Delta Knowledge

MindTouch Deki - Opensource Wiki Project

2009-07-07T20:13:00.001+10:00

Over the past few years, the open source community has started to be noticed by the business press.

In the cyclicals, Christopher Koch's 2003 article in CIO about stumbling across Open Source POS solutions started to erode some of the mysticism for businesses to open up their options. Now CIO has a permanent section for Open Source news, covering issues like SOA and the Sun Java move as well as the impact that the Open Source movement is having on Back-Office apps.

More recently, the Ernie Ball case showed that companies could totally ditch Microsoft and survive. A proposal more than attractive to many other Small to Medium Enterprises.

Thomas Friedman's book The World is Flat used several Open Source examples and made business people aware of the basic principles of Open Source software. The Apache Web Server development and the impressive growth of the Linux operating system are exciting examples of what is possible outside the normal private sector development strategy.

Clay Shirky talks on TED.com about the impact these distributed structures are having on the world and discusses these in terms of the institution versus collaboration. This video is well worth 20 minutes of your time if you haven't seen it.

Finally (and importantly for me) many of the wiki solutions we see today are either open source, were started that way, or have open source components or plug-ins. Whether it is Media-wiki (the system Wikipedia uses), the venerable TWiki, Atlassian's enterprise focused Confluence or the sexy, standards-based Mindtouch Deki, the key here isn't the software, but the community that springs up around it's design and continued development & support.

If you have a few minutes, please take the time to vote for Mindtouch and some of your other favourites in the Open Source Community Choice Awards. Many of the people involved in these great projects do so for little or no money, only the recognition and a sense of a job well done. Click on the logo above and give them a little or your recognition.

What a wonderful time to be alive!

2009-06-30T17:33:00.003+10:00

I have been fascinated over the last few weeks to see what is described here as "Twitter content or garbage", however I view it a little differently.

Most people see twitter as the technology. In fact the tech is just a communications enabler for a community. Now the Twitter community is fairly new, in a phase of high growth and as such has a loose culture. However this culture is morphing, maturing, in this case before our very eyes. Clay Shirky has discussed this in terms of the China quake in his recent TED video.

Many fell for the recent Jeff Goldblum incident by retweeting about his unconfirmed death, however they learned, etiquette has adjusted slightly. Today with rumors of a jet going down in the Indian ocean, tweets were a lot more reserved. People linked back to sources more. We are seeing a new culture develop right in front of us (or around us and in us if we are on twitter ourselves).

What a wonderful time to be alive!

Encouraging CEOs to make the leap of faith

2009-06-26T11:14:00.005+10:00

Key decision makers seem to be slowly awakening to the concept, if not the power of intangible business assets like social networks. However, they are still struggling in my view to work out how to integrate that into their current business frameworks where solid ROIs and clear, preplanned revenue paths exist before an investment of either time or money is made.

Craig Hepburn, fresh from the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston this week has just posted his thoughts about how this education is where a lot of our effort should be placed on the coming year. I agree.

Wikinomics goes a little way to share some of the case studies out there in CxO language. It also implies in many of them the critical message that many of these outcomes were not a stated goal at the beginning of the project, but emerged from the initiative.

In many ways, faith and creativity are required to execute a successful SM initiative. Not the blind faith of wishful thinking, but faith based on reason and an understanding of the possibilities of human interaction. In the end, any solution applied in a complex environment takes an element of faith that it will succeed. The trick is to engineer your projects such that they are designed to adapt to the successful outcomes and attenuate the negative outcomes as they arise, as David Snowden's Safe-Fail concept explains.

Evangelising social media and other KM tools doesn't mean building hype around a product or even a certain solution category. Most CEOs can smell a snake-oil salesman at 100 paces anyway. Neither is it so much about reducing uncertainty and having people ignore the complexity. A flexible/social tool like a wiki may fail at one solution but in the process be used by the same people to solve 3 other problems.

Evangelism is focused on increasing people's faith. Giving them a reason to believe that making the jump into Enterprise 2.0 will provide solid business benefits even when all of them cannot be known at the outset.

Image thanks from gamebump.com

Finding the right glove, Enterprise 2.0 Culture and Implementation

2009-05-28T11:04:00.002+10:00

For those of you who attended KMLF in Melbourne last night, thank-you for a great time.

Below is the presentation that led our discussion. I apreciate everybody's input. With people from large and small business, government and several consultants there too it was a great mix for this topic and I learned a lot too.

Lets keep the conversation going! You can always learn more about your organisational culture and how it impacts on Enterprise 2.0 planning and implementation.

Finding The Right Glove Org Culture & E2.0

View more OpenOffice presentations from Stuart French.

Watch & Learn about Confluence

2009-05-25T15:40:00.004+10:00

I have enjoyed watching Atlassian really embrace Enterprise 2.0 from within including a strong twitter presence and excellent use of their blogs and forums. I have been a user of their Confluence Enterprise Wiki product for several years and today I came across a page of videos (thanks @NeridaHart) showing some Confluence tutorials. Click here to check them out.

My favorite one, about Sun using confluence to connect their 25,000 users is below for your enjoyment. Notice the focus they have put on user reputation and how they have handled it. The next version of Confluence, v3.0 which is due out any day now, has some of these features now built in, including the ability to follow other people and see what content they are posting.

If you are new to confluence, then take 2-3 minutes to check out the video on 5 user cases here.

Creating Knowledge Cultures - Post 9

2009-05-20T06:46:00.001+10:00

In this final section I try to draw all these parts together and quickly discuss some ideas for how they can be applied in the real world. If you have been following along I hope you have enjoyed this series as much as I have putting it together.

Thankyou for your interest in this series. Culture is a fascinating phenomenon; so hard to nail down and yet so powerful a force in both our personal and working lives. You may have already been aware of all these factors and more. Regardless, my wish is that you go away from this with a greater sensitivity to both the dangers and the opportunities inherent within the cultures around us and a greater ability to avoid and seize them respectively.

6. Creating Knowledge Cultures: Putting it into Practice
The question that remains is: Can cultures be changed and managed?

Opinions differ. From those who give an enthusiastic yes, to others who warn you can simply minimise the risk associated with culture clash and yet others who say that culture is more than the external symbols and artefacts, so managing it is akin to nailing jelly to the wall.

In fact, if by “managed” one infers that culture can be manipulated from on high like moving furniture in a mouse-cage, then I fall on the side of the nay-sayers.

Figure 3: Schein's levels of culture (Schein, 1985, p17)

Using models such as Schein's levels of culture (Figure 3) and the delineation of subcultures, some organisational leaders are encouraged to play an active part in shaping the cultural norms of the organisation. The motivation; to best serve the organisation's goals and vision. However, even if cultural manipulation techniques were 100% successful, there is a downside: yes, constant high situational strength would mean that trust is not relied upon so much, but people would also be less free to work creatively and act intuitively or their own accord. A veritable army of “Yes men”.

Conrad & Poole
Of course most anthropologists would deride the idea that leaders could create cultures anyway (Meek, 1988, p.459), however Conrad & Poole walk somewhat of a middle-line. They define culture as “a communicative creation, embedded in a history and a set of expectations about the future. They are usually heterogeneous, composed of multiple subcultures.” (1998, p.98). Meek agrees with this compromise:

“Culture as a whole cannot be manipulated, turned on and off, although it needs to be recognised that some are in a better position than others to attempt to intentionally influence aspects of it. (Meek, 1988, p.469)

Conrad and Poole (1998) see cultural strategies for organisational design and management as being superior to traditional individualistic and relational strategies. While recognizing that human beings are emotional and community-oriented, cultural strategies stop short of considering the resulting social construct as an entity unto itself.

Cultural management strategies, they argue, focus primarily on creating a sense of community within work groups as a way of "managing the tension between individual and organizational needs." This methodology considers the impressive impact that cultural regularities have on an individual's beliefs and frames of reference and thus attempts to use them in "unobtrusive" ways via the manoeuvring of cultural metaphors and artefacts. These might include:

Identification, for example the recognition and lauding of beneficial behaviours,
Instituting or modifying organisational symbols like metaphors, stories and or rituals and ceremonies, and finally
Unobtrusive emotional regulation via position, interpretation and self-control via embodied organisational values.

Whatever the form, this type of control tends to follow a similar process: induce participation, which leads to identification of the individual with the organisations accepted norms and finally, emotional commitments are willingly entered into on the individual’s part.

Conrad and Poole note the short-comings with these methods, unless it is an organisation or one, offering water-tight solutions should raise alarm bells anyway.

They note the enthusiasm with which, especially North American, managers took up these methods, assuming that if culture could be controlled then they would be the ones to control it.

This of course reveals the first flaw: The authors speak of different sub-cultures in the organisation responding uniquely to management's attempts to mould beliefs, however if culture is a cognitive process and not "a thing" (D’Andrade, 1995) then every individual employee will respond in subtly different and complex ways.

Secondly, the very beliefs, values and metaphors they seek to change often do not have a first-order effect on employee behaviour. Therefore, changing them can have unexpected results and they offer Disney's problematic usage of the family metaphor as an example of how things can go wrong dramatically if the strategy fails.

Conclusion
The key here is that while culture is not a “thing” to be managed, it is certainly undergoing constant transformation. As mentioned earlier, the real power of a cognitive view of culture comes from a change of perspective. If we can learn to see that cultural issues are complex and highly contextual and that intra- and cross-cultural interactions are actually collaborative, mutual learning experiences (Holden, 2002, p.54), then managing both the opportunities and pitfalls simply becomes an issue of knowledge management, specifically networking, knowledge sharing and collaborative (or organisational) learning (Holden, 2002, p.52).

