A Place for Every Thing

There is an old adage: "A place for every thing and every thing in its place." And yet, if you've ever shared space with another human being, you know how hard it can be to (i) identify that one place and (ii) get everyone to put each thing in its "proper" place. (As I write, I'm staring at a bottle of dish washing liquid that always ends up on the "wrong" side of the kitchen sink, despite my best efforts!)

So why is it we think we can do better in our law firm knowledge management programs? The reality is that people often define the "proper place" for content differently. You only have to look at the variations in social bookmarking to see this. So, for example, instead of creating a rigid top-down taxonomy that imposes a regime of a single place for each thing (and then devoting the necessary resources on enforcement), why not spend your energy creating systems that allow users to organize the content as they see fit? After all, the point is to enable their easy use of the content -- it really isn't about ensuring that they find and use that content only in particular places.

At the end of the day, the purpose of the adage of one thing/one place is to eliminate options so that that you always know where to find your keys, your wallet, your cellphone, etc.  With the advanced search tools available today, we don't need to worry about this quite the same way when it comes to electronic content. So instead of enforcing a single way of doing things, meet your users where they are. I guarantee they'll be happier  -- and then so will you.

Chasing a Moving Target

When I first began talking years ago about the need to consider more than technology when implementing a knowledge management program, it seemed like a good start to have my technophile friends concede that there just might possibly be elements of user behavior, business process and corporate culture that could have an impact on their roll-out of a cool new tech toy. Now, however, it's time we thought in more granular terms about corporate culture.

In a recent post on culture and knowledge management, Carl Frappaolo reminds us that culture is not static. Like many things in life, it responds and adapts to stimulus in its environment. He takes the example of current economic conditions and the impact they are having on previously happy-go-lucky Millennials who had been approaching life quite optimistically based on their relatively adversity free existence to date. Suddenly, they can't find jobs and their outlook on life changes. And, as that outlook changes, the culture of their generation changes.

Similarly, corporate culture changes as it reacts to its environment. Here's how Carl describes that process:

...the culture of a corporation can change, can move backwards if you will, if serious underlying conditions of an organization change. A culture thriving in “self actualization”, comprised of individuals that readily embrace knowledge sharing and social computing can see itself slip backwards, further down the evolution chain, should it be threatened or altered by radical change in profit, a poorly managed merger or acquisition, a change in leadership, or any such situation that alters the states of basic safety and stability.

Taking Carl's reminder to heart, it's not enough to assess your corporate culture early in your tenure and then treat it as a constant. Rather, you have to take regular readings. Are conditions around or inside your law firm shifting? Is the firm's culture shifting to respond? As we move from the years of plenty to the lean years, are people changing the way the way they work and the way they spend? Of course. So, how are you adapting your law firm knowledge management program to suit this cultural shift?

Context Matters

Mark McGuinness would like you to test your perception. Take a moment to read his post, Are You Trapped in Black-and-White Thinking, and then tell me which square is darker. He uses this test to illustrate his concern about our tendency to think concretely in black and white terms -- no ambiguities, no shades of gray. In his view, this rigid approach cuts off creativity at the knees.

Spending a little time thinking about the restrictive lenses we use in daily life and how they affect our ability to think creatively is definitely a useful exercise. However, I'd also like to draw your attention to another aspect of this black/white test: Context Matters. When we saw the square surrounded by dark squares, we assumed it was lighter than it was. Equally, when we saw the square surrounded by light squares, we assumed it was darker than it was. In each case, however, the squares in question were exactly the same color. It was the immediate context of those squares that led us to perceive them differently. But, when we look at both of those squares in the context of the entire board, we get a much clearer sense of their true color.

Without getting carried away by this optical illusion, it is helpful to think about the value of context in knowledge management where there isn't always an objectively right answer. There is a lesson here for folks who think super-search is the ultimate answer to knowledge management challenges or who believe that extracting explicit knowledge and warehousing it in a KM repository is the best solution. With each of these approaches you run the risk of losing valuable context that can help the user make sound judgments about the content in question. In the language of law firm knowledge management, model document X may be the perfect precedent in situation Y and a complete disaster in situation Z. The only way you are going to know for sure is by looking at document X in context.

As you think about your approach to content, think about whether you're doing a good job of providing the context necessary to allow users to make wise decisions about the content they choose to use. Context matters.

