018 This month’s tip:

Protect your organizational memory.

Meeting minutes can be a very useful form of organizational knowledge, if you invest the time to get them right. To be successful, they first of all have to be read -- minutes that are treated too casually at creation time are easy to ignore later on.

Minutes must also be accessible, at both macro and micro levels. They need to be available to all parties, and you need some system for finding past discussions quickly. Otherwise, it will seem easier just to talk about a subject all over again. Finally, you need a way of presenting them that makes it easy to pull information from the page (or screen). That might mean separating decisions from discussions, or using lists of action items, or whatever else works. Done well, minutes can condense hours of discussion into a document that takes only minutes to read. They can help team members communicate more effectively, both with each other and with management.

You can find tools, templates, training and technology that might be useful, but making minutes a part of your organizational culture is the most important step.
 

February 2005 - Volume 3, Issue 2

Meme’s the Word

If you're unaware of the science of Memetics, you're not alone. It returns a mere 280,000 results in a Google search, compared to almost 9 million for "Knowledge Management" (which itself is hardly a household phrase). Memetics is a theory of cultural evolution which says that ideas propagate through fundamental units called "memes." Meme are the basic building blocks of ideas, in the same way that a genes are the basic building blocks of biology. Memetic advocates would tell you that people don't necessarily adopt ideas, rather it is the ideas which acquire people.

A good example of a highly memetic phrase is "Got Milk?" It's short, simple and easy to remember. In fact, it's pretty hard to forget. Wherever it goes, It carries an entire marketing campaign packed into a very small space. It can even be recast as something else, adding value to the new idea without losing the original association. Got Knowledge Management?

In communication terms, a meme packs a big punch. This is pretty arcane stuff, but if you're in the communication business, it's worth getting acquainted with the concepts and keeping them in mind. If you want to read more, a good primer is Richard Brodie's Virus of the Mind; you can also start by taking a look at his website. He's got a newsletter.

Seven Warning Signs

Speaking of memetics, introducing concepts in the form of a list adds a slightly memetic edge. People like lists, generally speaking, and feel comfortable considering things in such a context. Even if the ideas are somewhat random, presenting them as a list provides a structure and a feeling of completeness. So here are seven warnings signs of a Knowledge Management problem. Think of them as things overheard by the coffee machine...

1. I have this uncomfortable sense of deja vu -- we've been here before.
2. I know what I need to fix this problem, but I don't know how to get my hands on it.
3. If you have a new idea, you're better off keeping it to yourself. Tried and true is what works around here.
4. The trouble is we're trying to fix this year's problem by applying last year's solution.
5. There are a lot of smart people here, but you can never get through to the right person at the right time.
6. When something goes wrong, people are more interested in assigning blame than figuring out what really happened.
7. I have this uncomfortable sense of deja vu -- we've been here before.

OK, so maybe that's really only six warning signs. But if they sound familiar, you're in a place where people are neither learning from their mistakes nor encouraging innovation. It's a place that lacks the trust needed for out-of-box thinking, and lacks the infrastructure to connect people to the tools they need. It's a place that is not managing its knowledge, and that's a serious handicap, competitively speaking.

Thinking Local, Buying Global

Recently, we had one of those "aha" moments, connecting things learned long ago to things happening today. In this case, it was recalling Marshall McLuhan's idea of a global village, while on the hunt for some cheap wine glasses. The best place to go for this kind of item is actually not a department store, or a box store and certainly not a gift shop or a gourmet boutique. What you want is a restaurant supply house.

Most restaurant suppliers are willing to sell to the general public, although they may have inconvenient hours and minimalist showrooms. You won't find them in the shopping mall, or even on a main highway.  In fact, there are three within 15 miles of K Street World Headquarters, but there are lots of them on the web. So that's where we bought the glasses. A restaurant supply store in San Antonio was actually more convenient than one that was a short drive away.

As much as the web has become part of our lives, sometimes it still seems like science fiction.

The Death of Email?

We all know that email isn't as good as it used to be.

Once upon a time the messages in your In Box were almost always for you. You could have confidence that if you sent people email, it got there, and that (most) addressees would read it and try to respond. It was better than playing telephone tag, and was actually a great way to communicate, especially across time zones. A lot of things that had been tedious and time consuming became fast and easy.

Now, though, about 90% of K Street’s incoming messages are spam. We know our outgoing messages are more and more likely to be blocked by spam filters, too. Even if they get through, there's a good chance they'll be lost in the mix. People can again say "I didn't get the email" and you have to take them at their word. So for anything important, we've gone back to the telephone.

There are alternatives, though. It's easy to control who can send you Instant Messages, for example. With RSS, you can subscribe or unsubscribe to information you find of value, without action on the sender's part. Bill Gates says the spam problem will be solved in the next two years, but it's interesting to wonder if email will turn out to be a transitional technology, replaced by other things that put more control in the hands of the addressee. We're not making predictions, just watching the story unfold.

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