I cannot remember a time when I liked the word HR. However I have not been always able to articulate why I do not like this word. Today, I am going to try to.

I believe that human beings have sufficient intelligence to learn and perform complex tasks. Over time, most individuals if provided with the right social environments will not only continue learning but also continue improving their performance. When we socially learn, there are different behaviours at play that push us to do better, be better, appear better.

Now – in come in HR – not the people – but an idea, that focuses on individuals being less important than the business. Where an individual is more fickle than they are intelligent.  This idea fosters fears – what if half our workforce up and leaves? Then what do we really have to keep this business going? As a result there’s all this focus on process, industrialization, documentation, etc etc etc.  The new employees who are hired in are not allowed to learn and perform and socially grow – they are instead ‘trained’ with the processes, documents etc.  HR will come up with new innovative ways to save cost of furniture, lighting and heating such as ‘Home-working’ and further isolate individuals from one another. Over time, human beings become dependent on job aids and process guides and flow charts. We are afraid to think or respond – even if a given situation or problem falls out of scope for the training we’ve received. Over time we’re not in the happy la la land HR would believe they have created for an organization – the angst and frustration that comes from living a trained life is immeasurable.

Social networks and online communities help break these systemized silos that we are continuously being boxed into by our HR mindset. The last door we need to be knocking to realize human potential is that of HR departments.  The HR mindset steers away from humanness – complexity, ambiguity, emotional intelligence, relationships, trust, vulnerability – All of the above are ‘out of scope’.  Instead there are performance factors, core values, laddering processes, job aids, training plans, development plans (LOL) that are over-engineered around the individual and seem to pull apart the natural ecosystem that makes us a collective.

Social Learning and Social Media is about unleashing the potential of the collective. The industrialized dogma of formal learning is NOT a good starting place for us to figure how we are going to enable social learning in an organization.  We need a new framework to help enable social learning. It needs to come from a study of natural systems – the Amazon rain forests or Android Developer Networks… It needs us to re-engage with human beings and help them build & nurture relationships.

How are you enabling social learning in your organization? Do you have a pov that is different to mine?

Today however just about anybody can create a web site.  My post today is a reflection of how people use web sites and what that learning curve looks like.  Let me begin with a very rudimentary graphic that tells us what this learning curve looks like for us.

Stage one:  Dump

This is where a person or group of people create a web site and start dumping all this information / content on it.  This initial stage is fantastically energetic.  The idea that we can aggregate information in one place is a wonderful idea and everybody signs on to help with the ‘dump’.

Stage two:  Organize

As the site owners realize how successful they have been at stage one – Dump, they begin to feel slight anxiety attacks too.  There is really just too much information out there.  In response they tentatively start to organize content in categories / pages and folders.  Some might get so good at it that they carve out a whole career out of this task and become Information Architects.  Others struggle with the fallacy of most structures which is that it will become obsolete soon.

Stage three:  Digest

Most people often remain chained to this never ending loop that is stage one and two.  Something needed to change.  Yes, we like aggregating information and organizing it – no matter how good or bad our content architecture.  However we realized that the volume of information and the complexity of our content architecture made us less likely to digest all this great stuff.  Can there really be too much of a good thing?

So what changed?  Some of these site owners realized that information that cannot be consumed is really worthless.  So they put their heads together and came up with ways with which they could make it easier for a user to digest information.  Here’s some of those ways:

• Whenever possible, as frequently as possible, break information down into smaller chunks.  If you thought a PowerPoint slide with text was silly, why would you think a web site full of content and widgets was smart?
• Digesting information in order to understand and apply it to help us improve how we work is really what we’ve been doing for many, many years but it is called learning.  So how do we apply the principles of learning design to how we digest information.
• Learning is social.  We are better at learning from one another in communities than we are from CBTs or websites full of content.  The latter resources are very informational but they also do isolate us from the practice of what we learnt.
• Last but not least, any design that enables social learning will need to jettison our intentions to dump and organize information.  Liken this to how a rocket jettisons it’s bottom and middle layers to orbit the world.  We need to free our websites from this compulsive need to dump and organize (and control) in order to enable learning through discovery and reflection amongst a community of practitioners.

