Social Knowledge

One of the ongoing debates in the world of KM is the ever controversial “collection or connection” classification. It neatly defines the two most common wings of the discipline, one emphasising an information or artefact driven approach, the other endorsing the essential role of the human context or, as I would say it, the application of the Mk1 Brain. As someone who describes knowledge as a verb not a noun in order to break with the information managers of this world and to reinforce the necessity of action to create value I think you can guess where I sit on this one.

However the argument neatly highlights the problem with KM. KM is hard. Its hard to define, hard to demonstrate ROI, counter cultural, long term, and yet it promises so much. Because it is hard it is easier to characterise it as information on steroids because people can “get” that and can task someone to go away and do it – problem solved. It gives management the secure warm feeling that they are “doing KM” because they have neatly pigeon-holed it under something that is somehow familiar. The problem is that this isn't KM and it is in fact something of a dead end.

In a way the the debate has found an echo in the Social Media domain. Creating value from Social Media is much more complicated than simply starting a Facebook page. There is familiar debate about the value of curation as opposed to creation, a debate about ROI, and we have an over emphasis of seeing Social Media through the lens of Marketing because once again people can “get” that and task someone to do it. But again that really isn't the whole story by any means and again is something of a dead end.

But curiously enough there is an area where we can find some progress and value by bringing the two together. Social Media is underpinned by a mindset rooted in collaboration and sharing, iteration, evolution and tearing down barriers to participation. This mindset is coming from outside the boundaries of the organisation and shaking the traditional structures and practises as it permeates its way in. The challenge is for organisations to embrace that and create value from it through new approaches, new business models and new thinking – in a word innovation.

KM is rooted in the same insight but has come from the other end of the telescope in that it has sought to to create that environment within organisations and push it outwards.

We can now go beyond this and by bringing these insights together and we can create tremendously rich possibilities for organisations by bringing together the elements of curation, collection, connection and most importantly applications that can operationalise these elements in to action and value generation. We call this Social Knowledge.

Of course it takes planning, analysis, and a strategy but it can be done and a good deal of my work at twintangibles is taken up with this

Big Society - Big Headache

You know I have a bit of sympathy with David Cameron and the Big Society challenge he faces. Now my sympathy has nothing to do with my view of either the Big Society initiative or, for that matter, David Cameron. My sympathy is with regard to the challenge of communicating a philosophy to a diverse audience with diverse agendas and an audience more used to sound bite communications and an appetite for the more binary or concrete.

Why should I sympathise? Well anyone that has been involved with Knowledge Management should be able to empathise with him because a constant refrain to the ears of those seeking to bring KM to an organisation has been “I don’t know what KM means”. Now the reasons for “not understanding” were in some cases intentional, manufactured and considered as well as in others ones of genuine confusion. The reasons for this variety range from those who sought to discredit the initiative because it wasn’t in their interests so a feigned misunderstanding; through to the advocates of KM not really understanding the philosophy themselves or being un able to articulate it.

To expand on that a little I mean this. I always knew what the philosophy of KM meant and I also knew that, when applied properly, it challenged many of the Taylorist management traditions that persist to the detriment of business and to the benefit of a few vested interests. So it was in the interests of some to discredit any KM initiative and a simple but effective method for this was to pretend to not understand. An alternative approach was to directly misrepresent the philosophy of KM into a service based model so that it compartmentalised any initiative and emasculated the practitioners.

By the same token it was misrepresented by those who sought to ride on its coat tails – I am thinking particularly of software vendors who rebadged their database products as KM product – which of course they were/are not. It was in their interests to make it something that suited their ends regardless of whether that was an accurate representation or not. They could “de mystify” KM and sell a product at the same time. Management could either use the procurement as a representation of their “doing KM” or as a constrained and manageable project – whilst business as usual was maintained.

You may call me cynical but believe me its true.

And so to the less Machiavellian but no less challenging causes of misunderstanding. For some KM is and was a difficult thing to grasp as it went beyond their management experience and the advocates were unable to encourage the opening up process. Notably for some it was a challenging concept to grasp because it was a philosophical stance to managing an organisation that did not offer a simple recipe based or system based approach with best practice or rules to be followed – or even coloured belts to wear! For some, who genuinely understood its flexibility of application, this in itself was problematic as that liberty can be scary.