References for the Series:

Abrams, L. C., Cross, R., Lesser, E. and Levin, D. Z. 2003, Nurturing interpersonal trust in knowledge-sharing networks, Academy of Management Executive, vol. 17, no. 4, pp. pp.64-77.
Argyris, C. 2001, Good Communication that blocks learning. in Harvard Business Review on Organizational Learning Harvard Business School Publishing, Boston, MA, pp. 87-110.
Argyris, C. and Schön, D. A. 1996, Organizational Learning II. Preface; Chapters 1-3. in Organizational Learning II. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Reading, MA.
Bourdieu, P. 1977, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology), Cambridge University Press, Paris.
Britannica Online 2005, 'Encyclopædia Britannica Online', [online database], Chicago, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., viewed 13-Jun-2005,
Clarke, T. 2001, Part one - knowledge management: The knowledge economy, Education & Training, vol. 43, no. 4/5, pp. 189-196.
Conrad, C. and Poole, M. S. 1998, Strategic organizational communication: Chapter 4 - Cultural Strategies. in Strategic organizational communication: into the twenty-first century Harcourt Brace College Publishers, Fort Worth, pp. xiv, 479 p.
Cross, R. and Prusak, L. 2003, People who make organizations go - or stop. in Networks in the knowledge economy (Eds, Cross, R., Parker, A. and Sasson, L.) Oxford University Press, New York, pp. 248-260.
D’Andrade, R. G. 1995, The Development of Cognitive Anthropology., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Dirks, K. T. and Ferrin, D. L. 2001, The role of trust in organizational settings, Organization Science: A Journal of the Institute of Management Sciences, vol. 12, no. 4, pp. 450-467.
Dodgson, M. 1993, Organizational learning: A review of some literatures,, Organization Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 375-394.
Erez, M. and Gati, E. 2004, A Dynamic, Multi-Level Model of Culture: From the Micro Level of the Individual to the Macro Level of a Global Culture, Applied Psychology: an International Review, vol. 53, no. 4, pp. 583-598.
Fiol, C. M. and Lyles, M. A. 1985, Organizational Learning., Academy of Management Review, vol. 10, no. 4, pp. 803-813.
Garbarino, M. S. 1983, Sociocultural Theory in Anthropology: A Short History, Waveland Press, Illinois.
Garvin, D. A. 1998, Building a Learning Organisation. in Harvard Business Review on Knowledge Management Harvard Business School Publishing, Boston, MA, pp. pp.51-69.
Geertz, C. 1973, The interpretation of cultures; selected essays, Basic Books, New York,.
Hedberg, B. 1981, How organisations learn and unlearn. in Handbook of Organizational Design. (Ed, (eds.), P. C. N. a. W. H. S.) Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Hofstede, G. 1984, Culture's consequences : international differences in work-related values, Sage Publications, Beverly Hills.
Hofstede, G. 2005, Fun and Pitfalls in Cross-Cultural Research, Guest Lecture - Emeritus Professor Geert Hofstede, Melbourne University - Architecture (Prince Philip Theatre), Friday 6-May-2005, www.hofstede.com.
Holden, N. 2002, Cross-cultural management : a knowledge management perspective, Financial Times Prentice Hall, Harlow.
Huber, G. P. 1996, Organizational learning. in Organizational Learning (Eds, Cohen, M. D. and Sproull, L. S.) Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA.
Hutchins, E. 1991, The social organization of distributed cognition. in Perspectives on Socially Shared Cognition (Eds, Resnick, L. B., Levine, J. M. and Teasley, S. D.) American Psychological Association, Washington , DC, pp. 283-307.
Hutchins, E. 1996, Organizing work by adaptation. in Cognition Within and Between Organizations (Eds, Meindl, J. R., Stubbart, C. and Porac, J. F.) Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA, pp. 368-404.
Levitt, B. and March, J. G. 1988, Organizational learning., Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 14, pp. 319-340.
Liebowitz, J. and Beckman, T. J. 1998, Knowledge Organizations - What every manager should know, CRC Press.
MathDaily.com 2005, 'Ecological Fallacy', [online article], www.MathDaily.com, viewed
Mayer, R. C., Davis, J. H. and Schoorman, F. D. 1995, An integrative model of organizational trust, Academy of Management Review, vol. 20, no. 3, pp. 709-734.
McGill, M. E. and Slocum Jr., J. W. 1993, Unlearning the organization. in Organizational Dynamics (Autumn), pp. 67-79.
Meek, V. L. 1988, Organisational culture: origins and weaknesses, Organization Studies, vol. 9, no. 4, pp. 453-473.
Mezmer 2005, 'Dr Mezmer's Dictionary of Bad Psychology', [Website], viewed 3-Jun-2005,
Mischel, W. 1977, The interaction of person and situation. in Personality at the crossroads: Current issues in interactional psychology (Eds, Magnusson, D. and Endler, N. S.) Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ, pp. 333-352.
Nonaka, I. and Nishiguchi, T. 2001, Knowledge emergence : social, technical, and evolutionary dimensions of knowledge creation, Oxford University Press, Oxford ; New York.
Robinson, V. M. J. 2001, Descriptive and normative research on organizational learning: locating the contribution of Argyris and Schön, International Journal of Educational Management, vol. 15, no. 2.
Rogers, Y. and Ellis, J. 1994, Distributed Cognition: an alternative framework for analysing and explaining collaborative working, Journal of Information Technology, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 119-128.
Schein, E. H. 1985, Organizational culture and leadership, Jossey-Bass Publishers, San Francisco.
Schein, E. H. 1999, The corporate culture survival guide : sense and nonsense about culture change, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, Calif.
Seely Brown, J. and Duguid, P. 2001, Balancing Act: How to capture knowledge without killing it. in Harvard Business Review on Organizational Learning Harvard Business School Publishing, Boston, MA, pp. 45-60.
Simons, T. 2002, Behavioural integrity: The perceived alignment between managers' words and deeds as a research focus, Organization Science: A Journal of the Institute of Management Sciences, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 18-35.
Snowdon, D. 2002, Complex acts of knowing: paradox and descriptive self- awareness., Journal of Knowledge Management, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 100-111.
Sperber, D. 1985, On anthropological knowledge: three essays, Cambridge University Press; Editions de la Maison des Sciencs de l'Homme, Paris.
Sperber, D. and Hirschfeld, L. 1999, Culture, Cognition, and Evolution. vol. 2005 MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, pp. [Online Paper].
Strauss, C. and Quinn, N. 1997, A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Swidler, A. and Arditi, J. 1994, The new sociology of knowledge, Annual Review of Sociology, vol. v20, pp. 314-323.
Theron, A. 2002, University of Pretoria – South Africa, Pretoria, pp. 32.
Tuomi, I. 2002, The future of knowledge management., Lifelong Learning in Europe, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 69-79.
Wenger, E. C. 2001, Harvard Business Review on Organizational Learning, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA.

Creating Knowledge Cultures - Post 8

2009-05-19T07:22:00.003+10:00

Today I am covering the critical factor of Trust. Trust is a factor of successful collaboration that is mentioned nearly as much as culture, so it’s inclusion is appropriate not just because of it’s close proximity in the literature, but also because the part trust plays in the concept of Behavioural Integrity exposes some key factors in how individuals interact with the culture around and within them.
The proposed model of trust put forward by Mayer and his colleagues has come in very handy during my own Enterprise 2.0 implementation projects and I hope it gives you greater insight if you haven’t come across it before.

5. The central ingredients (part 2)
Trust
Explicit Knowledge Stores (in the form of electronic databases) just don't work on their own. War stories abound:

… "Yet these investments have rarely had the intended impact. While databases (and staff to support them) have grown to mammoth proportions, they are often underutilised as employees are much more likely to turn to peers and colleagues than to impersonal sources for necessary knowledge. The result has been a "second wave" of knowledge management advice geared toward promoting effective collaboration and learning in strategically important groups." (Abrams et al., 2003, p.64)

Tuomi (2002) also talks about the next stage of Knowledge Management:

Towards the end of the 1990’s, social learning, organizational sense-making, and systemic innovation and change management became prominent themes in knowledge management. In the next years, knowledge management theorists and practitioners will find themselves asking how revolutions can be managed.

One key ingredient in this venture is trust, one definition of which is “a psychological state comprising the intention to accept vulnerability based upon positive expectations of the intentions or behaviour of another.” One thing almost all researchers agree on is the concept of vulnerability. The presence of trust provides conditions where cooperation and more positive attitudes lead to higher performance. This happens both directly and indirectly due to a willingness to enter into relationships that involve vulnerability. (Dirks and Ferrin, 2001, p.451,455)

There is some debate about which characteristics build or affect trust, however Mayer (et al, 1995, p.715) proposes a model of trust (Figure 2) which combines the trustor’s propensity to trust with three antecedents – integrity, ability and benevolence - that are required before trust can exist between two parties.

It is important to note that trust itself is based on perceptions. While the trustee can build trust, they do not do so directly, but may build trustworthiness by aligning their actions with these antecedents.

Behavioural Integrity
Behavioural Integrity (BI) can be defined as the perceived pattern of alignment between an actor’s words and deeds (Simons, 2002, p.19). It includes the perception of espoused values matching enacted ones. It can be damaged by the breaking of promises and psychological contracts and in the case of leaders, any actions contradictory to corporate mission and value statements. As a pattern of alignment, it is built up over time through reiterative observations, however the focus on word-deed alignment precludes any consideration of moral principles.

While all individuals develop a perception of trustworthiness over time, Leaders tend to be given less latitude in their deviations. Simons suggests a trustor’s perception of misalignments goes up with the importance of the focal issue. Leaders have control over many such issues within an organisation and are thus their actions are constantly “in the limelight” so to speak.

At another level, organisations themselves can be ascribed a level of BI by those who deal with them at arms length. In this case the pattern affects their credibility in the marketplace. Simons asserts that “BI is highly problematic in today’s managerial environment of rapid competitive, technological and organizational change…” and that “it has profound consequences for employee retention and performance…” (Simons, 2002, p32).

Simon’s model indicates that relatively small word-deed misalignments can have significant consequences, so understanding the organisational culture can aid managers in maintaining BI, especially in times of organisational change.

Figure 2: Proposed model of Trust – (Mayer, et al, 1995)

Ability
The possession of skills or expertise to carry out a task will not only affect other’s perception of trust, will also tend to limit in which domains an individual can be trusted (Mayer et al., 1995p. 717).

Benevolence
“Benevolence is the extent to which a trustee is believed to want to do good to the trustor, aside from an egocentric profit motive.” (Mayer et al., 1995, p.718). It is often linked in the literature with prior relationships and some have considered it synonymous with altruism.
It plays a large part in initial trusting relationships as there is insufficient past experience for BI to be considered, however ongoing relationships will change based on the outcomes of previous trust experiences. This is shown in Figure 2 by the feedback loop from outcomes back to the antecedents.

Situational Strength
The question of how trust affects organisational performance is considered by Dirks and Ferrin (2001, p.461-2) who argue that alongside the traditional Main Effect model where trust has a direct affect on organisational processes, a second model of Trust as a Moderator. They borrow the model of ‘situational strength’ from Mischel to provide conditions under which each model will apply to a scenario.

