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

We need more / better communication! But not from me…

When it comes to communication, everyone points the finger elsewhere (credits: Evalottchen/FlickR)

I hear that a lot, in many organisations: communication is not good enough or there isn’t enough of it.

What does it really mean though? We are quick at pointing the finger to the problem, but not so keen on explaining what we really mean and what this implies.

Unfortunately also, too often we assume that the communication officer or team will solve all these problems, because ‘communication is their field, not mine’.

The reality is once again less black-and-white than it seems.

What they (might) mean	What is really happening (and what we can do about it)
They don’t know enough about other people and departments’ work	Not enough is documented about: ongoing projects, movements (calendaring), meetings and events, outputs published.♣ Contribute to these records: share your travel plans, schedule your meetings publicly, channel your outputs to the official repository.  ♣ Crucially, use a public (working out loud) channel to share information about what they’re doing, their questions, finds and ideas – be it on Yammer, a corporate Facebook group, Sharepoint or the organisation’s Intranet. ♣ Do this individually and in your teams. And stimulate others to do just the same.  ♣ If the above is impossible (e.g. because channels don’t exist), contact the communication team to help make it happen.
They don’t find relevant information through the formal communication channels and experience little connection and relation between the informal (bilateral chats) and formal channels	They may not know how to look for information and where, there might not be any information for lack of content ‘fuel’; they receive little information as compared with corridor talks and chatting with people at events♣ Look for an overview of communication channels and procedures.  ♣ Contribute to these channels to enrich them – otherwise there will always be a disbalance between formal and informal channels.
They experience lack of coordination	The different relevant entities of the organisation have few structural channels and processes to share relevant knowledge and information among themselves and rely on ad-hoc encounters to share strategic information♣ Use conversation channels and wikis that help people get in touch with each other despite distances, leaves documentation traces for themselves and others, and allow collaboration on joint projects. ♣ Use meta tags to ensure all relevant resources are tagged according to the taxonomy or folksonomy in use.
They feel they are reinventing the wheel	There isn’t enough documentation going on during and after projects to share useful insights. Perhaps not enough attention is paid to the process of conducting projects and the specific approaches followed, as opposed to just carrying out stated objectives♣ Very similar to the previous point, this relates to the lack of records or their disorganisation (e.g. for lack of metadata). The agile organisation will ensure resources are easily findable and the persons related to these resources easy to locate. A social network analysis/mapping of sorts might be helpful here.
They feel the organisation is not well equipped to face up and coming challenges that require more complex cooperation	They feel the limitations of the above in doing their job and know they need to connect to other sources of knowledge but are perhaps not so sure as to how to proceed♣ This is where an engagement-focused communication team could really provide high added value support by helping design, facilitate and manage engagement processes with other parties and stakeholders, inside and outside.  ♣ What could also help is to organise more conversations (brown bag seminars, conferences, discussions) that bring together different parts of the organisation and external parties, to shape up a big picture that matters to the organisation’s agenda.
They don’t enjoy enough communication support	They may have some genuine capacity needs in terms of communication and knowledge management/sharing but may not be aware of these, and perhaps there isn’t any (adequate) offering to fill these gap or perhaps these are not well known♣ See below. The task of the communication team is to connect the dots and to ensure that people use existing channels and processes to their advantage, without burdening them.
They hear “we ought to do more about communication”	There is just external pressure (from donors, partners etc.) to communicate, reach out to and engage with other parties… Either way there is a problem of externally felt need, not a self-recognised weakness♣ This is not an ideal situation, but better realise it than remain ignorant. In this case, all the above applies, and perhaps it would be good to connect with other people, networks, communities of practice and organisations that seem better prepared to 21st century engagement, to get some ideas about what could work or not in this organisation.

Of course the communication officer or team does have a role to play, that is to:

• Set up the channels (public calendaring system, output repository, chat/knowledge sharing platform to share simple updates)
• Set up recommended processes to use these systems
• Provide training initially to help staff members make use of these systems and processes/procedures, at various levels (from simple users to power users and administrators), with particular emphasis on meta-standards which help organise information more systematically and retrieve it more easily
• Coach staff and answer their question (seek their feedback on what works or not) to adjust the work
• Monitor how these channels and processes are performing over time and contributing to accomplishing the organisation’s objectives
• Over time, contribute to stimulating a culture of knowledge sharing and open enquiry that is conducive to adaptive management and proactive leadership cultivation

So, next time you wonder why communication in your (team, organisation, network) is so bad, ask yourself what you can do to improve it, and how your communication team can help you help yourself

Related blog posts:

• Communication, strategy and revolution
• Dotty dotted communication – can we avoid this please?
• Power your communication with ‘KM inside’

Harvesting insights (6): A checklist of comms/KM functions in any development (research) organisation or initiative

Just a post to gather my thoughts on this once and for all on this topic.

