#david snowden

[fox-army]

[nextwavefutures]

Making business sustainable

Making business sustainable—notes on a talk by David Bent. New post at the next wave.

Jukhee Kwon, ‘Meditation’, 2022 I went recently to hear the futurist and sustainability adviser David Bent talk on ‘business policy and transformation’ at the Bartlett School in London. David worked at the Forum of the Future for a decade or so, and these days mixes up some teaching with advisory work. The slides from his talk—some of which will be threaded through here—are on his…

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[nextwavefutures]

Tacit knowledge and high value work

Tacit knowledge is at the heart of high value work. Why? Because it’s complex. New post.

There was a lively discussion about the role of tacit knowledge over a couple of days at John Naughton’s daily blog recently. I’ll come back to the reason why the subject came up in a moment or so. I came quite late in life to questions of knowledge management, and my first exposure was to the work of the Japanese professors Nonaka and Takeuchi, and their ‘SECI’ model, which argues explicitly…

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[earpeeler]

The Kiss Room - Special Edition - November 21

The Kiss Room – Special Edition – November 21

Happy Birthday KISS ARMY! NOV 21st! join us for a bonus edition of THE KISS ROOM originally broadcast on Saturday, November 21 as part of Montco Radio’s Kuss Hunger Goodbye event! Matt Porter is joined in THE KISS ROOM by Bobby Dreher with special guests including Anthony DeLucia, Joe Gillies and Anthony Russo from the ultimate classic KISS tribute, ALIVE! ’75 • Len DeLessio (delessio.com) • JR…

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[idearipples]

Knowledge Flows

We always know more than we can say, and we always say more than we can write down.  – David Snowden

Formal Knowledge Management frameworks usually categorize Knowledge into tacit and explicit and that helps to classify  knowledge into what is codifiable versus what can’t be codified in the context of an enterprise. KM has tried to codify what is possible and claim victory over explicit knowledge. To gain access to tacit knowledge, KM has also resorted to personal networks through communities of interest and communities of practice. 

In the information age, when we are constantly subsumed by needing and wanting to know more and bombarded with more than we can usually handle, we develop curious habits of dealing with it. We have also evolved in the ways we ‘handle’ information outside of our organizations, but that’s not the subject of this post. Within the enterprise, the KM group usually has remit and responsibility over the management of some of the Knowledge assets, but rarely all. The KM groups buy or create the best possible knowledge management solutions, sources, storage systems and publishing platforms. But not many KM teams engage in training the company's staff on what good personal knowledge management would look like. This should be considered important - let me explain why. Let's start with some categories of Enterprise Knowledge :

What we know we know – this is the universe of documents that we know exists. We have usually created these documents, contributed to their creation or know we will need them for future reference. For this need,  enterprises will offer varied methods of personal, restricted and unrestricted storage options in the form of hard drives,  shared servers, team spaces/sites and the enterprise portal and ofcourse, the trusted email.

What we need to know (and should) – this is the universe of memos and guidelines and any other material that is deemed as both necessary and appropriate for the enterprise to ‘push’ to employees in order to get them as synced together as possible, think performance review reminders, compliance guidelines,  policies, company news, required or recommended training and the list goes on. Enterprises will usually ‘push’ this kind of information via emails, or the enterprise portal or the enterprise social network (depending on the sophistication of its systems and the adoption rate of each). This too is a challenge in larger organizations that need to push a lot of information to their employees for all sorts of reasons including informational, compliance, employee engagement, and mandatory action.

What we want to know – this is the kind of information that we are looking for in specific circumstances. For example, we are working on a report and are missing the data point on a public company’s annual revenues. We know exactly what we are looking for, but need to get connected to the source of the information. In some cases, it is simple codified information like a client company’s revenue numbers, but many times it might be something like the sales strategies of a privately-held company (the kind of information which is sometimes codified and sometimes not – in either case, it is usually hard to find largely because it is sensitive or proprietary or both).  For this kind of need, we will often also rely on sources that are external to the enterprise, largely because the search engine Google has contracted the world of information to a few clicks (yes, they have spoiled us forever) and, zealous sharing of knowledge, even the proprietary kind, happens more often than not. Knowledge workers will also turn to formal and reputed sources of information like Factiva, Lexis Nexis and many others that offer the benefit of indexed information that is easy to search and more credible to cite.

