December 2010
75 posts
Social sensitivity brings a group closer for...
Work teams who openly express their negative feelings share more information, have greater solidarity and are better at solving complicated analytical problems, a new study has found
Dismissing hierarchy is preposterous
Dismissing hierarchy is preposterous. Hierarchy is a simple social network pattern. It’s network structure is hub and spoke. (Just turn an org chart on its side and have a look.) Like most fundamental social network structures, hierarchy is essential and omnipotent. It helps allocate resources, furnish continuity, assure compliance, and so forth. The social network utility of hierarchy is...
Collect stories to understand...data prevails
To address this issue the USAAF hired civilian psychologist John C. Flanagan. He quickly realised that most people, whether the trainee pilots themselves or the highly experienced instructors, were almost useless at explaining what contributed to even phenomenal success or dreadful failure. He wrote: “Too often, statements regarding job requirements are merely lists of all the desirable...
Satisficing
Satisficing, a “handy blended word combining satisfy with suffice”, is a decision-making strategy that attempts to meet criteria for adequacy, rather than to identify an optimal solution. A satisficing strategy may often be (near) optimal if the costs of the decision-making process itself, such as the cost of obtaining complete information, are considered in the outcome calculus.
The...
Cognitive dissonance
Once you start to think about it, the list of situations in which people resolve cognitive dissonance through rationalisations becomes ever longer and longer. If you’re honest with yourself, I’m sure you can think of many times when you’ve done it yourself. I know I can.
When trying to join a group, the harder they make the barriers to entry, the more you value your membership....
Organisational design issues in knowledge sharing...
For my review of this article see this snippet - Threat and self-esteem in knowledge sharing.
NOTES
Organisational design issues
encouraging creators/risk-takers over learners…”not-invented here” is a symptom…an incentive to re-invent the wheel (even though re-use is promoted)
status/competitive nature of rewarding individual action/career enhancing (even though we...
Threat and self-esteem in knowledge sharing
…psychological processes such as interpersonal comparisons, ego-threat, and self-affirmation can affect the ways decision makers assess the act of taking and using knowledge, and consequently how knowledge flows through organizations and markets.
People want to have positive views of themselves, and organize much of their lives around maintaining, enhancing, and protecting their...
CoPs have got your back!
…the group can turn into a community for a short time. For instance, when the majority of its members face the same issue and they get organized to fix it or weight enough on the enterprise so it will fix it. In this case, what made the transformation possible is the failure of the organization
- Bertrand Duperrin
Related
Social media is not synonymous with community
Projects begetting...
Complexity and resilience in the pace layering of...
On the other hand, information architects could elect a second option: repositioning themselves as guardians, not of a system’s architectural stability, but of its ecological resilience. Such a role would involve negotiating and monitoring the many complex and unpredictable ways in which fast layers such as tagging interact with slower layers such as controlled vocabulary maintenance. Such a role...
The assumptions of resilience theory
Resilience theory proceeds from four basic assumptions:
• Eco-systems do not change continuously or chaotically, but through periods of relative stability punctuated by sudden change that reorganizes the entire system;
• Change at all levels is discontinuous, patchy, and non-linear. Consequently, it is difficult to analyze how smaller systems scale up to larger sizes;
• The destablizing...
Vertical stack or Horizontal integration or both
…Should collaboration technologies be a separate vertical stack of tools with links to and from existing tools? Or, should they be an integrated horizontal layer directly within the enterprise applications?
In other words it a vertical add-on, or a horizontal core component layer?
As a vertical add-on, you can keep discussions and tacit information separate from the repositories of the...
Encourage hoarding by rewarding
If managers want their employees to share information, why do they encourage them to hoard it by rewarding competition among them?
We found, as predicted by economic theory, that the people rewarded for individual performance shared information least; the people rewarded for team performance shared more; and the people rewarded for company performance shared most.
In each case, the degree of...
Flattening experts with networks
Executives should support the change in power that follows from a change in the sources of expertise. In one Pacific Rim bank we studied, over 90% of questions in the company’s traditional knowledge management system traveled up from field offices to headquarters while answers traveled down in the opposite direction. Tapping expertise only vertically misses the full benefits of openness. Truly...
Centralized KM planning is prone to failure
In his seminal 1945 work arguing for the importance of market economies, economist Friedrich von Hayek emphasized that knowledge is unevenly distributed across society, and that centralized economic planning is prone to failure due to an inability to aggregate distributed knowledge and establish accurate resource prices.
We believe this principle also applies to knowledge markets within...
When to use absolute and relative incentives
…there is a solution to the problem of individuals hoarding information: using absolute rather than relative rewards. If a sales tournament rewards only top sellers, only relative position matters: One person winning means another person loses, so, in the company’s knowledge market, salespeople keep their best ideas to themselves.
On the other hand, absolute rewards can foster information...
Networks not experts in Just-in-Time KM
Traditional, first-generation attempts to manage knowledge relied mainly on centralized knowledge management systems. In that top-down approach, a central authority prioritizes development to address mainstream problems based on two assumptions:
(1) knowledge needs are predictable, and (2) experts rather than peers elicit and validate knowledge. Both assumptions have limitations.