Together with some colleagues from WorldFish and the Inernational Water Management Institute (IWMI), we have been pondering about the profile of comms/KM profiles and positions in any organisation and/or project, since ILRI and IWMI held a really interesting workshop on knowledge management and communication in the CGIAR research programs.

The reflection on KM positions has been helpful to think about the profile of the people that might have to take care of comms and KS/KM/learning. Now, at a higher level, what are the organisational functions that take care of communication and/or knowledge sharing and management and learning? This is treading suspiciously close to the happy families of engagement, but here I want to think about the functional departments or units of work that any organisation might want to consider useful, rather than look at the fields of expertise as mentioned in the families of engagement.

Every organisation or project has its way of looking at these functions – rightly so – but what could a generic checklist of these functions look like?

I would think this works around different tiers of organizational importance (how this is perhaps currently assessed, not how it should be assessed) and relative recognition of those functions.

• First tier: 
  • Public awareness and media engagement (i.e. communicating the organisation/initiative)
  • Dissemination of information (communicating the results -against stated objectives- of the initiative)
  • Marketing (for commercial companies or initiatives that promote a particular product or service)
  • Network engagement (and management) with critical stakeholders and partners
  • Policy engagement and support, advocacy
• Second tier:
  • Internal communication
  • Data and information management
  • Knowledge management
• Third tier:
  • Capacity development (around communication and knowledge work),
  • Monitoring and evaluation (of knowledge work and communication)
  • Process documentation (informal monitoring)

For projects and time-bound initiatives, these different functions follow a different lifespan which my colleague Peter Ballantyne drafted here. Let’s examine these functions one level down in granularity:

Public awareness and media engagement: promoting the intervention/organisation, getting public attention through the media and conveying it through more mainstream (and increasingly social) media. This is all about communicating about the project/organisation/team etc. and is usually the most recognised set of communication activities because it might be a requirement from donors but also a good way to get some visibility for the initiative (the quest for immortality shows its nose again).

Dissemination of information and results

Communicating agri-water research over time (credits: ILRI/Ballantyne)

Second in line, usually, after talking about the intervention or organisation itself is: talking about what comes out of information dissemination. In this other graph by Peter Ballantyne, this would be typically the second peak of communication activities in an otherwise ‘communication-empty’ initiative: PA at the project launch, and dissemination at the end when results are ready. The problem is: it’s not enough. But dissemination remains a crucial function of communication – even though we are increasingly moving towards an engagement-rich communication approach.

Marketing

The projects and organisations that have some products and services to offer to the public – pay-for or not – have an additional communication imperative around the marketing of these products and services. The approach changes a bit between pay-for and free/public products and services but the idea of attracting attention, creating a desire, informing the desiring customers and leading them to action (the AIDA model which is increasingly questioned and reexamined from a socialisation perspective – see graph) or the

AIDA socialisation (credits – CoffeeMarketing)

4Ps (price, promotion, product, place) can come in handy to make sure products and services find their customers and users. But again there might be little engagement there. Hence…

(Practice-oriented) Network engagement and management with critical stakeholders and partners

As pure dissemination-based approacheds are finding their limits, network engagement and management (or rather facilitation) is becoming increasingly crucial. Communication is no longer about crafting documents in isolation and sending them to intended target audiences but more and more so about bringing those audiences in the (co-)creation process. Trust becomes an important currency in communication work and partner / stakeholder management. We analyse our social networks, map stakeholders, identify who are the key nodes in the network and work with them from the start.

Whether by means of visits, exchanges, workshops, training courses, brown bag seminars, informal and formal lunches, bilateral discussions, network engagement is becoming a central bone in the communication spine. The practice aspect of this function is to ensure that the engagement effectively leads to transforming and adapting discourses, ways of thinking, behaviours i.e. the formal and informal practices of these actors we are working with and for. It is the alter-ego of the next function…

Policy engagement and support, advocacy

A related field is that of policy engagement / support and advocacy. The objective here is to ensure that research and other activities inform and influence policies, support them, and advocate issues that might have been blind spots until now. Increasingly, policy engagement is moving away from conventional advocacy (the one that is following a PR approach of unilaterally targeting messages for audiences) to embrace a much higher degree of interactions with these policy-makers and political actors that should be influenced. In multi-stakeholder processes, these political actors are part of the co-creation process and that is a new way of engaging with policies.

The next three areas are less obvious functions of comms/KM but people talk about them and recognise their importance. They simply don’t act upon it systematically.

Internal communication and knowledge sharing

Perhaps this ought to just be part of regular communication but it has often been overlooked in the past, because internal teams were not a key ‘target audience’. As we are in the network era, the importance of communication, cooperation and coordination dawns on project managers, and as teams are increasingly decentralised and scattered across various countries and locations, internal communication and knowledge sharing are also increasingly recognised as an important area of comms/KM.