And finally there were those who advocated it but either didn’t understand it or could not articulate it with sufficient clarity and so the audience was genuinely confused.


There is no simple solution to the “communications” and “understanding” challenges but it remains an un resolved problem for KM and has, in my view, caused it to under achieve as a management style.

David Cameron will face the same challenges because he will face those with an agenda to oppose or subvert, and those that truly find it difficult to embrace a somewhat nebulous concept, and the limits of the communications generally in an anti thinking sound bite based world.

Wonder how it will go?

Snow, Disruption and Social Knowledge. Do you know the connection?

Knowledge is not information. Never has been, never will be. But information is often one of a number of inputs to a knowledge activity, and finding ways of making that information resource as good as it can be is challenging, particularly in complex environments. Many KM projects fail because of too much emphasis on information management, and that part itself often fails because the technical tools they use to underpin that aspect of the project are much to rigid, mechanistic and rules based to be of use to knowledge activities in complex environments. Lets not get into the failure to recognize when we are in complex environments!

This has been very apparent in the recent snow falls in the UK. The disruption caused by the snow is immense and very very costly and all the usual debates about lack of preparedness begin again. The debate typically runs along the lines of why we don't have enough gritt, snowploughs, why do we fail where other more climatically challenged countries cope etc etc etc.

These are all important considerations but for me the biggest problem is the collapse of information provision. So many of the journeys we take are regular ones and we are lured into the sense that this is a simple environment where routes are known, timings set routines established. The number of knowledge activities are typically decreased, there are not so many decisions to be made when all is well. But, as soon as there is disruption, caused on this occasion by snow, the complexity of the situation is revealed. Knowledge activities, decision points, are legion and in order to make those activities as effective as possible one of the resources that is needed is accurate timely information. Wherever you look people want information, and the usual sources are in utter disarray. In fact they are usually very misleading, so our ability to complete knowledge activities, that is make decisions and judgements, is seriously reduced. This is applicable to all but as a public transport user a typical example is the utter collapse of train information. Indicator boards show trains on time that never arrive, announce cancellations when the train roles though and no one from the train staff seems to know anything. This scenario can be replayed in almost any travel environment. Staff are not empowered to undertake knowledge activities – regulations the other brake to knowledge effectiveness – and if and when they do the information about that is often hidden, not shared, or shrouded in secrecy.

The fascinating thing in the last few days is to watch the twitter traffic. People reach out to these mechanisms to self organize and share real time insight from multiple parties. People ask questions, anyone on this train, anyone know if this road is open and often the answer is from someone on the ground, on the train looking at the scene. Its is not perfect by any means but the information available is generally far more accurate than the rubbish on offer from, in this case the train operating companies.

This emergent, community generated and, importantly, live and timely information sharing is just one example of how Social Media tools have such great application in knowledge intensive and complex environments, and why Social Knowledge is in fact the only game in town from a KM perspective at present.

If there is to be a government led review of the disruption caused by this latest cold snap I hope that whoever leads it takes note of this insight and looks at establishing very simple cost effective flexible information sharing techniques that are open to all as one part of a more complete approach to dealing with extreme weather. It would not be difficult or costly but the pay off would be immense.

Knowledge Aware Management

I have had the good fortune to read 'Farmers – Your Store for 100 years' (ISBN 9781869507633) which is Ian Hunters book on the Farmers stores in New Zealand. Ian’s team at The University of Auckland’s Business School were commissioned to write the history of Farmers to celebrate the 100 years of trading since its founding in 1909, and whilst this might sound a little dry it is in fact a terrific read.

What is particularly striking is how the store grew rapidly through its adoption of what was then a very innovative retailing approach, and that is the catalogue based retailing model. It has many parallels with the online retailing phenomenon in that customers are remote, select items from a brochure and it is then despatched directly to them from a central store. The impact was as profound then as it has been in more recent times and Farmers grew to be a major retailer in New Zealand. It has gone through a number of incarnations and suffered through some poor strategic decisions in the late eighties which saw its ownership shift between groups that were often not New Zealand based. I have little doubt that much of the poor decision making would have come about from flawed thinking on the part of professional service firms happily advising that the firm follow management trends without ever thinking through the implications for the social capital and intangible knowledge based assets in the organisation, and basing judgement purely on balance sheet based rationales. Happily the firm is back in New Zealand ownership and under the guidance of David and Anne Norman and with 4000 staff and over 50 stores it is clearly on the up again.

