Tinkering with tools: (Pretty) Easy Prezi

Prezi the (really not so) new cool presentation tool

Prezi is a presentation tool. An alternative to Powerpoint. It has been around for a while now (four years), and I hadn’t used it since 2010 when, among others, I was wondering ‘What is learning?‘ but current circumstances at work have brought me back to using it again – as testified in one recent blog post on partnerships.

This time it’s not so much for my own use (I tend to facilitate events a lot more than present anything at those events) as for my colleagues’ use, so this ‘Tinkering with tools‘ post is about Prezi, some resources about them and a couple of tips to enrich one’s experience with it.

So what is Prezi?

Prezi is a dynamic presentation tool that is built in a totally different logic to Powerpoint. Let’s examine closely the differences between the two:

Powerpoint	Prezi
Series of interconnected slides following one path – ‘Slide’ logic, whereby the slide is the playing field	Canvas offering a navigation pathway amidst an infinity of other ones - Canvas logic where the whole canvas is the playing field – it is possible to step out of the indicated ‘pathway’ to look at any element on the canvas
Lecture-like experience ‘a la overhead sheet’ though can be used very strongly (the tool is never the problem, the tool user can be)	Dynamic exploration-like experience where the user is invited to discover a brave new world
Possibility to emphasise certain elements with animations or formatting (bold, colour etc.)	Few formatting options (3 types of fonts though colours possible) but endless possibility to emphasise elements by scaling them up or down, adding dynamics to the presentation
Many animations possible in the slide (if used well, one of the powerful features of PPT)	Some animations possible but mostly animation happening between sequences of text e.g. nesting images into images into images
Possibility to embed images, videos, audio etc.	Possibility to embed images, videos, audio etc. AND Powerpoint presentations
Risk of putting too much text in and to bore the audience OR risk of putting too many animations in and to annoy the audience ‘Death by Powerpoint‘	Risk of putting too many transitions and movements in and to get the audience sea-sick ‘vertigo by Prezi‘
Embedding in websites happens through prior uploading on e.g. Slideshare	Embedding in websites directly (though via a rather not so straightforward logic for WordPress sites)
Software used from the client’s PC	Online, or pay-for – free 30-day trial – desktop application

If this doesn’t help you visualise what I mean, perhaps you might want to take a look at this example:

Now let’s have a look at some useful ways to build Prezis, from my experience…

Practical tips and tricks?

First off, focus on three things:

1. your story (the content and logic of it),
2. the storyboard of that story (e.g. what element will you disclose one by one, flanked by what possible visuals and other media etc.)
3. and finally how will you plot these onto your canvas. It is really crucial to think about this because the prezi will be used all the more as you incorporate a strong story in a smart way of using the canvas.

This means that once you’ve got these elements figured, you should plot (i.e. add, write, upload, include) all these elements of text, visuals, audio and video bits more or less where you want to put them on your canvas. Your use of the canvas and of Prezi’s navigation logic is what makes the difference between a good prezi and an excellent prezi. Then you can scale them differently to hide them a bit for an element of surprise.

Prezi is not Powerpoint, so don’t build a Prezi the way you would a Powerpoint. Forget about overview slides, forget about animations on slide, and certainly forget about the biggest mistakes in building and delivering (death by) Powerpoint e.g. having too much text to read, adding useless visuals which don’t strengthen your point etc.

On the other hand, use the strength of Prezi: move around, scale in and out, turn the text, play with the canvas and with details in it (e.g. nest an image in the dot of an ‘i’ or in the brain of a person in the picture), use a visual as your canvas and move around, get a hang of options with the templates offered, think for yourself and try a story canvas that suits your style and your needs. It can be a blank canvas, a pre-existing template, a picture…

However, here are also some other tips to avoid shooting yourself in the foot with your innovative prezi (at the risk of putting your audience off Prezi for a while):

• Even on a prezi, too long a presentation can bore your audience. Time yourself and avoid speaking over 10 minutes
• Scaling in and out is great but doing too much of it really gives vertigo. Spend some time talking over each ‘bit of text’ rather than moving straight into the next bit, to allow your audience to find its balance and sense again and to avoid vertigo
• Use pictures not in a Powerpoint slide kind of way but rather embedding the text in the picture or vice versa, or show the picture after or before the text
• Add different kinds of media (e.g. video) to also time your presentation and give space for your audience to stabilise its senses
• Keep a consistent use of fonts and colours to give a sense of balance to your presentation
• At all times, keep your story in mind. As much as early Powerpoint presentations used all kinds of animations and lost the plot (and the audience), Prezis are cool only if they strengthen the point, not dilute it.