Data and information management:

Data and information management are typically an area whose importance is recognised. Lip service is frequently paid for it, but following through with elaborate and robust systems for data and information management are a mile further which many are not ready to run. Still this is an area of concern for communication because the documentation part of the work collects a lot of information and the platforms and channels are usually set up by the communication (or KM) team. In research organisations, this function is sometimes nested directly in the research teams – but the challenge remains intact: someone needs to ensure data are collected, tagged and meta-tagged properly, cleaned, archived and sorted. Information outputs and records should also follow this logic, at a higher level of processing.

Knowledge management

Maybe this also ought to be lumped up with its sub-components of knowledge sharing, dissemination and information management, but knowledge management ought to be a function (if not a formalised position) to ensure the integration of conversations with documentation and learning. It becomes the life and blood of reflexive communication in and outside the organisation or initiative.

Now we enter the obscure areas in comms/KM, those functions that are usually not accounted for, not paid lip service for nor even thought about much, if at all.

Capacity development

One of these obscure areas is capacity development for comms and KM. In any organisation or initiative, there are people writing, presenting, engaging, reflecting, questioning… but they’re not part of the comms/KM team. They are sometimes very strong in all these areas that are perhaps not typically in their portfolio of activities. But sometimes they are not and they should be trained, coached, sharing their perspective with peers to improve their own practice. And sadly, there isn’t much in store for them to do so. Organisations and initiatives of the future should include a capacity development aspect to their activities to make sure that everyone involved is strong at conversing, documenting and learning individually and collectively…

Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) of knowledge work and communication

Of course M&E is recognised in most development/research organisations but formally including the monitoring and evaluation of knowledge work, much less so. Yet a formal assessment of communication and KS/KM activities would help all parties get more effective at what they are doing. Simple reporting on outputs is far from reaching this goal and understanding dynamic relationships, use of knowledge, effects of learning, transformative consequences of engagement are subtle but critical areas of importance for all of us if we are to remain relevant over time and strong on adaptive/proactive management.

Process documentation (informal monitoring)

I’ve already blogged in the past about process documentation and its Latin and Francophone variants in the past. It seems to me (and to my former organisation IRC) a crucial area to learn by doing and to improve the way an initiative is unfolding against its theory of change. Alas too often people recognise the importance of processes but fail to monitor them, not even informally – documenting discussions, reflections, insights, questions is not the cup of tea of most people, but I do think it is absolutely essential to instil a learning culture and to support various other areas of work: communication, KM/KS, M&E. See this publication for more information on this topic.

Morphing these categories?

Communication is evolving. Social learning is blurring the boundaries as it tends to bring together a lot of these activities together. And every organisation is mixing these functions in its own ways, so there isn’t a fixed menu but rather a set of options that can be combined and recombined in any comms or KM strategy. The functions themselves are however relevant to think about.

What changes do you see happen in this field? What is missing among these organisational functions?

Related blog posts:

• Communication, KM, monitoring, learning – The happy families of engagement
• Capacity development, organisational development, institutional change – The extended happy families of engagement
• What comms/KM functions for what results?
• Revisiting the links between communication and knowledge management
• Power your communication with ‘KM inside’
• KISS my comms
• A simple KM and communication strategy… with double focus on the context

Revisiting the links between communication and knowledge management

At the fifth informal get-together of the Ethiopia/Addis Ababa KM4Dev network, one of the focused conversations we held was about the relations between communication and knowledge management. I wrote this year about how KM can power communication. I also blogged about the different families of engagement in which comms and KM can be found.

KM and comms overlap a lot – with the exception of learning?

The KM4Dev Ethiopia discussion we had focused on the following two questions:

1. Where do KM and comms sit in your organisation / project and are they formally or informally connected? How?
2. Where do you see comms and KM work together and possibly integrate?

The conversation highlighted a few points which I think are worth looking into here.

KM and comms are defined very differently in different organisations or projects; they encompass each other (KM is part of comms, comms is part of KM) or they are totally separate depending on the concepts that form the foundations of that organisation and the politics of different departments… What is sure: There has to be a real purpose in bringing comms and KM together to encourage formal and/or informal cooperation among these approaches.

As many other things, definitions don’t matter so much (we’ve been working on comms and KM all along without labeling these ways) so long as your organisation/project feels comfortable knowing what it does with it. That intention matters, particularly if as I have advocated KM (and comms) includes a strong emphasis on learning. Purpose is essential to accelerating learning.

One of the main differences between KM and comms has been the idea of messaging (highlighted in the definitions in one of the resources mentioned below) which has characterised much comms work in the past: In organisations and projects, comms – understood here as a department rather than a function or skill set – has been traditionally focusing on unilaterally sending messages to target groups. There has been very little said about multi-lateral relations in comms work and also very little about (face-to-face and online) engagement from the start. This is changing, however, with more and more communication strategies and activities paying attention to nurturing the network (or ecosystem) as part of which the organisation or project is part. This change of approach is perhaps the main reason why there is such a blur between communication and knowledge management: comms is evolving; and so is KM, moving away from being understood as just information management (more about the difference between the two on the KM4Dev wiki). Adding to the blur, is that knowledge sharing is essential in KM and might be understood – wrongly – as communication.