What I found particularly striking and particularly encouraging were the words of these entrepreneurial owners. I quote from the book

“Over the past three or so decades, Anne and I have been fortunate to participate in the recovery of several iconic brands....In almost every situation we have found that the heritage within these organisation has produced a pool of talent that for some reason has been ignored by the previous owners who had tried to fix an organisation that was far from broken! What has been achieved in our short ownership period has not so much been through our own efforts but through empowering existing people within the organisation.”

If anyone wants to know what knowledge aware management is – that is a definition of it in practise.

Howzat?! Knowledge and Emergence in Cricket

Anyone that knows me knows that I love the game of Cricket . One of its great fascinations, in particular Test Cricket, is its complexity and so the temptation to find parallels between the game and business is very tempting. But its easy to get carried away with this and to address every business issue with a cricketing metaphor. The current brouhaha around allegations of corrupt practice and spot betting is a case in point. It would be entirely possible to find myriad opportunities to spark a discussion about issues like ethics and CSR, poor regulation by moribund money centred administrators, failure to maintain boundaries – you can see where this might go. The problem with this is that too often the person drawing the parallel can be drawn into extending the similarity to a point where the comparison between sport and business is unsustainable and so meaningless.

But both business and sport, in this case cricket, are it seems to me subject to certain common principles and phenomenon because both involve concern human behaviour and cognition. For example it has been possible for me to apply KM techniques in top level sport – notably rugby - and use some of those same principles back in a business environment. IF we approach it from the point of view of those principles there might be something of value to reflect on. So in that spirit I wanted to just identify two things that struck me as interesting without getting into how the third umpire might be applied in the financial sector.

Firstly I was struck by the demonstration of the necessity and power of human intervention for knowledge disclosure. Let me explain. I am a committed listener to the BBC's Test Match Special . For those that don't know this is a radio commentary of five day test matches. It sounds incredible to the uninitiated but believe me it is not only possible to do but it is absolutely compulsive listening. The format is that the commentator covers the action – such as it is – whilst having a more speculative, ruminative and forensic conversation about the game with an accompanying “expert summariser”. There is also a statistician on hand as well. The result can be funny, thoughtful, provocative even infuriating but always entertaining. The amount of cricketing insight and experience on display at this point is formidable and as an exercise in the disclosure of knowledge of the game it is almost without comparison. So it was fascinating that when the controversial no-balls were actually bowled this team immediately felt something was not quite right in what was a wonderful demonstration of a knowledge disclosure points (KDP). Of course they made no accusations but there was an unease about what had happened based on the evaluation of a complex event by the Mk1 brain and we could, if we so wished use Dave Snowden's excellent ASHEN framework to perhaps better understand how that assessment was done. But to me it was just another example of how human cognition is the best judge of action and risk in a complex environment.

The second interesting point of observation for me – particularly so in an age of Social Media - was the role of the players – past and present – and the supporters in forcing some action. The emergent outrage shown by these parties, expressed typically through quick media distribution, and the aggregate effect of that has already forced some action form a range of groups, politicians administrators etc. who had up to that point begun to fall back on the old “head in sand approach” of “No comment”, “the matter is in police hands”, “cant interfere” etc.

So whilst I am not saying business is cricket or vice versa I am saying we are all subject to similar forces and opportunities that can, if managed and harnessed correctly, can be very beneficial.

Like, its like, you know, init?

The English language in its written form is a wonderful thing. In the hands of an expert it can provide the most accurate and precise descriptions and alternatively it can be used to convey subtle nuance and intentional ambiguity. That potential for both laser like precisions and rich layers of meaning provides both authors and scholars with a powerful tool for both communication and analysis in a complex world. It is at that interface between understanding and articulation that knowledge exists as it is at that point that human cognition comes into play and it is that brain action that is the knowledge. Without it the words are passive, the most sophisticated encyclopaedia just a collection of words and the the most complex play much the same. In the hands of a talented actor or actress a script can be rendered into spoken words in almost infinite variety, with each interpretation offering different meaning and emphasis.

