Paraphrasing always had a negative connotation for my French ears. Like beating around the bush or repeating things without value.
I know a much better meaning now: it’s a cornerstone of listening and learning.
I’ve been in this wonderful course from Sam Kaner about facilitation and participatory decision making. Quality stuff! And one of the first skills we learnt was paraphrasing.
Paraphrase, mirror, mimic each other, create a connection and have fun! (Credits: Arnold Newman / Getty Images)
This technique is useful for events and any piece of work involving people conversing, in fact even for personal life.
Essentially it’s about interpreting what someone said to check we understood. Sometimes it’s just mirroring (repeating), sometimes drawing the person to say more, or even ask others t osay more about the same topic. Obvious you would think! All the more so as facilitators. Yes, I do it often, but not systematically. And as Sam would say, you have to commit to it.
And yet how often have I really understood everyone’s point? How often have I taken things for granted? Time to change that and practice.
Paraphrasing is my new diet. And I’ve just learned again how humbling but refreshing learning is…
Feeling thankful…
PS. And with this post I’m ending the series of short daily posts. Not sure about the whole experiment…
The next learning step is everywhere. Curiosity and ritualised investigation accelerate these discoveries though (Credits: photonquantique / FlickR)
This may be related to the anatomy of learning. I notice that we tend to learn in a pervasive way: as we go along we discover micro patterns. But we can, and should, put our attention to the next mile, the next thing we can improve. These micro patterns that come to our attention are an opportunity paving the way for new learning, as they reveal to us a new change that is possible.
Good minds put attention to small incremental changes. Great minds – with wisdom and humility – put moments or happenings into entire wider trajectories of change, based on a conscious, purposeful, intention.
Typically that’s also what great parents do with their children: they raise their attention to the intention behind an act, and explain the very reason why it’s good to celebrate a particular moment beyond just appreciating it. They ritualise that learning.
Raising our attention is hard enough; emphasising intentions of greater significance is even more subtle to get to. Yet it’s what makes learning more collective, more sticky – and what makes long lasting change more likely to happen.
Two examples of putting measures in place to mark the intention and ritualise learning:
Asking for each post you share: ‘why you should bother reading this’ – because (I) you’ve realised that otherwise the value may not be so clear to readers.
Stopping criticising only and rather wondering what we (I) can personally do to improve something we are criticising.
Learning is hard. Hard to understand, hard to apply, hard to make consistent, hard to apply and change behaviour.
Learning about learning is a lot harder.
So when someone starts talking about ‘double loop learning’, eyes start rolling out. And when ‘triple loop learning’ splashes in a conversation, it ends in a circle of silence baked out of disbelief, compassion and impatience mixed with utter confusion…
People working hand-in-hand with the people involved in a given initiative to understand and evaluate their learning about what they’re trying to do – like the IKM-Emergent programme evaluation approach perhaps.
A community that has managed to work with all stakeholders in and around it to actually self-organise and find its own ways of dealing with its own wicked problems – possibly this was one of the objectives of the Millennium Villages.
Now the question is: can this be funded (by global development actors)? So far, very little chance, it seems. High risk, low certainty, extreme degree of complexity and abstraction (to start with).
But it’s, at the same time, remarkable that we haven’t yet put more attention to this if we want to be more efficient, more effective, more sustainable, scaled up and out and about…
How long before one funding agency, or one collective of people with a strong sense of agency, finds the boldness to just start an initiative that puts triple loop learning front and centre?
How long can we afford to stay at the surface of complex problems? When it’s too late?
Politicians discussing global warming (Isaac Cordal)
Nothing like having your back to the wall to do some useful research.
Here I am, fishing for ideas on good communication and knowledge management strategies. I addressed how to develop a communication strategy a while back. And though I’ve shared some ideas on how I would go about a KM strategy, I haven’t really synthesised all the stuff I’ve found useful to do so through the years; so here’s some stock-taking exercise for resources dealing with designing and rolling out a knowledge management strategy.
How to develop a KM strategy? (Credits: UNU-ViE_SCIENTIA / FlickR)
Caveat: This is not a simple exercise, as most companies want to preciously hoard their information about this business-critical area of work. Case studies do exist a bit everywhere but this post doesn’t attempt at highlighting those in particular.