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.

Summary of stats:
Total number of tweets [Roughly]: 80 tweets between Sept 01 – Sept 15
Ratio of tweets with links to those without: 65:15
Number of tweets useful to me: 26 [100% of which were tweets with links]
Number of tweets that I really liked out of the 26 above: 5
Number of not useful tweets for me: 10
Number of not current tweets to me: 43 [26 of these tweets fell into the 'Me' category, 15 were tweets without links]
Looking at the numbers above reinforces the FALLACY of calculating ROI or ‘value’ based on numbers alone. Volume and higher percentages are NOT the only indicators of value.
To illustrate this, I further took the 26 useful tweets and grouped them into a map of ideas that convince me why I follow David Gurteen on Twitter. David and I and many of you are part of a community of practice – and through his tweets, I am able to participate, engage, learn and respond to this practice. We don’t have to be intimately aware of what we’re individually working on, but together and yet seperately we’re working to steward this practice along. I say we but I really am talking about David here. Take a look at my Twitter stream and I doubt you’ll find much of the stewarding of practice going on… but the graphic below reinforces for me what good looks like and what I can aspire to include in my ‘Personal Knowledge Management’ behaviors.

Here is the list of links per ‘topic’ – the ones in BOLD are my ‘super-useful’ ones – I share this in the hope that you too will find some value in these and thank Mr Gurteen like I did for his ‘throw aways’ :
Morals:
Cost of ignoring best practices:

http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/hbr/cramm/2009/08/are-we-failing-theory-or-is-th.html

Wikipedia and Enterprise 2.0 KM

http://www.slideshare.net/TSystemsMMS/the-wikipedia-myth-enterprise-20-knowledge-management

Secret to Enterprise 2.0 success

http://www.euansemple.com/theobvious/2009/9/14/the-secret-to-success-with-enterprise-20.html

Common Practice:
Enterprise 2.0 and emergent collaboration
http://adamkcarson.files.wordpress.com/2006/12/enterprise_20_-_the_dawn_of_emergent_collaboration_by_andrew_mcafee.pdfWhy KM fails:

http://www.nickmilton.com/2009/08/why-km-fails.html

Posturous Guide

http://mashable.com/2009/09/06/posterous-guide/

Presentation editor

http://prezi.com/

FQ

http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/cs/2009/09/a_single_question_haunts_me.html

Online syndication

http://www.masternewmedia.org/guide-to-online-content-syndication-part/

Network strength:
Most prolific #KM tweeters

http://tweettrail.com/?q=%23km

Meet Alfie Kohn

http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/L001599/

Stories:
Mobile phones doing ‘good’:

http://www.crisscrossed.net/2009/08/31/citizen-scientist-how-mobile-phones-can-contribute-to-the-public-good/

Opening speech – KM Singapore

http://www.blip.tv/file/2540594

Google OS

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/09/youre-already-running-google-chrome-os.html

TED – Sixth sense technology

Towards the smarter enterprise:

http://www.elsua.net/2009/09/01/ibms-smart-work-global-jam-towards-the-smarter-enterprise/

Motivation and Dan Pink [2]

http://www.elsua.net/2009/09/14/can-twitter-serve-as-a-personal-knowledge-management-tool/

Morality:
Live your moment

http://www.successful-blog.com/1/10-ways-to-live-in-the-moment-every-moment-of-your-life/

Rewarding trust

http://ow.ly/olnt

News:
Skype sold:

http://mashable.com/2009/09/01/ebay-sells-skype/

Women and wikipedia don’t mix

http://mashable.com/2009/09/01/women-wikipedia/

Twitter trends

http://mashable.com/2009/09/06/hot-twitter-trends/

Apple tablet vs Kindle

http://mashable.com/2009/09/12/apple-tablet-eats-kindle/

Me:
About my knowledge cafe

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!