[Thanks to ProBlogger, Darren Rowse, for pointing out Mark McGuinness' post.]

Rothko and KM

Those of you who follow the art scene will know that the Tate Modern in London is hosting a celebrated exhibition of Mark Rothko paintings. Thanks to the BBC, those of us outside London can have a taste of the exhibit via a brief video tour by the sculptor, Anish Kapoor, and Sarah Montague.

The conversation and controversy surrounding this exhibit provide interesting lessons that can be applied to knowledge management. First, consider the description by Anish Kapoor of the "restricted vocabulary" with which Rothko worked. That vocabulary contained only color, a field and a foreground. In Kapoor's view, Rothko worked successfully within the constraints of that limited vocabulary to "draw on deep human emotional realities." For those of us who tend to spend our time protesting our constraints, there is an important lesson here in using our contraints to move ourselves to richer insights and more creative output. For those of us thinking about KM budgets during an economic downturn, it's worth thinking harder about how financial and staffing limitations might provide opportunities for new and innovative work. When you consider what Rothko was able to do with some black paint, you realize that we don't always push ourselves to make the best use of what we have.

The second lesson relates to the dispute as to whether some of these Rothko paintings were hung incorrectly. Critics have charged that two of the paintings in Rothko's Black on Maroon series should have been hung horizontally rather than vertically. Nonetheless, the curator and gallery are sticking by their decision to display the paintings vertically. The discussion about the "right way" to hang the paintings was a salutary reminder to me that sometimes breaking with tradition or convention can provide fresh perspective and insight. As knowledge managers, we can get caught up in the role of librarian or guardian of the canon. In fact, our primary function is not archival; rather it is to provide the resources necessary to facilitate innovation and growth. Key to that function is offering a new perspective on what our organizations know. If that means turning things on their head from time to time, so be it. The purists may protest, but if you've facilitated insight and innovation, it's worth it.

Coming full circle, if you find yourself working with severely limited resources, consider whether trying a different angle on an old KM program or resource might provide the opening you need to achieve something new or useful. Now is not the time to play it safe. Otherwise, you'll find your programs and impact shrinking faster than your budget.

Behind Every Successful KM Effort

In the November 24 edition of Newsweek there's a humorous quote:

There is no one more surprised than I -- except my husband. You know what they say: "Behind every successful woman, there is an astonished man."

These are the words of Gen. Ann Dunwoody, while speaking at a ceremony held recently in Washington, D.C. to recognize the fact that she is the first woman to achieve the rank of four-star general in the US military. Of course, she's playing with the old adage: "Behind every great man there is a great woman."

Reading her words made me wonder -- what lies behind every successful KM effort? I'd suggest vision, a collaborative firm culture and entrepreneurial knowledge managers. You also need great teamwork with IT. I'm not sure you need a lot of money or a large staff. But, then again, I've always been of the opinion that working within financial or staffing constraints often leads to game-changing innovation.

What would you add to this list?

The Metrics Mess

I recently saw the perfect illustration of how we can get ourselves completely tangled up in unproductive activity by measuring the wrong thing. In this case, it was someone on Twitter who thought they had hit the jackpot because they had hundreds of followers. Further, this person was offering advice on how to increase the number of followers his readers had. This struck me as misguided at best. To be honest, there are folks I follow whom I'm sure don't realize I exist. Equally, there are folks who follow me, but I'm largely oblivious to them because our paths don't cross very often. So the numbers alone don't tell the whole story and may, in fact, tell a misleading story.

The real issue isn't size of following as much as it is scope of impact. How many of these folks are really paying attention to you? How many do you actually affect? Unless you know this, you don't have a good understanding of your interaction with Twitter. Admittedly, there are Twitter stars whom everyone likes to follow. And, assuming we follow because of their established reputations, we're more likely to pay attention to what those Twitter stars say. For the rest of us in the Twitter mob, however, the number of our followers is a poor (and possibly inaccurate) proxy for our impact.

Coming back to law firm knowledge management, take a moment to consider whether your efforts to measure the wrong thing are leading you into unproductive activity. Don't focus on bulk -- focus on impact. For example, counting how many times a particular document is opened via your portal or document management system may be interesting but not helpful. What you really want to know is how many times was it opened and actually used? And, how often was it exactly the thing the user was searching for? In the latter two cases, you learn much more about the quality of your content and the quality of your search engine.