According to Mischel (1977, p.347), “strong” situations are those in which guidelines and incentives motivate most actors to 1) construe the situation in the same way, 2) draw similar conclusions as to appropriate responses, and 3) behave in a particular way. Depending on this strength, trust may be reduced to a moderating role, modifying interpretations and actions, or cultural norms may provide unambiguous cues, making interpretation not required and removing trust’s influence entirely.

Alternatively, “weak” situations are those that lack these traits and allow for individualised interpretation and action. In these scenarios, trust as a Main Effect holds considerable power in reducing uncertainty and supporting action (Mayer et al., 1995, p.730, Dirks and Ferrin, 2001, p.461).

Discovering an organisation’s assumed norms and values allows members to determine when trust will be a determinant factor. Furthermore, a management focus on issues of behavioural integrity will not just improve trust, but have a flow-through effect by modeling cultural standards that will lead to a greater propensity to share knowledge through the group.

Creating Knowledge Cultures - Post 7

2009-05-18T08:01:00.000+10:00

5. The central ingredients (part 2)
A Theory of Action
Organisations are complex adaptive systems however, good models such as Argyris & Schön’s apply cognitive theory to explain how they learn, and the complex interactions between the types of learning in organisational contexts.

Figure 1: A theory of action (Argyris & Schon, 1996)

The term “espoused theory” means the theory of action which is claimed to explain or justify a given pattern of activity. The “theory-in-use” however, is a tacit theory of action implicit in the performance of the actual activity. (Argyris and Schön, 1996, p.13) As shown in Figure 1, this theory is driven by cultural norms, values, strategies and assumptions. This theory-in-use must be discovered through observation. The consequences of an activity are seen as a result of the espoused theories, seen as governing variables, as modified by the often tacit action strategy based on the theory-in-use.

Single-loop Learning
Single-loop learning is thus an active process of organisational enquiry that results in the modification of the theory-in-use to keep organisational performance within acceptable parameters based on values and accepted norms. The values and norms themselves – the governing variables – are not changed (Argyris and Schön, 1996, p.20).

Double-loop Learning
Double-loop learning (Figure 1) involves the exploring and sometimes painful reconsideration of values and strategies. This can be done individually or on behalf of an organisation when agents reassess the effectiveness of the organisational values.

Double loop learning is a critical part of an organisations culture of it is to maintain unity of vision and purpose during times of conflicting requirements or environmental change.

Deutero-learning and Unlearning
The process of managing the first two types of learning is referred to as deutero-learning. This is an acknowledgement that the organisation (or individual) must have in place learning systems that encourage inquiries about performance to be properly managed, overcoming a recognised tendency for higher level learning to be rather ill-defined and ambiguous (Fiol and Lyles, 1985, p808).

Another possible result of deutero-learning is the concept of unlearning (McGill and Slocum Jr., 1993) where old assumptions and values are challenged and replaced with new, more effective frameworks for interpretation and understanding. This concept of deutero-learning is an essential one for continuous improvement and should be encouraged within the culture of the organisation through management focus, coupled with a willingness to allow members to learn from their mistakes.

Communities of Practice and Knowledge Networks
In general, even the “top-down” experts recognise that organisational cultures are not homogenous. Both Schein and Hofstede are renowned for their ‘levels’ of culture, and concepts of sub-cultures, however a cognitive view of the organisation sees manifold, dynamic, informal links between individual actors over time. Cross & Prusak (2003) describe some excellent techniques for mapping and using these affiliations to better manage knowledge flows and detect information bottlenecks.

But for those leaders who are willing to see themselves as more sponsor than emperor, a valuable organisational form that takes advantage of knowledge networks in a more formal way is called Communities of Practice (CoP). Defined as groups of people informally bound together by shared expertise and passion for joint enterprise (Wenger, 2001, p.2), the organic and informal nature of CoPs makes them resistant to supervision and interference. However Seely-Brown & Duguid claim:

Knowledge Management focuses on effectiveness more than efficiency. It's bottom up! It assumes that managers can best foster knowledge by responding to the inventive, improvisational ways people actually get things done. (Seely Brown and Duguid, 2001, p.47)

So as an organisation develops a knowledge sharing culture, knowledge networks and the tools they offer become powerful drives for increased innovation, responsiveness and performance.

Creating Knowledge Cultures - Post 6

2009-05-17T07:43:00.003+10:00

The big advantage to splitting a paper like this up is:

You can digest each part before moving on, and
If you fell asleep during the last post, hopefully now you are wide awake to get stuck in to this exciting chapter on the ingredients that contribute to “bottom-up” culture theory. :-)

I hope you enjoy the next few posts as much as I did investigating them. In reality they are far from forming a definitive list, but with a grasp on these key concepts, you will begin to build a toolbox of concepts that you can use in your team, department or entire organisation.

5. The central ingredients (part 1)
Distributed Cognition
Distributed cognition is defined as the distribution of cognitive labour among a group toward a common goal (Hutchins, 1991). Much the same as the distribution of labour, distributed cognition, however, has received much less attention in the literature (Ibid, p.284).

While researchers have moved forward within their own fields - social interaction in anthropology and cognitive learning in cognitive psychology and neuro-science - applying the two together is a relatively new endeavour.

Since the first wave of knowledge management back in the 1980s (Tuomi, 2002), authors like Liebowitz, Beckman (1998, p.16) and Clarke (2001, p.189) followed these thoughts about corporate memory and concepts like know-how, know-why and know-what. Liebowitz and Beckman's definition of corporate memory include the concept of "professional intellect" which attempted to include tacit areas of skills, creativity and meta-knowledge about how knowledge should be contextually applied.

Citing the works of Bougon, Weick, Binkhorst and Daft over the two decades to 1995, Tuomi summarises that “this research highlighted the fact that organizational knowledge is not something that can be objectively recorded and stored in databases; instead, organizational knowing is an active process where people try to make sense of their environment.” (Tuomi, 2002, p.6)

The concept of distributed cognition moves a step beyond this. Based on the latest advances in cognitive psychology but applied to a social (organisational) or anthropological (national) context, distributed cognition is not a new learning method, but a rethink of how we see individuals and the way they learn both individually and in groups.

In distributed cognition, groups are seen as cognitive systems, capable of adaptive responses to changes in their environment (Hutchins, 1996, p.380).

For this reason the concepts of distributed cognition and learning organisations are intimately joined and some (Hutchins, 1991, Argyris and Schön, 1996) agree with the point that while single and double loop learning certainly can be witnessed at the explicit level, more often than not, organisational learning (and unlearning) happen at the deep and often shared cognitive level. Hutchins (1996) goes further again and explains how organisations not only remember as a group, but also re-organise and adapt themselves in such a way as to improve performance using the same cognitive process – sometimes despite a managerial preference for a more traditional, hierarchical style leadership.

The result is a more organic view of the organisation which, when applied to the traditional views of organisations (and the link between structure and culture), reveals the flaws in policies based on the assumptions that top-down thinking can engender.

Learning Organisations
Organisational learning speaks of far more than employee training and skills management programs.

Organisational learning can be described as the way firm build and manage knowledge and processes around their activities to contextually adapt and develop organisational efficiency (Dodgson, 1993, p.377). It involves the concept of having all members of an organisation participate in a process of double-loop learning that encourages self-examination, personal responsibility and share first-rate information about their roles with others (Argyris, 2001).

“Learning organizations are skilled at five main activities: 1. systematic problem solving, 2. experimentation with new approaches, 3. learning from their own experience and past history, 4. learning from the experiences and best practices of others, and 5. transferring knowledge quickly and efficiently throughout the organisation. Each is accompanied by a distinctive mind-set, tool kit, and pattern of behaviour." (Garvin, 1998)

Research
Robinson describes two different strands of research on organisational learning (Robinson, 2001). The Normative strand is concerned with the management of outcomes with respect to organisational improvement, as opposed to the Descriptive strand which holds a social and cognitive psychological focus on how organisations actually learn. She notes that the work of Argyris and Schön straddles these strands by providing a theory and practice of intervention (normative) plus a rigorous and useful theory of action (descriptive) which we will go further into here.

Organisational Memory
While organisations without individuals are nothing but a pile of paper and databases, it is recognised that organisations as a collective do have the capacity to learn and store information. Rules, procedures, technologies, beliefs and of course cultures are preserved over time and despite turnover of personnel (Levitt and March, 1988, p.326). Huber (1996, p.148) notes that poor organisational memory is far more complex than can be explained by the view of employees as “repositories for organisational information” and Levitt and March explain that the learning process is further complicated by the ‘simultaneously adapting behaviour’ of other agents in the process (1988, p.331).

Creating Knowledge Cultures - Post 5

2009-05-16T06:59:00.002+10:00

“The real difficulty in changing any enterprise lies not in developing new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones” - John Mayand Keynes.

Today, in the 4th chapter of Creating Knowledge Cultures, I introduce a different approach to describing and understanding culture and begin to move towards how Knowledge Management can actually play a part in this process with it’s underpinnings in complexity theory and it’s openness to think beyond the logical positivism of the early and mid 20th century.

4. The new solution
Culture as cognitive process
With tongue planted firmly in cheek, Mezmer defines cognitive science as a branch of psychology that aims to figuratively find out how minds work without literally having to figure out how minds work (Mezmer, 2005). Although satirical, it is somewhat appropriate when considering the application of neural cognition to the problem of culture.

The step from symbolic language-based cognition to a connectionist approach takes the study of learning and sense making to a deeper level, on both the individual and social dimensions. Laszlo noted the similarities between the brain and organisations in their roles as information processing systems, (Hedberg, 1981, p.6), however, to go all the way and model a human brain, neuron-by-neuron, is simply implausible given our current level of ability in measuring and modeling brain function.

Instead, cognitive science makes no apologies and focuses on expanding beyond the traditional cultural theories by building a set of common characteristics of the human brain to act as models that explain the creation and use cultural schemas, both at the individual and social levels. It places meaning and cultural schemas in the minds of the society’s individuals, rather than in the symbols and artefacts those individuals create. In this way, it serves to solve the paradox of culture by describing an individual’s capacity to build these schemas based on shared and similar experiences with others in their group – providing the centripetal force – while allowing the individual’s schema to be built from the ground up based on their unique set of experiences, many shared with the group and possibly some exclusive to the individual – allowing differences between individuals and groups and also the ability to change over time - thus the centrifugal force (Hoecklin cited in Holden, 2002, p.24).

