Far Wise in Knowledge Management

Social visibility in the new office building

Lilia writes about our new office building to where we moved during Christmas holidays. It is nice to read how she observes differences between the two buildings and how this affects social visibility.

I agree that our part of the building (the "old" part) is like she says: "Social spaces between offices are bigger, more colorful and architecturally it's more fun to walk around..", but need to add that is only for our part. The "new" part is not so colourful or with big social places (no real coffee corner). I think we are lucky to be in this part: it is the best part.

I also agree that it is less easy to see who is there for coffee or talk. Now for me it is clear when I hear voices that some people are at the coffee corner, but that's because my office is close to the cc. (The same reasons why the aibo dogs drove me crazy - but I have to admit that those toys attract people from all floors).

Another observation, not mentioned by Lilia (well, she may not have noticed yet, since she is half sleepy with jetlag and not walking around for so long here), is that we now get a division between "old" part of the building and "new" part. I found that I hardly see my colleagues in the new part any longer! The only (obvious) reason to walk to the new part is the post boxes, but since I don't get that much of post, I limit my visits to a minimum.

How a building influences my contacts.. Hmm... I think I should go for a walk and see my colleagues on the other side of the building..

First thoughts on information overload

Information overload is one of the research themes we have chosen for 2005. Anjo already wrote something about it, because, poor him, he was asked to prepare some slides about the topic.

Two days ago we all presented our presonal views on information overload and discussed it. However different the views, there were more similarities than I expected beforehand. Here are some of my observations:

• Information overload has a very subjective element (not everybody suffers from it). We should talk with people, look at what they do, to get a better view on the matter
• Complexity and chaos was often mentioned. We live in a complex world, what can we do to reduce or handle it?
• Technology has a double role: it can reduce IO, but increase it at the same time (take e-mail, Google, Blogreader). Multi-channels, push-pull of information
• Cognitive (over)load is probably one of the reasons. Weight between effort and result
• Structuring, filtering can be helpful in solving

Some assumptions were nice:

• There is chaos now and there will always be chaos
• People are lazy (which links to the ideas of Janine about 'knowledge animal'

This is only the beginning, to start our project. There is far more to do and so we will in the coming year.

One thing I may start with is the following:

Anjo refers to an author I don't know (shame on me), Tufte, whose name suddenly appears in more weblogs (McGees Musings, Anecdote ).  What I understood is that Tufte is writing a book Beautiful Evidence, and there is one chapter Corrupt Techniques in Evidence Presentations that can be read. Maybe I should do that.

ELLE about weblogging

Since I don't think Anjo will take a subscription to ELLE, now they write about blogging, I will summarise what was in their story about weblogging.

Let's start with the conclusion at the end: people want to express themselves and weblogs give them a chance to do so. Even though it is 9 out of 10 times about nothing, weblogging is better than hanging in front of the TV.

Mind you, ELLE on the pedagogic tour. I always thought the readers of ELLE are female, backgrounds in higher education, age 25-40 (something like that)? Not particularly the type that the whole evening hangs in front of the telly.

Anyway, the rest of the paper tells about some fanatic female bloggers, who mostly have writing ambitions and their weblogs are a sort of platform for testing their skills and (hopefully) to be recognised by a commercial publisher.

The women in this story have a lifelog (so ELLE calls them); men seem to like the more nagging type of weblog. Funny observation.

Grown-up's toys

My dear colleagues are driving me crazy at the moment. I don't know who, but someone bought 3 (!) aibo robot dogs, you know those thing that can walk, lay down, take a 'bone' and turn their heads when you say something. Two of them are walking around on my office floor and they make noises and play music. And of course, the rest of my colleagues, who don't live on this floor come to visit our new pets. Go away!

One is called Bobby, but I thought Bobby is white. I wonder what happens when you kick Bobby.

Weblogging must be popular...

if even the Dutch ELLE magazine publishes in this month's issue about weblogging!

Expectations of storytelling

A customer asked us to help him with the well-known problem of knowledge and experience that will be lost when a large group of employees will retire the coming years. One of the things we are using to help the customer is storytelling.

We talked with several experienced employees and made video-interviews in which they tell about problems they encounter, which cannot be solved by using the company handbooks. These were very nice interviews with enthousiastic experts ("reflective practitioners" we call them) in which we also heard a lot about the organisation culture. We found that all were great storytellers; sometimes we needed to find the spark to ignite, but then you can see their spirits for the work they do.

However, showing the videos and talking to management, we found out what their expectations for storytelling were: to bridge to knowledge gap between the younger inexperienced and the nearly retired experienced employees. Further talking gave me the feeling that we were talking about knowledge retention, a technique I know from long time ago (expert systems, that type). My feeling is that storytelling is not a good method for knowledge retention, or, the other way: is this (knowledge retention) what we want? Personally, I don't believe in this "brain dump" and it is certainly not our goal with storytelling.

Luckily we were able to convince the management of the way we use storytelling. I learned that even though we thought we made our expectations and goals with storytelling clear, it was not clear (enough) for the management, at least they had different expectations.

Nightmare

Yesterday we went to see the movie "Der Untergang", about the last days of Hitler, seen through the eyes of his secretary. In a review I read that it would show a more "human" Hitler. In that respect I was a bit disappointed. The humane moments were very short, the person I saw was a dominant yelling monster. Apart from that it was a very impressive movie. So I found out last night when several dreams I had were about the movie. At 4 o'clock, lying awake, I thought I had to think of something else, for example of something stupid like running, in order not to dream about the movie. Thinking about running, after a while I started to think in German and here again, I was back to the pictures I saw that evening. No escape possible, it seemed! I was happy when in the morning the alarm went off.

Go and see it!

State of blogging

Despite "blog" being word of the year 2004, 62% of (American) Internet users don't know what a weblog is (end 2004). Just read in Webwereld (Dutch) a study by PEW Internet and American Life Project.

The report says that weblog reading has increased a lot (27%, which is an increase of 58% compared to February 2004); weblog writing is only done by 7% of American Internet users. The increase of weblog reading can be explained by the popularity of RSS. The report (4 pages) can be downloaded.

The weblog community (if there is one) is still small. I'm not surprised that weblog reading outnumbers writing; we recommend people who are interested in weblogs to first start reading and then decide if they want to start a weblog themselves. In the discussions we have here with our (blogging) colleagues we find that not everybody likes keeping a weblog (writing). By reading one can find out what others do and how their style is.

New Cynefin site

Shawn Callahan (in Anecdote blog) announces that the Cynefin Centre has a new website. What attracted me as well in the Anecdote post is the following:

In the meantime here is a brief description of a lessons learned project done by the Bank of Thailand which applied Cynefin narrative techniques. 

The Cynefin site is still under construction, it's mainly the homepage that is filled. For the Knowledge Base (which now contains only 1 document) you need to subscribe. It is clear that the site needs some more time; something to visit again later.

A new (blogging) year

Today is my first day back to work and the first in our new building. My company moved from the nice university campus to the middle of Enschede city, to a corner of the area that was burned down because of fireworks explosions (in May 2000, if I remember correctly).

A first day like this is a bit messy: I had no idea what my office would look like (it is bigger than I thought!), is my computer working (it is) and how long will it take to unpack and make myself "at home". The walls are empty and white, so we need to find some art posters or so. Apart from that, I'm ready to get back to the job. And this is the problem: I'm not in the mood... I want vacation! One week is just too short.