Caveat 2: Because it is not simple, and I didn’t get enough time to search thoroughly for all that might be out there, this will be a ‘living post': I will enrich it with other resources that I think should feature here. So, feel free to bring up your key readings on this :)
A KM4Dev conversation (Credits: Westhill Knowledge)
As ever, the KM4Dev wiki is a gold mine of relevant information and as you might expect, KM4Devers have explored this topic more than once. So we have four waves of KM strategy conversations here, as well as some useful (quite recent) case studies at the end.
The four conversations cover:
How a 10-year vision about KM can be developed in an organisation
Where to start with a KM strategy
Using frameworks and getting started
The stealth approach in KM strategies
What’s useful: the attention to principles of action and the fact that this resource is quite easy to absorb and to implement as it has a good, concrete, summary section. An excellent starting point.
Their interactive KM strategy framework allows you to select a different phase of KM strategy development and zoom in on specific challenges and related posts, other writings or resources… So a good complement to the KM4Dev wiki. However here nothing is said about how you should go about it, but that’s because APQC, like quite a few other people mentioned here, makes a business out of advising you on KM too.
This series of 12 Powerpoint presentations might, at times, seem a bit dry to read but it contains a wealth of advices regarding knowledge and knowledge management. The part 5 focuses on developing a knowledge and then a knowledge management strategy, looking also at how to measure KM successfully and how to launch your KM program.
There is perhaps nothing really brand new in this but the merit of this master course is to be quite comprehensive and to be transparent.
The recent book by Stephanie Barnes and Knoco’s Nick Milton is allegedly one of the best reads on this topic and is most likely selling fast too. I don’t like to promote pay-for resources so much, that’s why I’m keeping this for the end of this selection.
Designing a successful KM strategy
The reason why this features here – and before I have even read the book myself (though I ordered it) is that Nick Milton has been blogging very regularly the past few years, and very regularly about some very good stuff. So do check his blog.
The points that I like about his approach to KM strategy include among others: Pilots, change management (not just KM), attention to facilitation as part of the skill set of a knowledge manager, guerrilla strategy, attention to principles and key knowledge areas, in addition to the standard stuff you can find in other resources mentioned here.
What we think about with KM strategies is sometimes just the tip of what needs to be taken care of (Credits: Infertilegirlinafertileworld)
Sarah Cummings and I wrote this overview of KM strategies a few years back. Although dated (2009) this comparison draws a few conclusions that are relevant regardless of the KM strategy context:
Four pointers to make decisions: the complexity of the organisation (or network etc.), strategic orientation (navel-gazing or outward-focused), learning phase in the strategy development and reference framework;
Four elements of a KM strategy: scope, approach, tools/practices, monitoring and evaluation…
Now, if I’m true to my own model of KM=CDL, I would end this stock-taking exercise by wondering how a KM strategy addresses a) cultivating conversations, b) documenting these and other experiences and c) stimulating action-focused learning, and this at organisational level but with a strong inclination to connect with individual level and (inter)institutional level. But that is too much at this stage, so more matter for another post.
You can see more resources in my bookmarks on KM strategy and as mentioned above I’ll keep on updating this so watch this space!
A short post, for an idea that is not really new in my (mind)world: Training is great. But it won’t give you the superpowers you were expecting…
Where do people get this idea from? Even in my close surrounding people believe training is the surest way to become someone else, and I see countless CVs that display a sometimes endless list of training courses like a proud badge of capacity. Like: Training transformed me into a superhero!
Become a superhero with training? Errrrm…. (Credits: MindMappingSoftware)
I don’t deny that training:
Can bring critical new information and skills;
Challenges your thinking about some theories and practices that you may not have been exposed to;
(If done well) Puts you in concrete situations where you have to show and encourage new behaviours.
… and probably a few more benefits…
But on the downside:
How many training courses are actually designed around your context, your issues, your needs and opportunities?
How many training courses pay attention to how you will apply the new information and skills in your work tomorrow, next week, next year?
As a result, what is the likelihood that you apply new information and skills in your day-to-day work (unless you have the capacity/authority and discipline to enforce this? We already know how difficult it is to change.
How likely are you to change that behaviour if you don’t have a practice of reflection about your ongoing work and naturally try to accommodate the new skills and information in your natural ecosystem and routines?
