Far Wise in Knowledge Management

The leader's guide to storytelling

Steve Denning announces that his book The Leader's Guide to Storytelling is published. The same day I receive a message from Amazon that this book is now being shipped to me. I can't wait to read it! Of course, I've already read parts in Steve's weblog, still I would like to read it sitting on the couch instead of reading it from the screen of my computer. For "really" reading the computer can never win from a book.

Social Software event from Kenniscirkel

Yesterday evening I was too tired to blog, with my head full of thoughts about the event I visited in Utrecht, organised by Kenniscirkel on Social Software. It was a very interesting event, with inspiring presenters and an audience of different types of organisations.

First the presentation of Frank Janssen (Frankwatching) from TPG Post. I read Franks weblog for some time, so now I met the person behind it, which is really nice. Frank presented numbers of an Intranet monitor from Twynstra Gudde, combined with usage numbers in TPG Post. Remarkable: in TPG Post, personal productivity and collaboration decrease (compared to the years before) and what people miss is to "know who knows what".

Frank described the new 3Ws: weblog, wiki, webfeeds, which he all calls social software. For me webfeed (RSS) is related to people but to information. Ok, I agree that I can select to read the weblogs I like most, but RSS is a way to easily read the inputs (of other sites as well, like news papers).

To summarise Frank: Social Software is simple, intuitive, flexible, non-technical and organised bottom up, so fills in the gap in Intranets for collaboration and knowledge sharing.

Next a presentation from one of the founders of Macaw (Maarten Sikkema), a software development company where all employees have an (internal) weblog. Their Intranet portal is a communication channel, compared to (our and probably many companies) a content management system. On the homepage you see all the new entries in weblogs, discussion fora and so on. It looked a bit chaotic, but here is where the news can be found.

What I liked is the openness and self regulating system they believe in. Maarten Sikkema said "We don't do in knowledge management", but I think they do quite a lot! This (weblog, wiki) is also part of knoweldge management, though not the heavy information/document management systems many people think is similar to knowledge management.

Ton Zijlstra summarised the presentations and added his experience.

Then the group split in three for small-scale discussions. I choose the group about "culture", guided by the Macaw fellow. Here I learned about the dinosaur, or the people in the company who will never adopt a new technology (like weblogs). So you have the pioneers, the followers and the dinosaurs. Don't spend your energy on the dinosaur, but don't let them stand in your way, was the message. Mostly these dinosaurs are middle management, was our idea, since the bottoms and tops in the organisations (terminology from Oshry's book "The possiblities of organization") have less to lose.

Proven Partners will summarise the discussion in a wiki, so I'll look forward to that and read what happened in the other groups.

Quote of the day

I love this quote (found in CONIECTO from Gabriela Avram, who I hope to see at ECKM'05 in Limerick):

I love deadlines. I like the wooshing sound they make as they fly by.

Old news

Last week I was on the phone with my boyfriend who lives in The Hague on working days. I could hear we were watching the same programme on TV (news programme), but that he receives the news earlier than I do! I could hear (through the phone) a woman talking before she is on my screen and it is certainly a difference of 3-5 seconds. So people in the west of our country know the news before we in the east receive it.  I knew the west was privileged to the rest of the country, but I didn't know it was that bad. We receive old news.

Balancing three meter above the floor

The opening act last Thursday were two ladies doing some acrobatic movements in ropes hanging from the ceiling. I was standing on the balcony of the second floor and was lucky because they climbed to the level I was standing. And there was nothing to help these ladies when they fall! Beautiful, fascination and a bit scaring as well. The pictures are taken by a colleague.

Innovation is Pain?

Last week we had the official opening of the new office building. On the knowledge market we also had a knowledge management stand. If you were there you could have done an information overload test (in Dutch), tell a storytelling story or looked at the Bush-Kerry debate with Anjo. A lot of interested people for the topic.

Next to the market there was an interactive session. One of the presenting couples presented a statement on innovation, which lead to an interesting discussion. Of course, it started and ended with the question "What is innovation?". Hearing the different reactions, some people seem to believe that innovation is something radically new, while I think most innovations come from linking existing things in a new way or building upon something that already exists. Nothing on our knowledge market (demo's, prototypes) is really new, though we see it as innovation.

Another interesting remark from the audience "Innovation is pain"; you need to be in pain to feel the need for innovation. Of course, as a runner I know that "Gain is pain and blood is good", still I think that being in pain is too late for a company. Sometimes pain is needed for change, but a company that wants to be innovative can't wait for the pain, so then it's more a matter of choosing the company strategy.

In the construction area it would be good that they suffer a bit more, this area hardly seems to be innovative. I once did a project in this area, we looked at information streams and it is incredible how inefficient people work and how many mistakes are being made. But there is a high demand for houses in Holland, so they can afford to work like this. Here a bit more pain would certainly help to improve.

Overview of communication theories

Via a posting by Oliver Wrede who refers to a list developed at the University of Twente with communication theories. Very useful overview! I miss one on information overload (if such theory exists).

Reducing email defects with training

In our information overload study we often hear that email is a major problem. When I hear this I wonder, what is actually the problem: is it the volume of email people receive, the unclearness of the message (why did they mail this to me, the cc-culture), or is it the pressure that people feel (I have to react now, or the cc to the manager). Yesterday I read a very interesting paper by Anthony Burgett, Thomas Jackson and Janet Edwards who describe the email problems (defects) in more detail and present a solution: email training.

The paper titled "Email training significantly reduces email defects" appeared inJournal of Information Management (paper in PDF, subscription needed). The defects the authors found in a large organisation relate to the quality of the emails:

-         information deficiency (poorly written, context unclear)

-         poorly targeted emails (inappropriate use of cc-function)

-         media selection (other medium would be more appropriate)

-         interruption (distracters from work)

-         processing and filing of email (prioritise and manage messages, trouble retrieving messages for later use)

The funny thing is that most employees are not trained in writing email. Ok, they receive support with the functionality of the tool but usually not with the message itself. The paper describes training for sender of email, which consists of showing examples of poor emails and asking to pick out the defects. I expected more an instruction here, "How to write a proper email message". Besides that, senders were trained how to better manager their email by using folders and archiving (which is more a receiver problem to me). After the training, a test shows that the two major improvements were:

* better use of the subject line which makes it easier to prioritise an email and also to assess the content (99% significant);

* better written emails which were easier to read and to the point (95% significant).

So, even a very simple training (studying examples) gives such good results. Sounds very easy to try out ourselves.

Another part of the research (relation email defects to job grade, age and duration) I did not mention here, will do that later.