Conversations
with David Snowden
Practice and
Communication
of 3rd Generation Knowledge Management
Table of Contents (Click on list item to go
directly to each topic)
Part III: Postscript Between Snowden,
Ash
Part
III: Conversation Between Snowden, Ash
 Personalization
of Knowledge Management
Jerry
Ash: What
is happening in the workplace that supports the notion that the
focus is shifting from knowledge as a "thing" which
can be captured and cataloged to the management of knowledge
ecology?
David
Snowden:
In terms of changes in the market place, I see the increasing
failure of second generation solutions, the idea that knowledge
can be disembodied from people's heads and made an organisation's
asset is falling into disrepute due to the frequent lack of shared
context, and the reluctance of any knowledge holder to disclose
what they know other than in the context of a question.
Jerry
Ash: I am
gratified that my own deep disbelief that "capturing"
individual knowledge for the benefit of the organization was
a bad idea. In fact, I thought all along that such a strategy
was extremely harmful to the ultimate goal of building a trusting,
mutually respectful environment in which knowledge sharing and
growing could occur.
I'd like to believe
that the corporate world is seeing the error and moving in the
direction of an individual/company collaborative model. But I'd
still like some proof. Is it only that "mind mining"
has fallen into disrepute, or does it also mean that the dynamics
of the human factor has been accepted and acted upon. If so,
that would be a major concession from management that "knowledge"
can't be captured, owned, manipulated and managed as the organization's
own intellectual capital -- just as physical assets were managed
in the past. Can you give me some examples of companies that
are moving forward in the 3rd Generation? Are there known practices
that will help us move in that direction with our own KM programs?
One example may
be the U.S. Postal Service's portal project piloted by John
Gregory, our first Leading Light in the AOK series just launched
this month. John is talking about transforming how the US Postal
Service's marketing and sales people work in context with information
and knowledge available to them. Is that the 3rd Generation you
are talking about? Where else is the blend of explicit and tacit
knowledge beginning to take shape? How long do you think it will
take the executives in our organizations to accept such a sea
change in corporate culture? Too many haven't discovered Gen
1 or Gen 2 yet. Maybe that's good -- they can fast track to Gen
3. Or must they all follow the same faulty path?
Dave, I'm expressing
these frustrations because I know many of our members experience
them every day. They are still engaged in stealth KM where corporate
leadership has not traveled far enough through Gen 1 and 2 to
reach Gen 3.
David
Snowden:
A point Jerry expressed: "That would be a major concession
from management that 'knowledge' can't be captured, owned, manipulated
and managed as the organization's own intellectual capital."
Actually that's
not what I argued for; some knowledge can be captured, owned,
manipulated etc. The focus of the second generation of codification
is not wrong per se, there are many things that we can and should
do in this area.
My argument is against
the assumed universality of that approach both in Business Process
Re-engineering and second generation knowledge management. There
is some knowledge that can never be codified, some knowledge
that can be codified but shouldn't be to maintain a dynamic model
and some knowledge which should always be codified.
The issue is to
separate context from narrative from content; each is different,
each has different possibilities and opportunities.
Jerry asks: "Can
you give me some examples of companies that are moving
forward in the 3rd
Generation?"
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American
Pragmatism Stifles Innovation
Dave
Snowden:
I'm always wary of giving examples, although at various times
we have used the principles of 3rd generation with companies
such as Thames Water, Syngeta, English Nature, Aventis, DARPA
funded projects on strategy via the US Government, several government
agencies in Singapore, one major US software company (sensitive
about the use of their name) -- I could go on at length. None
of them has taken up 3rd generation as a "thing" because
they have also grown out of the management fad phase that has
plagued business, particularly in the US where there is almost
an evangelical adoption of a succession of ideas from BPR to
KM.
Slightly tongue
in cheek, I'd also attack American pragmatism as stifling innovation.
I can give practical examples, but then people just want to copy
them. What we are doing here is creating a set of heuristic concepts
that can create unique solutions, rather than applying so-called
best or actual past practice. One of the principles of complexity
is that it challenges the generalisation of past practice into
reusable models, what I call "recipe book" consulting.
Jerry said: "I
know many of our members experience them (frustrations) every
day. They are still engaged in stealth KM where corporate leadership
has not traveled far enough through Gen 1 and 2 to reach Gen
3.
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Dealing
with Lagging Generations
Dave
Snowden:
My experience is that this is only a problem where people try
and sell KM as a concept to managers. My approach is very simple.
