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.

A Path a way from Linked In

I am a great advocate of Social Media and its power to unleash what I refer to as Social Knowledge. I am also constantly reminded of how you can count on its emergent properties to evolve ever new, rapid and exciting developments, even if it road there can be a bit bumpy sometimes. A fantastic example of that has come to my attention just today with the news of a new service called Path a service that sounds like it might go some way to overcoming the limitations of some of the SM tools that have grown out of their usefulness for some specific purposes.

I also thought Linked In would be as good. I loved it at first, thinking that the way people to open their key networks up for sharing seemed a superb tool. Technology was underpinning and expanding a well used tried and tested idea of personal recommendation. Personal recommendation works on the basis of trust tagging – that is to say if you trust the person that is making the recommendation a bit of that trust is handed on to the person they are recommending. There is judgement there is a knowledge activity involved.

Great ideas. But for me Linked In was scuppered as a knowledge tools when it became apparent that some felt that a public demonstration of huge numbers of links was a metric of success thereby launching a to my mind ridiculous expansion where people linked to pretty much anyone they met meaning that their ability to judge trust and tag was useless. Similarly the mutual recommendation became viral and so, from a knowledge perspective, in the way I imagined it to be used, Linked In became useless. A number of SM tools have gone this way where their success means that there is too much noise for them to be useful in the way I originally envisioned them. However must I confess that meeting the highly insightful Adam Gordon of Winning Work really was an eye opener where he demonstrated tremendous knowledge value from Linked in – but in a quiet different application of the tool from the way ion which I had originally welcomed it.

But for my original wants it remained useless and I argues that Linked In needed to introduce a new service that reflected Dunbar's Numbers and allowed you to express a real trusted core of links that was constrained and validated.

As is the way with Social Media – wait a little while and something comes along and Path it is. Sounds brilliant, not least because it is based on Dunbar’s thinking. Only problem is it requires an iphone, something I don’t have or want. Ah well wait a while and an Android equivalent will come along – it’s just the way of things! You can read more about it here.

Lets unleash the power of market forces

It is so entertaining to hear that banks are in “secret talks” about reigning in bonuses from £7bn to £4bn amid concerns that any precipitate action might drive “star performers overseas” as if this is some kind of crisis and that we should be concerned about it. The usual media campaign to try to convince us the City is somehow populated by “special” people.

I say – Let em go! There are plenty more to replace them!

If the financial crisis that befell us a couple of years ago taught us anything at all it taught us that this cosy club of financial “star performers” are not quite as stellar as they think. For those of us who have had the dubious pleasure of mixing with these types it rapidly becomes obvious that, far from being special or particularly gifted, they are in fact a bunch of lucky Joes who by chance, privileged, happenstance, greed (select as appropriate, multiple selection permitted) who found themselves in the fortunate position to enter into their self delusion because it is financially beneficial for to them to do so. Eventually they do actually start believing their own publicity and the emperor changes clothes regularly.

I have always felt that whilst Gorden Geko got most of the best lines in Wall Street the absolute cracker was that of Carl Fox – as played by Martin Sheen when he said “What you see is a guy who never measured a man's success by the size of his wallet!” a guide to life we should all adopt.

In much the same way the Beeb needs to happily wave bye bye to presenters with high opinions of themselves and exaggerated salary demands because the actual truth is they ain’t that special and frankly there are plenty of people queuing up to do the same thing for a lot less.

So to these advocates of the free market and market forces generally I say this – Go! Move along. I am confident that plenty of others will fill your space thereby flooding the market with so called “star performers” and, by your own logic, this will drive down the price you can command. In the words of software geeks let the banks “eat their own dog food.”

Think of it, lines of fund managers lining up at the bank gates to be picked for day work every morning, having boot polished their frayed cuffs to look presentable. Now there is a thought.

Price, Choice and Cost

Its national “Get On Line week” and it is aimed at encouraging the 9 million UK people who don't have access to the internet and so are “missing out” on public services at lower cost. We even have The Archers being harnessed for Big Brothers propaganda. Such tosh and a monumental con, and I say this as someone who is a fan of the online world. It is another example of the obsession with price whilst ignorant of cost. We see this approach increasingly, I recall someone trying to walk into a Job Centre and look for work to be told they could only do that if they first registered and that you could only register by phone. Absurd. Taking services away from Sub Post Offices to purely online modes erodes the viability of these social hubs which have an impact on the integrity of communities.

Its slightly ironic when today we have a “revelatory” announcement that Cyber Terrorism ranks as a major threat to National Security.

But its not just the public sector. Supermarkets tell us they are giving us “choice” and “meeting customer need” by providing self service checkouts. The reality is that manned check-outs close, choice is reduced and most importantly someone loses at job all for what? The illusory benefit of lower prices at the ignorance of the greater longer term cost.

