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Walking on a Wire
Walking on a Wire is the title of an old Richard Thompson song, about the challenge of maintaining balance in the face of emotional forces. For Richard, it was the forces of human relationships, although when he wrote this tune, "wire" only had one meaning.
Today, most of us are wired up the ying yang and in this new reality, balance is more important than ever. During the vacation season, it's sad to be reminded that more than 60% of people check
their email while they're away (according to a recent survey by AOL and Opinion Research). Some more statistics: 25% of the survey group were unable to go without email for more than three days. 41% checked their email in the morning, before their first cup of coffee, 77% had more than one email account. In fact, a quick Google on "email on vacation" doesn't turn up much about the pressures of the modern age. It does turn up a lot of articles explaining how to do it.
It seems there's something stressful about being out of touch -- a fear we might miss something momentous. So even when we're away, we're never really away. The distinctions between work and
non-work are blurred, and we lose something in the process. At the very least, we lose the periods of transition. Telecommuting has its merits, but it does tend to blend things that might better be kept
apart.
There's no moral to this story, and no easy answer. But it behooves us all to step back and take a look at ourselves once in a while. Bob Guns, author of The Faster Learning Organization,
wrote that time for reflection should be considered a necessary component in KM. People should be able to spend some time each day, just thinking about what they needed to do. That would be nice,
wouldn't it?
The Dog Poop Girl
Last week, the Washington Post covered an interesting example of the interaction between the web and the community, a story about communications and “citizen journalism” with implications that are either amusing or disturbing. You decide...
It begins with a young woman riding a subway in South Korea, with her little dog too. This dog did what dogs will do; the owner chose to ignore the problem despite the protests of fellow riders.
Someone snapped her picture with a camera phone, put the image on the web, and within hours, she was everywhere. Her story was the hottest thing on South Korean discussion boards, with an impassioned
debate over the ethics of exposing her, compared with the ethics of leaving dog poop on the floor. (Most people seemed to feel that by behaving this way in public, she had given up any right to privacy.)
More pictures materialized. Within days, her identity and past were revealed; posters started asking about her parents and relatives. People recognized her in public because of her dog, and her
Burberry carrier. She was at the mercy of the mob, even if it was a "smart mob." In at least one account, she reportedly
quit her job out of public humiliation. You can see some of her pictures and parodies here,
but be warned that if you follow this thread, "poop" is not the only word you’re going to see.
A cautionary tale. Perhaps in the future, it's not Big Brother we need to worry about.
Maybe we should be worrying about our tendency to watch each other, and the ease with which any technologically-savvy individual can bring his or her own idea of justice to the world at large.
Café Society
David Gurteen is a UK-based consultant who describes himself as a "knowledge networker." He is
perhaps best known for his Gurteen Knowledge website, a free resource of over 4,000 pages of book reviews, articles, profiles, events, inspirational quotations, and everything else you could imagine, covering knowledge management, learning, creativity, and innovation. He's also the founder of the Gurteen Knowledge Community, which now numbers some 12,000 people in 138 countries, a group that’s held together primarily by a monthly electronic newsletter. It's free, and you can subscribe at his site.
David is also known for a particular knowledge sharing technique, called a Knowledge Café. It's a way to focus an organization's knowledge, strengthen networks, kick off a Community of Practice
and otherwise extract some practical (and low-cost) benefits from this thing called KM. Last night, in fact, the principals of Knowledge Street were in attendance at the first ever Knowledge Café held
in North America, at the World Financial Center in New York City (which makes this the closest thing to breaking news we have ever published in Directions!)
That idea of a café as a
knowledge sharing platform is at the heart of what KM is about. Way back in 1998, Daniel Erasmus suggested that the morning coffee was one of the most important knowledge management systems in any organization. Thomas Stewart sometimes ends his presentations with the image of a coffee pot, describing it as the ideal knowledge-sharing technology. It brings people together in a random way, holds them for a few minutes and encourages conversation. The problem with the coffee pot is that it doesn't scale very well, and we haven't yet figured out how to recreate the experience in the virtual world.
We've made progress, but sometimes you still need to smell the coffee.
Summer Reading
In our days at the company formerly known as DMR Consulting, we had the pleasure of working briefly with Dr.
Kimiz Dalkir. She was attached to the company's Corporate Knowledge Products & Services Group in Montreal, and later went on to teach Knowledge Management at McGill University. That's where she is
now.
Kim has written a very exhaustive text for the study of KM, published last month by Elsevier/Butterworth-Heinemann. It's the kind of book that would accompany a college survey course on the
topic, and includes chapters on KM Cycles (from various sources), KM Models, Knowledge Capturing, Sharing and Communities of Practice, Applying Knowledge, Organizational Cultures, KM Tools, Strategies
and Measurement, Roles & Responsibilities and Future Challenges. It's very thorough, and also up to date, which is a rare combination in this ever-changing field. There are lots of examples from
real-world situations, and lots of good illustrations, as well. The book is Knowledge Management in Theory and Practice, and you can order it on-line, either from the publisher, or from Amazon.
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