Consider the following: a document was opened 10 times and used each time, but then opened 20 times and discarded because it was not on point. For someone looking at bulk alone, they'd say, the document was opened 30 times, declare victory and go home. However, someone measuring impact would say it was used 10 times not 3o, and then would ask why. When you ask that question you create the possibility of learning and insight. That's when you know you're on the path to using metrics intelligently.



[permission to use granted under a creative commons license]

KM vs Social Media: Give Peace a Chance

A few weeks ago the blogosphere was hopping in response to the KM vs SM generational war piece Venkatesh Rao launched on an unsuspecting world. I responded at the time that declaration of war was first published, as did other thoughtful folks. Now Venkat's piece has been republished in Social Computing Magazine, alongside Jeff Kelly's rebuttal.

Jeff argues that while some resistance to change is inevitable among human beings, it is unfair to characterize all knowledge managers as resistant to change. In Jeff's personal experience, there are "many more eager adopters than resistant dinosaurs." In fact, many knowledge managers I know have been excited and energized by the possibilities for KM offered by social media. To be honest, much of the resistance to social media that I've observed lately has been exhibited by managers who were skeptical about KM in the first place. This isn't so much about age as it is about outlook and experience.

I'm inclined to agree with Jeff that there is much more constructive peace than destructive war between the generations on this issue. His prognosis of the current situation rings true:

Our technology and society will continue to evolve; people will continue to be resistant to (but finally adapt to) change; youth will continue to disdain their elders until they become tempered by wisdom; and the opportunities to learn and prosper will continue to grow for those wise enough to do so.

The more things change, the more they remain the same.

Just the Way You Are

For those of my readers who were secretly hoping that I'd lose interest over the weekend in my current fascination with popular music and management, I'm sorry to disappoint you. I was getting ready to stop and then I discovered that Billy Joel is not only a philosopher, but a pragmatic one. His song, Just the Way You Are, is viewed by the more romantic among us as an extraordinary statement of the complete acceptance many hope to find in a relationship. For those of us more pragmatically minded, we realize that he is just stating the obvious: it's really hard to get a person to change -- so you might as well get along with what you've got.

While optimism and a deep belief in the perfectibility of humankind are an important part of the culture of the United States, it would be foolish to base a knowledge management department or KM program solely on the hope that folks will change. There are some fundamental elements of human nature that simply can't be undone, although they may be tweaked around the edges. For law firm knowledge managers, understanding the basic personality type of lawyers is an important prerequisite to organizing a law firm knowledge management program that has a prayer of succeeding. For all knowledge managers, understanding the patterns of behavior in your employees and users will allow you to be much more effective.

So, let's return to the prior discussions about the importance of recruiting the right people to your team, really knowing the people who work with you (their values, strengths and weaknesses), and then deploying them strategically so that they achieve their highest and best. If we take Billy Joel's song to heart, getting the recruiting right is critical. By hiring people who have the right values for your team and demonstrate the ability to think critically, work creatively, learn and grow, you free yourself to pursue an ambitious knowledge management program without having to waste precious time in the nearly futile task of trying to change their fundamentals.

Understand early who they are and then take them "just the way they are."

Aspiring to KM Geekdom

While I don't have a snowball's chance in any place warm of ever achieving geekdom, I couldn't resist testing my abilities against Gizmodo's The 50 Skills Every Geek Should Have. I flunked -- but I'm not too worried. In fact, I suspect that I'm in pretty good company.

That said, I do sometimes wonder what a comparable list for knowledge managers would contain. To do our work well, we need a strange mix of technical and people skills, as well as substantive legal knowledge if you're working in the world of law firms, for example. So here's my first stab at a list for knowledge management -- in no particular order:

1. Superior listening skills
2. Empathy
3. The ability to translate from user speak to "geek speek"
4. Skills in organizing chaos
5. Analytical ability
6. Superior persuasive writing and speaking skills
7. No tendency to technophobia
8. Deep knowledge of human nature
9. Openmindedness
10. A willingness to plan cooperatively via an iterative process rather than imposing solutions
11. Basic kindergarten competence (i.e., plays nicely with others, doesn't run with scissors, etc.)
12. Ability to build strong and productive teams
13. Creativity
14. An understanding of database configuration and functionality
15. An understanding of social computing
16. An understanding of law firm (or your industry's) economics
17. ?