Being in command of both the understanding and use of language must surely be one of the most important aspects of education, and a measure of educational attainment must be the ability of a student to both understand the question and to articulate an answer based on their interpretation. The sophistication of the answer will also reflect the ability of that student to accumulate other material and insight and compile and synthesize it in the process of analysing the question and forming an answer in the Mk1 brain. In all of this there is subtly, ambiguity, complexity and judgement.

It concerns me when you hear people representing major examining bodies – in this case Edexcel – explain, with a certain smugness, that they will re write questions that, to an unsophisticated reader, might seem confusing, and even rewrite historical or literary quotes to remove ambiguity so as to make exams “more accessible”.

If a question uses a word that has more than one meaning when used in different contexts but the question requires you to understand that the word is being used in only one of those contexts then that should be fine. This is emphatically so if that reading of the word is the only way the question make any grammatical sense. That is not the same as being ambiguous. Not to Edexcel apparently. If it uses a word that is more than two syllables but has a precise meaning that is also entirely acceptable. I recall as a child that ones “reading Age “ was determined partly by the vocabulary in use. It is hard to believe that a student will have gleaned a great deal from other sources if their vocabulary is so limited that a text more complicated than Janet and John is beyond them. But again not to Edexcell apparently. Personally I am even happy with ambiguity in questions if the subject of the question is open to interpretation. Demonstrating an understanding of competing views is a sound test.

To rewrite quotes is at best disturbing and at worst sinister and deceitful. I have always loathed revisionism that seeks to make facts more palatable to contemporary tastes as I do think this is dangerously reminiscent of the principles of conformity required by Orwell's infamous thought police. I also despise its reductionism and attempts to render events to a monochrome and binary interpretation as I don't see the world being anything less than complex.

This attitude exam paper construction came to my attention in the context of a debate about dumbing down prior to A Level results being announced last week. The examining body, which seems to have a very clear conflict of interest when it states it wants to effectively increase pass rates, is making a profound and dangerous error in “making exams more accessible”. These methods are simply misunderstanding the nature of knowledge and seeing the knowledge creation process as being a simple binary transaction. It is encouragement of this type of approach which can only compound the problem we have with general literacy levels, and inarticulate conversations punctuated with the persistent use of ”like” and “you know?”

I get exercised by this as it is symptomatic of what lies at the heart of many a failed KM program in business where an unwillingness to engage with an understanding of the knowledge generating process as being a complex one and desiring instead to force it into a simple transactional based model.

Its bad enough when this harms business success, but it is worrying when the flawed thinking begins to damage educational standards. With such twisted standards and low expectation is it any wonder 20% 0f children leave school functionaly illiterate!

The point of an exam is to test and challenge not to be accessible.

Are you some kind of communist?!

Here in Glasgow the funeral of Jimmy Reid yesterday has been cause for much reflection. Over a drink a colleague and I shared our views of him as a man and his political journey from his communist days through his support for the Labour party to his later Nationalist allegiance. We all agreed that he was a fine orator and that his willingness to adjust his standpoint without giving up his fundamental humanity and social conscience was a tribute to his honesty and sincerity. His inauguration speech as Rector of Glasgow University is a fine piece where he speaks of alienation and the fact that we are not “rats.” The fact that people see that his work was grounded in his social conscience and that his creed was not bounded by casually applied labels reminded me of a conversation I had recently after presenting to a group of MBA students on the nature of KM and how it is actually a philosophy rather than a discipline and that philosophy does often require an adjustment to traditional and commonly held management perspectives. I had shared with the students a few examples of successful business leaders and social innovators who had bucked the trend or taken unconventional approaches to problems with remarkable and positive results. It was an eclectic mix. Hans Monderman sat alongside Ricardo Semler, and Dr Egon Zehnder rubbed shoulders with Muhammad Yunus. The point I wanted to make was that the organisations they were going to work for during their careers are made up of people and the challenges they face as managers are complex. So the recipe based models trotted out by many business schools and gobbled up by many of the less critical students are not simple answers that they should mechanistically apply and expect results. I wanted them to understand there are alternatives, that innovation is important, and that knowledge is in fact a verb and is inextricably tied into the application of the human mind to decision making. As such there was a great deal of emphasis placed on how KM is a philosophical approach to management and that often a key part of success in complex environments is providing people with the freedom to act. Now this message was not as welcome to some who had perhaps a more Taylorist understanding of management and a less enlightened view of KM and at one point someone asked “Are you a Communist?” I couldn’t help but smile as it has been a commonly used expression in my life that whenever someone suggests, particularly in a business context and generally in a frustrated environment, a common sense solution to a business issue colleagues would often react in mock horror “Are you some kind of communist?” they would joke, communism clearly being the metaphor for radicalism.