As you can see, I also need to explore Prezi to improve my own style since my 2010 attempts.

Some more resources about Prezi:

• Top 10 Prezis of 2012 (inspiration always helps!)
• How to use Prezi (video tutorial of March 2013)
• 5 reasons to use Prezi (one positive experience about Prezi)
• The problems with Prezi and two reasons I rarely recommend Prezi (very useful words of caution)
• Prezi: a dynamic presentation or nauseating experience? Pros and cons in one post
• Why the best prezis use grouping and layering (short tips to avoid motion sickness)
• Prezi for dummies cheat sheet (shortcuts, media formats and more)

Related blog posts:

• What is learning
• The tool obsession, a serious(ly) childish posture
• Stop taking hostages! The ills of poor event design and facilitation

Of partnerships, DEEP and wide

Partnership, an anchor and harpoon forged over time (Credits – Rob Young)

PARTNERSHIPS!

The holy grail of development!

Well, when you bother about collaborative approach that is. And some prefer to use partners for results rather than relationships. But for any development organisation with the right frame of mind, partnerships are central. Only it tends to be a lot of discourse and perhaps not enough action.

Let me offer, in this shoot post, a few ideas to work practically with partners:

• Partners are not a category of actors. They’re not NGOs, they’re not governmental agencies, they’re not donors. They can be all of them. Partners are all the actors we care enough to listen to, to work with, to deliver together with, to enrich mutually, to develop each other’s capacities… They go way beyond the vague and slightly demeaning term of ‘stakeholders’. As was said in this week’s annual programme meeting of my employer:

Let’s turn ‘stakeholders’ into partners

 

 

• Partners are not just for our own benefit, they should be mutually enriching. Otherwise we’re not talking about partners but about parties that we benefit from, like  fat sheep that we prey on. Is it the vision of development you wish to spread around? It most certainly isn’t mine.
• Partners are not obscure organisations hidden behind generic terms of reference. They are groups of people that we know and that rely on individual relationships, hopefully formally or informally institutionalised enough that they don’t depend on just one person. But let’s not underestimate the deeply human nature of any meaningful (even institutional) ‘partnership’.
• Building partnerships is hard work. It takes time to find the people that coalesce around some ideas; it takes patience to understand each other’s language, to accept each other’s vision and agenda, to recognise each other’s strengths and weaknesses frankly; it takes courage to want to bridge the gap, to invest in the partnership beyond the inevitable bust-ups and possible breaches of confidence; it takes resources to bring our organisational apparatus behind those partnerships. It takes years to achieve meaningful partnerships.
• Maintaining partnerships is also hard work. It implies having genuine discussions about the end of funding for a given initiative, exploring other options together, but also keeping regular visits and holding ongoing conversations – even chit chat – throughout, as two old friends do, without always having an interest in mind.
• Investing in partnerships is not about multiplying the amount of organisations that are mentioned in our initiatives and projects, it’s about deepening the relationships we have with them, the only way to build the trust out of which authentically well grounded, relevant, jointly owned, sustainable work can emerge. In this sense…

Partnerships are not necessarily about ‘widening’ the list of our institutional friends, they’re about ‘deepening‘ the relationship we have with them, increasingly bringing to the light the difficult questions that one day might threaten those very partnerships and finding ways to address them, together, with maturity.

• Finally, for genuinely helpful partnerships to emerge, mutual capacity development and a collective eye for critical thinking and adaptive management are key. That is what helps partners understand how the situation evolves and take decisions in a better informed way.

Some of these messages are strongly echoed in the synthesis reflections about the ILRI annual programme meeting:

Partnerships are perhaps key, but they’re not a word to throw around so as to tick boxes, they’re a long term investment, philosophy and care for people of blood and flesh, of ideas and ideals, for development that makes sense and makes us more empowered, honourable and human every day.

Related blog posts:

• Development, between results and relationships
• Look beyond WHAT to do: WHY and HOW lead to WHO
• Capacity development, organisational development, institutional change – The extended happy families of engagement
• Complexity in multi-stakeholder processes – how to manage, facilitate or navigate around it?

KM for Development Journal news, zooming in on the facilitation of multi-stakeholder processes

Some news about the Knowledge Management for Development Journal, for which I’m a senior editor: the upcoming issue (May 2013) is just about to be released and will be the first open access issue again after three years of commercial hosting by Taylor and Francis. This is a really welcome move – back to open knowledge – and the issue should be very interesting as it focuses on knowledge management in climate change work.