Comms and KM retain nonetheless deeply distinctive features. As mentioned in the engagement families analogy, the marketing and PR branches of the communication family are very different from what KM does or intend to do. The learning aspect is also usually not a very prominent aspect of comms, while it is adamant to good, agile KM. And information management is only thought of as distantly supporting comms, while it is part and parcel of KM.

Perhaps another key difference is that comms is recognised and mainstreamed a lot more in business and has been traditionally used as a strong corporate arm, i.e. a controlled field which organisations pay attention to regarding what they are communicating and how they are engaging with clients, partners, beneficiaries etc. With the advent of social media, the corporate comms side has continued to extend its influence, while the KM arm is perhaps moving increasingly towards personal knowledge management and the role of social networks to influence the conversations, documentation efforts and learning issues of people – and their organisations if they are employees. 

Ultimately both comms and KM wish to change the behaviour of a number of internal and/or external audiences… But communication tends to still have that ‘corporate’ feel to it, while KM and its inherent recognition of learning – and of the power of social learning – recognises much more explicitly the importance of external signals and of co-creating knowledge to get to smarter conversations that solve current problems and pre-empt future issues. This is introduced in this recent explanation by TheKnowledgeCore. The method to achieve change is not the same – much more controlled in comms and  arguably much more open to social learning for social change in agile KM.

Coming back to the initial point here, if there is a real will to make communication and KM work together, it really happens. KM then informs ‘smarter’ communication while KM also benefits from the expertise of comms to approach different internal and external groups more effectively, offline and online. And such a comms-fuelled smarter KM connects strong information management (having information well organised, available, accessible and indeed accessed) with strong communication, to ensure that communication and knowledge sharing are based on existing and pertinent information.

So, this definition and distinction game is a fuzzy affair, but there is certainly much to gain in stimulating interactions between proponents of workers of the comms field and those of the KM field. That’s what agile KM is also about. I am a knowledge sharing and communication specialist, so it makes perfect sense to me that both fields are related, perhaps this post gives you some ideas to consider it too?

And while at that, here are some possibly interesting resources around similar discussions in the past:

• (2012) Communication Vs. knowledge management - an excellent and recent conversation on this topic with lots of challenging comments, insights and questions
• (2010) What is the difference between communications, knowledge transfer, and marketing? (though I don’t like the idea of looking at knowledge transfer)
• (2006) Positioning Technical Communication in Knowledge Management (a slightly technical issue)
• (unclear date) A practical case: Knowledge management, learning and communication in value chains which provides some definitions and looks into how each plays a role in value chain work in Latin America
• (last week) And of course the notes from the recent KM4Dev Ethiopia discussion.

Related blog posts:

• Communication, KM, monitoring, learning – The happy families of engagement
• Power your communication with ‘KM inside’
• Communication, strategy and revolution
• A simple KM and communication strategy… with double focus on the context

Profile of the social learning hero

Social learning is back on the menu.

It’s always been around but somehow the social media age and the increasing recognition of the complexity we have to put up with all point forcibly to the social nature of learning.

And social learning is no easy task. It means grappling with others, getting hands dirty in negotiations and in collective problem-solving. It is about investing in future good, not immediate return on investment, even though early wins are a plus.

If social learning is the important paradigm of the day, what are the important characteristics of a social learning hero? An extension of the modern knowledge worker?

What does the social learning hero look like? (Photo – Mac3 / FlickR)

Here’s what I think a social learning hero should gather, in terms of gifts/skills and of attitude. And by social learning hero I don’t mean to describe the function of the facilitator of a social learning process which requires a very specific set of attributes. I’m interested in looking at how various people could engage successfully in social learning if they gather the right skills and attitude – and I’m not bothered with the knowledge and experience of a specific field here. You will see that there is some overlap with a knowledge worker.

Gifts and skills:

• A capacity for strategic visioning, looking at the big picture in the longer term, to be able to map the different agendas and factors that may play out…
• An ability to understand different accents, perspectives, and to reformulate what s/he heard to ensure s/he has understood what others meant;
• A synthetic mind to summarise the various perspectives, identify patterns in those and possible win-win solutions;
• Negotiation and conflict resolution skills (following the simple lessons of books like ‘Getting to Yes‘) which help avoid dead ends when interacting with others and offer solutions in case real confrontations happen;
• An open heart giving the emotional capacity to connect with others at a deeper level and build real trust authentically;
• Outstanding interpersonal communication skills to express oneself articulately so as to share knowledge more effectively and have the possibility to get in touch with a variety of people (see point 1);
• Good ears and eyes to pick up the signals around (and question them);
• A solid understanding of the learning process and all its dimensions to shape a strong social learning process;
• Ideally, good facilitation skills to be able to contribute to organising the process of collective sense-making and problem-solving, with simple methods such as planning the purpose, harvest, actions and invitations.
• Another bonus would be the ability to work with social tools, as this strengthens face-to-face interactions (more about this in the Social Media Guide for African climate change practitioners).