I think that it is wonderful that KM could be viewed afresh as being so radical and it rather made my point that in fact generally KM is very misunderstood, and as a result is often mis applied. But at its heart, regardless of all its labels, true KM is founded in the belief that the most important asset in an organisation is the people associated with it and deriving value from that asset must involve respecting it. There are so many ways we can approach this and the rise of social media tools and their widening use in the workplace is one tremendous opportunity in helping liberate the virtual organisation to greater and greater success.

So, farewell to Jimmy Reid and, as you said mate, we are not rats and the sooner we see our key business assets as not being rats the better for all concerned.

Lets hear it for the Banks

There is still a good deal of bank bashing going on at the moment. Excessive profits, excessive bonuses – you know the stuff. However the main criticism being levelled at them at present Fleet St, politicians and society generally is that they are “not lending” most notably to small businesses. Now, far be it for me to defend the banks. I have a well known and very vocal disregard for most of those institutions but….I do think some of this is a bit tough and unfair at present. The reason for my unlikely defence of the banks lies in the idea that maybe, just maybe, they have woken up to what I have been telling them for the last few years. And that is that much of the financial crisis and the exposure of the banks was a result of the failure to understand the nature of knowledge in their business. Could it be that they have finally realised this?

Anyone that has attended one of my “Let me explain KM” presentations for the past few years are familiar with one of the metaphorical examples I use involving banks and my experience of using them over the past 40 years. I use samples of my correspondence with my banks to demonstrate how my relationship with these institutions has changed over that time and how their knowledge of me has declined to a point where it is simply not possible for them to:
a) offer a decent service and more importantly in this context
b) judge my potential as a risk.

In brief I demonstrate how the retail bank has sought to commoditise the relationship and reduce it to a simple transactional based relationship where the aim is to systematise and drive down cost as if the banking industry were some kind of Taylorist dream of simple causality.

My contention is that this is fundamentally un sound as this industry, and our interaction with it is, if I use the Cynefin framework, a Complex relationship. My early correspondence with the bank showed a real bank manager in place at my branch who knew me, knew my circumstances and could make decisions on my credit worthiness and how the bank could build loyalty by responding to me specific and individual needs. Fast forward to a point where I have no branch, the staff there are administrators with little or no autonomy to act, and so are left with blunt un satisfactory and in flexible transactional based interfaces. They don’t know me, can’t offer a service and, most importantly, can’t judge my risk.

The model can be extended to the commercial banks – with systematised lightning fast trading that is not intelligent enough to cope with the unexpected, and credit rating methods that are both flawed mechanistic tools run by organisations with very conflicted business models.

All a recipe for disaster and disaster naturally struck. Add to this an environment where personal debt was outright encouraged to fuel an artificial boom through consumer spend, and a business environment still foolishly wedded to the “wisdom” of running businesses on geared debt it is a potent mix.

Now that these models have been shown to be flawed and frankly dangerous we should hope that one outcome of the financial crisis would be a return to more human cognition in the banks when judging the risk profile of borrowers as a minimum.

But reintroducing a knowledge led environment in a bank – that is to say one routed in the intervention and application of the Mk1 brain - cannot be done quickly. Whilst proper KM practitioners can help here, developing the intuition, heuristics, and experience necessary to make this effective takes time. So perhaps caution being shown on the part of the banks is a good sign. Perhaps they have recognised that caution is a good thing and that they do need to develop more sophisticated approaches and that the process of doing that will take time. Weaning businesses with poor debt demanding business models will take a bit longer, but requirements on the banks to be less exposed and have greater capital seems also to be having an effect.