The September 2013 issue is dedicated to ‘Breaking the boundaries to knowledge integration: society meets science within knowledge management for development.’

Discussing innovation and multi-stakeholder platforms (Credits: WaterandFood / FlickR)

But here I wanted to focus a bit on the December 2013 issue of the Knowledge Management for Development Journal which will be about ‘Facilitating multi-stakeholder processes: balancing internal dynamics and institutional politics‘.

Multi-stakeholder processes (MSPs) have been a long term interest of mine, as I really appreciate their contribution to dealing with wicked problems, their focus (conscious or not) on social learning, and the intricate aspects of learning, knowledge management, communication, monitoring and capacity development. Multi-stakeholder processes are a mini-world of agile KM and learning in the making – thus offering a fascinating laboratory while focusing on real-life issues and problems.

What is clearly coming out of experiences around MSPs is that facilitation is required to align or conjugate the divergent interests, competing agendas, differing world views, complimentary capacities and abilities, discourses and behaviours.

In particular I am personally interested to hear more about:

• How homegrown innovation and facilitation can be stimulated and nurtured for more sustainable collective action movements, especially if the MSP was set up as part of a funded aid project.
• How the adaptive capacity of a set of stakeholders is being stimulated beyond the direct issue at hand (be it education, competing agendas on natural resources, water and sanitation coverage etc.) or not and how it becomes a conscious objective of these processes.
• What facilitation methods seem to have worked out and to what extent this was formalised or not.
• How the facilitation of such complex multi-stakeholder processes was shared among various actors or borne by one actor and with what insights.
• How individuals and institutions find their role to play and how their orchestration is organised in such complex processes (i.e. is there a place for individual players, how does this address or raise issues of capacities, turnover, ownership, energy, collective action, trust etc.).
• To what extent – and how – was the facilitation of these processes formally or informally reflected upon as part of monitoring, learning and evaluation or as part of softer process documentation.

This special issue, which is very promising with almost 25 abstracts received in total, should explore these issues in more depth and bring up more fodder for this blog and for exciting work on using social learning to improve research / development. The issue will come out in December 2013 as mentioned. In the meantime, a couple of upcoming events in my work will also touch upon some specific forms of multi-stakeholder processes: innovation platforms.

What else is boiling around this blog? A lot!

Coming up soon: Another couple of KM interviews, some reflections on open knowledge and related topics and perhaps getting to a Prezi as I’ve rediscovered the pleasure of working with it after three years of interruption. Only even more is boiling outside this blog – as this turns out to be the most hectic season at the office these days. More when I get to it the week after next.

Read the December 2013 issue’s call for papers.

Related blog posts:

• Complexity in multi-stakeholder processes – how to manage, facilitate or navigate around it?
• A frame to work with learning alliances? 
• The change alliance
• Profile of the social learning hero
• Social learning in climate change – Of buckets, loops and social LSD?
• What’s really new about social learning?

Assessing, measuring, monitoring knowledge (and KM): Taking stock

Been a while since I last properly ‘took stock’ of a specific topic in my knowledge garden. The last one about storytelling. But I’ve recently been working again on one of my pet topics: assessing knowledge work, so a good stock-taking exercise will be really handy for upcoming work, and hopefully for you too!

Some takes on M&E of KM via IKM-Emergent (Credits: Hearn, Hulsebosch & Talisayon)

Knowledge Management Impact Challenge (KMIC) work and related KM4D journal issue

In 2011, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) launched a KM impact challenge, inviting authors to submit entries explaining how KM could be effectively assessed. 45 different case studies were shared and reflected upon in a final report and a series of articles published in the Knowledge Management for Development Journal. These cases spanned a spectrum of KM interventions from capturing lessons, developing capacities, improving organisational performance, looking into learning events, impact of communities of practice etc. A lot of common challenges to assessing KM and practical recommendations and question to move forward are identified in this (to my knowledge) penultimate attempt at taking stock of assessing KM in development work.

Read the KM Impact Challenge final report or discover the Knowledge Management for Development Journal issue dedicated to the KMIC experiences (limited access, come back to me for specific articles).

Methods for measuring intangible assets

I first came across this resource in a blog post (itself worthwhile reading) from Gerald Meinert about ‘KM asks for value compensation‘. Karl-Erik Sveiby is one of the KM tycoons. He has been writing a lot of really good conceptual and practical pieces on KM as a professor and as founder of Sveiby Knowledge Associates. Although this list of approaches to measure intangible assets is not strictly focusing on assessing KM, it is very useful to consider as KM relates very much to intangibles. Sveiby looks at four different methods to measure intangibles: Direct intellectual capital methods, market capitalisation methods, return on assets methods and scorecard methods. He goes on looking into 42 different methods falling in either category.