Attitude:

• Empathy and openness to others, in the sense of welcoming others (including going out of our comfort zone) wanting to understand other perspectives and inquiring about the values, advantages, challenges of those perspectives;
• A true curiosity to try new things out and add them to an array of experiences;
• Humility to accept that one’s perspective is thus not better than another one’s or at least that other perspectives have potentially something to teach ourselves too;
• Flexibility to keep a sustainable negotiation standpoint – and accepting that not everyone is and can be equally flexible all the time;
• Clarity about what one expects from the social learning process while keeping attention for the balance with others’ needs and wills – perhaps mixed, as with the modern knowledge worker, with a vision of one’s own development pathway and next priorities;
• Reflecting in single, double and triple-loop learning, in practice;
• Intellectual and moral integrity and respect for oneself and for others, preserving the trust of others and perhaps stimulating inspiration from others.
• Generally, and this is perhaps the most important, a true will to find one’s goal in a collective adventure – a genuine balance between individual and collective good.
• A bonus might be to be optimistic (but not naive), positive (though not frantically) and  funny, to let humour grease the wheels of social learning…

A lot of these characteristics are also a must for multi-stakeholder and other social learning processes but they also need to possess additional traits. More about this in the future? Once again this is another ideal picture, not a typical profile that is easy to find around the world. But social learning we must be doing, and we might as well work on it from now on.

Related blog posts:

• Portrait of the modern knowledge worker
• At the IKM table: linearity, participation, accountability and individual agency on the practice-based change menu (1)
• Communication, KM, monitoring, learning – The happy families of engagement
• Complexity in multi-stakeholder processes – how to manage, facilitate or navigate around it?
• Development, between results and relationships
• Stop judging and move on, because we all do (follow the seeds of change)
• What is learning

What comms/KM functions for what results?

The workshop on “Organizing, Managing, Communicating and Leveraging Information and Knowledge to Support and Deliver CGIAR research program Results: A hands-on Workshop on Approaches, Tools, Systems and Services” happened last week.

As participant and facilitator I didn’t manage to find the time to share insights from the workshop but have lots to process still about e.g. monitoring knowledge work, the overall picture of KM and comms in an organisation, how to move towards achieving more impact focusing on our comms/KM support. And there was also the topic of this blog post, around the KM/comms functions that an organisation might need (which could also be useful for the CGIAR research programs but frankly span much wider frontiers)…

The workshop featured one ‘building block’ session about this. At the end of the session, the group decided to work on some sort of decision-support infographics that would help assess the needs for certain communication/KM functions. The picture that emerged during the session considered a set of variables at organisational level, matched at individual level:

• Organisational objectives / personal learning and development priorities
• Organisational capacities (know-how) and expertise areas (knowledge) / Individual  know-how and knowledge
• Organisational and individual networks
• Organisational culture (which affects the soft side of comms profiles, i.e. what kind of principles and values should comms/KM folks follow to perform effectively in a given programme or organisation) and individual principles and values

These are the drivers that influence the direction that we are taking as individual and as organisations. Then come the tools, approaches and concepts which play a role to support all the above. There are also the components of an organisation (not matched at individual level) which combine all of this to support the objectives, on the basis of expertise and capabilities.

I tried to make sense of this all in a presentation – an elaboration of an earlier sketch I made during that session.

There are various other elements that should go into a later, more detailed and dynamic presentation but in the meantime, there are still quite a few elements to emphasise, which our conversation stimulated:

• Our organisations/programmes have different ways to recombine all of this and that’s why a decision-support tool would be great to help assess what are crucial elements.
• However, all of them need to identify functions that support overall objectives, fit with the components (the rectangle holding lots of symbols), expand the expertise and capabilities of the organisation/programme and interact with the network and organisational culture (voluntarily removed from this version of the graph to keep it simple).
• The more organisations make use of personal/individual knowledge, know-how, network (and also information produced), the easier it is to develop a strong organisation, even though that is too often under-estimated.
• We can look at the functions required both in terms of the ideal picture but also looking at what the individuals interviewed to fill those functions provide. That is where the bigger picture and its emphasis on the individual mirror becomes all the more relevant.
• As much as the network influences the organisation or programme, the culture of that organisation or programme (and the individual values and principles of its staff members) are crucial to unlock the full potential required to have a strong set of comms/KM functions.