In traditional...
Fixed-reward incentives vs floating market or...
…markets cause resources to speak up and self-identify. They facilitate reuse of existing information, cause new information to be created when needed and efficiently regulate use of resources, including people’s time. Markets provide the framework to arbitrage gaps between problem and opportunity
…includes material or social incentives to encourage information sharing.
We’ve found...
Non-commissioned work - 20pc - cognitive surplus -...
Organisations from Google to Twitter are achieving some stunning results by carving out time for staff to work on whatever it is that inspires them.
Look around your office. If yours is like most, there’s no non-commissioned work. Nearly everything people do is commissioned. A few companies, however, are taking a different approach.
…the FedEx Days were so successful that Atlassian went a...
Bias for continuity and familiarity over change...
The course that a conversation takes is significantly affected by the taken-for-granted pattern of cultural assumptions ‘within which’ it takes place. And this means that, although the possibility is always present for thinking and action to break out of established patterns and take on new forms, the tendency is for local sensemaking and action-taking to continue along...
A leader’s task is to actively engage in the joint...
Perhaps one of the problems here arises from thinking of leadership communication solely in terms of ‘getting the message across’ – whether or not story is used as the way of pursuing this.
Organizations comprise people talking, acting, interacting and transacting with each other continuously through the medium of conversation. As people get together, both formally and informally, they make...
Understanding in retrospect won't predict same...
The idea is that approaches such as randomised control trails (RCTs) are good for determining known, or knowable program contexts, where cause and effect can be predicted with enough knowledge and investigation.
However, there are other contexts which are characterised as ‘complex’ in which state ‘cause and effect’ relationships cannot be predicted as many things are affecting many things.
In...
Gradients and Boundaries
Gradient models don’t create boundaries and humans need boundaries to think differently. With a gradient people settle where they feel comfortable
…a framework with boundaries allows people to see that they need to behave differently in different contexts.
- Dave Snowden
Our own articulation of an idea adds to our...
Has it happened to you that, as you begin to describe to another person a complex issue you want to ask them about, the answer pops into your mind before you finish the question? And you end up saying, somewhat sheepishly, “Nevermind, I think I’ve just realized what the answer is.” In trying to explain the situation, your mind has put the bits and pieces you know about the topic together in a new...
CoP success story
An AECOM plant in Argentina had made a successful move into biofuels processing and was producing sugar dust as a byproduct of its biofuels production. The problem: Airborne sugar dust can be explosive — and AECOM was concerned about the possibility of having fireballs near its fuel processing. A team of AECOM employees based in London had several ideas, but after weeks of back and forth, a...
What gets measured determines what gets done
…“what gets measured determines what gets done” from an employee incentive point of view…
There is a tension, peculiar to basketball, between the interests of the team and the interests of the individual. The game continually tempts the people who play it to do things that are not in the interest of the group.
A point guard might selfishly give up an open shot for an assist. You can...
Enabling opportunities for employee driven change
…pre-sorting of seatbelt parts into coloured tubs. Apparently only a few weeks earlier the parts had been arranged on a wall. All hooks and dangling parts, like your Dad’s tools in the shed. When a car came down the assembly line a worker would select the parts appropriate for the car model, and then attach them to the car. Each seat belt had roughly four parts, so that meant there was three...
Data first, model second
I don’t like 2by2 matrices because they create a categorisation approach in which the model precedes the data so people make things fit. As you can see from the first link the framework emerges from the data so its better for sense-making and is more likely to recognise a changed or changing context.
- Dave Snowden
Best practice may neglect adapting to real needs
After decades of demanding that employees strictly adhere to a 20-point list of customer service basics, the company’s [Ritz-Carlton] management realized that the specified routines weren’t adequately addressing the widely ranging expectations of the luxury chain’s customers
…expanding the list to address every possible situation that an employee might encounter would be futile.
As a...
Using narrative to qualify adaptive case...
Process standardization has been pushed too far, with little regard for where it does and does not make sense. We aim to rescue artistic processes from the tide of scientific standardization
Scientific process management calls for blindly reducing variability. But sometimes variability cannot be avoided. Take the inconsistencies in the wood used in the soundboards of pianos. In other cases, the...
Hive around problems or hierarchy or both
“A transformation has occurred between people working in hierarchical worlds to one in which people are gaining credibility and social rewards through social networking, publishing, producing content, becoming ‘experts’. It is easier to find people within the organisation, breaking down the traditional hierarchy. There is a now a flat management model – it has shrunk the organisation to...
Training for solved solutions vs Collaboration for...
Exceptions occur under a range of circumstances. For example, customers needing non-standard financing terms, managers needing to find transaction codes for unusual logistics requirements, or a software developer needing to resolve a coding problem involving multiple dependencies, and any of a host of other challenges faced in business that ERP, HR, CRM, and other enterprise systems don’t take...
Enterprise 2.0 is not just goal oriented...
Social software offers the prospect of diminishing, though by no means eliminating, the gulf between formal organizational processes and informal employee practices. The key fact is that social software is a way of cultivating shared experience rather than a mere means to an end, or goal, alone
Shared experience, not just shared information, is fundamental to the social networks underlying...