Of course, this does not dismiss the extra-personal realm of culture, just as Hutchins’ work on distributed cognition did not seek to dissolve the psychology of the individual (Strauss and Quinn, 1997, p.12,42). It simply serves to give a more holistic view of culture, being the interaction of regular occurrences both in the world and in the cognitive schemas people share (Ibid, 1997, p.7).

Unfortunately this disagreement between internalists and externalists has gone on for decades and despite all this insight, we should take note of this pragmatic but disheartening remark from Sperber:

“While cognitive science has come a long way in the last 15 years, the development of a common conceptual framework between the biological, cognitive, and social sciences is still a long way off.” (Sperber and Hirschfeld, 1999).

Bottom up
The key difference is in perspective. Facets of a particular culture are now seen as tacitly learned schemas that are built from the past experiences of the individuals entire experiences, including those within the organisation. These schemas serve to provide us with guides for interpretation, negotiation and appropriate action, just as before, however a more accurate understanding of an organisation's culture can only be gained through observing the actions and interplay of the groups individuals in a wide variety of circumstances - not by applying organisation-wide interpretations from the top-down.

How Knowledge plays a part
Holden reveals that the heartland of cross-cultural management is viewed in terms of knowledge management, organizational learning and networking at both local and global levels (Holden, 2002).

We have already mentioned the problems of ‘culture-as-difference’; however Holden suggests a new viewpoint on cross-cultural issues. By recognising that culture is an organisational resource, and building cultural management factors and processes into a corporate knowledge base, resolving international management problems becomes an organisational knowledge issue and can be dealt with in terms of its benefit to the firm.

This is a powerful insight, however it tends to under-rate the reverse impact ‘Culture as Cognition’ has on the concept of knowledge itself.

Knowledge is often defined as a type of deep, sometimes tacit, information summarised by terms like know-how, know who and know-what (Clarke, 2001, p.189). Nonaka (et al, 2001, p.14) defined knowledge as “a dynamic human process of justifying personal belief toward the ‘truth’”. However, knowledge is now defined as the complex and embodied effect of an individual’s life experience in its entirety. The positivistic distinction between tacit and explicit is gone and what was previously considered knowledge is simply the tip of the iceberg. The great depths of tacit knowledge now includes everything from higher thought to muscle memory to an unconscious awareness of the colour-change of ear-lobes when a person is embarrassed. Unconscious is the key here – or more correctly sub-conscious – and the tacit culture that derives from this type of knowledge is networked, tribal and fluid (Snowdon, 2002, p.103).

Creating Knowledge Cultures - Post 4

2009-05-15T07:12:00.000+10:00

Still here? Fantastic, this post will be brief but very important.

Today I discuss arguably the most famous (certainly the most cited) anthropologist in the field. Geert Hofstede is known for his positive approach to culture which is captured nicely in the quote "Culture is more often a source of conflict than of synergy. Cultural differences are a nuisance at best and often a disaster."

I was privileged to attend a lecture by Mr Hofstede at Melbourne University a few years ago. He is an excellent speaker and ran an extended question time afterwards which I really appreciated. I asked him how he felt about some of his followers that apply his theories to groups smaller than nations or people groups. His response was interesting. He pointed out that his Cultural Dimensions should never be applied to groups of less than 5000 people and referred to these students as “wayward sheep”.

That said, if you haven’t heard about Hofstede’s dimensions I encourage you to spend a little time on his site and learn about them so you can be aware of their power at the international (especially marketing) level and problems when applied to smaller groups.

3. The problem with the solution (part 2)
Hofstede
Geert Hofstede is one of the most widely cited anthropologists in the last 30 years. His studies of international cultures beginning with IBM have led to models of cultural development and human mental programming that are used in sales, management, economics and the social sciences (Hofstede, 2005).

His pragmatic, “broad-stroke” style acknowledges the interplay of the brain’s learning capability with culture – which he defines as a society’s “collective programming of the mind” (Hofstede, 1984, p.13). However he greatly simplifies these interplays (perhaps this is his appeal?) in favour of more empirical models by stating “It is possible that our mental programs are physically determined by states of our brain cells. Nevertheless, we cannot directly observe mental programs. What we can observe is…words and deeds.” (Ibid, p.14)

As a behaviourist, he avoids the positivist fallacy when relating values to behaviour, however his repeated claims that culture may only ever be used in relation to nations has been often ignored by his followers {e.g. “Culture shapes the core values and norms of its members.” (Erez and Gati, 2004)}, and his own leanings are exposed when he states that “the more accurately we know a person’s mental programming…the more sure our prediction [of future behaviour] will be.” (Hofstede, 1984, p.14)

We would do well to beware of similar fallacies when investigating an organisation’s culture and not presume to understand an individual’s behaviours or motivations based on prevalent mental models observed in the group.

Creating Knowledge Cultures - Post 3

2009-05-14T07:56:00.003+10:00

In the next two posts of creating knowledge cultures I start to critique some of the big thinkers in culture theory. It is a brave move. Many of these amazing people have contributed wonderfully in both theory development and practical methods for dealing with groups based on their described cultures and sub-cultures.

Underneath these theories though is what I believe is a serious shortcoming in the foundations upon which these theories are developed. Read on to see if you agree with the argument.

3. The problem with the solution (part 1)
Top down view of culture
While much of the work on culture has value, there are several criticisms of the traditional view of culture that need to be dealt with. Abraham Maslow said, "If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail." Armed with the predominantly externalist definition of culture, corporate leaders around the world have implemented cultural analysis and change management programs and while each author warns of potential dangers, the seemingly endless benefits to efficiency and productivity are hard to overlook.

However, the top-down view of culture tends towards generalisations and while these can hold enough weight at the national level, when applied at a group or organisational level, discrimination can often be the result for two reasons.

Firstly, using top-down averages on a heterogenous group will almost certainly overlook or alienate nonconformists.

Secondly, human beings are complex organisms. They are motivated by unique value structures that re-interpret (or miss-interpret depending on your viewpoint) management’s attempts to mould beliefs and instill corporate values (Conrad and Poole, 1998, p.100, 104-105).

It shouldn’t surprise us that people are different. Even the most altruistic want to be noticed and respected by peers and elders. Yet mankind’s need to build patterns and algorithms of understanding (or schemas to use the cognitive psychologists term) is so strong that leaders quickly accept and apply these assumed patterns in their leadership strategies simply hoping for good results.

Seely-Brown and Duguid noted the chilling affect that top-down thinking can have on organisational processes, for example creativity (2001, p.46).

Culture as Essence or Difference
Schein makes the surprising statement that leaders are distinguished from managers because the former create and change cultures while the latter simply live within them (Schein, 1985, p.5). He states that culture “is the result of a complex group learning process”, however the assumption that the culture is either the essence of the group or the difference between groups remains basically unchallenged.

As Strauss and Quinn (1997, p.12) note, each view of culture adds value to our understanding and most are not mutually exclusive, however, each theory’s individual focus usually leads to a quite different methodologies and practices. It is these methodologies that may or may not be applicable in the field of organisational design and management.

Most visible of late has been the predominance of gloom and doom statements in the culture-as-essence and culture-as-difference camps. Even the language “culture war”, “conflict of cultures”, “culture clash” reveals the underlying assumption…the personality of this group of people is fundamentally different to the personality of this other group of people so the only strategy left is damage minimisation.

I agree with Holden (2002) who argues that “the concept behind culture-as-essence and culture-as-difference has limited explanatory power”.

Flawed logic
Of course here lies the root of the problem. It may well be beneficial when dealing with a nation as a whole to base business decisions on national averages or societal means. For example if the average Bahamian wears casual attire 360 days of the year, then setting up a men’s suit store in Nassau may not be a very profitable business decision.

However, averages across a large group cannot be applied to the individuals within the group (or even sub-groups or subcultures within the group) without more information about the individual. This is a widely recognised error called an ecological fallacy (MathDaily.com, 2005, 'ecological fallacy'), and Hofstede warns against it repeatedly in his presentations (Hofstede, 2005). For example, if Class A averages 92% on their maths scores and Class B averages only 67%, it does not follow that an individual from Class A is better at maths than an individual from Class B. The student from Class A could have failed math while being surrounded by geniuses and the student from Class B might have found themselves in the opposite situation.

This error leads to discriminatory stereotypes as explained above and can destroy perceptions of benevolence and trust in the individuals concerned.

The reverse ecological fallacy, or ‘exception fallacy’ (MathDaily.com, 2005, 'exception fallacy'), raises its head frequently in top down cultural models. This occurs when a group is judged based on observations of a few individuals or exceptional cases.

This fallacy is at the root of a lot of racist assumptions and both trust and knowledge sharing will suffer if it is in evidence.

Image courtesy of "The Far Side" & Gary Larson.

Creating Knowledge Cultures - Post 2

2009-05-13T07:59:00.002+10:00

Welcome to part two of my series on creating knowledge cultures. In this chapter I talk about the early pioneers who started to define culture from their anthropological roots by focusing on a top-down view of cultural forces within nations, people groups, communities and organisations.
This is a light treatment of these authors who have made significant contributions to theory and research in the wider social sciences.

2. The solution to the paradox of culture
Anthropology & Geertz
Arguably the best known and possibly most influential anthropologist of recent times is Clifford Geertz. His seminal work, The Interpretation of Cultures (Geertz, 1973) is still quoted by many today and played a central role in changing the definition of culture from a general catch-all term to describing a semiotic concept of social connections within which man is suspended; and the analysis of which was then redefined as an interpretive search for meaning (Ibid, p.5).

An ethnographer, Geertz claimed that ‘thick description’ was the only way to study the culture of societies. By thick, he meant a recorded enquiry that includes as many observations about a scenario as possible. For example the actor’s background, race, emotional, financial & social state, political and environmental factors, everything the ethnographer can discern. Geertz claimed that to break down such an observation into its component parts would be to rob it of its ability to function as a useful record.

This thick description is then run through a process of analysis which involves sorting out the cultural symbols and their structure and then use these to interpret the situation – if possible – without bias from one of the elements or by the ethnographers beliefs (the later leading to the most hated claim of ethnocentricity).