Reflective learning is all part of KM as well so I could even be encouraged to think that perhaps these mighty “masters of the universe” might have the humility to acknowledge their mistake and learn from it.

Perhaps I am just being naïve. Leopards rarely change their spots but can we not be hopeful that this caution on lending is actually a good sign?

You mean you made a mistake!

What is this “misspoke” nonsense? It annoys me on a number of levels, as you would expect. For one I see it as a ridiculous Americanism coined by Bilary to cover for the fact that, if we are charitable, she fell into that common transatlantic problem of ignoring the truth, or if we are unkind, she lied. So the charitable could call it The Hollywoodisation of History – you know how it works, when the truth isn’t quiet as palatable or PC enough the ominous phrase “Based on real events” comes up on the opening credits and you are subjected to a couple of hours of total fantasy. As I am not that charitable and because recounting your role in a truly dreadful piece of history involving real death and horror isn’t a “movie” then I tend to call it lying

However, as my opinion of politicians and their propensity to lie is well known this does not surprise me but the most recent use of the “misspoke” word was when a Cameron aid used it to explain away a statement by the PM that Iran “HAS” a nuclear weapon (He got the “I” country wrong by the way he meant Israel of course – but that is a whole different story). And so we come to my second objection to the word and that is that its use is symptomatic of deep seated cultural issues in organisations – and possibly our society – our inability and un willingness to admit mistakes.

In too many organisations to admit a mistake is seen as, well, a mistake. That somehow to admit ones human frailty is to open up a chasm of failure into which one cannot fail to fall. A machismo thing? Maybe. The result of working in a blame culture? Almost certainly. Demonstration of poor trust bonds? Often. The cultural rock on which many KM initiatives founder? Absolutely without question. Whilst such a culture persists it will cause a great deal of procrastination and be a barrier to innovation and action because of the fear of failure and the inevitable subsequent admonition – read blame. It is also a barrier to the ability to learn from mistakes. As we all know we actually learn a great deal more from our mistakes than our successes and as Dave Snowden rightly says in complex environments where there is uncertainty of outcome from interventions we should be seeking to create environments of safe failure rather than fail safe.

I have a good friend who works in a large public sector organisation and his tales of failure to act, endless procrastination, and unwillingness to innovate echo many of my experiences of working with similar groups. None is prepared to put their head above the parapet and actually “do” anything for fear that if it goes wrong the gun sights will swing round to zero in on them. Worse still this unwillingness to actually adopt a position on anything leads to the endless use of vacuous, bland and ultimately meaningless management speak in useless communications which, in turn, simply depress and de-motivate staff who can see through its inanity.

Now there is a great deal that can be done to change this – but it’s tough - and a great deal of what I call KM is concerned with either addressing this directly or introducing approaches that can if not change the culture, finds ways of getting around the barriers that it creates.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that governments are shot through with this type of behaviour given the prevalence of spin, but Cameron to his credit did admit that he got the junior partner quote wrong regarding WWII (too many of those “movies” no doubt) so he is not averse to admitting mistakes apparently. Lets hope the outcome is that the government lexicon has “misspoke” erased and counsel that the word “mistake” is both permissible and human.

Too Big to Succeed?

Governments continue to ponder the introduction of measures aimed at avoiding a repeat of the “too big to fail” scenario of insolvent financial institutions and It will be challenging to bring any such measure in. Lots of compelling argument will be introduced to oppose it and many vested intersts will lobby to stymie such changes.

The arguments for and against are relatively well rehearsed with the exception of one. What about the idea that in actual fact they are too big to succeed?

Now this might seem rather an odd suggestion given that some of the “too big too fail” banks were on the face of it “big” and big tends to be regarded as successful in a business context. But I have long argued that, in knowledge based industries – and I believe banking and finance is a knowledge based industry - big is not necessarily better. I have also argued on a number of occasions that the financial crisis was a failure of those industries in understanding the nature of knowledge management and knowledge based business generally.

