As someone who has spent nearly all his working life in the public service, the above heading is heretical.  Medical students are taught “First, do No Harm” but public servants and politicians too often strive to do something, anything, when a problem arises.  Often the best course is to let things work out for themselves.  Markets have an uncanny knack of correcting themselves (often precipitously), but within certain bounds, effectively. 

Now this is not a piece on Government Bad, Markets Good.  Government intervention in many instances is warranted, effective and applauded.  But if there is one thing that the Cynefin framework has taught me is that people are not machines, societies are not aggregations of machines, and that unintended consequences of government actions can often be worse than inaction. 

A recent article in the Washington Post (thanks Andrew Leigh for the link) points out areas where government intervention has failed because people “regularly respond to those interventions in contrarian, paradoxical and unpredictable ways”.  The article further notes that policies that make people feel safer actually encourage more risk taking behaviour (citing driver airbags, bike helmets, drugs and obesity, etc) suggesting that targeted interventions aimed at particular sections of the population will have a greater effect.  One size fits all does not work in clothing stores - and it does not work with public policy either. 

Systemic interventions require trial and evaluation - something that policy experts are notoriously poor on.  At the very least, they require a fundamental reflection about the unintended consequences of the actions rather than simplistic cause-effect models.  Foresight tools can really help in this area.   

Generally, government regulation is in response to market failure.  Sometimes that direction reverses with market failure the result of government regulation.  Investigating these system dynamics and how they change over time is key.  Too often, regulation is aimed at garnering equilibrium in markets rather than allowing for innovation which may overcome the initial problem.

Food for thought for all you policy wonks out there.

Came across a really good site recently regarding the new web products and linking them with Government activities, or as they put it, technology-enabled public sector transformation.  theConnectedRepublic.org has been developed by Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group and consists of a multitude of references from whitepapers, videos, blog, wiki and forums. 

One of the blog authors is Martin Stewart Weeks who I met when I attended some of the Office of the Chief Information Officer events with the Victorian Government.  It’s great to see them continuing their work on a global scale. 

Their recent focus has been on social innovation with posts on the Social Innovation International Congress including this good post on Geoff Mulgan’s 10 theses for social innovation.  I particularly like his #4 and #5 which state the system for turning promising ideas to scale is inadequate and far inferior to those in science and business and that many fields can contribute methods and insights to social innovation.

A couple of synchronous events recently.  First, I was having a chat with one of the senior managers at work the other day about the two different approaches to IT, one that focuses on infrastructure, workflow and standard processes, and the other (which I am more involved with) on self-publishing, wikis and emergent conversations and collaboration.  Then I noticed in one of Andrew McAfee’s recent posts (on a great conference on Inventing the Future of Management) where he talked about exactly those different types of IT, a first one that imposes work structures and then the Web 2.0 technologies that instead, let those structures emerge. 

McAfee prefaces his comments with the view that this newly-available toolkit of corporate IT gives managers two diametrically opposed abilities and that companies and managers that accept this duality are going to stand out over time.   In other words, they need to “transcend and include” those two seemingly opposing approaches.  Contextual analysis like using Cynefin is really handy here to make sure that the best approach is adopted for the applicable environment and not try and cram all issues into the one type of technology.

On a similar tack, I recently read Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything which explores the emergent side of IT.  So it was nice to notice that my last post on coordination, cooperation and collaboration was actually picked up on the Wikinomics blog! 

It’s been about 4 weeks since the last post as I have been in Australia on some R&R including coming down with a dose of pneumonia which left me feeling very flat and delaying my return to Dubai.  But back now in Dubai and committed to lots of posts over the next 4 weeks!