The merit of this work is to consider the valuation of knowledge capital in various ways. Perhaps not enough is said about how knowledge leads to other changes but that is covered by other methods and resources listed here.

See Sveiby’s methods for measuring intangible assets

Nick Milton’s series of quantified KM stories

Nick Milton, of Knoco Stories, is a prolific blogger on KM and he totally should have been much higher on the top 100 KM influencers on Twitter. Among the many things that Nick has been blogging about are a series of quantified success stories – 60 to date while blogging here – which look at ways KM helped make or save money, adoption of new practices, increasing implementation speed, increasing effectiveness and benchmarking it against other comparies etc.

Have a look at these Knoco Stories ‘quantified success stories‘.

The use of indicators for the monitoring and evaluation of knowledge management and knowledge brokering in international development

This is the latest I’ve come across. Compiled by Philipp Grunewald and Walter Mansfield on the back of a KM4Dev Innovation Fund grant, this survey report came together with a workshop report which consists in fact mainly of a list of 100 indicators to assess knowledge (management, sharing etc.). See the survey report or discover the top 100 indicators in the workshop report.

KM4Dev curated discussions on monitoring and assessing KM

Over time, various KM4Dev members have been asking about this perpetually reappearing conversation topic (and the reason why I consider M&E of KM one of the phoenixes of the KM field). Of all these discussions, ‘Monitoring and evaluating KM‘ and the more recent ‘Measuring knowledge sharing‘ are perhaps the most pertinent pointers, although other conversations helpfully addressed specific aspects related to e.g. after action reviews, partnerships, portals, conferences etc.

There is another one of these conversations happening on the KM4Dev mailing list as we speak. Feel free to join and perhaps to help document the conversation, I may include it in this stock-taking post.

Check the KM4Dev wiki on M&E-focused discussions

The IKM-Emergent papers on monitoring and evaluation of knowledge management

Finally, I couldn’t ignore these two papers that the Information and Knowledge Management (IKM) Emergent project came up with, which I also co-authored:

• Working paper No 12 Monitoring and evaluating development as a knowledge industry: ideas in current practice by Simon Hearn, Ewen Le Borgne and Valerie A. Brown, August 2011
• Working paper No 13 Monitoring and evaluating development as a knowledge ecology: ideas for new collective practices by Ewen Le Borgne, Simon Hearn and Valerie A. Brown, August 2011

The first paper takes stock of the major problems with assessing knowledge management in its various forms and how it is currently being done. The second paper suggests an alternative approach to doing it, inviting a variety of people that have a stake in the evaluation of KM and collectively reflecting with them on what assessing KM could be and how it would add more value.

These papers – while in the making – were presented at one of the KMIC webinars:

I have some more resources which I’d like to share with you from my Delicious bookmarks for your own sake.

There must be many other key resources, reports and inputs and I would love to hear from you: What are your personal gems about assessing knowledge work? What resources and ideas have changed your view of this complex and uber-important aspect of our work in the field of KM?

And here I don’t provide a meta-analysis of all these resources, but this might be the next step in my own perpetually restarting journey in the territory of KM.

Related blog posts:

• What the *tweet* do we know (about monitoring/assessing KM)?
• M&E of KM: the phoenix of KM is showing its head again – how to tackle it?
• The wealth of communities of practice – pointers to assess networked value
• Back on monitoring learning, from social media to impact
• Social web metrics: between the cracks of evidence and confidence
• The other stock-taking posts and other posts in the M&E category.

Engagement and deeper connection in social networks, a dialogue with Jaume Fortuny

What? Do I smell something new?

This will not be your typical KM for me & you post. Instead, it’s an idea of Jaume Fortuny (and see his Twitter profile as Jaume’s a terrific and prolific tweeter) which we have gently pushed forward to shape it up into an online conversation that we wish to continue here rather than just among us two (narrating our work life, right?).

The engagement pyramid (credits – FogFish)

The crux of this conversation: how to generate and maintain engagement on social media? In more details, what makes a person follow another person online and keep on doing so over time? Jaume is a regular follower of this blog and it’s time to address you as ‘You’ indeed

As I told you in our email conversation, I rather approach engagement from the side of social engagement (as in this really excellent resource about youth engagement) and I have blogged about the engagement happy families, engagement in facilitation and how KM can drive more engagement in comms etc.) but never in the way that you portrayed.