This is work in progress… Any reaction at this stage?

Related blog posts:

• Paving the way for communication and knowledge management in the CGIAR research programs
• Power your communication with ‘KM inside’
• Communication, KM, monitoring, learning – The happy families of engagement

Paving the way for communication and knowledge management in the CGIAR research programs

The CGIAR organises a communication & KM workshop for its research programme

The CGIAR network of agricultural research centres has set up 15 ambitious research programmes (CGIAR research programs).

This week, with a group of about 45 people staff from those programs will be working on various aspects of knowledge management and communication for those research programs. This (repeat after me…) kmc4CRPs workshop will have participants focus on five main themes:

• Internal communication
• Knowledge sharing and learning
• Co-creating knowledge locally (and getting research into local use)
• Communicating for policy impact
• Scaling up and out of research

Under these main themes, various ‘building block’ sessions will zoom in on specific aspects of the work. And hands-on tool sessions will get some practical guidance for how to go about the tools to support our building block activities.

At the end of the week the group hopes to have various useful insights and recommendations which can be applie in a somewhat better coordinated/more consistent way across those research programs.

This week promises to be rich so there might be quite a few blog posts coming out of this workshop (which I’m partly facilitating), including interviews from interesting people…

Keep watching this space, and feel free to channel your questions here too!

Email management and deflecting the unavoidable

Fight email overload: space, time, action and reflection (Credits – 2time-sys.com)

Somehow, emails are not really part of what I would consider a KM infostructure, even though in practice they are essential, with apparently 62 billions of emails shared every day.

So, some word of advice about email management might help. But there’s plenty out there. Hey, wait! A knowledge management professional should be able to give you some good advice on email management, right? So here we go for your (well, my) agile KM worker’s tips to overcome the unavoidable email glut, baked in many years of sifting through emails and reflecting about it by myself and along better-informed people before me…

Create email time: Not all your time should go to managing emails

• Focus on your work rather than on emails and other distractions. Otherwise you’ll be interrupted too often – and it seemingly takes 7 minutes to reconnect to what you were doing (though the link above mentions this takes up to 23 minutes… either way you might lose focus easy but gain it back only slowly)…
• Turn off email notification pop-ups and other apps that drive your attention to your inbox at all times.
• Take specific moments to look at your emails. I do it early morning when I start, after lunch break and at the end of the day. 30 to 45 minutes at a stretch. And that helps. I occasionally still don’t resist the temptation of checking emails more regularly but these three slots are really all I need and the rest is more like distraction tickling my bored brain.

Tame your  email space – Prioritise and deflect: Not all your communication should be email-based, so it’s a matter of prioritising your emails and deflecting what is not meant for you or for your email inbox

• Do, delegate or dump. Another great brain spark of my dear ex-colleague Jaap Pels, and a variation to the theme: fight, flee or freeze. Either you can take care of the email yourself, or you should pass it on or you should just delete it because – seriously - it doesn’t matter!
• Use Yammer and other means of communication. Some people like Leo Babauta and Luis Suarez have been living the past 2+ years without email and without withdrawal syndromes… For me, Yammer helps catch up with a lot of information that would normally end up in my inbox. Granted, this presupposes that my colleagues also use it. That means you can also create a group routine to collectively reduce email overload. 1+1=3
• Do not put emails in a ‘to check’ folder – you will just never get to it. One related system that actually works in my case (on Outlook) is to categorize emails (e.g. websites to check, messages to check, friends’ messages etc.) but to keep them all in my main inbox so I think about them regularly and every so often act upon them.

Act (or not)!

Once you’ve set up your routines, act upon it – or sometimes not (as it might be an even more effective approach…)

• Answer within three minutes: If an email takes you less than 3 minutes to react, then just deal with it. On. The. Spot. Seriously, it will help.
• Do not react if it comes from someone that is quicker than their shadow to react. Emailing to one another is like dancing (except much much less pleasant): you need to find your common pace and style. There’s good chances you will always be overwhelmed if the person you’re receiving an email from is electronic mail’s Lucky Luke.
• And my secret tip (which might not work if you’re a CEO or top manager): Ignore emails for long enough that people will have found alternative solutions. Similarly, don’t reply too quickly or it boomerangs back…

Learn to learn how to manage your emails

Sharpen the saw, Stephen Covey would have said: find ways to remain dynamically in control over your emails.