I remember working with a professional services firm that had extremely strong social and trust networks in it. It worked very hard on these bonds with rigorous recruitment practices, unusual reward schemes and extensive reinforcement and encouragement programs to maintain them.

But they had a problem. As they competed in an increasingly global market they had expanded in both headcount and geographical spread and these bonds, this community, was becoming strained and threatened. As a KM engagement we were looking at ways to try to retain that key cultural plank as the company grew. It was a challenge, but it was inspiring to encounter a firm that recognised how important this human relationship model was and is to their success, and believe me this was a successful firm. Scale was a problem.

The advantage that “small” can bring to knowledge based firms by embedding trust and enhancing pooled human cognition is, in my view, enormous. And I am not alone in saying this. Gor-Tex for example apparently try to limit office sizes to 150.

Much of this ties into the so called Dunbar numbers and to try to ignore it would be to fly in the face of many thousands of years of evolution. Of course there are many things that can be done to allow companies to grow, but I do think there is a limit.

Bujt it seems to me that too often as companies in knowledge based industries choose to scale up there is a tendency to try to commoditise what they do and to try to systematise complex decision making away from what is required – i.e. the application of the human brain. They seem to be applying management models of simply analysing and reducing transaction costs that were useful in a previous industrial but are less relevant in a knowledge based value adding environment.

So I say lets chop the banks into bits not only to avoid the “too big to fail” dilemma, but because they will probably perform better.

Kitchen Sink Economics?

Once again it seems that those who wish to deny the fundamentals and buck the obvious are being found out. The scorn of the powerful for simple truths has always irritated me.

A couple of years ago now I gave a lecture at my old business school where I talked about the financial crisis as a demonstration of the failure by the financial sector to understand Knowledge Management. To illustrate this I described my own personal experience or retail banking and how it had changed, and what that told me about the industries perception of, and approach to, risk and how I had expected, and predicted, the implosion. You cannot beat the mark one brain for bringing contextual insight and judgement to the complexity of risk. The would be Masters of the Universe in finance are just one more common example in business of those wearing the emperors new clothes. The only difference being is that in many cases I think some are aware they are naked (making their crime all the worse in my book), and there are some who are simply unwilling to listen to the lone voice that tells them they are.

Alas it seems to be happening again. Many people, me included, expressed considerable doubt about EMU and the launch of the Euro on the basis that it denied the existence of some fundamental flaws. Those being in this case - you cannot bring together economies that are radically out of step, remove the ability to respond locally to issues by effectively removing financial levers and expect it all to go well. Add to that the fact that you cant live beyond your means indefinitely as an individual or as a nation without consequences. Of course the powers that be said that this was not so, some how these basic rules didn't really apply in their new freakonomics world, and in any case the checks and balances were there that ensured that the economies were sufficiently converged to make this no problem. Yea right – obviously.

The other day there was a news report describing how modern attitudes to debt is different to the baby boomers attitude. Different to the extent that people now take on debt with little or no intention of ever paying it off, just spinning the financial plates. Well, let me say for the record – I don't agree and I tweeted it as a council of despair. Well, it seems that some nations and organisations seem to believe they can adopt the same notion and perhaps a nation actually defaulting on its debt is seen as not too important. I take no great pleasure in saying this or seeing the problems amount in Europe, but the situation with Greece will get worse. The situation in Germany will also get worse as it becomes increasingly obvious that many of the bail outs of the PIGS are flawed and going to land at the door of the German tax payer. Look at NAMA in Ireland as a perfect example.

Sometimes it is worth cutting through the crap that gets trotted out as the wisdom of the rich and powerful men in suits and remind them that many of the things necessary in life and business are learnt at kindergarten and basic economics is included.

The revenge of the machines

I love this. For all the acolytes of technology and AI in particular, here is a salutary reminder of why human cognition is the key to solving complex business issues.

Robot folds a towel.

Making those knowledge disclosure points as effective, accurate and as timely as possible is the aim of KM or KAM (Knowledge Aware Management) as I sometime like to refer to it. That is very distinct from a) information management, or b) installing search engines.

For the record it actually took the robot around 25 minutes to fold the towel.