet, the
responses of others have been positive, and it is way too early to draw any
conclusions on this experiment my blog is. No, it's the service of blogger
that's the point. Not that I think I have much ground to complain, as this is of
course a free service I'm using. But what I really miss already is the
possibility of readers giving comments. Today I found myself pasting an e-mail
exchange into Blogger. E-mails that would have been comments if they could have
been. So that's a drawback. Second I think servertimes are too high. So now I'm
on the lookout for a new place to host my blog. Thursday I'll have lunch with
someone who has more experience with blogging, than me. Not that it is very
difficult to match my experience :) But I trust her to be a good source of
information. I could host my blog myself, as serverspace would not be an issue,
but that still leaves me with the choice of tools. As this is an experiment I'm
not eager to spend money. But probably dishing out 40 euro's or something might
buy me something halfway decent to give this experiment an actual chance of
being a succes.
In my recent article on the
role of trust in knowledge management, I discussed trust as an action.
Something I do to jump over uncertainties in decisions or choices I have to
make. In another thread on
the same topic, Gary
Lawrence Murphy plays devil's advocate and challenges this view of trust as
an action, as a verb. I begged to disagree with him and then I said something
that already sounded odd when I wrote it, and that my thoughts kept returning to
since: It is my action, it is me that willingly ignores the uncertainty
and moves ahead. Trust is what I need to make a choice/decision and carry it
out. Trust is not a commodity that resides in the one I am trusting. If I
trust someone to be responsive to me,it actually means to me that I need LESS
trust to be able to reach a decision, whether to engage with this person or
not. By showing trust, i.e. jumping over uncertainties, I build
relationships with other people. The result of these actions is a trusting
relationship, where the trust invested by me (and not the initial
trustworthiness of the other: again, it is not a commodity) leads to less
uncertainties (for me) in the next choices/decisions I may have to make in that
relationship. I have made the part I found odd bold. What was I saying
here: if I trust someone I need less trust? This morning under the shower I came
up with this tentative explanation: I have defined trust as an action. By
jumping over my uncertainties on the outcome of a decision I come to the
decision. I trust my decision to work out ok. If this decision
concerns a relationships with someone else, and if my decision works out, we
normally say that this means the other can be trusted. However based on my
definition the trust was in making the decision. The fact that it worked out
actually gave me proof that next time for the same decision, the uncertainties
might be less. And therefore my leap of faith might be smaller to come to the
same decision again. So if we say we trust someone, this means that we
recognize a consistent pattern of behaviour, and a certain level of
predictability (reputation) in the other which is strong enough to reduce the
uncertainties I may have in making choices/decisions with the other as
counterpart. So I need to excersize less trust, because I can trust the other
based on his track-record. Then a trusting relationship is not a relationship
where the actions of both counterparts require high levels of trust (as an
action) but a place where there is proof of these high levels in the past,
actually resulting in less need of trust as an action in the here and now.
Of course this will need frequent enough positive feedback, reaffirmation.
This because we deal with estimates of uncertainties. If I betray a trusting
relationship, what I actually do is saying to the other that the his/her
uncertainty estimate based on my reputation is a miscalculation. Then the other
has to trust enormously to be able to reinvest in a relationship: what he/she
thought was a reliable certainty turned out to be a huge uncertainty. It is when
this newly required leap of faith is too big that a relationship is abruptly
terminated.
Of course Gary responded to the above in kind, see his blog entry at
Teledyn where he wonders how it is that none of us over on knowledgeboard met
his challenge head-on, even though there are enough metrics to warrant such a
discussion. Why is it that were only attempts to either prove him wrong, as I
tried to do, or to just look away and avoid the whole issue of how trust is not
just a cognitive thing but a physical sensation as well? The reason that non
of us have reacted to Gary's neuro-physiological approach, now that I think
about it, might stem from an intuitive (neurophysiological?) drive to block out
anything that points to our more animal-like aspects. And pavlovian responses to
other peoples e.g. subliminal messages is something we probably don't want to
dwell on for long as it seems to undermine our basic perception of ourselves as
free agents. Or maybe it is just because we are generally ill at ease with the
intangible stuff that goes on in our heads. Maybe this would be something to
explore further. Also, and this is something very different, I see a two-way
approach in responding to what has been said in the threads on trust sofar. One
group of comments takes the self as a starting point and then reflects on what I
can do to enter into trusting relationships. This is also the point of reference
I take. (although I'm pretty much the only one probably that takes trust as
something that's independent from intrapersonal relationships). The other group
takes the other as a starting point and then asks how can I be sure that he's
not doublecrossing me, in other words how can I protect myself from
untrustworthy elements. This to me seems the basic divide: how can I foster
trust, vs/and how can I defend myself against misplacing trust. The first starts
of from a generally trusting view of the world, the other from a generally
distrusting view of the world. Thinking along while writing this, I have the
intuitive feeling that this division might be the reason I responded to Gary's
original comment with an attempt to persuade him to my view, or in other words
to prove him wrong. If that's the case, than it's of course no wonder that it
didn't work :) Thus far the articles from both John Moore, George Por
and myself
have concentrated on the question how to foster trust, as a person or a
organisation. Anything on how to deal with willful distrustful behaviour by
others has been left untouched. In my article, with hindsight, this was done on
purpose, as I tried to explore what I can do pro-actively. The distrustful view
of the world takes a more reactive stance, as it seems to me, and that is
something I generally try to avoid, as it puts me on the receiving end of any
potential stick almost automatically.
Hi there, In recent weeks I have come across several
blogs with professional aims. Now I'm trying my hand at blogging myself. This
even though I don't really know if this is added value for me or not. During the
last couple of days I discussed blogs with David
Gurteen, Lilia Efimova
and Sebastien
Paquet, who all have their own blogs. I asked them why they blog, and what
it brings them. It turns out I have been blogging for years myself. Just not on
the web! In a
post to knowledgeboard.com I describe how I've kept a diary for most of my
life, have been taking notes during conversations and meetings for 14 years, and
have been jotting down notes, phrases and singular thoughts. Now I will try and
do the same on-line My blog will focus mainly on Knowledge Management (KM), but
don't feel surprised if other stuff comes up as well. I have named my blog
inTERdependent thoughts. Untill now my notetaking was purely a personal
endeavour, to which others were not privy. These were independent thoughts. By
publishing them here I entwine them with thoughts of others, and they thus
become interdependent. The "ter" in italic marks the transition. The first
interdependent thought in action is this blog. Thanks to the exchange with David
and Lilia it has come into existence. Who am I? Well, for starters have a look
at my
profile over on KnowledgeBoard.com. Or simply take a look a the picture
below, and wait for whatever will be published here in the future to form your
own opinion.
Lilia Efimova
Martin Roell
Gary L. Murphy
Sebastien Paquet
Sebastian Fiedler
Frank Patrick
Thomas Burg
Ross Mayfield
Terry Frazier
David Weinberger
Dina Mehta
Rick Klau
Stuart Henshall
Elizabeth Lawley
Spike Hall
Andy Boyd
Phil Wolff
Matt Mower
Jim McGee
Olaf Brugman
Andrea Janssen
David Gurteen
John Moore
Elmine Wijnia
Chris Macrae
David Pollard
Julian Elvé
David Buchan
Denham Grey
Judith Meskill
Ian Glendinning
George Por
Paul J Kelly
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