• Explain to others, whenever you can, what your personal preferences/policy are regarding email. This way, they know that you react quickly or not, that you prefer to be called or visited face-to-face, or yammered to etc. It creates that dancing motion I mentioned above…
• And as for pretty much anything else, just try different approaches and reflect upon what works for you or not. It’s been my best weapon to disarm the email nuclear threat…

And here is a selection of a few very recent articles or posts about this topic:

• Coping with email overload (April 2012) – great tips about mindfulness and taking control.
• Strategies for dealing with email overload / how to get to and maintain inbox zero (date unclear) – a very neat guide in 3 steps (of multiple tips), highly advisable read.
• 7 easy ways to reduce email overload (July 2012) – about the environment of managing emails.
• 5 ways to get email overload under control (July 2012) – simple tips to control emails.
• Why no one has tamed email (August 2012) – how did we come to this email overload situation in the first place and what can we do to fight it?
• The geek’s guide to dealing with email overload (August 2012) – a selection of tools that might help you.

What are your tips to resist email overflow?

Related blog posts:

• KMers navigating between fast flow and slow space
• Peter and Justin: when and how does information make sense?
• Putting learning loops and cycles in practice
• What is learning

Harvesting insights (4): Making knowledge travel?

Time to revisit a concept that’s key in the recent past of ILRI’s and some other CGIAR knowledge work architecture: making knowledge travel. This concept and approach was, among others, central to the Agricultural and rural knowledge Share Fair organised in Addis Ababa in October 2010.

This post written by organiser Nadia Manning right after the event summarises some perceptions about ‘making knowledge travel’ from the Fair.

Making agricultural knowledge travel (Credits – Nancy White / FlickR)

What are we talking about and what are the implications of this concept and its meaning?

The idea, in the ILRI/CGIAR practice is quite simple: we are overwhelmed with knowledge and information but we also struggle to unlock useful information (and perhaps they would say knowledge) that remains stuck in silos, databases and private spheres. We should promote ways for that information and knowledge to travel further than those static ranches of safeguarded knowledge treasury. We have to make it travel.

An important distinction: let’s agree that for this post by ‘information’ we mean concrete/tangible data put together to be consumed readily (i.e. articles, videos etc.) and by ‘knowledge’ we mean peoples’ exchange about information.

So what does it mean in practice?

A lot of things:

• We have to make information available, accessible and applicable (the Triple-A framework that the above-mentioned post highlighted) which means information should be developed (available), easy to find in full access (accessible) and developed in a way that makes its use possible (applicable). More on this in the implications.
• It means we should make use of the information long tail to counter the tyranny of ‘pushing yesterday news out’ – some of that older information remains useful long after its first publication.
• Finding, encouraging, stimulating, developing spaces for connection between information sources and consumers – whether these be multi-stakeholder processes or specialised channels between certain groups of people.

What it implies for our organisations and for ourselves?

There are lots of lessons to take upstream if we want to make knowledge travel downstream.

Indeed, information-wise we and our organisations need to:

• Turn our work into information – not only the results but also the work processes – documenting the process to tease out important insights.
• Share that information in various ways, using websites, social media (which have a very strong potential to redistribute that information more widely by the virtue of trust-based network affinities) and other media that are fit for that purpose.
• Save that information in available, open access places where anyone can find it later – ideally properly (meta)tagged to help others and search engines assess the relevance of that information against a given query.
• Develop that information in open standards so that it can more easily be (re-)used and adapted by others.
• Format/version/package that information possibly in different formats and levels of language and technicity for different audiences.

And knowledge-wise:

• Encourage contacts with wider networks, beyond our familiar networks, which can be amplified by social networks (following people that are at the edge or our own networks i.e. the people that are followed by the people we follow).
• Organise effective events and conversations to weave information and knowledge in trust-based networks that are reinforced by face-to-face contact.
• Indeed use multi-stakeholder processes – where applicable due to the complexity of the agenda at stake – to encourage knowledge sharing and further connect distant/remote parts of a given social network.

As you might have picked up, this involves once again a sound personal knowledge management practice of ‘working out loud’ but also other things. And then again, ‘making knowledge travel’ does not entirely unveil what is at stake.

What this approach perhaps doesn’t emphasise enough?

Perhaps the ‘knowledge’ aspect itself was not sufficiently emphasised – as the overall approach of making knowledge travel actually seems to relate mainly to information. What it thus doesn’t say enough is that not only should we make sure our information is available, accessible, applicable (and actually applied!) but that we should also organise processes – using specific tools, since despite their over-reliance tools are not so bad after all – to ensure that people connect and share knowledge to make it travel further.

Consequently, the most important aspect is to connect knowledge (thus people) rather than information because what matters is not information, not even knowledge, but learning from both and acting upon it. Learning out loud is instrumental, in this respect, to go one step further than making knowledge travel perhaps emphasises.

Maybe we should talk about making learners travel together, as a more accurate and more useful paradigm. Using other face-to-face methods of social learning would come in handy in this respect too: farmer field days, exchange visits, study tours, secondments, knowledge fairs, coaching and on-the-job training, job rotation, peer assists, action research and the likes are all ways to do this – and the more consistent, repeated, long-term these processes are, the more likely they are to build trust and to become useful for social learning and more effective action.