And this first one refers to a recent post over at Anecdote on the difference between collaboration and cooperation.  Shawn asked me for my views and I mentioned that collaboration is a bit deeper than cooperation.  So I felt Ok about that view when looking at a recent post over at Wikinomics referring to differences between coordination, cooperation and collaboration. The figure that they link to from an Economist Intelligence Unit article on the role of trust in business collaboration compares these three items and posits a sort of hierarchy between them with coordination on narrow goals, cooperation on broad but mandated goals and collaboration on shared and common goals where trust is highest, with new value being created that accrues to each party, and with high levels of commitment and specialisation.  This echoes my view of collaboration involving more “shared meaning and purpose with smarts. ”

The original EIU article sponsored by Cisco is quite good, based on a survey, and identifies that collaboration is often used to describe what are really cooperative and coordination level tasks as organisations attempt to cash in on the collaboration buzzword.  But collaboration is a higher order activity, one that is more bottom up and where trust is a key ingredient.  A definitional issue, sort of like the difference between KM and IM (and I won’t go there!).

In yet another long actKM discussion between Joe Firestone and David Snowden, Alan Dyer recently wondered whether an upended box of matchsticks on the floor was complex or chaos.  I wrote back stating that it was just a heap but if someone came along and rearranged them then it would be an artifact. 

Let’s extend the comment from Stephen Bounds that “once the potential energy is dissipated, then as Luke says, they’re just a heap” into the knowledge arena.

Joe Firestone’s blog title is “All life is problem solving”.  A different purpose as quoted by Scott Sampson in a chapter in the book “What is Your Dangerous Idea?” states:

“The purpose of life is to disperse energy.”

My wife and I gave a presentation which took a rather different and somewhat eccentic perspective on KM at the 2006 actKM conference when we talked about knowledge energies and the energy of knowledge.  In summary, we took the view that knowledge has properties that have the potential to unleash energy if tapped and also contain the properties of flow and dynamics that can be observed in well-run knowledge processes in teams.  Energy flows in organisations like meridian channels in bodies (that are used in acupuncture) - unseen, difficult to objectively measure, and that when blocked require some form of appropriate therapy.

This perspective links to chaos and complexity.  If the purpose of a complex or chaotic system is to disperse the energy within it, then it can be surmised that the un-ordered nature of these systems provide significant opportunities for the release of large amounts of energy (for niceness or evil!).  The increasing complexity in modern organisations is from attempts to grab more of the energy in the system and harness its potential.  So within emergence and chaos lie the energy of opportunity and innovation whereas within order lies a far more limited, prescribed and linear energetic channel.  Both are useful and context-sensitive – hence the power of the Cynefin framework as a social sense-making tool to identify those possibilities and engage people in exploring those opportunities.

Nice diagram on this post over at Visionary Marketing that plots various types of Web 2.0 social software on a pair of axes of interactivity and e-commerce. 

I particularly like the vertical line of blogs through forums and online discussions to wikis, increasing interactivity all the way through that line - and also that fully fledged e-commerce sites have little interactivity.

When I was working for the National Office for the Information Economy, we focused much of the work on e-commerce and building B2B partnerships between organisations in sectors to improve productivity.  This linked with clustering from an industry development viewpoint.  What was often missed here though was the link to customers and the democratisation of the value chain.  There is far more of this happening now with customers and clients being included directly in product design or concepts.  We started to do some work way back then on e-democracy as a method to incorporate online citizen feedback into policy development but it was all too hard back then. 

A couple of weeks ago I read Theodore Zeldin’s book on Conversation with my curiosity piqued by the David Gurteen Knowledge Cafe.  Zeldin describes conversation as a meeting of minds, of a dialogue between two people.  Conversations require opening ourselves to strangers, broadening our curiosity and he highlights the importance of courage.  At a recent conference that I helped organise, one of the keynotes requested the senior managers in attendance to go away and have just one courageous conversation in the next 24 hours. 

Zeldin particularly values conversations which are meetings on the borderline of what I understand and what I don’t, with people who are different from myself.  On the other hand, he considers conversation with yourself as full of risk – because you have to decide how much to enhance your ideas with imagination.  Lucky I have a good imagination otherwise it would be a very boring conversation!

One quote leaped out at me though from page 88: “Conversation needs pauses, thoughts need time to make love”.  I guess that argues against wham bam thank you ma’am type conversations and argues for the sensual and protracted conversations.  It is the pauses that often allows one to collect their thoughts, encourages the introverted to come forward and deepens the thread.  So is conversation then a meeting of minds like sex is a meeting of bodies?  Does this accord in some way with Patrick’s inclination towards Touch KM – with perhaps just a modicum less intimacy?  Or could it be that I have been simply too long away from home and my wife and that the conversation with myself is getting carried away by my imagination? 

