You want to plan a face to face event for your Community of Practice in order to transfer knowledge, but which event style do you select?

You want to plan a face to face event for your Community of Practice in order to transfer knowledge, but which event style do you select?

This reprised blog post is a reminder of that amazing example of free and open knowledge sharing that is Radiopaedia

X-ray published in ABC news, taken from Radiopaedia

As described in this fascinating article,   Radiopaedia is an online wiki where Radiologists all over the globe share online X-rays that are interesting, unusual, or demonstrate particular aspects of patient cases that others might learn from. When I was a geologist, there was a saying that “the best geologist was the one what had seen the most rocks”. Presumably the best radiologists are the ones that have seen the most X-rays, but no single radiologist can possible have seen a X-ray of every type of condition.

But now they can, thanks to this shared knowledge resource.

Radiopaedia was started in 2005 by Dr Frank Gaillard, as a way of storing online his digital radiographic images. Dr Gaillard had the inspiration to make this store an open resource, and in 2007 made it accessible to other radiologists. By 2015 Radiopedia had

•  7 million hits a month 
• 2 million unique users 
• users in every country in the world 
• more than 10,600 Twitter followers
• 17,660 cases sorted into 7,636 articles. 

The vision of Radiopaedia is

“to create the best possible radiology reference and teaching site and make it available to everyone, for ever, for free….. By pooling our collective knowledge and experience we can make a real difference in how people all over the world are imaged and diagnosed”.

The letters of thanks from radiologists all round the world show how useful this resource is in supporting correct diagnosis and thus saving lives.

So what can we learn from this?

I think the primary lesson is that a simple technology solution which serves a knowledge need for a large user base can grow quickly and organically. The barrier to entry is low, and the benefit for users is very high.

Secondly, the starting point for this was one person choosing to open his personal collection to the public. Despite the well-known behaviour of knowledge hoarding, Dr Galliard’s decision to open his knowledge base not just resulted in value to other radiologists; he himself benefited from the massive outpouring of knowledge sharing.

The value is particularly great for radiologists, in that many of them work as lone specialists. A global community provides them with a very welcome link to other practitioners.

Also radiologists are visual workers. Their chief tool is images. The more images they can see, the greater their knowledge base. The best radiologist is the one who has seen the most Xrays.  A wiki is an ideal way to share visual imagery, and to make tens of thousands of Xrays available to view.

Also the wiki is not a standalone, but part of a KM Framework. This includes

• Governance, in the form of guidance, a taxonomic structure and a charter
• A champion (Dr Gaillard himself)
• Editorial roles
• Expert roles
• A community of practice using various social media such as Facebook, Twitter, tumblr, pinterest and instagram
• A blog
• Online quizzes
• Online training courses

For those of you working in knowledge management, this case history provides a model for how you can connect a large community of lone practitioners, for whom a shared library of images is a massively useful resources.

Are there lone practitioners like this in your company? If so, then Radiopaedia may give you some pointers in how to build a system to support them.

Shhh by Catherine on Flickr

Image from this pew research article

Overall, the findings indicate that in the (government surveillance) case, social media did not provide new forums for those who might otherwise remain silent to express their opinions and debate issues. Further, if people thought their friends and followers in social media disagreed with them, they were less likely to say they would state their views on the story online and in other contexts, such as gatherings of friends, neighbors, or co-workers. This suggests a spiral of silence might spill over from online contexts to in-person contexts, though our data cannot definitively demonstrate this causation. .

Does this spiral of silence apply in workplace social media?

I have seen this happen in the work setting, as in the example below.

A new community of practice for project managers was launched in an organisation. Over a couple of months, activity started to pick up nicely in the community forum, with many people asking questions and receiving answers. However when we followed up with the originators of the questions, we found an interesting pattern had developed. The first answer to the question set the tone, and from that point the only people contributing to the thread were those who agreed with the first answer. Anyone who disagreed found a private offline way to contact the questioner, such as a phone call or a personal email.

We were able over time to resolve this behaviour through strong facilitation, and the community now works well in publicly exploring multiple views on all topics.

For those of us seeking to foster knowledge sharing within an organisation, the research study quoted above is very important. If we do not address this tendency towards a spiral of silence, our in-house social media will either create a new set of silos – silos divided by opinions rather than by geography or by organisational hierarchy (the “polarised crowds” mentioned above) – or people with contrary opinions will just drop out of the conversation.

The lessons to the Knowledge Manager are clear

 To start with, we cannot afford plural communities of practice covering the same topic. There needs to be one community covering each main work topic, not two or more polarised ones.

Then within each topic, disagreement needs to be sought and explored, in service of finding the truth. This is part of the role of the community facilitator – the role of allowing a diversity of opinion, and promoting and facilitating the dialogue that allows this diversity to be explored and resolved.

Finally, for the really contentious topics, you need a face to face discussion, such as a Knowledge Exchange.

We are built to share knowledge within our tribes. To improve knowledge sharing, build bigger tribes.

Papua New Guinea – True North – on Flickr – source/credit: North Star Cruises. Photograph by David Kirkland.  Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-ND 2.0)

As humans, we have  always had the ability, through language to share what we know. It’s just that, very often, we don’t want to. share with everyone. Sometimes we would rather keep knowledge “within the tribe.”

