Balancing life

In response to Jyoti’s post:

Work-life balance: It’s such a wierd phrase. As I thought about it, I realized much that you do about “work” is about the same you’d do about “off-work”…so perhaps this is really about life balance?
On a good day this is where what I do in the day ends up with me feeling productive, energized [though tired] and able to apply my ideas. On a bad day I feel drained, incapable of ideating and it’s a downward spiral in terms of productivity.

Key enablers for good days:
- the ability to prioritize.
- the ability to choose the kind of work you want to do, ie playing to your strengths. [Sounds cliched but this is all about recognizing yourself for the work you do well and asking for more -- instead of focusing externally on what others do well and trying your best to imitate]
- the ability to negotiate to execute the above — A friend shared with me a mantra that I now try and apply in any given situation: Win/Win or Walk.
- To build in flexibility into the plan so that you can deviate, have a conversation, take a walk…do something that was not in ‘the plan’.

Key philosophy currents to flow with:
- To recognize that a good life does not equal all good days.
- To recognize that you’ll figure out what works for you and that will change over time. There are no ‘shoulds’ that apply to you.

What has tertiary impact:
- Our ability to organize and plan.

What has no impact:
- Trying to compartmentalize into “work” and “life” — This is really silly. Part of it comes from the belief that we have to do “work = no fun, draining income generating stuff” to have a “life”. This is compounded in cases where “life = Roles of daughter, mother, wife” where “work” can sometimes be the ‘real’ life.
Compartments are OK to learn more about how you apply yourself — however to use them to go out and apply yourself is restrictive and worse stunts your growth.
- Sticking to your calendar/plan: This type of control rarely gives me any good days. I like to have pockets of ‘not knowing’ what I’ll be doing so that I can go with the flow. Yes, not knowing can add to stress — but that’s OK.

KMWorld 09

At the panel discussion on Personal KM, I heard a person remark how he uses his blog to remind him of what he knows — like an auxillary memory. This was an ‘aha’ moment for me. Way back, I created this blog to share my thoughts on what I am doing, but the notion of ‘perfection’ set in early on and kept me from using this blog fundamentally as a brain dump – for all the thoughts, responses and reactions to all the fantastic work going on out there in the world of knowledge sharing, collaboration, sensemaking and social networking.
So this post is a start in dislodging myself from being ‘poised to be perfect’ to really sharing what I am going through.
Three things that stood out for me from KMWorld: I must apologize if you were expecting detailed notes. I didn’t carry my netbook along, and didn’t use the work laptop I did lug around. Instead I went with a notebook and don’t really have much to report back in terms of notes.
My experience at the conference was in some ways disappointing. I am not sure if this is the case with most KM conferences [This was my first] but it’s hard to tell what proficiency level to expect from the audience. As a speaker on Day 2, I had no information from the organizers on what to expect from the audience. As part of the audience, I sensed the same confusion in most speakers — Are they addressing folks who’re at the ‘Is KM important?’ stage or are they addressing a group of practitioners and the conference was aimed to extend your thinking in specific ways? From experience, I think it was neither fully – but a bit of both. I also realized that I don’t do ‘There’s something for everybody’ approaches to a conference.
The other dissapointment is that I sorely missed David Gurteen! Most sessions were run in a horribly cold, lecture-type manner. The speaker came with huge decks that contained a lot of pictures and typically spoke for about 40 of the 45 minutes and then ran through a quick round of Q&A. Through each session, there wasn’t any space to have a conversation and build some relationships with fellow participants.

That said, here are a few things that I came away with from the conference:

Andrew McAfee was the keynote speaker on Day one. In his definition of Enterprise 2.0 [which appears to have become tighter since his first definition for the term] I loved the word ‘emergent’. He spoke about the idea of expertise in an organization being emergent and the value in diversity of scientific input. At this point, I wanted to bang my head against the table. I so get this but try applying it in an organization and it’s very, very hard to do. Enterprises have nearly perfected the art of replicating Pavlov’s experiment with our compensation approach. In such a situation, it’s simply absurd to ask leaders to build this culture of diverse, cross-pollinating network of collaborators. What results thus is a pursuit to locate the 1 – 5% of leaders who are willing to resist the lure of compensation and risk building relationships outside of their immediate team [read Turf]. The silver lining however is that it is not possible to perfect Pavlov’s experiment. The dog in an Enterprise is NOT an isolated being but a social one, who is tuned to the forces of the market and all our wonderful competitors who are vying for his talents. So yes, we know that expertise is emergent. We know that it takes time to acquire identity and reputation but it still doesn’t mean we’ll be any better in converting an ancillary connection into a strong tie / relationship.
Another term I picked up from Andrew Mcaffe’s talk was ‘social signals’. In this world of Web 2.0, there is an illusion that relationships can be instant. All I need to do is follow you on Twitter, and have you follow me on Twitter and voila, we’re in a relationship. Not! Go out to Amazon and there are plenty of social signals that is solicited from you. Like / Dislike, leave a comment, Rate, Tag etc. Clearly we’re at a point when we can confidently say that content that doesn’t solicit some form of interaction from it’s consumer is irrelevant or dead. Wherever we have content, its the interactions around that piece of content that will be relevant to us. Even if it’s help or instructions – there’s probably someone out there building a video/content that can help your users in ways that you can’t.
A panel discussion on Personal KM was very useful. How do we teach someone to ‘manage’ what he/she knows? In school, many, many years ago, rote memory was THE tool for Personal KM. Multiplication tables – no problem, just learn them by heart. Spelling? Same thing. The human brain was asked to store as many things as possible and in ways that could trigger quick recollection. In college, I came across a quote from Eienstien that read something like ‘I don’t bother remembering anything that I can find in a book.’. Today, given the rapid mobility across geographies and dispersed families and distributed ‘global’ organizations, there are as many more tools that we need to employ to help us keep track of what we know AND who we know KNOW what we know or want to know more about. Eliot Masie talked about looking at your network and parsing it through a test to see how diverse it was. If everybody you’re connected to is into what you know, that’s not going to help you grow or extend your thinking much. However if you are able to build a network that is diverse and that encourages the cross-pollination of ideas, then you are perhaps better able to apply the know-how of your network to risking innovation.
So how do we develop PKM skills across an organization? Do we even know what those skills are?
This brings me to the last highlight of the event and that was Patrick Lambe’s talk on expertise. I missed out on the first fifteen minutes but that still didn’t take away from the value of this session. I have used the term ‘expertise’ very many times – - it’s a critical part of my vocabulary when I want to talk to people about collaboration. Yet, Lambe got me questioning what I meant by ‘expertise’. In the traditional learning organization, expertise is really related to skill. Our experts are folks who are have deep expertise in these skills and we have a huge skills framework to catalog all the different skills out there that are relevant to productivity. Each skill gets mapped across a few proficiency levels and each individual can apply himself to building his proficiency by taking specific actions [that instruction designers excelled at defining]. Well, this was all well and good in a classroom. Then came Masie and e-learning and we could now scale learning across large audiences and package it in sizes tuned to the individual. So much so that e-learning, Masie regrets is also lonely learning. Was this enough? Lambe brings a different viewpoint to understanding expertise. He qualifies expertise in six components: Role knowledge, Know-who, experience, memory, skill, technical and he shared with us a research project where he is gathering evidence from different organizations on how they address these components of expertise through programs in their organization. Memory incidentally is the least valued by organizations. What this said to me, is that we’re OK in compensating folks for what they do today, and then are totally happy to let them forget it — Perpetuate this cycle and we’re in this continous cycle of trial & error. The Knowledge Management function is key to organizational memory and yet how much of learning programs are targetted at the memory component? Know-who is another key component – - – The power of all the knowledge that resides in the network: Is there a way to know more about this? Rob Cross’ work on ONA is a start into identifying these network patterns and yet what’s missing is the ‘know what’.
Whether we’re addressing the challenges of personal km or that of organizational culture around collaboration and innovation, I think that the pursuit of knowledge or knowledge management is the wrong one. Instead we need to pursue relationships and understand how networks can be augmented to surface individual voices and focus conversations.
I’ll end with a quote that I will paraphrase here: We can not afford to take a retrospective view of learning in a world of emergence.

NOTE: You can find my presentation that I gave on Day 2 on ‘Building successful communities’ on my LinkedIN profile – slideshare application. On my way out of the conference, I had an elderly gentleman call me out and tell me that I did a really good job — and that felt good!