We first map what people know -- that uses narrative techniques,
as interviews break the rule that "people only know what
they know when they need to know it." To ask people what
they know is to ask a meaningless question in a meaningless context.
The map is a dependency
matrix between knowledge assets and core processes from which
we isolate two types of knowledge projects: ones in which many
assets have to be managed to support a single process (easy to
sell, difficult to do) and ones where the management of a single
asset impacts many processes (easy to do, difficult to sell).
A knowledge strategy
is a portfolio of such projects in which the priority goes to
managing assets on which a key process has a high dependency,
but where the asset is vulnerable to loss. This process takes
eight weeks with the client staff doing the work part time (no
more than 10 percent) with someone like myself monitoring and
coaching through workshops at the start, end and middle.
Once this is complete,
each project is justified in its own right, based on business
priorities. This may then grow into a broader KM project, but
such a project emerges through the interactions and impacts of
the different projects. Once complete there is no need for stealth.
You are more likely to be asked why you didn't do something earlier
(at which point, do not say that you have been trying to for
some time, but say "yes sir" and swallow hard).
If an organisation
cannot afford such a simple process then their awareness is so
low you'd be better looking for another job. A problem is that
too many of the large consultancies just role out the old approaches
they used for process, quality, etc., when they look at knowledge
and all the organisation gets is another jargon ridden consultancy
report pontificating about best practices, and the like, which
just doesn't understand the nature of knowledge.
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All Ecologies
Have Predators
David
Snowden:
Jerry used the words: "sea change in corporate culture?"
The switch to complexity
thinking is a major change -- it's as great as the impact of
Taylorism and will take time to impact. We already know that
an increasing number of blue chip companies are getting involved.
IBM's decision to fund me to set up a new Centre for Complexity
and Narrative would have been unthinkable some years ago but
has now happened. But don't make the mistake of thinking that
because companies recognise the importance of human agents they
will become more humane. All ecologies have their predators.
Jerry
Ash: In
today's post, you wrote: "I use narrative techniques to
contextualise the model for a company so the heuristics and boundary
conditions are defined not in some abstract language, but are
rooted in the defining stories of that organisation."
I'm very interested
in how something like that reads. I consider myself a professional
communicator, and yet I share with all KMers a difficulty in
being able to "contextualize," as you put it, the potential
of KM in the existing hierarchy of an organization. Can you give
us a brief glimpse of (or a link to) a narrative that defines
the organization that way? Or tell us more about how to construct
such a narrative.
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Contextualizing
Narrative Is Not Journalism
Dave Snowden: You're thinking as a journalist!
You want a single narrative. Contextualisation doesn't work like
that.
With the Cynefin
model for example I will start with a series of story workshops,
no more than a couple of hours each spread over some weeks using
a sample of the organisations I am working with. Those sessions
will focus on the finding examples from the organisations own
past that represent the extreme situations that they have face
and might face. I also use alternative history techniques to
move the group to imagine situations agreed as highly improbable
-- this is easier to do in a fiction setting based on the past
than in an hypothesis of the future where politics and ambition
inevitably intrude.
I will then in a
single two-day workshop populate a white space with the various
examples gleaned from the supporting workshops, on the basis
of a simple logarithmic grid on the four extremes of known, knowable,
complex and chaotic. Once this is done, the boundaries between
the spaces are drawn, and the examples closest to the boundaries
are used to create a set of border definitions.
Working this way
the model has emerged from the collective actual and imagined
histories of the organisation, in stark contrast to many consultancy
models that attempt to shift the organisation into an abstract
context.
This is a big issue
for management, not just in KM. We tend to take methods and tools
from other organisations, or in summaries (biased by the researcher)
of what has happened in other organisations and then attempt
to imitate "best practice." This is not contextually
rooted and leads to miscommunication and inauthentic behaviour.
Multiple other experiences heard without an indication as to
the their merit -- positive or negative -- can be a legitimate
stimulus, but a statement of "the way" does not recognise
the multiple histories that make up the cultural context of the
organisation.
In our work we never
apply a recipe, we use heuristics derived from multiple experiences
to enable the creation of context sensitive models in which the
consultant acts as a facilitator of descriptive self awareness
-- not analysis, no prescriptive models.
This does require
a conceptual shift to a new level of simplicity. The danger is
that for most people, carrying on the way they have grown used
to, appears simple, but is in fact simplistic. If they make the
mental shift to a new concept, then it becomes simple; this has
been the case throughout the history of ideas, with conservative
forces delaying the adoption of new ways of working.
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 Part
I: 3rd Generation Knowledge Management
Part
II: Extended Discussion on KM Communication
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