Value - assets you own or make things happen
1…social media, enterprise 2.0, and social business design do have the potential to provide value to a business. The case studies are out in the open, so there’s no arguing about this.
2…case studies represent the special case, and not the general case.
3…social media, enterprise 2.0, and social business design require a different approach to command-and-control. Let’s avoid...
Turn your audience from critics to participants
We usually need a whack on the side of the head (an emotional jolt) to help us see things differently or to get motivated to step off a safe path into unfamiliar territory. To provide an effective emotional jolt, a pitch needs to connect with as many senses as possible (sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste). Numbers are one dimensional, speaking only to our rational brain. Because they don’t...
Mirror neurons
A mirror neuron is a neuron which fires both when an animal performs an action and when the animal observes the same action performed by another (especially conspecific) animal.
Thus, the neuron “mirrors” the behavior of another animal, as though the observer were itself performing the action.
These neurons have been observed in primates, including humans, and in some birds.
In...
Approximate the starting conditions; you can't...
…trying to exactly replicate the starting conditions might well be wasteful, it is in anyway impossible. However in the context of experiments and transfer of learning…one would not be attempting an exact replication, but rather to say something along the lines of XYZ put these things in place, had these resources and took these actions and things worked for them. Having done that, you...
Something that works in town X will not...
It is not a major shift to run a series of small trials, paying particular attention to different sets of starting conditions, see which produce the most beneficial outcomes and then seek to replicate those starting conditions in future projects, modifying and adapting as needed. That way you get different but equally beneficial outcomes in other areas.
- Dave Snowden
Beware of outcomes thinking in complex...
Assuming an experiment will scale, or replicate in a different context.
The fact that something works in one context (for example a particular hospital) does not mean that the outcome can be replicated in another place even if it similar. Each specific context is not fully knowable, and the interaction of agents in each context will be different in each case. We can replicate starting conditions...
Idealistic vs Naturalising KM
An idealistic approach goes something like this:
“In a perfect world everyone would update the KM system with details of their latest projects and contribute to a CoP relating to the area of their expertise.
Then when a new project starts all members of staff would check out the KM system for relevant material, use it and this safe money and time by not reinventing the wheel.
So we will...
Replicate starting conditions
We can understand starting conditions as a complex system evolves and we can influence their evolution if we focus on barriers and attractors (1st and 2nd order constraints) but not if we look at the end point (so attempting to predict makes things worse not better)
- Dave Snowden
euan: when asked what my favourite site was I... →
Yes this happens with email, but inject it with steroids and you have Twitter
“…it is worth noting that any corporation, however open its business...”
Experience design strategy
Listening to the conversations people engage online about a topic (such as your brand), and eliciting the participation of those people in the development and refinement of products and services, are two key parts of an experience design strategy.
Speaking the language of customer-centricity is not good enough. Companies must talk-the talk and walk-the-walk for brand strategy.
...
Social media is not synonymous with community
Social media can help foster communities but social media can be limited to allowing a conversation around content…which is *not* community
Communities have the following characteristics:
They are continuous, not temporal - this is not to say that people don’t drop in and out but there is a core membership that interacts together over a long period of time.
Communities gather around...
KM professionalism
When people want to design a house, they call an architect. When they want to cure someone sick, they call a doctor. When they want to build a bridge, they hire an engineer. It’s clear to me there are important prerequisites to being a good KM/IM practitioner, but they aren’t skills which are consistently recognised by organisations or even by our peers.
- Stephen Bounds (actKM...
Why will we move mountains for those we trust and...
Amazingly we ask friends things that are completely out of their field of expertise before we will enquire about it with people who will have a much more robust knowledge. This is because we trust them and do not have a relationship with the unknown expert.
A question I often ask my workshop participants to trigger a fun and rich dialogue is: “Why will we move mountains for those we trust...
High "betweeness" as influencial factor
The most connected people in a social network — those with the highest number of incoming and outgoing connections — have high eigenvalues. These eigenvalues can be calculated — like Google’s PageRank algorithm — by weighting the value of each connection based on the eigenvalue of the originator.
But this research [ARVIX blog, Best Connected Individuals Are Not the Most Influential Spreaders in...
Behavioral changes are transmitted more quickly in...
Damon Centola has undertaken research that shows that behavioral changes are transmitted more quickly in denser networks.
A company or a community where the members in general have more connections to others will be more likely to adopt new behaviors than in more loosely connected networks.
So, if you are — for example — management in a company confronted with the need to change business...
Knowledge as an object or as a thing
* By thing I mean “an organism”
http://www.slideshare.net/Andriessen/slidecast-andriessen-eckm-2007/16
http://www.slideshare.net/Andriessen/slidecast-andriessen-eckm-2007/23
Related
The inhabited world is comprised not of objects but of things
What do you call the gap between an existing and a...
http://www.slideshare.net/Andriessen/slidecast-andriessen-eckm-2007/27
“a problem is an interpretation of a feeling of discomfort” (J. Kessels)