You seem to say that there are factors attracting people to a given blog, either aspirations about spreading interesting information or perhaps even improving peoples’ lives. Depending on peoples’ interests, they are attracted to a given blog (or any other social media for that matter but let’s talk about ‘blogs’ for the sake of the conversation) because of its focus and how the content on that blog is crafted. But that is only the first step.

The second step is to make sure that people remain interested in that blog. You suggest this happens through (as a blogger) inviting interaction, displaying humility and kindness, showing that you care for reciprocation. You also suggest that over time, some other incentives help maintain this engagement: recognition, meeting face to face and establishing a physical (i.e. non virtual) bond, rewarding and motivating the person following the blog.

Finally you mention that you also have ‘a gang of people’ that you follow and with whom you entertain engagement over time without waiting for any return.

This is all really interesting to hear and I have a few questions for you – either generic or related to our interactions around this blog:

• What do you find ‘turn-offs’ (repulsive behaviours) on the blogs and in the people that you follow regularly?
• To what extent does the content and the content type (e.g. using different media) weigh in compared with the personality of the blogger and the relationship s/he has with their followers?
• Which posts on this blog have you particularly liked but more importantly why?
• Do you follow people in their social network ecosystem or around one specific platform?
• Do you think this engagement is susceptible to change over time with different people and how does this happen?
• Is there a point for bloggers to specifically invite their audience/readers/followers/friends to react either via surveys or specifically prompting them via e.g. Twitter and other social networks?
• What do you hope to achieve – if anything – with the people that you engage with more thoroughly and what can make it happen?

I also would like to say that for me, having people like you engaged over time and really following, re-sharing, questioning, reflecting is really great. It’s what helps me get a sense of direction and relevance from this blog. My blog has a niche focus with a likely limited audience, so any feedback is really great and is one of the reasons why I blog after all.

Engagement between social network connections is not a topic I really paid much conscious attention to so far, yet it is the currency of our networked age and a real zeitgeist signpost. Good that you woke me up to it Jaume! I look forward to the next round of this conversation to go deeper in our mutual exploration and understanding. Thank you for your excellent suggestion, and thank you for your engagement, as ever!

Related blog posts:

• Blogging for what? For reflecting, for sharing, for learning, for synthesising, for…
• From ego-tripping to ego-rippling: the knowledge ego-logy paradigm
• I WANT (YOU) TO CHANGE! Yes but how?
• A journey through five years of blogging
• Blogging, and the value of continually learning from patterns: take 2

Interview with Carl Jackson: of KM, social learning and creative design

I recently had the chance to co-facilitate an event dedicated to social learning together with Carl Jackson of Westhill Knowledge Group. Carl is a very good KM4Dev friend and a very knowledgeable person on knowledge management for development generally. He was front and centre in the organising team of the first ever annual KM4Dev event I had the chance to attend, in Brighton in 2006.

Carl kindly accepted to be interviewed about his views on the following:

• What is KM to you and how does it relate to social learning (if at all)?
• Where do you think KM is going (what fields is it moving towards) and where is its place in international development?
• What are your current interests in KM and/or social learning (to do what?)
• What do you recommend reading or who to get in touch to know more about all of this?

The video interview (3’37”) is totally not professional but the content is totally worth listening to.

The transcript follows below:

What is KM to you and how does it relate to social learning (if at all)?

For me knowledge management is really about how people come to realise the value of knowledge, irrespective of their position or of their level of authority. I think often it is about how organisations get to harness and value the knowledge assets in all kinds of places in the organisation or outside the organisation and in networks.

What’s interesting about social learning and how it relates to KM is it’s really pushing us out of this idea that KM is about looking at an individual organisation and the management of its own knowledge assets and thinking much more about knowledge is held within society more broadly and how people who come in with their professional hats also have knowledge from lots of other spheres of their life and other networks they can be bringing in to help us solve challenges that we’re facing in organisations so it’s making KM much more democratic and much more cultural.

Where do you think KM is going (what fields is it moving towards) and where is its place in international development?

I’ve seen KM become something which is now considered incredibly mainstream. It’s no longer considered to be an innovative thing that people are doing it’s like ‘hey well yeah we all do kinda knowledge management. There’s no particular cachet to be associated with it so now I think it’s much more around people trying to show how practically this is supporting the bread and butter that the organisations are doing.

Within international development I think one of the things where it’s most helpful is that a lot of organisations are working at national, regional and international scales whereas there is no particularly one place where you can go to access all the knowledge that you need. So KM within international development is about being very agile, accessing networks, building alliances and discovering knowledge in unexpected places.

What are your current interests in KM and/or social learning (to do what?)