Of course the concept of removing the key elements via this analysis, distorts the context of the scenario, and reduces the significance and accuracy of the research. Geertz admitted this claiming that “Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete” (p.29) and went on to define cultural analysis and interpretation as more “a refinement of debate”. But being committed to this methodology meant he used the same logic to pronounce as anathema, anything that sought to crystallise cultural facets into universal principles or ascribe them to properties of the human mind (p.20).

Watching first the behaviourists, and later the lingual cognitivists and their attempt to apply privacy theory to the problem of culture, drew forth Geertz’s scorn (p.12). The assertion that to break down a scenario, for example a wink, into its component private parts, i.e. the contraction of the muscles controlling the eyelid, not only robbed it of any ability to be interpreted, but also led to the assumption that meaning, therefore, must exist externally. The obvious target for this reasoning must then be the cultural symbols that an ethnologist would be so familiar with. This is exactly where his logic took him, and the early cognitivists could offer little by way of response.

Positivistic roots
Geertz went one step further, claiming that since the study of culture could be restricted to symbols and objects – upon which men have impressed meaning – empirical studies would make ethnography “a positive science like any other.” (Strauss and Quinn, 1997, p.14)

In the early 19th century, Auguste Comte – the founder of sociology - developed a philosophy which later became known as positivism (Garbarino, 1983, p.20). The central tenant of which is “any system that confines itself to the data of experience and excludes a priori or metaphysical speculations.” (Britannica Online, 2005, 'positivism').

In the early 20th century Logical positivism rose to prominence in the sciences and Geertz sought to rest his ethnographic methods on its empirical credibility just as Comte had done with sociology 100 years before.

Positivism in cultural studies tends to ignore the “wet” neuro-psychological aspects, not because they don’t exist, but because they cannot be empirically measured with any level of accuracy.

Mainstream Conceptions of Culture
Common usage of the social word culture usually refers to one of two meanings:
1) The tastes in art and manners that are favoured by a social group or
2) Behaviour peculiar to Homo sapiens, together with material objects used as an integral part of this behaviour. Thus, culture includes language, ideas, beliefs, customs, codes, institutions, tools, techniques, works of art, rituals, and ceremonies, among other elements (Britannica Online, 2005, 'culture')

The later is usually referring to behaviours and objects belonging to a particular nation or society, and the science of ethnographic and anthropology in general attacks this head-on. However, the definition of culture can also refer to smaller groups of people and the science of sociology (and to a lesser extent social and organisational psychology) tends to research smaller groups, such as organisations, etc (Rogers and Ellis, 1994, p.119).

Researchers and authors like Geert Hofstede, Peter Senge and Edgar Schein have had considerable influence in this area over the last twenty years. Focusing mainly on large multi-national enterprises as their in-situ laboratories, these and many others have created a plethora of books and papers on the subject of creating, analysing and changing corporate cultures. Many…from the top down.

Creating Knowledge Cultures - Post 1

2009-05-11T21:22:00.007+10:00

The DeltaKnowledge blog has been quiet for the last few months as I have started enjoying life without study on my back, but it’s time to start getting my thoughts back online again and to get things started I thought a good idea would be to do a series on organizational culture from the Knowledge Management point of view.

This series is from a paper I wrote a little while ago about the central ingredients for creating knowledge cultures and is a run-up to a discussion I am running at the Melbourne KMLF this month, so if you are coming along I hope you have a read and come prepared to participate.

In the paper I claim that in order to remain competitive in a turbulent business environment, organisations are beginning to understand the impact that culture has on every aspect of corporate life. Culture itself presents a paradox which anthropology, sociology and psychology have attempted to explain. I outline and critically review past definitions and solutions. Culture as cognitive process is then presented as an improvement. In this light, the central ingredients for the creation of knowledge cultures are presented, including distributed cognition, learning organisations, knowledge networks and the import of Trust. Finally I examine some real world applications and if and how culture can be managed is briefly discussed.

Rather than an in depth treatment, this is meant as a big picture view of the attempts to apply different cultural theories to the field of KM and touches of some of the key thinkers who have helped move this field forward to where it is today. For brevity, it ignores many other important contributors and associated theories, like Social Impact Theory, discussed recently on weknowmore.org’s theory of the week.

While “culture as an emergent property of complex environments” is not directly discussed, the discussion of distributed cognition will hopefully help dispel some of lingering ideas about the common definition of culture (especially corporate or organisational culture) as some sort of group attribute or single over-riding force.

Before I start I have to acknowledge the fantastic guidance of Professor Gabriele Lakomski of the University of Melbourne for whom I wrote this paper. I benefited greatly from her clear thinking and insistence that if the philosophical foundations were wrong, then the science could end up way off base when it comes to implementation. That said, I accept all errors and omissions as my own. The Theory of Culture is simply massive and it is with a strong sense of humility that I attempt to summarise and critique this small part of it. In fact I hope the feedback and discussion that comes from it will help me to continue learning about this important subject.

So here we go. I will post one part each day until it’s all up and if it gets done before my talk, maybe I will sum up some of the comments and answer some of the questions. Feel free to comment and I’ll do my best to answer (or to at least add to my list of discussion points for KMLF and you can come and discuss your point in person!)

1. The paradox of culture
To create knowledge cultures, one must first define what culture is. What, at first, seems like a simple task turns out to be quite a hotly debated topic, with a central paradox being enthusiastically courted by scholars of positivism, pragmatism, post-modernism and more recently naturalism and neuro-science.

This paradox is summed up thus:

“How can we explain both cultural reproduction, thematicity, and force … [centripetal forces] at work in social life – and cultural variation, inconsistency, and change … [centrifugal forces]? More plainly, how do we handle the fact this is not a homogenous world without creating separate entities … to explain the differences?”
(Strauss and Quinn, 1997)

Breaking down the paradox – the refinement of cultural definitions
As with nearly all subjective constructs, building a working model that approaches the observed nature can be a long and sometimes distributed process. This has certainly been the case with culture theory. Whether one has travelled the world, had dealings with multinational companies, or even just changed to another place of employment, the impact of different cultural norms are too obvious to reject out-of-hand. Yet individuals do seem to differ enough to make one hesitate before employing generalisations or abstracted assumptions based on the society, organisation or group they may belong to.

For this reason, researchers and practitioners in many fields have sought to define culture in ways that have enabled them to operate more efficiently where culture may impact the results of their research or change strategies. This has resulted in an omnium-gatherum of definitions with each field’s offerings slanted toward solving the problems that culture presents to them.
Coming from a sociology perspective, Swindler and Arditi (1994) remark that in previous cultural studies, “culture connotes symbolic systems that are deeply embedded, taken-for-granted, often enduring, and sometimes invisible." But go on to say, “The sociology of knowledge instead directs attention to cultural elements that are more conscious, more explicitly linked to specific institutional arenas, and more historically variable.”

Some view organisations through the metaphor of an anthropomorphic organism and speak of its culture as a collective consciousness with personality, needs and character (Meek, 1988, p.459).
In another example, Theron (2002) quotes Thurbin as follows:

“A definition of culture...is where a group of people who have worked together for some time is behaving in a consistent way. Thus, having a set of shared philosophies and common fundamental values.”

In his book, Schein, a professor of management at MIT and corporate consultant on organisational development, defines culture as follows:

"…a pattern of basic assumptions – invented, discovered, or developed by a given group as it learns to cope with its problems of external adaptation and internal integration – that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems." (Schein, 1985, p.12)

Later in his guide to managerial readers, he offered a simplified version, stating, "Culture is the sum total of all the shared, taken-for-granted assumptions that a group has learned throughout its history. It is a residue of success." (Schein, 1999).

Coming from the field of traditional anthropology, but with even less regard to the cognitive side of culture, Geertz presents a highly positivist view of culture claiming that “Society’s forms are culture’s substance” (Geertz, 1973, p.28). He defines culture not as a power, but as a context within which behaviours, institutions and processes can be thickly described and interpreted (Ibid, p.14) in order to build empirical credibility upon a positivist legacy: “Only public forms are observable and we should study only what we can observe” (Strauss and Quinn, 1997, p.15).

Hofstede believes culture is “the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one human group from another” (Hofstede, 1984, p.21). He equates the culture of a group to the personality of an individual and seeks to determine the culture of a nation or organisation using personality style tests of its individual members.

Finally the cultural anthropologists weigh in with a definition that includes the internal, cognitive aspects. From previous work on schemas in the 1970s and 1980s (Sperber, 1985, D’Andrade, 1995, Bourdieu, 1977) and leaning heavily on neurally inspired connectionism, Strauss and Quinn (1997, p.7) claim that:

“Culture...consists of regular occurrences in the humanly created world, in the schemas people share as a result of these, and in the interactions between these schemas and this world. When we speak of culture, then, we do so only to summarize such regularities.”

What is collaboration software?

2009-02-02T23:46:00.004+11:00

I wrote a short reply on actKM tonight in response to Matt Moore's question about Collaboration software. It would seem my thoughts let me a little further than I expected so I thought I would share my response here too to see what others think about what defines Collaboration software.

Bon appétit!

The reason for this post is I am yet to solidify my own definition. I am formulating the idea based on a few quotes I have read lately and also my own experience with Wikis. I think the difference also speaks to the difference between communication, cooperation and collaboration.

It seems to me that two parties can cooperate in order to bring benefits to each of them which outweigh the sum of their individual results. For example the Government cooperating with a car company to build a new plant. Car company gets a cheap implementation due to tax concessions, etc. Government gets increased revenue and lowers the unemployment rate a little...But the Government doesn't make the cars.

Collaboration then is when two parties work together on a single product or project. A single outcome if you like. Customers collaborate ideas with engineers about the upcoming model - more power, better fuel economy, extra 10,000 km between services, etc. Mitsubishi designs a car that Chrysler builds the engine and drive-train for. Not just a plug in, actually using the specific expertise of those companies teams to create a car that is better than either of them could make alone.

So, collaboration software in my book would be any software that enhances multiple parties ability to work together on a single outcome.

Communications software in general can do this, yes. I actually know a person who still prefers a phone to do it. The issue is custom fit to modern collaboration techniques. Some of the early bio-tech collaboration efforts were done with phones, faxes and email. It took months or years to get a project finished, but they did actually collaborate around the world on single, amazing projects. But time moves on, after research, design & development comes efficiency and newer customer collaboration tools can allow people to do their slice of the work and resubmit it to the whole in just hours or even in real time. And now we have the social media side coming in to help communicate the often unseen cultural and contextual markers that were absent before in non-face-to-face communications.

