Day: 14 August 2007

There’s been a lot written recently about the interaction between real and virtual worlds, by people far more knowledgeable about the subject than I could ever be. Yet, something that happened to me over the past couple of days made me think harder about the days to come.

What happened was almost trivial. Some of you know I had had a heart attack last Christmas, and that I wear a pacemaker. (An Implantable Cardioverter-Defibrillator, to be precise). This wee tim’rous beastie they call an ICD has a little built-in alarm. And said little built-in alarm went off in the early hours of Monday morning.

It was an unusual feeling, having an alarm go off inside you. A small part of me went into immediate panic mode, while the rest of me looked at the “facts” as I could see them; I reasoned that I’d never felt better, I was working out every day, I was learning to swim, the weather was hot and gruelling, my recovery rates were good, I was eating well and sleeping well, God was in His heaven and all was well with the world.

And so I carried on through Monday, determining to check things out after I returned to London. There were little voices whispering irritating things to do with having to have another operation, but I wasn’t listening.

Then the same thing happened Tuesday morning. This time I could not let it be, so I woke up early and called my cardiologist. Waited for his call back, resigned myself to not exercising or swimming until I knew better. He called back, and the answer was what I had hoped for.

What mattered most was how I felt. The alarms could have been caused by a number of factors, the key issue was how I felt. And I felt fine.

The incident made me think about the intersection between real and virtual worlds, and how more and more we live in that hybrid world. With hybrid signals. Lots of signals.

The signals need interpreting. Which means we have an increased reliance on people who can do the interpreting, although in most cases the final call will be personal.

This reliance on people doing the interpreting is what concerned me. It requires people to give honest open professional advice, making themselves extremely vulnerable. We need the “valuable but vulnerable” professional advice that Michael Power spoke so eloquently about in The Risk Management of Everything. Yet all the signs are that we are moving into a more and more litigious society, with (as Professor Power intimated) the small print outweighing the valuable advice.

Trust is going to mean something else as the real and virtual worlds collide, and as the sources and devices for signals and alarms increase exponentially. Trust is going to mean vulnerability on both sides, both trusted and trusting. That vulnerability is going to require covenant relationships in order to do away with the garbage-net of litigation.

Unless we do this, unless we move to covenant relationships between professional parties and the public at large, we are going to be overwhelmed. Overwhelmed by the noises we hear rather than the signals we should be listening to. Not waving but drowning.

I don’t know if it’s apocryphal or not, but years ago I heard a story about tulips. With advances in transportation and in technology, there were people interested in time-shifting tulip production. So they tried various methods associated with making tulips believe it was spring already, placing them in hothouses, keeping the surroundings springlike, and so on. The bulbs refused to budge and the experiments were gigantic failures.

Until someone figured out, maybe it’s not worth conning the bulb into thinking it’s spring. Maybe the bulb needed to know that winter was over. So they tried to keep the bulbs in artificial cold, and bingo the tulips had been time-shifted.

I felt the same way when I made the decision, some years ago, to open up my mailbox to my direct reports. My intention was to let them see precisely what I did by showing them what I faced, the incoming mail. That they could somehow vicariously gain the experience of sitting where I sat, doing what I did, thinking what I thought, by seeing what I saw.

And then I observed what they did. Boy was I wrong. Most of them were far more interested in my “sent mail”. They felt they could learn more by watching my outgoing rather than my incoming, they felt they could get “into my head” faster by focusing on my responses rather than on the stimuli.

I am no expert in knowledge management; I just like watching people and learning from them; I like teaching and mentoring people as well; and I try and do all this with an open and “sharing” management style. More trust and less verify until the need for verification keeps presenting itself, so to say.

What I saw with the opening up of my mailbox  confirmed a number of prior suspicions, suspicions that I had held ever since I’d seen early versions of Autonomy and Verity, suspicions enhanced as I got used to Copernic and Momma and Google.

People learn best by watching what you do. Not what you say.

And it is with this perspective that I am fascinated by the potential provided by Facebook and its ilk.

For example, one of the Story Types available in Facebook goes something like this:

John Smith used Blog Friends to read 24 Hours Left to Apply to Join Tulsa. John surfed from his own profile. The post was written by Fred Jones.

I think this is very powerful. Let me explain why.

I believe there are three primary reasons why an enterprise would want to “manage its knowledge”:

One, to share learning, so that the same mistake is not made multiple times.

Two, to share learning, so that activities get sped up.

Three, to share learning, so that people are motivated to learn and to teach.

To share learning.

Knowledge management is not really about the content, it is about creating an environment where learning takes place. Maybe we spend too much time trying to create an environment where teaching takes place, rather than focus on the learning.

Since people want to learn by watching others, what we need to do is to improve the toolsets and the environment that allows people to watch others. It could be as simple as: What does my boss do? Whom does she talk to? What are her surfing habits like? Whom does she treat as high priority in terms of communications received? What applications does she use? Which ones does she not use? When she has a particular Ghost to deal with, which particular Ghostbuster does she call?

What makes her tick. That’s what they want to understand, that’s what they want to learn from.

This type of learning is not just about subordinate-to-boss and succession-plan related, it is also about newbie-to-old-hand, mentored-to-mentor. A picture of the activities and relationships and paths followed, a “let me show you” session, is worth a thousand “let me tell you” sessions.

More and more, knowledge management is going to be about reducing the cost of, and simplifying the process for, letting someone watch what you do. Nonintrusively. Time-shifted. Place-shifted. Searchable. Archivable. Retrievable.

That’s how we are going to create the right learning environments. I think Facebook has the tools to capture much of this in the nonintrusive time-shifted place-shifted shareable way. Let the patterns emerge. Share the patterns. Get inside people’s heads. More to follow, let me see how the comments flow from this Starter-For-Ten.