What would you add? What would you omit? Why?

Creating a Great KM Department of One

In my earlier post, Is Your KM Department Selling Fish, I asked what a great knowledge management department staffed by only one person would look like. This is not a purely academic exercise. To begin with, every member of your staff has to be willing to step up as if they are the only ones responsible for the productivity of your department. But beyond this, I wanted to encourage us to think in more organic terms about what we are and what we can be.

Every acorn holds the potential of a giant oak. What sort of acorn are you? What sort of oak tree will you produce?

Is Your KM Department Serving Fish?

Have you ever heard an administrator say that their department could fulfill its mission without additions to headcount? Yet in this economy, more and more administrators are going to be told that they must meet their institutional obligations with a smaller staff. Before we let panic overtake us, let's spend a moment thinking about the wonderful opportunity this mandate presents. Necessity drives us to think critically about our mission, how we've chosen to tackle it and how we've chosen to staff it. In these last few years of feasting, many have become bloated. Now we have to rethink our approach.

Rather than thinking small, let's blow up the model and start again. What would you do if you could afford only a knowledge management department of one? What would you have that person do? Suddenly, routine chores that consume so much time and effort are much less justifiable. Equally, expending energy on projects that benefit relatively few is short-sighted. So, for example, instead of grinding away at database maintenance chores of marginal value what high-impact project would you tackle? In the context of law firm knowledge management, drafting a model document that might be used occasionally by a relatively small group of lawyers becomes less compelling. So does working on a lawyer's pet technology project, unless the resulting opportunity cost is one the firm is prepared to tolerate. Instead, spending time to train lawyers to filter and organize the flood of information that comes to their computers daily so that they and their colleagues can find this material efficiently makes much more sense. So does giving them centrally-accessible places to store and exchange the tribal lore that sets the great law firms apart from their competitors. In each case, you make individual lawyers self-reliant and leverage the efforts of one to benefit many.

In the language of economic development, this is about teaching people to fish so that they can sustain themselves over the long-term rather than handing them fish for a single meal. In the days of plenty, we could afford a large knowledge management staff to find the fish and serve it to hungry lawyers. Things have changed now and everyone will have to know how to do their own fishing. Are you and your firm prepared for this?

The Pantyhose Fallacy and the Reality of Pants

In my earlier post today, KM and the Pantyhose Fallacy, I begged the indulgence of my male readers with the following words: "Stick with me, gentlemen. I'm sure there's a male equivalent to this that I haven't thought of yet." Well there is an equivalent (or near equivalent) that is instructive: pants.

Traditionally, better quality men's trousers have been sold in the following manner: they are ready to wear except for the fact that the hem is unfinished so that each wearer can tailor their pant legs to suit their individual preferences. This is a great example of the new operating principle I proposed in my prior post with respect to how we should deploy knowledge management tools in the 21st century:

Facing this challenge requires switching from anodyne mega projects to deploying technology that is capable and robust enough at the core to permit users to lightly tinker with its functionality around the fringes without requiring a team of IT experts. Following this path, you should end up with tools that perform their basic functions reliably and well, while allowing individual users to tailor those tools to meet their immediate needs.

This will require a new kind of discipline from knowledge managers and their IT colleagues. Rather than looking for an application that merely meets the expectations of the lowest common denominator of users, we'll need to look for intelligently-engineered apps that do the basics well but that can be tweaked by users to meet their (reasonable) needs. The trick here is to find software that permits this kind of tailoring, yet does not require a great deal of money, training, time or IT intervention to accomplish the modifications. In other words, wiki-like simplicity and Facebook-like flexibility.

Here endeth my disquisition on knowledge management and clothing -- at least for now!

KM and the Pantyhose Fallacy

The Pantyhose* Fallacy may not yet be a term of art in knowledge management and information technology, but I can guarantee that you already understand its underlying principle. [Stick with me, gentlemen. I'm sure there's a male equivalent to this that I haven't thought of yet.] Here's the Pantyhose Fallacy: for years retailers have sold us a bill of goods -- that it is possible for people of varying sizes and shapes to wear an article of clothing sold in a single size. They call it "one size fits all." The sad truth is that the one size fits badly and doesn't remotely fit all.