]]> http://peoplewheels.wordpress.com/2009/11/27/kmworld-09/feed/ 0 priyadarshini http://peoplewheels.wordpress.com/2009/06/03/the-thing-they-tag-social/ http://peoplewheels.wordpress.com/2009/06/03/the-thing-they-tag-social/#comments Wed, 03 Jun 2009 21:07:37 +0000 Priya Banati http://peoplewheels.wordpress.com/?p=5 ]]> Day one of two day conference on social tools in London concluded today. This conference was chaired by David Gurteen, someone who I believe in many ways embodies what it means to be a model community steward. David is a quiet, easy-going, grounded human being who’s strength is in bringing together people and getting them to talk with one another. I am as you can tell quite in awe of his strengths.
And this is as good a lead as any other into the subject of this post, that thing they call social.
It started way back in architecture school when Prof Paniram said to a fellow classmate of mine in private counsel these words – “No man is an island”. What he meant and what is apparent to sociologists just as much as it is to fellow architects or designers is that much of what we do is bound to & by our relationships with one another. And yet despite this basic & age old reflection on the complexities that is our human world, today technologists are beating the drums about a “new” phenomenon they call ‘Web 2.0′, that is also touted by marketing and others alike with the name ‘social tools’ or ‘social media’. This follows management theorists who have been for awhile murmuring about social capital.
So what is all the fuss about? Technologies today enable interactions that is more than just about receiving and sending packets of data – they are converging around networks of individuals, playing upon their similarities and their differences with the help of a few basic assumptions. These assumptions are:
1. Each man/woman to his or her own.
2. Together individuals can organize and come together to create value for all.
3. Things can come apart just as easily as they can come together.
Take any of the different social tools out there and you can test these assumptions out.
We appear to be at the genesis of a complex design in the making that isn’t about one house, or even that of a town or metropolis. This complex design involves that of an environment that extends ‘real’ dimensions of time, space and presence to include virtual, asynchronous interactions in new and innovative ways yet. It isn’t about an individual, a community but includes all of mankind. The scale and scope is as ambitious as ever possible. To think that social tools are about delivering business value is quite childish. What we’re embarking on is a cultural shift equivalent perhaps to two previous occasions in human history – a) when man transitioned from being a hunter to take up farming and produce food from the earth and b) When men aggregated in cities for an industrial revolution.
For countries and companies, what lays before is a time of opportunity and innovation. Responding to this design in the making is not going to be enough. Individuals will need to direct it forward. Our education systems will need to evolve to prepare the next generation to think and ideate in ways we never have. Our investments need to be in preparing for this long term change, without being distracted by short term gains.
The question asked of us today is not if we can make use of the social tools available nor is it a time for fear of technology. Instead like Nandan Nilekani mentioned in a BBC interview, like Indians who are no longer afraid of technology, our question needs to be this – What will it take for us to not to give social tools everything we’ve got?
In the shorter horizon though and IBM’s Ian McNairn did hint at what is in the making. It isn’t enough to bring these tools to your customers or consume them with all the glee of a child tasting a lollipop. The frontier of social design is not about using a blog, Twitter and building a following. It lies, I believe, in defining the structural framework of human networks and iusing that to construct this new evolution of mankind – this thing we call social, an environment we’re already stepping into.

]]> http://peoplewheels.wordpress.com/2009/06/03/the-thing-they-tag-social/feed/ 0 priyadarshini http://peoplewheels.wordpress.com/2007/02/19/people-to-people/ http://peoplewheels.wordpress.com/2007/02/19/people-to-people/#comments Mon, 19 Feb 2007 12:26:28 +0000 Priya Banati http://peoplewheels.wordpress.com/2007/02/19/people-to-people/ ]]> The past couple of weeks and my new work role puts me in the center of the collaboration space and what is being referred to as the ‘people to people’ capabilities.
It’s a funny phrase really because it may imply that Knowledge Management (KM) initiatives might have in certain places escaped the very people they are here to cater to!
Essentially we do all agree that people relate to people and everything else (the gamut of technology) are merely fillers or bridges between them. It is challenging however to grasp the complexities of those connections, especially since it isn’t static but changing with the increasing use of technology.

]]> http://peoplewheels.wordpress.com/2007/02/19/people-to-people/feed/ 0 priyadarshini