Training goes back to way back when and yet it feels to me as likely to be a fit as playing bilboquet (cup and ball) guarantees… (Credits: Noël Tortajada / Rita Productions)
So: training? Yes! But make sure it’s adapted to you, prepare yourself to putting the training insights into your context… and just don’t put all your eggs into the training basket…
I’m just sayin’…
And for whatever it’s worth, if you consider training, you might look at how to calculate return on investment. If anything, it just shows how complex it is to have training lead to value and impact.
Knowledge management (KM) can be a very dry topic to explain, so how about a bit of fun to do the job?
A mate of mine was recently compiling some ideas to present KM to a group of people who don’t know anything about it. She picked my brains and I told her, among other ideas, to use illustrations explaining the challenges that (agile) KM can solve.
Here are some ideas if you want to ignore those challenges…
Information and knowledge are of no help when you have a hammer anyway! (Credits: Mugsy’s rap sheet)
Don’t mind your information and knowledge, it’s all over-rated
True! What’s all the fuss about the information age and the knowledge era, and being smart and all. Rote learning has proven a long time ago that it was by far the most successful way to respond to current problems, let alone future challenges. Just keep nailing (or hammering?) down your problems all in the same way, as you’ve always done. Why change a winning strategy?
Well, perhaps when it’s no longer winning, and you DO need to take stock of what people think and do around you ;)
Ensure slow, and regular death by powerpoint
Another common one that can easily be avoided by (agile) KM: Make sure your meetings and events are as loaded with information as possible (yes: encourage logorrhea). Who cares about knowledge sharing and co-creating?
Death by Powerpoint, slow and painful, and totally AVOIDABLE (Credits: Media Fake Posters)
Who said involving people was a good idea? What can be better than provide all your great thoughts to others and let them digest your excellent thinking rather than come up with a watered down version of it by themselves – even together?
Keep it solid, keep it straight: it’s all about your experience enlightening others, and frankly you have little to get from interacting with all those morons around you.
Make sure everyone around you is endlessly searching information and wasting time
The gazillions of hours wasted searching for stuff are killing us! (Credits: Kirtok)
That’s right, one of the benefits of not organising and managing your information is that it forces your colleagues to search (for hours) through the web, looking for what they need. They will get really web-savvy with this, and finding lovely kitten pictures, Buzzfeed’s latest nightmarish creations and perhaps even saucy videos will have no secret for them. Finding business-critical information on the other hand… well, it’s probably not part of their terms of reference really is it? So…
Don’t reinvent the wheel (Credits: S. Wiertz / FlickR)
Reinvent the wheel – in a worse way, and in order to reinventing the wheel
Let’s go one step further: Since searching for information hasn’t reaped any tangible benefit for your business, don’t bother building upon the past, just CREATE IT ALL ANEW, bigger, flashier, fancier, ahem, though perhaps not better.
People who worked on similar challenges before didn’t understand your context, your needs, your problems, so they likely have very little in store to help you…
Just ignore them and fix that damn wheel. Someone still needs to create it, right?
Make sure your colleagues are all drowning in emails
It’s such a hassle having to learn a new tool that pretends it can do away with (part of) your emails, so just wallow in your email soup and relish the deluge that keeps coming in and keeps your heart and tension very healthy. And you may beat the record number of emails in your inbox, or amount of emails received per hour. Just go for it, there wouldn’t be anything sillier than trying to fix this since it’s so fun replying to emails endlessly. It also keeps you away from other work that needs to be done.
Life if sweet without KM.
Try and beat that record (Credits: Gideon / FlickR)
Don’t learn, don’t look back, and if you do, think single loop only
Learning? That’s for pupils and students. You don’t need it. You surely have all the best answers to all the problems in the world anyway… And even if you did need to learn, it’s just to improve your very same approach to problems – sharpening that hammer so to speak.
If you have some success, just celebrate. If you had problems, quickly ignore them. At any rate DO NOT try and document what happened. It’s a complete waste of time. Everyone knows that a success can easily be replicated elsewhere, and that a failure doesn’t help anyone, certainly not you.
Don’t bring people together to (come on, that big picture blatantly doesn’t exist!)
That big picture does NOT exist. Just relax and keep your head in the sand (Credits: Kat Banaszek / FlickR)
Thinking there might be other solutions for the issues you face, or bigger issues affecting you and your organisation is a gross exaggeration, a conspiracy from outside to prevent you from doing what you do best: business as usual. The solution must be in one deeper ply of your thinking. You’ve always found the right answers to all problems so you can figure out that big one too.