By this definition I guess tools like twitter would not be collaboration tools. They are communications tools that communicate the context and background missing in older, more formal communications tools. Both old and new can be used to enhance collaboration, but I think we need the full gamut of IT and KM solutions, custom built to our complex environment and special needs to see the most efficient collaboration initiatives emerge.

For me, any technology that can transfer a thought, word or idea from one human being to another is communications. That is the beauty of a working wiki. It isn't that you can edit too. It is that in reading and then editing you are participating and communicating as part of a community. That might be used for collaboration, it might not. It is all communications software I think. The collaboration tag comes down to what you do with it and how well it does it.

Well, what do you think. Am I on the right track or am I crazy? Have you pulled out the dictionary and looked up "Collaboration" yet?

Let me know your thoughts.

Thanks: "DNA Rendering" by ynse (Flickr)

Nice Intro to Enterprise 2.0 and BPM

2009-01-30T11:19:00.002+11:00

As you can probably see here I am always looking for good ways to explore and explain Enterprise 2.0 to people at different levels of the journey. The trick, I think, is to expand their tent a little at a time. Give them a taste of the benefits then introduce the next set of ideas.

Today I linked to Mark Masterson at Computer Sciences Corporation in their Germany office.

I came across him after his post about Enterprise 2.0 and organisational culture turned up in my weekly Google search results. I plan to continue my conversation with him next week on that subject, but it's nice to find somebody on the other side of the world with such similar interests and viewpoints.

Mark has posted some presentations on his Linked-In profile that take aim at those looking for process automation and pointing out the benefits of using (Gasp of horror!) humans instead of computers to do some tasks that - as it turns out - computers really aren't that good at doing.

So, if you are at the crux of developing business processes, or have crashed and burned a few business system projects, then have a look through. It's just 24 pages, explains itself pretty well and is definitely worth your time.

The confluence of PM and KM

2009-01-21T06:52:00.002+11:00

I have been studying informally for the CAPM exam recently and while doing so have been aware that while the PMBOK Guide discusses a "Project Management Information System", the technologies involved in this are less well described.

Last week I put a cal out on ActKM for those interested in joint developing a set of Project Management templates to be used in a wiki and I am now putting the call out here too.

There are a few reasons I think wikis would be a good tool to manage projects:

In small businesses especially, the large PM tools are way too expensive. Using Creative Commons we will make these templates free for anyone to download. All you need is a wiki to install them on.
Project Managers in general seem to be more of the box ticking type than the Barak Obama social types. As Sonal Shah points out in this nice blog post, Project Managers need to communicate more.
Many of the documents are of a collaborative nature anyway. Stakeholders especially can benefit as a recursive process of creation for the requirements document tends to jog the mind and uncover needs in respond to other stakeholders points. erfect when stakeholders are on different continents or cannot meet for other reasons.
The social nature of wikis means your team can work collaborative way. It traditional, highly siloed projects, the team members can see what the other parts of the project are up to, and in more modern projects, the Project Manager can encourage collaboration, especially around interface points.
Finally, the visible nature of the wiki means that not just Project Plans and Status Reports, are visible, but also the project process itself. People can see what comes next and make more holistic decisions.

Interested in helping out? We will be using Atlassian Confluence and it will take some time, but if you think you have something to add then fire me an email of comment on this post. I look forward to hearing from you.

Implementing KM with Social Knowledge in mind

2009-01-19T10:17:00.005+11:00

Today I responded to a Linked-In question by Pervez Z. Khan and thought I would share it here as I ended up collecting my thoughts in the answer.

Pervez is a Communication and IT Consultant in Saudi Arabia and his initial question was:

Any help in identifying tools for generating knowledge, capturing knowledge and sharing knowledge

I am participating in a project to prepare a road map to establish a KM Strategy and Phased Implementation. I need to oversee the Role of IT in establishing the KM center and tools required for generating, capturing, sharing knowledge. In addition, methods, models, strategies, strategies, bench marking of best practices and Knowledge Center Planning and Implementation Phase Guidelines for a telecom service provider company.
Any link or help will be appreciated.

There were quite a few good replies but many of them followed the assumption in the question that Knowledge is about measurable, documentable information flows. The discussion can be viewed here.

John Malony had responded about the problems with this outdated view of KM and Joseph Colannino had posted a great little case study of the successful automation of the information flows around their R&D process. My response is below.

I tend to agree with John Maloney. Joseph Colannino's answer about knowledge audits is brilliant, but is actually an information flow audit. Much of knowledge work is actually done socially, however this doesn't mean it cannot be assisted with IT tools.

Enterprise 2.0 solutions like wikis, blogs and tagging are a way that some of the social exchange of knowledge can not only be captured in process, but also expanded in scope, allowing remote employees to enjoy the same level of connection as local staff do.

Implementing these tools is not the same as putting in an ERP of DMS. It requires an evolutionary framework that is modified not just due to the changing business requirements, but also by whether it is used or not, ie: does it suit the corporate culture and if not, is it close enough that a change management program addressing both cultural and software function issues will make a difference.

Security is also slightly different in this area and a combination of clear guidelines and structured zones or domains for internal and public information should be provided for.

Finally, one of the key productive outputs of enterprise based social networking is that of serendipity. This tries to make use of Clay Sharky's "Long Tail", ie: those people who have little to do with a project or operation, but the one thing they can add might save the entire project. To make the best use of this requires high levels of involvement, which is most often stopped by 1) bad usability, and 2) lack of management support. As IT manager, the first one is right in your domain. The second should be championed by the local manager to get executive support early on, or before the implementation.

University 2.0

2008-12-11T11:23:00.007+11:00

Having just completed and submitted my Masters Thesis, I thought I would share some of the tools and techniques I used in this task.

I know that some of this is not really Web 2.0 and definitely not Enterprise 2.0 mainly because they are not "User-generated-content", but none-the-less, many of these technologies didn't exist five years ago, so I thought it would be worth sharing.

I discovered these through the course of my study, but you can steal my ideas. If you are studying now, about to start a course, or are just interested in how things have changed, something here might give you the hint you needed to move forward.

Wikis
Yes, my thesis subject was Wiki use in SMEs, but what better way to manage the thesis project than a wiki?

I used a personal copy of Confluence hosted on a friend's server. This is free and comes with two user licenses. The guys at Atlassian were fantastic (possibly because I implemented a corporate Confluence wiki at work) and I set us one user for myself and another for my research supervisor so she could log in and keep tabs on the progress.

I set out top level pages for each of the project stages and used todo-list macros liberally to capture what I had to achieve for each section.

Until that point I have been tracking the project charter and scope development as a diary in Microsoft Word, so I transferred these entries in to the news section of the wiki which became my study blog - more on that later.

Further through the project, I brought in help in the form of a wiki expert in Sydney to help with the interview of a Sydney company. Once again, the wiki came in handy collaborating with him as we organised the details and recorded the results.

Best of all, the automatic versioning of wiki pages has helped preserve a record of how the pages, thoughts and ideas developed. This was critical for me as qualitative research tends to be quite organic different aspects move forward in spurts as new knowledge is gathered and assimilated.

Apple iTunes U Podcasts
During the study it became apparent that I needed more background information, especially on the psychological issues behind cognition as a basis for the model of culture-as-schema that I used.

With a tonne of reading already on my plate, the only extra time I had was driving to and from work. This is where iTunes U comes in.

iTunesU is a place in the iTunes Store where universities all around the world post entire lecture series and make them available for download, often for free. The concept was started by MIT making their entire university open for public download claiming that it is the style of delivery, not the content that makes MIT special.

I chose an MIT course "Introduction to Psychology" and listened to the whole thing over a 3 month period. A year of knowledge downloaded in "dead" driving time. Amazing. Next I chose courses in Neuroscience & Behaviour (MIT), Technology & Society (ENTC), Human Computer Interaction (Stanford) and Socio-cultural Anthropology (Arizona State) and chose the individual lectures that I thought were relevant to my study.

I can't tell you how much these podcasts help shape my world view and grounded many of my assumptions about the underlying theories. Looking back I have no idea how people in the past were able to go near the boundaries of their fields without this type of trans-disciplinary knowledge. Thank you iTunes U!

Wikipedia
There is still a lot of suspicion about using Wikipedia in an academic context. This often arises from two sources:
1) A misunderstanding of the power of community. Often criticisms of Wikipedia begin with the following "Because anyone can add or change content, there is an inherent lack of reliability..." Looked at in a single case, this is true, any article can be vandalised, either intentionally or through lack of knowledge in the topic on the part of the author. However it can also be said that 50,000 of our cells mutate on a daily basis due to solar radiation. The reason the human race is not extinct from cancer is the self-monitoring and healing mechanisms within each human cell, not because we have really good medicine. Likewise, the communities that build up around Wikipedia topics perform a similar self-healing function without the need - in most cases - for moderation.
2) Saying that, Wikipedia is not guaranteed to be perfect or thorough at any given point in time (in fact it doesn't claim to be), so use of it without guidelines is not suggested. There is a great page about this here at the Gould Library.

The key for me was to use Wikipedia in two ways:
1) to get a quick overview of a topic related to the one I am studying. If I was studying Distributed Cognition and a text mentions the philosophy of determinism, then I quickly look this up on Wikipedia before continuing reading on the main topic.
2) to quickly determine the scope of a topic and what other sources are important. Often academic texts only talk about a simple aspect of a topic. Wikipedia entries are usually developed by a community of people with different interests, so a broader treatment and a list of external links often helped me gain a broader perspective on a topic and be able to better question the logic of the paper I was reading.

I did not cite Wikipedia directly. If I couldn't find a published source, than I discarded the Wikipedia information.

Blogs
As I mentioned above, I converted my study diary from Word to individual news items in my wiki. This basically functions as a blog and I treated it as such. Some of these blog entries were about problems I was having, new information or people I had found, a review of a paper or a philosophical discussion about the merits of one methodology over another.

Later in the study, these entries also included records of communication with participants and even some analytic memos.

Around 12 months ago I was being asked a lot of KM questions by people and realised that much of what i was emailing people was already written down in my study blog. It was then that I launched the Delta Knowledge blog. I wanted to walk-the-talk and share my knowledge as a Knowledge Manager and Masters student.