At the moment, last kinda year I’ve been very excited around how we can start to use some of these ideas from ‘human-centred design’ or ‘collaborative design’ where it’s getting away from thinking of knowledge being primarily a textual or analytical thing and starting to invest in processes that are much hands-on, drawing on disciplines from architecture and design, to create spaces and processes which are creative hands-on innovations that unlock people’s potential to ex-temporise, to do things ‘ad lib’.

What do you recommend reading or who to get in touch to know more about all of this?

I’m not one for reading research papers, what I tend to do is to always rely on my colleagues from the KM4Dev community so seeing the blogs that are associated with KM4Dev and also any opportunity that I can get to work with or attend events that my friends in KM4Dev are part of in because they’re really cutting edge.

Carl Jackson: www.linkedin.com/in/carlwkg 

Westhill Knowledge Group: www.wkg.uk.net

Related blog posts:

• Social learning in climate change – Of buckets, loops and social LSD?
• KM=CDL, on the journey to universal sense-making
• What’s really new about social learning?
• Profile of the social learning hero

What’s really new about social learning?

In the recent annual science meeting of the CGIAR research program on climate change, agriculture and food security (CCAFS), the theme for the event was ‘social learning’. Upon hearing what social learning referred to, a lot of the workshop participants were wondering what was really new about social learning. For reasons that are too long to explain – and it’s not the purpose of this post – we didn’t really take the time to zoom in on the differences.

So here’s an attempt at making distinctions between social learning and related initiatives and schools of thought in previous experiences. Because there are a lot of previous trails leading to the social learning bush: Participatory action research (PAR), participatory rural appraisal (PRA), participatory plant breeding (PPB), multi-stakeholder processes (MSPs), participatory impact pathway analysis (PIPA) can all legitimately subscribe to a long tradition of social learning. A very rich tradition of participatory work that has been explored extensively by a consultant to take stock specifically of CGIAR experiences in this domain. Yet there is are differences between all that (excellent) work and what might be called contemporary social learning work:

Social learning is…

Social learning is instrumental, respectful of various perspectives, conversational, a long term commitment, adaptive, reflective, trust-based, visionary, open-minded, context-specific, participatory, dynamic, improvising, flexible, action-oriented, it’s about learning, it’s social and most importantly it is transformative.

It is not just participatory, because participatory approaches could actually just involve specific groups for specific activities but not really keep these groups front and centre involved from the get-go and throughout the initiative.

It is not just action (even though the transformation feeds off the action) because it is about generating new insights for more effective action, learning in effect, but not just any learning.

It is not just learning because it involves more than one party and happens mostly through sustained social interactions. It is a rich kind of learning, the kind that comes with disputing  views, telling each other our truths and complacencies, muddling through hopes and disappointments and finding common ground and mutual respect from the respect that is earned in challenging situations, whether as partners or opponents.

It is thus potentially more than action research, although it’s very similar in the sense that it starts with assumptions and verifies these assumptions along the way, thanks to feedback mechanisms. But social learning puts the emphasis on the social nature of learning and action throughout the process, whereas in action learning there is a risk that the learning itself is limited to the research process itself.

It is not just about bringing diverse views to the mix, even though this is an important step forward. A forum brings together lots of different stakeholders, but it doesn’t necessarily transform them. Social learning happens through sustained interactions that lead to that transformation.

It is not just tossing a few token conceptual ingredients in the stir-fry of jargon-coated fancy fluff. It’s about careful attention to a structured process of opening a space for collective reflection that goes beyond any one entity or group that is part of it. 

Social learning is not controlled, it is operating as a complex adaptive system, it is bound to be richer, deeper and more transformative the longer it takes and the wider it goes (as it harnesses more and deeper perspectives). For that reason, it’s not necessarily easy to instil because it takes a vision; it takes capacities (not least to facilitate such processes – something which incidentally will be partly covered by the December 2013 issue of the knowledge management for development journal about ‘facilitating multi-stakeholder processes’); it takes resources to bring about the critical mass of insights in the quantity and the quality of the actors involved; it also takes patience, determination and the belief that chaos might lead to insights and that an apparent mess can hide an uncanny order; it takes time to build the relations and to let the feedback loops provide their beneficial effect; and it takes balls to decide to go for it or to stop it in the face of justified adversity.

And social learning helps us tackle complex issues and and work around wicked problems like ‘climate change’:

It’s not the easiest way, but it’s surely a useful way to address distant goals. Remember:

If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together (Xhosa proverb)

Related blog posts:

• Social learning in climate change – Of buckets, loops and social LSD?
• Profile of the social learning hero
• Complexity in multi-stakeholder processes – how to manage, facilitate or navigate around it?