In the world of knowledge management, vendors have led us to bland, standardized implementations of tools that barely meet the needs of users. Perhaps we were unduly influenced by the big legal publishers who insisted we do it their way or not at all, but far too many KM efforts have forced square pegs into round holes. The imagined benefits of standardization caused us to overlook the real benefits of judicious customization to meet the needs of individual users. And now, those users are rebelling. Forget the rigid top-down taxonomy. They want to tag and organize content on the fly. Forget about limiting them to a small collection of recommended content. They want easy ways of identifying, segregating and then sharing their own "favorites." Forget about hermetically sealing employees behind the firewall. They want to be able to mix and match the best of internal and external content as the spirit moves or the circumstances dictate.

The challenge for KM is to give up the imagined security of rigid standardization and adopt more flexible means of meeting user needs. This challenge moves KM personnel out of the role of prison warden and into the role of companion and facilitator. Facing this challenge requires switching from anodyne mega projects to deploying technology that is capable and robust enough at the core to permit users to lightly tinker with its functionality around the fringes without requiring a team of IT experts. Following this path, you should end up with tools that perform their basic functions reliably and well, while allowing individual users to tailor those tools to meet their immediate needs. Although we've been told that few users actually take the time to customize or edit, I wonder if this will change as more users begin to use flexible internet apps in their leisure time, and thereby learn the value of customizing tools to meet personal preferences and maximize personal expression.

But, even if you're not entirely sure about the 21st century trends for technology, remember that 20th century example of pantyhose: One size almost never fits all.


[*A note to readers outside North America: pantyhose is also known as tights in many parts of the English-speaking world.]

The Futility of Bottling Knowledge

Are you trying to bottle knowledge? If you view knowledge as a "thing" to be captured, packaged and delivered, you're trying to bottle knowledge. How's that working for you?

Knowledge management gurus will tell you that bottling knowledge is a very KM 1.0 approach and ill-advised. Experts from the school of hard knocks will tell you that trying to bottle knowledge is an exercise in futility. You'll never ever bottle enough to really make a difference; even if you bottle some good stuff, your customers will always want more; and when you're in the bottling business you run the risk of creating bottlenecks.

Not convinced? Consider this:

Fish : Water ~ Humans : Information/Knowledge

In other words, fish swim in water and we swim in information. Trying to bottle information/knowledge is as difficult as trying to contain our environment.

So what should you do instead? Switch metaphors.

Instead of viewing knowledge/information as a "thing," think of it as water. Rather than trying to bottle all that water, think about channeling it. Think about creating small reservoirs as necessary. Think about distilling it. Think about broadening access to it. If you're not convinced, consider how very difficult it is to contain water over the long term. It goes where it will. Why fight its natural tendency to flow?

Viewing knowledge/information as water will lead you to some fresh new ways of handling law firm knowledge management. Less about command and control, more about channeling and collaboration. It will also inexorably lead you to social media tools. They are far better equipped to help broaden access to knowledge than the KM 1.0 tools we've been working with.

And, if you really want to broaden your perspective, switch metaphors again. How about this metaphor: try thinking about knowledge as "love." If you're curious about this, read Is Knowledge Stuff or Love?

Minimal Impact KM

Dr. David Vaine has done it again! In his video address to the actKM Conference, he gave an illuminating overview of the scope and benefits of Minimal Impact KM. In the process, he recognized the seminal work of "Dennis Snowden" in giving knowledge managers the excuse of complexity to explain inaction and "David Greenteen" for encouraging people with clear ideas to talk themselves into a tangle of confusion and inactivity.

For those of you who may not be up on the latest trends in knowledge management theory, minimal impact KM touts the benefits of doing a great deal without in any way affecting the work lives of your colleagues or the results of your enterprise. (This reminds me of a brillant Dilbert observation: We have achieved unprecedented levels of unverifiable productivity.)

Dr. Vaine identifies several proven methods of achieving minimal impact KM:

- depreciative inquiry
- social network paralysis
- corporate flogging
- six stigma

As you come up to budget season and are preparing proposals for your law firm knowledge management programs for the upcoming year, give some thought to whether you qualify as a leader in the area of minimal impact KM. If you do, what are you going to do about it?

[Thanks to Dave Snowden for pointing out this masterpiece by Dr. Vaine. And, thanks especially to Patrick Lambe for keeping us honest.]