Now in speaking to a very learned gentleman (RH) on this, Zeldin’s book is just commonsense.  Of course I agree!  But it often serves to be reminded of that.  It’s just like managing people is just commonsense but a shame that too many managers leave their commonsense at home.

actKM has had a recent discussion on the topic of wisdom management.  Patrick and Matt have blogged on the topic and I thought I would put in my 2 cents worth.  I mentioned in my note on actKM that a futures report by the UK Chartered Management Institute envisaged a probable future where technologies for capturing wisdom and wisdom management will emerge.  They stated that knowledge and wisdom management will be key to organisational success. And even more - wisdom will become a valuable resource so organisations will want to access the societal, cultural and organisational memory via practices such as organisational rituals, gatherings and accounts of long-term employees. This tacit knowledge can be accessed via storytelling, anecdotes and case studies. Organisations must increasingly use products and solutions that facilitate wisdom.

The above sounds a bit like some of the later developments in knowledge management to me.  But let’s explore what wisdom management could be.  If the purpose of KM is about improved decision making and innovation, what would wisdom management be about?  Is there a different purpose?  Joe and Serena in their actKM posts seem to think that WM would be more about reducing errors in decision models or making great decisions.  I tend to disagree but more on that later.

There seemed to be general agreement  on actKM not to link the two words wisdom and management together (although I would not mind working in a Wisdom Management Department to be able to say I work in WMD – but then perhaps wisdom management might be a weapon of mass destruction in its own right).  On this track, I have had discussions with others that KM is not about the management of knowledge but the nurturing of an environment where knowledge can be created, shared and where K can flourish (ecosystem model).  So similarly, wisdom management could be the development of an environment where wisdom can be shared and nurtured?

Now all this leads on to the juicy topic of what is this wisdom thing anyway.  And what makes a person wise rather than just knowledgeable?  Wisdom involves ethics, sincerity and cutting through the crap.  Wisdom has more to do with advice, mentoring and life-long learning.  What passes as wisdom for one person is knowledge for another, and is just plain common-sense for another person.  Wisdom is different to consilience (the coming together of knowledge from different domains).

I agreed with Patrick that wisdom tends to be experiential and individual and is difficult to scale.  It has a lot to do with learning and with leadership.  It takes time and is entirely dependent on the journey of the recipient of the wisdom. 

This journey aspect is particularly important.  The Getting of Wisdom is not so much about the destination (as making better decisions) but the journey of getting there – it is more about one’s own lived story and how that unfolds over time and the role of wisdom through mentors and an innate curiosity.

Wisdom and wisdom management may not clarify things in the first instance.  It may be that you need to develop and change your values / beliefs in order to be at a level to receive that wisdom.  Wisdom could be what you look back in hindsight as major transformative learning points in your life.  It could be the spark that confused you and that you had to undertake learning to bridge that paradox and ambiguity.  In this sense case then, true wisdom would be relatively rare whereas knowledge is relatively common (and I don’t mean common sense!).  Wisdom may also involve being reminded of what we have forgotten. 

For many, wisdom has a sense of the spiritual about it as it is personal, to do with lifelong journeys and transformation.  It’s not just head stuff.  It requires courage and curiosity to listen to wisdom.  And sometimes, there may not be anything there anyway (the concept of zen). 

Well, that’s my take on wisdom and wisdom management/leadership  anyway!  I can’t see it taking off anytime soon but you never know with the baby boomers and cultural creatives and downshifters with time and money on their hands, that there might be something in it.  But once it is commoditised, the magic may be lost!

Sometimes you see a couple of reports that are diametrically opposed to one another that have significant implications for our future.

One the one hand, there was a report quoting one of Australia’s top neurosurgeons who said that heavy use of mobile phones could double the risk of brain cancer and that immediate and decisive steps need to be taken.