Oh, and don’t forget to run for presidency next time you can ;)
Don’t pay attention to your institutional memory, don’t do exit interviews etc.
Institutional Memory (Credits: Thomas Hawk / FlickR)
One of the common challenges that KM tries to fix is to mitigate the loss of institutional memory through buddying/coaching, on site training, codifying practices at work, implementing a proper induction program and handover process including a good, grounded exit interview.
But hey, that’s a whole waste of time. Just get on with work, focus on the here and now only and when someone leaves your company you’ll find a solution for the replacement. Anyway chances are they are not really good employees and wouldn’t leave much behind at any rate (after all: they’re working for you, a worthless company that has proved well beyond the point that they don’t take KM seriously because they are not smart).
There is so much more I could mention, all these buzz words and idiotic ideas like innovation, resilience, adaptive management etc. fail fail fail… Just rejoice at the idea that your company may start looking like The Office – so prepare your jelly supplies, and sit back, relax and enjoy the KM-free world. A world free of hassle, at least mañana…
How many meetings (even one on one) are spent to regurgitate something, to present ‘stuff’ of various relevance and quality, to eruct presentation upon presentation as if the audience needed to know everything ever written about the topic at hand…
Logorrhea – and it’s only getting worse… (Credits: Scott Adam)
How many events with an avalanche of information, and so little co-creation?
Hey, I’d get it if we were in 1983 and there was no other way to get that information. But in 2015, almost everyone has a phone that can provide all the information we need. Share if you care.
Death by Powerpoint (Credits: Tom Fishburne)
This single-route approach to face-to-face is not only another (often not so) disguised attempt of inducing death by Powerpoint, but it is also: a completely missed opportunity to develop something new, an insult to our intelligence and capacity, a deliberate attempt at stupidly reinventing the wheel again and again and again (remember the reasons why Open Space Technology and World Café were created?), a real barrier to developing trust between people (who will thus not get an opportunity to meet each other) and an utter waste of money – remember the meeting cost calculator?
Synergy (Credits: MacroMarcie)
How about quality face-to-face time to avoid the logorrhea of information? People coming together should remain the kindling of magic that happens so easily in personal life. It should be about everyone bringing their experience, ideas, emotions, capacities, know-how, know-who… it’s about a communion of souls and conjugation of roles – synergy made out of energies.
So: How about sharing information beforehand, online, because it’s possible but also because it prepares the participants to the purpose of this face-to-face moment. Interactive moments of discovery, exploration, alignment, co-creation, prototyping (see Carl Jackson’s ideas about this), assessment and commitment?
THAT is the mix for real magic.
A few essentials can help further here:
The guts to require that people coming together prepare themselves to let go and to co-create on the spot, without invading each other’s space with their pompous excellence;
The discipline of preparing ourselves for meetings, however large or small scale – ideally we should always have a clear learning objective for all face-to-face encounters we’re planning – and have read whatever information is necessary to kickstart the conversation;
The habit of managing our information (as part of PKM) and of choosing the face-to-face moments we have with others because we can fully invest ourselves;
And so, ok, perhaps just the minimum of information to level the playing field here – but just enough to get the substance to make magic happen. No less, and certainly no more.
We can no longer afford to use meetings to just ‘share information’. In this year and age that is the equivalent of encouraging online visitors to read scanned faxes posted on a website and to come once a month to a physical office to bring their (printed) comments about it.
Anno 2015, synergistic learning is well beyond faxes, prints and single-comms streets. It’s social, it’s alive, it’s enthralling. So whatever your next face-to-face moment is, be there, be together and as Delroy Wilson would say, ‘Get ready’.
So, as we approach Christmas, I dedicate this to all the children of the world, hoping they find some peace of body, mind and soul for the end of this dramatic year, and for the one coming.
I also hope that they find the spark that unleashes their amazingly creative and constructive energy, that they get taken by the beauty of the world around them, and that, as the incredible learners that they are, they keep the hunger for discovery and spark of life kindled for ever…
Like children, we adults are also learners, only we get complacent at thinking we know enough at times, and our memory is finite and already full of stuff so keeping track of stuff we learn is perhaps a bit harder. But this is not the place and time for a post on adult learning.