Top KM influencer on Twitter? Why and what then?

This week I had the very pleasant and slightly shocking surprise of landing as #23 on MindTouch’s top 100 Influencers on KM – see more information about this here (or click on the icon on the right hand side).

Here is the top quartile:

1. weknowmore
2. David Gurteen
3. Dave Snowden
4. Stan Garfield
5. Nancy White
6. VMaryAbraham
7. Jack Vinson
8. Euan Semple
9. Alice MacGillivray
10. knowledgetank
11. Ian Thorpe
12. Richard Hare
13. Peter West
14. Gauri Salokhe
15. Chris Collison
16. #KMers Chat
17. Stuart French
18. KM Australia
19. John Tropea
20. KMWorld Magazine
21. Christian DE NEEF
22. Mario Soavi
23. ewenlb
24. KM Asia
25. Steve Dale

How did this happen?

I’m still surprised. By no means do I consider myself worthy of making it to this list. If at all I could have featured in the bottom part. So if I try to understand how it happened, I guess  what could have helped the ranking is, randomly: mutual connection to most of these top tweeters, consistent use of hashtags (#KM, #KM4Dev, #KMers), regular updates on this blog which is dedicated to KM from which I channel tweets, re-tweeting – and being retweeted for – interesting KM insights from other influential KM thinkers who are on Twitter or not.

And more importantly… so what then?

A few ideas and comments come to mind:

This rating is only one subjective, biased assessment and it’s only about Twitter. There are countless of KM specialists that should be there, who are very influential but are not presented in this top 100, either because they are not active at all on Twitter or because of the way the MindTouch ranking algorithms work.

As Nancy White mentioned, it’s remarkable that many KM4Dev members are making it to this list, which is great for the community and an incentive to really do something about it as it might change (y)our life. It looks as though it’s not just my biased understanding that assumes this community rocks and is a beacon of CoPs, despite all its ongoing doubts and issues – some of which will be addressed in the annual face-to-face event in Seattle this July.

From my Twitter stream, it seems that a lot of these people are also following each other, which shows that the KM Twitter community is fairly tight-knit and has quickly connected nodes to form this fantastic thinking grid that it is now. The wonderful gathering function of #KMers Chat has possibly been one significant mechanism to interconnect all these people too and to take stock of many of the challenges that KM professionals are facing, whatever their function title is or entails. This is good matter for entertaining such conversations and regularly convening a quorum of the critical KM minds.

As Stuart French noted, this ranking shows the diversity of the KM field and the focus shift from technology to humans and their interaction processes. However, this is likely to change as technology will play an increasingly important role. This is one of the key (and totally plausible) predictions of Steve Wheeler in his wonderful ‘learning futures’ presentation: 

The only thing that doesn’t change is change itself – it just keeps on happening, and the KM world, with its antennas in such diverse arenas as business management, psychology, education, cognitive science, human resource management, coaching, information technology, training, social activism etc. is a good place to map trends, raise questions, shape up conversations that keep on getting our ever-changing job done, and allow us to deal with complex issues and wicked problems. The positive issue of such a ranking is that it helps us all connect to this great thinking pool.

Finally, and as far as I’m concerned, it’s perhaps an example that the knowledge ego-logy sometimes comes with rewards, but also with responsibilities. For me this token of recognition is a call to become ever more helpful in the field of (agile) knowledge management, (social) learning and critical thinking, on Twitter and everywhere else.

At any rate, I’m also happy for this event and I’ll proudly keep the badge on this blog for a while. Thank you if you were involved in compiling this ranking or helped me and other KM thinkers make it to this list!

As the no.1 KM Twitter influencer shows (together) ‘We know more’. 

 

Related blog posts:

• From ego-tripping to ego-rippling: the knowledge ego-logy paradigm
• How do I describe my ‘work in KM’?
• Portrait of the modern knowledge worker
• A tribute to KM4Dev: how it transformed my life and how I hope to share the magic

How do I describe my ‘work in KM’?

Might it be another phoenix of the knowledge management world next to assessing KM: the description of our job as knowledge worker?

There are lots of variation to the job of ‘knowledge management specialist’ and lots of related functions. In a recent fragment about knowledge work identities which I collected on my TumblR from a conversation happening in the knowledge brokers’ forum, nearly 50 job titles were offered for knowledge brokers.

Clearly, knowledge work begs for simple explanations that unveil a complex function.

What do I tell people who inquire what my work is?