But on the same page at the time, there was a link in the latest technological coverage of an interview with Martin Cooper, the inventor of mobile phones, who dreams of embedded wireless devices that can be powered by your body and help diagnose and cure illness. 

Now is there a link here?  Isn’t there a potential of radiation poisoning if we embed radiation-emitting devices in our bodies.  Personally, I have a concern over the amount of radiation that we are experiencing, particularly from mobile communications devices (note embedded devices like pacemakers are a different story).  Possibly some form of low radiation device that links with a more powerful device that you wear around your ankle might be better.  Just a note of caution to limit the use of these things - particularly for children.    

Been a very popular discussion on actKM over the past few days on that hoary chestnut of a topic - the differences between information and knowledge, and whether the IM department in an organisation should have carriage over knowledge management.

Earlier this evening (my time here in Dubai), Dave wrote a great post explaining his views of the differences and I thought I would record them here (as I am terrible at trying to find things later in the emails).  It articulated far better than I could many of my views on the matter.

Lets address the question of knowledge and information afresh, taking your latest will elaborate working below.

Firstly let me make it clear that it is not an either/or between a position (i) they are mutually exclusive concepts and (ii) they are a superset/subset one of the other.  Some knowledge can be partially represented as information (and reused as such), some cannot.  As you know I dislike the DIKW model as it implies a hierarchy, and a KI model would be equally bad.   So let me assert a different position.

1 - I am happy with the general concept that information is a form of structured data which is intended to inform in a communication process of some type.  This may be pull-push, direct, indirect etc.

2 - I see no utility in statements that information is knowledge that leads to action and the like - all basic variants of DIKW.

3 - I do see utility in understanding the different between what it means to manage knowledge and what it means to manage information.  I normally do that with a metaphor of the difference between using a london taxi (knowledge) and a map (information) to get around London.    The map is data which has been structured to inform and if I share sufficient context with the map maker then it informs me and I can take action on it.   I can also get a taxi where not only has the taxi driver internalised the map, but lots of other things as well.  There is for example evidence of significant changes in the Hippocampus in London Taxi Drivers as a result of the two plus years of training they go through.   Compete with a taxi driver (as a map user with a hire car) and you will loose.  The map may get you there, but the assumption of shared context can be dangerous.  I once used a map in New York and almost got mugged for exactly that reason.   Its like the point on french cuisine - you may have the recipe but that is just a starting point it is not complete of itself.

4 - knowledge enables me to interpret information.  If I acquire knowledge of management accounting then a chart of accounts informs me, if I have no such knowledge then it is data.  Knowledge management this has, as one of its primary tasks the creation of sufficient shared knowledge to enable the use of information.

5 - a large body of knowledge requires more than information in the form of recipes, it may take years of experience (often of tolerated failure) for the brain to acquire sufficient patterns to make sense of the world.  It may require the muscular and other sensory systems to adapt and evolve.   I can give you a book on how to plaster a wall and the right tools but you will make a mess of the job (I know this have conducted some controlled experiments with people who advocated your position in the past).

So overall this is a complex issue.  Knowledge and Information work in different ways and with each other.  Two who options you pose are both wrong.

Now if you drop down to a near signal approach (which I think Joe is doing as well but not in the sense of Shannon that is a difference between you) then the concept of information becomes meaningless outside the context of biology.  Yes all cells exchange information but at this level all things are in effect information processors of various types.   The reason the language is used differently in management and social systems is that information is a useful concept, considered as data taken through a process of abstraction to the point of codification.  So I think if you take that position then your approach is vulnerable to a reductio ad absurdum counter argument.

Overall the information and knowledge are different but overlapping concepts that need to be distinguished.  The management of knowledge is a function of all aspects of an organisation.  The management of structured and codified information is the responsibility of the IT or IM department.  By linking the two in the way you have suggested you encourage the view that knowledge can be codified information which as I said before is not only wrong but downright dangerous.

Dave Snowden
Founder & Chief Scientific Officer
Cognitive Edge Pte Ltd

Now blogging at
www.cognitive-edge.com