I started by copying across all entries from my study blog that did not contain personal or confidential information. It turned out there were quite a few. Since then, I have posted more than half of my blog posts on this blog and have received several emails and phone calls that people have benefited from my writing. It cost me nothing (well, $10 for the domain name) and helps people a lot more than all these thoughts just sitting on my hard drive.

actKM Listserve
actKM runs a list server for knowledge management professionals around the world. While this is old technology, it suits the bill and the quality of people who regularly contribute is outstanding. I have been able to participate in conversations that I would never be exposed to in my occupation, and ask questions of experts with many more years experience than myself.

The community of actKM is a tough one. I learned quickly not to make throw away comments as there is little suffering of fools, however this comes from a passionate belief that rigorous debate and critical questioning can lead to better understanding and it pushed me to do a lot more reading of philosophy so I can make my point without being immediately shot down. I grew to trust these people and be able to understand the viewpoints they were coming from and take away the best from each. While critical in their writing, they are warm and supportive of your efforts when you are sincere in your efforts to learn and grow in understanding and knowledge. Socrates in an email :-)

If you are interested in knowledge management, then you need to be on this list. I suggest "lurking" (reading the posts without participating) for around 6-9 months like I did so you can gain a feel for the rules and norms of the list.

Twitter
My final addition around 6 months before I finished my thesis was to take a dip in the synchronous world of Twitter. Twitter is an online messaging site that allow you to post small messages (140 characters or less) answering the question "what am I doing right now". Sounds simple, in fact sounds stupid right? Why not a Facebook wall, or the presence status on your IM tool?

But Twitter is more than this. On Twitter you subscribe to the people who's posts you want to follow, and others choose to follow yours. It is not automatically two way. This gives you the ability to get to know the people you choose or to subscribe to official twitterers like the NASA news or CNN. It also allows you to send a message to people by adding an @ to their twitter name. This builds up a tight little community around you of like minded people, all sharing little bits of information, interesting web-sites, who they talked to in their job that day, and even what they had for dinner. You gain an insight into your colleagues lives that you cannot get any other way, but the impact on my study came from the almost instantaneous feedback to ideas from those following me. I could share ideas with specific people or just float them publicly for comment.

I also followed @WestPeter from Canada who tweets about the latest papers published in the areas of communities, information design, innovation, knowledge management and trust. This led me to several papers that had an impact on my research that I had not previously come across in the lit review.

My twitter login is @Kurokaze204 if you want to join in the fun!

Conclusion
All in all, these tools and services made my study time so much broader than I would have experienced just reading a few papers and books.

The interactive process underlying many of these allowed others to sharpen my thoughts and show me were I needed more knowledge.

I hope these services and others like them are embraced by the universities of the future to allow faster feedback, broader, more trans-disciplinary learning and allowing the student to join and build communities of experts in their field before they even step in to their first job.

Why and When a Wiki Won't Work Weally Well!

2008-11-28T14:53:00.008+11:00

Wiki's have been a success for several years now in the public space, using the wisdom of crowds and collaborative knowledge creation.

For the last few years wikis have also been making their way into the enterprise space as well. Solutions like Socialtext, Atlassian's Confluence, MindTouch Deki and Traction TeamPage are now being used by many different sized business and government departments.

The phenomenon is now attracting researchers, interested in understanding how wikis are being used and adapted in this area.

My own research is looking at what sort of corporate cultures assist in wiki use & growth.
A german team of researchers at the University of Bamberg are looking into organisation wiki use from a SNA point of view using Social Systems Theory.
Researchers Janus Boye and Dorthe R. Jesperse published a report earlier this year showing that wikis are taking off in the corporate world, but care should be taken in the areas of culture and structure to avoid some of the pitfalls of an open system when used for content management.

Many commentators are also discussing how they can be improved upon, either through growing the technology itself, or by better implementation, as Stewart Mader's site often covers.

Simon McDonald posted a nice article summarizing his negative (and positive) experiences with wikis on evolt.org.

Today I found a blog post by the "Wikis in Organisations" team talking about what mistakes to avoid when implementing a wiki. Great advice and follows the idea of The Mistake Bank I came across a little while back.

All of this fits with Dave Snowden's constant reminder that we learn more from our mistakes than our successes. I am starting to agree.

Weaving a model for E2.0 adoption

2008-11-24T08:32:00.005+11:00

Given the Greek heritage of thought in Western Culture, it's not surprising that we tend to struggle with managing the intangibles of business life. It's not that we can't handle them. We deal with intangibles in other parts of our life, relationships, even the quality of the wine with last night's meal.

But in the business world, where our actions need to be justified, usually with a dollar figure, it is simply easier to do. It is easier for us to have nice, orderly, process-driven business lives. There's just one problem. Businesses are full of people. Social people, imperfect people, obnoxious people, human people. People that live lives full of intangibles, and we have seen many stupendous failures and staggering success stories where intuition and social pressures played a far larger part than the logic of the situation.

Enterprise 2.0 technologies are designed to take advantage of the social nature of the people who work in our businesses. It allows them to connect, interact, and exploit the knowledge within (and sometimes without) the business in a more effective ways than could have been imagined by the promoters of scientific management 50-odd years ago at the boom of the industrial era.

We still live with the vestiges of the industrial era and in some sectors many of the lessons learnt are still relevant and valuable. However. As Drucker pointed out:

“Every knowledge worker in modern organization is an "executive" if, by virtue of his position or knowledge, he is responsible for a contribution that materially affects the capacity of the organization to perform and to obtain results.”
Source: The Effective Executive - 1966

So when implementing E2.0 solutions, the intangibles need to be taken into account. Not just in the initial justification for expenditure, but more importantly in the selection and implementation of these tools.

There are several people talking about this at the moment.

Matt Hodgson has been doing some wonderful thinking about organisational culture and it's impact on the implementation of E2.0. You can find then both at AppGap and on his personal blog.
Stephen Collins quoted myself and Matt's discussions in this blog post and recently added these great thoughts to the mixing pot,
John Tropea has posted a few excellent articles forming around E2.0 and emergent collaboration. Broad thinking and good reading if you are thinking about E2.0 being for your business.
James Dellow of Chieftech has been posting recently on his thoughts about "Intranet 2.0" and how E2.0 may or may not contribute to this vision.

I do a lot of reading and have thoughts like those above in my head as I review my research data. That is how qualitative research works. It is immersive. Unlike sterile surveys summarised by countless statistical analysis, exploratory social research involves getting involved in the complex interplays between people and teasing out the cultural factors that are impacting their success or failure.

Matt's work on the two-domain model has been exiciting to watch and encourages me to finish my thesis so I can enjoy putting it to use by building the implementation programs and principles that Stephen Collins says are so necessary. Matt initially moved away from my focus of "Participation" and it's two forms, Mandated and Spontaneous, however in his last post he used instead the term "Interaction". I like this term. It speaks at a higher level than participation, and also includes the concept of reciprical involvement between human and technology that my data seems to indicate is going on.

Patrick suggested last night that I consider instead a layered model where the intangible and tangible domains overlap the same space. This is a nice idea and I am already thinking about how I can visualise that to better display the interactions in the data.

Finally, I discovered a new idea while writing about how the wikis were used in SMEs yesterday. I share it here in the hope I will get some feedback, either critical or helpful, I don't mind. It's a new thought for me and I want to sound it out here before expanding on it in the thesis in the hope it will be more rigorous for the exposure.

The quote looks at another possibility when implementing E2.0 tools. Often we hear the catch-cry: match the tools to the culture of the business. My question: is this entirely correct?

It should be noted that many of the uses were only successful within individual divisions of the companies, and suited the cultural constraints of those divisions. This suggests that it may be the business use itself that needs to be aligned with the local group’s culture, rather than the tool.

Please post your replies written on the back of $100 notes! I'm going to have to do something pretty special for my poor wife after all this to convince her I'm not just a part of the office furniture :-)

The beginnings of a theory of participation

2008-11-17T02:08:00.002+11:00

After several days of being immersed in my research data I am starting to see patterns appearing around the use of wikis in Small to Medium Enterprises.

One of the repeated findings in my study was the user's awareness that the wiki was only going to be valuable if everybody was participating. They spoke of an awareness that a solo effort was a waste of time and effort.

Below is my first try at mapping the interactions between these concepts and uses the actual labels used by the participants in the study. There is minimal theory in this framework. Each link is based on evidence in the data. I share it because I am interested in feedback, both from practitioners and academics. Not just on the model itself, but also if people have seen similar frameworks published. I'm sure I cannot be the only one seeing these interactions in the wild?

The key for my study seems to hinge around group participation in the wiki. This participation generates both tangible and intangible benefits which can boost trust and encourage further spontaneous participation which was the hallmark of all the successful wiki implementations in the study.

Many people currently talking about Enterprise 2.0, including Andrew McAfee himself, mention the process of evolution where both the functions and even the tools themselves are modified or replaced over time to best suit the needs of the business. Often the idea of success or failure is based on the notion of participation. For example, Safe-Fail can be useful to detect the success or failure of systems based on the concept that participation in these systems is an emergent behaviour of a complex system, so it is unreasonable to be able to predict beforehand which tools will gain participation simply by comparing software features with business requirements.

I am interested in three areas surrounding this:

What drives an employee to use or not use a tool?
What part does the culture of the organisation play in this process?
What can be done to kick start a successful adoption?

I hope you will be kind enough to take a few minutes to consider these questions, the model and how these factors might be improved based on your theories.

Having a sticky in your wiki!

2008-11-06T15:45:00.003+11:00

A few people lately have asked about my Master's research project and I realised that while I talk about it a lot I haven't really posted what I am up to, so for anyone who is interested, I would summarise it this way:

The corporate Wiki seems to be highly suitable given the fluid nature of distributed cognition within the Small to Medium Enterprise environment. The limited and usually grass-roots adoption of Wikis in this sector suggests that the organisation's culture effects why and how they are implemented due to it's strong influence on Knowledge sharing in general.

To prove this hypothesis, my research will study Wiki use in SMEs and build a model of what cultural factors play a part in their uptake and success.

After researching 5 companies in Melborne and Sydney, the thesis is coming together now and I hope to make it available to interested parties early in the new year. I am also looking at publishing it on the Digital Thesis Database or the ProQuest Dissertations & Theses register if you have access.