Finally, the very idea of making knowledge travel could be fallacious, if we believe a great few influential KM thinkers on the basis of this post by Harold Jarche and its comments. I tend to agree with them. I think we can share knowledge but we can’t transfer it (more on this in this post), so I doubt we can make knowledge travel, but information we certainly can. And stimulating more and more diverse ways to share knowledge should be amplified as part of this approach too.

 

At any rate, making knowledge travel is more helpful than making information rot in the cavern and knowledge stay quiet in our heads. So, thank you Nadia, Peter and others for inviting us to make knowledge travel about making knowledge travel… the journey is very exciting already!

Related blog posts:

• What the heck is knowledge anyways: from commodity to capacity and insights
• Communication, KM, monitoring, learning – The happy families of engagement
• Global information systems, between the info monster ‘Charybdis’ and ghost town ‘Scylla’
• KM=CDL, on the journey to universal sense-making

Annual reports, the gold standard for the state of KM in the company?

The annual report, a flame in the dark to highlight our practices or to shine without reason? (Credits Josh Kenzer / FlickR)

Annual reports are a painful exercise, for most companies anyway.

I have seen managers, designers and communication specialists from various organisations tear their hair by lumps working on this annually recurring chore.

Being personally much more inclined towards the knowledge-sharing and collective thinking side of communication (away from unidirectional message massaging, marketing verbose and public aware-mess) I never quite understood what was the big deal about the annual report: a glossy production that usually reveals little about the real struggles and aha-moments of a company. And that report is sent to a group of people that either don’t really read that information because they don’t care or they do care but know enough about the company in the first place to make the reading of this peculiar publication totally superfluous.

But then, perhaps annual reports are actually interesting in another way: They may be the gold standard that reveals the maturity of knowledge management and its status in each organisation – an epitome of all the struggles and opportunities that knowledge management may face in an organisation all bundled in one.

Annual reports are indeed an open battle field of different influences and forces in presence which reveal a lot about the ‘KM culture’ of each company:

• Form vs. function: The design says a lot about the place given to form vs. function (pure text text text). The integration of multimedia, the use of infographics, a different way to present the report are all ideas indicating there is attention put on the way information is presented or not (with a view to encouraging the reading of the contents);
• Formality or informality: The very tone of the report indicates to some extent the degree of informality that is tolerated in the company. In many cases, annual reports are very corporate and formal productions, but the wording and design can make informal dents into that ‘keep-it-serious-don’t-smile’ publication, which might also say something about the tolerance for informal peer-learning at other moments than the development of the annual report;
• Marketing vs. learning: How much of the report is oriented towards promoting the organisation and how much is it focused on the agenda (i.e. the set of strategic issues and challenges) that the organisation pretends to address? If it is learning-oriented it might stress crucial questions and aha moments achieved in the past year, rather than reassure everyone that the the organisation is doing the best job in the world in the most important arena of the world.
• Internally focused vs. externally focused: The position of partners and other actors or networks acting at the edges of the organisation is presented quite starkly in most annual reports (or indeed royally ignored). This might give an indication as to the tendency of the organisation to include learning on the edges (through personal and organisational networks), which itself indicates the organisation’s maturity vis-a-vis learning (as we know that learning at the edges is crucial);
• Unidirectional vs. engaging: most annual reports tend to just disseminate carefully selected information without inviting any feedback. However it doesn’t have to be this way – perhaps the annual report could indeed invite others (especially important partners) to share their view. Perhaps it was done in the process of compiling the annual report and that can be mentioned – but perhaps nothing of the sort happened and then so much for a culture of engagement and conversation;
• Centralised vs. decentralised knowledge flows: The production process of annual reports reveals some power and knowledge flow tendencies: will it be compiled by a central unit or with a wide involvement of other staff – crucially those in decentralised offices? This is a very good indicator of the state of documentation as well. In many cases, this is precisely the painstaking point of annual reports: it feels like pulling teeth and tongues from all staff members to get these stories that will illustrate the work done, results achieved and new questions unravelled… Although an organisation with a mature approach to knowledge work should find it easy to reap the fruits of working out loud and continually documenting processes.

How do all these factions and factors come into play in a concerted way (or not)? This is what the annual report production process (and the finished product itself) actually reveals. It does give a good overview – perhaps more so for internal staff than external audiences – about the state of learning, knowledge sharing, documentation and conversations (remember KM=CDL) in the organisation. It also weighs KM against public awareness and message-based communications.

So, however painful the annual report exercise turns out to be, it does disclose a great deal of useful information for the organisation. Perhaps it’s time for me to look into the ILRI annual report and get a better sense of where we’re at…

Related blog posts:

• The ever learning organisation
• Look beyond WHAT to do: WHY and HOW lead to WHO
  
• Power your communication with ‘KM inside’
• The most difficult job in the world?
• What is good in a project?
• Peter and Justin: when and how does information make sense?