I want to thank all of you who kept the spark of curiosity, interest, generosity from your inner child to also engage with this blog and probably many conversations, spaces, people around. I keep this blog up also for you and thank you for the time you’re taking a peek or having a chat here :)
Here is the end-of-year overview of most popular posts (your posts), doubled with my personal selection of posts from this year.
Most popular 2014 posts (in bold, posts actually written this year):
A simple idea: change yourself and you might see entire systems transform.
Change (Peter Downsbrough, 2011)
Aren’t we all butterflies fluttering our wings somewhere and causing tsunamis on the other side of the world? We are connected, and global change starts with individual change. Or perhaps it doesn’t, but what is certain is that without individual change we won’t see systemic change…
So why do we keep chasing the unicorns of this world in such simplistic ways? We want to achieve scaling up, sustainability, social learning, systemic change…but we don’t ask ourselves the right questions. All these unicorns won’t materialise if organisations are not willing and capable of operating together, and organisations won’t manage that if their own staff – individually – are not capable of learning by themselves, of being intentional about the change they want to see happen, of sharing with and caring for others, of connecting deeply. Exactly like the unit 0 of civilisation is the family, the unit 0 of learning and change is ourselves as individuals.
One of the concepts that has taken me recently is ‘process literacy': the capacity of people to go beyond ‘what has to be done‘ to also understand the fine processes that happen behind those objectives – what process documentation, systematization and capitalisation are trying to do. Being ‘process literate’ means that you constantly pay attention to the channels that are most appropriate to understand the issue you are contemplating. It means you can talk content (dive deep) and connect it with relevant fields and ideas (go wide).
It is through that process literacy lens that a lot of the questions we are grappling with will actually reveal some useful angles. Someone I just met is trying to unpack ‘knowledge management in value chains‘ and it turns out there is very little at the junction of these two fields, but she is adamant that it is in documenting the process of (not) doing KM in value chains that we will find ways to improve knowledge creation, sharing and use in those value chains. Spot on!
So, while social learning remains great, we need to nurture and cultivate that process literacy within ourselves. Social learning, by the way, is also understood by some as individual learning connected – via social media – to others (see the presentation below in its attempt to manage information through that type of social learning).
But the lesson is the same: learning, sharing, change, better livelihoods lives, they all start with each and everyone of us. So get ready to shed your caterpillar skin for the learning and change revolution to happen: we need all butterlies around to flap their wings.
What is it that makes knowledge management worthwhile? A lot of things I’m tempted to say as a knowledge manager, but there’s one important benefit that you cannot ignore: it saves time. And so it saves money.
KM… the Time Jumper? (Credits: Hartwig HKD / FlickR)
Whether applied at an individual level (personal knowledge mastery), within an organization or in a network, KM is the extra mile that saves your time.
It saves time because it goes beyond the immediate needs of one person in one situation at one time in one place, to extract generic lessons that people can use, in other places or at other times.
In doing so, KM helps people identify relevant experiences, information, knowledge that they need to solve problems and it even helps them connect with the people that can help them fully understand or address the puzzle they’re facing.
But KM does require a little extra mile.
Spontaneously, a good KMer encountering a problem will not just try and fix it. S/he will record it, bring it to the attention of others concerned with it, and also document the way that problem was solved, or the gap in policies and processes that was revealed in the process. It would be much easier to just fix the problem and get on with it.
And that extra ‘KM’ mile may not always come in handy:
Looking back at what past information, experience or expertise you can find at hand to understand an issue is not something most of us like doing;
Sharing, alerting others about some specific information takes time;
Documenting the process needs tedious consistency;
Involving others in the work you do (because you ) adds a lot of complexity to ‘fixing an issue';
Updating guidelines, good, bad or best practices requires discipline;
And you don’t even have a guarantee that others will find your information, understand it well enough, or use it…
So, at least initially, KM takes some time off you… but hey, if that extra mile helps others facing similar issues (or yourself the next time you are in that situation), what the heck, it’s worth it! If you believe in KM, you share because you care. Pay it forward!
Just make sure you use the most appropriate places to share, document, update that critical information. If you use the right arenas, then you’re sure to help others save time, in space or… time…
In addition, at some point you just develop the habit of routinely going that extra mile and hardly feel the time it takes anymore. You are entering the ‘effortless helping’ phase that blesses all good KMers.
So, even if KM takes that little extra mile, as it saves your time, keep your smile (and just do it)…
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