Enterprise 2.0 & it's effect on Organisational Culture

2008-11-02T02:21:00.003+11:00

Back in 2007, Tom Davenport posted a critical article on Andrew McAffee's Enterprise 2.0 idea. He put forward the view that while Prof. McAfee is a nice guy, and his ideas are very interesting, they were "not going to become the next big thing", and certainly "won't make organizational hierarchy and politics go away".

In commenting on the article, David Weinberger wrote the following which I think touches on my own thoughts of the article quite nicely:

Tom, technology has never done anything on its own. So, I agree: the tools themselves won't bring about Enterprise 2.0. Tools by themselves can't even assemble a cabinet from Ikea. (On the other hand, can anything assemble a cabinet from Ikea?)
But, our tools when taken up do have an effect on how we interact. Some of the effects are direct -- e.g., wikis enable a type of asynchronous collaborative, negotiated writing not exactly like anything before them -- and some of the effects will undoubtedly be indirect. E.g., once we've used wikis productively, perhaps our attitude toward the nature of authority will change a little. Maybe not; the effects of technology on attitudes and expectations are hard to observe much less predict.
But it's reasonable to think that the technology, when taken up and used, will affect enterprises directly and indirectly...and (I suspect) in the direction E2.0 adumbrates.
Or not.

This is the crux. Most people who are either hyping Enterprise 2.0 or criticising it seem to be taking extreme positions. Not only that, they are taking quite black and white definitions of the issue of culture and Enterprise 2.0. Often they see this aspect as a chicken and egg dilemma and think that because certain cultural factors are necessary for Enterprise 2.0 tools to be successfully implemented (the egg comes from the chicken) that these tools then cannot modify the culture of the organisation further once implemented (so therefore chickens cannot possibly come from eggs).

My friend Matthew Hodgson from SMS, who I have quickly grown to respect, recently blogged about the above article and a response to it regarding Enterprise 2.0 and culture change. While I am sometimes scared by how similar Matt and my views are, I found some of his points hard to integrate with the recent views of culture. Hannerz, in discussing the term Cultural Complexity says:

"The term 'complex' may in itself be about as intellectually attractive as the word 'messy,' but one of its virtues in this context is precisely its sober insistence that we should think twice before accepting any simple characterization of the cultures in question in terms of a single essence."

The definition of culture I am using for my thesis is based upon Strauss & Quinn from Duke University:

"Culture … consists of regular occurrences in the humanly created world, in the schemas people share as a result of these, and in the interactions between these schemas and this world. When we speak of culture, then, we do so only to summarize such regularities"

As Matt points out, "Tools don't change people, people change people". But just like stone axes, bronze swords, the steamship, coal & oil technologies and the telephone before them, tools effect the way people can manipulate their environment AND interact with one another, and in the area of communications tools, culture is effected even more dramatically. My family's relaxation culture was changed irreversibly with the purchase of a television with a built-in hard-drive that allows us to pause live TV. Kids now come to dinner mid-TV shows, Movies can be paused to sooth a child's nightmare. Stress levels have never been so low!

Responding to Tom Davenport's article, Dion Hinchcliffe wrote a ZDNet article suggesting that Enterprise 2.0 tools weren't the cause of change, but rather a catalyst to speed up change via the cultural modifications I just touched on, but also that the fundamentally social nature and ease of use of these tools makes them their own change agent, making the users their own change advocates which helps overcome many of the cultural barriers that previous technologies have run in to.

I am not sure I agree with everything he had to say and he admits to being biased, however I think he is on the right track. Matt wasn't quite so enthused though, and in his blog post this week, he attacks the article from the viewpoint of Organisation Psychology by pointing out that based on a study by three HCI academics, Culture effects wiki use, but wiki use does not effect culture. I have several concerns with Matts summary and the study it was based upon, so please forgive me Matt as I dissect both in an attempt to get my thoughts straight. I hope it comes across as criticism, not cynicism.

1. The wikipedia study consists of a statistical analysis searching for correlations between Hofstede's cultural metrics (Power Distance, Collectivism versus Individualism, Femininity versus Masculinity, and Uncertainty Avoidance) and certain types of editing actions on Wikipedia pages in several languages.
A) Hofstede himself admits that these metrics are to be used at national levels and can not be transferred to smaller entities such as corporations,
B) He also admits that that should only be used in relation to one another. In other words one country against another country, not one member of a race versus a member of another race,
C) Misuse of Hofstede's work often leads to ecological fallacies where individuals are tarred with the same brush as the average of the group to which they belong. This happens in the study where they suggest that managers should take into account that all French workers "are likely to feel uncomfortable about deleting others' work. It is therefore advisable not to expect or require it of them in collaborative online work." This sort of statement from senior lecturers and PhD students is dissapointing. The fact it made it past peer review, even more so.

2. The paper only declares that culture does effect wiki use (just like previous studies have shown it does on WWW use). It does not follow that the opposite is untrue and this is a one way street.

3. Matt goes on to summarise five types of corporate culture and how they effect information behaviour. Here Matt shows his hand, assuming two things that I believe the Neural Cognition literature does not agree with, but are often seen from the psychological view of culture:
A) he presents the culture as an object in it's own right rather than a collective term for the complex overlapping neural schemas held individually by each member of the group,
B) he sees this culture as the essence of the group's motivation to act and the difference between it and groups with different cultures.

In plain english what I am saying is that everybody is partially the same and partially individual. We are all dissenters at some level. Smaller sections of the group may not exhibit the same "culture" as the main group, and certainly individuals may dissent entirely and often for quite small and personal reasons, such as the sudden ability to have a say in corporate policy.

4. The study itself does not use a longitudinal methodology in order to ascertain if any changes to the culture took place before and after the use of Wikipedia, in fact the study didn't even identify individual editors, but grouped them buy the language they were speaking (to their credit they mention this in their limitations section).

5. And finally, Hofstede's metrics were measured in the 60's and 70's within the IBM corporation's offices around the world. This present several shortcomings:
A) It could easily be argued that IBM's national staff do not properly represent the countries cultures as a whole (and many have argued this),
B) Even if you did try to measure that change, these are national averages and Hofstede's study would have to be conducted all over again to determine a shift.

So, can a tool change a culture?
*YES!* I believe so. They do all the time and have done for centuries.

Can a tool be implemented in a culture if there is a mismatch between the tool and the needs of that culture?
Not likely and if it did, it would be an uphill battle. However, I have evidence of wikis working in divisions, but not successfully transferring up to corporate-wide use. This data suggests that an entire enterprise doesn't need to be exhibiting the flat-wide, open frameworks that Matt speaks of (or the Search, Links, Authoring, Tags, Extensions and Signals (SLATES) that James Dellow quoted of Andrew McAfee recently) for individual groups to be evolving toward this style of operation and therefore being able to successfully implement these tools.

Does this mean these tools cannot change a culture once implemented?
NO, this simply does not follow. Not from Matts logic and not from the study he quotes. In fact, both my research and personal corporate experience have revealed changes in the way businesses operate when knowledge workers encounter new communications possibilities through the use of Enterprise 2.0 tools.

Does that mean Enterprise 2.0 tools are a new breed of tools that will tap into a deep human need, transforming business and corporate structures around the world like we have never seen before?
Of course not! Look I realise I'm pushing against the hype-cycle here, I believe these technologies allow a cultural change that we have not seen before through - amongst other things - the introduction of community into our communications tools which until now have been largely didactic in nature, but on this point Tom Davenport is probably spot-on when he says,

"They won't make the ideas of the front-line worker in corporations as influential as those of the CEO. Most of the barriers that prevent knowledge from flowing freely in organizations – power differentials, lack of trust, missing incentives, unsupportive cultures, and the general busyness of employees today – won't be addressed or substantially changed by technology alone".

But please hear me! That doesn't mean they won't be changed at all. These technologies are simply enablers - powerful ones because they tap in to the cultural norms that in the past were usually experienced socially within family, recreational and religious groups. They don't "cause" organisational cultures to change any more than radio technologies caused war fleets to become more coordinated, but they do act as a catalyst to change. Radio didn't just bring over-the-horizon coordination, extending the distance of the semaphore flags. Once the enabler was there, it's convenience and instantaneous nature caused a shift in the command structure of naval fleets which flowed on to Naval strategy and the ways governments could wield that power. It is in these new uses of the technology that the pro-hype people seem to be basing it's success and more-critical people like James seem to be searching for. However, I hate to be boring, but in most cases it will be the little cultural and communications issues being overcome that will probably be the biggest benefit; and for that we simply have to implement them before we will see if solutions emerge. And that is what the Evolutionary aspect of Enterprise 2.0 is all about.

So in conclusion, Matt I will let you modify the "if you build it, they will come" statement if you let me modify yours from "it’s only people who change people’s behaviour" to "it’s only people AND THE WAY THEY INTERACT THAT changeS people’s behaviour".

Wiki or Email?

2008-10-27T17:05:00.004+11:00

One of the keys to implementing Enterprise 2.0 tools is to select the correct solution to each problem. From a strategic perspective this means reviewing a knowledge or process audit and searching for the appropriate tools to fill each niche.

In the real world though, its a lot more messy and one organic way to migrate people from the old trusted tools like email is to identify new opportunities as they pop up and encourage people to try using a different tool to do the job. These little pilots can grow and start to touch each other in the same way that outlying towns become suburbs in urban growth.

Stewart Mader recently reported on John Tropea's blog post about using a wiki instead of email for a small project. The original post is here and describes the use of a wiki for a small project that started as an email to all stakeholders.

Of note is that John tried to use comments as a way to get conversation (not just information gathering) happening in context on each wiki page. I agree comments are important and so are the page watches that ensure you get emailed whenever somebody else updates a page you are watching.

At Daniels we have taken this one step further. Not only do we still look for these opportunities to move things onto the wiki (we are doing this in both the Finance and Compliance departments right now) but in the IT department - where the wiki started -I worked hard to encourage a culture where people went to the wiki first to create new content or spaces where content could be gathered. This has taken some time, but 12 months down the track, new pages are being created all the time and even the new guys on the team are saying "I'll put it on the wiki and email you the link" just weeks after starting with us.

Email is still a very important tool for the company and the executive team still never touch the wiki, preferring phone calls and emails, but the culture is spreading. People all over are starting to see the benefits of public documentation that a wiki provides and this is being reflected by users now approaching any person in the IT team with their problems because they know the background info is equally available to any of us. Even people like me who haven't been involved in IT support for years. "Man! Are you psychic? I only spoke to James yesterday!"

Not psychic. Just collaborating with a wiki.