7 Principles of Law Firm KM

Dave Snowden's 3 Rules of knowledge management have expanded to 7 Principles, now that he is focusing on law firm knowledge management. (Perhaps there is just something about lawyers that invites the creation of more rules). Here are the 7 Principles:

1. Knowledge can only be volunteered, it cannot be conscripted.
2. We only know what we know when we need to know it.
3. In the context of real need few people will withhold their knowledge.
4. Everything is fragmented.
5. Tolerated failure imprints learning better than success.
6. The way we know things is not the way we report we know things.
7. We always know more than we can say, and we always say more than we can write down.

This is a list worth chewing over. I expect I'll come back to it several times. In the meantime, I'd urge everyone involved in law firm knowledge management to take a hard look at their KM programs and measure them against these 7 principles. A large number of firms are engaged in classic KM 1.0 efforts: trying to convert tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge, creating precedent collections and brief banks, writing practice guides to convey best practices, etc. These methods seem to violate one or more of the 7 Principles. It would be worth spending a little time to determine if you are achieving the levels of success you and your firm anticipated from this efforts. If not, how much of that is due to the fact that your projects do not conform to these principles? If you are truly successful in your KM 1.0 approach, we should talk. You may have identified an interesting exception to the 7 principles.

[Hat tip to Dennis Kennedy's microblogging on Twitter.]

War Between Social Media and KM?

Connie Crosby pointed me to Ralph Poole's post, Social Media vs. Knowledge Management. In it he discusses Venkatesh Rao's assertion in the Enterprise 2.0 blog that there exists a generational war between the proponents of knowledge management and the proponents of social media. In Ralph's experience, this rings true:

I have seen it in the way Microsoft SharePoint, with minimum Web 2.0 capabilities, is embraced by IT departments while open source web 2.0 are shunned.

For Venkat, the combatants in this battle are the Boomers (born 1946-62) and the Millenials/Gen Y (born 1980 -). Here is how Venkat draws the battle lines:

Inside organizations and at industry fora today, every other conversation around social media (SM) and Enterprise 2.0 seems to turn into a thinly-veiled skirmish within an industry-wide KM-SM shadow war. ...KM and SM look very similar on the surface, but are actually radically different at multiple levels, both cultural and technical, and are locked in an undeclared cultural war for the soul of Enterprise 2.0.

Venkat sees top-down knowledge management as the product of the Boomer generation, while bottom-up social media is more reflective of Millenial values and aspirations. Caught in between are the Gen X folks (born 1963-79) who are not numerous enough to open a new front of their own, but may prove to be the perfect intermediaries between the opposing factions. According to Venkat, each of these generational groups approaches social media in different ways, which leads to the battles we're seeing in some workplaces regarding whether and how to adopt social media behind the firewall.

Venkat goes on to identify the 5 social dimensions of the war, and then the following 5 technological dimensions of the war:

1. Expertise locators are not social networks. For Venkat, expert idolatry is the fixation of Boomers who just love authority. By contrast, he finds that Gen Xers and Millenials believe in "situational" experts, a more transitional phenomenon.

2. Online communities are not USENET v3.0. Venkat draws the distinction between, for example, the Millenials' fondness for wide-open Facebook groups that nearly anyone can join vs GEn X LinkedIn groups that have gatekeepers.

3. RSS and Mash-ups are Gen X ideas. According to Venkat, they derive from the Gen X need "to reuse code and content to conquer overwhelming complexity."

4. SemWeb isn't Next Gen, it's Last Gen. In other words, SemWeb is the Boomers' revenge. For Venkat, "both KM and SemWeb set a lot of store by controlled vocabularies and ontologies as drivers of IT architecture." No more unconstrained folksonomies, thank you very much.

5. SOA and SaaS are Gen X; Clouds are Millenial. Venkat bases this assertion on his interpretation of the words used to explain these related concepts. For him Service-Oriented Architecture and Software as a Service are typically pragmatic (and, in his view, unimaginative and ugly) Gen X approaches to what Millenials describe more metaphorically (and imprecisely) as "clouds."

Venkat ends with the following prediction:

It takes no great genius to predict how the war will end. The Boomers will retire and the Millenials will win by default, in a bloodless end with no great drama. KM will quietly die, and SM will win the soul of Enterprise 2.0, with the Gen X leadership quietly slipping the best of the KM ideas into SM as they guide the bottom-up revolution.