In New Scientist December 2012, Mark Pagel, the author of  “Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind” wrote an article called “The War of Words” in which he argued that languages evolved in order to keep different tribes separate, just as much as to allow communication within the tribes.

He points out that that the greatest diversity of human societies and languages (and there are over 7000 languages on the planet) arises not where people are most spread out, but where they are most closely packed together. Papua New Guinea is a classic case. That relatively small land mass – only slightly larger than California – is home to between 800 and 1000 distinct languages, or around 15 per cent of all languages spoken on the planet. A different language is spoken every few kilometres, and Pagel suggests that these have evolved to keep the different tribes distinct, separate and competing. He says

“In support of this idea, I have found anthropological accounts of tribes deciding to change their language, with immediate effect, for no other reason than to distinguish themselves from neighbouring groups. For example, a group of Selepet speakers in Papua New Guinea changed its word for “no” from bia to bune to be distinct from other Selepet speakers in a nearby village. Another group reversed all its masculine and feminine nouns – the word for he became she, man became woman, mother became father, and so on. One can only sympathise with anyone who had been away hunting for a few days when the changes occurred”.

The two features that drive this are, according to Pagel “groupishness” – affiliating with people with whom you share a distinct identity – and xenophobia, demonising those outside your group and holding parochial views towards them.

So language and knowledge sharing are linked, and both language and knowledge sharing are very much kept “within the tribe”.  Sharing knowledge with other tribes is an unnatural act; something languages have evolved to deter.

We can recognise the same effects of groupishness and xenophobia at work. Organisational boundaries create teams and silos, they create groupishness, and they create “us and them” feelings, which may be reinforced by internal competition.  Knowledge sharing happens within the silos, but seldom between them.

So what can we, as KMers, do about this?

We need to create new tribes.

This is the idea behind Communities of practice – that we can build a new organisational structure along knowledge lines, that cross-cuts the existing silos. By creating these new tribes, we create a feeling of groupishness and a sense of identity which align with the needs for knowledge sharing. One community leader I know calls this “dual identification” – identification with the business silo, but also identification with the community of practice.

We need to create new vocabulary.

This is particularly important after a merger, when terminologies between the merged organisations will be different. Without finding a common terminology, the old divisions remain, reinforcing old groupings. I have argued before that a Community of Practice is united by a common jargon and where multiple jargons exist, you need to lead the attempt to merge them.

I read an article recently about how a national rugby team can be created from individuals from different and rival clubs – a process of creating groupishness from a selection of xenophobic competitors – and the first step was to create a common vocabulary for the patterns and techniques they would encounter on the field of play. To create a common group, they needed a common vocabulary.

We need to remove the influences that keep us most separate. 

The most pernicious of these influences is institutionalised internal competition; reinforced by awards like “factory of the month”, “salesman of the year” and so on.  Anything that separates and divides, creating us (winners) and them (losers) will kill Knowledge Management stone dead and must be removed and replaced with awards that unite.  “Us” needs to be the company (plus key allies, stakeholders and supply chain) and “them” needs to be the competition – and then only where you are in a competitive context.

Create new tribes, create shared language, create shared groupishness, keep the xenophobia for the competition, and then Knowledge sharing will follow.

People often ask us “how do we incentivise  knowledge sharing?” I often answer “don’t bother. Incentivise knowledge seeking and re-use instead”.

I give this answer, because knowledge sharing in itself achieves nothing. Knowledge needs to be sought and re-used before any value has been added, and re-use is often a far bigger barrier than knowledge sharing. The Not Invented Here syndrome is far more prevalent than Knowledge Hoarding.

As an analogue, think of a driver in a car in a strange city, looking for a building which is not on the satnav.  They need knowledge, people on the sidewalk have the knowledge, but why doesn’t the knowledge reach the driver? It’s usually not because people won’t share, but because the driver doesn’t ask.

Knowledge needs supply and demand – sharing is the supply, seeking and re-use is the demand. Supply without demand devalues a commodity. Demand without supply increases a commodities value. Supply and demand need to be in balance, but the best way to kick off a market is to stimulate demand. 

Without an appetite for knowledge re-use, knowledge sharing can actually be counter-productive, resulting in the feeling of the “knowledge firehose”.  Better to incentivise knowledge seeking first then knowledge sharing later, create the appetite for knowledge before you create the access, and create the demand before you create the supply.

There will naturally be SOME supply already, as there are people who naturally like to publish. They like to share, they like to write, they were given two ears, one mouth and ten fingers and use them in that proportion.  If you create the demand and create the channel, the supply will follow. As David Snowden pointed out,

“In the context of real need few people will withhold their knowledge. A genuine request for help is not often refused unless there is literally no time or a previous history of distrust. On the other hand ask people to codify all that they know in advance of a contextual enquiry and it will be refused (in practice its impossible anyway). Linking and connecting people is more important than storing their artifacts”.

Create the need, connect the people, and the sharing will follow.