I tell them different things: That I hold a mirror to help us all realise what we do, why and how. That I work on making sure that we become more effective in our work dynamically (i.e. continually, over time, not just for a given task or project) through learning, managing the information that matters to us and managing access to and curation from knowledge sources (conversations and the people behind), and that we do this more effectively as collectives rather than alone – hence the need to become social learning heroes.

I tell them that my work in KM is about avoiding reinventing the wheel, getting more perspectives on the same issue to find better, more sustainable solutions, ensuring that our conversations increase in number and improve in quality and help us get better.

Depending on who I’m talking to, I also tell people that I work in communication but not the message-based ‘military’ type of communication (with bullet-like messages targeted at people with hopes for impact), that I work rather on making communication engaging, collective and reflective. I tell people that I work on all of this from the perspective of knowledge management, communication and monitoring/evaluation/learning.

But is this really good enough?

Nick Milton rightly prompts us all to be able to “sell” our knowledge work in a compelling, powerful and short ‘sales pitch’. So here’s a revised elevator pitch that speaks to the three points that seem imperative to address in conveying our KM message:

• What’s my point – what do I do for a job? I help people think critically about the information and expertise they need (by themselves or through others) to develop better and more sustainable solutions for the problems they face and connect with or trigger the conversations they need to do that; in the process I make them more likely to proactively seek these solutions in the future, both online through social media and offline through engaging meetings and events.
• What’s in it for you? I can help you use the potential of knowledge work and social learning to be more effective now and continually, more connected to your field(s) of interest and expertise, more innovative and happier by helping and being helped by others.
• What do I want you to do? I hope you can point me to the areas you would like to improve to become more effective and better connected and to see how social media and other means can get you there, “standing on the shoulders of giants“.

Of course this pitch needs to be adapted to the very people I engage with, but as a global pitch, tell me if you think that sells it enough and what you would change otherwise

Related blog posts:

• Portrait of the modern knowledge worker
• The most difficult job in the world?
• KM=CDL, on the journey to universal sense-making
• The constant knowledge gardener
• The role of positive deviants in organisations

Open knowledge, working out loud, sharing ideas and our mind at large

A simple and small shoot: to open our mind out large…

Opening our mind, such a simple complicated thing… (Credits – Tanyew Wei)

I always wanted (and still do) to try the experiment of accepting with one or more persons – for a given limited time – to give each other the option to check at absolutely any time what the other is thinking about and to accept sharing it. A risky experiment, I agree, but what a fabulous shortcut to each other’s mind and ideas this would be too. The power of Open, in all its terror.

Another experiment I always wanted to do is to share what we are working on as we are working on it: opening Pandora’s box of our half-baked thinking, our weak reflections, our incomplete search for evidence, our half-started/half-aborted attempt at revisiting good sources from the past and combining new ideas. Now that is not too risky an experiment, and it’s a direct contribution to ‘working out loud‘, with perhaps even wider implications for the audience we might influence at large.

My colleague Peter Ballantyne recently wrote this excellent blog piece from a recent trip he did to Michigan State University to attend an ‘Open Knowledge for Agricultural Development Convening’ and he’s also sharing views about the importance of collective work using e.g. wikis. Have a peek at the presentation, it’s really worth it!

Even before we reach that collective stage, we can open up our working cabinet to let others in on our thinking, on the ideas that are crossing our mind. Blogging is a way to do this of course; yet, however draft-like our thought pieces become, they are already polished one level further compared with the moment when we get struck by an idea…

Tweets are another point in case. We can reveal what’s crossing our mind on a tweet – but rarely do we end up exploring this with our Twitter crowd much further than another tweet or two.

One piece is missing thus. John Tropea has got it: with his ‘snippets’ TumblR, he’s keeping track of some useful fragments of text that strike a cord with him and that he might want to come back to.

I have just decided to start my own TumblR as an experiment – as an antechamber and experimental springboard to this blog. On that TumblR I plan to keep fragments of writing that I find interesting and want to come back to later. I will also share simple ideas that I may come back to on this blog for (slightly) more elaborate thoughts. I might start by pasting the list of blogging ideas I have on the side (about 50 or so ideas for possible blog posts).

The idea is simple: the earlier we share our ideas, the earlier others can use those ideas, reflect and comment on them, and the more likely we are all better off with enriched ideas, good conversations and stronger relations. And better suggestions for the next blog posts…

Let’s see where this leads me…  and you!

Related blog posts:

• Blogging for what? For reflecting, for sharing, for learning, for synthesising, for…
  
• The birth of a thought and the life-times of a concept
• KM=CDL, on the journey to universal sense-making
• Stop judging and move on, because we all do (follow the seeds of change)