The problem with this approach is that it under-rates KM and, perhaps, overestimates SM. In the conversations I've heard lately regarding social media, the KM folks have been working hard to find points of intersection and common interest with social media. They are treating this as an evolution rather than a revolution. Some have even gone so far as to say that social media is just the new marketing spin for KM. That assertion is likely to send Millenials running for the Maalox, but it appears that KM isn't ready to be declared dead quite yet. Rather, it's trying to transform itself from a purely archival discipline to a more dynamic and informal approach that puts people in direct touch with each other, without the obvious intermediation of a knowledge manager.

[Full disclosure: I'm a Gen Xer as far as Venkat is concerned. The previous paragraph could be read to confirm his contention that Gen Xers tend to pragmatism and compromise.]

Nonetheless, it's useful to be reminded from time to time that our preferences are shaped by more than our intellect or experience. Sometimes an accident of birth can dictate how you respond to complexity and innovation. For Venkat the Boomers, Gen Xers and Millenials have distinct and different approaches to technology, information and community. Think hard about how you fit into this generational view before you make your next decision about social media.

Update (12 Oct 08): Take a look at Mark Gould's thoughtful related post -- Oh good grief. He tackles the "generational" straw man relied on from time to time by advocates of the next new thing.

Culture and Technology

Knowledge management without cultural awareness rarely is successful. You can be on the verge of deploying the best technology tools in the world, but if those tools aren't in synch with your organizational culture, you might as well distribute quill pens and parchment. Carl Frappaolo (VP Market Intelligence a AIIM International) and Dan Keldsen (Director, Market Intelligence at AIIM International) made this point very clearly in a terrific presentation they gave on October 3. (For helpful summaries of their presentation, see Ron Friedmann's blog and Jack Vinson's blog.)

Carl has posted their slides on his blog, Taking AIIM. When you get over to that blog, pay particular attention to slide 16, which shows the stages of cultural evolution, overlaid with the stages of technology. This slide demonstrates that you need an organizational culture that reflects a specific level of collaboration before you can implement particular tools successfully. If you've got folks working in splendid isolation with no desire to change their modus operandi (i.e., "islands of me"), they won't be receptive to your brilliant web 2.0 technological advances. You can coax, you can beg, you can embarrass yourself anyway you choose, but they just won't get it. And they most certainly won't adopt your new tool.

Besides the degree of collaboration prevalent in your organizational culture, you also have to be aware of the limits your culture puts on information. So, you want a wiki? Make sure you've got an organizational culture that permits the free and open exchange of information. If you're in an organization that discloses information on a need to know basis only, don't be surprised if your wikis are under-utilized. Equally, if you're in an organization that is excessively hierarchical, don't expect junior folks to contribute to your new blog or wiki without explicit permission from senior managers. In each case, the organizational culture will severely curtail the open information exchange that blogs and wikis promote.

The trick here is to get better at anthropology and then pitch the tools to meet the culture. If you've got your heart set on yanking your law firm knowledge management program into the 21st century by introducing social media tools, wait until you see specific forms of collaboration or conversation emerging among your lawyers. Let them enjoy that for a while and then watch for stresses or pain points to emerge. If they do, offer a tool that can alleviate the pain. If there's no pain, it's unlikely there will be much user interest in changing how they work. Busy lawyers rarely push for new technology if what they've got basically functions -- even if there is something that would objectively work much better. They sensibly weigh any inconvenience of their current methods against the perceived gross inconvenience of learning something new. As with most things, overcoming inertia is tough. However, it's a much easier battle if you harness the natural forces of your organizational culture.

The Art of Creating Possibilities

The whole point of KM is Innovation. We aren't putting people in conversation with each other, soliciting their stories or helping them exchange their learning just because it makes for a nicer workplace. We're also doing this because it's precisely that cross-pollination of ideas and experience that helps birth new ideas and new ways of doing things. Knowledge management done right helps create an environment that fosters healthy change.

The "science" of knowledge management pushes us to find better, less intrusive, more effective and efficient ways to ensure that the essential information is exchanged, and exchanged in a manner that permits easy and accurate understanding. This isn't about knowledge extraction and capture or centralized control. It's about KM getting out of the way so that just in time exchanges of information can occur in context. Unless you've been living off the grid for the last few years, you probably have already realized that this approach to KM undercuts the old KM 1.0 drive towards creating and maintaining repositories and databases. KM 1.0 is based on an outdated notion of knowledge manager as archivist.