And how do you create the need for knowledge?  There are a number of ways;

• Managers create a high performance culture, where people are eager to “push the envelope”
• Managers ask the two questions that drive KM behaviour, emphasising the first
• Managers set people challenges that they don’t know how to solve using just their own knowledge

So don’t incentivise knowledge sharing – incentivise knowledge seeking first. The sharing will follow.

Connecting people is far less efficient than Collecting while being far more effective – but how much more effective?

Knowledge can be transferred in two ways – by Connecting people so that they can discuss, and Collecting knowledge in written (explicit) form so others can find and read it (see blog posts on Connect and Collect). 

Connecting people is less efficient than transferring documented knowledge, but more effective.  We can never be sure about the absolute effectiveness of knowledge transfer without some good empirical studies, but there are 2 pointers towards the relative effectiveness of these two methods. These pointers are as follows;

First, the often repeated (and sometimes challenged) quote that “We Learn . .

• 10% of what we read 
• 20% of what we hear 
• 30% of what we see 
• 50% of what we see and hear 
• 70% of what we discuss 
• 80% of what we experience 
• 95% of what we teach others.”

This is similar to Media Richness theory, which ranks media on the basis of it’s richness, with unaddressed documents as least rich, and face-to-face as most rich.

Second, David Snowden’s principle that

• We always know more than we can say, and 
• We will always say more than we can write down

we always know 3 times more than we can say, and we will always say 3 times more than we can write down, Collecting becomes 21 times less effective, and so on.

The heart of KM keeps knowledge flowing, and that heart has two chambers. 

Image from wikipedia

You can think of the organisation as a body, and knowledge flowing round the organisation like blood flows round a body.  But what is at the heart of KM? Is it knowledge sharing? Is it communities of practice? Is it knowledge creation?

The answer is that if there is a heart, it is not a single thing, but two chambers working together.  The two chambers are our old friends Connection and Collection; the Connect and Collect routes for knowledge transmission through Conversation and Content respectively. 

• In the Connect route, Knowledge is transferred through conversation – either face to face or electronically mediated. 
• It can be supported by processes such as Peer Assist, Knowledge handover, knowledge exchange, knowledge markets, knowledge cafes, action learning, after action review, mentoring, coaching, and communities of practice.  
• It can be supported by technologies such as collaboration tools, people-finders, community forums, webex, telephone and skype. 

Collection 

Collection supports knowledge transfer through collecting documented knowledge, synthesising it, sharing it and making it findable.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution for knowledge transfer, because not every transfer context is the same.  However we can look at four main classes or types of knowledge transfer, by looking at the dimensions of TIME and LOCATION.

There are other dimensions as well, such as whether the transfer is Expert/Expert, Expert/Novice etc, but let’s stick with 2 dimensions at a time, as that helps build a Boston Square, as shown here. 

OTJ (On The Job) Transfer

The transfer of knowledge between people or teams who are co-located – doing the same sort of work at the same time in the same place – can be done on the job. This is the sort of context you see within a project team. The knowledge does not need to be documented in order to be transferred, and because everyone is working with the knowledge every day, then your focus should be more on conversations about knowledge rather than building knowledge bases. Knowledge can be transferred through embedding processes like mentoring, coaching, and particularly After Action Reviews, as well as through numerous informal conversations. 

Serial transfer

The transfer of knowledge within a series of projects in the same location, one after the other (and often with the same team) is called serial transfer. Much serial transfer can be accomplished by the transfer of project plans, designs, basis of design documents, and so on, as well as by transferring lessons learned, and transferring core team members. Project knowledge handover meetings can also be useful – sometimes known as baton-passing. The focus here is less on conversation, and more on transfer and continuous improvement of artefacts. This can results in excellent examples of steep learning curves.

Knowledge transfer between individuals working in the same place but at different times is accomplished by personal knowledge handover – a planned set of conversations, and compilation of a set of key documents, contacts, lessons and tips and hints. This can be part of a Knowledge Retention Strategy.

Parallel transfer

The transfer of knowledge between a series of projects running simultaneously but in different locations, or between many individuals doing the same work in different parts of the business, is called parallel transfer. This can rely heavily on face-to-face activities such as peer assist, and knowledge visits, as well as real-time transfer of knowledge through communities of practice, online forums and enterprise social media. Because operations are simultaneous and continuous, much knowledge can remain tacit, and the focus is on conversation rather than content.

Far Transfer

The transfer of knowledge between projects running in different times and different places, or from person to person separated by time and distance, is called far transfer (a term coined by Nancy Dixon). Far transfer cannot rely on real-time conversations, or on simply transferring project plans, as the next project may take place in a completely different country in several years time. Knowledge will need to be transferred in written form as a knowledge asset, or as a series of Lessons Learned. Far Transfer relies on captured knowledge, the development of knowledge assets, and careful attention to well written and easily findable advisory and instructional content.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to Knowledge Transfer; it depends on the specific context, which may  be one of the four described here. 

Many people prefer to use the term “Knowledge Sharing” instead of “Knowledge Management”. However as a synonym “Knowledge Sharing” is inadequate and misleading. 

Sharing is Caring by Fabian Rosdalen on Flickr

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