I recall working in a Public Library in London many years ago. It was striking that so many people came to the library as a social event, away of meeting people, the chance of some human interaction, the reason for a walk. Borrowing or returning books was entirely secondary to this group, but the service we provided was absolutely essential.

Doing things online to the exclusion of other means, and self service everything, is a progressive attack on personal interaction and a mechanism of introducing exclusion and reducing choice. The end result is that we have to put up with fatuous initiatives such as “Get On Line Week” to try to twist the arm of many who simply do not want, and should not need, to.

We must never under estimate the value of social, and I mean face to face, interaction. The very simple solution to the concerns of bureaucrats behind “Get On line Week” is to ensure that ALL public services are available at the same cost in off line mode to everyone.

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.

Shared Concerns

I read these words with interest the other day.

"Today, more than never before, the economic battle is the main task , because it is on this work that the sustainability and the preservation of our social system rest.

Without a sound and dynamic economy and without the removal of superfluous expenses and waste, it will neither be possible to improve the living standard of the population nor to preserve and improve the high levels of education and healthcare ensured to every citizen free of charge.

If the people do not feel the need to work for a living because they are covered by extremely paternalistic and irrational regulations, we will never be able to stimulate love for work or resolve the chronic lack of workers; teachers, police and other indispensable trades.

If we do not build a firm and systematic rejection of illegal activities and different expressions of corruption, more than a few will continue to make fortunes at the expense of the majority.

If we keep the inflated payrolls in nearly every sector of national life and pay salaries that fail to correspond with the result of work we cannot expect the prices to cease climbing constantly or prevent the deterioration of the people’s purchasing power."

Now these don't come from Manchester or Liverpool and are not a sneak preview of what's to come in Birmingham. But the sentiment and general thrust of it could be used, I suggest, at anyone of them.

I have always been struck more by the similarities between peoples across history, geographies, and ideologies than the differences. Reading Chaucer I find behind the Germanic language characters that are readily identifiable to me today. Travelling the world you meet people whose concerns and aspirations are much the same as ours. Looking at early business history I see the same concerns and issues being grappled with as modern entrepreneurs face, albeit mediated through different technology. It is that belief that we have more in common than we often give credit to that I think is both hopeful and positive. I also believe that Social Media, when used well and appropriately is a wonderful tool to help us to nurture and tap into shared enthusiasm, shared innovation and shared prosperity.

Oh and who said those words – General Raul Castro Ruz.

Emergent Reporting

Maybe it is the ghastly weather in Glasgow that makes me cast my mind back to that lovely balmy evening in Matera that I mentioned in my Blog after the IFKAD 2010 conference. I had a conversation with Rob McLean of Matrix Links on what we described as “emergent reporting” and promised to elaborate on it. Well better late than never here it is.

Rob is a leading thinker on financial reporting and valuation of intangibles and we were considering how the use of Social Media (SM) could influence financial reporting as it has already affected Marketing and Communications. One of the most profound impacts of SM is how it changes the dynamic in communications. Traditionally Communications has been a case of establishing the message and then managing the channels that carry that consistent message to the eager and waiting public. The theory being that if you manage it enough and are consistent enough the message will eventually get home.

The rise of SM and its viral power and emergent nature means that it is simply not possible to manage it in the traditional way. It is by definition unmanageable. Communications are democratised to the extent that it has become essential for communicators to listen and then respond to the emerging view and in this way the exchange becomes a conversation and the dynamic of the relationship is completely changed. The benefit is that by listening to this complex environment previously invisible insight can be made visible, and in so doing it can open up new possibilities and opportunities that would otherwise have remained hidden.

How might this effect financial reporting? Well Rob and I considered and agreed that reporting is, in its current mode, a communications exercise. It has an agenda to present a particular view of the financial position of an organisation to a variety of stakeholder groups.

Now this leads to debate and varied interpretations. In some cases it has implications in markets, and brand value from a CSR perspective. Part of the challenge is that these different stakeholders have different needs and interests, and will be looking at different things in the figures. It is difficult to prepare a statement that will please all parties.

So, our idea was how about putting raw data out there and let the various parties derive their own reports. So the deal is, you can have the data as long as you provide us with the report back. We can then analyse your reports. The dynamic is entirely changed and as a result the organisation would gain deep insight into what each group was looking for by the way it used the raw data, and be able to respond directly to each groups concerns. This type of emergent reporting would be underpinned by social media tools and create a completely new reporting model.

I don’t expect it to happen in the short term, but it is, in my view, an interesting idea. And for those that say it will never happen, I say that I recall people saying how communications and marketing weren’t going to be changed by SM.