What we don’t know we don’t know – this is the kind of information that we run into through an enterprise social network. The chances that you will come across both people and information that will teach you something that you don’t know (but could benefit from knowing) are exponentially higher than any other source of information that you would have been given access to within the enterprise.  This is largely because serendipity plays a huge factor in the discovery of such information. Typically, an individual turns to his or her personal networks and communities of practice to connect with tacit knowledge that was not codified. The KM department of today helps in that area as well through enterprise social networks, which amplify knowledge sharing through a community of practice and beyond. In the long run, this is also where we can distinguish ourselves both at the individual level and the organizational level because we could learn of new ways of thinking about something or in fact discover something sooner – in both cases, accelerating our personal learning curve and expanding the horizons of our mind. 

The organizational management of Knowledge within an enterprise is an ever increasing challenge for the many reasons I have listed in earlier posts.  The increasing tide of knowledge assets within an organization, both in volume and by variety, makes their sharing, cataloging, retention and even disposal a daunting task. Throw in the complexities of legal requirements to retain and/or dispose knowledge assets and navigating the intersection of securing confidential information and granting comfortable transparency in terms of sharing information, and you've got something that requires discernment and continual governance. Recently I have been considering the line between organizational knowledge management and personal knowledge management. How much of it is the responsibility of the organization to enable and manage and when does the burden start shifting to an individual? How far are most organizations from fully supporting knowledge management needs at both the enterprise level and the individual level (after all, many organizations don't even have a robust KM group)? Does the plan include better training for staff on personal knowledge management? Your opinions welcome.

[light-on-epiphanies-blog]

Frameworks for Making Sense of Complex Systems & Problems

I've encountered many frameworks and approaches that help me make sense of complex systems and problems.

Yesterday I wrote about the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework - a useful approach and set of methodologies for making sense of family and community strategies to enhance livelihoods.  I complemented Nathan Bennett on his annotated bibliography titled Sustainable Livelihoods from Theory to Conservation Practice - found in a series of Working Papers Published on the Conservation Knowledge website - http://www.papr.co.ca/index.php?p=1_25_Papers.

This morning I was reminded by Roxanna Samii about David Snowden's Cynefin Sense-making Framework.  Roxanna publishes a terrific blog - http://rsamii.blogspot.com/ on knowledge management, learning, change management leadership and the challenges of rural development.  Roxanna is a friend who works at the International Fund for Agricultural Development in Rome. 

David Snowden's Cynefin framework helps leaders to identify five types of issues according to the different ways that cause and effect appear to us.  It's a popular framework, written up in Harvard Business Review and employed by companies like IBM, Deloitte and Microsoft.

See http://youtu.be/5mqNcs8mp74 for a short video explanation, and see http://youtu.be/Miwb92eZaJg for David Snowden's terrific explanation of the framework for the task of organizing a birthday party for a bunch of 11 year old boys - hilarious and informative!  See if you can see yourself in the Ordered Systems version of the party inside your daily organizational life.

The Cynefin framework can help us understand the contexts in which we operate so that we can make better decisions that make sense in those contexts, instead of applying solutions that really don't make sense in those contexts.  It's a good analytical framework for looking at complex systems that we may know little about. Somewhat like applying the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework to a remote community where I am a not community member, but have the opportunity to work with to (hopefully) help enhance livelihoods.

We often perceive the world we live in as a world of order where cause and effect are related, and we think we can predict outcomes.  We also perceive worlds of "un-order" (especially other peoples' contexts) where cause and effect are present, but don't immediately make sense and outcomes are not predictable (at least to us as outsiders). 

I am a sociologist and I have worked my entire career with lots of engineers.  There is a tendency among some of the engineers with whom I work to assume we operate in a world of order - a technical problem requires an ordered technical solution.  However, often times, communites that surround the apparent technical problem get in the way of the ordered technical solution.  Sometimes the ordered technical solution doesn't fit the local context, and vice versa.  The result can be tension and sometimes conflictual relations between the engineers and the local community.  The engineers I most enjoy working with are quick to recognize that it is important to find the right solutions that make good engineering sense, but also make sense in the local context.  Ideally, I get brought into complex contexts before ordered technical solutions are applied.

As a young professional, I was thrust into this world of complex contexts, first on the massive Left-Bank Outfall Drainage project in Pakistan where several local villagers were destroying high-tech desalination pumps and irrigation systems along the Indus River in Sindh Province, and later in Egypt in the Nile Delta where farmers were destroying high-tech drainage and irrigation systems designed to mitigate salination problems.  Ordered engineered solutions were disrupted by local realities, local economic systems and traditional knowledge about how things work.

I learned quite a bit in those contexts, and other far flung places.  I continue to apply frameworks like Cynefin to make sense of what happens around me.