The "art" of knowledge management is by its nature a little harder to get your hands around. It's about an orientation, an approach to work and life. Good KM is closely attuned to and respectful of organizational culture. Good and effective KM ultimately helps shift that organizational culture toward more openness, more collaboration, more innovation. This view of KM is based on a notion of knowledge manager as facilitator.

If we are true to the demands of the "art" of knowledge management, we knowledge managers have to embody and demonstrate that orientation toward collaboration and innovation. This means finding new ways to engage in productive conversations that expand understanding and don't reduce every interaction to a zero-sum game. This isn't necessarily how we've been taught to behave in the corporate world, so it can be a significant challenge for a lot of us. Further, it's an approach that assumes a certain level of personal maturity and goodwill.

Innovation rarely results from the occasional brainstorming sessions. It comes from applying what you're learning to what you know, taking information from one domain and mixing it with experience in another domain to see what results. It's life as a lab. It's indulging your sense of curiosity, tempered only by the constant question: how does this make things better?

Since far too many of us push through life with our heads down, shoulders forward -- simply trying to get things done -- we often don't remember to take the time required to be open to possibility. A bent to innovation requires some under-used muscles. Chandni Kapur at Anecdote, provides a humorous reminder of one way to find and exercise those muscles in her post Practising the art of creating possibilities:

People respond so differently to new ideas. While some people jump with excitement at the thought of new possibilities and irrational ideas, unfamiliarity can [make] others uncomfortable, give up, or find it safe to be a skeptic. This is so well illustrated in this conversation between Alice and the queen in Through the Looking Glass.

"I can't believe that!" said Alice.

"Can't you?" the queen said in a pitying tone. "Try again, draw a long breath, and shut your eyes."

Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said. "One can't believe impossible things."

"I dare say you haven't had much practice," said the queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Being able to rise above the restrictions of what is, to imagine what might be, and then to create the map that moves your organization to that potential requires vision and leadership, a marriage of both the art and science of knowledge management. A little bit more queen and a little less of Alice.

Why Bother with Web 2.0?

As discussed in my post, Overcoming Hurdles to Web 2.0, the rate at which law firms have adopted web 2.0 has not been impressive. There seems to be a great deal of organizational resistance to giving up the "command and control" approach to knowledge management and moving to a more dynamic, grassroots approach. And, because of the slow rate of adoption among law firms, law firm knowledge managers can't even point to the Web 2.0 successes of many other law firms in order to goad their own firm into implementing social media tools. In this environment, it's easy to ask "why bother with web 2.0"?

If your firm is stuck in the KM 1.0 rut, take a look at the impressive results of a shift from KM 1.0 to KM 2.0 at Cap Gemini. In his post, From CoLLection to CoNNection, Jon Husband reports on a presentation by Yves Noble at KMWorld & Intranets 2008 in which he recounts the fantastic success of Cap Gemini's adoption of web 2.0.

The post contains Jon's live-blogging notes, so it is in sound bites rather than paragraphs. Nonetheless, it contains some real gems. Here, for example, are the notes on Cap Gemini's situation under the KM 1.0/"Collection" model:

Problems with old KM Solution ?

Plenty of good content, well-organized, well-structured - but people did not use it

20% year-over-year decline in use

Average age [of] document in the system 3.5 years

7 years to refresh knowledge content (wow, papyrus grows faster than that)

Complex and confusing for non-experts

Many disconnects between tools, processes and the organisation

Costly infrastructure

And here's what happened when they switched to using web 2.0 tools and a "Connection" model:

Speed and scope of adoption (official deployment has not yet started)

27,00 registered users

900 communities

500 forums

500 wikis

250 blogs

.. and have not spent even $1.00 in “communications” thus far

Remember these are the results before official deployment! It's enough to make most folks in law firm knowledge management bright green with envy.

Take a closer look at this presentation. It covers everything from the state of their old system, through the long process of moving minds and implementing new tools, to their stunning results. The Cap Gemini experience is a great answer to the question "why bother with Web 2.0."

Yves Noble provides a valuable road map. Follow it!